In many ways, U.S. imperialism is already at war with Iran.  Assassinations and cyber-attacks by the U.S. lapdog Israel, sabotage and incursions, sanctions that can be more devastating than physical attacks — all of this has been going on for years.  

The debate in the U.S. ruling class is not whether, but how to step up this war.  There are three main camps, both in Washington and in Tel Aviv:

Assassination, a Weapon of Choice?

1. Step up the clandestine war.  Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, says there is no need to bomb Iran. What he’s really saying is: We spies can solve the problem by assassinating Iranian scientists and messing up Iran’s computers.  This camp calculates that massive bombing risks provoking a nationalist “rally-around-the-flag” response, along with international sympathy for Iran.  So clandestine war is the first choice.  But the issue is: Will that slow down Iran enough?  Iran’s fascist regime has been working on a bomb for 23 years, and they still are not there.  But they are getting closer.

2. Work to overthrow the clerical fascists.  This camp argues that Iran’s nuclear issue is only one of many threats from that country.  Iran has also sponsored Hezbollah, which has built an impressive missile arsenal to threaten Israel. It has also been active in Iraq, encouraging those who would pull down the democratic façade the U.S. created and replace it with a new dictatorship like Saddam Hussein’s — except this time run by a different faction of the Iraqi ruling class (the Shia instead of the Sunni).  So this camp advocates regime change, which means overthrowing the Islamic Republic.  

Iranian workers, professionals, and many capitalists hate the Islamic Republic, a backward, religious, fascist regime.  Ordinary Iranians want to join the world. They want to use the internet, hold hands in public, watch Western TV and movies, and wear reasonable clothes in place of the chador. As a result, some U.S. and Israeli bosses support regime change.  They calculate that the Iranian people may rise up to overthrow the detested Islamic clerics, an uprising that could happen as quickly and unexpectedly as the recent regime change in Libya and Egypt. Unfortunately, the result will probably follow those two countries’ as well. Another faction of capitalists will take over from the Islamist fascists.

3. Bomb Iran. This is a risky step.  It could backfire on U.S. imperialism or bring great rewards.  The Saudis and other Gulf monarchies are urging the U.S. to act, but they would be the first to criticize if the action failed to go well.  The Iranian ruling class makes all kinds of threats about what they would do if attacked, but they have a long track record of not responding if their only options are poor ones.  An attack on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, for example, would anger oil-importing countries like China that would otherwise sit on the sidelines.  

The most likely scenario is the first one, with U.S. imperialism stepping up the pressure and the Iranian fascists escalating their response.  That is a recipe for starting a bigger war. Iran’s ruling class appears to have convinced itself that the United States is a paper tiger that talks tough but does nothing — a dangerous illusion.  

Three Imperialist Wars Too Many?

In recent years, U.S. rulers have ignored provocations from Iran because they’ve been tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington did not want to take on another imperialist war while it was losing two others.  Now that the U.S. military has mostly exited Iraq, there may be less patience with Iran.  Standing up to Iran is one issue that unites the often bitterly divided U.S. ruling class. The Senate approved a recent law increasing sanctions on Iran by a vote of 100 to zero. In short, 2012 may be the year for a dramatic escalation of the ongoing U.S.-Iran war.  Israel may attack.  A broader war may be brewing.  

In that event, our communist position is: to hell with both of you.  We have no sympathy for either U.S. imperialism or for the clerical fascists in Iran. The only victory for the working class would be for us to use the war to win broad masses of workers for  communist revolution, in Iran, the United States and the world.