Imperialist threats against Iran have been stepped up once again, writes Communist Students member James Turley:

Last July, during a Youtube debate, Barack Obama (now de facto official Democrat presidential candidate) promised he would talk to the leaders of what are perceived as anti-American states – Venezuela, Cuba and Iran among them.

This rather mild pledge, in another reminder of the general state of US politics at this time, has turned up again in attempts to smear the White House hopeful as ‘soft’. Obama, for his part, is having none of it – first, he declared last month that non-specified diplomatic “preparations” would be required.¹ Then last week, at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) conference, he went much further, claiming that “by pressuring Israel to allow Palestinian elections with Hamas participation”, and by going to war against Iraq when “Iran was always the greater threat”, administration foreign policy had made Israel “less secure”.²

Aipac has a deceptively neutral name – in fact it is the motherlode of the so-called ‘Israel lobby’ in the US. Obama was not the only candidate to give a speech at the conference, and all were gushing in their admiration for America’s most steadfast ally in the Middle East. There is little wonder that the Jerusalem Post called the Aipac conference “an expression of all that is wonderful about America and about the US-Israel relationship”.³ What with Obama’s comments and John McCain’s now infamous rendition of the Beach Boys’ 60s hit, ‘Barbara Ann’, as “Bomb Iran”,⁴ Americans once more go to the polls to choose between two sabre-rattlers.

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