Australian Aborigines in Chains at Wyndham prison, 1902
If we remember the “Six-Day War” between Israel and a number of Arab countries in 1967, we might rightly name Israel's war against Iran, in which the United States also participated for a day, the “12-Day War”. The impression that Iran took a serious beating in this war is widespread, both because of the heavy casualties inflicted by Israel's bombing and assassinations on the first day and because the world's heaviest bomb dropped by the US from a B-2 aircraft caused serious damage to the Fordow nuclear facility. However, first impressions are not always the most accurate.
We are face to face with a manoeuvre that probably occupies a very special place in the history of warfare: Why did Trump drop the world's most destructive bomb on Iran one day and force both countries to a ceasefire the next day? Without interpreting this correctly, it is impossible to determine the winners and losers of this war. In order to interpret this correctly, it is necessary to understand why Israel started this war and why it ended it (under pressure from Trump).
For Israel, this war was a new (and for it hopefully decisive) phase of the war to purge the Middle East (West Asia) of the “axis of resistance”. Although it had not been able to defeat Hamas, it had razed Gaza to the ground. It had rendered Hezbollah immobilised by assassinating a large section of its leadership. It had finally put an end (with the help of Erdoğan's Turkey) to the existence of the Baathist regime in Syria. The attack on Iran was aimed at preparing the ground for the overthrow of the regime. The justification was the “vital danger” posed by Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Iran's response after the first day showed that this country was no easy prey. Israel inflicted heavy casualties on Iran, but in return it has been dealt a real blow. Perhaps even more importantly, significant oppositional sectors of the Iranian population, despite their extreme resentment of the regime, rallied in defence of the homeland in the face of Israel's attack.
With relations between the two regional enemies in this state of standoff, Trump's unexpected appearance in the skies over Iran with a B-2 only to roll up his sleeves the next morning to end the war meant only one thing: to create a myth behind which his ally Netanyahu could take refuge, with no harm to his prestige, in order to end this war, which might otherwise have lasted for months or years without a winner. Trump’s claim of having “obliterated” Iran's capacity to produce nuclear weapons was just that myth. The Pentagon intelligence report leaked to CNN and the New York Times, and the statement by the spokesperson of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Iran's capability had been damaged to an extent in which it would only be postponed for a few months, but Trump continued with the refrain of “obliteration”. Why? Because Netanyahu had cited the “threat of nuclear proliferation” as a justification for, in reality, going to war to overthrow the Iranian regime, just as he had overthrown Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Trump took away Netanyahu's justification by saying that the “nuclear threat” had been “obliterated”. Trump had to do this both to end an unwinnable war and to silence the elements in his own MAGA movement opposed to going to war in the Middle East.
All of this implies that Iran was not "beaten"! On the contrary, it was Israel that was not able to attain its goal. Israel is the side that came out of the war with losses. It might not be correct to say that Iran has won a victory, but it is certainly true that it has not been defeated. The war has proved that, on its own, Israel does not pose a deadly threat to Iran and has thus turned the balance of political power in favour of Iran.
Many people in the world and in Turkey were upset about this. From the very first day, the partisans of "regime change" sided with Israel and its benefactor the United States, taking the oppression of women by the mullahs’ regime as its main justification. Let no one claim to have taken the 2022 "Jin Jiyan Azadi" revolt as seriously as we have! All our publications show this, as our web sites will attest to. But we took no less seriously, the uprising of workers, labourers and the poor, which reached its peak in 2019, and even during this war we stood by these struggles while unconditionally supporting Iran against Israel and the USA. But the lobby for regime change was too miserable or too stupid to realise that the subject of this war was not the reactionary Iranian regime but Israel's unrivalled domination of the West Asian region. Apart from those people, in the ranks of the socialist, or even the Marxist movement, there were not a few people who, because of the character of the Iranian regime, secretly favoured the overthrow of the regime in Iran.
It is necessary to put a stop to this. It is necessary to set priorities well. We are talking about the priorities of the conscious vanguard of the working class and of the internationalist Marxists.
We can take as an example the priorities set out by Trotsky in the first year of the Second World War (at the end of that year he was murdered on Stalin's orders). From 1939 on, many socialists had begun to argue that there was no longer any basis for the defence of the Soviet Union in the wake of the agreement signed between the USSR and Nazi Germany, sometimes called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and that it too had to undergo a "regime change". Trotsky would oppose this approach in the following manner:
“We must not lose sight for a single moment of the fact that the question of overthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy is for us subordinate to the question of preserving state property in the means of production of the USSR; that the question of preserving state property in the means of production in the USSR is subordinate for us to the question of the world proletarian revolution.” (“The USSR in War”, In Defence of Marxism, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm)
This is not a discussion on tactics, but on principled priorities.
Likewise, as internationalist revolutionary Marxists, in other words as proletarian socialists defending the long-term interests of the working class as a whole, we need to set our priorities as follows.
The question of democratic rights has different value signs, depending on the interests of the class and/or nation for which these rights are defended. If there is a defence of "democratic rights" for the sake of the interests of the bourgeoisie or of imperialist countries/nations, this is an impostor’s defence of democracy. This is not among our priorities.
"Human rights imperialism" is the established name of a political strategy implemented by imperialist countries around the world today. Let us give the simplest example: Today, imperialism (whether the former colonialist European imperialism or today’s torchbearer US imperialism) accuses the countries of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in the Sahel region of western Africa, of contravening democratic norms because they have each recently experienced a military coup in recent years. This is sheer hypocrisy: the military regimes in these three countries have expelled the imperialist (French and American) military forces from their countries. They are now pursuing a policy that leans mainly on Russia. This is why imperialism is troubled by the overthrow of the electoral systems that existed before, which were largely sham setups. On the other hand, these same imperialist countries have remained silent about the coups in neighbouring Chad and Sudan during the same period simply because these latter coups were organised in their favour and which they themselves have either contributed to or helped sustain.
This is nothing new. The history of imperialism is filled to the brim with this kind of ugly hypocrisy. At the time when the photograph you see at the top of this article was taken, the European imperialists, while enslaving African peoples in the literal sense of the word, were demanding democratic rights from the Ottoman Empire for the peoples of the Balkans and the Armenians! Of course, the oppressed Balkan peoples and Armenians deserved support but not from the imperialists. Only the working-class movement and other oppressed nations could have helped them. Support from imperialism is something for which any oppressed nation will one day surely be made to pay the price!
Secondly, we must not expect that any reactionary regime will be overthrown by wars waged against that country by imperialist powers in such a way that the oppressed peoples of that country will be liberated. Imperialism will either abandon the oppressed peoples at some stage of the struggle (as has been the case in an array of widespread examples in modern history), or it will go even further and worsen their conditions, enslaving them completely. A century ago, the Palestinian people sought refuge from the pre-capitalist colonialism of the Ottoman Empire in the protection of the most powerful imperialism of the epoch, the British Empire. A century later it is still under the yoke of the cruellest settler colonialism and is being decimated by genocide!
Thirdly, absolute priority must be accorded to the transfer of power from the bourgeoisie to the working class. Only that revolution will triumph that is prepared to defend the revolutionary masses and itself against the violence the bourgeoisie will exert in order to prevent the transfer of power to the exploited classes. Nothing but a leap forward of the socialist revolution on such a scale and with such a force as to decide the world situation can save humanity from barbarism.
Therefore, we must not lose sight for a single moment of the fact that for us the value of political democracy is subordinate to the question of whether it will bring power to the ruling class and imperialism or to the oppressed peoples and the exploited classes; that for us the question of our political position in wars is subordinate to the question of whether those wars will strike a blow at our greatest enemy, imperialist capitalism; that for us every struggle is subordinate in the final analysis to the criterion of whether it will lead us to the victory of the exploited classes and the takeover of power.
The rest is empty chatter.