By Party for Socialism and Liberation
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
The Party for Socialism and Liberation issued the following statement in response to Trump’s attack on Iran:
Donald Trump’s destruction of Iran civilian nuclear energy sites by the use of bunker busting bombs and cruise missiles will open the gates of hell in the Middle East, perhaps igniting a regional and global war. The people in the United States should imagine their reaction if a foreign power dropped 31,000 pound bombs and launched cruise missiles to destroy US civilian nuclear reactors. This is what Donald Trump did to Iran tonight. This is a war crime!
And to make it even more outrageous, Trump included in his announcement of the strikes that “now is the time for peace!” To include a call for peace in a literal announcement of war is a mind-blowing expression of hypocrisy and arrogance that has perhaps no equivalent in world history. What Trump has done is shred hopes for peace, and instead plunged the region and perhaps the world deeper into devastating conflict.
In his White House address tonight, Trump claimed “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater, and a lot easier.” It is hard to imagine a statement that more completely turns reality on its head. Just since the Bush administration, the United States has invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, bombed Libya, Syria and Yemen, and made Israel’s genocide in Gaza possible. It is the US and Israel, not Iran, who are “the bully of the Middle East”. And how is the onus on Iran to make peace, when they have been the victim of an unprovoked, brutal aerial bombardment by Israel and now the United States itself?
Trump also said in his speech, “I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.” That Trump would embrace an internationally wanted war criminal like Benjamin Netanyahu is no surprise – Trump himself is a war criminal and a hardline supporter of the genocidal Israeli regime.
Because of Trump’s aggression, there is now no telling how far this will escalate. Iran could imminently retaliate by hitting one or more of the many U.S. military bases that surround their country. If this leads to U.S. casualties, the next step could be an open-ended U.S. bombing campaign, a “boots on the ground” invasion, or even the uncontrollable spread of war around the world. The one who is responsible for the grave danger to every person on the planet is the war criminal Donald Trump.
Trump was lying when he promised that he would keep the United States at peace. Since his entry onto the political scene, Trump has tried to take advantage of widespread opposition to endless war in the Middle East by pretending to share this view. But at his core, Trump is a hardcore militarist who wants to use the Pentagon war machine to bully and subjugate the entire world. Human lives – Iranians or the working class youth he sends to kill and die – are of absolutely no concern to Trump and the other war mongers.
Trump is also lying when he says that Iran was about to develop a nuclear weapon. Even the U.S. government’s own intelligence does not believe that Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear-armed power. And the hypocrisy is striking – Israel is a nuclear weapons state but refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the United States has the world’s largest nuclear weapons stockpile and is the only country to have ever actually used nuclear weapons in war. “Iran is developing nuclear weapons” is a poor imitation of George W. Bush’s lie about Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction”, and just as false.
The people of the United States do not want another endless war. Tomorrow and in the coming days, people will be taking to the streets across the country and around the world to say: “No war on Iran!”
