This is not a "library issue," per se,but a reason we should amend (for timeliness) and push forward, our SRRTAC resolution re Iran ,taking it to Council at Conference.We will present an amended version which will bring it up to date, but I ask that we find TWO ALA Councilors to sign off on it and present it to Council. The movers from SRRTAC will do the presenatation at Council RTAC resolution re Iran ,taking it to Council at Conference.We will present an appropriately amended version at the appropriate time which will bring it up to date, but I ask that we find TWO ALA COUNCILORS who will sign off on it to [present to Council.
I suggest Emily Drabinsky for one possible signator....
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Hands Off Iran: The Right to Sovereignty
Any U.S. war with Iran is not a "security issue" or a "regional dispute." It is a direct attack on the basic principle of selfdetermination.
For anyone on the left, that principle is not optional. The people of Iran have the right to decide their own future-even under a repressive state, even in the middle of crisis-without U.S. bombs, sanctions, or intelligence agencies deciding for them.
Foreign intervention is not neutral. It is not "help." It is the denial of a nation's right to chart its own course.The record is not in dispute. In 1953, the CIA and Britain's MI6 overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran's democratically elected prime minister, after he dared to nationalize Iran's oil and challenge Western control over its resources. Operation Ajax destroyed a government that reflected a real democratic opening and reinstalled the Shah, whose dictatorship was armed, trained, and defended by Washington and London for a quarter century.
That wasn't an accident or a "Cold War misunderstanding." It was imperial policy: crush independence, protect Western capital, and call it "stability."
The rage that exploded in the 1979 revolution was aimed not only at a brutal monarchy, but at the foreign powers that had put it there and kept it in place.When U.S. officials and pundits talk about "regime change" in Iran today-through bombing, proxy wars, cyberattacks, or economic strangulation-they are walking the same path.
They erase this history and present Iran as a blank slate to be redesigned from Washington. They talk about "freedom" and "human rights" in the same breath that they defend sanctions which destroy medicine supplies, crush the poor, and punish ordinary people for the crime of living under the wrong government.
So let's be clear: this is not the moment to ask what the U.S. should do in Iran. It is the moment to say, without qualification: Hands off Iran.
Iran's political system is without a doubt deeply repressive. Workers, students, feminists, leftists, national minorities-countless people have been jailed, tortured, or killed for demanding change, from the 1979 revolution's betrayed promises to the Green Movement of 2009 to the "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising in 2022. None of this gives the United States the right to turn Iran into its next project.Post1979 Iran has tried, in its own contradictory and often reactionary way, to remain independent of U.S. and European domination. That independence is real, and it matters.
For anyone, however, who has watched the U.S. set Iraq on fire, occupy Afghanistan for 20 years, or help tear Libya to pieces, the pattern is obvious: invasion and regime change do NOT bring democracy or women's liberation or stability.
They bring mass graves, refugee camps, warlords, and permanent chaos. They make it harder, not easier, for people on the ground to fight for a better society.
A "Hands Off Iran" position is not a love letter to the Islamic Republic. It is a clear rejection of the imperial idea that Iran is a problem to be "fixed" by American power.
The U.S. has NO moral standing here. A state that armed the Shah's secret police, backed Saddam Hussein during his war on Iran, and has enforced crushing sanctions for decades does not get to pose as a friend of the Iranian people.
Many Iranians-including some of the regime's fiercest critics-still see independence from Washington as a nonnegotiable gain of the revolution. They do not want to trade clerical rule for an American proconsul, a NATO occupation, or a puppet government assembled in a foreign capital.
Escalation-airstrikes, sabotage, covert operations, evertightening sanctions-will not "free" anyone. It will deepen authoritarianism, fuel nationalism, shatter social movements, and push the entire region closer to a wider, possibly catastrophic war. It will close the political space that Iranians themselves have opened with their own blood.
A serious left position starts from one basic recognition: liberation cannot be delivered by an empire. When it comes to Iran, that means backing the Iranian people's struggles for justice, equality, and freedom against both their own state's repression and U.S. imperial designs. The choice is not between the Islamic Republic and American bombs. The choice is between foreign domination and real self-determination.
The U.S. has no place in deciding Iran's future.
Hands off Iran-completely.
M Rosenzweig
SRRT AC member/liaison with IRTF of SRRT