Defend Iran –
Defeat U.S./Israel War!

U.S/Israel war crime. At least 153 people, mostly children, were killed when a girls school in Minab, Iran was hit in an airstrike in the imperialist/Zionist war on Iran. (Photo:  Mehr News Agency)

The following Internationalist leaflet was distributed at protests in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sydney, Australia on February 28.

FEBRUARY 28 – For the second time in eight months the United States and Israel have launched a war against Iran with the aim of overthrowing the government with a pro-imperialist regime, destroying Iran’s nuclear industry and its missiles. After kidnapping the president of Venezuela’s Bolivarian republic, Nicolás Maduro, and taking control of Venezuela’s oil, the would-be Yankee emperor Donald Trump is out to topple the Islamic Republic … and grab Iran’s oil. Israel’s genocidal strongman Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to cement Zionist dominance in the Middle East. At this crucial hour, the League for the Fourth International calls on all revolutionary socialists, class-conscious workers and opponents of imperialist world domination to defend Iran, a semicolonial country, and to take a stand for the defeat of the genocidal imperialist and Zionist warmongers.

In Iran, Trotskyists would call for workers to mobilize to crush the attempt to restore the rule of the bloody dynasty of Shah Reza Pahlavi, the imperialist puppets today being promoted by Israel. While giving no political support to the mullah regime, the fight should be for workers revolution. Internationally, the LFI calls for workers action against the war on Iran, and to stop arms to Israel, as we have since the outset of the genocidal Zionist/imperialist war on Gaza, And we reiterate our declaration at the time of the June 2025 attack on Iran, “Iran Has the Right to Nuclear Weapons to Deter Israeli and U.S. Nuclear-Armed Terrorists.”¹

Since the outbreak of protests in Iran at the end of December by merchants in Iran’s bazaars, against the plummeting exchange rate of Iran’s currency, the rial, Trump has been cynically posing as the savior of the Iranian people. But the bazaaris have historically been the economic base of the Islamist regime, and the shortages and privations besetting the working people of Iran are largely the result of the crippling sanctions imposed by the U.S. and European imperialists. The protests were soon taken over by pro-shah provocateurs, and put down by the repressive forces of the Islamic Republic at a cost of several thousand lives. Revolutionaries gave no support to the pro-shah protests.

The delusional megalomaniac Trump claimed that his airstrikes with “bunker-busting” monster bombs last June “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Nothing of the sort occurred. In fact, Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium had already been moved to new sites. Iran’s rulers have repeatedly said they are not seeking nuclear arms, but as we have written, the U.S./Israel attack “made clear that Iran needs to exercise its right develop a nuclear deterrent capability.” Since then, the European imperialists sought to blackmail Iran into giving up its nuclear program, threatening to intensify economic sanctions. In recent weeks, Trump has again gone through a charade of “negotiations,” but only as a cover for the impending war.

Reports from Iran indicate that the left and labor movement have been paralyzed. Opposition to the stifling clerical mullah regime is widespread among largely secular middle-class sectors and hard-pressed working people. If the Israel-backed son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – installed by the U.S. and British imperialists in the 1953 coup against the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh to thwart his nationalization of oil – moves to install a puppet regime it would mean renewed imperialist control of Iran’s oil, restoration of landlord domination in the countryside, brutal repression of unions and intensified hardship for working people. But as the Islamist regime still has bases of support and a powerful repressive apparatus, the likely outcome of the U.S./Israel war is chaos, which would destabilize the entire region.

After the January protests, the Kurdistan Freedom Party, an Iranian Kurdish separatist group,  boasted that it had crossed Iran’s border from Iraq to attack Iranian regime forces. This outfit, trained by the U.S., openly appealed for Zionist aid and has now greeted the U.S./Israel attack. A “Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan” was founded on February 22 by five Iranian Kurdish opposition parties, receiving much coverage in Israeli media. The alliance with genocidal Zionism, clearly with the hopes of establishing an Iranian version of the puppet Kurdish regime in northern Iraq, underlines the bankruptcy of Kurdish nationalism as a strategy for the liberation of the oppressed Kurdish people, even as U.S. imperialism has sold out the Kurds in Syria to the Islamic reactionary regime there.

Internationalists at June 2025 NYC protest against U.S./Israel bombing attacks on Iran and genocidal war on Gaza. (Internationalist photo)

The U.S./Israel war on Iran, aided by the European imperialists despite their pious claims to oppose “escalation,” is one more example of the deadly consequences of fraying imperialist domination. Even with the huge “armada” of U.S. military forces in the region, the largest since the 2003 attack and occupation of Iraq, military sources say they cannot keep up the attack for an extended period. The workers, peasants and all the oppressed – including women, oppressed national and religious minorities – must defend Iran against the imperialist/Zionist war while fighting for proletarian revolution. That would include self-determination for the Kurdish people and other oppressed minorities, and a Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East, for which the key is socialist revolution in the imperialist centers.

In the United States, the Democratic Party – along with the Republicans – has paved the way for genocide in Gaza, supplying bombs and planes to deliver death from the skies, as well as for the takeover of Venezuela and now war on Iran. From World War II and the anti-Soviet Cold War to the Vietnam War and the “forever wars” in the Middle East, the Yankee imperialists have followed a bipartisan war policy, combined with racist repression “at home.” The fight against the war on Iran is part and parcel of the struggle against the mass deportations and drive toward a police state in the U.S., requiring above all a break with all the capitalist parties and forging of workers parties fighting for international socialist revolution, sections of an authentically Trotskyist, reforged Fourth International. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Return to THE INTERNATIONALIST GROUP Home Page