Barry Shepherd says: ""The SWP did what it could to oppose the threat of war through its election campaigns, forums and sales of The Militant. Our task was to tell the truth about the history of US imperialism’s role in Iran and about the revolution. We were fighting against the stream, as Washington’s chauvinist propaganda made headway among the American people....
""Many others on the left were disoriented by the ruling class’s campaign and were swept up in its wake. Another factor was that many had turned against the revolution, conflating the Khomeini leadership with the revolution itself in the belief that the Iranian masses were rightist religious fanatics....
""A few in the SWP and YSA were also affected by the jingoist pressure, and dropped out because of our uncompromising stand.""

Ï agree that in the first year or two after the overthrow of the Shah, the US SWP was largely correct in its approach to to Iranian revolution. But over time a number of errors began to develop.
The SWP failed to recognise that within two or three years the revolutionary upsurge in Iran had been largely contained, and a relatively stable bourgeois-nationalist regime established. Popular militancy was either repressed or channeled into mass organisations that supported the government and did not threaten capitalist property.
The SWP was correct to defend Iran against the imperialist-backed Iraqi invasion, which occurred in 1980. However the SWP made an error by supporting the Khomeini regime's attempts to carry the war into Iraq, after the Iraqi invasion of Iran had been defeated. This was based on the false assumption that the Iraqi masses would see the Iranian bourgeois army as an army of liberation.
Another problem was that the differences between the SWP and most other US leftists over Iran fed the SWP's growing sectarianism. The SWP became increasingly contemptuous of nearly everyone else on the left, who were seen as capitulating to imperialist propaganda on Iran. The SWP became reluctant to cooperate with others on the left even on issues where agreement existed (e.g. defence of Nicaragua against US aggression).
The SWP campaigned vigorously in support of the Iranian revolution, including by expressing solidarity with the students who took over the US embassy in Teheran in November 1979 and held US diplomats and embassy staff hostage for 444 days.
The students occupying the embassy were motivated by a justified anger at the role of US imperialism in Iran. The role of socialists in the US was to explain this anger and oppose imperialist intervention in Iran, which the SWP certainly did.
However the prolonged holding of the hostages gave the US ruling class an opportunity to stir up chauvinism amongst the American people to fever pitch. The SWP courageously defended the embassy occupiers, but could do little to stem the tidal wave of US chauvinism. The political climate in the US moved to the right, resulting in the election of Reagan. The left was marginalised.

In writing about the embassy seizure the SWP focused on solidarity with the occupiers (who were motivated by genuine anti-imperialist sentiments), without adequately analysing the motives of the Khomeini wing of the government, which planned and organised the occupation (See Dilip Hiro: “Iran under the Ayatollahs”, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1987, p 136-7).
The occupiers called themselves “Muslim students following the Imam’s [i.e. Khomeini’s] line”. The embassy seizure was a weapon used by Khomeini’s supporters against the “liberal” wing of the government, led at that time by the prime minister Mehdi Bazargan; but it was also a tactic used to help marginalise the left. The Khomeini faction used the occupation as a way of gaining credibility by appearing to be the most intransigent anti-imperialists, and thereby attracting radical youth and workers away from the left groups and into the network of pro-Khomeini organisations (the Revolutionary Guards, the Jihad for Reconstruction, the Mobilisation Corps of the Oppressed, etc).
However some articles in the US SWP magazine Intercontinental Press were unclear about the nature of these organisations. Some of the Iranian socialists interviewed by IP seemed to see the pro-Khomeini organisations such as the Revolutionary Guards, Jihad and Mobilisation Corps as inherently revolutionary (See for example “Interview with an Iranian Socialist”, Intercontinental Press, October 18, 1982). It is true that some members of these organisations did at times take progressive positions on certain issues and sometimes came into conflict with reactionary actions by the government. But fundamentally they were bourgeois organisations, loyal to the bourgeois Khomeini regime. They coopted radicalising youth into becoming supporters of this regime.
The SWP continued to talk about “the Iranian revolution” even after the elements of dual power which were created in 1979 had largely been suppressed or coopted by the bourgeois state. It argued as follows: “By attacking the rights of workers, peasants, oppressed nationalities, and women, the Iranian regime has dealt significant blows to the gains of the revolution. But it has not crushed the revolution, as can be seen by the massive mobilizations of Iranians today to defend their revolution from Iraqi attack”. (“The US left and the Iraq-Iran war”, IP, May 14, 1984)
The revolution may not have been “crushed”, but by 1984 it had been contained. The bourgeois government had been stabilised. The upsurge of worker and peasant struggles, while not totally ended, had been dampened down. This was partly a result of repression, but partly also the success of the regime in drawing radicalising youth into “Islamic” organisations loyal to the government.
Economically the revolution had begun to retreat. The threat to the property of the capitalists and landlords had begun to recede.
During the first year of the revolution a lot of capitalist enterprises had been expropriated. This continued at a slower pace for a couple of years. In the countryside peasant land seizures occurred. The reaction of local authorities varied - sometimes the peasants were repressed, sometimes not. A land reform law was introduced in an attempt to regulate the process.
But by the end of 1982 an “economic thermidor” had begun (Shaul Bakhash, “The Reign of the Ayatollahs”, Basic Books, 1986, p 211-216). The Council of Guardians issued a series of rulings defending private property. They declared the land reform law invalid. Government officials in 1983 began offering to return the nationalised enterprises to their former owners.

I am prepared to accept that “the Iranian revolution” had not been crushed, provided we are clear that what survived was a bourgeois revolution with a bourgeois leadership. But similarly it is arguable that the Iraqi revolution had not been crushed either. The Iraqi monarchy, overthrown in 1958, had not been restored. Land reform had not been reversed. The Iraqi oil industry, nationalised in 1972, remained under state ownership. The Saddam Hussein regime had the support of a section of the Iraqi population on the basis of its Arab nationalist ideology, despite its repression of the left. (Admittedly in the early 1980s the Iranian regime probably had more genuine popular support than Saddam’s regime)
Economically the two regimes were similar. Both governments had nationalised most of the foreign-owned industries operating in their countries. This is one reason why both were later included in George Bush’s “axis of evil”.
The SWP however saw Iran and Iraq as qualitatively different. This led it to support the Iranian regime’s attempts to overthrow the Saddam regime by sending Iranian troops into Iraqi territory (after the Iraqi army had been driven out of most of the Iranian territory it had captured). Intercontinental Press (October 18, 1982) published without criticism an interview with an Iranian socialist who opposed a call from the Tudeh (Communist) Party for the Iranian regime to offer a peace agreement.
The Iranian socialist seems to have assumed that the Iranian armed forces would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi masses. However the Iranian army had very limited success in capturing Iraqi territory. Of course this was partly due to imperialist aid to Iraq; but it was also because most Iraqis did not see the Iranian bourgeois army as an army of liberation. Dilip Hiro argues that: “...the Iranian invasion of Iraq aided Saddam Hussein at home: he could convincingly brand his opponents as traitors”. (“Iran under the Ayatollahs”, p 232) A public offer of peace would have been more threatening to Saddam than an Iranian invasion.
The war dragged on inconclusively until 1988. The US backed Iraq because it was worried that an Iranian victory would inspire radical Islamist movements in other Middle Eastern countries that might replace pro-imperialist regimes with relatively independent capitalist regimes.
At that time, Iraq was allied with pro-imperialist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. But this alliance was not set in stone, as the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait showed.
Iraq and Iran, both societies which had experienced bourgeois revolutions, had more in common with each other than either did with Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. The Iraq/Iran war undermined the gains of both revolutions. The Tudeh Party was correct to call for peace. Those Iranian socialists who opposed this demand were wrong. And the SWP was wrong to endorse the line of continuing the war.