The past week has been deeply distressing for people across West Asia. The genocidal Israeli state and the US continue to drop bombs on Iran and cities across Kurdistan, hitting military bases, schools, hospitals, homes, as well as desalination plants and oil warehouses. These strikes have killed a death toll in the thousands (including around 200 children), as well as many hundreds in Lebanon, with thousands injured and displaced. A number of civilians and migrant workers across various Arab nations and Israel have also died in retaliatory strikes by Iran. There is no doubt that the US and Israel are seeking to remake the region in their image.
These attacks come after the Twelve-Day War and western sanctions imposed since the Iranian Revolution, which have strangled the working class. For workers and other oppressed groups in Iran, economic hardship has been exacerbated by the Islamic Republic putting resources into militarisation rather than addressing food inflation, as well as decades of violent state repression. This includes thousands of people slaughtered due to anti-regime protests in the last two months. While Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other officials have also been killed, this does not end the brutality of the IRGC, who have cut off phone and internet, set up checkpoints and continue to execute civilians in the middle of a war.
The strait of Hormuz has been shut down by the Iranian state which threatens the supply of food and fuel across the world. 80% of the food and water for the GCC (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE) comes through that strait. Iranian strikes have also targeted water desalination plants in Israel and AI data centers in the UAE. It seems Iran’s goal is to affect the US stock market. This suggests Iran’s strategy is broader than its immediate self-defense.
Australia is complicit. The Albanese government’s support for US and Israel follows their bloody campaigns in Afghanistan after 9/11 and Iraq in 2003. They benefit from Trump’s “might makes right” foreign policy, with US military spending to build infrastructure in the NT. Australia provides battlefield intelligence from US-run bases like Pine Gap and North-West Cape, where much data is forwarded onto Israel. Central Arrente people have also objected to Pine Gap since the 1970s. Severing Australia’s US-Israel ties must develop into a coherent union demand across this continent, but this will only happen if Labor’s stranglehold on the unions is challenged by rank-and-file workers power.
Recent events further east are largely under-reported in comparison. Following months of cross-border attacks between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Pakistani military launched airstrikes in Kabul and its government declared it an “open war”.
The attacks on Tehran have lead to calls for ceasefire by both the Chinese and Russian states, but their alliance with the IR hasn’t led to military support up to this point.
The resulting refugee crisis from these wars will also collide with western nations electing parties on the primary issue of border control and anti-immigration policy.
Western imperialist powers are showing no restraint in pursuing control of the earth’s resources. While the ruling class publicly denies the existence of climate change, they are well aware that severe water and food shortages are coming, and they are positioning themselves to extend their own survival amid the devastation they helped create. All while the working class and oppressed pay the price with their lives—conscripted into armies governed by theocratic power hoarders and fascist despots, stuck under the concrete rubble created by war criminals, and imprisoned for demanding the bare minimum.
As ‘anti-imperialists’ police language on the left, tacitly defending the ‘sovereignty’ of the Islamic Republic to oppress women, workers and other minorities. In the words of Siyâvash Shahabi, they themselves “drift towards a pro-war horizon in practice”, But why? Trump and Albanese have still used the IR’s violence and repression as a convenient excuse to justify invasion. Certainly not the left publishing statements in solidarity with the Iranian working class. This uncritical campist orientation needs to be updated beyond the Cold War—the US is clearly going to do whatever it wants regardless of what a internationally minuscule left says or doesn’t say.
International law has proven to be the empty threat of repercussion. The Gaza genocide is yet unpunished and continues under the Trump-led ‘Board of Peace’, validated by states left and right, from Argentina to Vietnam. Violence that goes unaddressed by the organised left will only beget more violence from the ruling class. It’s clear these international safeguards only exist to protect capitalists from us. We must pursue another form of defense, one historically vindicated—international workers power.
Against a threat that operates globally, nationalist movements will not suffice, especially not when their proponents support the repression of the very working class organisations that’s needed to win this fight. Only a globally connected workers movement will be strong enough to stop rogue fascist states from grabbing what they can while locking down their borders to the people they dispossess. We need global economic leverage that makes the ruling class take pause, and we must put forward a positive program for a world without endless war. This starts with organising at the point of production in order to shut down systems that allow war to be carried out. The time to get organised is now.