Another Unprovoked War - Class Autonomy

Cover: Missile strike on Tehran, March 1. Photo by Vahid Salemi

Peter Gelderloos || In another unprovoked war, the US and Israel attacked Iran starting in the early hours of February 28. Over two days, they have launched over thousands of missiles and bombs from jets, drones, land and naval forces, targeting civilian, military, and governmental targets in a thousand different sites across Iran, including hospitals and schools, as well as attacking several organizations in Iraq that are allied with the Iranian government.

In a precision strike at the beginning of the offensive, they killed Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and several of his family members, a precision strike that has dominated most media attention. Much less attention has been given to the Israeli missile attack on a girls’ school in Minab, killing around 180 young children.

Early on March 2, Hezbollah made a limited attack on an Israeli military base, and Israel responded with a massive bombardment of military and residential sites in Beirut and across Lebanon. It is important to note that Israel continues to occupy parts of southern Lebanon for the past 15 months, in violation of international law and its own ceasefire guarantees, and it carries out approximately one attack on Lebanon every day, also despite the ceasefire. Israeli strikes have impoverished southern Lebanon, destroying thousands of homes, infrastructure, orchards, and other farmland. They have killed over 4,000 people, including 316 children, 790 women, and over 200 medics, and they have wounded over 16,000 people. During the ceasefire, Israel has killed 331 people, including at least 147 civilians, according to the UN. They have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

So far, the Iranian state has demonstrated a stable continuity of command in its counterattacks, comprising of missile and drone strikes on Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. All of these countries have been involved in the attacks on Iran, and all except Israel host US military bases (though of course the Israeli military is primarily funded and protected by the US and Germany). Unlike the US and Israel, Iran has focused its response on military facilities, which is considered legitimate under international law, since they were attacked without provocation and in the midst of peace talks.

The logic for the war is based essentially on a white supremacist double standard: the US and by extension NATO have decided that Israel may develop nuclear weapons, whereas Iran may not, and US and European governments, including Israel, are allowed to attack, invade, and carry out regime change in any non-white or historically colonized country they want.

The war is a continuation of Israel’s June 2025 attack on Iran, an offensive that did not meet Israel’s objectives of destroying Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium. The current offensive, now with massive support and leadership from the United States, has the objectives of regime change, destroying Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, and destroying Iran’s missile capabilities.

Some March 2 updates: towards the end of the second day of the war and throughout the third day, in response to continued barrages from Israel and the US, Iran shifted more attacks to energy infrastructure around the region, hitting oil refineries in Saudi Arabia and Israel, gas works in Qatar, the ports of Bahrain and Oman, and several oil tankers, effectively closing off the Strait of Hormuz, a key corridor for the global oil and gas markets. As a result, Qatar shut down its liquid natural gas production, Saudi Arabia shut down its largest oil refinery, global oil prices spiked 8% and natural gas prices in Europe went up an astounding 50% on Monday morning. The UAE announced it would close its stock exchanges for at least 2 days to prevent a panic and economic crash (keep in mind that March 2 is the first day since the beginning of the US and Israeli attacks that stock markets would open).

It is extremely rare to shut down stock markets to prevent panics, and tends to lower stock values and investor confidence even when they reopen. Major stock exchanges in Europe fell between 1-3%, though energy companies were up. In the US, the Nasdaq, S&P500, and Dow Jones Industrials each opened down about 1%, though energy stocks like Chevron, security stocks like Palantir and CrowdStrike, and military contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, all gained in value. (Military companies make money off of big wars, and oil companies make more money when oil prices go up even though such price increases cause an overall economic slowdown.)

Supporting the US and Israel might not be so good for tourism in the UAE…

Three US jets got shot down, though so far only 4 US soldiers have died. Also on March 2, Israel has accelerated its war against Lebanon, with more missile strikes, ground troops, and the forced displacement of numerous towns and villages, kicking people out of their homes on threat of death. Israel continues to strike hospitals and other civilian sites in Iran. And, British forces shot down several drones headed for a military base they hold on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The night of March 1, the leftwing (well, Labour Party, similar to Democrats) government of the UK agreed to allow the US to use its Indian Ocean base on the colony of Diego Garcia, helping the US to kill more Iranians.

As of the late afternoon, Tehran/Riyadh time, US and Israeli forces have killed 555 people in Iran, 2 in Iraq, and 13 in Lebanon. These are confirmed deaths only, and thousands more have been injured. Many of those will die of their injuries or be disabled for life, and though limited information is available it seems that more than half of all casualties are civilians. Iranian attacks have killed 10 in Israel, 1 in Kuwait, 1 in Bahrain, 16 in Qatar, 3 in the UAE, and 1 in Oman, all of which are countries participating in the unprovoked attack on Iran.

Tel Aviv. One of the few Iranian attacks to get through to Israel.

I think it’s important to remember two things:

The government of Iran is brutal and oppressive. The people of Iran are not free, and recently the government there murdered thousands of protesters and jailed and tortured many more.
The US and Israel don’t give a shit for the people of Iran or Lebanon, they have done their best to impoverish those countries, they are deliberately murdering and injuring so many civilians, and those people probably won’t be better off even if they don’t accomplish regime change. This is an unprovoked attack for purely political reasons.

I’ll be writing more about this broader war soon, once it becomes clear whether the continuity of Iran’s current government will hold, whether the war is likely to spread, end quickly (until the next offensive), or turn into a much longer war.

January, Tehran. People take the streets in an anti-government protest. Rest in power.

In the meantime, I want to draw out some relevant threads in a few other news stories, and share my recent article on the far Right in the US: through government policy, police terror, paramilitary white supremacist groups, and huge platforms in traditional media and social media, the far Right is interconnected and in power. Their strategy is to spread conspiratorial, victimistic ideas that whites, cis men, the wealthy, citizens, Christians, Jews, and cishetero people are under attack, when in reality they have been accelerating campaigns of terror, murder, imprisonment, criminalization, deportation, harassment, censorship, immiseration, and other punishments against Muslims, latines, trans people, immigrants, Black people, pregnant people, and anyone who stands up to resist.

“The far-right and Trump administration collaborating to target educators and marginalized communities.” Check it out, spread it!

Earthshot, a major charity supported by the British monarchy, has recently been connected to billionaire rapist and investor Jeffrey Epstein. Prince William, who heads Earthshot, has not shown up in the Epstein files (unlike his uncle), but Ahmed bin Sulayem has, with one thank you email to Epstein saying he “enjoyed the torture video.” Bin Sulayem is another billionaire and the CEO of DP World, a major “port logistics” company. He’s also one of the top donors to Earthshot. This is a clear slice of the nonprofit/charity world. They are highly ineffective at protecting the environment since they prioritize initiatives that create business opportunities, and they provide an opportunity for the wealthy and powerful to rub elbows and also greenwash the basis of their wealth and power. Let’s take DP World. Port logistics means they are involved in global shipping. Enough global shipping to generate billions of dollars for their leaders and executives. Global shipping itself generates 3% of total greenhouse gas emissions – that’s more than the total emissions of Canada and the UK combined. Furthermore, shipping is integral to the globalization of industry, with the key products being shipped including monocrop food products like grains, soy, and bananas, fossil fuels like oil and coal, cars, and low-longevity electronic products like phones and laptops that require a huge amount of destructive mining.

Recent studies in the US and EU found that bird populations are falling at an accelerating rate. And the decline in bird populations is linked to the decline in insect populations (which is harder to document and quantify, since bugs are smaller, spend lots of time underground or in the water, and attract fewer enthusiasts who can help with census-taking). One of the main causes are the fertilizers, pesticides, deforestation, soil depletion, and monocrop deserts that are necessary for industrial agriculture. “What we found is that any metric of agricultural intensity was always the best predictor of acceleration of the decline” of bird populations, according to one author of the US study.

Guess what? We need to abolish industrial agriculture before it kills us. Guess what else? We can! Urban gardening is possible in many cities around the world, and is often spread or protected in lower class rebellions that may start because of police violence, racism, or economic crises but then spread to take on other issues, as insurrections often do. The transformation of farming is also possible around the world, with small scale projects that restore traditional practices or innovate new ones. Networking, such projects are already feeding significant numbers of people. With a recent project in Brazil, some friends and I have been trying to promote and spread such projects. Check out a couple of the things that came out of that project:

Truthout: The Real Models of Sustainability in Brazil

The Final Straw: Radical Ecological Struggle

We’re also hoping to put out a video in the next few months.

A January paper from the conservative Heritage Foundation, commenting on falling birthrates in the US, stated, “when a nation fails to preserve the family, the state soon fails to preserve itself.” This is part of the rationale connected to the current rightwing wars on trans people, queer people, and pregnant people, as seen in their reversal of abortion rights and growing criminalization of trans people. It’s also connected to the centrality of the nuclear family in alienating people from richer social relationships (most cultures trace family in far more complex ways than the nuclear family allows); to the patriarchy, offering men, even poor men and racialized men, access to some measure of power, and offers incentives to young people and to women to be complicit in oppression, knowing that they will gain more access to power over time if they support the institution; and to child abuse, sexual abuse, and spousal abuse.

The Right doesn’t talk very much about “domestic violence,” but they talk a whole lot about “trafficking” to justify the criminalization of sex work, and they spread conspiracy theories about pedophilia to justify the murder and criminalization of trans people or the forcible break up of families with trans children or trans parents. (They’ve also been weaponizing a few documented cases of sexual assault carried out by Hamas to justify or invisiblize far greater levels of violence, including systematic sexual assault, by Israeli soldiers.)

But the truth is, a hugely disproportionate amount of physical and sexual violence against children of any gender takes place in the family, and a hugely disproportionate amount of emotional, physical, and sexual violence against women is caused by their intimate partners. About half of women killed in the US are killed by their intimate partner (34%) or other family members (16%) (counting murder and willful manslaughter, which means intentional killing without premeditation). One of the other most frequent places children are harmed is in religious institutions kids are forced to attend, with their adults refusing to listen to their complaints, believe them, or see the warning signs. The Right almost never talks about this systematic violence. On the contrary, they make sure it keeps happening.

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News all around the world is really upsetting. Here’s some photos of chipmunk, squirrel, rabbit, human, and cat tracks in the snow. I hope you find them soothing.