WW in 1979: The Iranian crisis: the core of the problem

Workers World is in its 50th year of publication. We reprint this article from the Nov. 16, 1979, issue of the paper as part of our special archival series.

Nov. 14, 1979—The involvement of Secretary-Treasurer Miller into the top councils of the Carter administration has far wider significance than the fact that his authority as the Secretary-Treasurer was necessary to freeze Iran’s assets and issue the so-called national emergency proclamation. It signifies a merging of two divergent factions of the Carter administration based on military “solutions.”

In our previous installments we pointed out how the two principal factions in the governing group of the Carter administration were slowly moving toward merging their conflicting and contradictory approaches on fundamental questions regarding U.S. world economic and foreign policy.

We stated that the Volcker-Miller-Carter financial and economic measures which they effectuated last Oct. 6 and which were supposed to stabilize the U.S. financial and monetary position and begin slowing down the galloping rate of inflation were proving to be bankrupt.

A demonstrator murdered by U.S.-armed shah’s troops on Sept. 8, 1978.

Economic crisis not yielding to financial jugglery

We cited the sharp drop in auto sales by the three principal auto makers GM, Ford and Chrysler and the layoff of almost 100,000 auto workers, which was reinforced this week by even sharper drops in this key industry. There were other smaller but significant indications that the developing economic crisis was not yielding to the financial economic jugglery by this trio in charge of reshaping the crumbling structure of U.S. finance capital.

We called attention to the fact that the Carter-Brzezinski-Vance trio, which is shaping U.S. foreign policy at the behest of the Pentagon, was moving closer to the Volcker-Miller-Carter grouping, which is handling the economic and financial problems. In both of these groups Carter as the middle man vacillates and is pushed further to the right along with all the others toward finding the common ground between the groupings to solve the economic crisis.

Now that the Brzezinski conspiratorial mission to Algiers where he met the former prime minister of Iran, Bazargan, in secret proved to be a disaster for the U.S. because the Khomeini leadership promptly ousted Bazargan and denounced him for conspiring against the Iranian government with Brzezinski. Those groupings have proven most eager to convert the diplomatic and economic crisis into a political one, into the channel of another military venture against the Iranian people.

1978 anti-shah rally in Iran.

Bani-Sadr’s indictment of U.S. goes to core of problem

In his letter to the United Nations Security Council requesting a meeting of that body, the new foreign affairs director of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, made a scathing indictment of U.S. policy toward Iran and pointedly attacked the U.S. government for attempting to create a war psychosis against Iran and pushing the world to the brink of war.

The imperialists tried to picture the complaint against U.S. war preparations as a mere diversionary tactic from domestic problems in Iran. While few if any of the capitalist press published the entire text of this important letter, which details all the criminal activities not only of the Shah but of the U.S. itself in relation to the Iranian people, none referred to what is truly the core of the broad problem facing American finance capital, which Bani-Sadr pointedly made reference to.

“Mr. Secretary General,” said Mr. Bani-Sadr, “I am well equipped because of my scientific knowledge to know that the weakness of the American economy (at the present) and the weak position of the dollar has forced on America a grave economic and political crisis.

“Is America trying to reestablish the position of its money by putting world peace in peril?”

U.S. diverts economic crisis into military channels

The way the imperialist press would like to interpret this statement is to present it as a distortion of the current U.S. economic and political situation to suit Islamic economic doctrine. This, however, is a clear attempt at a cover-up of the deepening economic crisis.

Bani-Sadr is a competent, experienced economist with many years of practical experience in his profession behind him. Regardless of how one may view his economic methodology, he–like other economists who have to deal with the situation in a practical way–knows the facts of the contemporary economic world situation. He sees an attempt by the U.S., which as he says is faced with a “grave economic and political crisis,” to divert this crisis into military channels and bring about an imperialist war.

This is precisely the point we have been attempting to make in our previous installments. It signifies the merging of the two policies respectively held by Volcker and Miller and Brzezinski and Vance in which Carter plays the middle role of finding common ground in diverting their bankrupt economic and political policies into imperialist war channels.

This is not a new departure of recent contemporary U.S. history. The 1949 economic crisis was “solved” by the U.S. plunge into the Korean war of aggression. The 1957-58 economic crisis was also solved in the same manner. It took a little more time, but the U.S. war machine was already cranking up and the Pentagon was gearing itself toward Southeast Asia. The economic upswing came in reality almost simultaneously with the beginning of U.S. aggression against Viet Nam.

Lenin’s conception of imperialist war validated

Not even the ten years of military aggression against Viet Nam that followed, with more than half a million U.S. men and women under arms and hundreds of billions of dollars in military equipment, was adequate enough to fully divert another impending economic crisis. The collapse of the Penn Central Railroad and the Lockheed Corporation, the latter a principal U.S. war contractor, clearly demonstrated that the capitalist malaise could be driven underground for a while, but it could not in reality be solved.

The economic crisis which began again in 1974 and so sharply deepened for almost the next two years has not in reality been very much ameliorated. The upswing which followed has been of such an unstable and erratic character that almost none of the bourgeois economists have any hope that another economic crisis is not under way or has not already been in progress for some time.

From all this one can only deduce that the Leninist conception of the inevitability of imperialist war remains in full force, notwithstanding the existence of the most horrendous weapons. Only the broad intervention of the masses on a truly great historical scale can prevent it–and prevent it they will–by taking, in the course of the struggle, a revolutionary socialist road in the struggle against monopoly capitalism.