The Democrats’ Role in the Iran War

As the Trump administration’s genocidal war against Iran grows increasingly unpopular, forcing workers to fund the child-murdering imperialist ambitions of expanding regional domination, the Democratic Party mafia deceptively traffics in the peoples’ anti-war sentiments despite their own role in the torture and mass murder of Iranian people.

With the midterm electoral farce approaching, the Democrats aim to direct popular outrage toward the Iran War away from the streets and into the ballot box. To do this, they must conceal their own complicity in the US imperialist campaign against the Iranian nation and their fundamental alignment with the Trump administration’s strategic objectives in the war.

Both the Democratic and Republican mafias serve the interests of the US monopoly ruling class. They are both committed to securing the political, economic, and military domination of US imperialism over oppressed nations such as Iran, so that US monopolies can control their markets, resources, and exploit their cheap labor to reap maximum profits in collusion and contention with other imperialist powers.

The disagreements between the Democratic and Republican mafias regarding Iran are only at the tactical level. The Republicans prefer “shock-and-awe” tactics of open warfare to maintain US imperialist domination, while the Democrats prefer low-intensity warfare through sanctions and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which simultaneously bribes the oppressed countries with financial “aid” and blackmails them with starvation.

Democratic “opposition” to the war is not opposition to the genocide of the Iranian people, but rather opposition to the overt belligerence and high intensity of the war. This is because open warfare carries the real risk of threatening US domination in the region by mobilizing and organizing the masses in armed resistance against it, as we have seen with Iran’s heroic war of national resistance.

For the Democrats, the problem is not whether or not to carry out genocide, but how to best do so in the interests of US imperialism. This was made clear by Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who issued a statement on the day the Iran War was initiated on February 28: “Confronting Iran’s malign regional activities, nuclear ambitions, and harsh oppression of the Iranian people demands American strength, resolve, regional coordination, and strategic clarity. Unfortunately, President Trump’s fitful cycles of lashing out and risking wider conflict are not a viable strategy.”

Likewise, House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement criticizing the war solely on the basis of its sidestepping Congressional approval.

Just as the US was accelerating its military build-up in the region, and it became public information through the reporting of monopoly media that Trump was planning to invade Iran soon, Democrats voted on February 21 to pass $1.2 trillion in increased military funding through September 2026.

Schumer, who in the past has voted to authorize the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and enabled the Obama and Biden administrations’ expansion of their executive power to engage in assassinations, bombings, and other forms of state terrorism abroad, personally negotiated this deal with Trump and the Republicans.

Since the initiation of the Iran War, Democrats have demanded through unsuccessful resolutions that Trump comply with provisions of the War Powers Act—a piece of legislation enacted by Congress in response to US imperialist aggression in Vietnam in the 1970s—to force a Congressional vote to authorize the aggression in Iran. But this is just petty theatrics; even if the Democrats had the votes, Trump would immediately veto the resolution, with no possibility of a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress to override it.

Real and invented disagreements between the Democrats and Republicans serve the interests of both mafias and ultimately US imperialism. Each party can blame the other when its aims are not realized, drawing attention away from the root of the problem and likewise proposing solutions within the narrow confines of electoralism, mobilizing the masses behind their platforms.

Bourgeois democracy is the preferred system of government for the dictatorship of the monopoly class in the US because it allows the political representatives of its different factions to collude and contend for domination of the state bureaucracy while generating a facade of mass participation in political decision-making.

Clinton, Obama, and Biden’s Aggression Against Iran

Since the overthrow of the US-backed Pahlavi dynasty in 1979 and its replacement with the Islamists under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini—who have been mainly antagonistic toward US imperialism and its Zionist outpost in the region—the US has consistently sought to punish Iran, blockading the country and attempting to economically and militarily strangle it.

Under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, the first major rounds of sanctions that targeted civilian industries in Iran were implemented in 1995-96, which the Republican Bush administration would continue.

The new Democratic majority in Congress in 2008 would vote to authorize funds for President Bush and then President Obama to carry out a major escalation of covert operations against Iran.

Upon President Obama’s ascension to office, the coercive diplomacy of starving civilians and depriving them of access to medications through sanctions would intensify with the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010. His administration would oversee making Iran the most sanctioned country in the world, which would only be surpassed a decade later by Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Iranian government at the time made concessions to the US imperialists and agreed to a deal that allowed them to enrich uranium for civilian energy purposes, but the US never removed the sanctions.

According to the Woodrow Wilson International Center, financial sanctions resulted in a 30% drop in drug exports to Iran from the United States and the European Union in 2012. This led to shortages of drugs for the treatment of 30 illnesses such as cancer and heart and respiratory problems, and would later include blocking the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines.

While sanctions have been championed as a more “humane” alternative to invasion and occupation, they are often far more deadly than open warfare. The Lancet Global Health estimates that over 28 million people have been killed by US and European Union sanctions between 1971-2021, more than five times the number of battle-related casualties.

Obama would also remove restrictions on Israel’s ability to attack Iran, with Israel engaging in cyber-attacks and threatening to bomb Iran’s civilian nuclear program. The Obama administration increased military aid to Israel with an unprecedented $38 billion aid package, which the White House bragged was “the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history.” Then-Vice President Joe Biden told monopoly outlet ABC News that Israel had a blank check to “determine for itself what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran.”

After the first Trump administration, the Biden-Harris administration would continue the trend of further encircling Iran, expanding sanctions, and giving Israel carte blanche to carry out aerial bombardment against Iran as part of its expanded genocide in the region.

The Biden-Harris administration gave Israel a record $17.9 billion in military aid between 2023-2024, with then-President Biden telling ABC News, “We are devoted to the defense of Israel.” The administration also oversaw an increase in US troops in the region from 34,000 to 50,000 and carried out attacks on anti-imperialist forces in the region, including Ansar Allah in Yemen and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

During the 2024 presidential election campaign, when Vice President Kamala Harris was running against Trump, Harris said that Iran was the “greatest adversary” of the US, a notable shift from the imperialist rivals Russia and China, and that one of her “highest priorities” was to “ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power”.

When Trump entered office in 2025, Biden and the preceding administrations of both mafias had already laid the groundwork for the Iran War by funding and maintaining an extensive military blueprint surrounding Iran, arming its mad dog Israel and Gulf monarchies, attempting to starve and strangle the Iranian people through decades of sanctions, and carrying out extensive covert operations against Iran and throughout the region.

Image: Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy speak in the Oval Office, 2023. Credit: Picryl.

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