Democrats, Republicans: Parties of Imperialist War

U.S. Hands Off Iran, Out of Near East!

JANUARY 13—Donald Trump’s drone-strike assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Iran’s second most important official, at Baghdad International Airport on January 3 was nothing short of an act of war. Several leaders of Iraqi militias backed by Tehran were also killed in the attack. The White House ordered some 3,500 additional troops to the Near East and imposed still more sanctions on Iran.

The Trump administration cynically declared that Soleimani needed to be taken out because he represented an “imminent threat” of attack against U.S. citizens. The biggest threat to life and limb in the Near East, and beyond, is U.S. imperialism, self-declared cops of the world. It was widely reported that one reason Soleimani had traveled to Baghdad to meet Iraq’s prime minister was to discuss easing the confrontation between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. The same day that Soleimani was murdered, U.S. forces tried unsuccessfully to kill another key IRGC commander in Yemen, where the U.S. has heavily backed Saudi Arabia’s reactionary war against Houthi-led forces. And as Washington stoked fears at home of Iranian retaliation, Iranian Americans trying to cross back into the U.S. from British Columbia were detained for hours by border cops.

The Iraqi parliament reacted to the killings by calling for the expulsion of the 5,000-plus U.S. troops stationed in the country, with Sunni and Kurdish members boycotting the session. Trump countered by threatening Iraq with “sanctions like they’ve never seen before,” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo contemptuously dismissed the Iraqi prime minister’s request to simply discuss the issue. Trump also threatened Iran with “disproportionate” attacks—including against cultural sites in one of the world’s oldest civilizations—if Tehran retaliated against “any U.S. person or target.” He dialed back the war threats after an Iranian missile attack on two bases in Iraq on January 8 did not cause U.S. casualties. But the region remains a powder keg.

Mass demonstrations in Iran after the assassination revealed the white-hot anger in the population over U.S. belligerence. But much of that anger turned against the Tehran regime in the days after a missile took down a Ukrainian passenger jet with mainly Iranian and Canadian passengers, just hours after Iran’s attack on the Iraq bases. After three days of lying denials, Tehran had to admit that it was an IRGC missile that had struck the plane, with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani declaring that the country “deeply regrets this disastrous mistake.”

Iranians, who in the weeks prior to Soleimani’s killing had staged mass protests against austerity, and had been met with bloody repression, reacted with furious demonstrations condemning the IRGC and the country’s clerical leaders. Some are now demanding that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, resign and that the U.S. get out of the region. However culpable the Revolutionary Guards are for the tragedy, central responsibility for the air disaster lies with the American imperialists who had made the skies a war zone. Among Iranians, there is still bitter memory of the USS Vincennes firing two missiles in July 1988 that brought down an Iranian commercial aircraft in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. Washington later awarded to the ship’s captain the Legion of Merit for his “outstanding service.” (read on)