The military aggression by U.S. imperialism and Israel’s Zionist colonialism against Iran has been, from the very first minute, a one-sided massacre, preceded by no provocation whatsoever. Quite the opposite: the regime in Tehran was actively negotiating with the United States, making concession after concession to avoid escalation toward open war, to which Trump responded treacherously -using methods of state terrorism- by shamelessly assassinating Iranian authorities with impunity.

The military attack on Saturday, February 28 was both brutally bloody and -apparently- effective. On the one hand, the Trump administration and the Zionists carried out a brutal massacre of civilians, including the bombing of a girls’ primary school that left at least one hundred children dead. At this point, more than 500 civilian deaths have already been recorded. On the other hand, there was an extremely effective targeted assassination of Tehran’s political and military leadership. One of the victims of the attack was Iran’s «supreme leader», Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The U.S.-Zionist attack seeks to bring the entire region to its knees by completely eliminating any margin of independence for the strongest regime in the Middle East, an explicit enemy of the United States and Israel. They calculate that by definitively subjugating Tehran, they will be able to do whatever they please throughout the region. They do not expect any protest from partner and complicit governments such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, which have already been struck by Iranian retaliation for hosting U.S. military bases on their territory. At this moment, they appear to be aligning themselves directly with U.S. imperialism.

But that is not all: despite Trumpist demagoguery, the U.S. government seeks to prevent the Iranian people from being the ones to settle accounts with the regime of the ayatollahs. It is obvious that a people under bombardment is not going to respond to Trump’s sordid “call” to rise up against the regime while Tehran and other cities are being bombed. (On the contrary, civilians are fleeing the cities en masse!).

On the other hand, the map of Iran’s allies has grown increasingly blurred in recent years. Above all, Zionism has succeeded in significantly weakening the ayatollahs’ main allies in the region. Among them is the Lebanese national resistance group Hezbollah, which, under systematic pressure and massacre, has shifted more and more toward reactionary positions that did not define it in its early days. (Nasrallah, its leader assassinated by Netanyahu, used to appear years ago wearing Che Guevara T-shirts).

Traditional imperialism and Zionism are actively seeking to enslave all the nations of the Middle East, stripping them of every trace of independence in order to consolidate their domination. The anti-capitalist position of the revolutionary left can only be the unconditional rejection of U.S. and Israeli aggression, along with the defense of the Iranian people’s right to rise up against the oppressive regime. For that very reason, our current will not fall into the absurd trap of campism, which demands that in order to do so we must politically support the regime of the ayatollahs.

While Washington and Tel Aviv seek to rob the peoples of the region of any possibility of sovereignty, we must defend it more radically than anyone else. The last major expression of the Iranian people’s independent sovereignty was the mass mobilizations that confronted the Tehran regime this past January and were crushed by the regime in a bloodbath. There is no contradiction between one and the other. There is a line of continuity and revolutionary Marxist coherence: the defense of national self-determination and the self-emancipation of peoples by their own hands.

With the brutal repression of the popular mobilizations in December and January, with the massacres of thousands of people, the theocratic regime has not only shown that it can bring nothing positive to the popular masses. It also left a deep traumatic wound on the eve of the aggression, provoking demoralization and division just before the external attack.

And even so, it is abundantly clear that the Iranian people will never be able to win their democratic, national, and social demands at the hands of Trump and Netanyahu. Their only interest is to trample independent nations and peoples underfoot.

The imperialist and colonial aggression against Iran

In 1979, a revolution that was initially working class and urban popular in character overthrew the U.S. puppet regime of the Pahlavi dynasty, who bore the pompous title of shah but were nothing more than a military dictatorship backed by the CIA. Unfortunately, the traditional Shiite clergy, with deep historical roots in the country -especially among the more backward rural sectors- managed to seize power after pitting one section of the population against another, essentially the countryside against the city. Ideologically, they succeeded in equating «independence» with their reactionary religious doctrines and all modernization with foreign influence (even confusing postmodern intellectuals such as Michel Foucault).

They crushed the urban and left-wing protagonists of the 1979 revolution (including the Trotskyist nuclei in the country) but they could only do so by riding and reactionarily diverting the revolutionary wave that had driven out Washington’s puppets. The new reactionary regime quickly had to endure a very harsh military test: the long war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which at the time was allied with the United States. They managed to survive that ordeal, and since then Tehran has been the strongest government in the Middle East confronting the United States. That is because the regime headed by Khamenei was the reactionary product of the aborted revolution of 1979, revolutions have their twists and contradictions. Trump and Netanyahu want to put an end not only to the regime of the ayatollahs but also to any remaining gains of independence from that revolution, as well as to prevent the Iranian masses from achieving their self-determination in an independent manner.

The ideological apparatus that justified the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 is trying to set itself in motion once again, but it faces the problem that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already happened. There is now lived experience with the lies of U.S. imperialism. Since the early 1990s, they have been announcing that Tehran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons was imminent. Nearly forty years of “imminence” is not very convincing. Trump in particular claimed that last year’s attacks had succeeded in halting Iran’s nuclear program. And now he says it is necessary to wage a long war over that very same program they had supposedly stopped. Trump is replaying George W. Bush’s theater of lies after the horrific attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Who can believe Trump’s lies about defending «democracy», when he lays siege to cities in his own country with ICE? We can look not only at the real experience of military and colonial subjugation in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also at the regional allies backing the attack on Iran. To begin with, the leading Middle Eastern power aligned with the United States: the theocratic and fundamentalist regime of Saudi Arabia, whose ultra-reactionary official Wahhabi ideology is shared by none other than Al Qaeda, and whose leader murdered and dismembered a well-known journalist critical of his regime.

Comparisons with Iraq and Afghanistan twenty years ago are useful, because they expose Trump, but they are insufficient: we are living in a world very different from that of 2001 and 2003. Those wars in the Middle East were part of the «neocon» project of the «New American Century», an offensive by the U.S. imperialism that believed it had no rival (and in fact had none). Washington still wanted to present itself as the «democratic» power defending the interests of all the peoples of the world. That mask fell long ago, as did the unquestioned hegemony of the United States. Trump embodies a defensive but highly aggressive imperialism, one that increasingly presents itself less as democratic and more as a power entitled to subjugate others by force. First and foremost, this includes the immigrant population and all those who stand in solidarity with them within the United States itself.

Another fundamental difference lies within the United States itself: the total popular and ruling class consensus that existed around Bush’s wars simply does not exist at all for Trump’s wars. On the contrary, every step of external aggression taken by Trumpism further tears apart the internal fabric of U.S. politics, along with all its former consensus. Internal racism and external aggression are increasingly fueling polarization in the United States, with Minneapolis serving as an emblem of popular resistance against ICE.

For that reason, the suspicion is that Trump is using the aggression against Iran to silence the growing domestic discontent with his administration: rejection of his Nazi-style repressive methods against immigrants, anger over the rising cost of living, repudiation of his trampling of the most basic bourgeois democratic norms, and so on.

For that reason as well, both the aggression against Iran and the one against Venezuela were carried out in a treacherous manner, forcing acts of war without going through Congress, as mandated by the U.S. Constitution. Each aggressive action taken by Trump requires further straining the internal political regime, deepening division.

The war against Iran, like the aggression against Venezuela in January, is part of the Trumpist offensive of territorialized imperialism, which rules directly by force and without any diplomatic or democratic façade. They seek to subjugate the entire region, and also the population within the United States itself. Thus, there is a direct continuity between the current aggression against Iran and Israel’s wars since 2023 against the Palestinian people. With the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, they aim to complete the construction of Israel as a racially pure state that also serves as a war platform for the United States throughout the region. Crushing Iran and the right of its own people to self-determination, it is a vast country of 90 million inhabitants and nationally diverse, Persian, Kurdish, and more, is one of the most important steps toward a «peace of the graveyards» across the entire Middle East.

And, as in Venezuela, Trump also uses a terrorist tactic: treacherously assassinating the leaders of countries with which he is not yet at war, in the midst of diplomatic exchanges. One does not need to have any sympathy for Khamenei -which we obviously do not- to recognize that this amounts to the crudest form of state terrorism. Trump is telling the world that he can kill any political leader simply because he feels like it, because he has the power to do so, without abiding by any rule or law. It is imperial political terrorism meant to intimidate any international opponent.

In Defense of the Iranian Popular Mobilization

In the face of this reality, the «campism» of certain sectors of the left and «progressivism» is an aberration that deserves to be thrown into the trashbin of history. They demand that we not support popular mobilizations against the theocracy and that we join them in spreading the delusion that these movements are something “artificial,” invented by Yankees and Zionists.

Like imperialism, they deny peoples any right to decide their own future because the circumstances are never “appropriate.” They want us to wait for an ideal world in which imperialism (whether traditional or “revisionist” -that is, China and Russia) does not resort to deception and demagogy in dealing with popular interests and needs. Only then, when the United States or the far right no longer make political use of discontent with regimes such as those in Tehran or Venezuela, would they be willing to grant oppressed peoples the right to protest.

The Roja collective -made up of left-wing activists of Iranian, Kurdish, and Afghan origin living in Paris- summed it up very well during the U.S. and Israeli aggression against Iran in the middle of last year:

«In fact, these two historic enemies mirror one another in slaughter and malice. We must not equate these two capitalist regimes in terms of their position within the world order: the military capacity for aggression of the Islamic Republic is undoubtedly far less than that of Israel and its Western imperialist allies. However, the suffering it has inflicted is just as absolute as the violence of Zionist fascism. Any attempt to relativize that suffering, quantitatively or qualitatively, is reductionist and misleading. That suffering encompasses multiple forms of oppression, including the exorbitant costs of its nuclear project and the abduction of human dignity.

This asymmetric war between Israel and the Islamic Republic is, above all, a war against us.

It is a war against what we created in the ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ uprising, what we have achieved and what can be glimpsed on the horizon: a feminist, anti-colonial, and egalitarian uprising that did not arise from state power, but originated in the popular struggles of Kurdistan, especially those led by women, and then spread throughout the territory of Iran.

It is at the same time a war against the oppressed and working classes».

The fact is that the popular will in Iran has already made itself felt through mass mobilizations that were harshly repressed by the theocratic regime. Once again, defending popular uprisings like the Iranian one means taking a position exactly opposite to that of U.S. imperialism and Zionism: while they seek to strip oppressed peoples of any sovereign future, we defend their right to have one here and now. That is the only coherent position for the revolutionary left; everything else is reactionary.

Stop Trump and Netanyahu’s aggression against Iran!

Iran has the right to be a nation independent of imperialism!

Unconditional defense of the Iranian people’s mobilization against the regime of the ayatollahs!

The self-determination of peoples can only be won by the peoples themselves!