June 23, 2025 editorial of the New Anticapitalist Party-Revolutionaries (NPA-R) in France, translated from French.
On Saturday, the United States bombed Iran’s main nuclear sites. Trump has thus taken Netanyahu’s war policy to a whole new level. And Israel has already been bombing Iran for ten days, after attacking Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, while the genocide in Gaza continues.
Another war in the name of “peace and democracy”
The pretext for these bombings is to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb, the development of which has resumed since 2018, when Trump broke the Iranian nuclear agreement signed three years prior. Of course, one can worry that more and more states around the world, including the most reactionary ones, are developing such weapons. But today, in the region, it is Netanyahu, the butcher of Gaza, who possesses nuclear weapons! As for Trump, he presides over the only country in history to have used such weapons, to terrorize the Japanese population in 1945! Trump says that “Iran must now make peace.” What peace, when the self-proclaimed heralds of such peace attack and bomb indiscriminately? In reality, today’s warmongers, Trump and Netanyahu, supported by [French President] Macron the hypocrite, fear only one thing: that people rise up.
Who are the real terrorists?
In his speech, Trump denounced the Iranian “thug” who “supports terrorism.” But who are the ones sending bombs? Netanyahu and Trump are! They talk about “liberating the Iranian people from the tyranny of the mullahs.” Nonsense. The genocide carried out by Israel in Gaza does not in any way “liberate” the Palestinian people from the “tyranny of Hamas”; it simply exterminates them. And who can forget that it was the U.S. that supported the Shah’s previous bloody dictatorship in Iran? Or that in 2001 and 2003, the imperialist states bombed Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of “democracy”? The same thing happened with Sarkozy’s bombing of Libya in 2011. Today, Iraq and Libya are in chaos, and the Taliban have returned to power in Afghanistan.
Each time, the goal is to terrorize entire populations. Trump has already threatened Iran with a “tragedy far greater than what we have witnessed over the past eight days” and called on residents to leave Tehran!
Defend and organize the political independence of the working class
Iran counts nearly 30 million workers who have built experience in multiple struggles in recent years. Starting with the movement, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” which saw millions of Iranians and Kurds take to the streets to fight the regime after the assassination of Mahsa Amini by the morality police. For now, far from helping to emancipate the people, the U.S. and Israeli bombings have only served to stun the population and allow the Iranian regime to step up its repression by executing anyone suspected of being an Israeli spy.
The direct intervention of the United States in the Middle East causes great concern. But it revolts us, too. Imperialism is not only economic war, it is also war itself. This strength of our imperialist leaders is also their weakness. A revival of the working class in Iran could be the beginning of an uprising throughout the region. And even throughout the world… Two weeks ago, dockworkers in Marseille and Genoa set an example by blocking arms shipments to Israel. Last week, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched in European capitals and in the United States to denounce the imperialist war in the Middle East.
Let us refuse all support for Western leaders, starting with Trump and Macron. Down with imperialist wars in the Middle East and everywhere else in the world.
