BY JACK BARNES
In 1979 a revolutionary upsurge by Iranian workers and
peasants overturned the U.S.-backed regime of Mohammed Reza
Pahlavi, also known as the shah. This victory dealt an
enormous blow to Washington's domination in the region. Below
is an excerpt from New International no. 7 featuring the
article "The opening guns of World War III: Washington's
assault on Iraq," by Jack Barnes, on U.S. imperialism's goal
in the 1990-91 Gulf War and political developments in the
region since the defeat of one of the U.S. rulers' most
reliable client states. New International is copyright (c)
1991 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., reprinted by
permission.
The U.S. rulers' aim is to shift the relationship of class forces in the Middle East to its advantage, to take back some of what has been lost over the past three decades. The most recent big blow to Washington's power in the region came in 1979 with the victory of the Iranian revolution.
Prior to the overthrow of the shah, Iran had been one of Washington's most reliable client states. In the configuration of imperialist props in the region, the shah's "peacock throne" had formed the third leg of a tripod. The other two were Israel - by far the strongest leg, in its capacity as a massively armed junior imperialist power - and the Saudi and Gulf state monarchies, the weakest.
For more than ten years the U.S. rulers have been trying to recoup some of what they lost with the overthrow of the monarchy in Iran. For much of the past decade they did so by providing encouragement to Saddam Hussein's war against Iran and supporting the course of their imperialist allies, especially the French government, in supplying arms to Iraq for the war effort. That conflict, launched in 1980 with a massive Iraqi invasion of southern Iran, has been among the most slaughterous conflicts in this century, with hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries. Despite Washington's thinly disguised aid and comfort to Baghdad, however, that murderous eight-year war brought the U.S. rulers no closer to their goal of establishing another subservient regime in the region directly beholden to imperialist interests and reliant on imperialist military support.