August 1984

Persian Gulf Conflict

A war against the peoples of Iraq and Iran

by Jean Philippe Divès

The war between Iran and Iraq, which is lasting already 45 months and is the bloodiest ongoing armed conflict in the planet, has taken a new aspect since last April.
In that moment, the first attacks of the Iraqi planes took place against oil tankers of different countries, even those of neighbouring countries allied to Iraq, which were loaded in Iranian ports. From that moment on, the attacks have not ceased. The Iraqi regime started to fulfill the threat it had launched in August 1982, when it decreed the blockade to the Iranian Jang oil terminal and announced it would bomb without warning any tanker inside some exclusion zones. The Iranian government had, in time, replied by threatening with “creating insecurity in the region so that the enemy powers cannot export their oil” (1). This Iranian threat of a blockade in Ormuz strait (the Persian Gulf mouth to the Indian Ocean, a place where 20% of the world oil production passes through) caused the imperialist powers to put up a serious guard, which, in time, reinforced their military devices in the region.

Because of the tactical-military almost impossibility of being successful in making that blockade, and likewise if such measure took place it would prevent the Iranian oil exports (which are the main source of income for the country and allow the Islamic regime to keep the war going), the Khomeini government hasn’t tried any blockade to the strait and it is very unlikely they will. They did execute the first part of their threat, answering the Iraqi airstrikes with strikes against tankers of Arab countries allied to Iraq and USA grouped in the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and UAE).

From both sides, the “oil weapon” has joined in the game. The economic war is now completing the armed confrontation on the ground in the border between the two countries. Iraq, who suffered the 1984 February-March Iranian offensive and expects a new offensive that would threaten to cut the supply lines for its troops, needs to deal an economic blow to Iran to weaken its resistance potential. According to some sources (2), the Iranian oil exports were reduced in half due to the attacks. The Iranian retaliation did not have the goal of “internationalizing” the conflict but to pressure, through the allies of Iraq and the imperialist powers, to put an end to the Iraqi attacks.

A first immediate result of the new escalate in the Gulf is the increase of the military assistance of USA to the Gulf Cooperation Council, mainly Saudi Arabia, who got Stinger missiles and F-15 warplanes (the most sophisticated ones nowadays). Besides, the US army has organized, thanks to its Awacs radar planes, a permanent surveillance on the Gulf, which recently allowed the Saudi air force to destroy two Iranian planes that were about to attack one of its tankers. So the new situation created in the Gulf has allowed an intensification of the presence and military intervention of imperialism.

But at the same time it is threatening the expansion of the conflict and is, therefore, an economic threat to the strategic imperialist interests. It does not seem that this situation can end in a big oil crisis in the short run. With the exception of Japan, the imperialist powers have notably reduced their oil dependence from the Gulf in the last years. They have oil reserves for an estimate of three months consumption. The idle capacity of the world oil production is estimated in 15-20 percent, and the main consumers would be then able to successfully face even a total oil cut from the Gulf. For these reasons, the military escalation in the Gulf has not caused, so far, a relevant political or economic crisis. At least, these were the arguments of the Reagan government to “disdramatize” the situation. On the other hand, a non-immediate direct military intervention of imperialism in the region cannot be discarded.
More than ever, this situation demands a deep analisys on th part of the revolutionary Marxists about the Iran-Iraq conflict and a clear position to be taken on it.
It is not possible to understand the reasons for the conflict without putting it in the international and national context at the moment it broke out, mainly in the context of the general situation in the Middle East and the situation that was opened in Iran and in neighbouring areas after the fall of the Shah and the instauration of the Khomeinist regime in 1979.

The situation in the region is characterized, first of all, by an extraordinary uprising in the class struggle and the fight for national liberation (including the liberation of national minorities such as the Kurds, which are oppressed by the regimes of semi-colonial countries). These struggles put the imperialist order in question and in particular they threaten the national borders that arose from the decolonization process. The February 1979 Iranian revolution, which toppled a dictatorial regime allied to imperialism and based on the fifth most powerful army in the world is precisely, up to now, the highest expression of the uprising of these struggles.

A second phenomena of great significance is the irremediable crisis of the current which, during the 1950s and the 60s, constituted the main leadership of the mass movement in the region: Arab nationalism, the movement created by Nasser in Egypt as well as the Baaz parties (Socialist Party of the Arab Revival) in Syria and Iraq, lost the credit and support of the masses they used to have in their beginnings. The “Arab nationalist” regimes, those who oppose to imperialism and every day more and more agree with it, are nowadays practically reduced to military-bureaucratic dictatorships of their own national bourgeoisies.

It is precisely in these countries, such as Iran, where a new mass current rose up strongly, one that organizes entire layers of the petty bourgeoisie and de-classed sectors, whose aspirations is expressed by Islamic integralism, a medieval reactionary ideology that rejects symmetrically both imperialism and the emancipation of the proletariat. All this is done in the name of the utopia of “returning to Islam”. This current, with a force of 180,000 mullahs (religious doctors), placed itself at the head of the Iranian revolution at the beginning of February 1979 and, from there on, it successfully managed to make the gigantic mass movement to retreat after it was liberated. With this, Khomeini showed, in its deeds, the limits of Muslim integralism. Despite his third-world anti-imperialist rhetoric, he ends up capitulating to the bourgeoisie and imperialism, becoming their agent against the workers movement.

The Iranian revolution and Khomeini

A conjunction of factors, among which the main one is the huge political weakness of the Iranian workers movement, the inexperience and the lack of traditions of independent organization of its proletariat, put Khomeini and the Shiite hierarchy at the head of the mass movement in 1978-1979 and then of the Iranian state.

The “modernizing” economic policy followed by the Shah regime had only benefitted ultra-minoritarian bourgeois sectors connected to the imperialist companies. In particular, it crashed against the interests of the powerful traditional Iranian trader and industrial bourgeoisie (the “Bazaar” bourgeoisie). The latter massively bankrolled, through the Shiite hierarchy (for which the only legit power is Islam) channels, what put the mullahs in a privileged situation for that role. Khomeini himself recognized the close dependence of his regime regarding to the Bazaar when he recently declared “If the Bazaar moved away from the Islamic Republic, the Republic would be at risk of a defeat”. (3)

In the course of the months that followed the fall of the Shah, Khomeini and the mullahs accomplished the mission they had been appointed to by the Bazaar, that is, to defeat the mass movement and rebuild the bourgeois state. The clashes between the Islamic regime and imperialism (of which its top moment was the US embassy occupation from November 1979 up to January 1981) and with other sectors of the Iranian bourgeoisie, the ones that had fought against the Shah but were opposed to the total control of the state apparatus by the Shiite hierarchy (the sectors represented by Bazargan and Bani Sadr later) are within this frame. They reflect, in the first case, the divergences of the interests between a nationalist bourgeois regime and imperialism, and in the second case, the divergences among the Iranian bourgeoisie itself about the type of relationship to have with imperialism and the mass movement.

None of them are reasons to label the Islamic regime as “popular” or “antiimperialist”. The way in which the US embassy occupation ended shows the “anti-imperialism” of this regime. It betrayed the mass mobilization that took place and that hit hard on imperialism (the failed Tabas operation in April 1980 organized by the US government with the goal of freeing the hostages was one of the causes of Carter’s electoral defeat that year), the Iranian government, besides freeing the hostages without receiving anything in return, signed a financial agreement whose consequence was to give US imperialism billions of dollars as repayment of fraudulent debts taken by the previous regime.

Since arriving to power, Khomeini led a merciless military struggle against the Kurdish movements, which were only demanding autonomy within the frame of the Iranian state. Defending the private property at all times (including the property of the capitalists and landowners that had supported the Shah regime) according to the “Islamic law”, the new regime and its party, the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) took care of liquidating the independent movement of the shora (workers’ councils) which came out very strongly during the February 1979 insurrection and had got in some regions the characteristics of true workers’ power organs. For this, they used a two-faced policy. At the beginning they tried to group and integrate the shoras to the new bourgeois institutions and when this was not possible, they used a sometimes selective, sometimes massive repression.
The same repression was carried out against the left organizations, including those like Tudeh (“The masses”, the Iranian Communist Party), which had multiplied their statements and deeds in subordination to the Islamic leaders. According to an Iranian leftist source, in 1981 alone, around 20,000 political prisoners (mostly leftist opposition or Kurdish militants) were executed in Iran, while 60,000 went to the jails of the regime (4). According to other source, quoting leaders of the Mujahidins (the main “leftist” Iranian organization, a populist petty bourgeois organization which calls for a “progressive” Islamism and promotes the armed struggle against the current regime) since 1979 a total of 30,000 dissidents have been executed, while 100,000 are currently imprisoned in Iran (5). 

Little by little, as the cleric-bourgeois reaction was gaining ground over the revolution, Khomeini lost his “Kerenskyist” characteristics. He moved from being a bourgeois leader forced to give concessions to the independent mass movement and trying to use it, to becoming a Bonaparte, at the head of a solid ultra-reactionary dictatorship, and at the same time, with very particular characteristics. In other words, Khomeini is, in the particular context of Muslim integralism, a victorious Kerensky, who managed to defeat the mass movement and the revolution. This victory over the mass movement was accomplished, bradly speaking, during the second semester of 1981 and ended up, from the point of view of the type of installed repressive regime as well as its consequences in the conflict against Iraq, in some barbarism that has nothing to envy to the one existing under the previous regime. In this sense, Iran is an extreme example of how the lack of a revolutionary leadership can transform the greatest victories of the mass movement in their opposite, or to end up in situations in which the society as a whole suffers a brutal backwardness, being vulnerable to internal decomposition phenomena.
The Iranian fundamentalist bourgeois state is of a very particular type. The fundamental social base of the Khomeinist leadership is made up of members of the institutions of the Islamic regime (mosques, Islamic committees, guards of the revolution, crusade for reconstruction, Islamic associations of civil servants and companies, etc.), a true privileged caste whose importance is estimated at 10 percent of the economically active population. This new state bureaucracy benefits, together with the bourgeoisie, from the various material factors agreed upon by the regime thanks to oil revenues, one of the highest in the world. An even more important fraction of the population subsists only on the subsidies granted by the various Islamic institutions.
The Islamic regime, as it exists today, could not impose itself without finding resistance since the very day of the fall of the Shah. On the contrary, the next months after the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty witnessed an important development of the revolutionary activity of the masses, marked in particular by the generalization of the rise of shoras and structures of the same type in the countryside. It was not until after a two-and-a-half-year struggle (that is, at the end of 1981) that the Shiite hierarchy succeeded in destroying the independent manifestations of the mass movement, seizing absolute control of all the cogs of power and, on that basis, relatively stabilizing the bourgeois state.
The Iranian attack in September 1980 occurred at a crucial moment in the counterrevolutionary process carried out by the Khomeinist leadership: the independent movement of the shoras, after a certain reactivation in the heat of a wave of economic struggles of the working class, was the target of a frontal offensive by the regime. The "national union" campaign, which the Islamic regime was able to undertake in the face of the Iraqi attack, allowed it to deliver decisive blows against any independent expression of the working class.
Despite the policy of the Khomeinist leadership, the Iranian revolution still represented, on the eve of the outbreak of war, a pole of reference and an important revolutionary ferment, particularly for the oppressed masses of the neighboring countries. The dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein in particular (one of the most bloodthirsty regimes in the entire Middle East), felt threatened by the wave unleashed by the Iranian revolution, which threatened to spread to Iraq through the communicating vessels represented by the national Kurdish minority and the Iraqi Shiite community.
The Kurdish nation is today divided between five countries: Syria, the USSR and, particularly, Turkey and Iraq (where Kurdish workers represent about 30 percent of the population) and Iran. In these last two countries, for many years, a mass guerrilla has opposed the regimes that ruled. The Shiite community is the majority in Iraq, where high state positions are, despite a formally secular structure, in the hands of the Sunni minority (Sunni Arabs make up only 15 percent of the population). The Shiite movements in Iraq (supported from Tehran) fundamentally reflect the demands of the poor peasants of that country, to which the Iranian revolution had given a new impetus.
To a lesser extent, the Iranian Islamic regime itself, the one that, since before the Iraqi attack, multiplied the calls to Iraqi Muslims to throw out "the impious dictatorship of Saddam", constituted a threat for the latter. The Iranian fundamentalist regime defines itself, in effect, as the first detachment of the Islamic revolution that will liberate the Muslim world, as a non-nationalist regime but with a “pan-Islamic” vocation. The support it gives to the fundamentalist movements of neighboring countries (especially the Shiite of Iraq) is real and responds to a need: the dictatorship of the mullahs finds in it a justification for its existence and maintenance, an adequate ideological legitimation to counterbalance the limits inherent to its character as a parasitic regime, as a "historical accident" arising from exceptional circumstances.

The Iraqi attack and Saddam Hussein's targets

On September 17, 1980, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein announced his government's decision to unilaterally cancel the Algiers accords, which he had signed in 1975 with the Shah's regime. The Algiers accords, supported by imperialism (of whom the Shah's Iran was the gendarme in the region), gave the Persian empire part of sovereignty over the Shat-El-Arab (mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, the only maritime access route of Iraq to the Persian Gulf) and on three small Iraqi islands, of strategic importance, since they are located in the Strait of Hormuz.
Under the pretext of avenging this affront, the Iraqi armies crossed the border on September 21 and began the war on Iranian territory.
However, the true counterrevolutionary objectives of the Iraqi aggression were soon exposed. The territorial claims, although important (sovereignty over Shat-El-Arab, the three islands of the Strait of Hormuz and we also must add the old Iraqi dream of annexing the Arab Khuzestan, where most of the Iranian oil wells are located), have certainly not been decisive. Fundamentally, Saddam Hussein wanted to lift the mortgage that his regime feels, through the Shiite and Kurdish communicating vessels, because of the process unleashed by the Iranian revolution and the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. At the same time, he sought to defeat a regime that kept strong tensions with imperialism, to be recognized by the latter as its new gendarme in the region, replacing the Shah's regime, to obtain from that situation all the political and economic benefits that he would have the right to expect.
The weakening of the Iranian Armed Forces after the February 1979 revolution, the dissensions that took place at that time between the forces that had taken part in the overthrowing of the Shah (first clashes between the mollahs and Bani Sadr, beginning of the repression against the Iranian left, open civil war of the Khomeinist regime against the Iranian Kurds, etc.) and the international isolation in which the Islamic regime found itself since the beginning of the occupation of the US embassy, ​​seemed to indicate to Saddam Hussein that the moment was ripe for a strong blow that would quickly end with Khomeini.
To do this, Saddam Hussein openly allied with the forces of the former Iranian regime that were embarking on the preparations for a restorationist coup. A Baghdad government communiqué, which was published on September 25, stated that he did not wish to "confront the regular Iranian army, but only the Khomeinist guards" (6).
The reactionary Arab governments allied to US imperialism (Saudi Arabia in the front row, of those countries in the region), equally frightened by the aftermath of the revolution and the "pan-integralist" declarations of the Khomeinist regime, openly supported the Iraqi offensive. The imperialist powers and the Soviet bureaucracy did so tactically, blocking at the UN any clear condemnation of Iraqi aggression, and duplicating their military and economic aid to Iraq.
The support of imperialism for Saddam Hussein and the alliances that he had forged to achieve his objectives make pretty clearly the counterrevolutionary character of the invasion of September 1980. It is not true, however, that the Iraqi regime was a direct agent or a simple pawn of imperialism. The massive Soviet presence in Iraq (80 percent of ultramodern Iraqi weaponry is supplied by the USSR) predisposed the imperialist leaders to be circumspect. And, above all, Saddam's regime remained the enemy of Israel, the main gendarme and a fundamental pillar (even more so since the fall of the Shah) of imperialism in the Middle East. In this regard, it is necessary to remember that in June 1981, that is, in the middle of the war against Iran, a raid by Zionist aviation destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Tammuz (near Baghdad), recently handed over by France. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that the imperialist governments have approved the Iraqi annexation project of Khuzestan which, if it had been applied, could have unleashed a dynamic of questioning all the borders drawn, largely artificially, during the colonial period.
In the first years of his dictatorship (Saddam Hussein took power in 1968), the current Iraqi regime of the bourgeois nationalist type appeared as a scarecrow for imperialism, in a way like the Khomeinist regime today. He had carried out important nationalizations, especially in the oil field. He was considered as the "hard wing" of Arab nationalism, supporter of the most radical tendencies of the Palestinian movement and irreducible enemy of Israel. By the mid-1970s, Saddam's regime however began to moderate its intransigence. The signing of the Algiers accords in 1975 was the price he paid to obtain the support of the United States, Israel and Iran to crush the military rebellion of the Kurds of Iraq, led by Barzani. Subsequently, the Iraqi regime, which was from the beginning a fierce anti-popular dictatorship, continued its evolution to the right also in the international political arena. In this it followed the trajectory of the other Arab nationalist regimes.

The Iraqi military failure

All the calculations made by the Iraqi leaders on the eve of the invasion of September 1980 had to collapse in the face of the resistance of the Iranian masses, whose mobilization again developed with powerful momentum during the first months of the war.  The Iranian masses (including the Kurds of Iran, who were then in the midst of a civil war against the Khomeinist regime, the Arab population of Khuzistan and the left-wing organizations) defended the conquests of the February 1979 revolution (that the new regime was then far from having completely liquidated) against those who tried to reduce them to nothing.
Since November 1980, the Iraqi advance has been blocked. For nine days the population of the Arab city of Korramshar resisted the Iraqi armies, although the regular Iranian army and the army of the guardians of the revolution had fled. This action (in which leftist organizations played an essential role) marked a decisive turning point in the first phase of the war. In all the cities of Iran, the people took to the streets to ask for weapons to confront the invader. The Islamic regime then set up, to channel this movement, the bassijs (mobilization committees), within which the volunteers were placed under the authority of the pasdaran (guardians of the revolution).
Between September 1981 and June 1982, the Iranian counteroffensive took place, at the end of which the Iraqi army was pushed back to the other side of the border. On June 10, 1982, the Iraqi government was forced to call for a ceasefire.
The Iranian Islamic leaders then expressed their intention to continue the war on Iraqi territory, until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Shiite Islamic regime in Baghdad. But actually, they continued the conflict for internal order reasons, fundamentally with the objective of consolidating their power and definitively crushing the independent movement of the masses in Iran. It was very useful for them to be able to denounce and repress as "agents of Saddam Hussein and imperialism" all those who opposed his regime.
Despite the fact that the Iraqi army had suffered defeat after defeat throughout the past year, the military situation changed from the summer of 1982. From that moment on, Iraqi troops resisted and clung to their positions as long as possible along the border. The conflict was transformed from that moment into an uninterrupted trench warfare, by bloody and ineffective Iranian offensives. In these offensives, Iran compensates its inferiority in heavy weapons with the number of its fighters (Iran has more than 40 million inhabitants against only 12 in Iraq). Members of the Bassijs, mostly teenagers, recruited increasingly against their will, are launched in waves against machine guns and Iraqi artillery.
In two years, the front line hardly changed. The casualties in the two camps (estimated at 70 thousand Iraqis and 400 thousand Iranians) (7), as well as the use of gas by the Iraqi army, reaffirm the impression of a carnage comparable to the war of 1914-1918. In any case, the opposite of an image of a revolutionary war of liberation that the Khomeinist regime wants to give to the conflict.
In fact, the military situation of the conflict does nothing but translate a situation and relations of political forces inherent in a war that, from both camps, has a totally counterrevolutionary character.
On the Iraqi side, it is clear that the calls of the Iranian Islamic leaders inviting the Iraqi masses to rise up to liberate themselves from the "impious" dictatorship of Saddam Hussein have not found the expected echo.
Indeed, the clerical regime in Tehran offers little appeal to the oppressed masses. Furthermore, the war and the objectives assigned to it by the Khomeinist leadership are directly opposed to national sentiment, to the right of self-determination of the Iraqi masses. Of Shiite or Sunni confession, they are defending their Arab country against the Persian invader.
On the Iranian side, it seems that popular support for the war has decreased notably: “the great patriotic demonstrations that were still going on last year, especially after the recapture of Khorramshar (May 24, 1982), seem to have disappeared. Continuing a bloody conflict in recklessness no longer motivates anyone. Even in the moderate and popular sectors, the criminal use of war by the government is denounced as a diversionary maneuver to make people forget their deficiencies and to better crush their political rivals in the interior of the country. The bloody tragedy has lasted long enough, as shown by the demonstration in Desful, a city often bombarded by Iraqi aviation, against the futile continuation of hostilities” (8). Comments reflect, as a result of this situation, growing differences between the dignitaries of the Islamic regime. But the crushing of the opposition and the current effects of the fierce Islamic dictatorship on the workers' and mass movement prevent the expression in Iran of a true anti-war movement.

War only serves imperialism and the reaction

The massive mobilization of the Iranian population before the invasion of the Iraqi troops had destroyed the dreams of greatness of the Iraqi dictator. But the effects of the war in Iran would show that the Iraqi military aggression had achieved, in a way, the goal for which imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy had given it their support: to roll back the revolutionary wave.
Khomeini himself then described the Iraqi aggression as a "gift from God." In the absence of an alternative revolutionary leadership to the Khomeinist leadership, the war allowed the Islamic regime to consolidate its foundations and accelerate the reconstruction of a bourgeois state. A leader of a left-wing Iranian organization described the first effects of the war inside Iran like this:
“The imprisoned reactionary officers were released to reorganize the Iranian army (…). Strikes had already been banned before. But now they are met with armed intervention inside the factories (…). The workers were also forced to accept the militarization of the factories by the Islamic Societies (which now have a good disguise to fulfill their reactionary role in the factories).
“All the democratic conquests of the soldiers were eliminated, and an extremely repressive code of discipline was reestablished in the Armed Forces. Under the pretext of war, the campaign against the Kurdish people was intensified. The regime declared that ‘the Kurds basically serve Saddam's war goals.’In reality, the Kurdish Democratic Party offered the government a ‘truce’ in exchange for fighting together against the Iraqi army.
The implementation of the law and the agrarian reform was postponed until ‘the forces of the infidels are defeated.’ Political discussions were banned in schools and students are under the control of armed members of Islamic Societies in each school.
Left-wing political parties were banned (…). In many cities, the enlarged forces of the state apparatus were openly used to increase repression. Mujahedin militants were attacked and killed in the middle of the street. There are more than 100 known cases in northern Iran. The purges against militants in the factories were intensified. In Tehran alone, more than 1,500 workers were either detained or fired.
The campaign against the Kurdish people reached genocidal proportions, including bombardments of towns and the forced evacuation of the inhabitants of strategically important regions (…)” (9).
Not only did the war allowed the consolidation of the reactionary Khomeini regime, but it had comparable effects in Iraq for the equally murderous and anti-popular regime of Saddam Hussein, especially from the summer of 1982, when Iraq began to defend its territory against the Iranian counteroffensive:
“Today Saddam is probably firmer in power than he was before he went to war. This is, in part, due to the fact that the Iraqis do not believe that the Iranian goal is limited to liberating Iraq from the ruling Baath party. Saddam's subjects are convinced that Ayatollah Khomeini wants to impose a revolutionary Islamic regime in Iraq. The president, despite all his abuse of power, is seen as the only man strong enough to defend the country” (10). “The excesses and outrages of the clergy of Tehran have also served to markedly deteriorate the image of the Islamic Republic, not only among Iraqi Sunnis and Christians, but also among moderate Shiites of Nadjaf and Kerbala, who do not wish at all to share the fate of their Iranian brothers and sisters. Imam Khomeini has become like a scarecrow that Iraqi authorities agitate along the whole day to incite Iraqis to join ranks around the Baghdad regime. It is precisely the fear of Khomeinism that has led a part of the Kurdish nationalists, those who since 1975 have been fighting the Baathist regime in the Kurdistan guerrillas, to approach President Saddam to reach a compromise agreement with him” (11).
In addition, the war has considerably strengthened the position of the State of Israel in the region, at a crucial moment in the war it is waging against the Palestinian people and the Arab masses in general. The Iraq-Iran war constitutes a supplementary factor in the weakening and division of the Arab world against Zionism (Libya and Syria support Iran and the other Arab countries support Iraq). It has constituted, for both Iran and Iraq, as well as for many other Arab governments, a pretext for not helping the Palestinian and Lebanese fighters who faced the Zionist invasion of Lebanon (which Khomeini described, in that moment, as "adiversion" to make him forget his war against Iraq) in June 1982. The Zionist leaders themselves are not wrong. According to the correspondent for Le Monde in Jerusalem, “Israel is happy to see two of its enemies exhaust their energy in endless combat (…) Israel attends the Gulf War as an attentive spectator for whom satisfaction clearly surpasses restlessness (…).  The ideal for Israel would be for the Gulf War to last as long as possible and end without victors or losers.” (12)
In short, the imperialist states themselves, up to the present, have obtained great benefit, in principle a political, but also an economic one, from this endless conflict that confronts two semi-colonial countries, exhausting their forces and increasing their state of dependence. While it is true that the imperialist powers would not accept a total Iranian victory, which would threaten to “destabilize the entire region,” it is not true that they have fully compromised on the Iraqi side. In this regard, the issue of arms shipments to both sides is very illustrative.
Most of the ultramodern Iraqi military material is sent to Hussein by the USSR (which gives the Baathist regime significant payment facilities); the rest comes from France who, least of all has an interest in a defeat for Iraq (since the latter’s external debt with French imperialism is considerable) has given it almost free helicopters and Exocet missiles, and from the United States. As for Iran, its main suppliers were or are Italy, South Korea, Brazil and, above all, Israel, which at least until recently, provided the Ayatollah's regime quantities of American weapons in exchange for cheap oil.
The embargo decreed by the United States against Iran when the hostage issue happened (and which was never officially lifted) was then essentially formal. An American magazine comments, “The underlying problem is that the US has shown little concern about enforcing the ban on arms sales to Iran. As admitted by a high-level State Department official: ‘It is true that we have not done all that we could to stop the re-export of US-made equipment from Israel to Iran.’ The unofficial attitude of the government appears to be that arms sales to Iran do little harm to US interests. A State Department official says: 'we are not overly concerned as long as the Iran-Iraq carnage does not affect our allies in the region or alter the balance of power.'” (13).
By the way, it is possible that, in view of the latest events in the Gulf, imperialism will modify this position. Neither Reagan nor the Kremlin can control the conflict's own largely unpredictable dynamics. But this dynamic of the war illustrated by the airstrikes against the oil tankers does not modify its reactionary character, diametrically opposed to the interests of the peoples of Iran, Iraq and the entire region.

For the immediate stop of the conflict!
For the revolutionary overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Khomeini!

The dominant feature of the Iraq-Iran war from its inception has been its reactionary character. The first slogan that the revolutionary Marxists should therefore raise -a slogan that retains all its validity today- is the immediate halt of combat and the return of the two armies to the borders before September 1980.
However, the war has gone through two very different phases. From September 1980 to June-July 1982, the aggressor is the Iraqi regime, which waged a war of conquest (Saddam wanted to annex the Iranian Arab province of Khuzestan) and threatened to annihilate the conquests of the 1979 revolution, of which the Iranian masses still benefited. As of the summer of 1982, it is the Iranian Islamic regime (which in the meantime has used the war to consolidate its fierce anti-working class and anti-people dictatorship) that violates the right to self-determination of the masses of Iraq, Arabs and Kurds.
Two different revolutionary policies correspond to these two different phases of the war, although they have the goal of peace as a common denominator. During the first period, the fight to stop the conflict was mainly the fight to reject Iraqi aggression, to defeat Saddam Hussein's counterrevolutionary attack. This position -which implied the military fight shoulder to shoulder with the Iranian army against the Iraqi troops, and a revolutionary defeatist position in the Iraqi ranks- did not mean, however, that the revolutionaries had to give the least support to the objectives of the war stated by the Khomeinist regime.
The revolutionary Marxist position in the first part of the Iranian-Iraqi conflict is different, for example, from that adopted in the face of the Malvinas (Falklands) war. In the conflict in the South Atlantic that confronted Argentina with British imperialism in 1982, the revolutionaries were unconditionally in the Argentine camp, and therefore in the same military camp as the Argentine military dictatorship (without giving the dictatorship the least political support, quite the opposite), even supporting –and this is the difference with the first phase of the Gulf War– the objective of the war declared by the military: the recovery of the Malvinas. It was a totally fair war, which we made our own, and the axis of our struggle at that time against the Galtieri dictatorship was the criticism of its inconsistency, the denunciation that its policy would led to defeat, the struggle to start all the military, economic and political means that would allow us to defeat imperialism militarily and recover the Malvinas Islands for Argentina.
In the first phase of the Iranian-Iraqi conflict, the only possible military agreement with Khomeini and the Islamic regime (which at the same time was developing a real civil war against the left-wing organizations that opposed it and against the labor movement) was the defense of Iran to repel the Iraqi invader to the border. The united military front with Khomeini, had to, in order to build a position of defense of the Iranian revolution, go together with the denunciation of the military and political objectives assigned to the war by the Iranian regime, and of the use of war by the regime against the workers' and mass movement. This policy should then be identical to that maintained by Marx and Engels in 1870, in the first phase of the Franco-Prussian war, at the time when Napoleon III unleashed his aggression against Germany: "If the German working class allows the war lose today its strictly defensive character and degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will be equally disastrous. All the miseries that fell on Germany after its war of independence will be reborn with redoubled intensity”. (14)
As of June-July 1982, when for Iran the war goes from defensive to offensive, that orientation (the joint military action with Khomeini against the Iraqi troops) is no longer valid.
The revolutionary position in favor of peace, however, has nothing to do with the one hypocritically defended by the imperialist governments and the Soviet bureaucracy, which, at the same time that they call for an end to hostilities, continue to supply arms to the two murderous regimes. The surest means to defend this disastrous conflict for the two countries, both in terms of human lives and in terms of the economy, is the fight for the overthrow of the respective regimes and their replacement by governments that defend the interests of the workers and peoples. The fall of the dictatorship of Saddam and that of the dictatorship of the mollahs, or that of one of these two regimes if it were the work of the workers and the oppressed masses, would constitute an immense step forward for the peoples of Iraq, Iran and all over the region. Iraqi and Iranian soldiers: Turn your weapons against your own rulers! Peoples of Iran and Iraq, unite against the common enemy, imperialism and especially the State of Israel, its gendarme in the region!

Against any kind of imperialist intervention

Is there no danger of an imperialist intervention against Iran today? Has this danger not been recently pinpointed with the effort of military cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia, which allowed the Saudis to destroy two Iranian fighters over the Persian Gulf?
Certainly, that danger exists. If imperialism today, for one reason or another, attacked Iran (as there is currently no concrete indication that it would undertake any military action against Iran), it would be a new different war, or a qualitative transformation of the current conflict.
If imperialism attacked Iran, we would conditionally be in the camp of Iran. Without giving him the least political support, we would be in the military camp of Khomeini and his regime against the imperialist attack. And if Saddam Hussein's regime either approved or limited itself only to not denouncing and exploiting such aggression, it would become an agent of imperialism against Iran, and then revolutionary Marxists would have to place themselves again on the side of Iran in its war against Iraq. But none of this has occurred so far.
Be that as it may, the danger of an imperialist military intervention in the Gulf conflict reinforces the urgency of carrying out a campaign against the growing military presence of the imperialist armies in the region, a presence facilitated by the policies of the Iranian and Iraqi regimes. Ultimately, the victory of a revolutionary defeatist orientation in the Gulf conflict remains the best weapon to counter imperialist maneuvers.

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