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
Jan 23, 2012
The U.S. has a long history of attacks on Iran. In 1953, the American CIA overthrew an elected Iranian government simply because the big international oil companies objected to that government taking away some of their control over the country’s vast oil resources. The U.S. government helped impose the dictatorship of the Shah over the country.
In 1979, after 26 years of violent repression, the Iranian population overthrew the Shah. The U.S. government didn’t attack Iran directly. Instead, it encouraged Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, to go to war against Iran. That war lasted eight years and resulted in one million deaths. Toward the end of the war, Hussein used poison gas against Iranian troops and Iranian Kurdish towns, with U.S. financial aid and the help of U.S. military intelligence. In the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. government blocked even the most timid recognition of the use of these weapons of mass destruction by Iraq against Iran and the Kurds on March 21, 1986.
Since then, the U.S. has continued to attack Iran, not just through economic sanctions, but terrorist attacks of all sorts inside the country. One of the latest took place on January 12 in broad daylight in Tehran. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a 32-year-old scientist and university professor, was blown up after two assailants on a motorcycle put a magnetic bomb under his car. He was the fifth scientist in Iran over the last two years to be assassinated either by the U.S. or Israeli secret services.
This ongoing war by the U.S. sows more death and destruction, makes the entire region more unstable, creates the possibility of even worse wars–all for the greater good of Big Oil.