Speaking for the student Republicans, David Oliver defended Washington’s hostile policies toward Iran by comparing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler. “Iran is a threat to the region, our allies, and us,” he said. Oliver argued that the United States is “not imperialist,” citing it as “a beacon of hope, liberty, freedom, and peace.”

Young Socialist Ben O’Shaughnessy condemned the U.S. government’s threats against Iran and called for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He defended Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy against efforts by Washington and its allies to prevent such needed economic development.

O’Shaughnessy said the imperialist governments assert their prerogative to develop nuclear power while seeking “to keep semicolonial countries in their oppressed and underdeveloped status.”

He said, “The question should be: Who poses a threat to whom? Who poses the biggest threat to working people in the Middle East and the world over?”

He pointed to how in 1953 Washington orchestrated a coup against the government of Iran “for the ‘crime’ of nationalizing the country’s natural resources” and reinstalled the shah’s bloody rule. He described the 1979 revolution in which Iran’s workers and farmers overthrew the monarchy, and the subsequent consolidation of the capitalist regime there.

For working people and oppressed nations, the threat “doesn’t come from Iran but from the continued growing world disorder created by capitalism in its decline,” O’Shaughnessy said. He noted that Washington is the only government ever to unleash nuclear weapons, and that today the imperialist powers maintain thousands of troops around the world, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Korean peninsula.

Defending Washington’s nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, College Republican Kyle Ketcham argued, “President Truman thought that it was best, not only for us, but for the Japanese…. More citizens would have died in a full-scale U.S. invasion.”

During the discussion period, a student cheered the recent electoral victories of the Democrats and asked, “Wouldn’t you say the Republican Party has misled and is creating a sense of hostility and more terrorists?”

Oliver responded by listing bombings that have occurred during Democratic administrations, and said the solution lay in a U.S. military victory in Iraq.

Young Socialist Ben Joyce disagreed with both. Democrats and Republicans, as twin representatives of the U.S. ruling rich, have jointly carried out wars of aggression around the world, he said.

Joyce said working people have no interest in supporting the U.S. rulers’ “war on terrorism,” a cover for launching wars abroad and attacks on political rights at home. He said the only solution is for workers and oppressed people worldwide to unite in a common fight to overturn the imperialist system.

O’Shaughnessy quoted remarks by Cuban president Fidel Castro that revolutionary Cuba did not need nuclear weapons because “we have a different type of nuclear weapon: it’s our ideas.”

“The Cuban Revolution shows what’s possible when workers and farmers organize to take power out of the hands of the exploiters,” he said. That road is also the way forward for working people in the United States, O’Shaughnessy said.

Willie Cotton contributed to this article.  
 
 
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