What are the facts of the US war against the Iranian people? First, you should know a little bit about the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its relations with the US; the Iranians certainly do. Public memory in the US usually begins with the 1979 hostage crisis. Iranian memory goes back quite a bit further.

In 1921, a cavalry officer named Reza Khan led a coup backed by the United Kingdom and overthrew the Qajar Dynasty of Persia. After World War II, the US started its Cold War against the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In 1951, the people of Iran elected Mohammad Mossaddegh as their Prime Minister. He embarked on a program of nationalization of the Iranian oil fields, which had until then been controlled by and for the profit of a British firm, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation.

The United Kingdom wanted to invade Iran to secure to oil. After all, the entire global economy had switched over to running on oil by 1951 and every Western military power needed oil to run their war machines. They couldn’t let Iran decide who to sell oil to. They might pick the wrong people! US president Harry Truman convinced the British not to act. At the same time, US diplomats assured the Mossaddegh government that the US was their staunch ally. Behind the scenes, the US was preparing to move against Mossaddegh because the US ruling class was afraid that the Soviets might get their hands on Iranian oil.

In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence agents from MI6 orchestrated a coup. They had the Shah issue arrest orders to detain and arrest Mossaddegh and the cabinet of ministers. The initial coup failed and Mossaddegh rallied the masses of Iran to his side. The US sheltered fleeing army officers in CIA stations across Iran, then unleashed them to counter Mossaddegh. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The Shah needed to shore up his position, since his people despised him for what he had done to their elected champion. So, the US provided the Shah with a nuclear program. They bulked up the Iranian army with massive US weapons sales: the Shah was authorized to purchase almost any non-nuclear US weapons system, and spent over $4.3 billion on sales from the US in 1974. Most importantly, though, the CIA built the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK. They trained this brutal force and, under CIA tutelage, SAVAK tortured and murdered political dissidents until the Shah was overthrown.

In 1979, after nearly three decades of abuse, the people of Iran rose up against the Pahlavi monarchy. They were led by a coalition of Communists, socialists, and Islamic revolutionaries. The revolution in Iran took on an Islamic character because mosques were one of the few places where people could organize without being dragged away by the Shah’s secret police. Islam in Iran thus took on a revolutionary role, rather than a reactionary one such as in Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic Republic today is a Parliamentary Republic with a unique element: the role of the velayat-e-faqih, or the oversight of a political “guardian” and jurist of the faith – the “Supreme Leader” of Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (the IRGC you may have heard about recently) is a secular branch of the Republican government. Uppermost in the political philosophy of every branch of the Islamic Republic is the principle that the Iranian people should never again be pawns of the Western powers.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been the target of punishing US sanctions. The US has consistently attempted to exert what it calls “maximum pressure” – the same strategy they are applying to Cuba today and that they applied to Chile in the 1970s – to isolate the Iranian economy. This has resulted in countless deaths, and subjected everyone in Iran to collective punishment for daring to overthrow the US-installed dictatorship.

The Fight Against the zionists

The crimes committed by the zionist state in Palestine are not new, but their full extent has only now become undeniable to the US public. Since it was declared, the Islamic Republic has been opposed to the continuing genocide committed by the zionists and has worked tirelessly to assist the Palestinian resistance. This, more than anything else, has been the reason for the continued hostility of the US ruling class against Iran.

The US requires its forward base in the zionist territory for several reasons. It is the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of US power projection. It keeps the Gulf vassal stats like Saudi Arabia in line, ensures that oil can continue to flow, operates as a relief valve for domestic US class-strife, and helps the totally enmeshed US-zionist tech and computer economy remain afloat. It is, in essence, an extra “frontier” from which land can be stolen to reward corporate enclaves and individual technical specialists.

In the fight for the freedom of Palestine, the Iranian government has been the strongest ally of the Resistance. In a very real sense, it is impossible to stand up for Palestine without standing against the United States. That includes their aggression against Iran.

Are We the Villains?

The fact of the matter is, from a world-historical perspective – from the perspective of anyone who isn’t a white American – the United States is unequivocally and without question the global “bad guy” and has been since at least the end of World War II. The US government is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world. Everybody other than us already knows this! There is no government the US won’t overthrow in the quest for profit or “containment.” Whatever internal criticisms you have of the Iranian government and how it treats its people, never fear – the US government treats people worse.

Most non-aligned states feel the need to develop nuclear weapons to stop the US from invading them. There’s no need to look back in the history books, just look at how Washington treated the sovereign states of Venezuela and Cuba this year! For what? The acquisition of Venezuelan oil, to cut off the flow of oil to China, and to open up Cuba to American investors and hotel magnates.

But let’s walk through the latest timeline of the US interventions in Iran and try to see if there’s any kind of pattern:

July 2015. A comprehensive nuclear enrichment agreement is reached between Iran, the US, and the UN in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

May 8, 2019. Washington unilaterally repudiates the deal.

Jan 3, 2020. Washington kills Iranian general Qassem Soleimani with a missile strike for the crime of being anti-zionist and Iranian.

March 7, 2025. Washington says they want to restart talks.

April 12, 2025. First round of talks are held between intermedaries.

April 19, 2025. Second round of talks.

April 26, 2025. Third round of talks are held, the first where experts from both sides are present.

May 11, 2025. Fourth round of talks are held.

May 23, 2025. Fifth round of talks are held. Both US and Iran report that there has been progress.

June 13, 2025. The zionists bomb Iran while talks are ongoing.

June 22, 2025. The United States bombs Iran during the talks.

July 25, 2025. Iran and European authorities meet.

Sept. 9, 2025. Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog strike a deal.

Sept 28, 2025. The UN places new sanctions on Iran.

Jan. 13, 2026. Washington calls off all further talks.

Feb. 6, 2026. Washington restarts talks.

Feb. 26, 2026. Washington and Iran may have a deal.

Feb 28, 2026. While talks are ongoing, Washington and the zionists pummel Iran with missiles and kill the Supreme Leader and his wife without warning.

The Islamic Republic negotiated in good faith; it reached a deal not once, but repeatedly and it was purportedly very close to a deal on February 26. Their counterparts in Washington used the cover of talks not once but twice to strike Iran. So, who, then, are the villains here?

We Have the Same Enemies

The US ruling class — the capitalists — who control all government policy, who decide when and where the country goes to war, and who engage in the most hideous acts of pedophilia, rape, abuse, and even murder; those people who set up and run the US economy, who profit from your misery, who set the police on you, who pilfer your wages and retirement funds, who have been turning the screws on their economic vise since before you were born, who crashed the economy in 2008 and got away with it… those people are our enemy. If the people of Iran have grievances against their government, it is their fight to carry out when and how they choose. Right now, the might of the US imperial war machine is bearing down on the Islamic Republic of Iran… and the Islamic Republic is winning. Not on the abstract level of vague principles, but on the very real level of fact, Iran’s resistance to US imperialism is weakening our collective enemy.

We should be overjoyed that our oppressors are being bloodied by their ill-conceived attacks. The US strikes on Iran have not weakened it at all; they have made it stronger, unified the people of Iran, and placed command of the Iranian nation in the hands of the secular IRGC.

Iran is striking our enemies for us, dealing blow after blow to the imperialist economy, exhausting the imperialist war materiel with their strategy, while we sit idly by and do nothing.

It comes down to each of us to begin organizing local circles to support the world war on imperialism that is now being waged. We must gather all sympathetic people in our locality and plan ways to slow down or degrade the war machine that is firing missiles and dropping bombs in our names. As we do this, we must not lose sight of the true enemy; it is also up to each of us to combat the ruling class propaganda that asks you to be thrilled at the drama of a downed US pilot. What was that pilot doing there? Do not forget: the enemy of the world is our enemy too.

The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.