A declining MAGA stumbles into Armageddon
Three days into a catastrophic bloodletting that looks set engulf the whole of the Middle East, the Trump White House finally offered a rationale for its ‘pre-emptive’ turn to war: the US “knew there was going to be Israeli action,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained after a briefing with US Congress on 2 March. “We knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces and [that] if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them…we would suffer higher casualties.” Rubio’s shocking admission that the US went to war for Israel follows a long series of conflicting explanations coming out of Washington, and a marked retreat from earlier claims by Trump and others that the US was under threat of imminent attack—claims discredited by US intelligence and openly rejected by the Pentagon.
Clearly the US and Israel have embarked on a war of open aggression against Iran. This is a war of choice, flagrantly illegal under international law, and one that Trump has been persuaded to undertake by an Israeli regime keen to exploit MAGA’s increasingly tenuous command in Washington. Netanyahu and the far-right forces around him have been open about their expansionist aims: having carried out live-streamed genocide with the full support of ‘liberal democratic’ regimes in the west, over recent months they extended the carnage to the West Bank, continued their murderous suffocation of Gaza, and violated the ceasefire in Lebanon on a daily basis—all with complete impunity. The crackpot US ambassador’s endorsement of Netanyahu’s Greater Israeli project a week before the attack on Iran seems, in hindsight, to have been rooted in knowledge that plans were in their final stages.
Negotiations Were a Charade
By now it’s clear that the ‘negotiations’ over Iran’s nuclear program were never more than a charade, even though, as Omani negotiators insisted, Iran had shown unexpected flexibility, and a deal was within reach. The New York Times acknowledges that a plan for a joint US-Israeli military assault had been agreed early in the new year, with the date postponed (at Netanyahu’s request) for logistical reasons: Israel needed to replenish munitions before war could commence. Upbeat reports about the progress of nuclear negotiations fuelled panic in Tel Aviv that the notoriously fickle Trump might cut a deal: Israelis insisted on a laundry list of further demands which they knew the Iranians couldn’t accept, and Netanyahu headed to the White House on February 11th “determined to keep the American president on the path to war.”
A combination of cheap flattery and reassurance about the ease with which he could take Tehran seems to have been enough to persuade Trump to gamble it all on potentially catastrophic war. Facing into mid-term elections with the lowest presidential ratings on record, ducking and diving from mounting evidence of his deep involvement in a billionaires’ pedophile ring, rapidly hemorrhaging domestic support for his management of the economy and the unleashing of ICE, Trump and his White House entourage seem to have bet the house on prospects of an easy military victory over Iran. Very quickly it’s become clear that this is an unlikely outcome: a Trump regime that looked invincible just a few short months ago is now beset by crisis on every side. Early polling shows that less that one in four Americans supported strikes against Iran; that number will almost definitely plummet further as prospects for a short war recede.
Ignoring the flagrant illegality of US and Israeli military actions, and in spite of their hand-wringing just a few short weeks ago in Munich about the ‘rupture’ that Trump’s authoritarianism has inflicted on the liberal democratic order, one after another the western regimes have come around to declare their support for Trump’s war against Iran. France and the UK are deploying sea and air power in support of the aggression, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has declared openly that international law does not apply to Iran. The same rogues’ gallery of supposedly democratic regimes that have facilitated a two-years plus genocide in Gaza have closed ranks around US-Israeli aggression against Iran.
Military Dynamics
US and Israeli planners launched the war on the presumption that early ‘decapitation strikes’ would throw the Iranians into disarray and compel them to quickly accept humiliating terms: plans envisioned a “four-to five-day operation” that would bring Tehran to heel. Their success in assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khameini and a wider circle of high-level political and military functionaries reinforced this logic, but the Iranian military response—powerful missile strikes against US military and intelligence assets across the region, with clear indications that they were prepared to dig in for a long and punishing confrontation—has thrown the American war machine into confusion and, as Time magazine puts it, “shaken the Gulf region’s image of stability and safety, [which provided] the bedrock of many Gulf nations' relationship with the United States.” Trump officials approached Italian intermediaries to relay proposals for an early ceasefire, but Tehran rejected this outright.
War on the scale that we see unfolding across the Middle East takes on a logic of its own, with a long list of military and political variables that make the outcome impossible to predict. The only certainty is that it will bring immense human suffering: the horrific ‘double-tap’ massacre at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girl’s primary school at Minab in southern Iran is likely to be repeated many times if Trump and Netanyahu get their way. Military analysts suggest, plausibly, that frustration of their early plans—the failure to force an Iranian surrender—is likely to open a much more brutal turn to indiscriminate bombing by the US and the Israelis.
The temptation for Trump will be to make the cost of continuing so horrific for Iranian civilians that the Iranian leadership will be forced to come to the table: terrorism on a massive scale is therefore on the cards. This approach is reinforced in important ways by doubts about the capacity of the US to sustain a protracted war while its munitions have been depleted by supplying the genocide in Gaza, by major commitments in the Ukraine, and by its arming of Israel for a series of aggressions in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. Reports that the US is redeploying its THAAD systems from South Korea to the Middle East so early in the war with Iran highlight the strains. Similarly, Saudi officials have expressed frustration over a US decision to “abandon us and redirect its air defense to protect Israel,” leaving “all the Gulf states that host American military bases at the mercy of Iranian strikes." These tensions will deepen as the war continues.
The Zionist right sees the unfolding war as an unprecedented opportunity to redraw the map of the Middle East and remove any remaining impediments to Israeli regional hegemony. Netanyahu has been stumping for this war for most of his political career: he has peddled sensationalist claims about Iran being ‘days away’ from developing nuclear weapons for more than 30 years, and was the source of the false claims about WMD that provided the pretext for war in Iraq. Among the deranged Christian Zionists and imperialist toy soldiers in the Trump cult he has finally found an enthusiastic partner for realising Israeli ambitions.
In this context the Iranian military and political leadership’s conclusion that they are facing into an existential war is a rational one. With their backs against the wall, for now at least Tehran have calculated that the only path to a durable ceasefire lies in demonstrating to the US that it will pay an exorbitant price for any resumption of military aggression. Retaliatory strikes against Israel and against US bases in the Gulf are calculated to show that the attacks on Iran will exact a high cost, including the destabilisation of US-friendly Gulf states that have sought to keep their heads below the parapet. While we should not lose sight of the massive disparity in military resources available to the US-Israeli aggressors and an Iranian regime that has been subject to sanctions over many years, there is no doubt that Tehran can inflict major damage, and possibly survive the war more or less intact.
The Iranian Opposition and the Impact of War
US and Israeli calculations about the imminent collapse of the Iranian government seem, in hindsight, to have been based on an exaggerated assessment of the strength and cohesion of a growing opposition. While it is certainly true that the theocrats who have overseen the Islamic Republic in partnership with the powerful IRGC operate an extremely repressive regime, the oppositional movements that have taken to the streets over recent years don’t necessarily lend themselves to US or Israeli designs. In the west there has been a disproportionate fixation on middle class diasporic nostalgia for a return of the monarchist Pahlavi regime (and evidence that its rehabilitation is being driven by Israeli-directed bots) but the forces that have challenged for power in Iran have been, until recently, more fragmented and politically diverse.
An important element in the regime’s ability to sustain itself over recent years has been the extreme atomisation of Iranian civil society—until recently the difficulty of mounting a cohesive challenge to their power reinforced widespread pessimism and demoralisation. The past several years saw the emergence of important movements around women’s rights, around autonomy for national and ethnic minorities and, significantly, waves of strike action from 2017 onward in the face of regime-imposed neoliberalism and austerity. But the power of the remarkable wave of mass mobilisations over recent months rested on their ability to tap into widespread outrage over the steep deterioration in living standards: this was overwhelmingly a working-class movement, and one that mobilised large numbers of people who had previously remained on the sidelines.
That movement was driven off the streets in large part by government repression: even if we treat western reporting on the crackdown with the scepticism it deserves, there can be no question that the rulers in Tehran regarded this movement, also, as an existential threat: this explains their willingness to resort to overwhelming brutality.
While it would be foolish to assume the desperation that drove popular outrage just a month ago has disappeared, US and Israeli assumptions about the effect of war on Iranian society are rooted in a bizarre inverse reality. In what world would massacres like the one we’ve seen at Minab build support for US-led regime change? The far more likely impact of external aggression is to strengthen the government and smother—at least temporarily—voices of opposition under the pressure for national unity. Just as sanctions have crippled Iranian civil society’s ability to resist, imperialist war can only weaken democratic forces.
Democracy at Home and Abroad
True to form, the bourgeois media has already shown its hand in offering cover for US and Israeli aggression, and over the coming days and weeks their commitment to the propaganda war will deepen. The whole range of institutions that made themselves complicit in the Gaza genocide will strain to convince us that a war led by an international war criminal and a billionaire paedophile will deliver a bright new future for the oppressed people of Iran and the Middle East. But what can be more absurd than putting your faith in far right political forces that have openly declared their hostility to democracy—not only in Tehran, but in the streets of Minneapolis as well? We must resist their lies and instead build the kind of movement that can stop the mad rush to slaughter and win freedom, justice and genuine democracy for working people across this troubled world.
