America’s malign crusade against Iran

The United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran remain locked in a four-decade-long low-intensity conflict as the world prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11 later this year. Alarmingly, this belligerent condition continues to lurch into open confrontation as US policy aggressively intensifies against Iran under America’s new leadership. In fact, President Joseph Biden’s White House foreign policy team—led by an interventionist-militarist secretary of state, Antony Blinken—is already activating a more hostile agenda toward Iran.

Yet, as Iranians commemorated the 42nd anniversary of their country’s 1979 bourgeois-democratic revolution (that later transmuted into an Islamic Revolution) on Feb. 11, Iran is also preparing to hold a scheduled presidential election by June this year. And so, the probable emergence of a more “anti-US imperialist” government in Tehran now compels Washington to launch an imminent malign crusade against Iran.

The rise of two new presidents in both rival capitals within a half-year’s space—and mutually bellicose toward the other’s regime—will sharply raise West Asia’s tension level to “clear and immediate danger.” With the region’s strategic environment having significantly changed within the last decade, its power balance has also shifted in view of some of the Arab states’ altering attitudes toward their historic common enemy—the Zionist state of Israel. Moreover, countries in the Arab world led by Saudi Arabia are incessantly escalating a shadow war with Tehran’s nonstate allies from Afghanistan to the Maghreb.

Relatedly, during Donald Trump’s regime, US foreign policy objectives became reactive and shortsighted regarding the region. In his relations with America’s standing allies in West Asia, Trump basically conducted a transactional mode of affairs which were typically narrow in scope and limited in focus. Nonetheless, their impacts created a globally disruptive atmosphere consistent with US imperialism’s destructive aims. Such reactionary policy approaches were repeatedly witnessed with Trump’s much opposed and widely criticized assertions and actions concerning Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—and most of all, Iran.

Consequently, a destabilizing regional initiative fully facilitated by Trump late last year and early this year was the Abraham Accords process. This set of separate agreements, normalizing Israel’s bilateral diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, enticed these Arab states to totally ignore the principal question of Palestine as member states of the Arab League. It is apparent that the pact was a calculated US-Israel design to partly undermine and break more than half-a-century of Arab League unity upholding solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian nation’s right to self-determination, and to realign West Asia’s existing balance. Clearly, by enlisting more Arab allies into the Washington-Tel Aviv axis, the latter jointly hopes to create the basis for a newly formidable regional alliance to fight Iran—now supported by Russia and China—in the years ahead.

The present White House leadership will definitely maintain and expand the Abraham Accords, as this will surely help in Washington’s offensive to contest Tehran’s own plans for the area.

Equally, another Trump-era proposal that will likely be revamped by the Biden-Blinken team for an anti-Iran campaign is the Middle East Strategic Alliance (Mesa). The Mesa will be shaped into a North Atlantic Treaty Organization-type political-military project to ultimately fortify US hegemony in West Asia. As such, regional states which see Iran as a threat—the Abraham Accords’ cosigners, plus Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel—will all be pressed to join the Mesa, with the United States and Israel as the spearheads in the long run.

In the broader context, any future imperialist-Israeli-Arab assault to thwart the Tehran-Moscow-Beijing triumvirate in West Asia will only wreak greater havoc on the global realm. The terrible results of the post-9/11 US invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq are not only historically clear, but also devastatingly costly. For this reason alone, the ominous American crusade of aggression on Iran must be promptly resisted and prevented at all costs.

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Rasti Delizo is an international affairs analyst and an activist in the socialist movement.