Don't Attack Iran! Release the Sailors!
The seizure of the British sailors by the Iranian navy is a deliberate piece of coat-trailing by the Iranian regime. They are flexing their muscles.

That they feel safe in doing that is one measure of the weakening of the USA as a results of its setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those wars' byproduct of a comparative strengthening of Iran, which now has dominant influence in western Afghanistan and southern Iraq.

We have no idea whether or not the British ship was in Iranian waters. If it was, it shouldn't have been. No matter how far inside Iranian waters they were, the ship could hardly have posed a threat to Iran.

Teheran had, and has, a choice about making an "incident" out of it.

Not very long ago the prospect of a US attack on Iran seemed to loom very large. That the Iranians have chosen to make an "international incident" out of this episode, indicates the comparative strength they now feel against America and Britain, weakened by events in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is, however, possible that the clerical fascists who rule Iran have miscalculated. The Bush regime is capable of responding with air raids, if not, for now, with an invasion. We should strongly oppose such attacks.

The USA is bogged down in Irag and Afghanistan. When it got bogged down in Vietnam, in 1970, America struck out wildly at neighbouring Cambodia, which was a base for their Vietnamese opponents.

They bombed Cambodia "into the stone age".

Bush and his gang may calculate that a "strong" response to Iran now would help them overcome Bush's opponents in the US Congress, who have just voted to set a one-year deadline for US withdrawal from Iraq.

The religion-crazed Christian fundamentalist US President and his entourage, and the religion-crazed Islamic clerical fascists who run Iran, are equally capable of wild and irresponsible deeds.

No socialist should have any sympathy with the Iranian regime, which has sparked this crisis, just because their enemy is George Bush and the American state.

This is a brutal and reactionary regime, which has recently rounded up and jailed hundreds of teachers — the exact number is not known — for daring to go on strike.

We oppose attacks on Iran because of our solidarity with the peoples of Iran, not because of any solidarity with the Iranian regime.

No to an attack on Iran! No to the clerical-fascist regime!


That is from here.