Once again, U.S. and Israeli officials are ratcheting up their war threats against Iran. On June 6, Shaoul Mofaz, Israel’s transportation minister, made the most direct threat to date calling an attack on Iran “unavoidable.” Mofaz said, “If Iran continues its nuclear arms program—we will attack it.” The next day, on June 7, Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer went on record saying, “We must tell them: ‘If you so much as dream of attacking Israel, before you even finish dreaming there won’t be an Iran anymore.’”
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Thanks to the U.S. corporate media bias toward Israel, the U.S. outpost in the Middle East, overt threats by Israeli officials to annihilate Iran are portrayed as defensive statements expressing deep worry about an existential danger to Israel. Israel already has a sizeable arsenal of nuclear weapons, yet the Israeli government’s strongest—and unsubstantiated—accusation is that Iran may have thought about developing nuclear weapons at some point.
In 2006, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “Israel will be wiped off the pages of history,” much of the imperialist media widely published a mistranslation of the statement. Ahmadinejad’s words echoed a slogan from the early days of the Islamic revolution in Iran. The statement, as understood by everyone in the Middle East, was directed against the racist state of Israel. It was not a death threat against the people of Israel. In fact, it was merely a prediction, not a statement of actions that the Iranian state would take.
Along the same lines, at a June 2 food summit in Rome, Ahmadinejad repeated his prediction of the downfall of the state of Israel and said, “This will happen whether we are involved in it or not.”
Given the murderous history of the expansionist settler state of Israel, this anti-Zionist slogan reflects the sentiments of the vast majority of the people of the region. In contrast, the statements of Mofaz and Ben-Eliezer are not mere slogans against the Iranian state, but specific statements of intent to attack Iran. Ben-Eliezer’s statement is an explicit threat to annihilate an entire people.
Still, Ahmadinejad, the president of a country that has no nuclear weapons and has never attacked a single country since its revolution, is portrayed as some madman intent on bringing an end to the world. Such “news coverage” goes a long way in protecting the interests of U.S. imperialism abroad.
As strong as Israel is militarily, it would not be able to attack, invade or threaten its neighbors were it not for U.S. support. After his bellicose statement, Mofaz emphasized that the attack he is promoting could only be conducted with U.S. backing. The key to Israel’s intransigence is the military, financial and political support that it receives from Washington.
Obama, McCain singing the same song
Despite tactical differences, all sectors of the U.S. ruling class are as united on their unconditional support for Israel as they are on their commitment to regime change in Iran.
Representing the continuation of Bush’s policies of war and extreme aggression, Republican presidential nominee John McCain has a clear position on Israel, calling upon “all free people to stand by Israel in her defense of our common values and ideals.”
Earlier this year, during the campaign for his party’s nomination, McCain sang, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of a Beachboys’ song. One can easily imagine what the reaction of our “free and independent” media would have been had a presidential nominee in Iran displayed such “humor” toward the United States and Israel.
U.S. foreign policy aims on Iran have been remarkably consistent, irrespective of which party is in the White House. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has assailed the Bush administration’s policy, claiming that it has resulted in the strengthening of “terrorist states” such as Iran.
Obama’s solution is not to respect the territorial integrity of Iran, its right to develop independently or its people’s right to self-determination. Obama favors direct negotiations with Iran as a more effective means of containment and bringing about regime change through other means.
On June 4, Obama addressed the convention of the American Israeli Political Action Committee in Washington, D.C., as did McCain and Hillary Clinton. AIPAC is a powerful and well-funded lobbying group that advocates a continuation of unconditional U.S. support for the state of Israel.
Obama stated, “There is no greater threat to Israel—or to the peace and stability of the region—than Iran.” On his approach to Iran, Obama went on to say, “I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He paused for a second, glanced at the audience, and repeated, “Everything.” This was an obvious restatement of Bush’s oft-repeated “all options are on the table” position. The “everything” and “all options” include, of course, the use of nuclear weapons.
The new round of threats against Iran does not necessarily represent a shift in U.S.-Israeli policy toward Iran. They can be attributed to electoral politics, both in the United States and Israel. Like numerous other Israeli officials, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is facing corruption charges and may not survive politically much longer. Shaul Mofaz is competing with other Israeli officials for the leadership of the ruling party, Kadima, in anticipation of Olmert’s likely fall.
Obama, in his turn, is attempting to dispel any lingering doubts about his commitment to the ruling class by making tough statements. Apologists for the Democratic Party may claim that Obama is only saying what he has to say to get elected.
This may well be true, but it will not end there. Obama will not only say what he has to say to get elected, but if elected will do what he has to do to remain at the helm of the most powerful imperialist state in the world. Real change only comes from below, from a powerful mass movement.
Reining in independent states
Ever since the United States became the dominant imperialist power in the world, its policy towards Iran, as the rest of the Middle East, has been to assert control over the region’s resources through the installment and support of client states. Since the 1979 Iranian revolution, this has translated into a drive for regime change, support for Iraq in its eight-year war against Iran, pursuing sanctions, funding “democratic” opposition groups, airing deceitful propaganda through radio and television broadcasts, and other means.
The increasing regional strength of an independent Iran is a serious problem for Washington. The entire U.S. political establishment would not hesitate for a moment to militarily attack Iran if it were safe for their interests to do so.
Given the continued resistance of the Iraqi people to the five-year-old occupation, however, a ground invasion of Iran is not a possibility right now. Aerial attacks, as intense and murderous as they are— and we have seen this in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and many other countries—will not result in regime change even under the rosiest of the military planners’ scenarios. Though air strikes would severely weaken the Iranian regime, it would still pose a threat to U.S. interests, being capable of disrupting the flow of oil through the strategic Strait of Hormuz and causing a spike in the already sky-high oil prices.
The people of the Middle East continue to resist imperialist domination. The question for the managers of the U.S. state apparatus is whether a softer foreign policy approach will be more effective than playing hardball to achieve the interests of the banks and corporations.
