On the war between Iran and Iraq

By Jean Divès

One of the currents of the Marxist movement adopted, at the outbreak of the war between Iran and Iraq, the position of supporting the first of these countries, although without supporting the bourgeois leadership of Khomeini. This position was based on the fact that the Iraqi aggression had the objective of crushing the ongoing revolution in Iran, preventing it from spreading through the region. For the author of the article, what we publish below -whose title is "To really advance" - war changed its character after the Iranian counteroffensive began to occupy the territory of Iraq. Consequently, a change in the policy to be developed would be imposed: moving from support for Iran to defeatism in both countries. Considering it a polemic of great importance for the world Marxist movement, we open our pages to this position, as well as to the eventual responses it may provoke.

In the current period of imminent and widespread revolution, wars are a phenomenon that has acquired the widest extent. For us, in the precise title the "test of the wars" -that is, the concrete political position to be taken on each one of them- is of fundamental importance. In this last year, to take the most recent examples, the Malvinas (Falklands) and Lebanon wars have served to clearly delimit the positions of the different currents of the left, be they social democrats, Stalinists, Maoists or those who claim to be from the Fourth International.
Therefore, we cannot but salute as an extremely useful systematization of the Marxist principles applied to the various armed conflicts, the analysis made in the article “We advance”, published in Correo Internacional #8 (reproduced in Spain by the magazine Estrategia Internacional N ° 3).
In that article it is especially stated that “in the face of wars, the greatest test, together with the revolution, that can be demanded of a workers' organization, we were faithful to Leninism-Trotskyism. This indicates two -only two- alternatives: defeatism, that is, the rejection of both sides and a policy to achieve the revolutionary replacement of their imperialist or bourgeois governments, or clear and frank military support for the country whose government, reactionary or no , and for whatever reasons, wage a just war that is or we make ours. Military support, as Lenin and Trotsky did with Kerensky against Kornilov, Trotsky with Chiang against Japan, which certainly prepares the revolutionary change of the bourgeois government itself supported by war. In other words: military and not political support”.

In the same way, it is perfectly fair to say, regardless of the fact that this characterization encompasses very different concrete situations, that “we fight imperialism on the same side and under the military leadership of Galtieri, Arafat, Khomeini and Tomás Borge, without supporting them politically, we do not stop denouncing their inconsistency, nor stop preparing their replacement by revolutionary proletarian leaderships, that is, by workers' and peasants' or popular governments supported in internationalism and workers' democracy”.
On the basis of this programmatic and methodological agreement, however, a political divergence arises related to one of the specific situations mentioned in the article. In effect, it states that "we have considered the Argentine and Palestinian wars fair and ours, in the same way that we do with the current Iranian offensive against Iraq, or that we will be with Nicaragua, whether it is invaded or if it attacks Honduras."
Yes, we agree, for Argentina, Palestine and Nicaragua, as well as for the entire previous phase of the Iran-Iraq war. Instead, we do not agree on "the current Iranian offensive against Iraq." We formulate this assessment, based on an analysis of the changes produced in the region and, consequently, in the nature of that war, changes in which the qualitative leap can be determined approximately in last June-July. Because we did not take this evolution into account, we consider that the position held in the aforementioned article in the magazine Correo Internacional #8 is erroneous and puts any political intervention that tries to respond to this conflict at a disadvantage.
However, before addressing this question directly, it is necessary to insist on the nature and concrete consequences of this discussion, which in no way should be considered from an academic point of view.

The article we are commenting unexpectedly states that "we are making ours(no less!) the current Iranian offensive against Iraq."Within the framework of a general article, we consider this phrase inadmissible, the content of which is not argued or even explained and which, on the other hand, means a shift in relation to the statement on Palestine by the same authors who clearly stated that end of June: “… we demand that the armies that face each other in Iran and Iraq direct their weapons against the Zionist monster…”
This orientation did not imply any military support for the current Khomeini offensive in Iraq, but quite the opposite, because -with a minimum of consequence- it was a matter of saying to the two armies and to the two peoples: “Stop your fratricidal war that play the game of imperialism and Zionism and turn against the common enemy, the Zionist state”. And precisely, in order to create the conditions for victory against Zionism, this orientation implied, in accordance with the IC article, "the rejection of both sides and the revolutionary overthrow of their respective bourgeois governments."
We also want to specify that this orientation contained in the declaration on Palestine was in turn a shift in relation to the orientation assumed from the beginning by the International Committee and that it was not argued or made explicit either.
This discussion becomes important for practical, concrete work, both with fellow Palestinians and with Iranians wherever they are. Because both in Iran and among the Iranian emigration, the physical confrontations between the Islamic Republic Partysupporters of Khomeini and the militants of the Iranian left (Mujahideen, Fedayeen, Peykar) are concrete. And the problem of the war against Iraq -denounced by the entire Iranian left with the exception of the Stalinist party Tudeh, considering that its exclusive purpose is the internal repression of the mass movement- takes on obvious importance in this context.

2. June-July 1982: the character of the war changes

Under the heading "Stop Iraq's pro-imperialist counterrevolutionary aggression against Iran," the Statement dated October 6, 1980 of the Party Committee correctly characterized the attack from Iraq as "an attempt to inflict a major defeat on the Iranian revolution, to prevent the revolutionary contagion from encompassing the entire region where the domination of the weak states is deeply destabilized”.  And he added that: "from now on, this attempt is beginning to break down in the face of the resistance of the masses."
And indeed, those Iranian masses -comprising both left-wing organizations victims of Islamic repression and harshly persecuted national minorities, such as the Kurds or the Arabs of Kurdistan- put in check, at the price of considerable sacrifices, the Iraqi armed offensive supported by imperialism and also by Stalinism. In October 1981, the Iranian forces went on the counteroffensive, in April 1982 they expelled the Iraqi army from Kurdistan and forced Saddam Hussein to kneel and call for the opening of peace negotiations. On June 29, Baghdad announced its total withdrawal from Iranian territory.
What would have been the policy of a revolutionary leadership at the head of the Iranian masses at that time?  Undoubtedly, it would have relied on military successes and on the mobilization of the masses to deal a deadly blow to the Baath regime and would have extended, in alliance with the Iraqi masses fighting against Saddam Hussein's murderous regime, the revolutionary war within Iraq.
Unfortunately, and this is what the article we are commenting on seems to forget, the Khomeinist leadership is not a revolutionary leadership at all and by then it had already exhausted all its resources of its inconsistent anti-imperialism. Thus, the Iranian offensive on Iraqi territory, led by the Khomeinist regime that exercises its Bonapartist power in Iran relying on the use of the anti-imperialist sentiment of the masses (the fight against the great Satan) to, in fact, exterminate the vanguard of the labor movement and of the national minorities, could not but take on a totally reactionary character. From a revolutionary war of anti-imperialist defense, the Iranian-Iraqi conflict turned into a war against the Iranian and Iraqi masses, at the service of the main gendarme of imperialism in the region, that is, Zionism.
To understand this evolution, it is useful to review the chronology of events in this period.

What to extract from all this?It is obviously not a question of comparing the respective advantages or disadvantages of the Baghdad and Tehran regimes. On the contrary, it is necessary to objectively evaluate the consequences of the Iranian offensive for the course of the class struggle in the region. And it can be stated, without danger of being very wrong:

If these conclusions are justified, can we say that "we make the current Iranian offensive against Iraq our own"?  Obviously not, and the position expressed in the article we are commenting on is wrong because it forgets or underestimates three determining factors:

3. "The missionaries with bayonets..."

We say, then, that there is -in the course of the last period and from a qualitative point of view with the Iranian offensive on Iraqi territory- a change in the character of the Iraq-Iran war. Once the imperialist aggression of the Iraqi regime is thwarted, the Iranian offensive that aims to overturn Saddam Hussein and "liberate" the Iraqi Shiites (at least that is the justification of the Khomeinists) becomes an aggression against the national self-determination of the Arab majority of the Iraqi masses.
The military support generously given by the authors of the article to the Khomeini offensive refers to a very precise situation: the invasion of a country by the army of another country. In what cases do we “make ours” this invasion?

This is, therefore, a different case. For example, we can say that if today -which is highly unlikely- the Sandinista army invaded Honduras with the manifest purpose of installing a government allied to the Sandinista regime in Tegucigalpa, we would support this war as highly positive, as an expression of defense and extension of the Nicaraguan revolution. But can we apply this reasoning to the current Khomeini offensive? Would Khomeini, in his own way, defend the Iranian revolution by continuing the war against Iraq? All the facts show the opposite: defending the Iranian revolution today means defending first and foremost the elementary rights and freedoms of the working class, which the Islamic regime tries to crush using the war against Iraq, justifying itself before its social base, composed of lumpen elements and declassed petty-bourgeois, and trying to deceive the Iranian peasants and workers. Just as Kerensky and the Provisional Government justified themselves by the war with Germany.Kerensky defended "democracy", Khomeini defends fundamentalist Islam, and the two repress the mass movement in the name of their "ideal" in order to avoid the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state.
Referring to the Finnish experience, Trotsky quoted Robespierre, saying that "the peoples do not love missionaries armed with bayonets." In the context of the current war between Iran and Iraq, which confronts two peoples oppressed by their respective bourgeois governments and both dependent on imperialism, the question of "who is the aggressor", the question of national self-determination takes a decisive importance. Iranian military defeats -after an unbroken series of victories in the first phase of the war- the relative consolidation of the Iraqi Baathist regime, made possible by the Iranian offensive, are illustrative. The Iraqi Arab masses do not accept being "liberated" by the Iranian Persian army. We want to specify that the problem could be different if it were a confrontation between two Arab countries. There is, in fact, an Arab nation established over the years within the framework of the entire historical process and which is artificially divided (in most cases) into different countries, as a consequence of colonization and current domination of imperialism on the Maghreb and the Middle East.
But this is not the framework of the Iran-Iraqi confrontation. Unless we think that, with Khomeini, there is an “Islamic nation” or a “Shiite nation” within the “Islamic nation”.
Because it is real that the Iraqi Shiites, oppressed by the Sunni minority who lead the Baath, -being this a real detachment, despite the secular structure of the Iraqi state- are resisting the offensive of the Iranian Shiites and defending their Arab country against the offensive of the army of the Persian (Iranian) Pasdarans. We can point out in this regard, as one of the secondary reactionary consequences of the Iranian offensive, the beginning of "reconciliation" - in the name of Fez - between the "enemy brothers" of the Baath parties of Iraq and Syria... against the Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, masses against all the Arab and Middle Eastern masses.
We can make a historical analogy, also limited, but not without interest to compare the position adopted by our current in opposition to the revisionist positions that were expressed within the world Trotskyist movement.
It is about the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam, which was a continuation of the just war of defense of the Vietnamese state against Chinese aggression.
It faced a country that had just recognized a formidable revolutionary process (Vietnam), albeit controlled and partially undermined by a counterrevolutionary leadership, with another country (Cambodia) where the revolutionary process had been crushed with a bloody repression on the masses (regardless of the fact whether or not under Pol Pot a workers' state existed, a question that our current had not yet settled) and whose government acted, under the aegis of the Chinese bureaucracy, as an agency of imperialism.
Neither Iran nor Iraq are workers' states, nor they have a workers' and peasants' government at their head.  Besides the differences, there are however certain similarities with the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, if you compare the respective roles of Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein on the one hand and Khomeini and the Vietnamese Stalinist leadership on the other, as well as the imperialist policy towards them.
On behalf of our current, Comrade Greco presented to the meeting of the Unified Secretariat in April 1979 a draft resolution that specifically stated:
“9) The entry of the Vietnamese army in Cambodia reflects, albeit in a totally distorted way, the very process of the Vietnamese revolution and the objective need to unite Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia into a federation. From that point of view, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia contains some progressive elements.
“10) However, these positive elements are located within the framework of a completely harmful, catastrophic overall strategy for the world proletariat. The Vietnamese army invading Cambodia does not convene a constituent assembly, or any other mechanism by which the Cambodian people freely express their desire on how to organize their country. Thus, the Vietnamese invasion was not produced at all in order to develop a consistently democratic and revolutionary policy, but rather constituted a direct attack on the right to national self-determination of the Cambodian people.
“11) With this invasion, the Vietnamese bureaucracy casts discredit on the workers' states and deals a severe blow to proletarian internationalism and the right of national self-determination of the peoples. This right, without being absolute, must be respected in the same way that the Bolsheviks respected it in relation to Finland. For these reasons, the Fourth International must demand the immediate withdrawal, up to the last Vietnamese soldier, from Cambodian territory, regardless of the question of what the nature of Pol Pot's government really was”(emphasis added).
We have not "made our own" the Vietnamese invasion, although it distortedly reflected the dynamics of the Vietnamese and Indochinese revolution. That was, on the contrary, the position of the SWP, under the pretext that the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime was dealing a blow to imperialism...

4.  And in Iran, in which military camp are we?

The lack of political argumentation in the new orientation of Correo Internacional about the war between Iran and Iraq does not facilitate criticism. However, it can be affirmed with certainty, in view of the conclusion presented to us that an absolutely total abstraction has been made of the existence of another equally deadly war in the region: the civil war in Iran, in which two military camps are facing each other.

A war that develops in the form of an urban guerrilla, a rural guerrilla and, in Kurdistan, an almost "conventional" war between two armies separated by a front line! The executions and charges of the Pasdarans respond to the attacks and military assaults of the Mujahideen. Responding to the military attacks of the DPIK (Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan) there are the bombings of Kurdish cities and towns by Khomeini's army, that is, the Shah's army purged of its most openly restorationist elements.  In which military camp are we?
All the organizations of the Iranian left -except the Tudeh- that had given all their support against the imperialist aggression mediated by the Iraqis, denounce the continuation of the war, the refusal of the Islamic regime to sign peace in order to continue deceiving a fraction of the masses to crush the workers' movement and the Kurdish people. Are we in their camp or in that of Khomeini, who sends his pasdarans to break all the workers’ strikes, assassinating the workers' leaders, under the pretext that they favor the "hypocrites" and "false Muslims" of the Iraqi Baathis? If we "make our own" the Iranian offensive in Iraq, shouldn’t we denounce as counterrevolutionaries, as anti-defensemen of the Iranian revolution, those who, in Iran, are fighting against the continuation of the war, for peace?
The answer is obviously very clear, it is necessary to rectify our orientation very quickly. However, we can effectively pose the question: Given that imperialism uses the Saddam Hussein regime that acts as one of its direct agents, doesn't the failure to support the Iranian offensive risks"favoring imperialism?"? In the first place, it is necessary to verify the extreme softness of imperialism's reactions to the resumption of military operations, this time on Iraqi territory. There is an obvious reason there: in addition to the ones we have pointed out above (especially the relative consolidation of Saddam Hussein's regime), there is the fact that imperialism, as long as the oil wells are not directly threatened - in which case it would intervene directly, to put an end to the conflict- is fully interested in continuing the fighting even on Iraqi territory. On the one hand, the war weakens and divides the living forces of the Iranian revolution, and on the other hand, imperialism reinforces the dependence of Iraq and consequently its own control over the territory of Saddam Hussein! Not to mention the bargain that is for the Zionist leaders who are about to perpetrate their genocide against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples. What more can Reagan and Mitterrand ask?
In a more general way, our current also responds to this problem in the "dividing lines between the Polish revolution and counterrevolution" (Correo Internacional#2), in a paragraph for which we earned the wrath of Lambertist revisionism:
“In every fight, someone is ‘favoring’ someone. When we supported the Spanish revolution -as Trotsky said to Schachtman- we ‘favored’ the ‘democratic’ imperialisms that were against Franco, who was an agent of Hitler and Mussolini. But the problem is to see which is the determining fraction in each process and not who we are benefitting in a secondary way (...) If Solidaridad won the civil war against Jaruzelski and Breznev and took power, a new struggle would begin, whose winners would not possibly be Walesa or the Pope, but the masses, thus changing the course of the next world events”.
In other words, even assuming that the fact of not supporting the Iranian offensive militarily "plays thegame" of imperialism -and, in Iran, of the "democratic" pro-imperialists such as Shapur Bajtiar or even Bani Sadr-, the determining element is the revolutionary mobilization of the Iranian masses;  the determining element is that peace would be a blow to the bourgeois Islamic regime of Khomeini, an encouragement to the struggle of Iranian Kurds, workers, students and women; that peace would deprive Saddam Hussein of the "defense of national territory" argument; that peace would create the conditions to join forces against Zionism.

5.Whatistheshortestway to Jerusalem?

In order to channel the Iranian mass movement and to justify the continuation of the war, Islamic leaders incessantly repeat that "the road to Jerusalem passes through Iraq." In other words, the war, which would aim at the downfall of Saddan Hussein (which is more than doubtful), is a necessity in order to hit Zionism.  The press organs of some sectors of our movement have taken up, in a more or less open way, this analysis (or this illusion?), in contradiction with the Palestinian resolution of June and in accordance with “We Advance”.
It is essential that, as revolutionary Marxists, we abandon such a conception that is contrary to reality and in facts it becomes... to trust in Khomeini! A first response is that the Iranian regime, in addition to sending 300 volunteers recruited from among the Pasdarans, has done nothing to support the PLO against Zionist aggression. Quite the contrary, the demands of the offensive against Iraq have been a pretext, a justification, for not massively supporting the PLO, which has received ten times more help from the Kurds of the DPIK than from Khomeini!
We must, on the contrary, affirm that supporting the Palestinian people, opening the way to Jerusalem is, today, supporting the DPIK and the Iranian left. In this regard, let us simply quote the communiqué of the “Political-Military Command of the Mujahideen of Iran”, dated June 13, 1982:
“Yesterday, the political-military command of the Organization of the People's Mujahideen in Iran, at the same time again condemning the Israeli attack against the Palestinian revolution and the invasion of Lebanese territory, which is truly largely the fruit of anti-Iranian and anti-Palestinian politics of Khomeini during these last three years and of their common interests with Israel, announced in a statement:
“‘Being a fact that currently Iraq has accepted the passage of Iranian soldiers through its territory, the Organization of the People's Mujahideen of Iran is ready to send from its own ranks, in a week, at least 100,000 volunteers to Lebanon. This figure can rise up to 140,000 if Khomeini releases the political prisoners. This proposal is obviously only feasible if Khomeini momentarily ceases the repression and terror in the country and accepts the following conditions:
”1) That it does not obstruct in any way the calling, recruitment and dispatch of volunteers, and that it does not arrest or disarm armed people.
"2) That he accepts the presence of PLO observers in all phases of sending volunteers to the Iranian border.
"3) To be sure that he will not use any of his usual demagogic tricks, let Khomeini refer all the Mujahideen People's prisoners to the PLO representatives, to send them to the front."
Regardless of the political maneuver -totally justified- carried out this time by the Mujahideen, the truth is that Khomeini did not respond to this proposal, and he himself has done nothing for the Palestinians exactly like all the Arab comprador regimes.Iran Today, the Peykar magazine in France, publishes the photo and the PLO member credential of one of its military personnel, with the following caption: “Comrade Mohsen Fazel, who fought for several years under the name of Sami in the ranks of the Palestinian revolution in southern and eastern Lebanon, he was an active member of Fatah. He collaborated for a long time with the Scientific Committee, the Fatah programming center and the Bureau of the occupied territories. Comrade Fazel was arrested by the Pasdarans at a time when, with the PLO's pass, he was leaving again for Lebanon. He was executed without trial three months later in June 1981."
Everything shows that the Islamic regime does not fight Zionism, not even inconsistently. Or, if it fights it, it's the same way Saddam Hussein does! And this is what we revolutionary Marxists must explain to the workers of Iran and Iraq: the road to Jerusalem passes through the revolutionary overthrow of the regimes of Saddam Hussein and Khomeini; that this should put an end to the fratricidal war and that Iran and Iraq conclude an agreement to fight together against the Zionist enemy.
As for the reference made in the Mujahideen communiqué to "anti-Palestinian policy" and to Khomeini's "common interests" with Israel, it is not devoid of any foundation. The main supplier of arms to Iran is indeed… Israel!This is certainly a sinuosity of diplomacy (the other supplier is Syria!), but also there’s a conviction of the Zionists that they have nothing to fear from Khomeini's “Islamic revolution”.
The Iranian offensive in Iraq has coincided very exactly with the Zionist aggression against Lebanon. It made things easier for Zionism, disorienting the Arab and Iranian masses, giving an additional argument to the Arab regimes to justify their passivity in the face of the Zionist offensive in Lebanon, giving the Zionist leaders an expanded margin of maneuver for their operations, further legitimizing them more than ever before the eyes of imperialism as the only "consistent" agents of its policy. The fundamental gendarme, the masterpiece of imperialism in the Middle East continues to be the Zionist state, a colonial enclave. There is neither Saudi "sub-imperialism" (as the Unified Secretariat asserted) nor Iraqi sub-imperialism. The Arab regimes remain very weak and are still subject to pressure from the Arab masses. The entire situation in the Middle East is ultimately -and today more than ever- over-determined by the needs of the fight against Israel.  Every successful revolution in a country in the region will have as its first task the fight against Israel. It is an additional reason to characterize the continuation of the Iranian-Iraqi war as completely criminal, and to reiterate the call of our statement on Palestine.

6.  To be loyal to Leninism-Trotskyism in the current Iran-Iraq war

The invasion of Iraqi territory by Iran, the refusal by the Iranian Islamic regime to a ceasefire and its declared objective of imposing a fundamentalist Shiite Islamic regime in Iraq, at a time when Israel was also invading Lebanon, changes consequently the character of the war between Iran and Iraq. It has been transformed from a war in defense of the Iranian revolution into a totally reactionary war.
In this framework, our policy cannot be other than defeatism, the denunciation of the war, and the explanation that peace, a true settlement of the Iranian-Iraqi conflict, involves the overthrow of both Saddam Hussein and Khomeini, which allows the imposition of workers’ and popular solutions: freedoms for the workers' movement and its organizations, the right to self-determination of national minorities, etc.  And that only the establishment of workers' and peasants' governments, destroying both the Iraqi Baath regime and the Iranian IRPregime, will allow the oppressed masses to unite against the common enemy, imperialism and Zionism.
This policy does not imply "neutrality" in the face of the conflicts that develop in the region.