Doug probably agrees with Fred Halliday that leftists should line up with liberals, even if they are imperialists ("Cooler Elites"), against religious, anti-imperialist populists who are fundamentally or may become illiberals:
The events of 1979 bring out what was, in my view,
the central avoidable error of most of the Iranian Left --
its catastrophic stand on 'liberalism'. In essence, the
Left allied with Khomeini to break 'liberalism' -- that is,
those moderate democratic forces that opposed the
Shah but were against the clerical dictatorship. This
was a political error, since Khomeini destroyed the Left
as he had earlier attacked the liberals, but it also reflected
a theoretical mistake about the character of social and
ideological forces in Iran. For in any historical materialist
perspective, the 'liberals' reflected a more progressive
position than the reactionary ideas and policies of Khomeini.
This was evident enough from the history of Europe, where
the liberal bourgeoisie played an important role in fighting
feudalism and its associated ideas. (Fred Halliday, "The
Iranian Revolution and Its Implications," New Left Review
I/166, November-December 1987)
What Halliday underestimates is the reason why most Iranian leftists -- Stalinists, Maoists, left-Islamists who incorporated Marxist ideas, etc. -- did not side with liberals: _they were in principle illiberals themselves_: "Revenge ruled the day, and only the provisional Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan, and a number of liberal politicians and intellectuals objected to the killings and violations of law. Most Marxist and Islamist groups called for more and speedier execution of former officials" (Mansour Farhang, "'Spies' Under the Persian Rug," 26 June 2000, <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000626/farhang>). Given who they were, it is not accurate to say that it was an "avoidable" error -- their choice was rooted in their political character.
Moreover, most Iranian leftists at that time did not agree with Halliday that the role of liberals in a Third World nation like Iran could be the same as the (imagined) role of the liberal bourgeoisie in the history of Europe. Nor does historical materialism makes it evident that the liberal bourgeoisie even in Europe necessarily fought against "feudalism and its associated ideas." The French Revolution, which did the most to sweep them away in Europe, was republican and democratic, pushed furthest by the Jacobins and the Sans-Culottes. Sociologically, it was not a bourgeois revolution (see George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, London: Verso, 1987). It turns out that the bourgeoisie, contrary to the notion once prevalent among Marxists, have no particular historical mission. If people want democracy and republicanism, they need to take things into their own hands.
Last but not least, Halliday, et al. forget that liberals, even social democratic ones, can kill leftists as well as or better than Khomeinists, when push comes to shove. Remember Friedrich Ebert's SPD and what it did to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Even setting the question of leftists aside, the problems -- class relations of the ancient regime that are obstacles to reforms -- that liberals leave untouched generally kill far more workers and peasants than the Reign of Terror and Thermidor that are common to Jacobin revolutions, of which the Iranian Revolution was one. -- Yoshie