EDITORIAL
U.S. and Israel Attack Iran:
An Imperialist War Sets the Middle East on Fire

Mar 2, 2026

On February 28, the U.S. superpower, along with its sidekick, the Israeli military, unleashed a massive air assault against Iran. They bombed hundreds of targets around the country and killed important leaders of the Iranian regime, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s longtime supreme leader. These attacks weren’t just against supposedly “high value” military targets and the ruling elite. In the southern coastal city of Minab, an all-girls elementary school was bombed, killing at least 108 students, many of them between seven and twelve years old.

Trump has now vowed to use this war to devastate the country’s military, eliminate its nuclear program and bring about regime change. From the comfort and safety of Mar-a-Lago, Trump urged Iranians to brave U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles in order to rise up and overthrow the Iranian government.

Following the announcement of Ayatollah Khamenei’s death, there were reports of people going into the streets of Tehran and other cities to celebrate the end of a ruler, whose vicious, repressive regime had only recently murdered thousands of people protesting against its policies. Apparently, others took to the streets to mourn Khamenei’s death.

Whatever is happening in Iran, no one in this country should be fooled. This war is about one thing and one thing only: the further domination of the Middle East by U.S. imperialism, with the help of its closest ally, Israel. That means domination by the U.S. oil companies, military contractors, banks and big engineering companies—to make them ever richer and more powerful, stealing the resources and enslaving the working population and the poor in the entire region.

Trump is not doing the Iranian people any favors today. The U.S. superpower never opposed the Iranian regime because it is a dictatorship. The U.S. arms and supports dictatorships all throughout the Middle East, many of which are just as brutal and bloody as the rule of the Ayatollahs. No, the U.S. has opposed the Iranian regime because it had come to power in 1979 by overthrowing one of the main pillars of U.S. domination in the Middle East, the Shah, a vicious dictator. The Ayatollahs had hijacked the Iranian Revolution. Thus, in order to keep their independent base of support, they did not always do U.S. bidding.

Ever since, the U.S. superpower had sought to either get rid of the Iranian regime, or at least to contain its influence. But that didn’t stop the U.S. from partnering with the Ayatollahs, when it served U.S. purposes.

The U.S. rules over the Middle East by playing one regime against the other. Thus, the U.S. got really friendly with Iran, when U.S. troops got bogged down in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Iran provided vital military and political support. The U.S. government even signed a treaty with Iran which was supposed to begin some kind of normalization. But at the point that the U.S. had withdrawn most of its forces from those wars and no longer needed Iran’s support, the U.S. broke the treaty with Iran and resumed hostilities.

The U.S. and Israeli covert war against Iran and its allies became an overt war during the murderous, barbaric Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Last June, Israel bombed Iran for 12 days, killing several important Iranian leaders, with the U.S. joining in on the last day. The U.S. then began assembling the largest military armada in the Middle East since 2003, the year the U.S. launched its disastrous war against Iraq.

Trump has been careful so far not to send in U.S. troops. But these wars are already being paid for by the working class in the U.S. Now, under Trump, allied with Netanyahu, the U.S. is embarking on another war with the possibility of it spreading over the entire region.

This war is not just about Trump, or Netanyahu, or the Ayatollahs. War is how U.S. imperialism has defended its interests and domination over the Middle East for close to a century, and in so doing, it has turned the entire region into a powder keg that could be in the process of exploding.

None of this is inevitable. This war is only further proof of the true catastrophe that the capitalist ruling class is leading the entire world into. Until the working class in this country and other countries confront their own capitalist ruling class in a revolutionary movement, we will be drawn ever further into this impending catastrophe.