On 28th February the United States and Israel launched an unprovoked military aggression against Iran, assassinated its Supreme Leader and many more of its political and military leadership. Operation Epic fury had the openly stated intention to overthrow the Iranian regime and bring about the total disintegration of the Iranian state. This ongoing aggression has already claimed the lives of nearly 3000 innocent Iranian civilians, destroying Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure, bombing schools, hospitals, public media outlets and razing entire civilian neighbourhoods to the ground.

On the eve of February 28th, while the US was disingenuously “negotiating” with Iranian officials, the Iranian government had made it very clear that a repeated US/Israeli attack (like the one launched in June 2025) would be met this time with a different defensive response. Iran clearly stated that it would defend itself by attacking all American and Israeli military bases and supportive infrastructure in the entire Middle East region. And indeed, Iran responded as clearly forewarned in advance. The Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz for those countries allied to enemy aggression was foretold, and the Iranian asymmetrical defence strategy of attacking the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries who host extensive American military infrastructure was also forewarned.

Yet none of the GCC governments had warned the USA and Israel against using their airspace and land bases to attack Iran ahead of this war of aggression. Nor did GCC rulers even bother to condemn Israeli and US actions after the military aggression was launched. The same can be said about other parties more economically afflicted by the Iranian blockade of the straights, such as Japan, the European Union and the UK government.

It’s therefore with total incredulity, that one reads the statement issued by the G7 countries on Saturday 21st of March. The foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US declared: “We express support to our partners in the region in the face of unjustifiable attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies. We condemn in the strongest terms the Iranian regime’s reckless attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, including energy infrastructure.”

Presumably amongst “our partners in the region” under “reckless unjustifiable attack” according to the G7 is the State of Israel that had launched the aggression against Iran in the first place with its declared aim of destroying the Iranian state. This comes after Netanyahu had murdered over 80,000 of Palestine’s indigenous population in Gaza alongside Israel’s continued brutal colonialist reign of terror against the population of the West Bank. It’s also clear that Israel’s brutal assault against Iran has everything to do with depriving Palestinian resistance to oppression of any potential support in the Middle East region. But for the G7 foreign ministers, the unjustifiable mass murder of Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanese civilians doesn’t merit a mention, let alone a condemnation.

I’m not going to comment on the reasons for each G7 government’s decision to take refuge in an imaginary world of lies and falsehoods that would surely have made Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels smile with glee. Nor am I going to revisit the collective West’s determination to destroy all norms of international and humanitarian law, leading to catastrophic self-harm in the case of Japan, the EU, UK, Australia and Canada.

It is important to note Western political establishments’ increasingly flagrant indifference to murderous war crimes when it comes to Muslims, Arabs and other non-White populations, as was clearly shown by most Western governments’ continued support for the State of Israel throughout the genocidal atrocities that were committed against the Palestinian people.

The justification used by pro-war Western governments for the current attempts to conquer and dismember the Iranian state is as old as the history of European colonialist conquest and slavery.

We are repeatedly told that the Islamic Republic of Iran is an irrational religious cult that’s holding the Iranian people hostage and is engaged in acts of mass repression. Ergo, even if military aggression is unjustified is under international law they say, “but what if the Iranian fanatics eventually got hold of nuclear weapons?” Accordingly we, the “democratic” West, have a right to take pre-emptive military action without proof of an imminent danger, regardless of diplomatic or international norms.

The white supremacist ideology of open-ended and pre-emptive military assaults against the rest of humanity was endorsed by German Chancellor Mertz. He had criticised Spanish President Pedro Sánchez for not allowing the USA to use NATO military bases in Spain for the war against Iran. “Categorising the events in Iran under international law will have relatively little effect,” Mertz stated. “Therefore, this is not the time to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of the goals without being able to achieve them ourselves.” I shudder to think what crimes German Imperialism will be able to commit against humanity, when Chancellor Mertz achieves his dream of rapid German rearmament.

Apart from exposing the crimes of American/Israeli aggression, one must also question the simplistic portrayal of Iranian society as victims anxiously waiting to be bombed and killed in the hope that the West will save them from the clutches of religious extremists. The modern history of Iran is plagued with many such violent imperialist interventions and imperialist excuses for financial greed, theft and conquest.

In 1951 the democratically elected liberal government of Mosaddegh in Iran, nationalised the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, sparking a severe diplomatic crisis with Britain and the United States. Subsequently, the CIA and MI6 worked jointly to remove Mosaddegh from power through a military coup, restoring the repressive tyranny of the Shah over the Iranian people. A British Foreign Office Memorandum from 1951 had warned the Americans:

“Iran would be content to see the industry running at low level without foreign management. This raises a problem: the security of the free world is dependent on large quantities of oil from the Middle East. If the attitude in Iran spreads to Saudi Arabia or Iraq, the whole structure may break down along with our ability to defend ourselves. The first effect of nationalisation would be to put control into Iranian hands. Seen from the United Kingdom point of view the present problem was not solely one of the fate of a major asset. Control of the asset is of supreme importance. The point has already been made of the importance of the asset to our balance of payments and to our rearmament program. Moreover, it is false to assume an identity of interests between the Western World and Iran over how much oil should be produced and to whom it would be sold and on what terms. For all these reasons, the United Kingdom has to keep control of the real resources involved.”

American President Eisenhower had agreed to work with the UK to maintain colonialist control of Iran’s resources. In 1953 Iran’s seven years stint of parliamentary constitutional monarchy was brought to an abrupt end by an American and British intervention in Iran’s internal sovereign affairs. President Eisenhower informed the American public that, “the Iranian people have saved the day because of their revulsion against communism.” Eisenhower’s “blow against communism” had accomplished the violent destruction of Iranian civil society. Western-bribed military and mercenary thugs proceeded with summary executions of liberal, secular nationalist, socialist and communist leaders.

Repressive violence after the 1953 coup was particularly targeted against the Tudeh Party, at the time the largest and broadest socialist labour movement in the Middle East region. It had 150,000 party members and its main daily newspaper had the largest circulation in Iran. Tudeh’s affiliated trade union federation had 275,000 members, constituting 75% of the industrial work force. The British embassy in Tehran reported in 1946 that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had no choice but to concede the eight-hour day, Friday pay, overtime scales, higher wages, and better housing since the Tudeh-led unions had de facto political control over the oil producing provinces.

By putting a brutal end to Iranian democracy, the CIA-MI6 1953 coup had helped replace a nascent civil society with a theocratic Shia leadership in the Iranian opposition. The roots of the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah go back to the 1953 counter-revolutionary coup.

Iran had been a Shia majority country since the 16th Century, ruled by monarchical dynasties that had established the Shia Muslim faith as a state religion. Unlike Sunni Islam, the Shia clergy are more tightly structured as an organised religion, more akin to the Catholic Church with its past relationship to Catholic feudal sovereigns. As is the case with Catholicism, there’s always been a divergence of political opinions and social inclinations amongst different strata of the Shia clergy which reflected class divisions within society.

The 1906 Constitutional Revolution in Iran had caused the first modern schism amongst the Shia clergy. Some of the most prominent Shia Ayatollahs broke ranks with absolutist royal rule, by attempting to transform Iran into a constitutional monarchy with a parliament elected by universal male suffrage and a liberal separation of powers. The Shia clergy who led the revolution alongside anti-colonialist secular liberals and nationalists, evoked some traditions of the Shia clergy that sided with the oppressed and poor against feudal injustices of the landed nobility. The political actions of the revolutionary Shia clergy in 1906 had initiated a close, symbiotic relationship between the Shia theocratic establishment and the Iranian bourgeoisie, a religious coalition with the Bazaar capitalists (see footnote) that has lasted to this present time.

The two main reasons for the defeat of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution have some interesting resonances in 2026. Firstly, the Iranian bourgeoisie was badly divided between the secular nationalists, who advocated strict separation between the Iranian state and the Muslim religion, and the Bazaar bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, who advocated an Iranian constitution guided by Islamic Sharia laws and a parliament vetted by a Guardian Council of the Shia clergy. The second reason for counter-revolution, was the two main colonialist powers with economic and territorial concessions in Iran - the British Empire and Czarist Russia. Both became fearful of the anti-colonialist rhetoric of the constitutional revolutionaries. Hence, the colonial powers sponsored a military coup to install the late Shah’s father, Reza Shah as military dictator. Reza Shah later crowned himself as an absolutist monarch in 1925.

In 1979 the Iranian people finally succeeded in freeing themselves of the Shah’s repressive tyranny and its American backers. Although the Shia clergy played a crucial and leading role in organising the mass protests that overthrew the Shah, theocratic religious rule was never an inevitable outcome. Yet, during the Cold War struggle between US imperialism and the socialist countries, Iran was too strategically critical. It bordered both the Soviet Union and an Afghanistan that was in the midst a civil war between a leftist government and Islamist counter-revolutionaries, backed and armed by the United States, Britain and the Arabian Gulf monarchies.

The Iranian Bazaar bourgeoisie, led politically by the Shia clergy, faced an agonising choice. They had helped to free the country from American domination, had overthrown the Shah’s tyranny and banished the so-called 1000 families of the corrupt pro-Shah nobility. But a newly-minted democracy carried serious dangers for the Iranian ruling classes of socialist labour movement resurgence. There were also armed revolutionary leftist organisations patrolling the streets in large Iranian cities, alongside a working class and urban poor that could easily be led astray by these anti-capitalist leftists. Hence, the Iranian army and the Shah’s entire state security apparatus quickly surrendered to Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership without much of a fight. For the propertied classes in Iran, the Shia clergy were “the devil you knew the best”, much preferable to some liberal secular democracy that might not be effectively controlled and scrutinised by the senior Shia clergy. This section of the clergy was closely tied with the Bazaar bourgeoisie by family connections, wealthy religious foundations, mosques and community donations, and common landed estates. Once again, the Iranian hard left, the soft left and secular nationalists were brutally crushed by a ruthless Islamist reign of terror.

However, to help consolidate the new Islamic republican order, the Ayatollahs also made some major concessions to the Iranian working class and the peasantry. The Islamic Republic distributed more than 850,000 hectares of confiscated land to some 220,000 landless peasant families. They launched an ambitious literacy campaign and extended roads, electricity, clean water and healthcare into all villages. The regime spent a quarter of the annual budget in subsidies to the poorer urban population through direct subsidies for bread, rice, sugar, fuel and cooking oil as well as cheaper domestic energy prices. They passed a labour law with some concessions towards a six-day and 48 hour working week and a statutory minimum wage. Under the Islamic Republic, the percentage of children in school rose from 60 to 90. Infant mortality per 1000 dropped from 104 to 25, life expectancy rose from mid 50s at the outset of the 1979 revolution to 71 years at present.

Therefore, we must be very wary of simplistic ritual denunciations of the Islamic Republic as a mad and irrational religious tyranny. The Iranian people do not deserve to be enslaved to Western fossil fuel interests and nor does Iran deserve to be conquered and devastated by Israeli and American occupation forces because one may not agree with its government policies. On the contrary, we in Britain should express solidarity with the Iranian people by opposing Trump and Netanyahu’s murderous campaign to re-colonise Iran and loot its natural resources. We must also stand firmly against Sir Kier Starmer’s continued and active collaboration with the American military in its violation of Iran’s sovereignty. And stand against Trump and Netanyahu’s forever wars which spread chaos and instability that hurt the overwhelming majority of British people.

Iran has so far managed to successfully resist and stand up to this brutal and unprovoked aggression. We must call for a real and lasting ceasefire and negotiations in a framework that respects Iranian sovereignty and the rule of international law, and guarantees safety to Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian civilians from mass indiscriminate murder by America and Israel.

In pre-capitalist feudal Iran, the Bazaar social class ranged from wealthy wholesalers (tujjar) to smaller shopkeepers and guild masters (asnaf); this group formed a dense ecosystem of trade and finance. Historically, major elements of the Bazaar social class allied with the Shia clergy (ulama) to challenge the absolutist tyranny of the Iranian Shahs and helped resist colonialist encroachment particularly by the British and Russian empires. But with the advent of capitalist industrialisation under Reza Shah and his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the Bazaar bourgeoisie became more stratified between the wealthier banking, finance and rentier merchant class that benefited from the modern oil boom, and the more traditional market craftsmen and smaller merchants that were neglected in favour of the large shopping malls, big landowners and few major industrialists favoured by the Shah.

However, the process of middle and ruling class stratification didn’t diminish the Bazaar’s paramount place in Iranian politics. By being situated at the major nodes of regional and global trade routes, merchant families accumulated wealth, prestige and power. In doing so, bazaars also became central locales of political organisation in supporting or opposing the many rulers of Iran. The concentration of merchants, middlemen and wholesalers in densely packed alleys under covered roofs created a social space where common grievances could quickly coalesce, even between rich merchants, poor workers and diverse ethnicities. By the middle of the 1970’s, the Bazaar bourgeoisie led and organised by the Shia clergy, played a crucial part in overthrowing the Shah of Iran, his associated landed nobility and allied large industrialists.