by John Keegan
Saddam’s pause had the farther effect of allowing the Iranians to regroup, reorganize, and induct hundreds of thousands of new recruits into the army. In May 1981 they were able to launch a counteroffensive which forced the Iraqis to pull back from Abadan to Khorramshahr and in October they were driven across the Karun River, one of the first objectives. In November the tide of battle turned markedly in the Iranians’ favour. They began to organize mass attacks, sending human waves of untrained juveniles to march into Iraqi minefields and barrages of automatic fire. Step by step, during the rest of the 1981 campaign and into the spring of 1982, the Iraqis were forced to give ground, losing thousands of prisoners in the process. Saddam was unable to mount an effective defence, let alone a counter-offensive, and in June 1982 declared a cease-fire, claiming that Iraq had achieved its objects.
Iraq was in fact close to defeat, less because of military losses, grievous though they were, than financial difficulties. The fighting in the south, at the head of the Gulf, had severely diminished Iraq’s ability to export oil, but not so Iran’s which, with outlets onto the lower Gulf and the Indian Ocean, could continue to earn oil income. Iraq, as the war became protracted, was increasingly dependent on subsidies from neighbours, particularly Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to which Saddam successfully represented the war as a struggle against Islamic fundamentalism in which he fought to protect not only his régime but also theirs. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia both transported essential supplies to Iraq and provided oil credits to foreign suppliers, which paid, among other things, for war material. After two years of fighting, Iraq was effectively sustaining its war by borrowing and the loans, unsecured, unserviced and mounting, were putting the country into an increasingly unfavourable financial position. Its financial situation was to worsen throughout the following years and collapse to be staved off only by persuading neighbours to lengthen credit and, eventually, the United States to lend its support. During the 1980s Iran was regarded by the United States as the most dangerous of its Third World enemies, because of the violent anti-Americanism of the ayatollah régime and for its seizure of the staff of the American embassy in Tehran, in gross violation of international law. The extension of support to anti-Iranian Gulf States was a natural consequence; it eventually included the reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers as American ships, hastened after Iran began air attacks on tankers in 1984, and the strengthening of the American naval presence in the Gulf to protect them.
Yet despite foreign assistance, the war began to go badly against Iraq after 1982 and the turn of events was not to be disguised. Internally the cost, running at a billion US dollars a month, began to reduce funds available for imports; after an initial boom, deliberately sustained by Saddam to buoy civilian support for the war, the economy began to show signs of recession. Between 1980 and 1983 Iraq’s foreign currency reserves fell from $35 billion to $3 billion, with a consequent drop in imports; the reserves were farther adversely affected by Syria’s action in closing the pipeline to the Mediterranean, in retaliation for Saddam’s rupture of relations with the Syrian Ba’athist party. The human as well as financial costs were high, with casualties running at 1,200 a month, a figure that rose sharply during offensives. Militarily, from 1982 onwards, Iran was able to mount offensives with increasing frequency. During the summer of 1982 Iran embarked on a major offensive designed to cross the Tigris and reach Basra, Iraq’s second city and capital of the Shi’a south. The methods were as before: mass attacks by waves of untrained, under-age volunteers. After the initial shock, however, the Iraqis proved equal to the strain. Their engineers constructed extensive and deep lines of fortifications, in places creating artificial lakes which funnelled the direction of the Iranian thrusts. Behind strong defences the Iraqis fought well, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers; if ground was lost, it was recaptured by ground–air counter-attacks. The Iranian air force had difficulty in operating, because of American refusal to supply spare parts for its aircraft, while the Iraqi air force, flying French and Russian aircraft, was not so penalized; it was also equipped with large numbers of helicopters which Iran lacked. Moreover the Iraqi ground forces, encouraged by their defensive successes, displayed markedly improved morale; even the Shi’a conscripts, deterred at the thought of the ayatollahs exporting their joyless regime in the wake of victory, found a sense of patriotism and battled with a will.
Between 1982 and 1984 the struggle degenerated into a war of attrition, with the Iranians maintaining the offensive but Iraq inflicting the heavier casualties. Although by 1984 the total of Iraqi war dead had reached 65,000, with up to 60,000 taken prisoner, the equivalent Iranian figure was 180,000 dead and half a million wounded. Moreover, the Iranians were not gaining ground. The exception to their consistent failure to do so came in early 1984 when, by a cunningly organized night attack, Iranian amphibious forces succeeded in surprising the garrison of the Majnun Islands, near Basra. Despite repeated attempts to recapture the islands, the Iraqis failed. Saddam therefore decided to resort to unconventional methods. He was already manufacturing chemical weapons at two plants, at Salman Pak and Samarra, and now used two products, mustard gas and Tabun, in helicopter attacks on the Iranian positions. Mustard gas is a blistering agent, developed and widely used during the First World War, Tabun a nerve agent developed by the Nazis for use in extermination camps.
Chemical agents are notoriously unsatisfactory as weapons of war. They are difficult to deliver with precision and, once launched, are wholly subject for effect on the vagaries of the local weather; low humidity robs the agents of effect quickly, high humidity causes them to persist; favourable wind direction carries them into the enemy positions, unfavourable wind direction causes ‘blow back’ or results in dispersion away from the battlefield. The Iraqis in the Majnun Islands encountered all those conditions; the Iranians, by contrast, soon acquired protective clothing and antidotes which rendered the use of chemical agents pointless.
In the long run, Saddam’s resort to chemical weapons was to do him nothing but harm. Not only did his chemical warfare campaign fail to achieve its intended results; it also alerted the attention of the United Nations. The use of chemical weapons had been outlawed by the League of Nations during the 1920s and the ban had been sustained with remarkable consistency throughout the Second World War and afterwards. As one of the few demonstrable successes of international arms control, the United Nations was determined to support it and in March 1984 a team of UN inspectors was despatched to Iran to investigate its complaints. The team confirmed that Iraq had broken the ban, a report that prejudiced most countries previously favourable to Saddam against him. For a time Saddam was brought to desist; in 1987–88, however, he resumed his use of chemical weapons, in that period against his own people in Kurdistan, in an attempt to terrorize them against co-operating with Iranian incursions into their area. Notoriously, at Halabjah in March 1988, his use of chemical agents killed at least 5,000 Kurdish civilians in an operation directed by his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, later to be known as ‘Chemical Ali’.
Between 1984 and 1988, however, Saddam’s distasteful reputation as a chemical warmaker was offset in foreign opinion by what appeared to be the much more threatening behaviour of his enemies, both in Iran and in the wider Middle Eastern world. The ayatollahs made no attempt to placate either the West or the Soviet Union. They persisted in persecuting the Tudeh, Iran’s Communist Party, and they made little effort to disguise their links with Islamic anti-Western terrorists. The Syrians, meanwhile, were continuing to provide refuge and training facilities to a number of violent Islamic terrorist groups and President Gaddafi so provoked the United States by his support for terrorists that it launched airstrikes against Libya in early 1986. In these circumstances it was comparatively easy for Saddam to represent himself as a force for stability in a troubled region. He was, from the middle of the Iran–Iraq War, certainly so treated. The small Gulf States, terrified that Iran might infect their populations with anti-monarchist and fundamentalist feelin
g, increased their donations to Iraq’s war chest, eventually to the tune of $25 billion. The Soviet Union began to supply high-technology equipment, including intermediate range missiles, capable of reaching Iran’s major cities from Iraqi bases. Egypt recycled some of its Soviet equipment to help Iraq with spare parts. France, if on a strictly financial basis, delivered dozens of high-performance strike aircraft, enhancing Iraqi capability to attack the Iranian tanker trade.
Most tellingly of all, the United States, which had throughout the years of Saddam’s rise kept Iraq on its list of countries suspected of supporting international terrorism, now decided that a shift of policy would be advantageous. Saddam’s enemies were also America’s, a perception heightened by anti-American terrorist outrages in Lebanon in 1983, when, in what was to prove the first instalment of suicide bombing, a Marine barracks was truck-bombed with great loss of life, following a devastating attack on the US embassy in the city. Saddam’s Foreign Minister was invited to Washington; in December 1983 his visit was returned by Donald Rumsfeld, then acting as a special Middle Eastern adviser to President Reagan. David Mack, a former State Department official who accompanied Rumsfeld to Baghdad, explained later that ‘we wanted to build a Cairo–Amman–Baghdad axis’. The warmer relationship thus established did not lead to the US supplying arms to Saddam (though in 1982 it did send sixty military helicopters designated as crop-sprayers, which Saddam peremptorily had adapted to fire anti-tank missiles), but Washington used its good offices to facilitate the construction of new pipelines to port outlets in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, thus easing Iraq’s financial difficulties, and it also began covertly to supply intelligence to Baghdad, derived from satellite overflights and surveillance by American AWACS aircraft operating from Saudi Arabia.
Despite Saddam’s success in attracting foreign support after 1984, he was not at first able to shift the balance of the war decisively his way. He began by using the advanced weaponry with which he had been supplied to intensify his attacks on Iranian cities. The Iranian air force responded in kind but its stock of warplanes had been so reduced by losses in combat that the contest proved unequal. Iraqi missile strikes actually provoked demonstrations against the war in the affected cities. Saddam had better success by using his French-supplied strike aircraft, Super Étendards equipped with Exocet sea-skimming missiles, to intensify attacks on Iranian tanker traffic and the terminals at which the tankers loaded; there were seventy missile strikes in 1984–85. Iran responded by shifting its attacks to Kuwaiti tankers, in retaliation for Kuwait’s financial support of the Iraqi war effort, a move which, as mentioned above, led to an extensive reflagging of the tankers as American ships. This strengthening of the American position against the ayatollah régime was set back in a bizarre fashion when evidence came to light that Washington was simultaneously supplying Iran with weapons – the Iran–Contra affair – in an effort to secure the release of American hostages held by Islamic terrorists in Lebanon; the repercussions severely shook the Reagan administration. It did not assist Saddam’s position, in any case, when a damaging attack on the USS Stark in the Gulf, on 17 May 1987, was revealed to be the result of an Iraqi Exocet strike.
Nevertheless Saddam’s efforts to involve Western and other navies in the protection of Gulf tanker traffic against Iranian attack had become so comprehensive that even the Stark affair did not dent the defence they offered. His finances, despite the punishing costs of the war, also continued to hold up. Although by 1987 Iraq’s foreign debts amounted to $50.5 billion, or thrice its gross domestic product, with another $45–55 billion owed in loans from client Gulf states, sympathetic treatment by American, Saudi and even Soviet institutions allowed it to make interest payments and find purchasing power abroad. Iraq was effectively bankrupt but was able to continue fighting because no interested state, outside a small coterie of Islamic and anti-Israeli countries, wished to see it defeated.
Then in February 1988 the shift in advantage, for which Saddam had always worked, at last swung Iraq’s way. The terrible suffering brought by the war to Iran, which had sustained nearly a million military casualties, out of a population of 9 million males of military age, combined with the unremitting air attacks on its cities, which had caused a widespread flight of the civilian population, had so weakened the ayatollah régime’s power that it could no longer mount an effective defence. Saddam opened his decisive counter-offensive with renewed air and missile attacks on Iranian centres. In April, assisted by intelligence support, he unleashed a ground offensive on the Fao peninsula, lost to Iran in 1986; it was captured and by early July so was all Iraqi territory lost to the Iranians since 1980. The Iraqis also expelled the remaining Iranian forces from Kurdistan and even succeeded in seizing a foothold across the enemy border.
As Iran was also undergoing damaging attacks by Iraqi aircraft on its tanker traffic and coastal oil outlets, which it was unable to counter, reality forced the ayatollah régime to accept that the war could not be won and could only be prosecuted farther at increasing and pointless loss. Since 1982 Ayatollah Khomeini had insisted that only Saddam’s relinquishment of power – ‘régime change’ as it would later be known – would induce him to enter into a settlement. He was now brought to recognize that he could not achieve that outcome. On 18 July 1988, therefore, Iran announced to the United Nations that it would accept Security Council Resolution 598, calling for a cease-fire, and it came into effect a month later. Ayatollah Khomeini died the following year, at the age of eighty-seven.
Saddam, still only in his early fifties and in vigorous health, had therefore won a sort of victory; but at terrible cost. Besides the war dead, totalling perhaps over 100,000, the conflict had also severely weakened the Iraqi economy. War debts, largely owed to the Gulf States and to Saudi Arabia, amounted to $80 billion; reconstruction costs were calculated at $230 billion. Ordinary state expenditure exceeded income from oil, about $13 billion a year; there was no other significant export except dates. The country could not service its debts, was surviving after 1988 only by begging for time to pay from its creditors and was effectively bankrupt. At the outset of Saddam’s taking power, Iraq was a prosperous country with an excellent credit rating. By 1988 it was mired in borrowing which it could not manage. Moreover, Saddam’s institution of an austerity programme at home, designed to reduce government spending, brought him unpopularity. Large numbers of soldiers were demobilized into unemployment, the number of state employees was abruptly reduced, state spending projects were curtailed, with a farther loss of jobs, and the sale of state enterprises was seen to benefit only a small group of Iraqi capitalists.
Saddam had other difficulties. Despite the departure of Iranian troops from Kurdistan, Kurdish resistance continued, provoking him, unwisely, to resort to the use of chemical weapons against the rebels. In March 1988 he had deluged the township of Halabjah, the last place to be occupied by the Iranians, with hydrogen cyanide, killing 5,000 of the inhabitants and injuring 10,000 more. During the summer of 1988 he subjected another sixty-five Kurdish villages to chemical attack, causing heavy casualties and the flight of a quarter of a million Kurds to Iran or Turkey. He was meanwhile persisting with his efforts to develop an Iraqi nuclear weapons programme, despite the success of the Israelis in destroying the Osirak reactor centre in 1981. The West, generally so exigent in its efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, as indeed was the Soviet Union, at first displayed a careless indifference to Saddam’s lust to acquire unconventional weapons, including the missile systems necessary to deliver them. The West’s unconcern, originally conditioned by its estimation that Saddam, for all his known faults, was preferable as an agent of power in the Gulf region to the incomprehensible ayatollahs, persisted into the post-Gulf War period. Then, the balance of opinion, unpredictably fickle as it so often is, swung against him. He made what proved to be the grave mistake of arresting and executing a Western journalist, after a travesty of a trial, for reporting on his unconventional weapons programme. Suddenly international op
inion took against him. The United States was already suspicious of his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, a clear threat to its client state of Israel; the judicial murder of the Observer journalist, Farzal Bazoft, attracted the condemnation of Margaret Thatcher, who, as British Prime Minister, was the principal non-American influence on the outlook of President Ronald Reagan.
Saddam had by that stage of his career killed so many critics of his régime that he no doubt failed to comprehend why one more elimination of a troublesome individual should have serious international repercussions. Had he allowed the dust to settle it might not have done so. Almost immediately after the Bazoft affair, however, he embarked on a new foreign policy initiative which farther provoked Western disapproval. The matter was, politically if not morally, of far greater weight. Saddam made it clear that he was bent on recovering the crippling costs of the Iran war.
Though he had attacked Iran without any thought that he might be biting off more than he could chew, the first two years of the war had shown him otherwise. As difficulties developed, he turned to the other Gulf States for help, in the expectation that repayment would be neither difficult nor inconveniently demanded. As the war drew out he had found that loans and subsidies were made with increasing reluctance, and eventually arranged only out of fear of an Iranian victory. By the time the ayatollahs conceded, the cost to the Gulf States, Kuwait foremost, of sheltering behind Iraq equated, in financial if not human terms, to what might have been incurred had they fought themselves.
Saddam’s ‘victory’ thus left a bitter aftertaste. He expected, if not gratitude, at least financial understanding from his neighbours. They, however, wanted their money back. Both parties pitched their terms too high. Saddam began to demand not only the cancellation of his debt, $40 billion by 1988, but a large farther subsidy, $30 billion, to pay for reconstruction. His creditors, increasingly doubtful of his willingness or ability to repay, began to recompense themselves by increasing oil production, in breach of OPEC agreements to stabilize quotas. As oil prices on the international market were falling at the time, the Gulf States’ policy doubly disadvantaged Iraq, which found its income shrinking in consequence. The Emir of Kuwait, despite the evidence of Saddam’s growing displeasure, nevertheless emphasized that he would not reduce oil output, would not grant new loans and would continue to demand repayment of Iraq’s debts.