Khomeini's troops nad ace la. set off for Jerusalem!

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WHEN THE Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein first declared war on Irat «wo years ago, a lot of people in the workers' movement saw this as an imperialistsponsored attack on the Iranian revolution.

Washington indeed made no secret of the fact that it would be far from dismayed if Khomeini's turbulent regime, with its anti-imperialist rhetoric and its disruptive impact on the Muslim masses, were overthrown.

Saddam Hussein's regime, on the other hand, appeied to be deliberately distancing itself from its previous hard-line 'rejectionist' stance towards Israel and seeking to consolidate its links with imperialism.

Saddam Hussein's: war effort against Khomeini won the active assistance of King Hussein in Jordan and of a number of ultra-conservative Arab Gulf states, themselves alarmed at the possibility that pr:-Khomeni forces might topple them from power.

The initial pretext for the war was a long-standing territorial dispute dating back to the reign of the Shah. The refusal of the Khomeini regime to negotiate a solution to the dispute was part and parcel of its attempt to cling on to the whole of the Shah s territory - with the forcible suppression of the Kurdish people and other national minorities.

The anti-Shah revolution had already been turne by Khomeini and the mullahs away from any anti-capitalist dynamic, and into the mobilisation of lumpen mobs against the forces of the left. The oppression of women and gays had been institutionalised.

Between the bloody anticommunist terror of Hussein's Ba'athists and Khomeini's clerical regime there was nothing to choose politically: for the masses of the Middle East, the revolutionary overthrow of both offered the only way forward.

By Hi Sloan Since then the assessment of the war as r ictionary on voth sides has been vindicated. Hussein's apparent 'imperialist backing' has proved to have been largely an illusion, while Khomeini's foreos received material support from - of all people - the Zionist state of Israel.

As Khomeini's troops gained the upper hand, and drove back the Iraqi invaders, so the imperialists have let it be known that they will not move to protect Hussein.

And now Iran has turned the tables, mounting its own invasion of Iraq, besieging Iraq's second city, Basra - its only port and centre of its main oilfield. This new phase of the conflict is an undisguised aggression by Iran.

The issues before the JORDAN KU NAIT Areas where Kurds live workers and peasants of Iraq and Iran are in essence still the same. While neither' side is a direct tool of imperialism, Khomeini's invasion is as reactionary as Hussein's was two years ago.

Despite breast-beating talk of Iranian troops proceeding "through Iraq (and Jordan!) to Jerusalem' their mission is no liberating, anti-imperialist crusade, but the extension of Khomeini's rule of reaction and repression into Iraq -and possibly elsewhere on the Gulf.

The real path to liberation for the workers, peasants and soldiers of Iran and Iraq is to mobilise in revolutionary struggle against the war, and for the overthrow of their present rulers.