American President Joe Biden announced Tuesday afternoon from the White House a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. Aimed at setting the stage for an intensified regional confrontation with Iran, the deal comes after the far-right Zionist regime killed more than 4,000 people in its assault on southern Lebanon and Beirut over the past two months, and largely destroyed the leadership of Hezbollah.
The manner in which the ceasefire agreement was revealed underlined that its terms were effectively imposed on both sides by Washington. Rather than it being the fascist Netanyahu regime and Hezbollah publicly declaring that they have reached an agreement, a standard procedure when ceasefires are reached in a conflict, the parameters of the arrangement have been presented since the rose garden by Biden alone. The president announced that the Israeli and Lebanese governments “accepted” a “proposal” from Washington that would see Hezbollah withdraw its forces from the area south of the Litani River and Israel “gradually” withdraw its army from southern Lebanon over the course of 60 years. next few days. Hezbollah is not even officially a part of the agreement, since Washington designates it as a “terrorist organization” with which no direct negotiations can take place.
Biden's remarks made clear that far from marking a step toward “peace,” the decision was intended to set the stage for an intensification of Washington's relentless campaign to overthrow the Iranian regime. The 60-day ceasefire conveniently ends with the rise to power of Trump, who has filled his cabinet with anti-Iran warmongers.
“Israel showed boldness on the battlefield,” Biden said. “Iran and its proxies have paid a very heavy price. Now, Israel must be bold in transforming tactical gains against Iran and its proxies into a coherent strategy that ensures Israel's long-term security and advances broader peace and prosperity in the region.
For Biden and Washington's warmongers, Israel's massacre of more than 200,000 people in Gaza and the decimation of Hamas, as well as the significant damage inflicted on Hezbollah's capabilities at the cost of thousands of Lebanese civilian lives, are mere “tactical gains”. Made possible by a constant supply of high-power American weapons, these conflicts not only allowed Washington and its Israeli client to considerably weaken Hezbollah and Hamas aligned with Iran, but also to strike at the interests of the Republic. Islam in Syria and in Tehran itself. The Iranian regime's perilous position was graphically highlighted with the provocative assassination in July of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, while he was the Iranian regime's official guest in Tehran, and the missile strike of October 26 on Iranian military installations.
The “strategy” Biden advocated in his remarks Tuesday includes concluding a “historic set of agreements with Saudi Arabia,” including a “security pact,” “economic guarantees” and “full normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The despotic Saudi regime has ruled out the latter option until Israel's assault on Gaza ends, not out of commitment to Palestinian rights, but because it fears the political consequences among the Arab masses. Washington has been fiercely hostile to China's initiative in 2023 to normalize relations between Riyadh and Tehran, fearing that it would strengthen Beijing's position in the Middle East, the central arena of its 'New Road' economic strategy. of silk', aimed at developing global trade and securing access to raw materials.
Biden's policy is a continuation, at a much higher level of regional and global tensions, of the Abraham Accords initiated by Donald Trump during his first presidency. The goal of US imperialism then, as now, was to establish a military-strategic alliance encompassing Israel, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms to isolate Iran economically, diplomatically and militarily. . The goal being to bring about the fall of the Iranian bourgeois-clerical regime, either by war or by other means. The ultimate targets are China and Russia, against whom the United States and NATO are leading a major military escalation by allowing kyiv to use long-range missiles.
Biden's chatter about “peace and prosperity” in the region means nothing less than the consolidation of the energy-rich Middle East under Washington's unquestioned hegemony, with the establishment of a puppet regime in Tehran and the sidelining of its main economic and geopolitical rivals, China and Russia. The same “democratic” rhetoric has been used by successive US presidents as they devastate the entire region over the past 35 years, from the first Gulf War in 1991 to intervention in the Yemeni civil war to the he invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the assault on Iraq in 2003, and the ongoing civil war in Syria.
This uninterrupted series of regional wars is now transforming into a strategy of global conflagration: a third world war on several fronts for a new division of the world. This includes the US and NATO-led war in Ukraine against a Russia that is rapidly developing military-strategic ties with Iran, and a significant military presence in Syria. It also encompasses advanced economic, diplomatic and military preparations for war with China in the Asia-Pacific region; whether it is triggered over Taiwan, territorial disputes with India or some other pretext. The overthrow of the Iranian regime, a close ally of China and supplier of cheap oil to Beijing's economy, would mark a major stepping stone in this direction.
These conflicts have their roots in the irreconcilable contradictions of global capitalism: that between the nation-state system and globalized production; and between the mass social character of the productive forces and their private control by the financial oligarchy. These contradictions fuel conflicts between both great powers and regional powers, and they push the working class of all countries to fight against the ruling class, increasing the instability of all regimes involved.
If the ceasefire in Lebanon shows everyone how Israel, functioning as Washington's attack dog in the Middle East, is subservient to American imperialist interests, it is far from clear that the truce imposed by the States -United will hold.
Netanyahu had no trouble accepting the deal, and not just because it will allow the Israeli military, as he himself boasted, to replenish its reserves of missiles and other weapons significantly. exhausted and to rest some of his overwhelmed forces.
According to the BBC, it includes a US side letter granting Israel the right to “take military action” if “Hezbollah appears to be preparing an attack” – thus giving Israel and the US a joint mechanism to resume the war against Hezbollah when they believe it is mutually beneficial.
Most importantly, the deal leaves Israel free to continue its genocide in Gaza, where dozens of Palestinians were killed Thursday in airstrikes and a ground incursion into the Nuseirat refugee camp.
The Israeli ground offensive in southern Lebanon was met with stiff resistance, with the Israel Defense Forces suffering a significant number of casualties. Under the agreement, Hezbollah is to be forced to abandon numerous well-fortified positions on or near the Israeli border as its forces withdraw north of the Litani River, thus diplomatically assuring Israel of what it does not failed to achieve on the battlefield.
However, some elements in Israel, particularly in the north, have criticized the deal as a failure since – despite these significant concessions – Netanyahu and his government have clearly failed to deliver on their oft-repeated promise to eliminate Hezbollah as a military force.
The war, like the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, underscored that the Zionist regime must rely on direct intervention from the United States if it is to fulfill its promise to redraw the map of the region.
Across the region, military operations against Iran and its allied forces continue uninterrupted. US and British warplanes launched at least two airstrikes on targets in Yemen on Thursday. In Syria, one of the biggest attacks in many months by Islamist militias long sponsored by the United States and Israel against troops loyal to Bashar al-Assad near Aleppo led to the death of a top general rank of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on Thursday.
The Tehran regime, in crisis, has no progressive response to this systematic targeting by the imperialist powers. Torn between a faction that still believes it can strike a deal with imperialism and extremists advocating greater confrontation, including acquiring nuclear weapons, the bourgeois-clerical leaders fear above all the prospect of a mass movement of workers in Iran and across the region against imperialism and bourgeois nationalism.
Tehran pressured Hezbollah to adhere to the ceasefire. This was undoubtedly part of his effort to curry favor with the new Trump administration by presenting himself as a force for “order” and “stability” in the region. Another step in this direction was the meeting between Elon Musk, the world's richest man and a member of Trump's inner circle, and Iran's ambassador to the UN this week. It was Trump who provocatively targeted Iran during his first term, including torpedoing the nuclear deal that granted Tehran sanctions relief in exchange for opening its nuclear program to inspections external.
This highlights the bankruptcy of bourgeois-nationalist regimes throughout the region. Faced with a sustained campaign of “regime change” in Tehran, all Iranian leaders can offer are plaintive appeals for some sort of accommodation with the imperialists, who are in turn bent on eliminating Tehran as a obstacle to their uncontested domination over the Middle East. This stems from the organic incapacity of the regime, due to its bourgeois class nature, to appeal to the workers and laborers of the entire region, let alone the working class of the imperialist centers, whose opposition to the imperialist war and the national austerity measures which are inseparable from it continue to grow.
This opposition must be transformed into a conscious political struggle of the international working class to end imperialist war and genocide. It is only through social and political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program, in the imperialist centers of North America and Europe, and throughout the Middle East, that the slide of humanity towards world war and the barbarism it engenders can be stopped. This is the program that the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International, and we invite all who are ready to lead this struggle to join us in building an international anti-war movement led by the working class.
(Article published in English on November 30, 2024)
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