Two weeks later the frail 76-year-old ayatollah showed that he could inspire millions of his people to frenzied enthusiasm when he returned in triumph to declare that, with his Islamic Revolution, a truly Islamic republic would be established.
This momentous event was soon to be compared in importance with the French Revolution of 1789 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. For the comparison to be sustained it was necessary for the Iranian Revolution’s influence to spread far beyond Iran’s borders, and especially to the Muslim peoples of the Middle East. Khomeini and his clerical associates left no doubt that this was their intention. They proclaimed that all the regimes of Muslim countries in the region were corrupt, unworthy and un-Islamic and therefore deserved to be overthrown. They also denounced these regimes’ association with the West. Khomeini declared that a true Muslim country should have no truck with either East or West, but his special hatred was directed towards the United States – ‘the Great Satan’, the former ally of the shah. Anti-American rage swept Iran and, when President Carter allowed the shah to travel from his retreat in the Bahamas to the United States for medical treatment, a crowd of militants stormed the US embassy in Tehran, seizing some fifty US hostages and all the embassy documents. This outrage against all the norms of diplomacy, which even the most radical and revolutionary regimes usually accepted, provoked the United States, with the support of its allies, to declare Iran an international outlaw. Khomeini was not displeased. His uncompromising defiance of the West provoked admiration among all the Muslim masses to whom he wished to appeal. This was reinforced by his adoption of the cause of Palestine. He reversed the shah’s de facto alliance with Israel and invited Arafat to Tehran, where he was greeted as a hero.
At home, Ayatollah Khomeini set about consolidating clerical rule under his leadership. His authoritarianism provoked the opposition of the secular nationalist and left-wing elements who had supported his revolution, but they were no match for the hold he had gained over the Iranian people. In fact the most serious opposition to his rule came from more senior Islamic clerics who challenged his religious authority. But even this he was able to contain. He had political genius, which they lacked. He based his rule on the doctrine of velayat-e faqih – that is, ‘government of the Islamic jurist’ – which he had expounded in lectures in exile. This holds that the true Islamic state must be based on the Koran and be modelled after the Prophet’s Islamic community in the seventh century, and that it should be administered by the clerical class as the Prophet’s heirs. As the self-appointed governing Islamic jurist, Khomeini was able to hold supreme power above that of the president, prime minister and elected parliament, which were all provided for in the new Islamic constitution. Under his authority, mass trials of the shah’s former supporters were organized, leading to many executions. The educational system was purged of non-Islamic influences. Squads of young Muslim militiamen enforced a strict Islamic code of conduct. Educated Iranian women, who had reached an advanced stage of emancipation before the revolution, had their role in public life sharply reduced and all had to envelop their heads and bodies in Islamic dress in public,
The success of the Khomeini Revolution and its declared desire to export itself caused serious alarm among Iran’s Arab neighbours, but nowhere more than in Iraq. With its secular pan-Arabist ideology and its large Shiite population with little share in political power, Iraq was a vulnerable target. Tehran Arabic broadcasts poured hatred and contempt on the Iraq regime and called on the Iraqi people to overthrow it.
Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, decided to act first. Although Iran has immense resources and three times Iraq’s population, he believed that the Khomeini Revolution could be overthrown by a swift blow. The Iranian regular armed forces were demoralized. Iran’s large minorities – the Kurds in the north-west, the Turkomans of the Caspian plain and the Arabs of Khuzestan in the south-west – saw their religious and cultural identities threatened by the Shiite fundamentalist policies of the Revolution and were demanding autonomy and threatening revolt. The economy, facing a Western boycott, was in dire condition. Almost certainly, exiled royalist Iranian officers helped to convince President Saddam that it was time to move. On 17 September 1980 Iraq, alleging various minor acts of Iranian aggression, denounced the 1975 agreement with the former shah and invaded Iran.
The eight-year war which ensued was on an epic scale, with colossal casualties, massive material destruction and mutual rocket attacks on Baghdad and Tehran in ‘the war of the cities’. Iraq initially advanced deep into Iranian territory, but its invasion soon proved the danger of attacking a revolution. Iranian morale was higher than expected, and the Arab Iranians of the south-west did not rise to support the invaders. Within a year Iraq had been forced back, and by May 1982 Iran had recaptured nearly all its territory. All Iraq’s outlets to the sea were cut off. A prolonged stalemate ensued, interspersed by large-scale offensives which, as in the First World War, left many dead but the battle lines scarcely changed. Iraq, which could obtain arms from both East and West, had the advantage in weapons – especially tanks and artillery. Iran, lacking fresh supplies of its American weapons, was forced to turn to sources such as North Korea or the international black market in arms. It used its numerical superiority to launch human-wave assaults which often involved thousands of teenage youths imbued with the characteristically Shiite readiness for martyrdom.
For some time the Gulf War directly involved only Iraq and Iran. Initial world alarm caused a further steep rise in oil prices, but the reaction of the world outside the Middle East could be summed up in a possibly apocryphal comment ascribed to Dr Henry Kissinger: that the best result would be for both sides to lose the war. The war was prolonged because, while Iraq was prepared to settle for a return to the old frontiers, Iran demanded nothing less than the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
The six Arab Gulf states – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – supported Iraq with varying degrees of enthusiasm and openness, and as the war progressed they helped to sustain Iraq with money and supplies. They were appalled at the prospect of an outright Iranian victory. The threatening situation, aggravated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, acted as a catalyst for them to join together in self-defence in May 1981 to establish the Gulf Co-operation Council. This looked forward to a staged process of political and economic fusion, somewhat along the lines of the European Community.
Among the other Arab states, Jordan and Egypt declared their support for Iraq in the war even more openly. Jordan’s Aqaba port became the principal route for Iraqi imports of war materials; Egypt supplied arms and ammunition. But President Assad of Syria declared himself Iran’s ally in the war and closed Iraq’s oil pipeline across Syrian territory. Although this bizarre friendship between a professed Arab nationalist and an Iranian Shiite fundamentalist might have had something to do with the fact that Assad came from Syria’s sub-Shia Alawite minority, from his view it was primarily a strategic alliance against the detested rival Baathist regime in Iraq. Syria benefited from the supply of a regular quota of free Iranian oil and from the pro-Iranian sympathies among the Shiites of Lebanon. President Assad rejected all the repeated attempts by other Arab states to persuade him to change sides. The ideological cynicism of the Syrian–Iranian alliance was underlined when, in February 1982, the Syrian army ruthlessly repressed an armed rising in the city of Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose aims were closely similar to those of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.
While the fears of the Revolution among most Arab regimes were real enough, the danger that it could reach out to topple them receded as the war progressed – even when Iran appeared to have the advantage. Khomeini emphatically wished to appeal to all Muslims, not only to the Shiite minority, and he scorned any concept of nationalism within the Islamic umma. But he could not prevent the war from widening the ancient Persian–Arab rivalry or the Sunni–Shiite division. In the Arab Gulf states, any initial popular enthusiasm for the
Islamic Revolution was soon confined to the Shiite minorities. This caused their Sunni rulers serious concern, but increased their determination to stand firm, and the bloodthirsty repression of all opposition in Iran also helped to antagonize their Sunni subjects. In Iraq, with its Shiite majority, territorial nationalism showed itself to be the stronger force. Just as the Arab-speaking Iranians had refused to side with Iraq, the great majority of Iraq Shiite Arabs remained loyal and showed no eagerness to be occupied and ruled by the Islamic Republic. It was Iraq’s Sunni Kurds who gave the regime serious trouble.
In countries more remote from the Gulf War – in Egypt, Sudan and the Maghreb states – the Khomeini Revolution’s defiance of both West and East retained it some prestige among Muslim militants who had no love for the Iraqi regime. But the Ayatollah’s influence was symbolic. There was no question of accepting his political leadership – the Muslim Brothers of Egypt and Sudan had begun their own struggle long before the Iranian Revolution.
The murderous stalemate in the Gulf War continued from 1982 to 1987. ‘The war of the cities’, with rockets and shelling, was pursued sporadically at heavy cost. The Iranians alternated human-wave assaults with attacks on a smaller scale at varied points along the frontier to wear down Iraqi morale, but this was higher now that Iraqi troops were defending their own territory. In 1986 the Iranians captured Iraq’s Faw peninsula on the Gulf coast but failed at heavy cost in an attempt to seize Basra. The focus of the war moved to the waters of the Gulf, where Iraq’s air superiority could be used against Iran’s vital oil exports but Iran’s naval superiority enabled it to blockade Iraqi supplies. The danger that the tanker war might intensify and spread at last attracted the serious attention of the superpowers. In 1987 the United States offered to reflag Kuwaiti tankers to provide protection (following a similar offer by the Soviet Union), and by mid-year the USA was in full-scale naval confrontation with Iran. On 20 July the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 598 calling for an immediate end to all hostilities. Iraq accepted this but Iran refused, on the grounds that at the very least President Saddam’s responsibility for the war should be internationally accepted.
In 1988 the war took a new and final turn. Between May and June the Iraqis recaptured Faw and drove the Iranians out of other key areas on the frontier. With the numbers of willing Iranian martyrs declining and economic collapse looming, the closest supporters of the infirm octogenarian Khomeini persuaded him that there was no alternative to accepting the UN cease-fire. He told his people that taking the decision ‘was more deadly than taking poison’.
The cease-fire held, with the help of the UN observers, but it was still only an armed truce. UN-sponsored peace talks failed to achieve a peace agreement to settle the outstanding border disputes, or even an exchange of prisoners. The two regimes remained deadly enemies, although they had to accept that renewed war was impossible for some years. They began to rearm even as they set about reconstructing their ruined economies.
A triumphant President Hussein declared that Iraq had won the war – which in a sense it had, even if he had not achieved his original war aims of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. He had won by not losing, just as Khomeini had lost by not winning.
On 4 June 1989 Khomeini’s long-expected death finally occurred. The succession passed smoothly in spite of an underlying struggle for power between those, including Khomeini’s son Ahmed, who wished to pursue his uncompromising hostility towards the West and those who sought to normalize Iran’s relations with the world as an essential means of restoring the economy, while insisting that the Ayatollah’s legacy would remain unchanged.
It was the pragmatists who won. The Assembly of Experts swiftly appointed the mild-mannered former president Khameini as the new spiritual leader. Two months later the speaker of the Majlis, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, a man of high political skill, succeeded in having himself elected president with greatly increased powers and promptly ousted the leaders of the hardline faction from the cabinet.
For the millions of Iranians who mourned Khomeini’s death there was no one who could replace the man whom many of them had come to regard as God’s embodiment on earth, even if anyone had wished to try. In the decade since the Revolution, hundreds of thousands had died and the economy had been ruined in a war which had ended in failure. Dissidence had been harshly repressed, and a large proportion of the skilled and educated had fled into exile. Yet the scowling figure of Khomeini, so deeply unattractive to most of the rest of the world, still represented to his intensely proud people a spirit of unyielding defiance after centuries of humiliation by stronger powers.
The question was, how much of Khomeini’s legacy would survive? While clerical rule had been institutionalized and seemed likely to last for a time, Rafsanjani, with modest religious credentials, was essentially a secular figure. But he was not all-powerful – his hardline opponents had been bypassed but not subdued. He had to move cautiously towards calming and moderating the Islamic Republic’s policies towards the rest of the world, in order to reconstruct the economy and encourage the urgently needed exiles to return.
Only one thing seemed certain: Iran’s Islamic Revolution would not permanently change the face of the Middle East. This had proved beyond Khomeini’s power, and it was certainly impossible for his successors. As the representative of militant Shiite Islam, Iran could count on the open allegiance of many Lebanese Shiites and the covert sympathy of Shiite minorities in the Arab Gulf states, but little more. With its fifty-five million people, and occupying a strategic position, it was still a major power in Middle Eastern terms and all states with interests in the region were therefore anxious to have dealings with Tehran. But its power to influence events outside its borders was no greater than in the time of the shah.
Iraq’s World Challenge
The ambitions of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who had been the effective ruler of his country since 1968, were not exhausted by his eight-year struggle with his larger neighbour. Despite mountainous debts and an economy in desperate need of reconstruction he still maintained a huge military machine with nearly one million men under arms, and he poured vast sums into developing advanced weapons. During the summer of 1990 he threatened Kuwait because of its reluctance to allow Iraq secure access to the Gulf through its territory. He also blamed Kuwait for the fall in the price of oil by producing in excess of its OPEC quota – a fall which he claimed was losing Iraq a billion dollars a month in revenues. In late July he massed troops on Kuwait’s border. But despite this and the failure of Saudi Arabia’s efforts to mediate there were few – except the Iranians – who expected his next move. On 2 August he invaded and occupied the whole of Kuwait on the spurious assertion that there had been a pro-Iraqi uprising against Kuwait’s Emir. The Emir and his ministers fled to Saudi Arabia where they set up a government-in-exile. A week later Saddam announced the annexation of Kuwait as Iraq’s nineteenth province. He declared that the child had been restored to its mother, regardless of the fact that the Kuwaiti emirate had been born some two centuries before its supposed parent – the Iraqi state.
If Saddam had successfully taken the world by surprise, he had also miscalculated the extent of its opposition. The UN Security Council unanimously imposed mandatory sanctions against Iraq that, following a series of resolutions, became almost totally effective in blocking Iraq’s foreign trade and freezing its foreign assets. The first major crisis of the post-Cold War era offered the extraordinary spectacle of a country of eighteen million people defying the two superpowers and most of the world. As Iraqi troops advanced to the Saudi Arabian border there arose the alarming prospect that Saddam would seize the Saudi oilfields which, in conjunction with those of Iraq and Kuwait, would make him master of more than half the world’s oil reserves. The United States, which had regarded an Iraqi victory in the Gulf War as preferable to the triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini, now denounced Saddam Hussein as an international outlaw. President Bush immediately responded to King Fahd of Saudi
Arabia’s urgent invitation to send troops to defend the kingdom. Even after the initial threat had receded with the arrival of airborne forces, there was a continued build-up of naval, land and air forces totalling some six hundred thousand personnel, and carrying the most advanced weapons. The great majority were American but Britain and France sent substantial contingents and no less than fifty-four countries contributed either military forces or financial support. Of the greatest political importance to the United States was the addition, apart from the troops of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, of Arab forces from Egypt, Syria and Morocco, and others from Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh. It was vital to demonstrate that this was not one more Western crusade against the Arabs and Islam.
In fact opinion among the Arabs was divided and confused on the issue. While the governments of the Arab League declared with varying emphasis that Iraq should withdraw from Kuwait, there were those, such as Jordan, Sudan, Libya and Algeria as well as the PLO, that showed some degree of sympathy with the Iraqi position. These governments gave priority to announcing the danger to the Arabs and Islam presented by the huge influx of infidel Western armies. King Hussein of Jordan and Yasir Arafat tried urgently to negotiate an ‘Arab solution’ to the crisis.
A History of the Middle East Page 42