From John Molyneux’s blog:

Wherever there is a fight to be waged against imperialism, national or racial oppression, or dictatorship, revolutionary socialists are put under intense pressure (by liberals, nationalists, reformists, Stalinists and so on) to sacrifice or shelve (for the time being!) socialist ideas and demands, and even basic working class interests, in the name of unity in the struggle for the immediate aim. The strategy of permanent revolution rejects those pressures, not from the sectarian position of dismissing the anti- imperialist or democratic struggle as irrelevant , but from the standpoint of arguing for working class and socialist leadership in the fight for national independence and democracy.
In all such struggles the strategy of permanent revolution will treat the so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’, even its most ‘patriotic’ sections, as at very best an unreliable ally and potential enemy and therefore resist all calls for socialists and the working class to give up their political and organizational independence. Permanent revolution means that socialists while participating vigorously in the movements for national liberation and democracy, will seek to develop those movements into struggles for workers’ power and international socialism, not because no kind of national independence or democracy is possible without socialist revolution , but because the very nature of world capitalism and imperialism will weaken, corrupt and undermine any independence or democracy won on a capitalist basis.
Understood in this way the strategy of permanent revolution, far from being out of date, fits the current situation in the Middle East like a glove.