The overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria is being celebrated all across that country and worldwide. It is a major setback to the reactionary capitalist regime in Iran. It follows the powerful blows struck by Israel Defense Forces against the Iranian rulers and their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Despite these blows, the course of Tehran’s expansionist rulers remains a mortal danger to working people — in Iran, Israel and elsewhere.
The Socialist Workers Party 2022 political resolution, published in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward, addresses crucial aspects of what lies behind these conflicts. Written by SWP leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark, it lays out what it will take to end the danger of nuclear war.
“Tehran’s expansionist drive to extend the bourgeois clerical regime’s military and economic domination across the Middle East continues to pose the threat of an expanded conflagration,” the resolution says. “These perils are multiplied by the Iranian capitalist rulers’ declared aim of eliminating the State of Israel, home to nearly half the world’s Jews.” And they have been underscored by shifts in the world following Hamas’ deadly pogrom Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 Jews and others in Israel.
“Tehran’s accelerated course toward developing and deploying a strategic nuclear arsenal endangers all those throughout the region and beyond.
“The most important curb to this danger is Iran’s working people — of Persian, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Arab, and other national origins — who have protested in massive numbers in cities, villages, and rural areas in 2018, 2019, and again in 2022, in defiance of the regime and all its wings.”
The possibility that nuclear weapons will be used today also flows from the deepening crisis of the U.S.-led imperialist world order. Every ruling class worldwide is building up its military and looking for allies to protect its national interests.
From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington’s military interventions have the sole aim of advancing the profit-driven reach of the U.S. rulers at the expense of their rivals and, more importantly, of working people.
The SWP resolution explains that “only socialist revolutions in the imperialist countries can bring the danger of a world nuclear conflagration to an end once and for all.” In the U.S. and everywhere that requires “building a proletarian communist party as part of a world communist movement.”
That is the road to advance workers’ interests, as well as the national aspirations of Jews, Kurds, Palestinians and others in the Middle East.