Qatar condemns Iranian attack on US base and says missiles were intercepted
Here’s more on that Qatari response.
Qatar has condemned Iran’s attack on the Al Udeid air base and said that “Qatar reserves the right to respond directly in a manner equivalent with the nature and scale of this brazen aggression, in line with international law”.
In a post on X the Qatari foreign affairs ministry spokesperson Majed Al Ansari added that “Qatar’s air defences successfully thwarted the attack and intercepted the Iranian missiles” and there had been no casualties.
He said Qatar had warned of the dangers of Israeli escalation in the region and called for “the immediate cessation of all military actions and for a serious return to the negotiating table and dialogue
Richard Mellor
Qatar can go F%&k itself. Qatar is an absolute monarchy run by the same ruthless family for a century or more. It was first a base and protectorate of the British after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Like Yemen, it was an important piece of real estate for British capitalism in its plunder of India and also as a means to defend the Suez Canal traffic.
The text in its message is inaccurate. The air defences are US air defences and the weapons US weapons just like in Israel. Like the Mullahs or not, Iran was attacked first by the US colony in Palestine and then the US followed in order to protect the Zionist regime. Remember, both Trump and the mass murderer Biden are proud Zionists, Biden more so. Lastly, if you aren’t aware the US and Britain overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 go read about it. And not in Readers Digest please.
The US is at war with Iran. Iran did not attack the US. Does it not have a right to defend itself?
The weapons the US sells to all its flunkies in the Arab world are primarily to defend the rotten regimes it supports from their own working class; the Arab masses hate their governments. These corrupt, despotic regimes, armed by US taxpayer money, are always under threat of revolution from below. We saw how fast US flunkies fell in the Arab Spring of 201 starting with Ben Ali in Tunisia.
Qatar is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, ruled by a monarchy whose vast wealth exceeds that of the former British Monarchy. It has no working class as the work and labor that makes the country run is imported labor from poor countries like Bangladesh, Palestine and others. This is a ruthless undemocratic regime.
What does it cost us to have a base there? One of some 800 around the world. They’re not making us safer.
The US has the ability to continue these forever wars aimed at maintaining its global superpower status because it has overwhelming air power, not unlike the position the British navy was in during the height of British global power; the British navy bombed Dublin and Nanking in roughly the same era. These wars are not popular with the American people but can be tolerated, or ignored, when “our boys” don’t die in the main and so many of us can still get food to eat, though more and more people get their medical care and food on credit. The moneylenders will face their day in court if they’re lucky.
In the 20-year Afghan fiasco that cost the US taxpayer some $3 trillion by most accounts, it has been a small section of US working class families that have borne the brunt of the war. The deaths, the wounded that are far greater in these modern wars due to the advances made in body armour will be our kids or grandkids. I once read that double amputations rose as young workers survived explosions that would normally have killed them.
But air power alone is not enough to control a country. I feel sorry for Iran that the US ruling class will punish this ancient civilization severely but it cannot defeat it. The US ruling class, despite having all the weaponry at its disposal would have to put boots on the ground and it has only produced. Failure.
Of course, the sexual deviant Trump and all those who support war to defend markets and profits do not fight in them. They talk tough as they have a power the state gives them, but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, if these folks, especially those like the obese and frail Trump which is most of them, were in our streets, in our workplaces and our schools, they would have their asses whipped from one side of the street to another. Workers don’t like bullies.
Organized Labor’s Leadership. The Dogs That Don’t Bark
I cannot end this commentary without again pointing a finger at the moribund clique that sit atop organized labor. They are not only collectively complicit in the genocide in Palestine and the brutal, violent actions of the US government abroad, particularly with regard to the former colonial countries or what we now refer to as the global south; they are willing supporters. Silence is assent as someone once said, not always I answer, but often, yes.
These leaders, particularly in those unions that were the older, craft unions and that still have that craft mentality have a very narrow field of vision that ends beyond the jurisdiction of their own union and its members. They blindly support US foreign policy by saying nothing. The members of organized labor alone have the ability to stop the US economy from functioning. But to do this would also draw in millions of other workers throughout our nation who are suffering under capitalism in its period of decline.
The leadership of oragnized labor that has failed to prevent the decline of our living standards, pay and benefits, will be incapable of even maintaining the very basic protections as the situation worsens.
I know that there are leaders in smaller locals, mine had 800 or so members, that consider themselves leftists, or anti-capitalists of one sort or another. There are many others that are simply decent workers who want to protect their members (and their own) livelihoods. But as long as we are not on the side of all workers no matter where they live and that we refuse to break the deadly partnership the present leadership has with the employers on the job through what they call the Team Concept and break with the same partnership it has with the employer’s Democratic Party, we will all go down together, maybe not at the same time, but, as the old US slogan goes, An Injury To One is An Injury to All. And that means workers beyond the artificial borders of the capitalist nation state.
If you are one of the above in the labor movementas a rank and filer or rank and file official and you are not in a political struggle with the present bureaucracy, their disastrous pro-market policies, their army of staffers whose job it is to ensure no movement from below disrupts this situation; then you are failing your members.
Lastly, about Patriotism. What is it? Of course we love our country, our neighborhoods, our friends and co-workers. What we love about our homes and communities is not what the small minority of people that govern society and the politicians that represent them love. That’s why the concept of nationality is so absurd. The US is a settler state for one thing. The only “American” is an indigenous one. But we are here. I have no qualm’s about identify as an American worker. I have been an American worker for over 50 years. My friends are American workers. I hang out with them. I have relied on them in times of crisis. They have always had my back. The problem is that the term worker has been demeaned. There are only the super rich, the rich and us, the middle class. No workers in the US. Oh, and then there’s the poor but that a worker who has failed, a lazy worker and it’s their fault.
67,000 workers died in Vietnam in an imperialist war that was of no interest to us. The “support our troops slogan is a trick. We can support our troops by not putting them in harms way. Muhammad Ali was right about Vietnam. And Pat Tillman was murdered by the US state in my view for his views after spending time in Afghanistan.
We should not lose one son or daughter defending the racist genocidal Zionist regime or our own government’s imperial wars for profit.
The obsession with identity politics is aimed at obscuring the issue of class. Workers are gay, lesbian, transgender, black white and every color in between. Most of the disabled are workers so are the homeless. Many are atheists, more than you would think, and millions belong to one of the multitude of religions. The military is composed of workers in uniform, this is the cannon fodder they will use to defend the system that is killing us. In times of struggle we must always make class appeals to the workers in uniform. But the vast majority of us are wage workers. That is primary, there’s no shame in that word. We make society function.
That’s it.