Operation ‘Epic Fury’ marks a new, bloody chapter in the history of West Asia. While the US and Israel talk about eliminating nuclear threats, they conceal the brutal reality: this is not a liberation operation, but an aggressive attempt to restructure world power in their favour. While world leaders and politicians cheer the rain of bombs, it appears that the missiles falling on Tehran and Qom are causing massive civilian casualties and destruction. The horrific practices used in the Palestinian genocide are now being used in southern Lebanon, Tehran, etc. The bombings in Iran are smothering the legitimate and necessary social struggle of the Iranian working class in blood and rubble.
Stop this bloodshed. Stop imperialism. Hands off Iran, Women Life Freedom.
The devastating consequences: bombs as resistance breakers
Trump points to the fierce struggle of the Iranian masses to sell the interests of imperialism as aid to the Iranian masses. He is assisted in this by right-wing figures and politicians for whom the fate of the Iranian people is the least of their concerns, just as they believed that no genocide was taking place in Gaza. The Iranian masses have suffered particularly hard under the regime’s repression in the past months of resistance. Our solidarity goes out to them.
This is not the first time that imperialism has used the narrative that it is supposedly coming to the aid of the population. This also happened in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and it is also a colonial fiction: the claim that colonisation took place in order to help the population with the “civilisation process”, to paternalistically “educate” them.
One of the most direct and tragic consequences of this imperialist intervention is the breaking of social resistance. War initially deprives the resistance of its self-organisation. Moreover, when people are forced into survival mode – searching for food, water and safety under a rain of bombs – the focus shifts away from the social struggle against the regime as an initial reaction.
The Iranian people are thus doubly victimised: on the one hand, by the repression of a tyrannical theocratic regime that killed at least 7,000 demonstrators in January, and on the other, by a foreign imperialist power that is reducing their country to a battlefield for power. You cannot bomb a society into liberation and democracy. The histories of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria teach us that American bombs only lead to chaos and tyrants, with the entire working class, especially women and the most vulnerable groups, ultimately being much worse off.
The ‘Venezuelan Option’ and the hubris of Trumpism
The dominant motive behind this operation is not any interest in democracy, but US-Israeli imperialism, which sees opportunities: The so-called ‘Venezuelan option’ suggests that Trump and Netanyahu are hoping for a quick ‘decapitation’ of the regime, a destruction of its infrastructure, and then a deal with the remnants of the Revolutionary Guard. As in Venezuela, this would allow them to secure their own interests without any real change in the political establishment.
The Israeli regime is taking advantage of the momentum to strengthen its preeminent power in the region even more explicitly, and from that perspective, a collapse of the Iranian regime is particularly interesting.
This approach exudes a colonial contempt for the self-determination of the Iranian people. Trump’s lip service to the Iranian resistance is distasteful. All he is interested in is a vassal regime that secures American and Zionist interests – in particular control over oil and gas reserves and the strategic Strait of Hormuz. It is a geopolitical chess game in which the 90 million Iranians are merely pawns in an attempt to place the entire region of West Asia under Zionist and US control.
This brutal imperialist power politics is part of the new era of disorder, with increased imperialist conflict and protectionism. This comes as a result of the ever-slower growth and more acute, multiple crises of capitalism. This new, chaotic period, marked by militarism, economic shocks and war, follows the end of the era of globalisation and free trade. In that era, the US appeared to be the only global superpower, but with the rise of state-capitalist China, this era came to an end several years ago. With its imperialist power grab in Venezuela, its attempt to do the same in Iran, its claim on Greenland, its economic strangulation of Cuba, etc., US imperialism is strategically positioning itself against the other, competing capitalist axis represented by China, Russia and their “allies”. The struggle between the larger and smaller imperialist powers for access to essential raw materials, control of markets and production is becoming increasingly intense and bloody.
Colonial methods: divide and rule
An essential part of imperialist strategy is the use of colonial methods to divide the population. Iran’s history has been marked by such interference, culminating in the CIA-backed coup d’état of 1953 against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddeq. Today, we see the same dynamic: imperialism tries to pit population groups, religions and social groups against each other in order to prevent class-based unity, which could threaten their dominance.
Oppressed minorities such as the Kurds will not attain freedom and self-determination as part of a US-led imperialist plan. They have already been betrayed many times, in different countries, by that same US imperialism, which does not care about democratic rights or the right to self-determination.
True freedom and self-determination require a break with capitalism and imperialism. Only a revolutionary transition to a society of democratic self-management — in communities and workplaces, linked by solidarity — can lay the foundations for this. Such a socialist transformation of the region is only possible if all oppressed peoples can act on their right to self-determination in a free and democratic framework.
Intersectional solidarity: the only way forward
The logic of bombs and division must be countered by an intersectional approach to solidarity. By intersectional, we mean the understanding that class exploitation and other systems of oppression mutually shape and reinforce each other within capitalism. The ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî) movement that originated in Iran is a very important foundation on which to build. This movement, which approaches the struggle by bringing together victims of all forms of oppression and exploitation, can be an important foundation on which to build an anti-imperialist struggle. It unites gender oppression, economic demands and the struggle of national minorities. It has the potential to unite the oppressed against imperialism, capitalism and local tyrants.
Our solidarity with the resistance against war and dictatorship is not abstract or performative. It supports the independent self-organisation of the masses. This means:
- Unconditional defence of the movement against imperialism: ‘Hands off Iran’. Stop the war!
- No support for the Iranian regime: solidarity with the working class and the oppressed also means supporting their struggle against theocratic dictatorship. We reject the false choice between ‘camps’ of oppressors. Support for the independent organisations of social resistance, from trade unions to ‘women, life, freedom’.
- We must fight against our own governments that facilitate this aggression. Stop Trumpism, in Belgium and internationally.
- Side with all the oppressed: whether it is Iranian workers in the oil sector, women throwing off their headscarves, or Kurds and Palestinians fighting for self-determination; their liberation is inextricably linked, as a common struggle against capitalist oppression.
Conclusion: a future without tyrants
The road to a free West Asia does not run through Washington or the bunkers of the supreme leader. The current escalation threatens to plunge the region into decades of chaos, comparable to Libya or Iraq. Such chaos will also seep into the rest of the world, with the most vulnerable once again paying the price.
True liberation can only come from within, carried by a movement that refuses to bow to either monarchy or theocracy. Solidarity is our strongest weapon. It is the recognition that the struggle of the student in Tehran, the worker in the oil refinery and the activist in the diaspora is one and the same: a struggle for a dignified existence, free from capitalist exploitation and imperialist aggression.
Only by forging this intersectional unity can we break the cycle of violence and build a world in which the people themselves write their history.
We use the term West Asia instead of ‘Middle East’. The term ‘Middle East’ is a colonial and Eurocentric term. The name does not describe where the region is located, but how far it is from Europe. ‘West Asia’, on the other hand, is geographically neutral: it simply refers to the western part of the Asian continent.