More than 1,200 dead, schools blown up, entire streets flattened, vital infrastructure destroyed—this is the cost of the US and Israel’s war on Iran. Another 500 lives in Lebanon have been wiped out by Israel. The war is not being fought for democracy, nor to alleviate the suffering of the Iranian people at the hands of the Tehran regime. This, the seventh attack on a foreign country since Trump came to office, is about the US exercising military terror—the one thing in which it still leads the world—to protect its domination in the Middle East and to send a message to other big powers that it means to stay top dog.
The US and Israel are unleashing barbarism in Iran. Admiral Brad Cooper, US commander in charge of Operation Epic Fury, told the press on the third day of the war: “In simple terms, we’re focused on shooting all the things that can shoot at us”.
In the US military’s rules of war, that includes a primary school where 165 young girls were ripped to shreds by one of Trump’s “precision bombing” raids. As well as apartment buildings, TV broadcasting studios, emergency service units, hotels, sports stadiums, hospitals, Red Crescent offices, UNESCO-protected historic buildings and police stations, all of which have been heavily damaged if not smashed to pieces by days of aerial bombing. The US has now hit 6,000 targets in Iran, a bombardment twice as intense as George W. Bush’s “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad in 2003.
For all the US stories about liberating the Iranian people and carrying out surgical strikes, London’s Daily Telegraph, a right-wing newspaper and no friend of Iran, told the real story: “Tehran an ‘apocalypse’ of hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble ... Highways choke with those fleeing as others shelter with nowhere left to run”. This is what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth means when he says: “Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”. Hegseth couldn’t have spelled out more clearly the brutality of the US mission.
Israel’s two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza has provided ample opportunity for it to hone its killing machine, which is now being deployed to murderous effect in Iran. Already, the war and its consequences have extended beyond the Middle East, with a US submarine sinking an Iranian naval frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka, taking the lives of more than 100 Iranian crew. Israel has invaded Lebanon, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee in terror, and threatening to turn Beirut into Gaza.
Rising oil prices and disruption to exports are driving up the price of fertiliser, threatening harvests, increasing the price of food and pushing more people into hunger. Workers around the world are bearing the cost of higher petrol prices. Industries across Asia are shutting down due to a fuel shortages. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank, conservatively estimates that every day of this war is costing the US public US$1 billion; others suggest a figure closer to $2 billion at a time the Trump administration is slashing welfare. The cost of the three US F15 jet fighters shot down in friendly fire, $300 million, is equivalent to the cost of supplying 125,000 Americans with food aid or 100,000 children with healthcare. Not everyone is losing out, though: defence stocks are, according to the Financial Times, “the real winners”.
Trump hoped this would be a short, sharp war through which intense bombardment and the death of the supreme leader might prompt forces within the Iranian leadership who might pose less of a threat to US interests to come forward to take the helm, as occurred in Venezuela.
When this didn’t happen, Trump turned to talking about a war lasting many weeks and with much more aggressive bombing, telling the media a few days into the war: “We’re kicking the crap out of them. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon”. On 7 March, he threatened the country with “complete destruction and certain death”. Given that the US military and successive presidents have for decades toyed with using nuclear weapons and given the expiry of even the weak international treaties limiting nuclear weapons, there is no limit to the terror the US and Israel might unleash.
Much is at stake. Trump has stated that an attack on Cuba, which the administration has called “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security, is next on the list of targets. US and Israeli terrorism in the Middle East must be resisted.
Why is the US attacking Iran?
Trump has given a number of often conflicting objectives for the war. That the US is coming to the rescue of the Iranian people striving for democracy against a brutal autocracy run by religious fanatics, or that the invasion is needed to stop an imminent nuclear or ballistic missile attack by the Tehran regime. That the war is to bring an end to Iran’s support for international terrorism or to install a leadership that will respect peaceful coexistence with its neighbours and which will answer to the US president. This is the same garbage that President George W. Bush told us about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the lead-up to the US invasion in 2003.
As if Trump, who has unleashed ICE goons against migrants in America, who has attacked the electoral system with a view to fixing the November mid-term elections, who has tried to turn the entire US state into a means to extend his own power and wealth and who has applauded fascist terror gangs at home, gives a damn about democracy in Iran. Trump didn’t even consult Congress before attacking Iran. Trump and his family have made fortunes in business dealings with the Gulf monarchies, tiny elites sitting on top of vast oil reserves and a working class made of indentured labour who are denied even the most basic rights. And then there’s Israel, which would rather kill Palestinians than let them decide their destiny.
If Trump wants to stop a country sponsoring international terrorism, he should look much closer to home. The US has left a trail of massacres and misery in its repeated wars in the Middle East, most notoriously the so-called War on Terror, which took the lives of millions of civilians and destroyed the economies of Afghanistan and Iraq. Its divide and rule tactics stoked religious and ethnic sectarianism that have plagued both countries.
Partner in crime Israel has been in a constant state of war with Palestine since the 1930s, grabbing more and more land and driving millions of Palestinians from their homeland. But it has also backed others to carry out its dirty work. For more than a decade in the 1970s and 1980s, Israel created, armed and funded the so-called South Lebanon Army, which served as a proxy to attack the Palestine Liberation Organisation and, later, Hezbollah. In 1982, Israel worked closely with fascist militias to massacre 2,000 Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps.
The US is trumpeting its war as a holy mission which will bring the Second Coming closer, while Israel is run by religious fundamentalists pursuing a dream of Greater Israel through terror.
It’s pretty easy to see that the justifications for war that Trump and his cronies have given are nothing but lies. So, why then is the US attacking Iran?
Clearly, there are domestic considerations. Trump’s support is steadily falling, and the Republicans face a serious reverse at the November mid-term elections from a people weary of inflation and squeezed living standards. Revelations in the Epstein files have hurt his administration. You can assume he hopes for a short war that allows him to claim victory, distract attention from troubles at home and boost his electoral fortunes. Even if he did promise his supporters “no more foreign wars”, the majority of Republican supporters support the attack on Iran.
But US foreign policy can’t be reduced simply to the prerogatives or whims of a particular leader. Despite Trump’s efforts to convert the state apparatus into his own personal fiefdom, the US war machine has deeper considerations that stretch far beyond the two and a half years Trump has left in the White House. The US has been war-gaming an attack on Iran for decades. Trump may have pulled the trigger, but that doesn’t explain the war.
Another potential explanation is that Israel is dragging the US into a war that it otherwise may not have initiated. Certainly, Israel is a hostile ethnostate that lives only by seizing land and, as such, it is impelled time and again to go to war. This explains its destruction of Gaza and its steadily growing occupation of the West Bank. And Israel’s ambitions are far greater than simply seizing historic Palestine. At its heart, Israel’s goal is to establish “Greater Israel”, stretching across the Middle East, potentially from the Mediterranean to the borders of Saudi Arabia.
Israel regards Iran as its primary obstacle to this goal. Hence, it has regular wars with Iran and lobbies successive US administrations to lead a combined operation to eliminate the Islamic Republic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now seized on what his government regards as an historic opportunity to smash Iran once and for all. Israel is also invading Lebanon, both to destroy Iran-backed Hezbollah and to grab more territory. This is not merely a wild adventure by the blood-soaked Netanyahu government; the attack on Iran and invasion of Lebanon are fully backed by Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid.
Israel has no interest in “nation building” or finding leaders it can do a deal with while leaving the regime more or less intact. Chaos in the Middle East serves its purposes. As senior Israeli security adviser Dennis Citrinowicz told the Financial Times on 4 March, Israeli thinking is: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future or the stability of Iran”. If this means Iran collapses like Libya or Iraq, riven by bloody sectarian struggles for power, so much the better.
The war undoubtedly aligns with the Israeli government’s long-term objectives, which is why when Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press on 3 March that the US had attacked Iran “preventatively” because it knew Israel was about to do so and Iran would then attack the US in retaliation, many believed this confirmed that Israel and its Washington lobbyists were bundling the US into war. Add to this decades-long US political and military support for Israel’s wars, with the genocide in Gaza only the most recent.
But none of this proves that Israel drags the US into wars to the US’s detriment. The US backs Israel because it is a force multiplier for US imperialism in the Middle East. The Israeli military can be relied upon to strike America’s enemies without the US necessarily being involved or expending the resources that would be required for the US to carry out such missions on its own. That Israel does so also enables the US to avoid the kind of international diplomatic blowback that might follow from US attacks.
Growing collaboration between Israel and the US in developing new weapons systems, and Israel’s testing of them on the field of battle, along with extensive intelligence sharing, only add to the benefits the US extracts from this relationship. What’s more, Israel can lash out in the Middle East without fear of a backlash at home: no other population in the region is as committed to Western interests as Israel’s.
As former President Joe Biden told the US Senate in 1986: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region”. It is this that explains the hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid the US has given Israel since it emerged as a regional power in the 1967 Six Day war with its Arab neighbours.
This does not mean that Israel and the US are always perfectly aligned. Just last June, the US appeared to rein in its ally during the twelve-day war with Iran. But the two are very close allies that are united on the fundamentals.
The US is not attacking Iran because Israel told it to. Blocking Iranian power in the region, if not the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, has long been a priority for Washington under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Oil, or more precisely, control over oil, is a key reason for this.
The Middle East contains half of the world’s proven oil reserves and produces one-third of its oil. It also holds 40 percent of natural gas reserves and supplies one-quarter of global LNG exports. Twenty percent of the world’s oil and LNG exports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, making it the chokepoint of world energy supplies.
Who controls the Middle East controls the world’s oil and gas markets. Oil remains central to the world economy, and because oil powers the world’s navies, jet fighters, bombers and tanks, it is critical also to the military machines. When it comes to controlling oil supplies, talk about a “rules-based order” is for the birds. Raw power is what matters. This is why every imperialist power has an eye on the region.
The US dominates the Middle East and has done so since the former colonial overlords Britain and France were pushed out in the 1950s and 60s. It has relied on a series of client regimes and close allies that have hosted US bases housing tens of thousands of US armed forces personnel. Israel acts as an advance guard for US imperialism.
The chief irritant to US imperialism in the region has been Iran, which in 1979 threw out the Western-backed Shah and expelled the US. Iran matters when it comes to US imperialist machinations. With a population of more than 90 million, the world’s third-largest oil reserves and well placed to control the oil trade through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran could not be ignored.
In the late 1980s, the US threw its weight behind Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its decade-long war with Iran that cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. As preparations were underway for an attack on Iraq in 2003, US hawks were pushing for an extension of the war to Iran, with a British official summing up the Bush team’s motto at the time to Newsweek: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”. The US quagmire in Iraq put paid to such plans but did nothing to reduce US hostility to Iran, against which the US maintained deadly sanctions.
Iran’s growing influence in the region following US defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq forced the US to alternate between compromise—as in Obama’s 2015 deal to wind back Iran’s nuclear enrichment program in return for lifting sanctions—and confrontation, as when Trump, in his first term, tore up the agreement and gave Israel a green light to assassinate Iranian leaders.
Israel and the US have, in the last two or three years, decimated much of what was called the Iranian “axis of resistance”, which incorporated Hezbollah, Hamas, loyal militias in Iraq and the rebel movement in Yemen. The fall of al-Assad in Syria, another Iran ally, took another piece out of Iran’s regional armoury. Russia’s war in Ukraine has diverted Putin from coming to Iran’s aid. The mass protests and strikes for democracy in Iranian cities in recent years have demonstrated the unpopularity of the regime in the eyes of swathes of the Iranian public. The US believed that now was the time to strike. This explains the US marshalling the largest naval task force in decades in the Mediterranean and Arabian seas in the weeks before the attack, along with the dispatch of 100 fighter jets to bases in the Middle East and Europe to support operations.
It is not that Israeli pressure on Washington and Israel’s first strike on Iran were irrelevant to the exact timing of the US attack, but the US was already set on a path to war. Just as importantly, war with Iran complements its own long-term objectives.
So, the idea that the US is acting at the behest of Israel is wrong. It is important to look at who is popularising this idea and why. First, there are the liberals who believe that the US is or could be a force for good in the world, but is manipulated into going to war by Israel. Such a belief whitewashes the entire bloody history of the US. The US has invaded, bombed and killed without restraint for centuries. First, in destroying the Indigenous population and invading and occupying Mexican land. Later, starting with the 1898 war with Spain, it became a full-blown imperialist power that has waged war across every continent. It has done 99 percent of this without any Israeli lobbying. Downplaying the menace posed by the US empire in this way gets us nowhere.
Even more dangerous are the outright antisemites and fascists who see Israel as calling the shots to the detriment of the US. Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens have amassed huge social media followings, and not just among those on the hard right, by peddling the idea, sometimes openly, sometimes coded, that “Jews run the world”, and hence the US is in the service of Israel. The left should have no truck with such claims.
For the US empire, this war is about more than just defeating or weakening Iran. The US wants to use its war on Iran to demonstrate to friends and enemies further afield that it remains the regional and world hegemon. While the US may currently dominate the region, its rivals are never far away. Over decades, Russia has struck deals with local rulers in the region to draw them into its camp. More recently, China, the world’s largest exporter, has made inroads through its Belt and Road Initiative. With commercial prowess comes state penetration, threatening US hegemony. When China oversaw negotiations leading to a resumption of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023, alarm bells rang in Washington.
If the US is able to subdue Iran, whatever form that might take, this will send a powerful message. China may have economic leverage, but when the chips are down, it is US military power that determines who rules the world. An Iran under US control would likely withdraw from the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Belt and Road Initiative. Taking down the Iranian regime would also weaken Russian influence in the Middle East, already hurt by the fall of al-Assad in Syria.
A clear US victory will also be understood by its friends in the region. The Gulf monarchies are now important logistical, aviation and financial hubs in the world economy and an important factor in the regional balance of power. In return for cooperating with the US, these regimes get US backing, weapons and protection from internal dissent and foreign rivals. The Gulf monarchies did not want this war, and they are now wearing the consequences of it in the form of Iranian drones and missile attacks. But if the war indicates the dangers of US and Israeli imperialism in the region, a US victory will also tell the Gulf states that they have no option but to continue to follow Washington’s lead, and that includes financing US government debt with their huge reserves.
Each imperialist power uses a combination of aid, finance, trade and violence to secure its spheres of influence. Control over energy supplies forms an important element in US considerations. The US depends very little on Middle Eastern oil; it exports as much as Saudi Arabia and imports relatively little. Its recent decapitation of the Venezuelan government gives US oil companies access to the world’s largest oil reserves, constituting one-sixth of the total.
America’s allies and enemies are much more exposed to disruptions to Middle Eastern energy. On US orders, Europe and India have both substantially reduced their imports from Russia since the Ukraine invasion and switched to the Middle East. Europe now depends on the region for 20 percent of its oil and India one-half. China is even more dependent, relying on the Middle East for two-thirds of the total. Not just oil: Europe imports 10 percent of its LNG needs from Qatar, China one-third and India two-thirds. While some countries have built up big oil reserves, none have a surplus of LNG, nor is there any spare production capacity. US control of the spigot of Middle Eastern oil and gas puts the US in a strong position to twist the arms of countries that depend on it.
We cannot tell how successful the US will be in achieving its goals. The whole mission may turn out to be a complete disaster, not just for the people of the region but for the US itself. George W. Bush declared “mission accomplished” six weeks into the Iraq war. The war ultimately destroyed his presidency. But as Red Flag has argued elsewhere of the US war drive under Trump: “Whether it can or will succeed in Iran or anywhere else is moot. The point is, Washington is not going down wondering. It has switched gears. This is a crash or crash through operation, to hell with laws, rights, decency and humanity”.
The whole Trump project has been to dispense with the fig leaf of the “rules-based order” and to assert US power against both allies and enemies alike. Whether its imposition of tariffs, shutting down any domestic opposition, arresting opponents, arm-twisting allies under threat of sanctions, attacking sovereign states, backing Israel in its genocide in Gaza and expansion into the West Bank, it all comes down to the US using its unparallelled strength to bully weaker forces, not just for immediate gain, but to strengthen the position of the US empire long term.
In November, the administration announced its new National Security Strategy. This proclaimed Trump’s determination to secure the Western hemisphere for the US. Hence the abduction of the president of Venezuela, the airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, the threats against Colombia, Panama and Cuba, meddling in Brazil’s judicial system, the threat to take over Greenland and support for right-wing presidents in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, El Salvador and Paraguay who are all boasting of their own Trumpian programs at home.
The so-called Donroe Doctrine does not mean that the US is going to withdraw to the Americas. The US is the global hegemon and is not about to cede Europe to Putin or Asia to Xi Jinping. Trump is about using the full power of the US state—financial and military—to intimidate North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners, to get them to shell out more for their own defence, to compel them to do deals with US companies, set up factories in the US and, perhaps, to shovel some money to Trump’s businesses. Trump is doing much the same in East and Southeast Asia.
In response to the US openly mocking the “rules-based order”, there has been talk in recent months in Europe and Canada about creating a bloc of middle powers that might forge a path independent of the US. While this may be a long-term project, these governments face a reality that, for now, the world economy is still dominated by US finance and that they have no alternative sources for the quantity of weapons and military supplies they need. This has meant that, while some have grumbled about various aspects of the war, they have mostly fallen in behind the US. In the name of “defensive operations”, the Starmer government in Britain has opened airfields for US B1 bombers and allowed the US to use the Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has told Europeans: “Now is not the moment” to lecture the US on international law.
The Albanese government, true to form, has plumbed new depths of sycophantism in its support for the war. On the day the nuclear-armed US and Israel attacked Iran, the government issued a statement that could have come from the White House, regurgitating all the lies about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program and its threat to global peace and international security. Citing the Iranian regime’s “brutal acts of violence and intimidation”, it threw itself into the camp of a US president undertaking murderous repression at home.
Labor ministers condemn Iran for its “indiscriminate” retaliatory strikes on the Gulf states but won’t utter a peep about the US and Israel massacring hundreds of Iranian and Lebanese civilians. When challenged whether the obviously illegal US strikes on Iran breach international law, Albanese and his ministers parrot the line that “the legal basis for the attacks is a matter for the US and Israel”, giving the two warmongers a green light to press ahead.
Nor could the government resist the temptation to stoke Islamophobia, condemning and threatening the Shia community in Sydney for mourning the death of spiritual leader Khamenei. Illustrating its cynicism was its snap decision to grant humanitarian visas and shelter to five Iranian soccer players on Trump’s orders when both countries have for years detained, demonised and tried to deport thousands of Iranian asylum seekers back to potential persecution.
When Foreign Minister Penny Wong was forced to admit that three Australian Navy personnel were on the US submarine that torpedoed the Iranian frigate, she said that they played no operational role on board. In fact, those submariners are just one small part of Australia’s direct contribution to the war effort. According to research by Peter Cronau for Declassified Australia, Australia has 100 personnel serving with, on secondment or undergoing training in the US for the operation of Australia’s future AUKUS submarines, with 50 currently serving on US nuclear-powered submarines. One hundred more Australian military and intelligence personnel are stationed at US bases in the Gulf, undertaking naval and aerial operations.
Like the British Labour government, the Albanese government is now deploying “defensive military assistance” to Gulf states, including surveillance aircraft and missiles. The Coalition, which doesn’t share Labor’s fear of plain speaking, welcomed the decision, declaring Australia to be at war with Iran.
Much more significant to the US and Israel’s wars, though, than submariners and spy planes are the US-Australian spy stations at Pine Gap and the Northwest Cape in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, respectively. These are the eyes and ears of US and Israeli military intelligence and are involved in every operation carried out by US and Israeli armed forces in the Middle East, from guiding submarines to drone targeting of individuals in their homes and offices.
Like Israel, Australia is joined at the hip with US imperialism. It too bears responsibility for US wars and the bloodshed they entail. The powers waging this war are motivated by their own imperialist ambitions. These are not even dressed up as lofty or humanitarian goals: they are about projecting power through industrial-scale, deadly force. They are motivated only by what is good for their interests and will trample underfoot anyone who gets in their way. This is modern capitalism: competition between blocs of countries for control of natural resources, markets, trade routes and productive assets leads to deadly and never-ending military conflict. It is a system that can always find the money and resources for waging war, but can’t feed and house people or protect the planet we all rely on. It is not fit to continue.
As long as the US and its allies are allowed to roam the region, there will never be peace in the Middle East. We must demand an end to the war on Iran, that Israel get out of Lebanon and that the US get out of the Middle East. No more bombing, no more military supplies and no more support for the US empire. And in Australia, the priorities must be to shut down US bases, expel all US military personnel, scrap the AUKUS nuclear submarines and end all US-Australia military cooperation.
