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

by Mehran Kamrava

  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.23 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.24 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.25 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.26

  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.27 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.

  There were, of course, no winners in this bloody and devastating conflict. Not even Saddam or Khomeini could claim to have come out of the war as victors. The best each side could do was to exaggerate the damage it had inflicted on the enemy and deemphasize its own problems. Estimates put the total number of dead at 310,000: 205,000 Iranians and 105,000 Iraqis.28 Altogether, nearly a million people were either injured or killed. Tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides were missing in action, and untold numbers were taken prisoner of war. Tehran is estimated to have had between 50,000 and 70,000 Iraqi captives. Iraq’s number of Iranian POWs, believed to be smaller, was never fully determined. The war also had incalculable economic costs, running into hundreds of billions of dollars. Excluding weapons imports, Iran is estimated to have spent between $74 and $91 billion to conduct the war, and Iraq between $94 and $112 billion.29 Iraq’s economy was especially hard hit, as it was saddled with a crushing debt burden of around $89 billion, about $50 to $55 billion of which was owed to Iraq’s allied neighbors to the south: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE. The cost of the necessary economic reconstruction in Iraq alone was estimated at around $230 billion.30

  Saddam Hussein, who had initially tried to insulate Iraq’s general population from the effects of the war by pouring money into the economy and promising a quick victory, was now faced with one of the gravest threats to his rule. Far from consolidating his hold on power, the war had spun out of control and had left his economy crippled. Early on, Iran’s ruling clerics had imposed rations on basic foodstuffs and banned the import of luxury goods, and they were thus better positioned to deal with the war’s adverse economic consequences. Far from undermining them, the war had strengthened their hold on the various levers of power, and its conclusion brought no credible threat to the clerical dominance of the state or to the overall legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. The predicament of Field Marshal Saddam Hussein was quite different. His three-week victory had turned into an eight-year nightmare, and he had nothing to show for it, only hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, billions of dollars in debt, and an economy scarcely able to absorb a demobilizing army of a million men. Saddam, the wily politician with a legendary survival instinct, needed to do something and do it quickly. Within two years, he undertook yet another international adventure. This time, he invaded Kuwait.

  THE SECOND GULF WAR

  In the early-morning hours of August 2, 1990, approximately one hundred thousand Iraqi troops stationed near the Kuwait border marched south and, in a matter of hours, occupied the small sheikhdom and its capital city, Kuwait City. Almost all members of the Kuwait ruling family, including the emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Sabah, fled to Saudi Arabia. In a few hours, Saddam once again stood at the apex of power. He had handed his generals the quick and easy victory that had eluded them for eight years in the war with Iran, and this time the rewards—the looting and plunder of one of the world’s richest countries—were far more handsome and immediate. In less than a week, on August 6, Baghdad formally annexed Kuwait and declared it to be Iraq’s nineteenth province. While apprehensive about the ominous consequences of such an adventure, the people of Iraq celebrated Saddam’s seemingly awesome military prowess and his expansion of Iraqi territory. As foolhardy as the invasion might have seemed to the people of Iraq, few of them felt sorrow at the annexation of Kuwait, which many considered an artificial, colonial creation, anyway. Kuwait now belonged to Iraq, and both firmly belonged to Saddam Hussein.

  Figure 14. Iraqi forces on the “highway of death.” Corbis.

  The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait followed months of mounting tensions between Iraq, on the one hand, and its southern neighbors and the United States, on the other. Saddam apparently had started preparing for his southward invasion shortly after the formal conclusion of the war with Iran. By the time the Iran-Iraq War finally ended, the peoples of the two countries were both worn down and eager to get on with their lives. As chapter 5 demonstrated, the Iranian state, in response to a general desire for social and political relaxation, undertook an extensive program of economic reconstruction and ushered in what amounted to a Second Republic. Such was not the case in Iraq, however, for Saddam Hussein’s increasing political desperation ruled out domestic or diplomatic normalcy. For a few
weeks in the spring of 1990, he floated talk of establishing democratic institutions, even going through the formalities of holding new elections to the National Assembly and inaugurating a new constitution. But democracy cramped Saddam’s style, and before long the new constitution was suspended and even the pretense of acting democratically was set aside. Instead, Saddam decided to divert domestic attention by pointing to a host of international conspiracies against Iraq, this time hatched not by the Iranians but by the United States, Israel, and their Persian Gulf allies—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE.

  Early in 1990, it is said, several foreign banks estimated that Iraq would finish the year bankrupt, owing some $8 to $10 billion to foreign creditors.31 Not surprisingly, Saddam demanded that Kuwait pay Iraq $10 billion and cancel the debt it had accumulated during the war with Iran. At the meeting of the Arab Cooperation Council in February, he allegedly said, “I need $30 billion in fresh money, and if they don’t give it to me, I will know how to get it.”32 While the saber rattling against Kuwait continued, Saddam turned his attention to Iraq’s other new enemies. He intensified his verbal attacks on Israel; charged an Iranian-born British journalist with spying and executed him; and accused the UAE and Kuwait of conspiring to harm Iraqi interests. Saddam shortly added territorial encroachments by Kuwait to his list of complaints.

  Both the UAE and Kuwait undertook a number of conciliatory gestures—Kuwait, for example, announced it was cutting its oil output by some 25 percent—but to no avail. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, sought to act as a mediator and for a while appeared to have succeeded in easing Iraqi-Kuwait tensions. But Saddam had already made up his mind. By time the sun rose over the hot sands of Kuwait on the morning of August 2, Iraq’s army was in control of most parts of the small country. By two o’clock that afternoon, Kuwait City had fallen.

  What ensued can best be described as a “war of miscalculations.” Every party in the unfolding conflict misread the situation and miscalculated the intentions, the resolve, and the strength of its opponent. The Iraqi leadership completely miscalculated the international community’s reaction to its occupation of Kuwait and its resolve to restore to the Kuwaitis their sovereignty. Baghdad also miscalculated its own strength, believing that it could inflict serious damage on the American-led military alliance. Moreover, Iraqi leaders misread the public mood in the United States, thinking that the memory of the Vietnam War would erode popular support for another open-ended military engagement. What Baghdad did not realize was that after some twenty years the memory of the Vietnam War had grown faint among the younger generation of Americans, for whom the Reagan-Bush years—punctuated by the release of the hostages in Tehran and military victories in Grenada and Panama—had resulted in a resurgence of patriotism and renewed national self-confidence. For an American public yearning for a victory that would decisively erase the painful memory of Vietnam, and for a Pentagon eager to display its new hardware and smart weapons, the prospect of fighting a distant, evil dictator was too tempting to pass up. Saddam, as he himself soon discovered, was barking up the wrong tree. That Kuwait was one of the world’s largest producers of oil only added to the resolve of the hastily assembled “Allied Forces” to press for the small sheikhdom’s liberation.

  As it turned out, the Iraqi armed forces were suffering from three basic, mortal flaws. First, throughout the war with Iran, the Iraqi military had exhibited weaknesses in planning, coordination, and strategy. By and large, these difficulties had arisen out of Saddam Hussein’s personal involvement in military decision making and his penchant for micromanaging his field commanders.33 Second, the Iraqi army was far more battle-fatigued than battle-tested. The eight-year war with Iran, for which the Iraqis were neither economically nor psychologically prepared, had been a bigger drain on Iraq than either Saddam or his adversaries initially realized. When it came time to fight, Iraqi soldiers showed little actual resolve to stand firm, and many started surrendering en masse. Some even surrendered themselves to Western journalists whom they mistook for military personnel. The sustained and highly effective carpet bombing of Iraqi defenses in the first few days of the conflict quickly impressed upon the Iraqis that their new adversaries were far more deadly than the beleaguered, undersupplied Iranians they had faced earlier. Fighting the new enemy meant almost certain death and very little chance of survival, never mind victory.

  A third, even more fundamental problem faced the Iraqis. Given that Iraq was a developing country, its military capabilities and ensuing military doctrine were largely defined by, and limited to, its overall position within the world system. For the Iraqis, it was one thing to take on another Third World country next door but quite another to pick a fight with a superpower. The Iran-Iraq War had featured heavy reliance on the infantry and on trench warfare. It had even seen many vicious hand-to-hand combats. But the new adversary relied not on infantry troops but on smart bombs released from hundreds of miles away. Trenches, troop concentrations, fortified bunkers, and other usual features of conventional warfare were now either obsolete or, in many instances, liabilities. In addition to heavy reliance on chemical weapons, many of Iraq’s battle successes against Iran had become possible only after the United States had shared satellite intelligence with the Iraqi military.34 Now the former patron was itself the enemy. Saddam’s archaic military thinking did little to compensate for the comparative technological inferiority of his armed forces.

  The lopsided nature of the conflict became apparent from its earliest days, when Iraqi defenses began collapsing like a house of cards. By the time the war was over, 142,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on Iraq and Kuwait. More than one hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers were reported to have been killed, and another sixty thousand surrendered. Fully 3,700 Iraqi tanks were destroyed, as were 2,400 armored vehicles and 2,600 artillery pieces. The only way the Iraqi air force was able to escape widespread destruction was by flying the bulk of its jet fighters, as many as 135, to neighboring Iran after a hastily arranged cooperation agreement. By contrast, American casualties numbered no more than 148 dead, 35 of them by “friendly fire.” Fifty-seven American jet fighters and helicopters were also shot down, but not a single American tank was lost.35

  Eventually, the U.S.-led coalition grew to include some thirty-six countries, although its principal contributors remained the United States, Great Britain, and Saudi Arabia.36 In theory, the United States and Saudi Arabia were in joint command of the operation. In reality, however, the whole affair was an American endeavor. An important aspect of the operation was that it featured the contributions of Arab states outside the Persian Gulf area, most notably Egypt, Syria, and Morocco. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait placed Arab leaders in the unenviable position of having to either join the military coalition against Iraq or, by staying away, appear to support its occupation of Kuwait. The invasion of Kuwait, it must be remembered, was not all that unpopular among Arabs outside the Arabian peninsula. The invasion and the tensions leading up to it happened to coincide with the daily death of a number of Palestinians in street clashes with Israeli soldiers and a flaring up of the intifada movement. In light of America’s unwavering support for Israeli statehood and territorial expansion, the mounting of Operation Desert Shield seemed to most Arabs utterly hypocritical. The United States, many reasoned, had done nothing to stop or to reverse Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 or its continued expansion of settlements in Palestinian territories. But it was now rushing to the aid of a corrupt ruling family with vast oil resources. Throughout the region, from Jordan to Egypt and Morocco, anti-American, pro-Iraqi rallies were held, and political leaders had no choice but to let the people vent their anger. Popular passions were further inflamed when Saddam made his withdrawal from Kuwait contingent on Israel’s withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories. Jordan’s King Hussein, sensing the depth of his people’s anger, declared his neutrality and offered to mediate between Saddam and the Kuwaiti ruling family. The PLO openly sided with Iraq. Most others, ho
wever, cast their lot with the United States, suppressed serious dissent at home, and, lured by the prospects of American economic assistance and subsidized oil from the Persian Gulf, sent troops to Saudi Arabia. In a contentious meeting held in Cairo a week after the invasion, the Arab League voted twelve to three, with two abstentions, to join the Desert Shield alliance.37

  Figure 15. Shiʿite Iraqi women mourning after the Gulf War in 1991. Corbis.

  Operation Desert Storm was launched on January 16, 1991, with a massive aerial bombardment of Iraqi troop fortifications in Kuwait and throughout Iraq itself. Within a week, the Iraqi ground forces were decimated; the lucky ones who had the chance surrendered. Civilians were also hit, and the tragic bombing of a civilian shelter in Baghdad on February 13 led to the deaths of more than one thousand individuals. Washington claimed that the shelter had actually been a command and control facility.38 To expand the war and to give credence to his anti-Israeli credentials, two days after the war started, on January 18, Saddam ordered the firing of twelve SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv. Four days later, another three were fired, this time killing three Israeli civilians and injuring scores of others. Uncharacteristically, Israel refrained from retaliating, impressed upon by the Americans that to do so would play into the Iraqi leader’s hands.39

  Five weeks after the aerial bombardment commenced, by which time little fighting spirit or capacity was left in the Iraqi forces, on February 24, the allied forces launched a multipronged ground offensive to dislodge what was left of Saddam’s forces. The road from Kuwait back into Iraq was cut off, and thousands of fleeing Iraqi troops were strafed and carpet bombed. For forty hours, Highway 80, the main link between Basra and Kuwait, became the “highway of death” as orders were given, in the words of one U.S. officer, “to find anything that was moving and take it out.”40 Finally, on February 27, Iraq accepted UN Resolutions 660, 662, and 674, which declared the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait null and void and deemed Iraq responsible for war reparations. The following day, both sides agreed to a cease-fire and hostilities ceased. The ground war had lasted only one hundred hours.