January 7, 2020

The gangsters in the White House and the Pentagon are responsible for the targeted assassination of a top representative of a sovereign government. The target, Qassem Soleimani of Iran, was on a peace mission that the U.S. president was aware of and had encouraged.

Trump has now followed up this political murder with a tweeted threat to destroy Iran’s heritage by striking 52 sites in Iran, some of them cultural. Under international law, such destruction is a war crime. Most people would also see it as an act of terrorism.

POTUS applied his usual way of operating, this time to actions that might lead to a world war. He once infamously said he could murder someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue in daylight and get away with it. Has he deceived himself about getting away with this murder?

After the Iraqi Parliament voted on Jan. 5 to expel U.S. troops — about 6,000 are still there, plus some thousands of mercenaries — Trump threatened Iraq with sanctions harsher than those applied from 1990 to 2003, during the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Since those sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis, including a half-million children under five, it means he is threatening Iraq with genocide.

Take note that nearly the entire Republican Party has given thumbs up to this murder. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Lindsay Graham — those for whom the word “warmonger” would be a gentle term — praise Trump and tell outrageous lies to defend murdering the Iranian leader.

All Republicans and nearly all Democrats supported both the hostility toward Iran and the wars and sanctions against Iraq. So did nearly all the corporate media. These crimes are the responsibility of the U.S. ruling class as a whole.

Regarding the murder of Soleimani, the Democratic Party leadership – Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer – has limited its criticism to Trump’s failure to notify and consult with Congress and his administration’s incoherent strategy.

The two parties differed on one major issue: Democratic President Barack Obama promoted the 2015 treaty limiting Iran’s nuclear development in return for ending the punitive economic sanctions. On May 8, 2018, the Trump administration broke this treaty and reimposed economic sanctions.

U.S. role as oppressor

A quick look at the reality of the last 66 years of U.S.-Iran-Iraq relations shows which one is the oppressor state and the war criminal, contrary to U.S. imperialism’s version.

A U.S.-coordinated coup in Iran in 1953, led by the CIA, deposed an Iranian elected government and replaced it with 26 years of dictatorial rule by Shah Reza Pahlevi. (See CNN documentary on the CIA’s role in the coup at tiny.cc/6x1diz/.)

In 1979, a massive popular revolution expelled the shah and replaced him with what has become the current Iranian Islamic Republic.

From 1980 to 1988, Washington encouraged the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein and Iran to fight each other, arming and killing millions of people on both sides. In 1990, the U.S. targeted Iraq, bombing its cities and its army. It followed that with 12 years of genocidal sanctions against Iraq.

Then, on March 19, 2003, U.S. imperialism invaded Iraq under the pretext — later proven to be absolutely false — that it had “weapons of mass destruction.” To defeat Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation, Washington then provoked and exacerbated sectarian and regional differences among the Iraqi population.

The occupation and sectarian war killed and displaced millions, tearing apart Iraqi society. U.S. imperialism remains in Iraq only to plunder its resources. Washington threatens Iran in order to plunder the whole region.

So far the Iranian government and its allies have said they will hit back on their own timing and will aim at U.S. military targets, not civilians.

If Trump carries out another escalation, it would threaten a conflagration in Southwest Asia, raise the danger of a world war and put people in the United States at risk.

From the people of the U.S. — especially from the working class and all oppressed sectors of U.S. society —  there can be only one reaction: “Get the U.S. out of Iraq! No war against Iran!”