A day after the US announced the deployment of a second aircraft carrier group in the region, it decided to supply $20 billion worth of weapons to Israel, another step toward war in the Middle East. The Biden administration is supported by the entire ruling class and is determined to wage a catastrophic conflict against Iran, viewing Iran as a front in a global outbreak of imperialist violence against its rivals that can only be stopped by the independent political mobilization of the international working class.
This is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from a review of the content of the arms sale. After enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza for over ten months, the Biden administration plans to deliver over 50 F-15 fighter jets, advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles, 120mm tank ammunition, high-explosive mortars and tactical vehicles. Delivery of the entire jet fleet is expected to take five years.
From a purely military perspective, there is no conceivable use for such a large arsenal in Gaza. The Strip has already been bombed to pieces, and Hamas fighters have only rudimentary short-range rockets that are unlikely to threaten any target in Israel. Israel’s urgent need for such weapons only makes sense in the context of advanced preparations against more sophisticated adversaries, such as the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and Iran itself, which are capable of shooting down Israeli aircraft and attacking the country directly with long-range missiles.
Tweet is loading…
Socialist Equality Party (SEP) presidential candidate Joseph Kishore condemned the arms sale in a statement:
The Pentagon’s announcement has a sinister undertone. Israel already has unchallenged air superiority in the region. The sole purpose of this arms sale is to offset expected losses in a war with Iran and its allies that could break out at any time. The Biden-Harris administration wants to ensure that Israel can continue to pulverize the people of the Middle East without interruption.
The latest arms sale followed unmistakable signs that Washington wants war across the region. Since the Israeli genocide began last October, U.S. officials have made clear that their support for the “final solution” to the Palestinian issue is tied to plans to fight Iran, a key ally of Russia and China in the Middle East.
After Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April, killing seven senior members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, American and other NATO military units helped repel Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel with drones and missiles. Israel’s most recent egregious provocation, the assassination of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas politician Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran within hours of each other in late July, prompted Washington to announce the $20 billion arms deal and grant Israel $3.5 billion from the $14 billion aid package passed by Congress in April to immediately purchase U.S.-made weapons. In addition, the Biden administration lifted a three-year arms embargo on Saudi Arabia, Iran’s arch-rival in the region.
After Iranian politicians, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, reaffirmed their right to retaliate for Israel’s assassination of Haniya, the Biden administration is inciting Tehran to launch an attack that can then be used as justification for further escalation.
American and Israeli politicians are no longer making a secret of the fact that Iran is a target. During his address to a joint session of the US Congress in July, Netanyahu openly announced his intention to wage war against Iran in alliance with US imperialism, for which he received a bipartisan standing ovation. “If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, it is this: our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory,” he declared to thunderous applause. “Iran understands that to truly challenge America, it must first conquer the Middle East… But in the heart of the Middle East, Iran’s path is blocked by the State of Israel.”
Netanyahu discussed a Middle East-wide war the following day in a closed meeting with Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Harris opened her subsequent briefing with the press by saying, “I just had a frank and constructive meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I told him that I will always ensure that Israel can defend itself, including against Iran and the Iranian-backed militias like Hamas and Hezbollah.”
America’s imperialist strategists hope to use war to fundamentally restructure the Middle East in Washington’s interests and at the expense of its rivals. Eliminating Tehran’s allied Hezbollah in Lebanon and expelling Iranian forces from neighboring Syria would undermine the pro-Iranian Assad regime and open Russian forces to direct attack at their only Mediterranean naval base in Tartus. Washington also hopes to use war to undermine China’s growing influence in the region, as demonstrated by its brokering of a ceasefire between Iran and Saudi Arabia last year and its growing economic presence.
But these hopes are deceptive. American imperialism has already killed millions of people and devastated entire societies in three decades of uninterrupted wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. The devastation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria has not reversed the rapid economic decline of American imperialism compared to its competitors, but rather exacerbated major power conflicts. A new war would therefore quickly develop into a direct clash of major powers on a global scale.
These past disasters act as accelerators rather than brakes on new military adventures of American imperialism. Washington’s determination to provoke open war with Iran is inextricably linked to its global strategy of world war, which it sees as the only viable means of maintaining its hegemony over rivals and nominal “allies” alike.
In addition to the Middle East, which is considered a crucial front in this war due to the region’s vast energy reserves and its geostrategic importance for control over Europe and Asia, Washington is at war with Russia in Ukraine and is preparing for war with China in the Indo-Pacific.
The International Committee of the Fourth International had already declared at an earlier stage in this process in its 2016 statement “Socialism and the Fight Against War” that “no part of the world is outside the interests of American capitalism”. “Every continent and every country is viewed through the prism of the economic and geopolitical interests of US imperialism. The American ruling class is focused on developing a strategy to meet every real and potential challenge.”
All the imperialist powers of North America, Europe and Japan are involved in this new division of the world. It arises from the insoluble contradictions of world capitalism: between globalized production and the division of the world into antagonistic nation states, between the social mass character of production and its concentration in a few private hands. The only solution open to the imperialists is to plunge humanity into the barbarism of a global conflagration, even if this entails the risk of a nuclear Armageddon.
These same capitalist contradictions are driving the working class into revolutionary struggle. Workers around the world are outraged by the barbarity of the genocide in Gaza and the hypocrisy of its imperialist defenders, as well as by the ruling class’s efforts to impose the full burden of militarism and war on workers through wage cuts and austerity. The most urgent task is to unite these struggles in a global anti-war movement led by the working class on the basis of the program of world socialist revolution, because imperialist wars can only be ended by abolishing the capitalist system in which they are rooted.
This requires the building of a mass socialist and internationalist party of the working class. This party is the Socialist Equality Party in the USA and other national sections of the ICFI around the world.
