Solidarity with the Iranian people! U.S. hands off Iran!

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A statement by the Political Committee of Socialist Action (June 23, 2009)

1) A division in the ruling elite has opened up the way for an explosion of discontent with the reactionary clerical capitalist regime in Iran. The massive mobilizations clearly reflect the deep hatred of the government by the masses.

Even the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, a leading conservative, has declared that a majority of Iranians are convinced that the June 12 presidential election results were invalid. The fact that the official victor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was credited with a score similar to his victory in 2005 did not provide any credibility; in that year and in the previous parliamentary elections the opposing faction largely boycotted the vote because its candidates had been rejected by the Council of Guardians—that is, they were denied the right to participate in the elections.

The arguments of some commentators in the West that only or primarily the upper class supports the mass protests against the officially declared election results are clearly false. Mass demonstrations have been held in the poorer, working-class southern districts of Tehran as well as the north. These protests have obviously been an outpouring of discontent of the general population with an undemocratic and oppressive regime. In no country and at no time in history have privileged sections of the population defied murderous repression in the streets.

2) There is no clear difference between the two major candidates, Ahmadinejad and Mir Hossein Moussavi. Both represent factions of the ruling bourgeois elite, divided only by competing ambitions and perhaps by tactical differences (although even this is unclear.). Both support the continuation of the present theocratic regime.

The June 12 presidential elections offered no real choice. The theocratic bourgeois rulers would not allow any candidate opposed to the continuation of the present system to enter the election. Only four of about of 400 nominated candidates were permitted to run.

Thus, Moussavi was also vetted by the authorities of the present system. He has in the past served as prime minister of the Islamic Republic and as such assumed responsibility for its repressive policies. It is simply because he offered a legal cover for expressing opposition to the present regime that he has emerged, at least in part and momentarily, as a symbolic leader of the mass movement. The extent of Moussavi’s control of the opposition movement or whether he will be able to maintain leadership are far from clear.

The previous experience with the “liberal reformer” president, Khatami, who collapsed when the reactionary clerics clamped down, was deeply demoralizing for the masses who wanted a change. He is now a supporter of Moussavi. The outcome of the 6 Socialist Action july 2009 Khatami period also made it clear that the Iranian president had no real power, that the real power was vested in the “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei. It is he who has issued the orders for suppressing the protests. But he is unelected by the people and has little personal credibility. His decision to mobilize the repressive forces to crush the demonstrations inevitably tends to turn the movement against the Islamic Republic as such.

3) It is in the interests of the Western bourgeoisie, who claim to rule on the basis of democracy in their own countries, to identify themselves publicly with the movement for democratic rights in Iran. But that does not mean that they really think that it would be in their interests for the movement to win. There have been a number of indications, most egregiously by the head of the Israeli secret service, Mossad, that they think that it will be more difficult for them to deal with the threat that Iran represents to their interests if the country is headed by a less discredited regime.

In any case, the more intelligent U.S. leaders, represented by President Obama, have acknowledged that the U.S. has little credibility in Iran, especially because of its role in overthrowing the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, and installing the repressive dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah’s military shot down 50,000 Iranians who were peacefully demonstrating against his rule and brutally tortured and murdered tens of thousands opposed to his regime. The attempts of Republican Party politicians to wrap themselves in the mantle of the Iranian protesters are clearly a self-interested domestic political ploy and only make them look ridiculous.

4) Socialist Action defends the mass struggle in Iran against the government’s violent repression, and we wholeheartedly support the demands of the Iranian people for democratic rights. We encourage the masses to organize themselves in their own interests and to not trust or subordinate themselves to any bourgeois politician or representative of the ruling elite.

The present struggle shows the essential fallacy of bourgeois elections. This is a process the masses cannot control. They need to trust in their own organizations, in which they can participate and control. The rise of shoras (popular councils) in the 1979 revolution was an example that needs to be followed and taken further.

Khamenei’s claim that the elections were a glorious victory of the Iranian people is an outrage—especially when his own henchman, Larijani, says that most Iranians think they were a farce and hundreds of thousands of Iranians have shown a determination to denounce them in the face of threats of mass repression. It disastrously discredits the regime. We call for the people insulted by Khamenei’s claim to reject the entire process, and to find ways to express their real aspirations.

Since the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution, the workers have been denied any right to organize themselves and to fight for their demands. Democratic rights are an essential demand for them, and it runs counter to the fundamental objectives Olivier Laban-Mattei / AFP / Getty Images of the Iranian capitalist class and the imperialists, who remain its big brothers, despite their demagogic pretences. Socialist Action stands on the side of the masses. We know that there can be no socialism unless the masses and the workers have the freedom to express themselves. 5) The attempts of the dominant clerical faction to demonize the protests as manipulated by foreigners or pro-imperialists are obviously self-interested demagogy. But it is nevertheless certain that the United States and other imperialist states will seek opportunities to exploit or intervene in the present conflict—including taking possible military action.

Iran is surrounded by U.S. military bases, and there is abundant evidence that plans have been drawn up for aggression against Iran. It is an open secret that the U.S. has covert military teams operating in the country, even if so far only in remote frontier areas among marginalized ethnic groups.

Nothing could be more deadly to the aspirations of the Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands than U.S. intervention. For that reason, the primary task of socialists, progressives, and friends of democracy in the United States, the imperialist state that bears the principal responsibility for the miseries of the Iranian people, is to expose, denounce, and mobilize against any attempt by the U.S. government to intervene in Iran.

Clearly, the Iranian government’s ruthless repression of the mass movement demanding democratic rights increases the threat of U.S. intervention. Such policies will inevitably deepen divisions among the Iranian people. The best and ultimately the only effective defense of the gains of the Iranian Revolution and of the sovereignty of the Iranian people is the unity of the masses of the country behind a leadership that is prepared to once again mobilize in the millions to challenge and provide a real revolutionary and socialist alternative to the present repressive clerical capitalist state. n ... Judge Sotomayor (continued from page 5: “Right wingers v. Judge Sotomayor”)

economic system determined, at all costs, to perpetuate itself by all and any means necessary, for as long as possible.”

The belief in some court-appointed savior is a self-delusion. Real change results from the hard work of political organizing in communities, unions, social movements, and the society as a whole. The courts protect the overall interests of the ruling class. That this class consists largely of white males is entirely to the point. So, despite 17 years on the bench, including 11 years on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, a Latina woman nominated to the Supreme Court must still pass a loyalty test to prove that her heart and mind align, not with her gender or ethnic group, but with the rich and powerful men the law was created to serve. Her judicial record must show that she will not be particularly friendly to women, Latinos, or the working class.

Since Obama presented Judge Sotomayor as his nominee, all her public statements and the statements of her political allies have gone to placating the fears of the right. Senator Patrick Leahy (Dem.-Vt.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, quoted her as saying to him “‘as a judge you follow the law.’ … And she said, ‘ultimately and completely’ a judge has to follow the law no matter what their upbringing has been” (The New York Times, June 3, 2009).

The democratic ideal of “equality before the law”

is all too often undermined by the reality of social inequality. Justice, willfully blind, fails to see the effects of poverty and discrimination and fails to weigh the consequence of oppression and opportunity denied. The rhetoric of equality, loudly proclaimed by every politician of the ruling-class parties, justifies and perpetuates a society founded on inequality, and on ethnic and class oppression. n

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... Mass protests shake Iranian clerical regime Socialist Action july 2009 7 (continued from page 1: “Iraq War intensifies as U.S.-Maliki government declares ‘victory’”)

two-thirds of the population (the announced majority of the government candidate, Ahmadinejad) do not support it. If the government had that kind of support it would not need the massive and ruthless repression it is mobilizing.

Furthermore, it would have nothing to lose in calling a run-off election, whereas it has a lot to lose by brutally repressing and demonizing the protests against election results that masses of Iranians are convinced were faked.

The two principal arguments advanced by the opposition that the election results were faked is the rapidity with which the results were announced and the fact that Ahmadinejad’s vote was the same everywhere, without any regional variation. That argument puts in question any attempt to try to assess what Ahmadinejad’s real base is.

Supporters and apologists of the regime claim that the popular layers voted for him, and only the middle class voted for Moussavi and the other opposition candidates. But the protest demonstrations in Tehran obviously brought out a broad spectrum of the population, and they were held in south Tehran, historically the poorer section of the city, as well as in the north, where the middle class is centered.

Some defenders of Ahmadinejad have argued that he was more popular than Moussavi among the poor because the opposition candidate favored privatization of the economy. However, the quotes from debates between Moussavi and Ahmadinejad cited on internet blogs focused on the question of inflation.

Moussavi did make some bows in the direction of an increased role for private enterprise. But Evrand Abraminian, a scholar who has written on recent Iranian history, said in an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz of June 27: “Moussavi was able to reach the classes who supported Ahmadinejad for populist reasons. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the gap between rich and poor in Iran actually narrowed, because Moussavi—who was prime minister at the time—initiated price controls and was responsible for nationalization. It’s no coincidence that many on the left supported him. The trade unions support him too.

“He cannot be called leftist or socialist, as several articles have described him, but rather a statist.”

In any case, it is unlikely that Moussavi’s nods in the direction of private enterprise discredited him in the eyes of the poor since the economy has deteriorated so disastrously under Ahmadinejad and the incumbent president has failed notoriously to improve the standard of living of the masses. Moreover, privatization has been going on rapidly already under Ahmadinejad. No components of the clericalist regime have ever had an anti-capitalist discourse.

The fact is that inflation is the curse of oil-based economies. The oil income provides a lot of money for subsidies, but unless it is used for productive projects it simply feeds inflation that undermines the development of the economy in general.

As long as Iran remains a capitalist state, without a planned economy or state monopoly of foreign trade, it is inevitable that populist subsidies will be abandoned and that the nationalized enterprises will eventually be reabsorbed into capitalist business.

It is true that the elite military corps of the government, the Revolutionary Guard, has extensive economic interests that it may consider better defended by Amadinejad. But it is unclear how much the Guard’s control of enterprises is actually public control or how it is viewed by the masses.

Growing disillusionment The determination of the protesters in the face of an unyielding regime has indicated a deep disillusionment with the institutions of the Islamic Republic, despite the attempts of their nominal leader, Mir Hossein Moussavi, to keep his opposition within the framework of the established system. In fact, Moussavi in his time as prime minister presided over repression of opponents of the regime. He could only run for president after being approved by the Council of Guardians as loyal to the Islamic Republic.

But Moussavi’s candidacy offered a legal cover for all shades of discontent with the status quo, and as the protests continued despite the intransigence of the conservative majority in the ruling clerical institutions, they have tended to radicalize. The most obvious symptom of that is the chants of “down with the dictator” that became prevalent after the supreme authority of the theocratic state, Ayatollah Khamenei, had pronounced that the election results were “a divine victory” that it was treason to question.

An Iranian reporter, Azadeh Moaveni, wrote in the June 19 British Guardian that the recent revolt had been brewing for a long time. Ahmadinejad was originally popular because of his defiance of Western sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. But his popularity faded with a catastrophic increase in inflation (now 26 percent) and the deepening of a repressive atmosphere: “The economic downturn began turning people against the president, but his fate was sealed when he reintroduced the molesting social controls....

“Late that summer [2007], authorities launched a full-scale campaign of intimidation against young people they accused of un-Islamic appearance. Within a few short weeks, police detained 150,000 people, and all the women in my life went out to buy the shapeless, long coats that we had worn back in the late 1990s.

“Though the campaign targeted young men as well, authorities singled out women with particular brutality. The government’s disdain for women increased by the day. Though Iranians fretted about the impact of Western sanctions, the government turned its attention to a bill that would facilitate polygamy. Soon after, it announced a plan that would supposedly solve Iran’s marriage crisis. It called the scheme ‘semi-independent marriage’, and it amounted to a hollow version of the institution that would secure men legal and piously sanctioned sex, while denying women the security and social respectability of conventional marriage.

“On internet news sites and newspapers, women reacted scathingly. A girlfriend of mine, whose English classes had recently been segregated by gender, complained the government was imposing seventh-century rules on modern women. To add to Iranians’ frustration, interminable queues accompanied the government’s petrolrationing scheme, unveiled that summer. In the evenings it could take several hours to fill our car, and when our local petrol station was torched by rioters furious with the new plan, we stopped using the car.”

Pictures of the demonstrations that came out of Iran over the internet have showed women playing a prominent role, in some cases boldly confronting the repressive forces.

An upsurge of labor organizing that began in recent years has been brutally repressed but apparently not stamped out. The most important of the new independent unions, Vahed, the Tehran bus drivers, issued a statement June 18 in support of the protests:

“As previously expressed in a statement published on-line in May of this year, since Syndicate Vahed does not view any of the candidates support the activities of the workers’ organizations in Iran, it would not endorse any presidential candidate in the election. Vahed members nevertheless have the right to participate or not to participate in the elections and vote for their individually selected candidate.

“Moreover, the fact remains that demands of almost an absolute majority of the Iranians go far beyond the demands of a particular group. In the past, we have emphasized that until the freedom of choice and right to organize are recognized, talk of any social or particular right would be more of a mockery than a reality.

“The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Company fully supports this movement of Iranian people to build a free and independent civil society and condemns any violence and oppression.”

Vulnerability to imperialism In the past, as Azadeh Moaveni described in the British Guardian, AhmaAFP / Getty Images (Above) Police officer attacks a man near Tehran University, June 14.

dinejad has been able to unite public opinion behind him as a spokesman of Iranian national pride. But it seems unlikely under the present circumstances that playing the nationalist, anti-imperialist card is going to have the same effect.

In fact, the brutal suppression of mass protests and the totalitarian-style intoxication of the state-controlled media weakens Iran as an anti-imperialist force and can make the country more vulnerable to imperialist attack. That is the possibility that socialists, democrats, and progressives have to be alert to, despite their revulsion at the brutality and undemocratic character of the Iranian regime.

The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was more brutal and repressive than the Iranian regime has yet been, but the imperialists were not welcomed as liberators but became the objects of almost universal hatred.

A columnist in the June 27 issue of Dawn warned: “The brutal nature of the Iranian leadership makes it easier for Israel to sell a pre-emptive attack to Washington, and for Obama to sell it to the American people. None of this can be good news for the Iranian people, who, while steeped in the lore of martyrdom, want to live normal, peaceful lives.”

But an attack on Iran by the U.S. government would also be bad news for the American people, as the Iraqi fiasco makes evident. A war with Iran could be a far greater disaster. The Western capitalist regimes in normal times like to identify themselves with democracy (although when their system is threatened they can turn to dictatorial or even totalitarian means). But a U.S. intervention in Iran would produce even less democracy than it has in Iraq, where the result has actually been clericalist rule.

In fact, any U.S. intervention would be designed to forestall democratization rather than promote it. The 1979 revolution released a deep-going dynamic of social radicalization. The imposition of a clericalist regime froze it. But the present upsurge indicates that these processes have continued under the surface.

There is no way that the United States would want a resumption of the Iranian workers, peasants, and popular revolution of 1979, and there is hardly any limit to what it would do to head it off. n

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(continued from page 1: “Iraq War intensifies as U.S.-Maliki government declares ‘victory’”)

far from what U.S. officials in Iraq have in mind. Deadly force levels are still a requirement for Iraq “stability.” Indeed, the recent wave of bombings could well provide yet another pretext, along with the original claims of “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and “collaboration with the Taliban in the 9/11 bombings,” to justify the continuation of the occupation force.

In addition, 150,000 or more U.S.-paid American mercenaries of every variety continue their deadly deeds unimpeded, the largest privatized army in U.S. history. Last month’s bipartisan Congressional “supplementary” appropriation of almost $100 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars stands in sharp contrast to all assertions that stability and victory for the U.S. and its puppets is at hand.

American imperialism faces an insoluble dilemma in Iraq. It is hated by the vast majority of the population and the world’s people for its near-genocidal superpower interventions (1.5 million have already been murdered since the first U.S. Persian Gulf War in 1991). And at the same time, enmeshed in the greatest U.S. and world economic crisis of the capitalist order since the Great Depression 80 years ago and challenged by its international capitalist competitors for access to and domination of the world’s markets and resources, it has no exit strategy from Iraq or Afghanistan.

The U.S. is driven by the nature of its exploitative system to ever expanding wars and long-term occupations—today in Pakistan, where its dependent allies are threatened by their own peoples, and perhaps tomorrow in Iran, where the insurgent mass movement threatens to break out of the framework of clerical capitalist reaction and chart a new course independent of U.S. and world imperialist domination.

Indeed, the rise of the Iranian masses and the ongoing discrediting of all of the pre-selected candidates in the recent rigged elections pose a greater threat to U.S. imperialism than either of the Ahmadinejad or Moussavi pro-capitalist camps. Nevertheless, the Obama administration, initially understanding that U.S. threats against Iran or advice to its government regarding its conduct largely falls on deaf ears, was cautious in its approach, referencing Obama’s rhetorical and deceptive Cairo speech as its new and “humane” guidepost.

The Iranian people have not forgotten the 1953 U.S.sponsored coup that removed the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh government nor the U.S.-financed 10-year war waged against Iran by Iraq, when the latter was under the tutelage of the U.S. government. Two million Iranians and Iraqis died in that war.

U.S. officials are also mindful that on June 29 six of Iraq’s largest oil field were up for auction to the world’s oil giants. Iraq sits on the world’s third largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia and Iran. Backed by the U.S. occupiers, there is little doubt that U.S. oil corporations will have the inside track against its imperialist competitors. Few have forgotten that among the first acts of the U.S. “victors” in 2003 was the tearing up of the oil contacts signed by the Saddam Hussein government with U.S. rivals in France, Russia, and elsewhere. National Assembly conference in Pittsburgh The second national conference of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations (National Assembly) comes at a propitious time, when the notion that the Obama administration would fulfill its promise of “change” is beginning to crumble against the reality of the policies implemented under his reign. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are now Obama’s wars, have been extended to Pakistan, and new threats of aggression and war have been added to the mix with Obama’s belligerent stance toward Iran and North Korea.

The recent military coup in Honduras, with that nation’s newly-elected president forced into exile, cannot be understood without factoring in the role of the U.S. military. U.S. military bases in Honduras have long been used as a launching point for U.S.-sponsored wars and interventions. The Honduran military has been historically armed, financed, and trained by the United States.

The National Assembly’s July 10-12 conference in Pittsburgh is expected to draw over 200 leading antiwar activists from cities across the country. An ambitious nine-point Action Proposal has been prepared by the Assembly’s Coordinating Body (CB) for the consideration of all attendees. One-person-one-vote will be the operative decision-making principle. Everyone opposed Marty Goodman / Socialist Action (Left) Activists unload medical supplies in New York for the Viva Palestina convoy, aiming to break through Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza. The National Assembly also calls for an end to U.S. support to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

to U.S. wars and occupations is welcome. The strategic and political goals of the National Assembly are a united and independent antiwar movement focused on mass mobilizations and demanding the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The National Assembly also calls for an end to U.S. support to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and support to the right of self-determination of all oppressed peoples and nations.

Tens of thousands of conference brochures have been distributed nationally to outline the conference’s objectives and to solicit additional Action Proposals for the consideration of the Pittsburgh conference. Three lengthy plenary sessions are scheduled to discuss and debate all proposals and amendments presented to the conference, which will also elect a new National Assembly leadership to help implement the network’s decisions.

The Coordinating Body’s Action Proposal centers on a call for nationally coordinated local and regional antiwar actions on Oct. 17, a month that includes the dates of the beginning of the U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the 40th anniversary of the massive antiwar mobilizations initiated by the Vietnam Moratorium in 1969. Leaders of the present Iraq Moratorium organization have joined with the National Assembly in calling for the Oct. 17 mobilization.

The CB’s Action Proposal also includes the organization of a National Assembly “Out Now!” contingent in the Sept. 24-25 protests at the third G-20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh. Other prominent parts of the Action Proposal that will be discussed and debated include a coordinated week of student protests, a national speaking tour of prominent antiwar figures, the establishment of a Working Committee to “ensure that the antiwar movement stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine and integrates the issue of Palestine in the broader antiwar struggle,” and the continuation of National Assembly efforts “to engage all organizations and constituencies … in nationally coordinated mass demonstrations in selected sites, including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the spring of 2010, the seventh year of the U.S. war on Iraq.”

The Pittsburgh conference includes two important panel discussions and rallies where leading activists from many antiwar and social justice organizations are slated to present their views. Central leaders of the ANSWER Coalition and United for Peace and Justice will be active participants, along with representatives of Pales-

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The brutal suppression of mass protests and the totalitarian style of the state-controlled media weakens Iran against imperialism.