by Yossi Schwartz, Internationalist Socialist League
RCIT-Section in Israel/Occupied Palestine
11.10.2013
www.thecommunists.net and www.the-isleague.com
Hassan Rouhani, the new Iranian president, went to the UN summit to meet with the US President Obama and offer the US some forms of collaboration between the two states.
The reaction of the Israeli government was open hysteria. Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said “there is no more time for negotiations.” Rouhani’s call for negotiations was dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a deceitful “charm offensive.” Netanyahu continued, “One must not be fooled by the Iranian president’s fraudulent words…The Iranians are spinning the media so that the centrifuges can keep on spinning.”
While the US and Israel have repeatedly referred to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the leaders of Iran have consistently maintained that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes only.
Iran, Nuclear Power and Western imperialist Hypocrisy
Naturally, we do not know who is telling the truth. But we do know the following:
(1) The US is the only state that has used atomic bombs (during WWII).
(2) According to the foreign press, Israel possesses at least 200 tactical atomic bombs.
(3) If Iran were an ally of the US, like Pakistan, the US would not object to its possession of nuclear weapons.
Thus the issue is not the right of a state to develop weapons of mass destruction, but whether the state in question is perceived as an ally of the US.
In this sense, Israel’s fear is that Iran and the US will negotiate some forms of collaboration which will end Israel monopoly over the nuclear weapons in the region. Israel wants to be the only state in the Middle East which possesses nuclear weapons in order to retain its unsure position as a strategic asset of the West in the region.
Decline of US imperialism’s as well as of Israel’s Power
The fact that Obama wants to come to some form of an agreement with Tehran indicates the decline of the importance of Israel for the Western imperialist states. If the war of 1967 made Israel the darling of the West, Israel has subsequently gone down hill, at least from 2000, when it was forced to flee Lebanon. Since then, it has lost yet a second war in Lebanon in 2006, as well as the Gaza war against Hamas in 2012.
Thus the possible new relations being established between the US and Iran indicate the growing isolation of Israel, not only among the general population even in Europe, but among its traditional supporters in the other Western imperialist states.
These developments are also an indicator of the declining power of American imperialism and the growing influence of Russian and Chinese imperialism with whom Iran is allied in support of the Assad regime in Syria.
U.S. wants to pry Iran away from Russian and Chinese imperialism
The US would like to pry Iran away from the Russian and the Chinese imperialists; Iran, from its side, wants to end the Western economic sanctions against her and open markets in the US and Europe to trade with her.
Stephen Kinzer, a former writer for the New York Times, who specialized in Iran, wrote in his book Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future (2010) that, after the September 11 attacks, Iran actively collaborated with the US against their common foes, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, in Afghanistan. “The State Department produced a report saying that the US had a “real opportunity” to remake its relationship with Iran, a report endorsed by the CIA. But in January 2002, to the bewilderment of the Iranians, President Bush denounced Iran as part of an ’axis of evil.’ Nonetheless, a year later, Iran proposed comprehensive talks with the United States. Iran would ask the U.S. to lift economic sanctions, guarantee Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology, and oppose anti-Iranian terrorist groups. In exchange, Iran would accept ’full transparency’ in its nuclear program, end any ’material support’ for Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, increase its cooperation with the U.S. against al Qaeda, and accept Israel within its 1967 borders. But the Bush Administration ignored the proposal.” (1)
Today what all the imperialist powers, both Western and Eastern, have in common is their determination to derail the Arab revolution. Only by doing so can they prevent it from developing in the direction of a completed democratic revolution, one that can only be won as a worker-led revolution.
Mossad’s secret War against Iran
It is not very likely that Iran will break with Russia and China and become a full ally of the US. However, it is possible that the level of tension between the US and Iran will decrease. This thawing of US-Iranian relations infuriates the Israeli ruling class since the latter has no power to do much to ruin the party, except for some more covert sabotage of Iranian installations and additional targeted killings of Iranian nuclear and computer experts.
We can not be certain, but it is more than likely that Israel is behind the killing of Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of Iran’s Cyber War Headquarters. Ahmadi was found dead this past weekend in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, north-west of the capital, Tehran.
CBS reporter Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, a former intelligence correspondent for Haaretz, write in their book Spies Against Armageddon that Mossad agents themselves are the ones carrying out the assassinations against Iranian scientists. The authors claim that Israel was responsible for the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists and for interjecting the Flame and Stuxnet viruses into the computers that control Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. They make the case that Israelis – not local lackeys or political dissidents such as the Mujaheddin-e Khalq(MEK) – carried out the assassinationson Iranian soil:
“For such a sensitive dangerous and daring mission as a series of assassinations in Iran’s capital, the Mossad would not depend on hired-gun mercenaries,” Raviv and Melman assert. “They would be considered far less trustworthy and there was hardly any chance that the Mossad would reveal to non-Israelis some of its assassination unit’s best methods.” (2)
Defend Iran against the imperialist Aggression of the U.S. and Israel! Long Live the Iranian Revolution against the Mullah Regime!
The Internationalist Socialist League (ISL) and our international organization, the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), will continue to defend Iran, a capitalist semi-colonial country, against any imperialist aggression – be it the U.S. or Israel – without giving any support to the bourgeois Islamist regime in Teheran. In case of a war, we stand for the military victory of Iran and the defeat of imperialist U.S. and Israel. We would call the international workers movement to do everything possible to obstruct the imperialist war efforts. We call for an end of the imperialist sanctions against Iran. We defend the right of Iran to develop civilian and military nuclear programs. (3)
At the same time ISL and the RCIT call the workers, peasants and urban poor in Iran to organize for the revolutionary struggle against the reactionary regime in Teheran. The only way forward is to overthrow of the capitalist ruling class of Iran and to build a workers’ and peasants’ republic! Such a secular republic would immediately guarantees full democratic rights for women as well as religious minorities and the right for national self-determination – including separation – for the Kurdish, Azeri and other oppressed nations! For a Socialist Federation of the people in the Middle East!
Footnotes