Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 39
October 1 – Sometimes a phenomenon is so all-pervasive and dominant for such a long time that a serious and unfortunate development like the Iraq-Iran war tends momentarily to undermine its overall significance. Such is the case with U.S. imperialism’s role in the Middle East.
The press is full of news of areas in Iraq and Iran that are bombed, facilities that are destroyed, civilians who are wounded and killed. The mutual destruction on both sides seems more and more to put the U.S. in the role of a nervous and watchful outsider, intent on putting out the flames of the conflagration.
No matter how much the U.S. continues to build up its naval and air armada in the area, the capitalist media will not deviate from casting the U.S. in the role of a disinterested and benevolent protector of its own and others’ interests. This is true even if the U.S. ultimately has to “protect its interests” through a wholesale and murderous military intervention.
Let us then recapitulate once again the most elementary and fundamental facts about the relationship of the U.S. to the Middle East in general and the Persian Gulf in particular.
One must inevitably ask again and again, what is the fundamental objective of the U.S. ruling class in that area? It is, of course, to dominate and control the entire Persian Gulf area so as to be able to have under its absolute ownership the vast bulk of the oil that flows from the wells to the tankers of the so-called free world.
The U.S. ruling class would have liked Iran or Iraq to have provocatively closed the Straits of Hormuz. However, both countries have declared their intention to keep the straits open, thereby depriving Washington of the opportunity to create a hysteria over the stoppage of the oil.
In the meantime, the U.S., by dispatching such a vast armada into the Middle East, is still waiting and feverishly working to accomplish what has been an objective from the very beginning – to create a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident which it has thus far been unable to pull off.
But to control and dominate the Gulf area, the imperialist ruling class, in order to effectuate its overall objective, first of all wants most immediately to recoup its lost wealth in Iran. Every since the overthrow of the shah, Washington has sought to restore a pro-imperialist, pro-U.S. regime in Iran.
Some of the imperialist columnists, like Joseph Kraft, have openly called upon the U.S. to exploit the Iraq-Iran war so as to overthrow the present Iranian government and install a pro-imperialist, pro-U.S. puppet regime. President Sadat, in his interview with an American correspondent the other day, in so many words called upon the U.S. to do likewise.
It is also an open secret that almost all of the reactionary Arab regimes, including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and others, have in one way or another indicated their partiality to the Iraqi side in this fratricidal struggle between two dependent and oppressed peoples, which has now turned into a war of conquest and not merely a localized effort to straighten out peripheral issues of territory which are part of a longstanding border dispute.
(Marx and Engels long ago explained, in the case of Bismarck’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, how what may have started as a progressive struggle in the development of the bourgeois nation became a reactionary war of conquest.)
From this it is easy to draw the hasty conclusion that the Iraqi government is completely lined up with U.S. imperialism and that it is in effect totally under the direction of the U.S. in its war with Iran. From such a premise many false and harmful tactical conclusions in the struggle of the workers and oppressed peoples of both countries can be drawn, leading to disastrous results.
It is true that the Iraqi regime may have been encouraged and even secretly aided in launching its attack against Iran. But while it is true that war accelerates all social and political processes, it is premature to say today that the Iraqi regime under [Saddam] Hussein is completely under the domination of the U.S. in its struggle against Iran.
It would, of course, simplify the task of the Iranian government in conducting its own war with Iraq, which is also reactionary and lacks any progressive social or political content. If the Iranian government can make the struggle against Iraq seem synonymous with the real struggle against imperialism, it may be able to mobilize a larger part of the progressive, democratic, and working-class movement in the interests of its reactionary, bourgeois, nationalist aims.
To assume that Iraq is merely acting as a puppet of U.S. imperialism is to give a finished political formulation to an unfinished political process which is internally contradictory and, moreover, may be reversed. Let us see.
It took the U.S. government several years to be able to pull the Sadat bourgeois regime into its orbit. This took place only after a virtual political counter-revolution and the overthrow of the progressive regime that briefly existed after Nasser’s death. The U.S. may have had a hand in the coup in 1971 against the Nasserite regime, yet it took several years to bring Sadat to Jerusalem and then to Camp David.
The Iraqi regime has been slowly gravitating in the direction of strengthening its ties with imperialism and some of the reactionary Arab regimes for a considerable period. But its foreign policy orientation, at least up until now, is to achieve the status that bourgeois India has in Asia. Whether that can be achieved, which is not precisely a laudatory, let alone a revolutionary goal, is another matter. But the Iraqis, while leaning for some support on the U.S., are unwilling as of now to be caught in its embrace a la Sadat.
The U.S. may have been expecting that a quick knockout blow by the Iraqis would have immediately overthrown the present Iranian regime and opened the door for a right-wing, pro-imperialist coup. That has not happened. Nor will the U.S. stake its destiny in the Middle East, and particularly in the Gulf area, on the Iraqi regime to act as its proxy.
On the contrary, the U.S. government is willing to extend only such overt and covert support as it deems necessary for its overall objective, which is the exclusive domination of the Gulf and dominion over all of the people in the region.
But it is not putting all its eggs in the Iraqi basket, by any means. The truth of the matter is that the U.S. is desperately trying to keep a foot in both camps and succeeding only to the extent that this fratricidal struggle eats away the very vitals of the human and material resources of both countries.
Moreover, as the Iranian revolutionary militants clearly recognize, the U.S. is still counting on a reactionary overthrow of the Iranian regime on the basis of a deterioration of the revolutionary momentum in the country and the ascendency, as a result of the war, of precisely those military figures who can and ultimately will undo the Khomeini-Bani-Sadr regime – unless the revolutionary masses take things into their own hands.
With counter-revolutionary exiles working outside Iran, with the Iraqis assisting some, with Sadat building and maintaining other reactionary exile forces, the danger of counter-revolution in Iran is far more serious in the long run than the danger of having, in the interests of the revolution, acceded in some measure to the Hussein regime’s original negotiating terms for the settlement of the border dispute before the invasion started.
What conclusions can then be drawn from all this in the light of the class struggle in the entire Middle East?
Clearly the task of the Iranian working class and particularly its revolutionary vanguard elements must be to give priority to the struggle against the real imperialist foe. It should not be confused. The anti-imperialist struggle should not be submerged by going along with a violent, unrestrained, chauvinist and jingoist false patriotic fervor against the aggressive Iraqi regime. It must be again pointed out that the struggle against Iraq lacks any progressive social or political content so far as the revolution goes.
It does nothing to further the task of completing the bourgeois democratic revolution. By its attempt to forge a monolithic so-called patriotic front, it seeks to dissolve the growing class consciousness of the workers, spells the doom of the progressive and democratic institutions that have grown up as a result of the revolution, and sets back the task of carrying the bourgeois revolution forward to a socialist revolution. Instead it foments a frenzied and unbridled patriotic and religious fanaticism.
It cannot be too strongly put that the task of the working class in Iraq is to clearly point out that the conflict has now become a war of conquest against Iran, and the Iraqi military forces have gone far beyond the originally disputed territories. This might have been difficult for the revolutionary militants in Iraq to point out at the beginning, when the Iraqi regime claimed it was solely interested in straightening out its borders. But this could have been delayed until a later date when both Iran and Iraq would be free to negotiate in peace. It is now clearly a reactionary war on the part of Iraq. Marxist-Leninists in Iraq cannot fail to recognize this now.
Moreover, whatever advantages Iraq might have accrued as a result of these dubious gains are completely submerged and turned into alarming disadvantages by the slow but gradual alignment of the Iraqi government, the reactionary Arab regimes, and the imperialist U.S. government.
There is absolutely no way out from this trap which has been created by the Hussein regime other than the working class assuming its own independent class position, which should not be resolutely against the war.
Furthermore, the need of the hour is to speak out loudly and clearly against the war as a war of conquest and aggression which puts Iraq in danger of being pulled into the imperialist embrace along with Sadat, Jordan’s King Hussein, et al.
The efforts of the Iraqi and Iranian working class should be directed against imperialism. For the Iranian working class, the task is to create a revolutionary defense of Iran against imperialism which is synonymous with the defense of the fundamental interests of the working class and oppressed masses in the struggle against the reactionary bourgeois government of Iran.
If the Iraqi regime continues to advance its forces, it is the duty of the Iranian working class and especially its revolutionary vanguard not to leave the task of pushing back the Iraqis to the Iranian government. To the extent that it is possible, ways and means must be found to do this independently or in collaboration with progressive democratic elements in the armed forces.
For the Iraqi working class nothing is more urgent than to demand an immediate end to the hostilities against Iran, to mobilize the masses independently in a call to bring home “our troops,” and to call for the establishment of fraternal links with the Iranian working class in the general interests of proletarian solidarity and the creation of a just peace.
Last updated: 11 May 2026