Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 40
October 8 – Now that Jordan has allied itself with Iraq, and Syria has openly and clearly sided with Iran, the momentum for widening the war has once again raised the specter of U.S. imperialist intervention on a scale more threatening than ever.
Having gotten away, without any opposition whatsoever from the U.S. Congress, with sending the provocative radar planes to Saudi Arabia, the Carter administration has now disclosed that it has also sent “technical” assistance to service the planes, which means the deployment of U.S. troops without the sanction of Congress. All this is in clear violation, of course, of the War Powers Act.
After getting away with this scot free, the State Department through its Deputy Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, announced that the U.S. would now “respond to requests for assistance from non-belligerent friends in the area.” The so-called non-belligerents, of course, are Oman, Kuwait, and the UAE (United Arab Emirates).
Christopher’s October 6, 1980, speech in Boston, billed as a foreign policy talk, bristled with unprecedented threats against Iran, Iraq, the Soviet Union, in fact, against any and all comers. Over and over again he stressed that the purpose was to defend “our vital interests,” speaking as though the Persian Gulf were the Hudson River or the Potomac. And, as if his audience did not remember, he again and again referred to the threat in Carter’s State of the Union message that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the U.S. and will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Never mind that Iraq and Iran are not forces from outside the Gulf area. Christopher’s invocation of Carter’s war-threatening message to the U.S. Congress in January of 1979 has now been reinterpreted to include Iraq and Iran as well as the USSR.
Clearly the danger of U.S. intervention is now greater than ever.
Is it too late to pull back from the disastrous course on which the Iraq-Iran war is now unmistakably leading? Let us recapitulate once again.
If the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein had commenced military operations merely to recoup its alleged claim to the area around the Shatt al Arab waterway and had stopped there, it could have conceivably claimed that it was merely trying to reassert sovereignty over a vital link in an area indispensable to its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
We do not believe that, however meritorious the claim, such action was necessary to the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of Iraq. Nonetheless, had the military operation stopped there, it could have conceivable remained a merely localized incident, even if some retaliation from Iran had occurred.
However, when the Iraqi military forces, accompanied by heavy artillery from air strikes as well as convoys of heavy armor, crossed the Shatt al Arab waterway into the port of Khurramshahr and went on to Abadan, it became plain that this was a war of conquest, even if judged solely by military standards.
Nevertheless, having demonstrated that it was aggressively pursuing a war of conquest with respect to Iran and having occupied significant stretches of Iranian territory as well as parts of Khurramshahr and other cities, it was still possible for the Iraqi regime to demonstrated that it had merely local, territorial interests to recoup and nothing more. It then could have done what the People’s Republic of China did in its short-lived war with India in 1962.
China was merely interested in recouping its just territorial claim, but in order to do so it moved much further into the interior of India. It then stopped, and of its own volition, without making any new demands, retreated to precisely the positions it had claimed as its own before the military operation began.
Thus Iraq had the option as late as last Thursday of unilaterally doing the same thing: declaring an end to the hostilities, abandoning the inroads it had made into Iran proper, and ordering its forces back to the Shatt al Arab territory it had claimed prior to the outbreak of military operations.
Instead of that, however, the Hussein regime unilaterally proclaimed a ceasefire, set a limit on its duration, added some impossible demands, and called for a peace conference. This was not a bona fide effort to end the hostilities, but a crudely couched ultimatum which no sovereign nation in the position of Iran today could accept.
The response from Iran was inevitable and the mutual destruction continues to take its heavy toll in human life as well as material resources.
Whether by miscalculation or design, Iraq is clearly the aggressor, clearly the violator of Iran’s integral, territorial rights, and guilty of promoting a reactionary, fratricidal war by one dependent oppressed people against another.
All so-called localized wars of the Iran-Iraq type, in which the imperialist powers are so intimately involved and have such great stakes, tend to start off with limited objectives. But the relentless pursuit of these purely limited objectives requires unlimited military means. This is the process by which so-called isolated wars turn into huge conflagrations.
After the indiscriminate destruction of the oil facilities in each of these countries, not to speak of the loss of life, nothing could compensate for the injuries inflicted, even if the war were to end today.
Politically, it has brought to the fore the most vicious chauvinism which only a bourgeois war for bourgeois aims could generate.
The progressive social and political deterioration which this war inevitably brings on, precisely because it is a war for bourgeois nationalist aims on both sides without an iota of progressive content in advancing, promoting, or completing their bourgeois, democratic revolutions, will bring to the fore reactionary political trends and forces. This will deepen their vulnerability both to imperialist attack and enticements.
Only yesterday it was disclosed that President Bani-Sadr freed more than 200 air force pilots from jail in order to fight against Iraq. Who are these imprisoned pilots?
They are from the group which earlier this year had been arrested on charges of being part of a reactionary conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian government. What does this show?
It shows that the war has forced a swing to the right, and that the Iranian regime now has to lean on the reactionary elements of the old military for its support. One of these pilots had the temerity to publicly state, “It is Iran I am fighting for, not Khomeini.” (New York Times, October 8, 1980)
Since Khomeini still appears to be the symbol of intransigence against imperialism, notwithstanding his reactionary domestic policies and “holy war” against Iraq, it is clear that what this pilot is saying is merely a generalization of the reactionary military’s attitude in the war against Iraq.
It points up the deep contradiction of the Khomeini-clerical faction which, while it stood strong against U.S. imperialism on foreign policy issues, has got itself entangled with its “holy war” against Iraq. It should not be forgotten that Khomeini has called not merely for opposition to the Iraqi regime’s claims against Iran practically since the first days of the revolution, but has called directly for the overthrow of the Iraqi government and of Saddam Hussein in particular.
“Hussein is an infidel, a person who is corrupt, a perpetrator of corruption, an atheist,” and so on and so forth. Khomeini has continued this so-called exporting of revolution to Iraq in the spirit of a religious crusade. A religious crusade, like the Christian crusades of nine centuries earlier, is always and everywhere a cover for class interests.
Whatever else may be in the mind of Khomeini, in practical political terms his Islamic crusade against Iraq (and other countries) is objectively an attempt to use a religious cover for the expansionist aims of the same, pre-revolutionary leaders of Iran of the latter part of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth whom he so violently attacked – particularly the Pahlevi dynasty.
The Iranian bourgeoisie never seems to forget that Iraq was created by Britain only in 1921. For most of this century the Iranian bourgeois-landlord regime has not only regarded Iraq as a part of the Iranian cultural sphere (Shiites are 60 percent of the population of Iraq), but has tried to dominate the area and recoup its position as the preeminent power in the Gulf – even while Iran itself was a puppet of the U.S.
The oppressed masses of Iraq and Iran cannot allow the bourgeoisie in either country to conduct a ruthless war of annihilation on the pretense that it is being conducted against imperialism. Imperialism is involved in this struggle all right, far more deeply than the masses of Iraq and Iran, and even more so of the United States, realize.
But the way to direct the struggle against imperialism is to cease this fratricidal struggle, unite the workers and oppressed in a solid front, and defeat the efforts of the Iranian and Iraqi bourgeoisie who by their instigation of this war are bringing imperialist intervention closer every day.
The need of the hour is to establish fraternal links between the revolutionary working-class vanguard organizations of Iraq and Iran. It is necessary, indeed most imperative, that the war be condemned on both sides. Its continuation facilitates the task of imperialism, and U.S. imperialism in particular, of creating a full-fledged conflagration.
It is futile to look for salvation from a widening of the war and the creation of a new bloc of Arab states against Iran. Nor can there be an alignment of forces among the Moslem countries in the region, which the Khomeini-clerical faction hopes can topple the regimes opposed to Iran. Neither of these “solutions” can in any way be regarded as viable. They can only lead deeper into the mire.
The reactionary bourgeois elements in the Arab world look to the first alternative as the solution, and hope to carry it out under the mask of Arab unity against Iran. In reality, it can only be a camouflage for promoting the imperialist aim of overthrowing the Iranian regime and installing a pro-U.S. puppet regime.
The second alternative, on which the Khomeini-clerical group has stacked its hopes, is internally contradictory. If it is conceived as an anti-imperialist struggle, it misses the target completely. Even in the eventuality that Khomeini succeeds in exporting his so-called Islamic revolution to Iraq, and the present regime is overthrown as a result of his so-called religious crusade, it would bring to the fore in Iraq not a more anti-imperialist regime but an extreme right-wing one, susceptible if not completely subservient to imperialism.
This would immeasurably worsen the situation for Iran. It would, in fact, completely discredit and disprove Khomeini’s mythological religious position. It would demonstrate that holding similar religious beliefs, while having antagonistic bourgeois nationalist interests, does not at all spell out cooperation. Did the mutual Catholic belief in Germany and Poland, for instance, prevent Germany’s aggression in either world war?
Only the working class and the oppressed masses have a true identity of interest in ending this cruel war. Only the working class can be consistently internationalist, anti-imperialist, and thoroughly socialist in its world outlook.
Last updated: 11 May 2026