Vol. 71/No. 17      April 30, 2007

The five were abducted in January in a botched U.S. raid in Iraqi Kurdistan, the real aim of which was to capture two senior Iranian representatives on an official visit to the area.

Washington’s refusal to release the five Iranians is part of the imperialist campaign to brand Tehran the aggressor in Iraq and the region. Iran’s government is supplying lethal bombs to “terrorists” in Iraq and is helping to instigate violence in the country, we are told. “Exporter of murder,” scream U.S. and other big-business media about Tehran, because Iranian-made arms were reportedly captured in Afghanistan.

What a gall from the “civilized hyenas,” as Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin aptly called the imperialist powers! Washington, London, and their allies invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, have occupied them for nearly half a decade, have tortured and humiliated prisoners of war they captured in these countries, and have fostered ethnic divisions, helping to fuel a brutal civil war and communal killings with no end in sight in Iraq.

This is turning the victim into the criminal. A treatment millions of African Americans and other working people are intimately familiar with from cops in the United States. A practice many workers know is often used against them by the bosses and their hired guns when they go on strike.

The kidnapping of the five Iranians is a piece of the U.S.-led campaign to prevent Iran from developing nuclear power—needed by that semicolonial nation to reverse its underdevelopment fostered by imperialist domination—on the claim that Tehran is secretly building atomic weapons. But it is Washington, the only government to ever use a nuclear bomb—and that against an Asian people—that poses a threat of annihilation to the people of the world.

We should demand: Release the five Iranian officials held in Iraq! Lift the sanctions against Iran! Hands off Iran!
 
 
Related articles:
British rulers ‘humiliated’ over capture of 15 soldiers
London, Washington try to squeeze Iran
‘London hands off Iran!’
Communist League candidate campaigns in Scotland
U.S. occupiers to cordon off parts of Baghdad  
 
 
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