by Ray Takeyh
For its part, the Ba’athist regime viewed its Islamist neighbor with an equal degree of contempt and concern. As the vanguard of a secular, modern Arab order, the resurgence of traditional institutions and religious politics was belittled by the Ba’athists as irrational retrogression. The Islamic Republic with its regional mandates and ideological claims was a unique threat to Saddam’s rule.7
The tense relations between the two states was further strained as Iran’s message of revolutionary defiance proved particularly attractive to at least a segment of Iraq’s Shiite majority. Organized opposition forces such as the al-Dawa Party soon conducted violent campaigns against Ba’athist targets and officials, most likely with Iranian complicity. The minority Sunni regime, shielding its absolute power behind the veneer of pan-Arabism, must have felt particularly vulnerable to Khomeini’s appeal to the hard-pressed Shiite populace. The Iraqi counterreaction featured all the brutality and excess exemplified by Saddam’s tyranny, as the Shiite community was subject to relentless reprisals, and some of its most venerable clerics were summarily executed. However, such harsh repressive measures did not ease Saddam’s mind, since he feared that the contagion of Khomeinism may yet destabilize his rule. Once more, ideological antagonisms intruded, intensifying suspicions and making violence an attractive option for the perennially impetuous Iraqi leader.
To attribute the emerging conflict between the two states to ideological incompatibility is to discount Saddam’s overweening ambitions. By 1980, Egypt’s acceptance of the Camp David Accords had effectively removed one of the principal obstacles to Iraq’s leadership of the Arab world. Moreover, the revolutionary chaos in Iran and the decimation of its officer corps by the vengeful mullahs was leading Saddam to perceive that a decisive military strike would not only provoke the collapse of the theocratic regime but consolidate Iraq’s leadership of the Arab realm. A combination of threats and opportunities was proving irresistible to a leader prone to taking great and dangerous risks.8
As border clashes between the two states intensified, Saddam openly castigated the “mummy Khomeini” and implored the Iranian masses to “find someone else other than the rotten Khomeini.”9 By the summer of 1980, Saddam took the inflammatory step of renouncing the 1975 Algiers Accords, which had provided a framework for operating the contested Shatt al-Arab waterway. The Iraqi dictator simply claimed that “since the rulers of Iran have violated this agreement from the beginning of their reign as the Shah before them, I announce before you that we consider the March 1975 agreement abrogated.”10 Finally, on September 22, 1980, Saddam took the catastrophic decision to invade Iran, beginning one of the longest and most destructive wars in the modern history of the Middle East.
Even in the context of strained relations between the two states since 1958, Saddam’s invasion of Iran was a stark departure from the previous pattern. To be sure, there had been sporadic border clashes and both parties had supported proxies against each other, but a full-scale military invasion cannot be seen as a mere continuation of the existing tensions. In essence, Saddam dramatically altered the nature of the conflict between the two states and escalated tensions to a new level. Indeed, had Saddam not reached the pinnacle of power, the controlled rage between the two states might well have persisted as it had for over two decades. But as a rash ruler with ambitions to establish his state as the leader of the Arab world and the hegemon of the Gulf, Saddam perceived a unique opportunity to rid himself of his theocratic nemesis next door. The defeat of Iran would not just evaporate a strategic challenge, but it would lead the grateful Gulf sheikdoms to accept Iraqi predominance and the larger Arab realm to acclaim the vanquisher of the Persian hordes. On the other side, Khomeini stood with his own determinations, which would lead to the continuation of the war despite its human and material costs. To the mix of ideological animosity and territorial dispute was now added the personality of two dogmatic leaders, indifferent to the suffering and welfare of their citizenry. The Iran-Iraq war was consequently destined to be one of the most prolonged and devastating conflicts in the annals of warfare.11
The Iran-Iraq war was unusual in many respects, as it was not merely an interstate conflict designed to achieve specific territorial or even political objectives. This was a war waged for the triumph of ideas, with Ba’athist secular pan-Arabism contesting Iran’s Islamic fundamentalism. As such, for Tehran the war came to embody its revolutionary identity. The themes of solidarity and sacrifice, self-reliance and commitment not only allowed the regime to consolidate its power but make the defeat of Saddam the ultimate test of theocratic legitimacy. War and revolution had somehow fused in the clerical cosmology. To wage a determined war was to validate one’s revolutionary ardor and spiritual fidelity. The notion of compromise and armistice was alien to the Islamic Republic, as its commitment to the war transcended conventional calculations.12
Iraq would soon discover the problem with invading a revolutionary state infused with a messianic ideology: the imperatives of caution and pragmatism are lost on the militant elite. As an ideologically driven state, Iran never defined the war in terms of territory lost or gained but as a spiritual mission seeking moral redemption. For the clerical rulers, Iran had been attacked not because of its provocations or territorial disputes but because the Islamic Republic embodied a virtuous order. This was an infidel war against the Islamic revolution, the “Government of God,” and the sublime faith of Shiism. “You are fighting to protect Islam, and he is fighting to destroy it,” Khomeini told the Iranian people.13 In a similar vein, Rafsanjani emphatically declared, “The fact that we are not making peace stems from the Koran and the honor of Islam.”14 The clerical leadership genuinely insisted that the war was a blessing, as it would either lead to a momentous victory for the forces of piety or to martyrdom, which was itself the ultimate form of salvation. Thus, the sacrifices of the war were exalted even if the ultimate outcome was not an Iranian triumph.
Throughout the duration of the conflict, religious discourse and symbols were used to present the war to the public. The duty of the righteous Muslim was to resist oppression and wage war against enemies seeking to tarnish Islam. The importance of patience and steadfastness was also noted, however, as God would reward not just the zealous but those who persisted in their ardor despite setbacks and suffering.15 Such claims may seem self-serving, designed to galvanize a populace called to endure significant difficulties for an undetermined period of time. For the clerical leadership this was not just a gesture of cynical manipulation of popular sentiments, however, but a genuine expression of their ideological framework of the war. Seldom in their many declarations and speeches does one find the ruling elite preoccupied with the limited territory in dispute or Saddam’s violation of agreements governing relations between the two states. The sweeping, universalistic rhetoric revealed that for Tehran this was a more profound, even an existential, struggle between the forces of Islamic virtue and a profane Ba’athist ruler.
During Saddam’s later conflicts with the United States, he would be castigated by American politicians as an aggressor, a genocidal maniac, even another Hitler. Yet the Islamic Republic’s distinct ideological approach to the war eschewed such terms for the more emotive Koranic designation of Saddam as a heretic, an embodiment of evil plotting against the true essence of Islam. In a sense, the clerical rulers appropriated the rhetoric of the Muslim empires that had battled the armies of the Crusaders, where the issue was not mere aggression but a collision of two contending civilizations—in this case, the ethical Islamic Iran against Saddam’s world of dissimulation, treachery, and cynicism.16
Given such perceptions, the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine avoided issues of tactics and strategy in favor of revolutionary fervor. Ayatollah Khomeini captured this sentiment by stressing, “Victory is not achieved by swords; it can only be achieved by blood.”17 While traditional armies sought a coherent command structure and access to necessary armaments, Iran was to rely on its culture of martyrdom and sac
rifice, on the theory that moral superiority and the power of faith were sufficient to overcome Iraq’s devastating war machine, generously supplied by the Western powers seeking to contain Iran’s ambitions.
Nor did Iran’s war aims reflect the limits of its power. Tehran’s objective remained the complete destruction of Saddam’s regime and the elimination of the Sunni domination of Iraq’s politics. The fact is that after 1982, when Iran evicted Iraqi forces from its territory, Baghdad was prepared to cease the war. However, Khomeini and his clerical brethren insisted on the continuation of the conflict until their maximalist objectives were achieved. The problem for Iran was that its military capabilities were not sufficient to realize its inflexible aims. The gap between determination and capacity ensured a stalemate, as neither side was powerful enough to impose a solution on the other, while Tehran was simply unwilling to reach a compromise solution to end the war.
After 1982, the war settled into a pattern of bloody deadlock, reminiscent of the carnage of the First World War, where the capture of inches of territory would consume countless lives. A dogmatic Iran would unleash sporadic, large-scale offensives using human waves that would inevitably be repulsed by Iraq’s better-equipped army. Then an inevitable lull would ensue, only to be shattered by the grisly pattern of another failed operation. As the war persisted, both parties sought to alter tactics and cultivate new allies in order to somehow breach the stalemate. It was in this context that Iraq introduced chemical weapons to an already deadly battleground.18
Iraq’s employment of chemical weapons against Iran began in 1983, and after their initial battlefield use, the list of targets was gradually expanded.19 Nor did the Iraqi leadership deny its right to utilize such weapons to fend off Iranian attacks. By 1984, Iraqi military commanders were boasting of how they used “insecticide” to exterminate “the swarms of mosquitoes.”20 The former Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was uniquely honest when admitting the use of such weapons, albeit in retaliation for what he said was Iran’s similar deployment of chemical weapons.21 After eight UN investigations, sheaves of evidence from eyewitness accounts, and captured Iraqi documents, it can be declared conclusively that while Iraq did employ weapons of mass destruction, there is no indication of Iran’s similar use, belying Aziz’s spurious claims of just retaliation.22
In the end, the principal strategic utility of chemical weapons is to terrorize the combatants and demoralize the population. Saddam was successful in this regard, because Iraq’s systematic use of chemical agents gradually undermined the confidence of Iran’s zealous volunteers and the cohesion of its armed forces. Throughout the war, Iran’s hard-won battlefield gains were often reversed by Baghdad’s use of weapons of mass destruction. In a similar vein, the potential targeting of cities, which became much easier by the mid-1980s once Iraq developed long-range missiles, dramatically frightened Iran’s civilian population, leading to mass exodus from cities and towns. The pressure exerted by an increasingly frightened population and the beleaguered armed forces proved a heavy burden for the clerical hard-liners seeking to perpetuate the war until victory.
In the meantime, the apparent internationalization of the conflict was yet another lever pressing the clerical leadership to end the war. The massive aid and intelligence information offered to Iraq by the Western powers was supplemented in the latter stages of the conflict by a robust U.S. naval presence protecting Gulf commerce from Iranian menace. Given that the Gulf sheikdoms’ oil profits were allowing them to generously subsidize Iraq’s war machine, Iran’s inability to disrupt that trade offered Iraq another important advantage. As battlefield losses mounted, the international community simply would not allow Saddam to fall. It baffled Iran’s leaders and citizens alike how the Western bloc, with its emphasis on human rights and democratic values, had come to embrace a tyrannical Sunni ruler.
By 1988, Iran’s population was exhausted and war-weary. Eight years of sacrifice and hardship had not produced the much-pledged victory. The steady stream of volunteers who sustained Iran’s war effort had been reduced to a trickle, compelling the regime to impose draconian conscription measures to meet its basic manpower needs. The huge offensive operations with their human wave assaults were no longer a possibility as draft evasion and the loss of revolutionary ardor compelled the army to reduce the scope of its activities. More pragmatic officials, such as Rafsanjani, now began to implore Khomeini that the time had come for ending the conflict. The war that had been so useful in terms of consolidating the revolution now began to threaten the theocratic edifice through popular disenchantment, demoralized youth, and grumblings within the armed forces.
The final event that pressed Iran’s internal debate toward an armistice was the accidental shooting down of an Iranian airliner in July 1988 by a U.S. naval vessel, the USS Vincennes. Despite America’s apology and an offer of compensation for the 290 passengers killed, Tehran assumed that this was a signal of a more vigorous American involvement on behalf of Iraq.23 Iranian officials now feared that prolonging the war with Iraq would lead to direct U.S. military engagement to overthrow the Islamic Republic. In an unprecedented move, the commanders of Iran’s regular armed forces and the Revolutionary Guards, who had been so at odds about how to wage the war, informed the central government that they lacked the capability to protect the state against both Iraq and America.24 The military’s judgment was endorsed by all the relevant institutions, including the firebrands in the parliament; the president of the republic, Ali Khamenei; and senior economic advisers. Such combined pressures finally compelled Khomeini to inform the nation of his decision to cease the conflict.25 Crestfallen, he confronted his countrymen and proclaimed the end of the war:
Today, this decision was more deadly than drinking hemlock. I submitted myself to God’s will and drank this drink to His satisfaction. To me, it would have been more bearable to accept death and martyrdom. Today’s decision is based only on the interest of the Islamic Republic.26
Despite its revolutionary determination, Iran fought the war with disadvantages it could not overcome. Given the absence of reliable and generous allies, an inability to gain steady sources of weapons, and international isolation, Tehran had to rely exclusively on its own resources to achieve the unrealistic goal of the destruction of Saddam’s regime. Iraq may not have been able to defeat Iran, but proved sufficiently resilient to rebuff Iranian offensives. As the war dragged on, the gap between Iran’s objectives and its capabilities continued to widen, imposing a dose of reality on a regime that took pride in defying conventional calculations.
The Iran-Iraq war ended nearly two decades ago, and in the intervening period Iranians have come to deal with the causes and legacy of the most prolonged conflict in their country’s modern history. As with Americans wrestling with the Vietnam War, Iranians, after an initial determination to forget, are struggling with the wounds of a controversial conflict. In many ways, the war continues to define the parameters of Iran’s political culture and international orientation. In the 2005 presidential election, Rafsanjani’s role in the war became a subject of controversy as questions were asked as to why he and the leadership of the Islamic Republic at that time did not end the war in 1982 when an armistice was apparently available.27 And, of course, Ahmadinejad, himself a war veteran, did much to emphasize his service on behalf of the nation and the lessons that it imprinted on his consciousness.
Today in Iran, one rarely finds a family that has not been affected by the war—the loss of a son, a disabled relative, the hardship that all had to suffer. Memoirs, books, scholarly conferences, and journalistic accounts deal with the war, its continuing legacy, and its visible scars. The war, as with much of history in Iran, is a living enterprise.28 Increasingly, after much contemplation and discussion, a consensus is beginning to emerge both in public circles and among the governing elite that the cause of Iraq’s persistent belligerence was the Sunni domination of its politics. The Sunni minority was always looking abroad for glory and pan-Arabist
acclaim to sanction its hold on absolute power. For the clerical oligarchs a stable Iraq is one where the majority Shiite and Kurdish populations have a determining role in the governing deliberations. Given Iraq’s demographic realities, the electoral process will ensure the rise of the Shiite community and effectively diminish the power and influence of the Sunni populace. In a strange paradox, the war has made the Iranian leaders forceful advocates of democratic pluralism next door.
Such emerging perceptions are consistent with the Islamic Republic’s discourse and propaganda during the war. Throughout the conflict, Iran was careful to distinguish between Saddam and the Iraqi populace. In numerous speeches, Khomeini noted the dissimilarity between Saddam and his Sunni power base and the vast majority of the Iraqi population. The Sunni elite’s embrace of Ba’athist ideology had essentially transformed them into heretics, Khomeini argued. Thus, the war was waged not against a people, but a system—the Sunni-dominated, secular Ba’athist order. In a clever move, the vast majority of the Iraqi populace was absolved of its complicity in the war as the Ba’athist Sunnis were depicted as agents of anti-Muslim transgression, with the Iraqi people also serving as one of their chief victims.29
Beyond Iraq, the war also shaped Tehran’s views of the larger international community. The Western powers’ indifference to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran has led to a pervasive suspicion of the international order, particularly its American guardian. The notion that Iran’s tangible security interests can best be achieved by relying on international conventions and treaties has a limited audience in a country that has suffered substantial casualties at the hands of Saddam’s chemical warfare. It is here that the legacy of the war makes the development of a nuclear capability all the more attractive to the clerical rulers. Moreover, America’s lack of concern about Iran’s sufferings continues, as the indictments against Saddam brought after the U.S. invasion still do not include his war crimes against Iran. Such persistent insensitivity has caused an uproar in Iran, as Tehran continues to demand that the Iraqi dictator stand trial for his abuse of the Iraqi people and invasion of Kuwait, and for his indiscriminate use of weapons of mass destruction against Iranian soldiers and civilians. So long as the United States ignores these requests, the wall of mistrust between the two countries is likely to remain intact.