[Editorial, Militant no. 501, p. 2]
The abortive attempt to rescue the 50 American hostages from the embassy in Tehran was a desperate measure on the part of Carter.
The President himself had earlier said that any such attempt would almost certainly lead to the death of the hostages.
Yet clearly, the pressure of public opinion, itself originally whipped up by the President and the capitalist press, pushed Carter into this crazy mission to ‚prove‘ to the electorate, in the weeks before the presidential election, that he is still capable of taking decisive action.
Carter was determined to demonstrate to the world that the United States „can’t be pushed around“, and at the same time to reassure nervous client dictatorships in the Middle East and elsewhere, whose survival ultimately depends on American arms.
As it turned out, „mechanical failures“ forced this ill-conceived mission to be aborted before it provoked any major clash with the Iranian forces. Far from bolstering his position, it has proved a devastating blow to Carter’s prestige. Above all, it underlines the weakness of US imperialism at the present time, particularly as far as the volatile Middle East is concerned.
Any rescue attempt would require bold decisions and determined execution. But from beginning to end, the rescue attempt was prejudiced by hesitation and muddle.
This is not just „bad luck“, as Carter’s apologists are trying to make out. It reflects the splits between the strategists of American imperialism, and conflicts within the ruling class itself.
Usually, it is the military chiefs who push for such adventures, but on this occasion many of the military experts advised against it. Its main advocate in the White House was Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president’s national security adviser, who supports an aggressive foreign policy based on an almost unbelievably crude analysis of contemporary international relations.
However, if the rescue force had succeeded in reaching the US embassy in Tehran, possibly joined [as some reports suggest] by an Iranian „fifth column,“ it is inconceivable that there would not have been a serious shoot-out, with the almost certain death of some of the hostages and massive bloodshed of Iranian students and workers.
Such an outcome would have provoked an even bigger crisis for US imperialism, and for the capitalist world generally. It would have inflamed the anger of the Iranian masses to even greater heights, and given a further enormous push to the development of the Iranian revolution.
The labour movement in Britain and internationally must unequivocally condemn the rescue attempt, which was not a „humanitarian“ exercise, as Carter claims, but was by its very nature an armed intervention against the Iranian people.
After the fiasco in the desert in which eight American personnel died, however, the world labour movement has undoubtedly been outraged by the scenes of the Ayatollah Khalkhali and his followers raking through the charred remains of the American dead. Incidents like this are yet another indication of the reactionary character of the Islamic fanatics currently at the head of the movement in Iran.
But what right have the imperialist powers of the world to condemn such actions? Their righteous indignation is sheer hypocrisy. How many times in the past have the imperialists – whether in China, Indo-China, Malaysia, or Kenya – displayed triumphantly the mutilated bodies or impaled heads of their victims? In those cases, imperialism felt perfectly justified in perpetrating atrocities against those fighting for national liberation.
Nevertheless, the events of the last few days underline the irrational and reactionary character of the present Iranian leadership, and its inability to take the revolution forward.
While condemning US intervention, whether in the form of rescue attempts, economic sanctions, or other possible military action to force the release of the hostages, Marxists cannot for a moment support the seizure and holding of the hostages.
The anger and frustration of the students and their supporters, which undoubtedly led to the seizure of the embassy in the first place, is understandable. They saw it as a way of hitting at US imperialism, the power that for decades armed the Shah, trained his torturers, and assisted in the suppression of all opposition movements in Iran.
But the holding of the hostages will produce no tangible gains for the Iranian workers and peasants. On the contrary, it is entirely counter-productive in so far as the hostages serve as a diversion from the burning problems facing the revolution. The hostages have provided Khomeini with a heaven-sent opportunity of covering the inadequacies of his leadership with a veil of nationalistic-religious. hysteria.
The hostages have also, in some ways, worked to the advantage of US imperialism, allowing Carter and the world capitalist press to whip up a frenzy of hysteria against the Iranian revolution.
The situation has been used to gain acceptance for a more aggressive foreign policy, and particularly for an accelerated build-up of arms expenditure in the US, Britain, and other capitalist states. Events could only take this course in Iran because of the absence of a mass party with a clear Marxist programme, capable of taking the revolution forward. From the very beginning, the Tudeh [the Iranian ‚Communist Party‘] has proved completely incapable of giving a revolutionary lead. Nor do the left-wing ‚Marxist‘ students of the Fedayeen offer a viable alternative to the Iranian workers.
But it is only the programme of Marxism, with the nationalisation of the economy under workers‘ control and management, a radical distribution of the land with economic support for the peasant farmers, and fundamental moves to establish an entirely new state apparatus based on workers‘ democracy that could assure the success of the Iranian revolution.
Although the Mullahs, under the enormous pressure of the Iranian masses, have been pushed into carrying out some anti-imperialist measures, and some nationalisation, their primary aim is to preserve their own position at the head of the revolution.
Recent events clearly demonstrate, moreover, that they are intent on diverting the movement on reactionary, fundamentalist Islamic lines. Although they may yet be pushed even further, the ideas and the methods of the Mullahs inevitably play into the hands of imperialism and the forces of a potential reaction in Iran.
Reeling from the adverse reactions to the humiliating failure of Carter’s rescue mission, the spokesmen of imperialism are now talking of the danger of armed conflict between the super· powers. Even some within the labour movement have echoed the idea that the Tabriz incident will prove to be a new „Sarajevo“, in other words, the prelude to world war.
But war does not come about by accident. War is the continuation of politics by other methods, and it is determined by the balance of class forces. The present international correlation of forces rules out the immediate possibility of world war between the superpowers, war which would unavoidably lead to totally destructive nuclear conflict.
Carter and his military advisors, it is true, have hinted at further military action in Iran. It cannot be categorically ruled out that US imperialism will in the next period use the special „strike forces“ it is now preparing for “police action“ or punitive raids in areas like the Middle East.
But a major armed intervention would provoke mass resistance from the Iranian people, give a powerful new impulse to the revolution, and produce explosive world-wide repercussions, not least within the United States itself. US imperialism, as events since the fall of the Shah have shown, has no significant forces on which it can rely in Iran. And how could it hold down the whole Iranian people by armed force?
The position of US imperialism in the Middle East is now weaker than at any time since the end of the second world war. Imperialism faces the hostility of the majority of Arab regimes, even of Saudi Arabia, a rotten dictatorship which was previously a kept client of US imperialism.
Although the Saudi regime is still ultimately dependent on US military and economic support, their opposition to continued US support for Israel on the issue of Jerusalem and the West Bank and their need to give public support to Khomeini’s „Islamic“ regime, has produced a conflict between the Saudi regime and the US government.
The United States clearly has the wholehearted support of Egypt, which is now almost as much a client state as Israel. But Sadat’s support for the US has pushed him into conflict with other Arab states, and is unmistakeably laying all the conditions for enormous upheavals, with the overthrow of his own regime by the Egyptian workers and peasants.
The rescue attempt, moreover, has produced a rift between the US government and its European „allies“. Only a few days before the secret mission, Carter had forced the western capitalist governments into line with an ultimatum, insisting they support US sanctions against Iran. Then, apparently without Informing these governments in advance, Carter launched an armed operation which made nonsense of the attempt at sanctions.
The leaders of the European capitalist powers and Japan are also fearful that retaliation to sanctions by Iran and other Arab states [whether by restricting oil supplies or cutting down western imports] will do enormous damage to their own economies in a period of growing world recession. Schmidt and others obviously feel that Carter has been blinded by preoccupation with his own election prospects to the danger of pushing Iran further towards Russia.
The European capitalist leaders reluctantly agreed to the US sanctions policy in the first place precisely because they feared Carter might otherwise resort to military intervention in Iran, which would open the door to counter-intervention by the USSR. Such Russian intervention, in fact, would even be „legal“ under the still-existing Russo-Iranian treaty of 1921.
In relation to the Soviet Union, moreover, despite US imperialism’s hysterical but impotent denunciations of the invasion of Afghanistan, the US government has been put in the humiliating position of virtually relying on the Russian bureaucracy to mediate with the Iranian leadership in the aftermath of the abortive rescue.
Whereas the Russian bureaucracy considered it vital to its interests to intervene to support a threatened proletarian Bonapartist regime in Afghanistan, its main interest in Iran is to preserve stability. A major conflict, which would have unpredictable consequences, would pose enormous dangers to the power and strategic interests of the bureaucracy. Reports make it clear that Moscow has been exerting pressure on the Khomeini regime to play down its reaction to the rescue mission.
These events in Iran, and the situation throughout the Middle East, reveal the grotesque contradictions which have developed as a result of the impasse of capitalism and imperialism in the present period. But because of the enormous weight and influence of the bureaucracy in Eastern Europe, Russia and the other Stalinist states, revolutionary movements, like in Iran, against imperialism and capitalism have taken on a completely distorted form.
Only the working class, with the support of the exploited masses of the underdeveloped countries, can break this deadlock. Only the conscious movement of the workers, with Marxist perspectives and clear socialist aims, can resolve the intolerable contradictions that have developed in the world today.
The establishment of a genuine workers‘ state, based on workers‘ and peasants‘ democracy, in a single country with a significant working class, or alternatively the success of political revolution in Russia or Eastern Europe, would completely transform the world situation, opening a socialist pathway for the movement in other countries to throw off the intolerable burden of capitalist exploitation and the chains of oppression.
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