My weekly comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (17.02.2026), identifying the threat of imperialist war to the interests of the international working class. The fight for Iran is the battle for ownership of people’s labour power and natural resources by competing ruling classes and super-rich corporate executives. Imperialist war is never on our side.

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Today’s talks between the United States of America and Iran hold imminent war in the balance. To argue against war is not to support one side or the other. The drive for peace is a valuing of humanity, of people, of life.
But it is naive to think that competing interests do not exist. The USA’s century-long domination of the Middle East has won unconscionable levels of extreme wealth to the corporations of America and the West, at huge cost to Arab peoples of all denominations and cultures across the region. The people of Iran no longer enjoy their own land’s treasures, the strategic value of the territories dwarfing the extensive oil and mineral wealth plundered and stolen by the West.
Iran’s economy is all-but destroyed, more by the brutal long-term sanctions from the USA and western allies than by the rigid authoritarian State dictatorship in Tehran. The USA’s military outpost in the Middle East, the Apartheid State of Israel, has pointed nuclear-armed missiles at its neighbour for decades.
The USA funded Saddam Hussein to wage a ghastly and costly 8-year trench-war between Iraq and Iran from 1980 following the country’s revolution a year earlier. More than 500,000 were killed, Iran’s economy intentionally demolished in the process. The US, UK and more than 30 western countries supported Iraq, with France sending Saddam £5BN in weaponry and the chemical weapons that he later used in Halabja and against Iraqi Kurds. Indeed, Kurds of all factions continue to be attacked by all sides today, the length of their suffering almost unimaginable. War often spills-over.
The racists who hate Muslims and Asian people won’t care a jot about yet another conflagration in the Middle East. Indeed, they may well cheer-on yet another war as if seeking the death or total subjugation of the entire world’s Muslim population of two-billion – one quarter of all humanity. That’s not going to happen. People like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson are arguing to slam the door shut in the face of Iranian refugees through their toxic anti-migrant campaigns.
Failed diplomacy over Iran will directly affect western economies and the livelihoods of western people whatever their prejudices. We are no longer living in the 1980’s, today’s military tensions far higher than for two generations past. Not least, the transfer of State funding away from health and welfare at home towards arms manufacturing. Only this week Starmer is planning an additional £14bn a year for military spending, leaving our schools and hospitals in tatters.
There is and always has been a global component, Iran strategically placed and becoming more-and-more a region set for a proxy war between imperialist rivalries. Just as North America and Europe funded Iraq, so Russia and China armed Iran back in the ‘80’s and continue to do so. And those imperialist rivalries continue today in more volatile and far less manageable circumstances.
At the pressurised and unpredictable centre lies the issue of nuclear weapons. Israel has them. The two US aircraft carriers, their accompanying bombers, jets and naval fleets, are carrying nuclear weapons, threatening Trump’s “major destruction far worse than previous attacks”. There is no evidence anywhere (Israel and the US would publish it were there) that Iran has nuclear weapons or any capability.
Last Friday Trump said regime change in Iran would be the best thing that could happen. Even if standing as only the 58th largest economy in the world, beleaguered by sanctions and inflation but holding 10% oil and 15% gas of world reserves, and with a population of 95 million, any assault would trigger an international crisis. Mass bombing of Iran will not ensure regime change and will only push ordinary people towards the regime again.
The outcome of western invasions of countries including Iraq and Libya have killed millions and destroyed any stability. The western-supported war in Sudan has forced tens of millions into famine and starvation. The occupation of Palestine and genocide in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of civilians, women and children, and destroyed an entire region. We can see what an invasion of Iran will do.
There are those liberals and on the Left who therefore side with the Iranian State, Russia and China against the obvious aggression and threats of the the USA and NATO. This is a misplaced and blindly comfortable but false position to take. All sides have regional imperialist ambitions none of which are in the interests of the working class, either of their own countries or internationally. It is we, the ordinary citizens, who lose and die in those wars, the rival ruling classes stamping our bones into the ground on which to build their next dynasty. It is reasonable and responsible to not take the side of any ruling class.
In a world of capitalist competition, the cry for “Welfare not Warfare” has to be in the interest and therefore the demand of the overwhelming majority of humanity. The Iranian people have a long and proud history of standing up to oppression and dictatorship. It must be for the Iranian people to determine and create their future, however difficult. And that will take another revolution, not a plundering Trump-inspired death-fest. Don’t Bomb Iran!