Washington and Tel Aviv have struck Iran. Parts of the diaspora are celebrating. The campist left is demanding we say nothing about the regime that is murdering protesters and simply mourn the bombs. The Fourth International tradition demands something harder than any of these responses.
The Mirror Argument
The monarchist press today is not grieving. It is celebrating. B-2 bombers over Tehran, smoke rising from the city’s downtown, Israeli Defence Minister Katz describing the strikes as a ‘preemptive attack to remove threats’: for a section of the Iranian diaspora, this is liberation. The programme has a name. Reza Pahlavi pitched Donald Trump a ‘Cyrus Accord,’ modelled on the Abraham Accords, with US and Israeli military pressure as the mechanism for regime change and a Pahlavi restoration as the advertised outcome. He refused to condemn the June 2025 strikes on Iranian territory. Today he has what he lobbied for. His staffers at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies were in the room when he visited Netanyahu in April 2023. The fruits of that alliance are now visible in the smoke over Tehran.
This is not the opposite of campism. It is campism wearing a different flag. The tankie logic that some sections of the Western left apply to the Islamic Republic runs like this: Tehran opposes Washington; Washington is the primary imperialist power; therefore Tehran deserves our political silence, whatever it does to its workers, its women, its communists. The monarchist logic runs on the same rails, reversed: Washington opposes Tehran; Washington commands the most powerful military apparatus on earth; therefore Washington is the agent of Iranian liberation, whatever the record shows about what it does with that power. In both cases, the same erasure occurs. The Iranian working class, the teachers striking across forty cities, the oil workers who could strangle the regime’s revenues, the women of the Mahsa generation who have already demonstrated they know how to fight: all of them disappear from the analysis. Become passive objects. Wait to be freed by someone else’s army or someone else’s axis.
The Fourth International’s Executive Bureau put it with precision in its January 6, 2026 resolution: the people of Iran ‘do not want to choose between two despotisms.’ Neither do we choose for them. Maryam Namazie, who has spent decades refusing both positions, supplies the slogan: neither turban nor crown, but Woman, Life, Freedom. That is the revolutionary internationalist position. Everything else is substitutionism.
What Has Happened
On the morning of 28 February 2026, Israeli forces launched a daylight attack on Tehran. US forces confirmed joining the strikes shortly after; CNN sources described it as ‘not a small strike.’ The sequence that Red Mole documented in the preceding days, the dual carrier strike groups, the eleven F-22s confirmed by commercial satellite imagery at Ovda Airbase in southern Israel, the voluntary departure authorisations from Gulf posts, the cargo and tanker aircraft surge to regional bases, was not a demonstration. It was sequencing. The sequencing has now produced its outcome.
Early target reporting, necessarily provisional at this stage, points most confidently to leadership and government nodes in central Tehran: the Pasteur and Keshvardoost districts, the area around the presidential office and the national security council. IRGC command infrastructure is widely asserted as a target category but lacks site-by-site confirmation. Nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Arak are frequently invoked in commentary as objectives, but IAEA-level technical confirmation for today’s strikes does not yet exist; treat those claims as provisional. What the target pattern does confirm, with higher confidence, is that this operation is aimed at the political-security apparatus of the state. Trump declared the strikes ‘a spectacular military success’ and warned that ‘many targets’ remain. Early reporting suggests collateral civilian casualties may be limited; that finding, if it holds, will be used to vindicate the ‘precision’ framing. It should not. The question is never only how many people the bombs kill directly. It is what they leave behind. The June 2025 strikes were also described as precise; a July 2025 Pentagon assessment found they set back Iran’s nuclear programme by around two years. They did not end the Islamic Republic, remove the IRGC, or give the Iranian working class a single additional gram of political freedom. The Libya precedent is the relevant one: NATO’s precision campaign produced a decade of catastrophe not because of strike casualties but because of the power vacuum it created and the forces that filled it. A decapitation strike on a state apparatus in conditions of mass uprising does not hand power to the uprising. It creates a contest whose outcome depends entirely on which organised force moves fastest. The Persian-centric monarchist networks backed by Washington and Tel Aviv are already positioned to make that move. The Iranian working class needs international solidarity to make its own.
The diplomatic track performed exactly the function we described: the construction of a legitimising record. The Geneva talks of February 26 produced a commitment to ‘technical discussions in Vienna.’ That commitment is now academic. Washington demanded zero enrichment; Tehran refused unconditional strategic surrender; and the sequence moved to its military phase. The UN snapback mechanism, triggered by France, Germany, and the UK in September 2025, has already collapsed the rial and driven the food poverty that ignited the December uprising. Sanctions as a ‘peaceful alternative’ and bombs as a ‘last resort’: both have now been deployed against the Iranian working class.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar refused the use of their territory for offensive strikes. They understood what an Iranian counterstrike against Gulf oil infrastructure costs. Oil prices have already reached six-month highs on the news. Iran’s UN ambassador has declared that ‘all bases, facilities and assets of the hostile force in the region’ are now legitimate targets. Hezbollah retaliatory fire and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping are expected; US bases in Iraq and Qatar are on alert. The June 2025 precedent: Iran struck Al Udeid with 14 ballistic missiles, causing damage but no fatalities. That was a ‘telegraphed’ response to a more limited strike. The current one is not limited. The UK government blocked Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford for pre-emptive strikes. That refusal holds, for now.
What the Regime Actually Is
None of this requires a syllable of apology for the Islamic Republic. The clerical state has earned every word of its characterisation as theocratic Bonapartism, a regime that emerged by cannibalising the social forces of the 1979 revolution to install a militant state-capitalist order. The IRGC is not a revolutionary guard corps. It controls between twenty and forty per cent of the non-oil economy through the Khatam al-Anbia construction conglomerate and the bonyad parastatal foundations, a fusion of military power and capital accumulation that makes it not merely a repressive apparatus but a ruling-class fraction. The bazaari merchants who financed Khomeini’s movement now find themselves squeezed by IRGC monopolies and have joined the protests.
The workers’ movement has been under systematic assault since 1980. The Shoras, the workers’ councils that exercised genuine dual power in the oil fields and factories in 1978 and 1979, were smashed under wartime emergency cover during the Iran-Iraq war. The Islamic Labour Councils that replaced them function as company unions, policing workforces on behalf of management. The Haft Tappeh sugar workers have been repeatedly arrested. The Tehran bus drivers’ union has been prosecuted. Teachers striking across Iran have faced imprisonment. And 1988: the mass execution of leftist political prisoners, a crime the regime has never acknowledged.
The December 2025 uprising, triggered by economic collapse following the June 2025 war, has confirmed what the Mahsa generation demonstrated in 2022: there is a revolutionary subject in Iran, fighting on two fronts simultaneously, against the theocracy and against the threat of external liberation. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has documented over seven thousand protest deaths as of late February 2026; Iranian state-aligned sources cite a significantly lower figure, and the true toll remains contested, as it always is when the regime controls access. Between January and June 2025, over 455 labour protests occurred in 83 cities. The workers of Haft Tappeh, a workplace of five thousand in Khuzestan, have become the vanguard of a struggle that is not merely about wages but about collective self-defence and the independence of the labour movement. Their January 3, 2026 joint statement with pensioners’ and social organisations is worth sitting with: they demand the redirection of resources from the IRGC’s proxy network and the ayatollahs’ billion-dollar fortunes; they explicitly state that ‘political demarcation from Zionism, monarchy, and military aggression is more essential to the working class than bread itself’; they assert they need no leadership from above, rejecting a century of tyranny that includes the Pahlavis as well as the clerics.
These workers have done our theoretical work for us. The struggle against imperialism and the struggle against the regime are two sides of the same class struggle. Any framework that forces a choice between them is not internationalism. It is one form of substitutionism or another.
What History Demonstrates
The monarchists and their neoconservative sponsors have a ready answer to the historical record: but the regime is uniquely monstrous, the people are suffering, there is no other way. This is the argument that has justified every disastrous imperialist intervention of the last seventy years. Let us be specific.
Operation Ajax in 1953 did not just remove Mosaddegh. It destroyed the developmental trajectory of the Iranian left and civil society for a generation. The Tudeh Party, despite commanding massive working-class organisation, was paralysed by Stalinist stagism and Soviet caution on the critical days of August 1953; the CIA’s coup found it immobile. What followed was the Shah’s SAVAK, equipped and trained by Western intelligence, running the torture chambers whose graduates Reza Pahlavi now invites us to forget. The accumulated resentment of those decades exploded in 1979 into a revolution the left was too weakened to lead. ‘We lost the war of relations’ is how one CIA officer summarised it. Imperialist intervention in Iran has a forty-eight-year track record. It produced the Islamic Republic.
Libya 1986: Operation Eldorado Canyon hit residential neighbourhoods and the French Embassy, killed 37 civilians, wounded 93. Qaddafi used the strikes to deepen his securitisation of Libyan society, suppress all independent organisation, expand the personality cult. The 2011 NATO intervention that finished the job produced not democracy but a failed state, a market for human trafficking, and the destruction of every organised left and labour structure that had survived the Qaddafi decades.
Iraq 2003. Over a hundred thousand civilian dead in the first two years, conservatively. The destruction of the Iraqi Communist Party’s surviving infrastructure. The sectarian fragmentation that was not an accident but a predictable consequence of dismantling a state without any plan for what class forces would fill the vacuum. The argument that Saddam was a monster did not make a single one of those deaths less real.
In each case, the same pattern. Imperialist military action against a despotic regime systematically liquidates the independent working-class and democratic infrastructure that serves as the only actual vehicle for genuine liberation. It provides the regime with a nationalist pretext to frame democratic dissent as treason. It substitutes rubble for revolution.
The British Left: A Rapid Assessment
The Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament are opposing the attack. They are correct that it constitutes illegal military aggression threatening a catastrophic regional war. Their framing correctly identifies the US objective as regime change through military force. This needs saying, and StWC is saying it.
But watch what accompanies that correct opposition. The campist logic activated by bombs falling is not silence; it is a demand for silence from everyone else. Every mention of the seven thousand protesters the regime has killed becomes ‘imperialist propaganda.’ Every reference to the Haft Tappeh workers, to Narges Mohammadi in Evin Prison, to the December uprising, becomes ‘playing into Washington’s hands.’ The smoke over Tehran is being used, right now, to launder the Islamic Republic’s credentials as an ‘anti-imperialist’ force and to rehabilitate every apology the campist left made for the theocracy before the bombs fell. This is not anti-imperialism. It is its counterfeit, and it is the most predictable manoeuvre in the campist playbook.
The SWP’s formulation, ‘Oppose West but don’t back the regime,’ is better. They correctly note that the Iranian regime is a regional capitalist power competing for its own share of dominance rather than a principled anti-imperialist force. They point to the destruction of the Shoras and the IRGC’s neoliberal turn. Where the formulation falls short is in treating opposition to the attack and solidarity with the uprising as sequential tasks: first stop the bombs, then support the workers. That sequencing is a political error. The bombs falling today do not simply strengthen the regime. The Islamic Republic was already fighting for survival before the first strike: seven thousand dead protesters, a collapsed rial, a general strike across 31 provinces. Strikes can accelerate state fragmentation as well as produce nationalist consolidation. The outcome depends in part on whether an organised working class is strong enough to exploit the fractures. And that strength depends on international solidarity now, not after the ceasefire. Opposing the bombs and supporting the uprising are not two separate tasks to be pursued in order. They are simultaneous and mutually constitutive. Either alone is a half-position that serves someone else’s agenda.
The Communist Party of Britain and the Morning Star present the sharpest internal contradiction. Their official statement on the 2026 protests identifies the regime as a ‘ruling theocratic dictatorship’ and calls for ‘democracy, social justice, peace, and national sovereignty’ in solidarity with the Tudeh Party. This is more forthright than most. Yet the same paper has published material labelling the mass street movements as ‘hijacked by CIA, Mossad, and National Endowment for Democracy’ operatives. Supporting the ‘legitimate protests’ of a fraternal party while branding the mass uprising as a Western psyop is not a coherent position. It is campism dressed in the language of communist solidarity.
The AWL has been willing to name the Islamic Republic’s crimes in the starkest terms, describing it as a ‘totalitarian tyranny.’ On the question of intervention, they nominally oppose US or Israeli bombing. However, their history of support for ‘progressive’ imperialist interventions in Libya and Syria, and their refusal to call for troop withdrawal from Iraq, constitutes a ‘globocop’ logic that undermines their credibility on this precise question. Correctly identifying the regime’s crimes does not, in itself, constitute an internationalist position. It can equally serve as ideological preparation for the bombs.
The Fourth International’s January 6, 2026 resolution charts a different course. It rejects any ‘choice between two despotisms.’ It supports the strikes, rallies, and autonomous organisation of Iranian workers and national minorities. It argues that sanctions and bombings ‘reinforce the hegemony of major Western powers, devastate peoples, and divide the working classes.’ And it insists: the only way to truly defeat the US military threat is to support the revolutionary overthrow of the regime by its own people, thereby removing the pretext for imperialist aggression. This is the framework.
The Diaspora: Who to Engage and Why
The Iranian diaspora in Britain, the United States, and Europe is not a monolith. Treating it as one is an analytical and political error.
The monarchist tendency has made its alliances visible. The Cyrus Accord pitch to Trump, the April 2023 Netanyahu visit staffed by Foundation for Defense of Democracies operatives, the refusal to condemn June 2025 strikes on Iranian territory: this is not a democratic opposition in any meaningful sense. It is the substitution of Washington and Tel Aviv for the Iranian masses as the agent of change. Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, writing from Evin Prison, has been explicit: this alignment with foreign military power ‘strengthens the regime’ by handing it a nationalist pretext to suppress internal dissent. The monarchist tendency uses the Lion and Sun to ‘normalise authoritarian state violence’ and systematically attacks leftists, feminists, and ethnic activists as collaborators. Its class character is petty-bourgeois at best; its political trajectory is towards a Western-client authoritarianism that would preserve the property relations of the Islamic Republic while replacing its clerical ideology with a restored dynasty.
The MEK, the Mojahedin-e Khalq, requires only brief treatment. Founded in 1965, it participated in the 1979 revolution and then spent the following decade collaborating with Saddam Hussein against Iran during the war. It is, by the assessment of academic scholars and former members, an organisation structured as a cult around its leadership. It has spent millions on Western political figures: Bolton, Giuliani, others at various points, purchasing rehabilitation of its terrorist designation. It commands zero organic support among ordinary Iranians. Its function in Western politics is as a paid lobby for regime change, useful to neoconservatives precisely because it can be presented as ‘an Iranian opposition’ while being wholly detached from Iranian society.
But the monarchists and the MEK do not exhaust the diaspora. There is a substantial secular republican tendency closer to the Mosaddegh tradition: Kurdish organisations including Komala and the KDPI, National Front diaspora factions, secular nationalist groupings that have consistently opposed US military intervention while refusing any apology for the Islamic Republic. The 2022 Mahsa uprising produced a new generation of diaspora activists: younger, feminist, internationalist, organised around ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ networks, explicitly rejecting the choice between the turban and the crown. There is an Iranian socialist left in exile emerging from the Fedayeen tradition, from secular left parties, from the socialist-feminist networks shaped by the Mahsa generation.
The practical implication is straightforward. Engage the secular republican and socialist diaspora on the basis of shared opposition to both the attack and the regime. Build trade union links with Haft Tappeh solidarity networks and the teachers’ campaigns. Support Narges Mohammadi and every political prisoner the regime would prefer we not mention while we argue about bombs. Platform the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ diaspora activists who have articulated, better than most of the British left, the position the Fourth International’s resolution endorses.
Do not share a platform with organisations that are lobbying for the bombing. Do not treat the MEK as a legitimate interlocutor. Do not let the word ‘diaspora’ blur the distinction between forces that want liberation from below and forces that want restoration from above.
The Revolutionary Position
The bombs have not liberated Iran. No bomb has ever liberated a country’s working class. But we should be honest about what the bombs have done, and what they have not done. They have not ended the uprising. They have not restored the Islamic Republic’s shattered legitimacy. They have not given the IRGC the nationalist consolidation it needs, not yet, not completely, not while the memory of seven thousand dead protesters is still raw. The Iranian working class is not simply a victim of today’s strikes. It is a political subject fighting on two fronts simultaneously, and the outcome of that fight is not yet determined. The regime deserves no defence and will receive none here. The people fighting against the theocracy and against American and Israeli ordnance falling on their cities deserve something more than our sympathy.
International solidarity, real solidarity, means both things together. It means action against the strikes: opposing British complicity, demanding an immediate ceasefire, building the political pressure that makes continued escalation costly. And it means active support for the Iranian workers’, women’s, and democratic struggles: the Haft Tappeh networks, the teachers’ solidarity campaigns, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ diaspora organisations, Narges Mohammadi’s demand from Evin Prison. These are not two causes that happen to coexist. The pretext for imperialist intervention is the regime itself. The most durable defeat of that intervention is a working-class movement strong enough to remove the regime on its own terms, denying Washington the justification for its military presence and transforming the political terrain. That transformation will not come from the IRGC’s missile batteries. It will come from the strikes and uprisings and autonomous organisation that the international left should be materially supporting today, while the bombs are still falling.
Neither turban nor crown. The bombs fell this morning and the revolutionary horizon did not change. Oppose the strikes; support the uprising. Woman, Life, Freedom: the revolution without saviours, guardians, or patriarchs. That is the only internationalism worth the name.
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Postscript: What the Media Is Not Saying
The US and Israel are bombing Iran this morning to ‘prevent a nuclear threat’. That is the stated justification. It deserves two minutes of scrutiny that virtually no UK media outlet is providing.
The nuclear deal that contained Iran’s enrichment programme, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was working. The IAEA confirmed Iran was in compliance. The European signatories, France, Germany, the UK, confirmed it was working. Trump tore it up anyway in 2017, in his first term, over their explicit objections. Iran’s subsequent enrichment acceleration, the 60% purity stockpile, the new centrifuge capacity, the programme that is now being cited to justify today’s bombs: all of it developed in the vacuum that withdrawal created. The threat the bombs supposedly answered was manufactured by the policy that preceded them. This is not irony. It is the mechanism, and it is absent from this morning’s coverage.
The person most loudly proclaiming the Iranian nuclear danger is Benjamin Netanyahu: currently subject to an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and the head of the only state in the Middle East that actually possesses nuclear weapons. Israel’s arsenal is estimated at around 90 warheads, held outside any international inspection regime, in defiance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty it has never signed. A state with illegal, uninspected nuclear weapons is bombing another state to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, and this asymmetry is not considered relevant context by the BBC or ITV. Netanyahu is crowing. The cameras are rolling. Nobody is asking the question.
The Guardian this morning at least noted that the current round of negotiations was not even allowed to conclude before the bombs fell. That is marginally more than most. It still does not provide the JCPOA context above, but it ends by assigning fault to the US and Israel, which is something. More telling was what was visible on the BBC: an anchor reporting from Tel Aviv, making the case for regime change in violation of international law more fluently than the White House communications team. Not reporting it. Making it. This is not a conspiracy. It is what normalisation looks like in real time: the assumptions of the powerful absorbed so thoroughly that they are reproduced without apparent effort or intent.
There is a third fact the media is not reporting, and it is the most damning. This morning, as bombs fell on Tehran, Trump and Netanyahu issued near-identical statements offering indemnity to IRGC commanders, police, and military personnel who put down their weapons. Both called on Iranians to rise up against the regime. This is not the language of nuclear non-proliferation. It is the operational doctrine of regime change. The nuclear framing was always cover. The cover was removed this morning by the people who constructed it. And there is a detail that confirms the pretextual nature of the nuclear justification beyond any doubt: on the eve of the strikes, Iran’s foreign minister moved toward accepting zero enrichment, the very condition Washington had set as its demand. Rubio’s response was to immediately produce a new condition. The goalposts moved the moment the stated objective came within reach. The bombs were not waiting on a diplomatic outcome. The diplomacy was waiting on the bombs.
These are not contextual footnotes. They are three facts that expose the stated casus belli as fraudulent, and the diplomatic process as a mechanism for manufacturing consent rather than seeking resolution. Their absence from coverage this morning is not an oversight. It is the political function the media is performing. Name it.
