The  Conflict  About  Iran

Theses and starting points

Feb. 14, 2006

1. Iran’s inner development since approximately the beginning of the nineties is marked by vehement struggles from the part of the workers and students, the gradual dissolution of the Islamic dictatorship and its brutal resistance. Precisely to the end of the nineties many strikes were staged and the inner order of the dictatorial Islamic regime was increasingly crumbling. Even brutal executions and ever-recurring repression by the vanguard forces of the Islamic dictatorship could not change that.

2. Many articles of the global press as well as of the Iranian revolutionary organisations and groups dealt with the inner decomposition of the Islamic regime, which posed as a religious-puristic regime, but was as little immune against the corruption as other bureaucratic regimes in previously colonial and semi-colonial countries. The claim to develop the country by science and technology and a modern infrastructure inevitably leads to the contradiction with religion, to problems. Up to the year 2003 approx., all of that was cause to the hope that a sweeping overthrow in the direction of elementary democratic conditions was imminent. This was interrupted by the occupation of Iraq, by the massive threat from abroad.

3. It must not be overlooked either that there were attempts by the US to infiltrate Iran in a sheepskin of "democratic opposition", above all with so-called human rights organisations, which pretend to represent democracy but in fact aim at stepping up the hegemonic influence of the US and other powers joined to her. Every revolutionary movement in Iran inevitably must be marked also by keeping US imperialism out in the most vigorous manner. They have to be much more emphatic on independence than all of the clerical forces, who want to make a name for themselves by that and thus to save their regime.
The USA, however, is forced by her own objective role to fear any true democratic movement. Not by chance she is supporting clerical forces in the first place, e.g. in Iraq, collaborating with them, if these just accept in some way, theoretically or even only practically, the supreme lordship of the USA.

4. The war on Iraq has led to the foreseeable debacle which countless people round the globe had warned of prior to March 2003. The situation is forcing the US to escalate further. This constraint, though, is not only the result of the entanglements of the Middle East, but also of the global international compulsions. As stated in the article "About some new economic developments - American economy boosted by armament expenditure?", the permanently renewed destruction and the hope that impulses for the global economy might somehow emerge from that, have meanwhile become a kind of compulsion for the US. Immediately tying to that, the stick of intimidation is wielded against other countries.
5. The conservative regime in the US pretends to oppose Islamic fundamentalism, but that tale cannot be bought, as the US has been tied to this fundamentalism by means of the entire exploitation of the earth already since World War I. The exploitation of the earth in this region consists mainly of the pumping of oil, the most important energy source of the 20th century. It is the fundament of wealth and simultaneously the precondition for the persistence in completely outdated conditions. Saudi-Arabia was the first bastion of fundamentalism as state religion.
Time and again the US has, also in other countries, engaged in subversive acitivities together with such political mullahs, Muslim brethren or other clerical-dogmatical, ultrareactionary forces.  
Under the conditions of the late seventies in Iran, the inflaming of the Shiite so-called revolution lead to the prevention of a different, otherwise inevitable overthrow, that is to say a bourgeois-democratic revolutionary overthrow against the Shah. It was overlapped, therewith leading the forces of the workers and students, whose ideas about the overthrow were quite different from the clergy’s, into a bloody suppression.

6. Being threatened from all directions – Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gulf Emirates –, today’s Iran is obliged to cope with the defensive situation, and the mullahs, whose social regime had already run into tremendous difficulties, again seized the chance offered by the situation. They took the bull by the horns, assuming the role of a defender of the nation. This ball has also been passed to them. At the same time, they consciously practise provocations, intensify the confrontation, needing this confrontation for inner use, in order to hold their ground.

7. The decisive question arises: How are the opposition forces in Iran and, of course, also the international opposition to react to this threat? A renewed crime against the Iranian people must be prevented. After decades of ravaging by the Shah and even worse ravaging by the mullahs, US imperialism must not succeed with the negative development of precipitating this important people on earth into a criminal war or even to go after the division of the country. Sometimes operating on the farce of democracy, sometimes on the most arbitrary use of force and even working for the dismemberment of the country – it is these means from the part of the US and her accomplices which the whole world has to anticipate. Also abroad it is necessary to discuss how this important conflict is to be countered by Iranians jointly with revolutionary and democratically minded people in the world.

8. Several fundamental international questions are intersecting in the Iranian question. This becomes clear in particular in the problem of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. What is the NPT? It is a treaty which allows some big powers to possess nuclear weapons without limits and thus to blackmail other states. To the large majority it dictates not to possess nuclear weapons. Moreover, it enables the states possessing nuclear weapons to control the not possessing ones. This treaty, which makes a complete mockery of international democracy and is one of the guarantees of the international exploitation and the international injustice, goes back to the then both big powers USA and Soviet Union. Today, the US is the main beneficiary of this NPT, but also Russia as the Soviet Union’s successor still wants to be beneficiary of this treaty. At that time, in the sixties and seventies, it even was particularly the Soviet revisionists, who were striving for the NPT. They hoped thereby to forbid in principle the peoples and nations and revolutionary classes the uprisings and actually to put the kibosh on the revolutionary development on the globe, a calculation which did not come out even. There is no democracy in the world on the fundament of such a treaty, what must have been realized also by the Soviet leaders of then, and blocking the democracy in the world finally means blocking revolution, too. This treaty does not perhaps mean that nuclear weapons are shut down completely and small countries are entitled to control the nuclear armament of the large ones and to put through the disarmament – actually, this would be something different -, but its only meaning is that the large states control the many smaller ones, the less powerful ones. Their own disarmament remains completely without obligation and has never been tackled in earnest.

9. Today, the so-called neo-conservative representatives of capital as well as the liberal ones are resorting to the "statutary source" of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in order to isolate certain states, not only, though, in order to threaten these few states but finally also to threaten all the other ones in case they would attempt to break the monopoly at any point.

In order to get through this treaty at that time, they were compelled to concede the civil use of the nuclear energy to all states, including the complete fuel cycle as the right of each signatory state. Today, the US and other powers attempt to deny also this right of the civil use of the nuclear energy, on which Iran completely rightly is insisting, and threats of war are uttered for the reason that a state just insists on these warrants of the NPT, on its right.

10. What is it that the US-imperialists dare to depict as alleged international law, if it is just nothing but their own interpretation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which they keep in mind? And what does it consist in? Its essence can be expressed thus: they are allowed to possess all the weapons, and all of the others are not. Not being able to put this through in this immediate manner, as there are still other states possessing nuclear weapons, they have taken them into the same boat and attempt, insofar as they are not in any event partners, to instigate them to insist on this completely unjustified treaty and, by far exceeding it, to axe even more the rights still existing for the majority of the states according to this treaty. The People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong once was the biggest critic of this treaty. Its development towards nuclear defense was to be thwarted, but this did not materialize, as the Chinese development of nuclear technology was faster than the finalization of this treaty. After the overthrow in China, though, a government has arisen which, too, has positioned itself on the base of the Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1992, thus becoming the butt of the own former criticism of revisionism in this question.

11. Should the US succeed in decisively weakening Iran by military threat from abroad and subversion from inside, or even to militarily assail the country, this could certainly be expected to have further grave consequences in the international development, as the US does not want to exist with a "multipolar" system such as some European countries, Russia, China, India are imagining, which oppose the absolute monopoly of the US. If she, however, succeeds in enlisting those four forces for an intervention against Iran, more conflicts will ensue very quickly, in fact between larger powers this time. Its necessary to put a spoke into the wheels of these criminal plans, and the wrong theories must be finished off which were spread by modern revisionism and have actually made possible this development.
These wrong theories dealt with "peace", which allegedly is to be accomplished by making common cause with the supreme representatives of the capitalist word order, as it was advocated by Khrushchev, Breshnev and later on by the Chinese revisionists and others. They were opposed to what was uncovered in the famous Chinese polemics about this hegemony, about today’s role of the nuclear question. Subsequently, they were starting point to the development of such a "peaceful power", to the justification of a hegemonistic and chauvinistic role of one’s own.

12. Actually there is the perspective of instigating a confusion which nobody will be able to master, if the US should, in the course of time, arrive at acting against Iran. But one must not lean back for this reason, of course, or think that no military intervention will happen. The capitalist powers in the world are basically at their wit’s end. The contradictions permeating the capitalist system on a worldwide level today are so large that nobody is able to master them, and voluntaristic outbreaks by capitalist rulers are becoming very probable.

13. Not only the international powers are to be criticized with utmost clearness, but the conditions in the Middle East region itself must be dealt with, too. Over there, the ailing regimes in the Arab countries and Turkey are existing, all of which are living in fear of their own peoples, of the further evolution, which avail themselves of Islam and at the same time have to cope with Islamic fundamentalistic machinations. Regarding these machinations, it has long since turned out that their originators are capable of collaboration with all kinds of domestic and foreign forces, and sometimes are acting provocatively just then, when the reaction needs them. Sometimes they also try some adventurous independent action, believing they could intimidate a big power like the US. In fact they will always play into the hands of the big powers, particularly the US.

14. A very important question is the question of Israel. Basically it has to be kept in mind: Israel is a racist state as for its inner substance, not even allowing for the marriages between Jews and Non-Jews, not possessing an idea of nation in the modern meaning, but a racist, "volkish" so-called nation concept, and there is in principle no right for existence for a racist state. This has to be remarked in advance.
It has to be taken into consideration, of course, that several millions of Jews as well as Arabs are living on the same territory. It turns out how right the original program of the Palestine Liberation Organsation (PLO) was, which is based on the idea that only a secular state can be erected in Palestine, in whichever form, as a confederation or a federal state, definitely as a construction without any racist or "volkish" principles. Basically, it would not tolerate a position of religious forces whatsoever, which would permit to control the state. No fundamentalistic forces, in particular Zionists as well as Hamas, Hizbollah and other organisations are allowed to assume public functions, are finally forbidden to form political parties. A republican model has to be followed which strictly observes the separation of religion and state. There is no other solution for Palestine. The state Israel, based upon Zionist fundamentalism, stands in contradiction to such a program and cannot survive a modern development in Palestine. The task consists in overcoming the fundamentalist forces of any kind in this region.
The old program of the Palestine Liberation Organisation basically remains the only real one. Anything else leads to the continuation of the already long-lasting war in which the energies are being dissipated. The Zionists do not, of course, intend to permanently retreat from territories like Gaza. This is just a tactical maoeuvre – for example in order to make the war against Iran possible, to keep the rear-front quiet.

15. It can be said that the creation of the Israeli state could not but lead to maximum polarisation, with the consequence of an infinite chain of crimes in the region. On the polarisation ensuing in the region, reactionary forces in all the states have capitalized. Islamists, military dictators, all kinds of reactionaries were able to work for a better profile in this constellation, vis-à-vis such an aggressor as Zionism. The liberation movement aiming at a bourgeois-democratic revolution in the Arab countries, hampered by Islam, was further hindered by the foundation of this state, an act of usurpation which was put through by the USA and the Soviet Union at that time. In fact, this must have been clear to all of the originators, and certainly it was.

16. Iran is of great historical importance, the Iranian people has ample revolutionary traditions, it has been a historical nation since 2.500 years and more, a nation of Indo-European language, which simultaneously has integrated the cultural elements of the Arab and the neighbouring Indian space, which commands large creative capabilities and is able to develop, for example, the nuclear technology, too, in the time to come. If US imperialism, after the crimes in Iraq, were to assail this nation, it would be forced to commit even much larger crimes. For all of these reasons, the forces must be developed against that already now.

Group Neue Einheit

www.neue-einheit.com