The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Israel’s Bombing of Iran:
Another Phase in Escalating War

Oct 28, 2024

In the early morning hours of October 26, residents of Tehran, Iran’s capital, were awakened by the sound of exploding bombs. Israel announced that more than 100 of its fighter jets and drones had attacked targets within Iran.

Commentators noted that this represents a new phase in the ongoing war in the Middle East, because it’s the first time Israel is acknowledging that its planes hit targets within Iran. But commentators also say that there is reason for some hope that the conflict will be contained. Iran’s leaders downplayed the attacks, they say, which may mean that Iran does not want a further escalation of the limited, tit-for-tat attacks between the two countries’ militaries.

Maybe—we don’t know. But some things are certain. It is hard to imagine that Israel would take a major step like this without the knowledge of the U.S., its staunch, generous sponsor. And U.S. officials did say that Israel notified the U.S. of the attack.

The U.S. has its own reasons to see Iran under attack, threatened, subdued. Iran, one of the biggest and most populous countries in the region, used to be a staunch military ally of the U.S.—one of its main cops in this strategic, oil-rich part of the world. But a popular revolt swept away the Shah of Iran in 1979, leading to a new regime in Iran—one which was not controlled directly by the U.S.

Ever since, the U.S. has been trying to pressure Iran, to isolate and weaken it. The decades-long economic embargo the U.S. has imposed on Iran, for example, has crippled the country’s economy and worsened the poverty of the working-class masses in Iran. Despite the claims of U.S. officials, however, the U.S. is not attacking Iran because the country’s reactionary rulers use religion to oppress their own population. In fact, the U.S. has found some of its staunchest allies in the region among the most reactionary religious dictatorships, such as in Saudi Arabia—not to mention Israel itself, whose discriminatory civil laws are based on an ancient religion.

The U.S. has shown the world in this past year that it will not move to restrain Israel’s aggression, which it finances. That is, the U.S. is ready to take the world into ever bigger, deadlier wars to assert and secure its control over the Middle East—and, for that matter, the whole world, around which the U.S. maintains hundreds of military bases.

The U.S. military wages its wars, whether directly or by proxy, to enforce the imperialist policies of the U.S. ruling class—that tiny, tiny minority of the U.S. population which controls the big banks, oil companies, military contractors. But the U.S. government not only makes us pay for these wars with our taxes, it also claims to wage these bloody wars in our name. No, this is not us. We are as horrified as the rest of the world at the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians, most of them women and children, in Gaza over the past year.

The horror in Gaza continues—and keeps spreading to the West Bank, Lebanon, and now Iran—with the full backing of the U.S. government. Nothing coming from the top will change that. Not the upcoming presidential election, for sure. The U.S. has been arming Israel, this tiny country halfway around the world, for decades, and to the tune of billions of dollars. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have consistently carried out this policy, laying the groundwork for today’s wars in the Middle East—all in the service of the U.S. ruling class.

Only the working class, when organized and fighting together in our own interests, can stop the Middle East, and the rest of the world, from slipping further into more chaos, death and destruction.