Obviously, the first alliance with the KMT (Guomindang) ended in awful circumstances. But initially the alliance allowed the Communists to grow and gain influence. Perhaps without some sort of alliance they would have remained a marginal group. We can see the alliance dialectically, it allowed the Communists to develop politically but ended up with a serious physical depletion of the ranks. The argument is that the latter could have been avoided if the alliance had not been taken so far by the Communists. I think the idea that some Trotskyists seem to have that in no circumstances should the Communists have allied with the Guomindang is wrong. It’s too leftist. Although in the end the first alliance became too rightest and the result was the massacre.
I tried to address the ‘United Front with what?’ argument in my post. You are right that the Iranian Maoists cannot form a military alliance with the Iranian regime, they are not strong enough yet. But it does not follow from this that they should declare that the main enemy of the Iranian people, even when there is an imminent threat of US invasion, is the Islamic regime not the US. As I said, if they feel able to urge the people to overthrow the Islamic regime, as the main priority, why could they not have urged the Iranian people to resist the US, as the main priority instead? In neither case does this position depend on them being in an immediate position to take power or take the lead.
There is not doubt that US invasion is worse for the Iranian people than the current dictatorship. Look at the chaos in Iraq. Any party that says that such misery would be better than what the Iranians have now will surely isolate themselves from the people.
This is not the same as saying people can’t criticise the reactionary regime. Neither are we saying it has any political virtues. It is one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Nor are we saying that it should not be overthrown-it should certainly be overthrown. We are talking about a matter of timing here.