The Washington regime knows no limits. Another country invaded. More lies to justify it. This time, channelling former President George W. Bush’s lies about Iraq 25 years ago, it’s that Iran posed an imminent threat to American citizens and that the US wants only freedom for the Iranian people.
Just a day before the US-Israeli assault began, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi told CBS News that Iran was capitulating down the line in negotiations over its nuclear program and that this was putting a peace deal within reach. But the “negotiations” clearly were little more than a ruse to give the US and Israel cover to carry out a criminal attack. Israeli military chief of staff Eyal Zamir said the assault had been planned for months.
The Iranian regime is a reactionary and oppressive capitalist theocracy. The Iranian working class has been heroically fighting against it for decades. But the idea that the far-right regimes in Jerusalem and Washington are friends of Iran’s workers and oppressed, and acting in their interests, is a sick joke. The measure of their commitment to freedom and liberation is seen in the rubble of Gaza and in the number of parents mourning dead children.
They have pulled off a genocide without repercussions while lecturing the world about “civilisation”. And, under Trump, the US is engaged in gangster-style thuggery everywhere it ventures—kidnapping world leaders, starving out opponents, threatening others’ sovereignty and carrying out economic warfare against almost every country on Earth.
The power and position of the US and Israel rest on plunder, exploitation and savagery. Still, they claim with straight faces that the latest mass assassination and bombing campaign is some sort of a good neighbour policy.
The assault on Iran must be opposed. But this is about more than just Iran, or even the Middle East. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, addressing the Munich Security Conference last month, spoke of building “a new Western century”. European diplomats gave him a standing ovation. Gaza, Iran, Venezuela and the starvation of Cuba are but a small taste of what this entails: criminal violence and intimidation; mass murder everywhere Washington doesn’t get its way.
“The West”, however, is not just white Europeans or those of that heritage. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have yet again facilitated this imperialist operation, allowing the US to station its forces permanently in their territories and working hand in glove with Trump and the Israelis. They haven’t been colonised; they are not suckers or stooges. They have put their own capitalist self-interest first and aligned with the world’s pre-eminent power.
Palestinians are not their fellow Arabs. Iranians are not their fellow Muslims. Like the rulers of every state, “their people” are capitalists, their language is money and power is their religion. In this, they are no different from the Japanese government, the Philippine government, the Argentine government, the Egyptian government, the Kenyan government and many others.
What of Australia in all of this?
“We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”, reads a joint statement from the prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister. It is thoroughly predictable that this government would regurgitate Washington’s talking point. But has it aided Trump’s far-right regime here? Has the Pine Gap facility in the Northern Territory been used for this criminal assault on Iran? The Australian government won’t say, because it never does.
Either way, how much longer can the Australian alliance with the US be tolerated? US imperialism is entrenching its position on this continent. According to one Reuters report, Australia has become “the top overseas location for US Air Force and Navy construction spending”.
This is occurring just as the Washington regime is leading what is increasingly looking like a global fascist resurgence. The key rationale for the Australian government tying itself at the hip to the US war machine through the Aukus partnership was upholding “the rules-based international order”. This rationale, cynical as it always was, now lies in tatters.
The order itself is being dismantled and disparaged by the US, which the Australian government had claimed to be the indispensable partner for upholding it. Rubio put it bluntly in Munich: “We can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people”.
The Labor government, by tightly integrating this continent and its military and intelligence services with the American empire is complicit in—a partner with—far-right gangsterism and war crimes.
The “rules-based order” was always little more than an imperialist order favouring the United States and its allies. The new order is the same, but different. In Rubio’s words, “Western civilisation” must be “unapologetic” and unshackled by “guilt and shame”. The new order is naked capitalism, in which only power matters, and in which humanity is an afterthought.
We have to resist this descent into barbarism.
