The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR

  On September 22, 1980, Iraqi forces invaded Iran at eight points on land and bombarded Iranian airfields, military installations, and economic targets.3 Tensions had been building along the two countries’ shared border for some time, and there had been sporadic exchanges of fire since the previous February. These border clashes had come at a time of profound political uncertainty and chaos in both countries, especially in Iran, which was still boiling with revolutionary fervor. Tensions between the two countries continued rising throughout 1979 and 1980. On September 17 of that year, Saddam Hussein declared the abrogation of the 1975 treaty with Iran, which had marked the halfway point of the Shatt al-Arab waterway as the two countries’ common border, and claimed complete Iraqi sovereignty over the river. Shortly thereafter, on September 22, his forces invaded Iran.

  The Iraqi invasion of Iran was a result of the interplay of four broad dynamics: (1) the domestic political predicament of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein; (2) the power vacuum in the new Islamic Republic; (3) the intensive propaganda of Iranian revolutionaries calling on the Arab masses to overthrow their leaders and to follow the lead of the Islamic Republic; and (4) Saddam’s regional ambitions as he sought to emerge as the new guardian of the Arab cause and the Nasser of his day. Each of these factors merits a closer look.

  Saddam (1937–2006) had originally entered politics at the age of twenty, when he joined the Iraqi Baʿth Party. The Baʿth Party, which saw itself as one of the primary vehicles for fostering Arab unity, was originally established in Syria, the birthplace of its main theoretician and founder, Michel Aflaq. In the late 1950s, a group of middle-class Iraqis set up a separate Baʿth Party in Iraq. Although the two parties never formally merged, in the late 1950s and early 1960s they did, to some extent, coordinate their political and theoretical positions. By the late 1960s, Aflaq was finding himself increasingly at odds with the ideological officers running Syria, eventually leaving for Iraq in 1968. In many ways this was a result of the increasing factionalization of the Syrian Baʿth in the late 1960s and its division into various competing groups before Hafiz al-Assad effectively dominated the party and imposed on it a measure of unity. Tensions between the Iraqi and the Syrian Baʿth Parties were soon to develop, and in the early and mid-1970s each party accused the other of undue interference.

  The 1958 coup that overthrew Iraq’s monarchy did little to improve the fortunes of the Iraqi Baʿth. In 1959, after mounting repression, a group of Baʿthists, including Saddam, was assigned to assassinate the dictator Abd al-Karim Qassem. Despite later glorifications of his role in the unsuccessful attempt, it appears that Saddam actually botched the operation.4 To avoid capture, he escaped to Syria, where he was warmly received by the Syrian Baʿth leadership, and from there to Egypt, where he received a high school diploma and briefly studied law at the University of Cairo. Egypt at this time was in the midst of the Nasserist phenomenon, and Nasser’s penchant for political theater and quest for Arab leadership appear to have left lasting impressions on the young Saddam.5 In 1963, when Qassem was finally overthrown and the Baʿth briefly captured power, Saddam returned home, only to find himself on the margins of political life because of his long absence. After a short stint in prison for attempted murder, Saddam managed to rise quickly within the Baʿth hierarchy and was put in charge of its military organization. His rise through the ranks of the Baʿth owed much to his family ties to the party’s leader, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. When the Baʿth returned to power in 1968 and al-Bakr became president, Saddam’s political ascent picked up speed. He was made deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), at the time the country’s most important decision-making body. A series of ruthless purges of the Baʿth soon followed, whereby potential opponents of al-Bakr and Saddam were eliminated one after another. By the early 1970s, Saddam had emerged as the second most powerful man in Iraq, in fact beginning to overshadow his older patron. He also meticulously cultivated a presidential image among the political elites and the larger masses by touring the country, signing international treaties on behalf of Iraq, and exerting his power both overtly and from behind the scenes. As two of his biographers write, “The voice was Bakr’s—but the hands were Saddam’s.”6 On July 16, 1979, al-Bakr notified the nation of his retirement due to “health reasons” and gave his blessing to the succession of his deputy. Saddam “reluctantly” accepted the presidency. Few people bought the staged theatrics. A bloodless coup had occurred.

  The conditions that allowed Saddam’s ascent to power, coupled with the political predicaments he faced as Iraq’s new president, were the primary reasons for his invasion of Iran the following year. The fact that Saddam Hussein had never formally served in the armed forces was symptomatic of a deeper divide between the Baʿth and the Iraqi military establishment. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the Baʿth had increasingly asserted its dominance over the army, and in January 1976 al-Bakr appointed Saddam to the rank of lieutenant general (retroactive from July 1973).7 Saddam’s assumption of power saw a concomitant rise in the size and powers of the Popular Militia, set up by the Baʿth as an ideological army and, in many ways, a rival to the regular armed forces. The ruthless purges of the 1970s also picked up pace with the new president’s inauguration, and some of the regime’s most recognizable figures were accused of treason or other antistate crimes and were eliminated. The purges within the RCC and the Baʿth were the most extensive, with some five hundred high-ranking party members said to have been executed within weeks of Saddam’s assumption of the presidency.8

  Figure 13. Iraqi female police officers during their graduation ceremony. Corbis.

  Authoritarian leaders seldom rule by repression alone. Depending on the larger circumstances in which they govern, they also try to gain some measure of popular legitimacy, however banal and fruitless such efforts might be. In Iraq, as in many other Middle Eastern countries, political leaders have often cultivated a sense of historic mission—an exaggerated account of the importance of their rule in relation to the country’s larger history—in order to enhance a supposedly popular mandate to govern and to “protect” the nation. Saddam’s image as such a “protector,” not just of the Iraqis but of the whole Arab nation, was bound to significantly broaden his mandate and, consequently, to expedite his determined quest for total political control. He made full use of the symbolisms involved, referring to the war with Iran as Saddam’s Qadisiyya, after the famous battle in which Muslim Arab forces conquered ancient Persia in 637 A.D.9 All observers agree that at the time of its invasion of Iran, the Iraqi state was “brimming over with self-confidence and a sense of its own achievements.”10 A quick and decisive victory over a historic enemy, now crippled by its own internal squabbles, offered political rewards too tempting for Saddam to resist.

  That the enemy was busy decimating its armed forces through revolutionary trials and speedy executions only helped expedite Saddam’s decision to attack. The political upheavals in Iran and the ensuing power vacuum were a second leading cause of the Iran-Iraq War. Soon after the revolution’s success, Iran’s new rulers launched a frenzied campaign to purge the ranks of the state of all nonrevolutionary elements. Within months, some twenty thousand teachers, eight hundred foreign ministry employees (out of a total of two thousand), and four thousand civil servants had been dismissed. The hardest hit were the armed forces, suspected of deep loyalties to the deposed shah; as many as two thousand to four thousand officers were quickly dismissed.11 At the same time, some Iranian tribes, located mostly along the country’s northern, eastern, and western borders, began pressing for greater regional autonomy. The Kurdish challenge to the fledgling revolutionary government was especially serious, and armed clashes began to occur throughout Iran’s northwestern and western Kurdish regions. By late 1979, Iran’s continued detention of U.S. diplomats and the prolonged hostage crisis were quickly turning the country into a regional and indeed global arch-villain. To the seasoned, calculating Saddam Hussein, int
ernal bickering among the revolutionaries, the youthful exuberance that publicly betrayed their inexperience, and the multiple domestic and international challenges they faced all made Iran’s new masters seem like easy prey.

  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.”12

  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.”13 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.14

  The battle of Khorramshahr proved unexpectedly costly and difficult for the Iraqis.15 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.16 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.17 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.”18

  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.19 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.20 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.”21 Despite the loss of untold numbers of civilian volunteers, the tactic proved highly effective in unnerving Iraqi commanders and spreading panic among their troops.22 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.