While Washington tightens its brutal economic blockade of Iran, Tehran is retaliating with attacks on commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz and threatening to strike oil facilities and other economic and military sites of U.S. allies in the Middle East.
The U.S. rulers hope that their economic squeeze — which has paralyzed close to 100% of Iran’s oil trade — and the threat of future military strikes will eventually force the regime to give in to Washington’s demands and put U.S. imperialism in a better position to deepen its plunder of the oil, gas and other resources in the region.
The dominant wing of the faction-ridden Iranian regime believes it can withstand Washington’s sanctions and inflict enough economic and military pain on U.S. allies that President Donald Trump’s administration will acquiesce to Tehran’s control of the strait.
While the U.S. military has not retaliated against Tehran’s latest strikes on ships, Trump threatened to “bomb the s— out of” Oman — a longtime U.S. “ally” — if the government there “gets in the way” of U.S. efforts to reach a deal with Tehran. Oman officials have been negotiating with Tehran over joint control of the Strait of Hormuz, undercutting U.S. demands that both governments allow unimpeded transit through the waterway.
The harshest consequences of Washington’s blockade fall on working people in Iran. With growing shortages of fuel and rising prices, wages — even when workers get paid on time — now often cover just a third or less of monthly expenses. Many are buying food on installment plans to stave off disaster.
Regime tries to shore up its rule
The regime is taking steps to shore up its reactionary rule. It has given the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more control over Iran’s regular army and stepped up production of missiles and drones after the severe blows its military suffered in its wars against the U.S. and against Israel.
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei recently appointed six new commanders to the Guard Corps and the Basij, its paramilitary thug force. His regime aims to advance coordination with Tehran’s “axis of resistance” — the Houthis in Yemen, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon — to attack economic and military targets in Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the Middle East; to be ready to unleash more repression against working people in Iran; and, in the longer run, to destroy Israel as a refuge for Jews.
Brigadier Gen. Ahmad Vahidi was appointed commander-in-chief of the Guard Corps and Mohsen Rezaei, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Prosecutors in Argentina charge both with helping plan the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded more than 300.
The Iranian regime’s biggest fear is that working people and oppressed nationalities will take to the streets in big enough numbers to challenge its rule.
Since March of this year, it has executed at least 39 people who participated in anti-regime protests in December and January, or who’ve been accused of other political “offenses.” More than 60 political prisoners are on death row.
“The rulers once again respond to the people’s demands for bread, work, justice, freedom and human dignity with the most brutal instrument of terror and fear: the gallows,” the Union of Workers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company said in an Aug. 13 statement.
The regime is using “wartime conditions” to violate “the legal procedures required,” to carry out the executions the union added. It called for “an immediate ceasefire and an end to the war, the immediate halt of all executions in Iran, the unconditional release of all imprisoned labor and political activists, and the complete abolition of the death penalty.”
The regime issued summons and threatened to arrest 100 prominent figures, including more than 20 well-known movie and television actors, for publicly opposing the death penalty.
“Since the beginning of the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran,” the Iranian Teachers Trade Union in Tehran said Aug. 14, “another war has intensified inside the country — the war between the established authorities and society and independent civil forces.”
Since March more than 60 teachers and union activists have faced arrest, dismissal and other sanctions, the union said. This has been especially severe in the Kurdish region. Kurds — like Baluchs, Arabs and other oppressed nationalities — have fought for the right to use their native languages and against discrimination in housing, jobs and education.
“Protesting discrimination, demanding free and quality education, defending students’ rights” and other fundamental rights “must not be answered with prison sentences,” said the Tehran Teachers Union.
Despite the increased repression, more working people are taking to the streets. Hundreds demonstrated outside the Central Prison in Sanandaj, the second largest Kurdish city in Iran, Aug. 17 and into the early morning the next day against the planned execution of Kaveh Rafoosheh. The 35-year-old Kurdish man was found guilty of murder in a street fight. Despite the protest, Rafoosheh was executed.
Every day there are new protests.
In one week in August there were dozens of protests around the country by retirees from the telecommunications and steel industries against inadequate pensions; oil workers demanding to be hired directly by the company instead of by contractors; municipal workers, healthcare workers and nurses demanding higher wages; unemployed youth demanding jobs; retired coal miners protesting problems with their health insurance; university professors forced into retirement; and patients and their families protesting the high prices and scarcity of essential drugs.