Given the continued antiSaddam rhetoric from US and British leaders it is easy to see the current threats against Iran as a new departure. Yet, in many ways, it was the war against Irag that obscured a central aspect of US policy since 1979hostility to the Iranian revolution. GEOFF RYAN reports. CONTINUED resistance to Molly US and British attempts to impose their rule on Iraq have brought Tehran once more into the sights of imperialism.
The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential elections in Iran was a blow tor the western DOWCIS. For the WOOLELLI media Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, their favoured candidate, was a moderate reformer - forgetting that less than 10 years previously the US had (such delicious irony) denounced
for trying to develop nim chemical weapons!
Ahmadinejad, Tehran, was given no chance by those who assumed most Iranians would embrace Rafsanjani. Their own prejudices meant they were totally out of step with developments in Iran.
For many Iranians former president Rafsanjani was not seen as the reformer portrayed by the west but was identified with corruption and brutality and the dominance of the clerical and bazaar merchant elite.
While vast numbers lived in appalling DOVCILV Rafsanjani was able to lavish huge sums of money on his election campaign. He was tied to foreign investors and Privalisalon.
Ahmadinejad, by contrast, was seen as 'clean'. He came from a working class background and had fought as a soldier in the war against Iraq. His programme demanded 'put the oil money on the table of the poor, while his modest personal lifestyle and donation of much of his salary to the poor, won him support amongst the Iranian dispossessed.
Of course a defeat for imperialism is not necessarily a victory for the working class. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales. He remains entirely committed to the dominant role of clerics in Iranian society and is well known for his viciously anti-Semitic outbursts and holocaust denial.
Of Ahmadinejad
course mav well undertake concrete measures that improve the daily life of working class
But any attempts to deal with the housing, social and unemployment crises will meet with resistance from the politically and socially conservative centres of power with which the presidency has to compete for dominance in Iranian politics. His attempt to clean up the notoriously corrupt Oil Ministry has already been blocked by Rafsanjani's supporters in the mosques and bazaars.
In a sense Ahmadinejad remains useful for the west and vice versa. His rhetoric allows Bush and Blair to portrav him as a crazed demawho needs to be replaced, thereby justifying western military policy. return, denunciations from Downing Street and the
Socialists are opposed to nuclear weapons and nuclear power. We are for immediate unilateral disarmament, for a complete halt to building any further nuclear power stations and for the development of renewable energy sources Theretore we cannot support Tehran's desire to develop a nuclear industry, whether for power or weapons.
However, we oppose the