In his Jan. 10 announcement of the “surge” strategy in Iraq, Bush said of Iran and Syria: “These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”
Barely hours after this speech, in the early morning hours of Jan. 11, U.S. forces stormed Iranian offices in the Iraqi city
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This provocative act was a signal that plans for escalating the war could go well beyond more troops in Iraq, including broadening the war in the region. Removing any doubts that the raid decision was made at the highest levels, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said, “I think there is plenty of evidence that there is Iranian involvement with these networks that are making high-explosive IEDs and that are endangering our troops, and that’s going to be dealt with.”
Of course, none of this “evidence” has ever been provided. If the Irbil raid had produced any evidence of Iran supplying IED technology to the Iraqi resistance, it would certainly have been made public since. Even if Iran is involved in transferring IED technology to Iraq, Irbil, in the province of Kurdistan, would be the most unlikely place for such a transfer to take place.
Historically, Iran’s strongest ties in Iraq are to the Badr Brigade—the militia led by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—a group founded in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. The Badr Brigade has not been engaged in resistance against the U.S. occupation. In fact, it has operated as an arm of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government.
Iran is also accused of providing support to the Mahdi Army, another Shi’a militia under the leadership of Moqtada al-Sadr. With their strongholds in the cities of Najaf and Karbala in the south and the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, neither militia has a significant presence in Kurdistan. Devoid of any rational military goal, it is clear that the raid was a political move aimed at warning Iran of U.S. government’s willingness to take the confrontation to the next level.
Attack on Iran imminent?
There is much evidence of the danger of a possible U.S. attack on Iran.
The expected arrival in February of a second U.S. aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf is clearly a threatening gesture toward Iran. There are no conceivable uses for naval carriers in the war in Iraq, a ground battle against a guerilla resistance force.
The fact that the head of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, is being replaced with a Navy commander, Admiral William Fallon, raises the possibility of a prominent role by the Navy in the coming months. If the United States were to carry out an aerial bombing attack on Iran, the Navy would play a central role.
The daily newspaper Arab Times, based in Kuwait, published a Jan. 14 article claiming that the United States was planning to attack Iran before April 2007. There were leaks in December 2006 that Israel had plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if the United States did not take the initiative.
Using threatening language, raiding Iranian offices in Iraq and moving aircraft carriers into the region are only part of the U.S. government’s moves against Iran.
The success of the United States in getting U.N. sanctions approved against Iran is another component of the pursuit of its regime change strategy. All indications are that Iran will refuse to cease its uranium enrichment activities, to which it is entitled by international law.
In addition to the sanctions, which have had a very limited effect, the United States has moved to economically strangulate Iran by forcing banks from other countries to stop their dealings with two Iranian state banks, Saderat and Sepah.
While these could be alarming signs of a possible U.S. attack on Iran, it is far from certain that the decision to bomb Iran has been made. There is no question that all of the U.S. ruling class and its political representatives, the Republican and Democratic parties, would like nothing more than overthrowing the Iranian regime.
It was during the Clinton presidency that “regime change” in Iran became official U.S. policy. Removing the Islamic Republic, a regime that follows an independent economic and political course, would take Washington one step closer to complete control of the oil-rich Middle East.
Risks of attacking Iran
From the imperialists’ perspective, there are many risks attached to an attack on Iran. The human cost, Iranian or
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Without instituting a draft, the U.S. military lacks sufficient ground troops to invade Iran, much less to occupy and hold it and fight off popular resistance that surely would follow.
A mandatory draft would offer new possibilities for the imperialist war drive. But precisely because of the fear of a broadening and deepening anti-war movement in the United States, ruling class politicians are virtually unanimous in their opposition to the draft. This limits the U.S. military’s options to aerial bombing attacks.
Through its previous experience in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea and other countries, the U.S. military has plenty of experience in annihilating the civilian infrastructure of a country and inflicting limitless death and misery upon its people. Carrying out such an operation against Iran would disrupt the growth of its strength and influence in the region, but it would not result in regime change. If anything, it likely would strengthen the anti-imperialist resolve of the Iranian people.
Further, despite the unparalleled might of the U.S. military, such a bombing campaign is unlikely to completely take away the retaliatory capability of Iran. Iran could retaliate by launching missiles into Israel, on the U.S. forces in Iraq, or at the oil facilities of U.S. client states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Iran could also retaliate by targeting oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting the flow of oil to the rest of the world.
Aside from the military calculation, a U.S. attack on Iran could be politically costly. By standing up to imperialism and supporting Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements against Israel, Iran has gained hero status among many people in the Islamic world. A U.S. bombing of Iran could seriously threaten the survival of unpopular U.S. client states in the region, many of which are already dealing with strong resistance movements.
As evident from congressional reaction, a significant section of the U.S. ruling class and its politicians consider the risk of attacking Iran unacceptably high. In a drive to topple the remaining states in the Middle East not under Washington’s control, it fears, U.S. imperialism may lose control of the entire region in an upsurge of regional resistance.
Iranian officials consider U.S. provocations to be “psychological warfare” aimed at forcing Iran to back down. Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, said: “But this talk (of an attack) should not be taken too seriously. We think they have the minimum of intelligence not to do a thing like this.”
Ultimately, it is resistance that will determine the extent to which U.S. imperialism will expand its war drive. The resistance of the Iraqi people to occupation has already stalled the neo-con super-aggressive plans to recolonize Iraq and create that elusive “new Middle East.”
Working-class people in the United States have nothing to gain and much to lose from imperialist wars. The task of the anti-war movement in the United States is to further limit the options of the imperialist war machine by creating a movement strong enough to force it to back down.
