Mazda Majidi is a member of the San Francisco branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He presented the following talk during the opening plenary of the PSL National Conference on Socialism Dec. 6.
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The propaganda goes something like this: The U.S. is trying to spread democracy and human rights; those people have been killing each other for centuries and don’t understand or appreciate the rule of law, democracy, etc.
To promote this racist image, coverage of the Middle East says little about its history. To people who have only seen the Middle East through the lenses of the ruling-class propaganda, it is a mystery when, how and why U.S. involvement in the Middle East started.
We are asked to believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq in 1991 to save Kuwait, and then invaded Iraq again in 2003 to save its people from Saddam Hussein; that the U.S. got involved in Iran in the 1980s because of the hostage crisis; and that the U.S. is now opposed to Iran out of fear of nuclear proliferation.
Ruling-class propaganda does not tell us that the U.S. has been directly involved in Iraq since the 1920s, when U.S. oil corporations got 23.75 percent of Iraq’s oil as a reward for entering World War I on the side of the victorious British and French empires. The rest went to the British, the French and the Netherlands. Iraq got nothing.
The capitalist media rarely mention the fact that in 1953 the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and installed a ruthless dictator, the Shah, as its client.
Because of the nature of the coverage, many people don’t realize that it is not some kind of accident that countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, and others have corrupt, undemocratic and backward regimes that undermine the interests of their people. These are all regimes specifically propped up by the imperialists.
The area that is now called Saudi Arabia wasn’t always called that. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious British Empire installed a family of corrupt landowners as the rulers of this region. The name of the family: Saudi—so the country was named after them.
Stemming the revolutionary tide
The reality is that imperialism has consistently thwarted development by fighting revolutionary movements and supporting client states.
The goal that the U.S. has pursued in the region has been consistent through various administrations, Democratic and Republican. It has been to secure control of its vast resources, particularly oil.
To achieve this goal, imperialism has to repress socialist movements that are a threat to its interests. Iran and Iraq each had a very strong communist movement, movements that at different times had a real possibility of taking over political power.
The 1953 CIA coup and the severe repression that followed crushed the left in Iran. Up to then, the Iranian Tudeh Party, or the CP [Communist Party], was by far the strongest and best organized force in Iran, with members in the tens of thousands and many more supporters.
When Iraq had its revolution in 1958, the initial reaction of the U.S. was to prepare for an invasion of Iraq. The day after the revolution, 20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in Lebanon. The day after that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped into Jordan.
Because of deep popular support for Iraq’s revolution and the possibility of a military reaction from the Soviet Union, the imperialists had to put their planned invasion on hold. But they did manage to save the neocolonial governments in Lebanon and Jordan from being swept up by the revolutionary movement that was going through the Arab countries.
With an invasion not a possibility, Washington supported the more rightist elements within the post-revolution political structure against the communist and left-nationalist forces. The U.S. backed the overthrow and assassination of President Abdel Karim Kassem in 1963. And Washington applauded the suppression of the left and the unions by the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party governments in the 1960s and 1970s.
Independent forces unacceptable to Washington
The U.S. was, of course, happy that it had saved Iraq and Iran from communism, but that wasn’t enough.
It is not only leftists that U.S. imperialism wants to bring down. It’s also nationalist forces, whether they come in a religious or secular form.
After the Iranian revolution of 1979, there were two neighboring countries, both with substantial amounts of oil, that had broken free of the control of U.S. imperialism. If the conditions were not right for overthrowing either one of these regimes, what the imperialists wanted to do was to weaken and destabilize them. What could serve that goal better than a war between the two?
With strong U.S. encouragement, in 1980 Iraq invaded Iran. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had publicly encouraged Iraq to attack and take the Shatt-al-Arab waterway. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was led to believe that the U.S. would be on Iraq’s side. But, in the words of a Reagan official, “We wanted to avoid victory by both sides,” Henry Kissinger was more direct: “I hope they kill each other.”
Of course, everyone knows about the current occupation of Iraq, so I won’t go into the details. I’ll just say that the 2003 invasion was the culmination of nearly a half a century of imperialist attempts to bring an end to Iraq’s independence. But, due to the heroic resistance of the Iraqi people, their plan to set up a stable client state has been an utter failure.
Similarly, imperialism is still pursuing regime change in Iran through various means. Criminal U.S. intervention in the region has left few independent states, but the people continue to fight for independence. For this reason, the continued existence of resistance and independent states in the region is a danger for the interests of corporations and the states that serve them.
And for the same reason, from a revolutionary perspective, we express solidarity with revolutionary movements and independent states in the Middle East.
