The massive bombing of Iran unleashed by the U.S. and Israeli governments on February 28, 2026, has thrust the Middle East into a regional war. Tehran is retaliating with missiles and drones directed against U.S. and Israeli targets, as well as oil refineries and other installations in neighboring countries that directly or indirectly support Washington’s unprovoked assault.

Drunk with the allure of imposing their will by military power after their recent success in Venezuela, the super wealthy families that rule the United States — alongside their Israeli allies — have sparked a bloody and expanding conflagration. While claiming to make the world “better off,” their “peace president” and his minions have opened up a new, more dangerous chapter.

This is an imperialist war, shaking the Mideast and threatening world peace. It has set back prospects for the Iranian people to eventually rid themselves of the oppressive regime in Tehran.

EDITORIAL

It is a war for oil.

Ranked third after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, Iran sits atop one of the largest oil reserves in the world. Taking control of these enormous assets would put the U.S. military in a better position to face a future war with China — Washington’s top competitor.

All this is done at the expense of working- and middle-class people in Iran and across the region.

So far, the White House has been mum about oil and China — its undeclared motivations for assaulting Iran. But the shifting rationales for the bombing offered by U.S. president Donald Trump and his top cabinet officials indicate they are all lying through their teeth about their true goals, or, at best, they don’t know if, how, or when they may meet their objectives.

The war’s shape-shifting rationale

At his first public event since the attack began, Trump on Monday, March 2, never mentioned a key part of his initial justification for the war: deposing Iran’s clerical regime.

Instead, he alleged Iran would “soon” have intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit targets inside the United States — without offering any evidence such capabilities exist.

In a midnight announcement on social media during the first weekend of the war, Trump had outlined the attack on Iran as a push to devastate Tehran’s rulers so that the Iranian people could take over. By Monday, that became “not a so-called regime change war,” in the words of U.S. war secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon the Iranian government was building sophisticated missiles and other conventional arms to shield its plans for a nuclear weapon. “Iran had a conventional gun to our head as they tried to lie their way to a nuclear bomb,” he claimed. (Never mind that his boss insisted in June 2025 the Pentagon had already “obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear sites.)

Incredibly, Hegseth also told the media, “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it,” claiming that Iran “waged a savage, one-sided war” for “47 long years” even if the country’s leadership didn’t “declare it openly.”

In reality, in the middle of ongoing talks with Iranian leaders in February, the White House decided to abruptly unleash the U.S. navy and warplanes against Iran in a joint operation with Israel, even though neither faced an imminent threat from Tehran.

U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio offered a third rationale for going to war. Washington, he said, knew Israel was going to strike Iran, which would lead to counterattacks against U.S. forces and potential casualties, and decided to strike first to minimize the risk.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories

This argument is already being used by the ultraright in the United States to peddle antisemitic conspiracy theories.

White supremacist Nick Fuentes, for example, has been outspoken about this. “Americans will die in terrorist attacks and in missile strikes so that Israel can expand its borders in every direction,” Fuentes declared. “Trump, Vance, and Rubio sold us out.”

Such sentiments, on the margins of right-wing politics now, can turn into a wave of Jew hatred if the war doesn’t go well for the White House.

As a March 3 newsletter by Jewish Currents put it, Rubio’s statement is “setting up American Jews to take the blame if the war goes badly, as it appears destined to do. Though left-wing and progressive Jews have tried to distinguish between Jews and Israel in the American imagination, mainstream Jewish institutions have done their best to confuse the issue, conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.” Most “mainstream” Jewish groups, like the Anti-Defamation League, rushed to back Trump’s war on Iran.

This war, and its shape-shifting rationale, are actually steered by one man — Donald Trump. A totally unpredictable president, who trusts only himself as his best advisor, and who does not think or care about consequences (except those that may affect him personally).

A March 5 Trump interview with Axios offered another illustration of this reality. Despite Hegseth’s denials — surely at the behest of his boss — Trump returned to his “regime change” justification. Given the February 28 assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei in an Israeli strike, Trump told Axios he must be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next leader — just as he was in Venezuela.

A day later, Trump took this even further, “leaving his aides, and congressional allies, struggling to keep up and at times contradicting the president,” as the New York Times put it. In a March 6 social media post, Trump declared he would settle for nothing short of “unconditional surrender” by Iran. After Tehran’s submission would come “the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s),” he mused.

This must make most of the wealthy families that rule the United States nervous. Trump was not their top preference for leading their empire. But they couldn’t find a better alternative, and they are stuck with him. He doesn’t care about their opinions, and they don’t hold him in high esteem. But most of them, or the big-business media they control, won’t openly criticize his launching or handling of the war unless it goes badly.

As Trump’s 2^nd Term: One-Man Rule & the Danger of Incipient Fascism, published by World-Outlook a year ago, put it, Trump’s “expansionist saber-rattling, attempts at resource grabbing reminiscent of the colonial era, and aggressive protectionism could lead to new wars and possibly another world conflagration. This is more likely in an increasingly unstable world in which ultra-rightist forces have already ascended to power, or are knocking on its doors, in a rising number of ‘first-world,’ or more accurately imperialist, countries.”

Competition for the world’s oil supplies

Khamenei’s killing, the targeting of other top Iranian government officials, and the broadening U.S. bombing raids, with civilian facilities hit alongside military installations, belie the Trump administration’s proclamations about “helping” the Iranian people.

The “regime change” Trump is toying with has nothing to do with freeing the people of Iran from the stranglehold of a repressive regime. Just as in Venezuela, “Operation Epic Fury” is about the oil.

And, just as in Venezuela, U.S. imperialism seeks to gain an advantage vis-à-vis China. Before the U.S. attacks, Beijing was buying more than 80% of the oil shipped from Iran, as well as having been the buyer of more than half of Venezuela’s oil exports. Together, this oil accounts for about 17% of Chinese petroleum imports, a significant share of its total needs.

The war in the Middle East has already expanded to involve most of the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, except Yemen, as well as Lebanon and Cyprus. On March 4, NATO forces intercepted a missile reportedly originating from Iran and headed toward Turkey. Among the NATO powers, France, Greece, and the United Kingdom have moved military assets closer to the war zone.

But the underlying competition between the United States and China threatens a much broader and more devastating military conflict down the road.

Behind Washington’s 47-year hatred of Iran

To the dismay of U.S. imperialism, Iran’s oil reserves have been out of its reach since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was deposed by a revolutionary upsurge of Iranian workers and peasants, as well as students and other youth, in 1979. From that moment, under then U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Iran has been a thorn in Washington’s side.

During the first years of the Iranian revolution, working people made significant gains. The shoras — democratically elected workers’ councils — pressed for workers’ control of production in the factories; peasants seized landed estates and demanded agrarian reform; women fought for and secured new political and economic rights.

“One thing was lacking in Iran, however, that prevented working people from completing their victory by taking power into their own hands. There was no revolutionary party, composed in its majority of workers and peasants, experienced in the struggles of the oppressed and exploited, and enjoying the respect of the masses,” as the accompanying article Revolution and Counter-revolution in Iran: The Origins of the Clerical Regime noted.

“This allowed the bourgeois forces organized around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to [eventually] establish a stable capitalist regime.”

In the fall of 1980, the Iraqi army invaded Iranian territory with the backing of Washington and its allies, who had been thwarted by the outcome of the Iranian revolution a year and a half earlier. The Khomeini regime’s conduct during that war, which ground on for nearly eight years, played a major role in the eventual overthrow of the Iranian revolution.

“By 1988, when the war with Iraq ended,” the article referenced above explained, “the clerics running Tehran had consolidated a theocratic regime on the corpse of the 1979 revolution. They have ruled dictatorially ever since.”

For decades, the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who succeeded Khomeini after his death in 1989 — has been marked by authoritarianism and repression. It set back the Iranian workers movement, already debilitated during the decade of the Iran-Iraq war, and kept it in check by repeatedly jailing and killing thousands of opponents.

Another feature of the clerics’ rule has been their vociferous antisemitism, fanning the flames of Jew-hatred in the Middle East with both rhetoric and material aid to bourgeois nationalist forces — such as Hamas or Hezbollah — that claimed to represent or support the Palestinian people’s struggle for self-determination but instead set it back. This Jew hatred is one of the excuses the U.S. and Israeli governments have consistently used as justification for their actions against Iran.

Most recently the Khamenei regime showed its true colors during protests that began on December 28, 2025. Initially sparked by staggering inflation, particularly in food and fuel — caused to a large degree by U.S.-initiated draconian sanctions, as well as government corruption — protesters increasingly turned their ire toward the ayatollah. In return, Tehran unleashed a fierce crackdown, firing metal pellets at close range into the crowds and threatening anyone involved in the protests with the death penalty.

By Iranian government estimates, the repression left 3,000 people dead in a matter of days; others estimate the toll to be much higher.

On January 26, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), based in Iran, reported that 5,777 protesters had been killed, as well as 86 children, and 11,009 had been severely injured. Another 17,091 deaths are still under investigation, and 41,880 people have been arrested, according to HRANA.

Washington’s hypocrisy

In announcing the undertaking of “major combat operations in Iran,” Trump addressed the Iranian people. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” he claimed. “Now you have a president who is giving you what you want.”

“So, let’s see how you respond,” Trump continued, in his arrogant and paternalistic manner. “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

However, the assassination of the top ruling cleric and a number of other government officials, and the deaths of hundreds, is not the gift for the Iranian people wrapped in a U.S. flag that Trump proclaimed.

Even though many Iranians understandably celebrated Khamenei’s killing, the assassination was a trampling of Iran’s sovereignty and a flagrant violation of international law.

In truth, the war has set back the Iranian peoples’ efforts to rid themselves of the oppressive clerical regime.

The recent wave of anti-government protests, including demonstrations by thousands of students at several universities across the country in late February — the first such actions since Tehran’s deadly crackdown in January — has subsided. This is to be expected in the middle of unceasing U.S. and Israeli bombings.

In addition, the Iranian government has been able to mobilize tens of thousands of supporters in many cities across the country patriotically shouting “Death to America.”

On March 3, thousands in the southern city of Minab, Iran, participated in the funeral of 165 girls and staff killed in a bombing raid during the joint U.S.-Israeli offensive that obliterated a primary school in Hormozgan province. Mourners condemned the imperialist war.

In fact, popular indignation at the war’s toll is rising across the country, where more than 1,300 people have been killed so far as a result of the U.S. bombing, most of them civilians, according to Al-Jazeera.

Lasting change in the interests of the working people of Iran can only come about as a result of their own efforts, through mass action like the mobilizations that toppled the Iranian monarchy in 1979.

Trump and his ilk will never install a government anywhere that represents the interests of the vast majority — working people. Simultaneously with his call on the Iranian people “to seize [their] destiny,” Trump told the New York Times he had “three very good choices” to lead the country for them. Once again, the White House is preparing to call the shots.

There is ample historic precedent. Washington backed the shah’s bloody monarchy that ruled Iran with an iron fist since 1925, for more than half a century, until the people of Iran toppled it in 1979. The royal tyranny’s rein included a CIA-backed military coup in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh for the “crime” of nationalizing Iran’s oil.

Contradictory claims: widening, but ‘not endless’ war?

Washington’s war on Iran is unpopular in the United States. Nearly 60% disapprove of the attacks, according to a CNN poll conducted immediately after the strikes. Two other polls, by Reuters/Ipsos and The Washington Post, had similar results.

These attitudes may become more widespread if U.S. casualties — so far six have been acknowledged by the Pentagon — rise.

During his March 2 press briefing, Hegseth tried to quell this discontent. He promised “this is not Iraq…. this is not endless.”

However, both Trump and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine attempted to prepare the U.S. population for a longer engagement.

Caine announced the deployment of additional U.S. troops and materiel to the region. He gave no predictions about the possible length of U.S. military operations.

Trump said his government initially “projected four to five weeks” as the likely duration of the war but noted the military has “the capability to go far longer than that.”

Trump stated he did not rule out the deployment of ground troops in Iran. Washington has never won a war through aerial bombing alone, and it is not likely to do so now. The White House is also arming Kurds in Iraq and pushing them, along with Kurds in Iran, to take over sections of western Iran to help with the Pentagon’s dirty work.

Despite growing concern in the U.S. population, most Republican politicians are falling into step behind Trump. The GOP closed ranks the first week of March and killed resolutions in Congress that would limit the president’s war powers.

On the Democratic side of the aisle, the main complaint is that they didn’t get an invitation to the party. They protest that the Trump administration did not seek congressional approval to declare war under the War Powers Act. But few Democratic politicians are outspoken opponents of the war itself.

In fact, the Democratic Party showed under the Biden administration that it is as gung-ho as the GOP in its desire to topple the Iranian regime and confront China. The Democratic elite is just not convinced Trump’s method is the way to do it.

Working people, youth, and other opponents of Washington’s imperialist wars cannot rely on representatives from either of the capitalist parties — Democrat or Republican — to lead the fight to bring U.S. troops home and to end the slaughter in the Middle East.

Now is the time to broaden protests that sprang up after the first bombing raids. United front actions — educating and drawing in broad layers of the population — are needed. These can center on the growing demands to immediately end the bombing of Iran.

We can point to the government of Spain setting an example worthy of emulation. It has adamantly refused to allow U.S. warplanes to use the country — including two joint Spanish-U.S. military bases — as a launchpad for strikes on Iran, despite U.S. threats to cut off all trade with Madrid.

The U.S. military should immediately get out of the Middle East!

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