This article is based loosely on a presentation given at a Consistent Democrats discussion forum on May 10th, along with another on the local election results.
There is a strong possibility of a resumption of the war in the next week or so, simply because the US, and Trump himself, cannot admit defeat. But it won’t make any difference to the outcome. The Trump regime is struggling to come to terms with its defeat. Iran is too strong militarily – with its drones, its missiles, and the missile defence it has now imported from China and Russia – to be defeated in a conventional war.
And it appears that, however much latitude the US ruling class has given Trump in waging this war, it does not want the use of nuclear weapons against Iran. Because it would lead to retaliation against Israel with nukes. Russia and Pakistan, North Korea and implicitly China have said this. Trump talks big and makes big threats. But he was deprived of the nuclear option by his own generals, who in practice he was unable to sack. Because of the potent possibility of a coup, one can surmise. So, there is nothing he can do. Even more bombing will make no difference. Ground troops would be a farce.
Trump’s Operation Epic Fury (Epstein’s fury) is over. It failed. Killing Ali Khamenei simply unified the Iranian population behind the government and setup of the Islamic republic. It politically backfired, pretty much immediately. As did the bloodthirsty attack on the girls’ school. As for Project Freedom – breaking the blockade of Hormuz by force – that is a bigger joke. It was spiked by two things – the Iranian attack in the UAE’s oil refinery in the Sea of Oman. And the closure of Saudi Airspace to the US which was the direct result of that attack. From the standpoint of US imperialism, this is a strategic defeat. It has lost its bases in the Gulf. They are mincemeat, whether or not there is any residual presence.
From the point of view of the rational interest of US imperialism, it is an unnecessary defeat and a disaster – the biggest since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet unlike the fall of Saigon, which was the completion of an incomplete social revolution, Iran was not and is not necessarily an opponent of US imperialism. It would have been quite prepared to play along. The demolition of Iran is a Zionist project. Israel has had the project of demolishing every significant non-servile state in the region since its foundation. Hence Suez, drawing in Britain and France to do its dirty work. Then the US was opposed. But the Jewish-Zionist cult grew to prominence in the US in the 1970s. Israel had French hardware in 1967 but little else. But it 1973 it had nukes, and threatened to use them against Egypt to blackmail the US into rushing it the conventional military hardware it needed to win the Yom Kippur war. Hence Nixon’s own nuclear alert.
The Israel lobby became increasingly powerful in the 70s and 80s. But with the collapse of the USSR, it managed to fill a political vacuum in bourgeois politics. With the supposed ‘death of communism’, what was there to fight? It became Muslims – the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis – which conveniently dovetailed with the Zionist agenda. Of Greater Israel and a straight line from the 1991 Iraq war, the 2003 destruction of Iraq, then Libya, Syria, culminating in this war with Iran.
But the world situation has changed, with the rise of Russia and China as allied world powers, with Iran as their potent ally. So, Israel has overreached itself, and it its potent influence – Trump is their hireling – has led to the US overreaching itself. The US has been in relative decline for a long time. But the neocon, Israel wars have qualitatively accelerated that. And Israel has failed also, its great protector has been defeated. In spite of its genocide in Gaza, and its genocidal war in Lebanon as well, its attack on Iran was a failure. Israel itself was twice very severely bombarded and defeated. It is being defeated in Lebanon, and it wants the US to keep fighting. In vain.
This is a strategic defeat for both the US and Israel. This is breaking the relationship between Israel and the US. On both sides of the political divide in the US, hostility to the Israel lobby is growing. Among MAGA – Trump’s base is deeply split over Israel and the ‘forever wars’ which Trump promised to put a stop to, but then has dragged the US into the biggest, most damaging and most obviously losing war of all, of this type. And the Dems, where it used to be the case that being opposed by AIPAC was the kiss of death, as they would engineer primary defeats almost as a matter of course for anyone who criticised Israel. But now a different situation has arisen, because of a huge change in popular opinion at the base of the Democratic Party, mirroring what has happened to MAGA, where an endorsement by AIPAC is being seen as a kiss of death.
All this opens up the space for working class politics in the US, and for a potential creation of a full anti-imperialist bloc internationally. WE need to regroup a socialist-communist component out of this.
