- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2181
When the United States and Israel began bombing Iran in an unprovoked act of war, they opened the way for conflict to escalate in the region and the wider world. The Albanese government has pledged its unstinting support for this breach of international law. Both the US and Israel have nuclear arsenals. No state possesses weapons it will not use.
US President Donald Trump announced the start of “major combat operations” and called for regime change in the country, having now killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging Iranians to “rise up” in collaboration with their attackers.
A huge US armada has been built up in the Middle East in recent weeks, larger than that assembled in the Caribbean before the US bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president last month. Talks had been ongoing in Geneva over US insistence that Iran abandon uranium enrichment for its civil nuclear power program, as Washington claims Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, something Iran has always denied.
Trump unilaterally tore up the previous agreement on Iranian nuclear power (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in 2015) in 2018, and broke up negotiations on the issue last year by joining an unprovoked Israeli bombing spree.
This year’s talks were undertaken in bad faith by the United States, with an Israeli official briefing Reuters that the attacks had been planned for months and the launch date decided weeks ago.
This is the behaviour of rogue states – and they have jeopardised the safety of humankind around the world with this catastrophic act of aggression.
AUSTRALIA’S ROLE
Australia must withdraw from the AUKUS war-making alliance, including closing US spy bases, beginning with Pine Gap, and urgently pursue a foreign policy based on justice, sovereignty and peace. In its utter subservience to its US master, the Albanese government has committed Australia to the central US goal of control of the planet, power to install governments subservient to its demands, power to privatise and deregulate the economies of every nation.
The US has militarised the Asia Pacific region. Apart from its bases, training and other facilities in Australia, the US has troops in:
- South Korea – more than 27,000 troops and plans for a missile defence system
- Japan – more than 48,000 troops
- Philippines – more troops and weapons
- Guam – the small island has more than 6,000 military personnel
- Western Pacific – US Pacific Fleet which include six core battle groups and eight destroyer squadrons
- Singapore – naval base, key logistics and maintenance hub for Navy and Air Force
- South China Sea – flights and ships provocatively ignoring China’s warnings
- Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean also plays an important strategic role.
- Military domination serves three key purposes.
The first is to feed the corrupt and bloated military industrial complex and its insatiable appetite for super profits which can only be made from wars.
The second is to maintain US economic domination, where this cannot be achieved by other means. The focus is on the Asia-Pacific region where the target – China – has extended its influence and will continue to do so into the future.
The third is to halt and stifle the development of progressive political alternatives and other independent, sovereign forces that reject its imperialist domination. This is the reason for the attempt to suppress pro-Palestinian solidarity action against Israel’s genocidal crimes in Gaza.
In other words, the US is not prepared to countenance any power that challenges its global economic, political or military hegemony. It is prepared to go to any lengths to ensure that position, including nuclear war. The Albanese government is serving its US master toward that end.
The grab for massive profits by arms producers has resulted in monopolisation of the killing industry. The likes of Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Boeing, Northrop Grunman, General Dynamics, Raytheon and BAE Systems strut the corridors of the Pentagon and defence departments and ministerial offices. It’s an industry notorious for its corruption and profit-gouging.
These are the same companies that the Australian government has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on to fight the US’s next wars. Australia’s plans for $1 trillion in military spending over the next 20 years will only increase insecurity and heighten tensions in the region, the South China seas in particular. It also serves to escalate the arms build-up generating even more bloated profits for the military industrial complex.
MUA condemns ongoing attacks on Iran by USA and Israel
Statement from the Maritime Union of Australia
The Maritime Union of Australia condemns the ongoing attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel as reckless, illegal acts of aggression that drag the world closer to a wider war and nuclear catastrophe.
These strikes are a gross breach of international law, an assault on Iranian sovereignty and a direct undermining of the already fragile framework of multilateral diplomacy.
Workers in Australia know that war is not an accident; it is the brutal expression of an imperialist system that puts corporate profit, arms dealers and Great Power rivalry ahead of human need.
From Palestine to the Gulf, it is ordinary workers, their families and communities who are killed, displaced and silenced, while the war industries, their shareholders and their political agents cash in. For maritime workers in particular, every billion dollars poured into missiles, submarines and bases is a billion dollars denied to building a sustainable, job-rich maritime future. Instead of feeding the war machine, Australia should be funding a publicly owned fleet of Australian crewed coastal trading vessels, rebuilding our shipbuilding capacity, and guaranteeing secure, union jobs on the waterfront.
The choice is stark: jobs in war, or jobs in moving the goods our communities need, strengthening our coastal shipping, and decarbonising transport. Military expenditure deepens insecurity; investment in coastal trade, tankers for the vital protection of our fuel security, ports and training – all build real security for workers and their families.
The US, as the biggest and most aggressive military power in history, is once again asserting a unilateral “right” to strike wherever it chooses, using the same lies and manufactured threats that justified the invasion of Iraq and countless other interventions. Israel, armed, financed and protected by Washington, is acting as a regional attack dog, escalating conflict and attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East through force, assassination and collective punishment.
These actions are not self-defence. They are offensive operations designed to secure US domination of the region and to crush any state that resists that agenda.
Australia must not be complicit in this program of permanent war. Successive governments have tied our foreign policy, our military infrastructure and now hundreds of billions of dollars under AUKUS to US war fighting strategies, turning our country into a southern base for operations that threaten peace both globally and within our own region.
That is a direct attack on the living standards and safety of Australian workers, robbing health, housing, climate, and maritime infrastructure budgets to feed the war machine, while employers push waterfront automation and AI to destroy secure jobs.
We call on the Australian government to condemn this war. We demand an immediate end to all US and Israeli attacks on Iran; the withdrawal of Australian political, military and logistical support; the removal of US bases from our soil; and a decisive turn to diplomacy, disarmament and respect for international law.
Peace is union business, and the union movement has both the responsibility and the power to mobilise against this drive to war.
Maritime Union of Australia
