In Tehran, Iran, families live in constant terror, with bombs falling at any time, in any place…. In Lebanon, Israel has unleashed the genocidal “Gaza Model,” of total devastation, seizure and occupation… Gaza remains locked under Israel’s genocidal siege, with people having barely enough to eat and murderous attacks continuing… In the Palestinian West Bank, a family goes out to celebrate—a mother, a father and two children end up dead, shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. 

Thousands have already been killed, and millions more lives are increasingly at risk thanks to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, an unprovoked war of aggression targeting the people of Iran that is clearly illegal under international law, and profoundly immoral. 

The U.S.-Israeli war of aggression against Iran is entering its fourth week, and the criminal violence being unleashed against the peoples of Iran and Lebanon, as well as the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, is now threatening to escalate to even more horrific and dangerous levels. 

Iranian responses to massive U.S.-Israeli aggression and bombing campaigns have included attacks against Israel, U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf, and oil facilities of the countries hosting them. Iran has basically closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 20 percent of world oil shipments flow. All this has created big problems for the U.S., including its military, thrown a giant monkey wrench in world oil markets, jolted the global economy, and more.

In the face of this, Trump is asking for $200 billion more to wage this war. He’s sending thousands more Marines to the region, and dropping 5,000 pound bunker busters on Iranian bases along the Strait of Hormuz. He’s reportedly considering seizing Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf and even attempting to seize Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium (the essential element of a nuclear weapon). The whereabouts of this stockpile is unknown but could be buried deep underground in Iran and is very dangerous. 

This past week, Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars Gas field, which provides the energy most Iranians depend on for hot water, heat, and cooking. Now, Trump has threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s electricity plants unless it opens up the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. This would entirely turn out the lights in Iran, and possibly effect nuclear reactors which could lead to a deadly environmental disaster. 

Iran has refused Trump’s ultimatum and warned it “would strike infrastructure used by Israel, the United States and American allies—including desalination plants that are a lifeline for much of the Middle East”—if its power plants were bombed, the New York Times reports. The speaker of Iran’s Parliament said “energy and oil facilities across the region will be considered legitimate targets and will be irreversibly destroyed.”¹

If the U.S. does go ahead with this attack, it would not only be a monstrous crime against the whole Iranian people, but it would greatly escalate the danger of this war—bringing in new, even more dangerous levels of death and destruction across the Middle East, and rippling around the world.

This war must be stopped—now! 

A War Against Civilians—the People of Iran.

In one breath, the U.S. and Israel claim they don’t attack civilians, only military and government targets. 

In the next, Trump talks of “obliterating” Iran, while his genocidal running mate, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (aka Netan-Nazi) gleefully crows that “Iran is being decimated,” and that “We’re wiping out their industrial base.” 

Since the start of the war, Israel has dropped some 12,000 bombs on Iran—3,600 in the Tehran region alone. The U.S. says its hit over 8,000 targets. 

The targets? They include homes, apartment buildings, bakeries, schools, cultural centers, hospitals and more. Iranian officials continue to be assassinated. 

These are civilian targets and overwhelmingly civilian deaths—war crimes. 

For the Iranian People—"No Place Is Safe, War is Everywhere"

This war is being waged on the Iranian people as a whole. And it’s an ongoing nightmare beyond imagination.

“Residents in Tehran and elsewhere say the attacks come at all hours and rock the ground,” the New York Times reports. “For many Iranians living under relentless Israeli and American airstrikes, each day brings a new level of anger and fear… attacks are gaining intensity, becoming louder and getting closer. Day and night, with minimal intervals, explosions rock the ground and send massive plumes of smoke and fire toward the sky.”

Meanwhile, the grieving families of those 168 young children—most girls between seven and 12 years—slaughtered by a U.S. missile that hit their school in the town of Minab, gather each evening at the local cemetery. “They come carrying rugs and cushions, food and water, and candles or lanterns that they place on the small, freshly dug graves,” Drop Site News writes from the scene. “Parents carefully clean the tombstones of their buried children. They arrange the spaces around them and settle in for the night—a quiet vigil that will continue until dawn. The collective grief in Minab, Iran is unfathomable… parents are struggling to come to terms with the scale of the loss.” 

“No place is really safe,” Amir said. He’s from Rasht in northern Iran. Many have fled there from the bombing of Tehran, before Rasht too was attacked. “War is everywhere.”

“Israel and the U.S. talk about how they’re targeting military locations and military facilities and people associated with the government, but that’s actually not the case,” says Sussan Tahmasebi, the executive director of Femena, an organization promoting women’s human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. 

“It really, literally is carpet bombing, and certainly carpet bombing Tehran, which is my city… According to the Red Crescent Society and the latest reports that I read, over 19,000 structures have been hit since the start of this war. Over 16,000 were civilian structures, and I think the majority of them are residences.”

“This creates an incredible level of displacement inside the country, because you know, when you hit the residences, and most of these bombings are happening in cities, and especially in Tehran, which is overcrowded. Tehran is the city of over 10 million right? So when a building is hit, it’s not just one person’s home, it’s multiple residences. So multiple families are getting displaced.” 

Tahmasebi reports that at least 1,200 people were killed in the first days of the war. Since then, the death toll has risen to at least 1,444 killed and 18,551 injured, according to Iran’s Health Ministry. Tahmasebi argues this is a vast, vast undercount.

Tahmasebi spoke with Sam Goldman on the Refuse Fascism podcast of March 15. She said in the first few days of the war, over 1,200 people had reportedly been killed. But since then, “those figures haven’t been updated because, I think, similar to Israel, similar to the U.S., each of these governments thinks that it’s a sign of weakness to talk about their casualties.” She adds, “the Islamic Republic has cut off the internet access,” making it “very difficult to document the impact of the war.”

At least 47,000 residential units in Iran have been destroyed according to Iran’s Red Crescent Society. There are other reports of widespread damage to thousands and thousands of civilian facilities including schools, hospitals, welfare institutions, media infrastructure, medical centers, humanitarian facilities, and more. 

These are war crimes. 

“They are destroying our country and our infrastructure,” a businessman in Tehran told the New York Times. “Soon we will be like Gaza. We won’t have electricity, or heat or food,” The Times adds, “He said that if some Iranians had thought that the war might free them of the Islamic republic’s rule, that hope was fading as people confronted apartment buildings being leveled, cultural sites being damaged, banking transactions not being completed and now crucial infrastructure being destroyed.”

A Criminal War By and For a Criminal System

This war is not driven by Trump’s ego, or some fixation Netanyahu has about Iran. 

This is a war of criminal monstrous aggression that flows out of the core nature and dynamics of the capitalist-imperialist system. This system is driven by expand-or-die global competition for dominance of whole regions of the earth, key natural resources and markets, sources of labor and more, while denying this control to rivals.

These dynamics have driven the U.S. to fight for and impose a stranglehold on the region since World War II. It has controlled and sucked out its vast natural wealth. It has installed and propped up brutal regimes of torturers and plunderers to enforce this exploitation and oppression. It has kept the entire region in a grotesque state of enforced backwardness in some areas with highly developed, decadent glitzy playgrounds in others. But in the past decade, China has become a contending power in this region. 

The U.S. has waged unjust imperialist wars—from Afghanistan to Lebanon, from Iraq to Libya to Gaza and now Iran. These wars have taken literally millions of lives. For the last nearly 80 years, the U.S. has been increasingly assisted by their genocidal terrorist attack dog, Israel, and now this has gone to a whole new level of coordination with their joint war on Iran.

Now, they are waging a war aimed at destroying Iran as a regional power, and perhaps to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a reactionary regime but the U.S. and Israel are aiming for its overthrow in order to lock in the U.S.-Israeli stranglehold on the entire Middle East—civilians' lives be damned. 

As we wrote three weeks ago:

Yes, this Iranian regime of brutally oppressive Islamic fundamentalist tyrants is truly terrible. But—contrary to what is voiced, in rote repetition, by bourgeois politicians, of both ruling class political parties (Democrat as well as Republican), and other representatives of U.S. imperialism—this Iranian regime is not the most terrible terrorist force in the Middle East (or the whole world, as Trump has claimed). That “distinction,” with regard to the Middle East, clearly belongs to Israel—which is a genocidal terrorist state that has carried out, and continues to carry out, atrocities on a scale well beyond that of the Iranian regime. (And, in terms of the world as a whole, the most destructive, and yes, terroristic, force clearly is the USA—not only in the form of the current fascist regime but overall and for some time.) 

Why Are the Democrats Overwhelmingly Supporting This Slaughter

Overwhelmingly, the Democratic Party leaders are going along with Trump’s imperialist war. And even the Democrats who oppose this and point to some of the Iranian civilian suffering, still couch this in terms of how it will affect America and Americans.

Take Democrat Ro Khanna. Khanna has criticized some of the humanitarian suffering in Iran caused by the U.S. But he is also the ranking member of the "House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party." In this capacity, he issued a statement criticizing the war for “Weakening U.S. Readiness Against China” and putting “America’s security and economy at risk,” rather than countering China in the Pacific. 

"U.S. Readiness Against China" means being ready to go to war! Khanna is still arguing that the U.S. should face off with their nuclear-armed imperialist rivals to dominate the world, but he is criticizing how Trump is doing this. 

The Democratic Party is a ruling class party, part of the same capitalist-imperialist system that has given rise to Trump fascism and so many other atrocities. They have big differences with Trump fascism but those differences are about what serves their system—a system that the masses of people have no interest in maintaining and that threatens the very existence of humanity.

Growing Danger of Wider, More Murderous War

Where all this goes is unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable. There is increasingly grave danger of the war widening even further, intensifying, and becoming much more dangerous for the people of Iran, the Middle East and all humanity.

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.

—Bob Avakian

And as we write in Three Dividing Lines: From the Revcoms, on the U.S.-Israeli War Against Iran:

It is crucial that protest against this massive war crime, committed by the U.S. and Israel, be manifested, as powerfully as possible, in a timely way—and every political force needs to be evaluated in terms of where it stands, and what it does, in regard to this.

And it is crucial that people look seriously into the deeper problem in the system that is driving this madness, and the revolutionary solution to bring about a radically different and far better world.

Stop the U.S.-Israeli War on Iran!

In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!

This Whole System Is Rotten and Illegitimate—We Need and We Demand a Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System!