Iran today is a religious dictatorship where Shiite Islamic clerics hold ultimate power. The Islamic regime consolidated power after 1979 through a counter-revolution against the Iranian working class movement and the left.
Behind its religious facade Iran is a capitalist country where clerics and supporters of the regime have amassed great fortunes through control of major industries.
The number of millionaires has increased to around 250,000 while over 30 per cent of the population live in poverty. A decade ago then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that just 300 people controlled 60 per cent of the country’s wealth.
Trade unions and protests are illegal. In 2022 tens of thousands took to the streets as part of the “woman, life, freedom” protests against laws that demand women wear the hijab. The regime killed more than 500 people and arrested 22,000 protesters.
There is deep opposition to the regime that has produced continuous waves of protest.
Netanyahu and Trump have justified the war on Iran through appeals for regime change.
But the bombing does nothing to help the fight for democracy in Iran.
It only strengthens the regime, allowing it to present itself as defending the nation and its people from the death raining down from the skies. And it gives them an excuse to step up the arrests and imprisonment of opposition figures, branding them agents of foreign powers.
Some who have supported protests against the regime in the past have swung back behind the regime. Football legend Ali Daei, who backed the woman, life, freedom movement declared, “I prefer to die rather than be a traitor,” siding with the regime against foreigners making war on Iran.
US sanctions and the threat of war through the 1990s only strengthened Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein against internal opposition. The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s also entrenched Iranian clerical rule. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini called it a “godsend” for the opportunity it presented to consolidate his power.
Many opponents of the Iranian government have spoken out against the bombing. Four Kurdish women’s activists issued a statement against the war from inside Evin prison arguing, “Our liberation… from the dictatorship ruling the country is possible through the struggle of the masses and by resorting to social forces—not by clinging to foreign powers or placing hopes in them”.
A group of six trade unions released another statement opposing the war, saying, “The workers and toilers of this country are justifiably outraged and fed up with the rule of the Islamic Republic”, but they “hold no illusions that the United States and Israel intend to bring us freedom, equality, or justice”.
Opposing US and Israeli bombing is vital to supporting the struggle against the regime inside Iran.
