Cet article du 16 juin 2025 is excerpted from Patrick Le Hyaric’s weekly letter. Click here to read the full letter for this week, and here to subscribe to it..
Let's say it straight away! We in no way support the authoritarian regime of the Iranian mullahs, and we do not defend its project of possessing nuclear weapons. Moreover, the truth forces us to say that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not. Iran is regularly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), while Israel refuses to be. Israel has between thirty and a hundred atomic bombs, while no one has proven that Iran has even one.
Western countries are, moreover, much more lenient on the issue of nuclear bombs with Pakistan or India, or by paving the way for Japan to acquire the atomic bomb.
And, if the pretext for the Israeli attack on Iran today is the acquisition of the bomb, how can we explain Israel's regular attacks on Lebanon or Syria?
As fighters for democracy, law, and peace, we stand alongside Iranian and Israeli workers, Iranian, Israeli, and Palestinian women in their quest for emancipation; alongside the youth of these countries to build a future of peace, social progress, and ecological justice.
We do not condone the death of innocents in Gaza, nor in Tel Aviv, nor in Tehran, nor in Kyiv. Better yet, we advocate for ridding this world of capitalism and its wars of resource grabbing, territorial wars, and economic, commercial, and monetary wars, whose only foot soldiers and victims are workers and peoples, regardless of their nationality.
The lies, the organised confusion, the media and governmental imbroglios only serve to conceal the reasons for the convulsions of a world that has become flammable.
It is urgent to demand at the same time: the cessation of uranium enrichment by the leaders of Iran, as well as the denuclearisation of the entire region, the end of military hostilities, the cessation of bombardments against Iranian vital infrastructures, as well as those by Israeli services, and against the populations of both countries, while demanding an end to the Israeli carnage against the people of Gaza. Such could be the nature of a debate and decisions at the United Nations that every country should respect and enforce.
No people have an interest in this escalation.No people need to suffer and lose their loved ones under the iron of bombs to save the Israeli Prime Minister from prison and to strengthen the integrist nationalism cultivated by the mullahs in power in Tehran.
Shoddy arguments serve the worst. Since when does a country have the right to bomb another preemptively, because its leader and regime are considered authoritarian? With such gibberish, how many wars must be started? The concept of "preemptive war" does not exist anywhere in international law. A new tipping point has been crossed when a head of government prosecuted by international justice can claim to be preparing the assassination of the head of a neighbouring state.
If Iran held and wanted to use nuclear weapons, how many minutes of life would it have left in the face of the thunder of international nuclear retaliations?
Invoking necessary war to export regime change means forgetting the painful experiences of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya where the worst was entrenched.But as always and everywhere, capitalist Western nations want to avoid a feminist, social, democratic revolution in Iran. It is the sovereign Iranian people who can open such a peaceful transition process towards democracy and social justice, not other religious fundamentalists in power in Tel Aviv. Freedom does not come through the destruction of innocent lives.
It is a fact: Israel attacked Iran.It did so without a declaration of war and without a UN mandate. A new aggression that only fuels the flames of the general conflagration brewing in the region.
The nationalist and supremacist power in Tel Aviv is attacking all quarters: Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Syria, East Jerusalem with the confiscation of Palestinian properties and colonisation.
Within the capitalist West, which sells to the Israeli power the means for these military offensives, there is bleating and droning about "the inalienable right to defend oneself." A curious inversion of responsibilities to camouflage the new violation of international law by the Israeli state and the additional step in the spiral of a disturbing movement pushing us towards the abyss.
That Iran is working on manufacturing the atomic bomb is one thing. Accusing it of an imminent nuclear threat is as fallacious as the phantom of weapons of mass destruction that served to trigger the Iraq war without a UN mandate. Moreover, and as a curious coincidence, the Israeli bombings were triggered the day before American-Iranian talks to halt this program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.Israel was thus tasked with sabotaging a diplomatic outcome. President Trump announced that he had known for "two weeks" that Israel would strike this Friday, June 13.
Knowing the Iranian economy is weakened and in crisis, knowing the internal dissensions within the Iranian leadership, measuring the strength of the popular protest against the Islamist and authoritarian regime, the capitalist West gives its green light to a state already guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, freeing itself from international law to reshape the Near and Middle East to make it a profitable area for its multinationals, its military-industrial complex, and its financial institutions.
The operation has multiple triggers.The designated global public enemy in the figure of Iran makes one forget the window that was opening in the condemnations of genocide in Gaza, makes one pack away any inclination to draw famous "red lines" to the Israeli power, postpones sine die the conference where the recognition of the State of Palestine was to be discussed.
The Western sacred union is strong. It also serves a sacred union within Israel.And contrary to what propaganda insinuates, war and destruction also push for national unity in Iran, for nationalism which is the fuel of the "Islamic Republic" and weakens the popular, feminist, and progressive movement in the fight against the dictatorship in Tehran.
Let us add that the bombardments of Iranian nuclear sites carry the germ of a nuclear and ecological catastrophe from which the Iranian populations will be victims.
Once again, in violation of international law, it is the project of "Greater Israel" and a new Middle East that the dominant powers are trying to push in order to expand their space for resource exploitation and human competition. The hydrocarbon riches of Iranian soil and the ninety million Iranians with a high level of education and culture are of utmost interest to the North American imperium.
Those who might doubt the dangerous detours into which nationalisms, far-right movements, and fundamentalisms push us, serving only the most unbridled capitalism, have just had a new, deadly demonstration. To condone this strategy, to continue arming criminals and warmongers, to let oneself be drawn into unhealthy propaganda where any defender of international law and human rights becomes an antisemite thrown into the pit of denigration, amounts to annihilating our freedom to think and act for a human globality, a world of peace, a common world for all human beings living in harmony with nature.Against simplifications and lies, against crimes and deprivations of liberty, let us not divide ourselves. Let us rise for justice and peace.
Illustration image: "U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles fly over the U.S.", photograph from February 3, 2021, by Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (Public Domain) – The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.
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