The United States Navy's torpedoing of the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on March 4 was a war crime. A submarine of the most powerful military force in the world snuck up on an isolated vessel posing no threat to anyone, gave no warning, offered no opportunity for surrender, and sent more than 140 sailors to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The Trump administration has not offered a single word of justification. It has not claimed self-defense. It has not alleged imminent threat. It has offered nothing—because it does not believe that anything is required.
The IRIS Dena was not in Iranian waters. It was not in the Persian Gulf, not in any declared exclusion zone, and not part of any active naval engagement. It was sailing alone in international waters, thousands of miles from the nearest combat theater, returning home after participating, at India's explicit invitation, in the International Fleet Review 2026 and the multinational MILAN 2026 exercise at Visakhapatnam. American and Iranian naval officers had attended the same professional gatherings on Indian soil only days before the criminal attack on the ship.
The United States possessed every means to warn this vessel. It possessed every means to demand her diversion to a neutral port. No warning was given because none was intended. After the attack, the US submarine made no attempt to rescue survivors. The 32 sailors who survived owe their lives entirely to Sri Lanka's rescue operations.
The Iranian sailors who were murdered have no names in the American press. They have no faces. They have no families that Western journalists have been dispatched to interview.
This crime is part of a far broader catastrophe. Great centers of civilization—Tehran, Isfahan, Qom—are being bombed and destroyed as the Trump administration escalates a war aimed at the obliteration of Iranian society. After the assault on Venezuela and the attempted strangulation of Cuba, the regime has expanded its campaign of violence across the Middle East and beyond.
Gaza was the dress rehearsal. Now the target is a country of 90 million people, and the danger is not only regional devastation but a wider war threatening the entire world.
While Trump and the Israeli regime are spearheading this war, the Democratic Party is fully complicit, the corporate media functions as a propaganda arm of the state, and the European powers are lining up behind Washington.
The same government that authorizes murder in the Indian Ocean has justified the killing of Americans on the streets of Minneapolis. The Trump administration is implementing one doctrine domestically and internationally in the interests of the same ruling class, a corporate-financial oligarchy dragging society into the abyss.
The purpose of Sunday's meeting is to tell the truth about the war, expose its real aims, and advance the program and strategy necessary to organize opposition—above all, the independent mobilization of the international working class against imperialist war and dictatorship.
We urge all readers and supporters of the WSWS to register today, attend the webinar, and share the event as widely as possible.
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