The Modern Middle East (34 page)

Iran’s revolutionaries might have seemed weak and vulnerable to the outside world, but they also seemed threatening. The rhetoric of the Iranian revolution, and the stated goals of Khomeini and his associates to export their Islamic revolution beyond Iran’s boundaries, constituted a third cause of the Iran-Iraq War. Among Khomeini’s many statements to this effect, the following is representative: “We should try to export our revolution to the world. We should set aside the thought that we do not export our revolution, because Islam does not regard the various Islamic countries differently and is the supporter of all the oppressed peoples of the world. On the other hand, all the superpowers and the [great] powers have risen to destroy us. If we remain in an enclosed environment we shall definitely face defeat.”
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Already, by virtue of its geographic size and location, its population, and its resources, Iran posed a formidable strategic challenge to its Arab neighbors to the west and south of the Persian Gulf. Adding an ideological crusade to the challenge was perceived by the adjacent Arab states as a mortal
threat. The fear that domestic instability might prompt the Iranian revolutionaries to attack their neighbors only added force to the threat. At this critical juncture, Saddam reasoned, only he could effectively defend the Arab nation against Tehran’s revolutionaries.

Saddam’s regional ambitions and his desire to emerge as the new, powerful leader of the Arab world were a fourth reason for his initiation of the Iran-Iraq War. With one brilliant, quick attack, he would occupy Iran’s oil-rich southwestern region—an area Iraqi maps refer to as “Arabistan”—establish Iraqi supremacy over the Shatt al-Arab River, replace the deposed shah as the new “gendarme” of the Persian Gulf, and become the Nasser of his day. By 1979–80, the Arab world desperately needed a new hero, a new leader who would inspire confidence, project power, personify the Arabs’ resurgence, and dispel their collective malaise. Nasser was long gone; Sadat had betrayed the Arab cause by negotiating with the Zionist enemy; and the bombastic Qaddafi was too removed from the heart of the Arab world. Saddam saw himself as the only natural standard-bearer of the Arab world, the only one capable of restoring to the Arabs the glory they deserved, defending the honor and territory of the Arab peoples, and giving hope to the millions let down by Nasser and betrayed by Sadat. Cairo, Damascus, and even Beirut had had their day in the sun. Now it was Baghdad’s turn.

On July 17, 1980, on the first anniversary of Saddam’s ascension to the presidency and shortly before the war with Iran, the Iraqi government ran a two-page ad in the London
Times
that read, in part, “Iraq was more than once the springboard of a new civilization in the Middle East, and the question is now pertinently asked, with a leader like this man, the wealth of oil resources and the forceful people like the Iraqis, will she repeat her former glories and the name of Saddam Hussein link up with that of Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, al-Mansur and Harun al-Rashid? To be sure, they have not really achieved half of what he has already done at the helm of the Baʿth Arab Socialist Party, [and] he is still only 44.”
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Clearly, the Iraqi invasion of Iran fit into Saddam’s attempts to consolidate his rule and establish a cult of personality. And, it seems, he intended for his audiences to extend far beyond Iraq and its immediate neighbors.

The Iraqi invasion of Iran started in earnest on September 22, 1980. Broadly, the Iran-Iraq War can be divided into three phases. The first phase lasted just under a year and was marked by dramatic Iraqi successes and the capture of sizable Iranian territory in the oil-rich, southwestern parts of the country. The second phase, which started in late September 1981 and lasted until late July 1982, saw a steady and almost complete reversal of the first. It was marked by a series of successful Iranian counteroffensives that
recaptured significant portions of lost Iranian territory and put the Iraqi forces on the defensive. But the Iranian drive eventually lost steam because of a series of tactical and strategic errors, compounded by the limitations of the Iranian forces. The third phase of the war was the longest, lasting almost exactly six years, from July 1982 to July 1988. In this third and final phase, the war settled into a seemingly endless stalemate, with neither side able to score a decisive victory. Finally, after the combined loss of hundreds of thousands of men by both sides, on July 18, 1988, Iran accepted a UN-brokered cease-fire agreement, and after a few weeks of additional skir---mishes the war ended.

Iraq’s invasion was quick and initially very successful. Iraqi military planners had hoped to capture the four principal Iranian cities in the southwest: Khorramshahr, Abadan, Ahvaz, and Dezful. Toward this end, before crossing into Iran, Iraq forces pounded Khorramshahr and Abadan with heavy artillery for nearly a week. Given that an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the Iranians who live in the region are Arabic speakers, the Iraqis had counted on the support and sympathy of the local Iranian population. At the very least, they had hoped to demoralize the Iranians by their unrelenting artillery barrage. But this was far from the case, and Khorramshahr’s defenders, who were geographically closer to the Iraqi border, put up a spirited defense. Khorramshahr fell to the advancing Iraqi forces on November 10, but only after bloody, hand-to-hand combat in the city’s streets. In the battle, each side lost an estimated seven thousand men. Iraqi losses alone included about one hundred tanks and armored vehicles.
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The battle of Khorramshahr proved unexpectedly costly and difficult for the Iraqis.
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Realizing he had underestimated the Iranians’ resolve to fight back and the battle readiness of their forces, and determined to keep Iraqi casualties to a minimum, Saddam decided not to try to enter the other main Iranian cities but instead to encircle each and to pursue tactical advantage by capturing key highways and strategic positions. This shift in tactics proved highly successful. Within three months of the invasion, Iraq was holding on to an estimated ten thousand square miles of Iranian territory.
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Before long, southwestern Iran had turned into an occupied, battered land, littered with human corpses and broken-down military equipment.

Contrary to Saddam Hussein’s anticipation, the war did not weaken but rather strengthened the Tehran regime by focusing nationalist sentiments on the common objective of defending the country and, by implication, supporting Ayatollah Khomeini. The Iranians, who had just been through a bloody mass revolution, had a relatively easy time channeling their still-furious anti-shah sentiments toward the new villain to their west.
Moreover, with the onset of the war, Tehran’s revolutionaries initially halted their purge of the military and rushed troops and equipment to the front. Even more determined, if somewhat less effective, were irregular militia volunteers called the Basij (literally, “volunteers,” more on which later), who were under the command of the Revolutionary Guards. In fact, Tehran’s populist revolutionaries had a much easier time mobilizing resources and volunteers for the war than did Baghdad’s ruling elite, many of whose soldiers were Shiʿite and thus had suspect loyalties. At the start of the war, each country had about 240,000 men in uniform. By the time the war ended in 1988, Iran’s forces had grown to include some 250,000 men in the Revolutionary Guards Corps and another 350,000 in the Basij.
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Khomeini, masterful at winning popular support through manipulating nationalist and religious symbols, now began elevating the virtues of martyrdom. His rich repertoire of revolutionary utterances soon came to include statements such as “We regard martyrdom as a great blessing, and our nation also welcomes martyrdom with open arms.”
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After some initial setbacks, Iran scored a series of military victories beginning in the summer of 1981 and culminating in the recapture of Khorramshahr nearly a year later, in May 1982. By now, the ongoing political struggle in Tehran had led to the impeachment and removal of President Bani-Sadr (for alleged military incompetence) and greater cohesion in the Iranian military’s command structure.
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As Iran’s conditions improved somewhat, for a time it seemed as if nothing was going right for the Iraqis. On June 7, 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed and destroyed a nuclear installation near Baghdad.
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Iraqi forces were further demoralized by a terrifying tactic the Iranians first put to use in November 1981: the use of human wave attacks to clear mines, cut through barbed wires under fire, and overrun the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. These human-wave attacks have been largely misconstrued in the West. “The Iranians did not merely assemble masses of individuals, point them at the enemy, and order a charge. The waves were made up of . . . twenty-two-man squads. . . . Each squad was assigned a specific objective. In battle, they would surge forward to accomplish their mission, and thus gave the impression of a human wave pouring against the enemy lines.”
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Despite the loss of untold numbers of civilian volunteers, the tactic proved highly effective in unnerving Iraqi commanders and spreading panic among their troops.
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By the spring and summer of 1982, the momentum had clearly shifted in Iran’s favor.

Iran’s success at retaking Khorramshahr marked the end of the war’s second phase and, in many ways, the end of Iran’s brief military momentum. Buoyed by their success in the southwest, Iranian commanders
mistakenly assumed that they could march into Basra, whose predominantly Shiʿite population had risen up against Saddam. But liberating one’s own territory is quite different from capturing someone else’s, especially if the intended target is the country’s second-largest city. Iraqi Shiʿites showed just about as much pro-Iranian sympathy as Iran’s Arabs had demonstrated pro-Iraqi leanings. For both peoples, irrespective of ethnic or sectarian affiliations, nationalism was the overriding force. Iran’s offensive proved of little value, and before long the war settled into an agonizingly long stalemate.

The third phase of the Iran-Iraq War was characterized by repeated massive Iranian assaults aimed at dislodging the Iraqis and Iraqi successes in holding on to their defensive positions. Throughout 1983 and 1984, the Iranians launched a series of attacks all along the border in hopes of at least demoralizing the Iraqi armed forces. But these had the exact opposite effect, with the Iraqis gaining in resolve and confidence as Iranian advances either were very limited or were reversed.
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Throughout, Iran’s attacks on ships carrying Iraqi oil in the Persian Gulf, and Iraq’s bombardment of Iran’s largest cities with its notoriously inaccurate but deadly missiles failed to change the course of the conflict decisively.

Back in 1980, Saddam Hussein had counted on a speedy, decisive victory over Iran in no more than three weeks. As mentioned earlier, his intent had been to consolidate his position domestically and internationally and to establish complete Iraqi control over the Shatt al-Arab River. But he quickly realized he had miscalculated Iran’s strength and its resolve to fight back. Within weeks of the invasion, therefore, the Iraqis asked for a cease-fire, especially as the casualties of the war, both in human life and in economic terms, began mounting. Tehran’s ayatollahs had quite a different perspective on the war. They found it a convenient tool for the continued mobilization of the masses, the extension of clerical rule over the remaining organs of the state, and the elimination of their opponents. Iran, therefore, continued rejecting Iraq’s demands for a cease-fire, ostensibly on the grounds that Iraq first needed to withdraw from all Iranian territories before negotiations could commence. In fact, the Iranian army appears to have devised an attrition strategy beginning in 1983, counting on its numerical superiority to eventually wear down the Iraqis.
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Consequently, throughout the mid-1980s the Iranians launched massive infantry assaults on Iraqi positions, often with little conclusive result. Beginning in early 1984, Iraq also used chemical weapons, specifically mustard gas and nerve agents. According to Iranian health officials, over the course of the war some sixty thousand Iranians were exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons.
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Over fifteen thousand
Iranian veterans were said to have died from illnesses related to chemical weapons in the twelve years following the end of the war with Iraq.
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Iran’s attrition strategy did not work in the long run, and in late 1987 Iranian forces began suffering repeated military setbacks. By now, the United States and Iraq’s Arab allies, especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, had succeeded in making Iran’s regional and international position untenable. Early in 1988, Iran lost the strategic Fao peninsula, which it had captured earlier, and then lost several naval vessels in one of its frequent engagements with the U.S. Navy. In February, Iraq also unleashed chemical weapons on its own Kurdish population in the north, especially in the city of Halabje, resulting in the massacre of thousands of Kurdish civilians. Beginning with the Halabje attack, Iraqi forces used chemical weapons with unprecedented frequency, and from then on they became a regular feature of Iraq’s battle order. Iranian forces were highly demoralized and, for the first time since 1982, on the defensive. The tide of the war had clearly turned in Iraq’s favor. Then, on July 3, an American naval cruiser operating in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian jetliner with 290 passengers on board. Khomeini decried that the “Great Satan” had massacred innocent Iranians on purpose. The United States called the shooting an unfortunate accident, claiming to have mistakenly identified the civilian airliner as a hostile Iranian jet fighter.
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Two weeks later, on July 15, in order to “avoid further loss of innocent life,” the Iranian leadership accepted UN Resolution 598, calling for a cessation of the hostilities and negotiations with Iraq. Now that the war had outlived its usefulness and begun to spiral out of control, Khomeini brought it to an end.