This article by John Molloy first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.
THE hell of a world on fire is heaven for the profit gougers and speculators as national governments who daily preach “there is no money” find it instantly for murderous weapons and then warn of the economic fallout of war (spoiler alert – its perpetual austerity). The US who, unlike the Cuban Government they have in their sites, can’t provide social security or healthcare for its own people, can spend $5.6 billion on munitions in the first two days of their illegal war on Iran.
As the Tudeh Party has stated the “aim is to turn Iran into a semi-colony of the United States in the region, or to drag the country into prolonged ethnic and religious civil wars (similar to what occurred in Libya or Syria) in order to completely destroy national sovereignty and ultimately partition Iran.”
The murderous recklessness of current US action has led to blowback affecting even the most compliant US allies whose leaders traded their self-respect for the kickbacks of the arms trade, the facilitation of the export of their nations extractive wealth and accommodating the presence of US bases on their soil.
In Britain, while Tony Blair, managed to adopt a position to the right of Starmer in his immediate, unqualified support for the US, a military figure, unexpectedly, cut through the delusional language of “special relationships.” Former Nato Supreme Commander General Sir Richard Shirreff, who is unlikely to have been a member of the Stop the War Coalition at any time, stated “let’s squash any idea of a special relationship…we should not in any shape or form be involved with the Americans closely…because they are being led by a couple of gung-ho nutters like Trump and Hegseth without a proper strategy, without serious thought about what the end state for this war is.
Yet again we have an America president who has gone to war, a war of choice, a war of hubris…without any clear idea of how the war ends and without any clear strategy…as Sun Tzu said…’tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat’…unless they have thought through the impact of what they are doing on the minds of the Iranian people, this thing is going to go south very quickly…the idea of assassinating the Ayatollah Khomeini, who is not just Iran’s head of state but the religious symbol of Shiites world…is about as subtle as murdering the Pope on the steps of St. Peter’s in Holy Week”.
No such realism of course from the American foreign policy hawk, John Bolton, who contributed to a far from a short list of historic sayings that articulate “anything goes” in support of the United States’ imperial slaughter. Echoing the infamous comment from a US General who said during their war on Vietnam that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it”, Bolton, in a similar style, when asked to comment on the US air strike on the “Shajare Tayyebeh” (The Good Tree) school in the city of Minab in southern Iran that butchered 165 people, most of them girls aged between 7 and 12, said “my advice to the Iranians in the future, and anybody else, is that…don’t build girls’ schools right next to naval bases.”.
These are the basic rules of the US/Israeli world order – no one else can have nuclear weapons, no one else can develop a domestic or foreign policy for the benefit of their own citizens or work collaboratively with other countries outside the US’s orbit for such an aim, no one, despite the clichéd use of hollow buzzwords like “democracy” or “freedom” can choose leaders, political or spiritual unacceptable to White House.
Anyone advocating any dilution of Irish neutrality, in any form, therefore, should be reminded that ultimately these are the “terms” of compliance with the US/Israeli war machine, a swapping of national self-determination and self-respect for an annual junket to the White House.