Rally to demand an end to the bombing of Iran, Washington, DC, June 13, 2025. Photo by Diane Krauthamer/Flickr.

Less than 24 hours ago, three Iranian nuclear sites—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—were hit by waves of unprovoked attacks carried out by the US Air Force. The Americans claim to have deployed more than 125 aircraft, including stealth bombers, fighter jets, and dozens of refuelling planes, surveillance aircraft, and support teams. This is a declaration of war. Meanwhile, Trump craftily—or perhaps confusedly—continued to maintain that he wanted to keep the door open to a negotiated solution—a possibility the regime of the mullahs had entertained.

In the immediate term, we must respond by unequivocally condemning the Israeli aggression and the US declaration of war, and we must do so without concession to any phony equivalence that ascribes blame to both sides.

Of course, it is becoming increasingly clear that, in the not-too-distant future, the mullahs’ oppressive, religious-fascist regime will fall. No politically progressive group could be so odious and blind as to defend the ruling dictatorship. Even the “campist” supporters of the so-called “resistance front”—if they base their opinion on the lived experience of Iranians and not on fantasies built on projections of their own aspirations, however legitimate those may be—must realize that this regime hijacked the popular hopes for democracy and independence that fuelled the 1979 revolution in order to establish a theocracy that serves the clergy, not the Iranian people. Today, the vast majority of Iranians see it as a corrupt, mafia-like regime that is the main cause of their daily misery and the country’s descent into an economic, social, and public security nightmare. Through decades of uprisings, the Iranian people have sought to overthrow this enemy within.

But overthrowing the regime is the exclusive right and prerogative of the Iranian people—not of foreign powers.

It is vital to remember this, because the Iranian people are not only saddled with this internal enemy. They also face an inveterate external enemy: the United States, the declining imperial power that took up the baton from the British Empire in 1953 by

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