As we go to print the US claims it is close to agreeing a new 60-day ceasefire agreement with Iran. Iran has previously demanded that any such agreement must include the cessation of Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon.
In the run-up to the latest talks in Qatar the US launched missile strikes on Iranian naval sites, while US President Donald Trump declared on his Truth Social platform that negotiations were ‘proceeding nicely’, before adding, ‘It will only be a Great Deal for all or no Deal at all.’ This was followed by threats that without a deal it would be ‘Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before’. Two days earlier Trump had posted that a peace agreement had been ‘largely negotiated’ – a claim immediately denied by Iran, which is demanding the US accept continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, release frozen Iranian assets and agree no dismantling of Iran’s civilian nuclear programme and a ceasefire that includes Lebanon. These demands are unacceptable to US imperialism and Israel.
Iran would like to negotiate an end to US hostilities but it will not surrender. It has not been militarily defeated and has inflicted damage to US bases and assets in the region, thwarting US imperialism’s initial war aims. On 28 February when the US-Israeli attack began, it seemed Trump two basic goals were first, regime change, and secondly ending Iran’s nuclear programme and eliminating its stockpile of enriched uranium. Despite up to 10,000 people killed across Iran and Lebanon since then the US has failed to achieve either. The unilateral extension of the ‘ceasefire’ by Trump on 22 April was an expression of this strategic failure.
On 7 April, after Trump’s genocidal threat that ‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’ if Iran didn’t re-open the Strait of Hormuz, the Pakistani Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, announced that the US and Iran had agreed a two-week ceasefire. During this period Iran agreed to allow shipping to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire agreement supposedly also covered the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon. However, almost immediately, Israel denied that Lebanon was included in the agreement and on 8 April unleashed a large-scale bombing campaign on the capital Beirut, killing more than 350 people. Iran responded by announcing it was closing the Strait of Hormuz until Israel stopped its attacks on Lebanon. The US then imposed a blockade of Iranian ports.
On 16 April a separate ceasefire agreement was announced between Israel and the Lebanese government; this was provisionally accepted by the Lebanese liberation movement Hezbollah, which had been resisting the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, but the Zionist state has continually violated it. This agreement led to a temporary easing of the closure of the Strait by Iran, before it was once again closed in the face of the continuing US blockade of Iranian ports.
The US blockade is also preventing oil tankers destined for China from leaving Iranian ports. Almost half China’s supply of oil and more than a third of its liquefied natural gas normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Other states in East Asia also depend to a large extent on the supply of oil and liquefied natural gas from Iran and the Gulf States. World oil prices are consistently now over $100 a barrel.
Britain and the European imperialist bloc continue to defend their own interests in the region. In April Britain and France jointly organised conferences, involving more than 50 other countries, to develop military plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz ‘as soon as conditions permit, following a sustainable ceasefire agreement’. The statement from the British Minister of Defence expressed clear imperialist ambitions for full control of the Strait. The Royal Navy announced on 11 May that it had deployed the destroyer HMS Dragon to the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, any effective protest in Britain against the war has ebbed away. Despite the use of British bases for so-called ‘defensive strikes’ against Iran, Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been allowed to maintain the fiction that Britain is ‘not involved’ in the conflict. The early energy of protests that united support for Cuba with opposition to imperialist and Zionist attacks on Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and Venezuela has dissipated, while emboldened supporters of the deposed Iranian monarch, the Shah, make common cause with assorted Zionists and British racists to attack anti-imperialist activists on the streets.
There is an urgent need for an anti-imperialist, internationalist movement that demands ‘Hands off Iran! British imperialism out of the Middle East!’ and exposes the complicity of the Labour government in genocide and war.
Bob Shepherd
