Editorial – Yet another Middle East war
Israel, the US’s rogue proxy in the Middle East with its own agenda, initiated the current war by attacking Iran with the declared aim of physically preventing it acquiring the nuclear bomb.
According to Netanyahu, Iran’s possession of the nuclear bomb would present an existential threat to the state of Israel. The suggestion is that, if Iran had the bomb, it would use it to annihilate Israel. This is just propaganda as Iran wants the bomb for the same reason as the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan have it – as a deterrent against being attacked. If Iran did have the bomb it would be very foolish of it to use it against Israel as Israel itself is a nuclear state.
The real reason for the war – and why the United States, Britain and the others are behind Israel in practice – is to maintain the balance of power in the Middle East. In relations between capitalist states ‘might is right’ and Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons would increase its ‘might’ and so shift the balance in its favour. It’s this that the Western states, who currently dominate the area because it is the source of much of the oil and gas they need to power their production, wish to prevent, ideally by diplomacy, but Israel has forced their hand.
Who controls the oil, and the trade routes and pipelines to get it out, has been the stake in all the many wars in the Middle East since the end of the last World War. On the surface the issue appears to be the existence of the state of Israel, established in 1948 as a ‘Jewish homeland’ on land that been the home for generations of non-Jews. This, in itself, was bound to create resentment but it might have worked had not the United States decided to build up Israel’s military might as its proxy on the ground in the region to defend its economic interests there.
The rulers of Iran may invoke religion as why they don’t want a Jewish state to control Jerusalem but they are well aware of the economic issues at stake. Here is what Ayatollah Khameini declared on 4 October last year:
‘The insistence of the United States and its allies on ensuring the security of the usurping regime serves as a cover for their murderous policy of transforming the [Zionist] regime into a tool to seize all the resources of this region and use it [this regime] in major global conflicts. Their policy is to transform this regime into a portal for exporting energy from West Asia to the West and importing Western goods and technologies to the region, to ensure the survival of the usurping regime and the dependence of the entire region on them’ (translated from French).
Which capitalist states control the economic resources of the region is of no concern to the workers and other ordinary people living there. The civilians on both sides are being killed and wounded and buildings and useful infrastructure destroyed, as happens in all wars, for an issue that is only of capitalist concern. The interest of workers in both Israel and Iran is to join with workers everywhere to bring to an end the war-prone capitalist system.
Next article: Pathfinders – Dark factors and dodgy populists ➤