Iran – History Keeps Happening

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Intro

The war that America and Israel launched in February of 2026 against Iran has a backstory that involves decades of American and British imperialist intervention in South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), as well as a wider context of Western imperialist aggression dating back to the Crusades at least.

In 1953, an American and British backed coup in Iran overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and strengthened the rule of the Shah, who proceeded to crush the Iranian people with an iron fist until he was ousted by the 1979 Revolution. America, Britain, Israel, and their junior partners such as Canada and Ukraine, are in no way opposed to dictatorship in the SWANA region, as Iranian history and the West’s current relations with the Gulf monarchies show; they only want the dictatorships to be on their side.

In the 1980s, America materially backed both sides of the Iraq-Iran war, but primarily the Iraqi side against Iran. In 2020, America assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani with an airstrike in Iraq, despite the fact that back in 2001, Soleimani and other Iranian military leaders had worked with American forces to capture the city of Herat in Afghanistan.

Since October of 2023, Israel, with American and German backing, has also been continuously attacking Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq; invading and occupying territory in all these cases except Yemen's. In 2024, Israel carried out an airstrike on the Iranian embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, killing 16 people, including officials and civilians.

In 2025, Israel and America carried out airstrikes on Iran, under the pretense of a nuclear threat which Israel and America themselves in truth represent. Junior partners Canada and Ukraine immediately applauded the Israeli and American aggression, seeing no irony in it despite all their hand-wringing about Russian aggression.

In 2026, when Israel and America launched a full-scale war on Iran, Canada and Ukraine again expressed their support, but this time Ukraine shifted to a more active role, materially backing the Gulf monarchies by supplying them with drones and carrying out an airstrike of its own on an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea, under the pretense that it was carrying arms to Russia.

Ukraine in fact has been intervening in the SWANA region since the early 2000s, when it helped America and Britain occupy Iraq and was kicked out by Iraqi insurgents. In the 2010s and 2020s, Ukraine sold arms to wealthy Saudi Arabia, assisting in the war Saudi Arabia launched in 2015 against Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. Since at least 2022, Ukraine has been buying various Israeli weapons, on the strength of them already being field-tested against Palestinians, and helping to fill the pockets of Israeli arms companies, enabling them to produce more, sustaining Israel’s various wars of aggression.

In 1914, the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, an opponent of his own country’s aggression against Libya and Ethiopia, proclaimed that "for an anarchist, the primary enemy is the oppressor who is closest to him, and against whom he can fight more effectively."

More than a century later, as the West finds itself caught up in yet another imperialist quagmire, and some self-proclaimed anti-authoritarians seem to believe that arguing with their ideological opponents online is the best thing they can do in the face of war and dictatorship, Malatesta's insight seems more relevant than ever.

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