Australia’s Labor government has been among the most explicit and rapid of US allies in backing the illegal war against Iran by the Trump administration and the Israeli regime. Labor is politically supporting a historic crime—a blatant war of aggression that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East and the world. 

Politically, Labor is justifying the massive and continuing bombardment of a historically oppressed country, which could claim tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives. Materially, Australia is directly involved in the onslaught through its close integration into the US military-intelligence apparatus, including the Pine Gap spy base in central Australia, through which American imperialism surveils much of the world and obtains targeting information.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rushed out a statement endorsing the initial US/Israeli strikes just three hours after they had been launched, one of the first by any world leader. Trump began the war in the dead of the night, while most Americans were sleeping and without even the fig leaf of Congressional approval. Albanese similarly proclaimed Australia’s support for a major new war on Saturday evening, Australian time, without a pretence of public or parliamentary discussion.

Albanese’s statement was a compendium of the lying talking points used by the US and Israel to justify their unprovoked aggression. “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security,” he declared. Those claims are on a par with the lies about weapons of mass destruction used as the pretext for the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Just four days before the US launched its strikes, Trump had proclaimed in his State of the Union address that the US had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment program in bombings last year. The attack occurred, moreover, amid talks at which Iran had expressed its willingness to submit to ongoing international monitoring of its enrichment program. Those talks were simply a smokescreen behind which the US prepared war.

More broadly, the invocations of a non-existent “nuclear threat” are an exercise in staggering hypocrisy. The US, the only country to have used atomic weapons, maintains the world’s largest arsenal. While Iran has never had a nuclear weapon, Israel has a stockpile of nuclear arms which it has always refused to disclose or submit to monitoring.

Albanese similarly presented the war as a response to the Iranian government’s “oppression” and “brutal crackdown on its own people.” He added: “For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force.”

Those claims are a total inversion of reality. American imperialism, backed by its allies including Australia, is the most “destabilising force” on the planet, and has targeted the Middle East with decades of predatory wars and occupations. Israel is a lawless regime that functions as a militarised base of imperialism in the region.

The suggestion that Trump or Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu are seeking to liberate the people of Iran, by dropping bombs on them, is obscene. Their attitude to the Iranian masses is no different to their attitude to the Palestinians, whom they have subjected to a genocide in Gaza for more than two years.

The real aim of the war is to establish total neo-colonial control over one of the most strategically crucial countries in the Middle East. For the strategists of American imperialism, subjugating Iran is seen as crucial to the confrontation with Russia and above all the preparations for a catastrophic war against China.

Albanese’s lies have been repeated by other government ministers since Saturday night. 

He and Foreign Minister Penny Wong have declared that the world will “not mourn” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian leader killed in the initial US strikes. That is a declaration of support for Trump’s doctrine of simply assassinating foreign leaders viewed as an obstacle to the interests of American imperialism. 

Defence Minister Richard Marles brushed aside the obvious illegality of the war, declaring, “The legality is a matter for both the United States and Israel to go through,” before reiterating Labor’s support for the strikes.

On Monday, the Liberal-National Coalition put a motion to parliament explicitly supporting the war, which was voted for by Labor and by the far right One Nation party. 

Meanwhile the entire press, from the Murdoch outlets, to those of Nine Media and the publicly-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, is pumping out war propaganda, revelling in Trump’s homicidal statements against Iranian leaders and presenting the war as some sort of humanitarian mission.

There has been no media scrutiny of Australia’s likely involvement in the strikes. Wong refused to answer a question as to whether Pine Gap had played a role, declaring it was a matter of policy not to comment on the facility.

In fact, it is almost certain that information collected at Pine Gap has been used to target the strikes. While it is often described as a spy facility, intelligence experts have stated that Pine Gap would more accurately be described as a war planning base. It operates two Orion geosynchronous signals intelligence satellites over the Indian Ocean, which surveil much of the world, from Africa to the Middle-East and Europe.

Pine Gap was used to facilitate the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as well as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Australia was among the US allies that participated in both of those criminal wars. In 2003, Labor, then in opposition, sought to cover up its backing for the blatantly illegal war, suggesting that the US seek a UN mandate before levelling Iraq. Now, Labor in office is openly supporting a war that is every bit as criminal.

Its embrace of Trump’s strikes has been noted internationally. In an online program on Sunday, former British Tory politician Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, a right-wing Labourite associated with Tony Blair, were discussing international responses to the attack. 

Campbell noted the nervous reaction of US allies, especially the European powers, who have tacitly backed the US while expressing fear over the potentially destabilising consequences of the war. He asked if any US allies had explicitly and openly endorsed the attack, to which Stewart responded “Anthony Albanese.”

That points to Australia’s increasingly central role, as a key international ally of US imperialism as it seeks to offset its historic decline through unrestrained militarism and war. Labor has backed the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, as well as the US-Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

In the Indo-Pacific, it is completing Australia’s transformation into a frontline state for a US war against China, including with a vast expansion of US basing and the largest expansion of the Australian military since World War II. Labor’s support for the war on Iran, part of Washington’s developing global conflict with Beijing, is a signal of its backing for US aggression and war plans directed against China.

As part of its backing for the Gaza genocide, Labor, like imperialist governments internationally, has carried out sweeping attacks on democratic rights. A battery of laws has been put in place, curtailing the rights to protest and political expression, based on the fraudulent conflation of opposition to the Israeli war crimes with antisemitism. 

That has been not only an attempt to shut down the protest movement against the genocide, but preparation to repress the mass anti-war sentiment that will emerge among workers and youth to the broader eruption of imperialist militarism, including war against Iran.

That sentiment can only go forward through a direct political fight against the Labor government. It must be based on the perspective of building an international anti-war movement, that mobilises the power of the working class against all of the governments involved and the source of war, the capitalist system itself.