The War Against Iran
The Correct Position
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a state built on the blood of tens of thousands of communists, workers, and the poor. With the Iranian revolution, the possessing class of Iran bound itself to a new clerical rule that secured their status quo, a rule that co-opted the revolutionary consciousness of the masses and, after securing its power, crushed all those who had supported the revolution against the Shah’s terror regime with their general strikes, protests, and their blood.
In the following 47 years, this state was weakened by sanctions, intelligence service sabotage, and constant direct and indirect military confrontations, from Saddam to Beirut, and was fought for its separation from the United States and its vassal Israel.
In order to survive and enforce its own regional interests, Iran bound itself to any actor that could help it survive its project – at times even Israel, the most important weapons supplier in the war with Saddam’s Iraq. These connections and proxies, from Israel to Hamas, sometimes encountered progressive actors who, with Iran’s support, pursued genuinely just goals. Equally, they encountered reactionary actors whose goals were simply close to Iran’s own regional interests. The goal of Iran’s alignment with any such actor is never a genuine internationalism or anti-imperialism, but rather a utilitarianism for its own cause and for asserting itself against its own competition.
Internally, the ultra-reactionary structure of rule continuously tightened after short-term openings under Rafsanjani and Khatami. The woman is bound to her religious role and fundamentally subordinate to her male counterpart. Any attempt at emancipation and resistance to this social role can end, as in the case of Mahsa Amini, with death. Progressive forces exist only underground or operate from exile. Leftist organizations, women’s initiatives, independent trade unions, and other progressive activists are systematically persecuted, criminalized, or smashed.
So much is clear and correct. Yet it seems to escape many self-proclaimed anti-imperialists why all of this has no relevance for the position an anti-imperialist must take regarding this war against Iran:
Iran is, albeit out of nationalist self-interest, the only power in West Asia that opposes the hegemony of the United States and its vassal Israel in the region. From this arises the necessity for those imperialist powers to eliminate this sole counter-power.
The sanctions and sporadic strikes due to the alleged development of nuclear weapons (which would likely have prevented this attack) have already done much to sabotage Iran’s internal development. Now that the genocide in Gaza has almost worn down the Iranian proxies at Iran’s expense (with the exception of Ansar Allah) and Syria, with al-Jolani, has aligned itself with the US-imperialist bloc, the moment has come to break the last geopolitically resistant state in the region with a strike against Iran.
A subordination of Iran would lead to the opening of the Iranian market and oil sector to Western capital and consequently an end to its ties with Russia and China. The strike against Iran must therefore also be seen as preparation for the great imperialist war against China, which the representatives of US capital have been postponing for years. A weakening of China’s energy supply, for which China has been preparing for years with the massive expansion of renewable energies, is not a pleasant side effect of the war against Iran, but, after the strike against Venezuela, part of a very targeted strategy to weaken the great adversary in the East.
To legitimize the strike against Iran, the defenders of imperialism point to the dissatisfaction of Iranians with their rule and the suppression of protests in January. But imperialism is not at all interested in “good” or “evil” states; the internal affairs of a state are only of interest to its competitors when they can be used to legitimize hostility. The proof is already evident in the example of Israel: The genocide in Palestine obviously has no influence on the unwavering support for the stationary aircraft carrier based in Tel Aviv. Only in a few cases was this support temporarily slowed by mass protests in the respective allied states – and even then, solely to not endanger the domestic political stability of the supporting states. The same applies elsewhere, for example in Jolani’s Syria or in Salman’s Saudi Arabia, where atrocities of comparable magnitude are apparently digestible.
One can accept this now, and still point to all the Iranians who celebrated the death of Khamenei and thus claim this attack is surely in the interest of the Iranian masses. To this it must be said that it may very well be that a large number of people in Iran will not mourn their butcher Khamenei – but that too is not relevant for a rejection of this war: The goal of this war is the subordination of Iran to the regional interests of the United States; this will is accompanied by tens of thousands, and looking at Syria, Iraq, or Libya, even millions of victims.
How “good” or “bad” the average Iranian finds Khamenei’s death has about as much relevance for this war as the assessment of Saddam’s death by an average Iraqi in 2006 – that is, none at all. If Khamenei had been killed not by Israeli rockets, but by an organized workers’ movement, a general strike, a progressive cause, then of course that would be a reason for progressives around the world to celebrate. But that is simply not the case.
On the other side, of course, are those vulgar “anti-imperialists” who now propagate solidarity with the Islamic Republic because imperialism is the “main contradiction” and everything else is just “secondary contradictions” (Where do Marx and Engels speak of “main and secondary contradictions”?). A “victory” for Iran, although it is unclear what exactly that would look like, would indeed be resistance to US imperialism, but that does not make it a “good” cause. We are not Stoics; omnia bona non esse paria! A victory for Iran would result in just as little progress in the conditions necessary for the self-determination of the Iranian masses as a victory for US imperialism. Iran is an ultra-reactionary theocratic class state, from which no solidarity can be derived just because it happens to have the same enemies as other oppressed peoples. At the same time, it is true that externally, Iran plays a certain role in the progress of multipolarity, which can certainly be seen as paving the way for revolutionary conditions.
Yet it is already foreseeable that a protracted air war against Iran would by no means lead to a weakening of the regime internally. Quite the opposite: it is highly probable that precisely those sections of the population who were previously critical or openly hostile to the system would, under the pressure of the external threat, once again rally behind the leadership. Ironically, it was precisely Saddam’s war against the young Islamic Republic that was able to strengthen the early internal instability of the Ayatollahs’ rule through broad social mobilization. Added to this are specific political-cultural conditions that assign a completely different function to the fighting morale of large parts of the religious Iranian population, in the sense of the martyr mythology surrounding Ali ibn Abi Talib, than for the Iraqi army under Saddam or even the Syrian armed forces under Assad. An “end” to clerical rule has rarely been as unlikely as now.
Far more realistic than a direct regime change appears to be an internal shift of power within the existing structures of rule, where more pragmatic forces – for instance from the ranks of the Revolutionary Guards – would take control of the state. Such a regime would show itself to be more flexible towards the West in foreign policy, without becoming even slightly more progressive internally. Almost as if social progress could not be separated from the material conditions of a state.
A sustained air war, which Trump today estimates will last “several weeks,” combined with economic strangulation, aims to systematically destroy industrial and civilian infrastructure and keep Iran permanently in poverty and isolation, ultimately to force the Iranian leadership into submission. The consequences would primarily affect the working population, whose living conditions would deteriorate dramatically, if they are not already among the tens of thousands who will perish in the course of this war.
Anti-imperialism does not mean judging military interventions by whether they accidentally produce a desirable outcome, but analyzing their character and purpose. What is decisive is not the possible side effect, but the motive and the power politics behind it. An attack is not justified because it accidentally removes a problem – just as a punch to the face does not become dentistry just because a rotten tooth is missing afterward.
The attack on Iran is the ultimate blow of the enraged US imperialism in the era of growing multipolarity, to secure its complete hegemony in West Asia and indeed also to prepare for the great war against China. This war is not a progressive war and must be rejected and opposed by every progressive person.
