A San Francisco protester makes the connection on March 28: U.S. hands off Cuba. Photo: Bill Hackwell The organizers built the stage. The cr
The anti-war, pro-Palestine politics visible across the country on March 28 were not organized from the podium. They came from below — and they ran directly against the institutional commitments of the people who built the stage.
That is the main contradiction in the movement right now. The infrastructure is tied to the Democratic Party, while the politics developing in the streets are moving beyond it.
Struggle-La Lucha and the Socialist Unity Party send our deepest condolences to the Iranian government, the Iranian people, and their famili
Struggle - La Lucha newspaper and the Socialist Unity Party mourn with the Iranian people and stand in solidarity with Iran.
Our immediate duty as organizations functioning in the United States is to demand that U.S. imperialism respect the sovereign rights of Iran and cease any interference, overt or covert, in the affairs of Iran and its constitutional process.
Again, we amplify our call for an end to the sanctions in the United States.
While the mouthpieces of U.S. imperialist interests loudly champion women’s rights, there is no evidence that the U.S. government has alleviated gender oppression anywhere abroad or at home. Quite the opposite.
It is crucial to support Iran’s women and oppressed genders by fighting to end U.S. sanctions, which oppress all the women and oppressed genders in Iran. It is the foremost way to back the fight for self-determination and defend against the opportunistic advances of those who wish to return them to the decades of colonial exploitation.
Any US military action against Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities would be a massive war crime.
By Juan Cole
Eric Schmitt, Maggie Haberman, David E. Sanger, Helene Cooper and Lara Jakes at the New York Times get the scoop. Their sources in the White House tell them that last Thursday, in a meeting with his senior advisers, Trump abruptly asked them if there were options for a US strike on Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities.
They say that vice president Mike Pence, secretary of state Mike Pompeo and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Gen. Mark Milley all sought to dissuade Trump from this course of action, on the grounds it could kick off a major war in the last weeks of his presidency. They are alleged to have come away from the meeting convinced that they had succeeded.
Some commentary on this story:
First, it should be noted that Iran is not engaged in illegal activity. Its right to enrich uranium for civilian electricity production was acknowledged by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or nuclear deal signed with all the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. Iran has only departed from that agreement in very minor ways, and mainly as a way of putting pressure on Europe to defy the US severe economic sanctions, which contravene the treaty. It is Trump’s Washington that has behaved illegally, not Iran.
So there is no casus belli and any US military action against Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities would be a massive war crime.
Further, the authors do not say anything about the likely consequences for Iranian civilians of such a strike.
It is possible that such a US strike on active nuclear enrichment facilities could kill as many Iranians as did the use of an atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, which killed between 90,000 and 145,000 people over four months.
Venezuela has called Alex Saab’s extradition to the U.S. a kidnapping in violation of international and diplomatic law and insists that his arrest in Cape Verde was made “illegally,” without even an arrest warrant, “violating the laws of the country and the Vienna Convention.”
