Workers World, Vol. 21, No. 48
December 5 – The United Nations Security Council resolution adopted yesterday on the Iranian crisis is not likely to be more than a footnote to history when the struggle of the Iranian people finally emerges victorious. It does, however, have more than topical significance in viewed in the light of the overall anti-imperialist struggle.
In the first place, it has to be remembered that this resolution was adopted under the unremitting pressure of American finance capital. The U.S. has made a point of trying to mobilize all the forces it could gather under its umbrella in an attempt to isolate Iran at the same time that it is using other methods in an effort to topple the Iranian government.
In its lead story on the UN Security Council resolution, today’s New York Times boasts that the resolution rendered “a rare degree of support in the UN for an American position, one that ran from the Soviet Union and China to the Third World through traditional Western allies.”
Nevertheless, the resolution, while calling on the Iranian government “to release immediately the personnel of the Embassy of the USA being held in Tehran and to provide them protection and allow them to leave the country,” did not contain the so-called condemnatory clause which the U.S. was most anxious to have in order to indict the struggle of the Iranian people and their government in the eyes of world public opinion. To that extent, the most flagrant effort of Pentagon diplomacy failed.
The resolution also, in its introductory paragraph, implicitly warned the U.S. against “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This certainly was not pointed at Iran, but only at the U.S. The resolution also urged both the U.S. and Iran to take steps to peacefully resolve the remaining issues which, in the language of imperialist diplomacy, could mean offering the UN as a forum to take up the issue of the shah.
The U.S. government, however, did get its way on the whole. The resolution specifically calls for the release of the hostages but makes no specific mention at all of the return of the shah to Iran.
Of course, if one wishes to consider the resolution as a whole, it is possible for the Iranian government to view the Security Council action as a retreat by the U.S. It does not contain any condemnation of Iran, which the U.S. savagely pushed for, and urges negotiation while warning the U.S. against intervention. Whether the Iranian government should avail itself of the opportunity to indict the U.S. in an international forum after releasing the hostages is obviously an acute political question facing the Iranian government.
The issue, however, that has worldwide significance of a general character is the position that both China and the Soviet Union took in finally voting for the resolution along with the imperialists and some Third World countries which are at the mercy of U.S. and Allied imperialism.
China’s vote on the issue, which is in sharp contrast to its years of having fought the U.S. as the “greatest enemy of mankind” and having postured as the leader of the Third World, is more understandable in the light of the virtual alliance with the U.S. and NATO against the USSR that China’s present leaders have developed. But the position of the USSR is less consistent.
The Soviet delegate at the UN took great pains to show that the USSR was merely affirming its own position of abiding by all the laws and conventions of international organizations to which it is a signatory. All this is very fine. But the voting, in reality, was not on an abstract legal principle.
The voting was on a political issue of the most immediate, practical significance for the besieged Iranian masses. The U.S. was merely using a patently obvious trick of diplomacy to isolate and condemn the Iranian revolutionary struggle against imperialism.
If one has to choose between abstract bourgeois legalisms and the concrete rights of oppressed people in the struggle for liberation, how should a socialist state conduct itself?
It is understandable that, as Lenin recognized long ago, the USSR exists not only in a hostile environment but “in a system of states.” It does and should conform to legal and conventional diplomatic modalities when that serves its socialist interests and is not inconsistent with the revolutionary interests of oppressed people and the working class as a whole.
Clearly the Security Council resolution did not serve the interests of Iran or the anti-imperialist struggle as a whole. And what was there to gain for the USSR? A pat on the back from whom?
Of course, there might have been an outcry from the rightwing here and an intensification of anti-Soviet propaganda if the USSR had voted against the resolution. It surely would have once again been the occasion for threats to scuttle the SALT treaty. But almost all, if not all, the U.S. senators who have proclaimed themselves ready to vote for SALT have said that they would do so because it is in the “national interest,” that is, in the imperialist interests of the U.S., and not for any other reason.
And even if there were a danger that the treaty would be scuttled if the USSR supported the Iranian position in the UN, the USSR (and China) could have merely absented themselves from the session considering the resolution, as others have done on many occasions.
Also, as the Soviet ambassador to Canada pointedly alluded to in a speech just the other day, the U.S. hijacking of a Soviet jetliner last August and the holding of about 100 people hostage was in flagrant violation of the very rules of diplomacy and conventions which the U.S. is now so loudly proclaiming in the UN. The attempt to hold the Aeroflot jet and prevent it from leaving for its destination was a provocative act and violated the very same principles of international diplomacy which the U.S. is now seeking to employ against Iran.
In the eyes of those who regard themselves as dispassionate observers, this certainly would have been good enough reason to abstain in the Security Council voting.
Up until today, when Pravda is reported to have carried a strong editorial attacking the U.S., the Soviet press has also been somewhat muted in its exposure of U.S. maneuvers and the interventionist plot against Iran. And that has been taken note of by the imperialists. Rather than responding with any conciliatory gestures, however, the U.S. government has utilized its provocation against the Iranian people to hike up the military budget. Nor has it missed any opportunity to point to the Iranian crisis as being merely one facet in the worldwide struggle against the USSR, its socialist allies, and all the oppressed people.
If the hand of Pentagon imperialism has been stayed temporarily, if the U.S. has not openly intervened in Iran militarily, if the vast armada that the U.S. has amassed at the doorstep of Iran and the USSR has not yet become “operational,” it is not due to any of the restraining influences of the UN Security Council or to the gestures of support for U.S. imperialist diplomacy by the socialist countries in the UN. It is due to the firestorm of revolutionary, anti-imperialist protest in the beleaguered oppressed countries.
The burning and sacking of the U.S. Consulate in Libya was merely one more additional proof of the tremendous gulf between the mood of the oppressed people and that of the governmental authorities in the UN Security Council. One has to view it from the vantage point of the people, the mass of the oppressed and exploited, and not from the seductive, unctuous entreaties of the Security Council.
The perspective from which it must be seen has finally been made absolutely clear by the Saudi Arabian war. Yes, the Saudi Arabian war, the war of the Arabian masses against the Saudi Arabian “shah” and his royal clique.
A UPI release of Dec. 4 has finally drawn back the curtain of silence from the Saudi Arabian struggle. So it appears that no less than 20,000 troops were necessary to subjugate what supposedly was merely a handful of “fanatics”! How come then that over 130 people were killed – 60 Saudi troops from the National Guard and 75 from the so-called religious fanatics – and 200 wounded?
If one were to translate this massive struggle into comparable U.S. figures, it would mean that more than 250,000 troops were deployed and as many as 1,000 – 2,000 were killed on both sides of the battlefield. Would anybody believe that this was due merely to the eccentricities or excessive zeal of a fanatical religious sect? Isn’t it obvious that it was in reality a profound social and political struggle under cover of religion?
The fact of the matter is that the firestorm of revolutionary struggle of the oppressed masses has been the one element that has helped stay the hand of U.S. militarism. The Security Council resolution, in reality, represents a cover and a screen by which the Pentagon hopes to prepare the next phase of its maniacal drive to regain U.S. world domination.
Last updated: 11 May 2026