SF leaflet: Trump and Zionists’ drive to Iraqify Iran risks WW3:

Condemn US State-Terrorist Murder of Suleimani!

The assassination in Baghdad of Qassem Suleimani, Commander of Iran’s elite Quds force, is a declaration of war by the Trump administration, and completely blows out of the water anything that remains of Obama’s Nuclear Deal with Iran. This is by design. The attack also killed Abu Mahdi Muhandis, the deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a conglomerate of Iraqi Shi’a Islamic militias allied to Iran. In the aftermath, Trump has sent a further 3000 US troops into the Middle East to ‘protect’ US assets.

Socialist Fight condemns this act utterly and we call for defence of Iran, the Iraqi government which has rightly condemned this act of terrorism, and of all anti-imperialist forces in the region, against US imperialism and its Israeli allies. An imperialist war against Iran, even more than the 2003 war against Iraq, has the potential to go nuclear and/or drown the entire region in a terrible bloodletting.

This could easily escalate, as China and Russia recently conducted trilateral military exercises with Iran in the Indian Ocean, and though the alliance is currently informal, they are already an important factor in the balance of forces. Trump’s act of murder could lead to a runway escalation.

Comparisons have already been made between the murder of Suleimani and that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist in Sarajevo in August 1914, the event that precipitated the First World War. But Trump’s action is worse than that, as the Sarajevo assassin, Gavrilo Princip, acted as part of an autonomous Serb nationalist group, and was not ordered to act by the Head of State of one of the Great Powers. This was ordered by Trump.

Contrary to the beliefs of many backward workers in the US, in Trump’s promise not to drag America into any more wars of the Iraq type, Trump was always a bought-and paid-for warmonger, particularly by that section of the US bourgeoisie that has a direct interest in demolishing any relatively independent and coherent Muslim or Arab state in the Middle East: the Israel lobby.

Trump’s action was praised within hours by Netanyahu, who opined:

“Trump is worthy of full appreciation for acting with determination, strongly and swiftly… we stand firmly behind the United States in its just battle for security, peace and self-defence … Israel has the right to defend itself. The US has the same right exactly.” (Times of Israel, 3 Jan)

It has been hard for the Trump administration to find vocal support, as least for now, from anywhere else than Israel. While his Republican Party predictably backed the murder, numerous Democrats have raised questions as to why this was done without Congressional Approval. All the would-be Presidential Candidates in the US have expressed ‘concern’ at Trump’s ‘recklessness’, as have all the contenders for the Labour leadership in the UK. Even Raab, Johnson’s Foreign Secretary here, is calling for both sides to ‘de-escalate’. It appears neither Johnson nor Raab were warned in advance, despite the amity between these fellow ‘killer clowns’. British troops that are still in Iraq are likely to be drawn in, and BJ will of course support his fellow, Trump.

Trump’s impeachment, and/or his election campaign, are mentioned as a factor by some as a possible motive, but this is shallow. Everyone knows that the Republican-dominated Senate will torpedo impeachment. And such a war in election year is very risky. The real driving force is the Israel connection. Because of its illegitimacy as a state built on stolen Arab land in a heavily populated Arab and allied Muslim region, Israel and its ruling class have a direct interest in the demolition of any regionally powerful Arab or Muslim state that is not a vassal or puppet of Israel.

The destruction of Iraq in 2003 was clearly driven by the neocons of the Project for the New American Century, a very disproportionate number of whom were ultra-right Jewish Likudniks and similar types. The issue of dual citizenship with Israel, available to anyone born Jewish and particularly important in class terms, to bourgeois of such origin, gives these bourgeois not so much ‘dual loyalty’ as two bourgeois-imperialist states, one very much more powerful than the other.

Bourgeois supporters of Israel with this hybrid class/ethnic interest form by far the most powerful foreign policy lobby group in the USA, and to a lesser degree its West European allies. To challenge Western support for Israel is fatal to the careers of bourgeois politicians in the West, and anyone who stands up for Arab and Palestinian rights faces the most concentrated campaigns of lies and slander since the days of Hitler and Stalin. This is what was done to Corbyn; this is what supporters of Israel want to do to the US Democratic Party ‘Socialist’ Bernie Sanders.

And this is the core of the forces pushing for an American war against Iran. Trump’s main funder and donor in his election campaign was the Likud billionaire Sheldon Adelson. The overlapping of the ruling classes of Israel and the United States is a regional phenomenon, not a worldwide one – it is obviously that the Israeli component of this has little interest in geopolitical changes in South America or the Far East.

But in the Middle East it does, and the Israel-US Alliance is bound together in a manner that puts it on a collision course with not only Iran, but those international allies Iran has understandably cultivated for self-protection.. This makes a wider conflict much more likely than in previous wars.

What is crucial in combatting these neocon wars is that the left learns to stand up to Zionism. We have to learn to answer blow-for-blow and wage all-out war against the purveyors of ‘anti-Semitism’ smears that were used in defeating Labour – along with other questionable methods – in the General Election.

We must no longer treat ‘leftist’ purveyors of such smears as well-intentioned people who just want to fight ‘racism’. We must understand that Zionists and their allies who promote ‘anti-Semitism’ smears are among the very worst racists.

We need to debate and understand the need for revolutionary struggle against the war and a revolutionary programme to overthrow capitalism, which have been matters of strategic dispute among anti-war activists and socialists for generations.

We are unambiguous in advocating that an end to war is only possible through an international social revolution against the system that not only gives birth to endless wars, but also threatens us all with extinction through the destruction of the climate and the biosphere. These are all crucial debates that have to be had out for the future of humanity.

But even in order to have these debates in a rational and democratic anti-war and working class movement, we have to do away with Zionist slanders and slanderers, which have become a kind of political disease that threatens to poison our whole movement. What has happened in the Labour Party is a warning. It must not be allowed to happen in the anti-war movement.