IRAN-IRAO IRAN-IRAQ_
Blood and oil The mid-March Iranian offensive has apparently ended as disastrously as the first big assault on Iraqi territory in the summer of 1982. After the initial slaughter, the Khomeini regime's offensives were more measured in scope. The most ambitious was the attack through the marshes in Febbattle that, he ich led so the capture of on a large scale. it he Iranians, which led to the capture of Majnun island. It was in that suffered heavy losses, and after that the time stretched on without the new offensives the Khomeini regime promised.
The long delay of the "final offensive" became a subject of ridicule un the exile Iranian press, and the Tehran government spokespeople could offer no better explanation than claiming that the Islamic Republic had decided to wear out the nerves of the Iraqis by keeping them waiting. Finally, more than a year after the Majnun island battle, tens of thousands of Iranian fighters were sent through the Howeiza marshes and across the Tigris river in another attempt to cut Iraq in two. Small forces had managed to cross the river in February 1984, been cut off and annihilated. This time apparently much larger forces suffered a similar fate.
by its correspondent in Kuwait, Yu. Glukhov. He used the cheif editor of the Kuwaiti paper Al Watan, Jacem Al-Matua as a front quoting him as saying:
"Who benefits from this conflict? That is the question we have to ask first. Of course, it is not Iran or Iraq, which have suffered enormous material and human losses. Of course, it is not the Arab and the national liberation movement in the region ... The gainers from all this are American imperialism and CaLL Israel."
Glukhov went on to write: flict has become a stimules race in the region ... The ant become a bridge for the Penag: establish itself here."
It was clearly not any streng of the Iranian revolution that poomplet Tehran's offensive. The scenario was as follows: The Iraqis stepped up attacks and broke the truce on hitting civilian targets. Iran retaliated by systematically shelling Basra. Iraq then began bombing Iranian cities. Iranian officials promised to retaliate through groud attacks.
Both countries are becoming economically exhausted. In its February 22 issue, the Iran Times reported: "Hojatoleslam Gholam-Hossain Naadi, deputy chairma of the Majlis Budget Committee, said that with only six weeks left to go in the Persian year, oil revenues totalled only 12.5 billion dollars.
The cabinet originally forecast oil revenues exceeding 20 billion dollars this year ... Oil was to comprise about 75% of the regime's plarned revenues and taxes the remainder." That is a loss of one third of planned oil revenue.
At the same time, reports from revolutionists in Iran have emphasized a rapidly growing alienation of workers in Tehran at least from the war, even among regime supporters. They also confirm that strikes are increasing. In late February, Mehdi Bazargan, representing the "liberal" wing of the Islamic Republic, opened up a public attack on the regime.
Thus, indications are that the Iranian regime launched this offensive under the goad of economic disaster, rising mass discontent, and internal divisions in the government itself. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Iranian youth in the Howeiza swamps will not alleviate any of those problems.
The relative stability the Khomeini regime acheived through demagogy and repression seems to be cracking. And there can hardly be any doubt now that if the masses regain an opening to express themselves, the first thing they will demand is an end to a war from which they have nothing to gain, a war in which • many tens of thousands of youth have been sacrificed to sustain false pretences of the ruling clerics to cover up their lack of solutions for the problems of the working people of Iran. 1. US sponsored pact between Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan, aimed against the Soviet Union.
Quoted from a Persian translation of the article in the March 22 Iran Times.
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Gerry FOLEY What is clear is that the battle was an extremely bloody one, and that the Iranian forces were shattered and pushed back. In its March 20 issue, the Paris daily Liberation cited an Agence-France Presse dispatch saying that AFP reporters had been able to visit the Iraqi side of the front and see "the ravages wrought in the Iranian ranks over dozens of kilometers."
The American authorities, who have the means for close surveillance of the region, announced finally that Iran had suffered a grave defeat, losing tens of thousands of fighters.
A new and more deadly type of poison gas seems to have been used by the Iraqis in the recent fighting Pierre Taillefer, an AFP reporter in Iran, visited a survivor of a gas attack in a Tehran hospital. Hani Rastagar, sixteen years old, told him: "The bomb dropped by an Iraqi bomber fell near a bunker sending out a little cloud of smoke. Everyone in the bunker, about a dozen fighters, died instantly. They turned white and went stiff."
Another slaughter of the innocents in the Mesopotamian marshes cannot help but be a far greater disaster for the Khomeini government than the failure of the big push on Basra in 1982. For one thing, the political terms of the conflict have become clear. The Iraqi soldiers and people are not going to side with "Islamic" liberators coming from Iran. Moreover, the war has gone on now for more than two years on Iraqi soil, getting further and further removed from defense of Iran. It has also become obvious that big attacks on Iraqi positions mean slaughter with little chance of any significant victory.
It is true that as the war has gone on, International Viewpoint 8 April 1985 the Iraqi regime has become more and more dependent on the right-wing Arab states and moved closer to US-imperialism. Iraq's reconciliation with the pro-imperialist Arab states was made official at the height of the Iranian offensive, when Mubarak and King Hussein went to Bagdad to embrace Saddam in his moment of peril.
However, the Khomeini regime has also moved closer openly to such rightwing regimes as the one in Turkey and in Pakistan. u This evolution, along with strong expressions of hostility to the USSR, has prompted Soviet organs to talk about a new CENTO (1) in a different form. The Soviet Union clearly sees it as in its interests to continue to arm Iraq.
As the Arabic magazine Al-Havadit, published in London saw it, "Washington and Moscow have a similar position toward the Iran-Iraq war, in the sense that they are waiting to see what direction the internal evolution in Iran takes in order to pursue a policy in accordance with their interests." (2)
This time the Soviets more openly condemned the Iranian offensive than in the past. Pravda's major article on the fighting (in the March 20 issue) was signed
LEBANON