The Iran-Iraq War: New International Perspectives 0415685249, 9780415685245

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The Iran–Iraq War

This volume offers a wide-­ranging examination of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), featuring fresh regional and international perspectives derived from recently available new archival material. Three decades ago Iran and Iraq became embroiled in a devastating eight-­year war which served to re-­define the international relations of the Gulf region. The Iran–Iraq War stands as an anomaly in the Cold War era; it was the only significant conflict in which the interests of the United States and Soviet Union unwittingly aligned, with both superpowers ultimately supporting the Iraqi regime. The Iran–Iraq War re-­assesses not only the superpower role in the conflict but also the war’s regional and wider international dimensions by bringing to the fore fresh evidence and new perspectives from a variety of sources. It focuses on a number of themes including the economic dimensions of the war and the roles played by a variety of powers, including the Gulf States, Turkey, France, the Soviet Union and the United States. The contributions to the volume serve to underline that the Iran–Iraq war was a defining conflict, shaping the perspectives of the key protagonists for a generation to come. This book will be of much interest to students of international and Cold War history, Middle Eastern politics, foreign policy, and International Relations in general. Nigel Ashton is Professor in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is author/editor of six books, including, most recently, King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life (2008). Bryan Gibson is a PhD Candidate in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence, and the Iran–Iraq War, 1980–88 (2010).

Series: Cold War History Series Editors: Odd Arne Westad and Michael Cox

In the new history of the Cold War that has been forming since 1989, many of the established truths about the international conflict that shaped the latter half of the twentieth century have come up for revision. The present series is an attempt to make available interpretations and materials that will help further the development of this new history, and it will concentrate in particular on publishing expositions of key historical issues and critical surveys of newly available sources. Reviewing the Cold War Approaches, interpretations, theory Edited by Odd Arne Westad Rethinking Theory and History in the Cold War The State, military power and social revolution Richard Saull British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War Marrku Ruotsila Europe, Cold War and Coexistence, 1953–1965 Edited by Wilfried Loth The Last Decade of the Cold War From conflict escalation to conflict transformation Edited by Olav Njølstad Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War Issues, interpretations, periodizations Edited by Silvio Pons and Federico Romero Across the Blocs Cold War cultural and social history Edited by Rana Mitter and Patrick Major

US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam Insurgency, subversion and public order William Rosenau The European Community and the Crises of the 1960s Negotiating the Gaullist challenge N. Piers Ludlow Soviet–Vietnam Relations and the Role of China, 1949–64 Changing alliances Mari Olsen The Third Indochina War Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 Edited by Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-­Judge Greece and the Cold War Frontline state, 1952–1967 Evanthis Hatzivassiliou Economic Statecraft during the Cold War European responses to the US trade embargo Frank Cain Macmillan, Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis, 1958–1960 Kitty Newman The Emergence of Détente in Europe Brandt, Kennedy and the formation of Ostpolitik Arne Hofmann European Integration and the Cold War Ostpolitik–Westpolitik, 1965–1973 Edited by N. Piers Ludlow Britain, Germany and the Cold War The search for a European Détente 1949–1967 R. Gerald Hughes The Military Balance in the Cold War US perceptions and policy, 1976–85 David M. Walsh The Cold War in the Middle East Regional conflict and the superpowers 1967–73 Edited by Nigel J. Ashton

The Making of Détente Eastern and Western Europe in the Cold War, 1965–75 Edited by Wilfried Loth and Georges-­Henri Soutou Europe and the End of the Cold War A reappraisal Edited by Frédéric Bozo, Marie-­Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow, and Leopoldo Nuti The Baltic Question during the Cold War Edited by John Hiden, Vahur Made and David J. Smith The Crisis of Détente in Europe From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975–85 Edited by Leopoldo Nuti Cold War in Southern Africa White power, black liberation Edited by Sue Onslow The Globalisation of the Cold War Diplomacy and local confrontation, 1975–85 Edited by Max Guderzo and Bruna Bagnato Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the Early Cold War Reconciliation, comradeship, confrontation, 1953–1957 Svetozar Rajak The End of the Cold War in the Third World New perspectives on regional conflict Edited by Artemy Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko Mao, Stalin and the Korean War Trilateral communist relations in the 1950s Shen Zhihua; translated by Neil Silver The Iran–Iraq War New international perspectives Edited by Nigel Ashton and Bryan Gibson

The Iran–Iraq War New international perspectives

Edited by Nigel Ashton and Bryan Gibson

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 selection and editorial material, Nigel Ashton and Bryan Gibson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Iran–Iraq War: new international perspectives/edited by Nigel Ashton and Bryan R. Gibson. p. cm. – (Cold War history series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988. 2. Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988–Diplomatic history. 3. Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988–Influence. I. Ashton, Nigel John. II. Gibson, Bryan DS318.85.I74 2013 955.05′42–dc23 2012025959 ISBN: 978-0-415-68524-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-07478-7 (ebk) Typeset in Baskerville by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgements

  1 Introduction

ix x xiv 1

N igel A shton and B ryan G ibson

Part I

Waging the war

13

  2 Lessons learned: civil–military relations during the Iran–Iraq War and their influence on the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War

15

I brahim A l - ­M arashi

  3 Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War: rule from the top

33

W illiamson M urray and K evin W oods

  4 Mustazafin and taghutti: Iran and the war, 1980–1988

56

R ob J ohnson

Part II

Economic dimensions of the war

75

  5 The role of oil in the outcome of the Iran–Iraq War: some important lessons in historical context

77

F ar z in N adimi

  6 The finances of war: Iraq, credit and conflict, September 1980 to August 1990 G len R angwala

92

viii   Contents Part III

Regional perspectives on the war

107

  7 The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War: cooperation and confusion

109

K ristian C oates U lrichsen

  8 The ostensible ‘silent victor’? The long-­term impact of the Iran–Iraq War on Turkey

125

E lliot H en T ov

Part IV

American policy and the war

147

  9 Reappraising the Carter Administration’s response to the Iran–Iraq War

149

C hris E mery

10 Changing American perspectives on the Iran–­Iraq War

178

J udith Y aphe

11 Critical Oral History: a new approach to examining the United States’ role in the war

196

M alcolm B yrne

Part V

International perspectives on the war

211

12 France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War

213

P ierre R a z oux

13 The Soviet Union and the Iran–Iraq War

230

A rtemy K alinovsky



Index

243

Illustrations

Figures 5.1 Breakdown of the Iraqi Oil Campaign 5.2 NITC crude and products haulage (mt) 5.3 Number of NITC sea voyages 5.4 Iran’s crude oil export (1978–90) 8.1 Turkish exports to Iran and Iraq 1980–88 8.2 Turkey’s combined trade balance with Iran and Iraq 1980–88

80 87 87 88 131 132

Map 5.1 The Gulf

81

Tables   6.1 Revenues from oil exports and total export revenues (1973–86)   6.2 Iraq’s debts accumulated from September 1980 to August 1988 12.1 French military deliveries to Iraq 1970–80 12.2 French military deliveries to Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War 12.3 French military deliveries to Iraq 1970–88 12.4 French military deliveries to Iran 1982–86 12.5 Composition of the French Task Force 623 in Operation Prométhée (August 1987 to September 1988)

95 97 214 219 219 223 226

Contributors

Editors Nigel Ashton is Professor in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life (2008), Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence (2002), and Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-­American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955–59 (1996). He has also edited The Cold War in the Middle East: Regional Conflict and the Superpowers, 1967–73 (2007). Bryan Gibson is a Ph.D candidate in International History at the LSE and specializes in U.S.–Iraqi relations during the Cold War. His Ph.D. thesis is on the U.S. policy toward Iraq and the Kurdish Revolt, 1958–75. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history and a Bachelor of Social Sciences in criminology from the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence and the Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988 (Praeger, 2010), based on his M.A. thesis.

Contributors Malcolm Byrne is Deputy Director and Research Director at the non­governmental National Security Archive, based at The George Washington University, Washington DC. Since 1998 he has also directed the Iran–U.S. Relations Project, which aims at documenting the history of that troubled relationship from both sides. Among his publications are Mohammad Mossaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (with Mark Gasiorowski) (Syracuse University Press, 2004), and Becoming Enemies: U.S.–Iran Relations and the Iran–Iraq War, 1979–88 (with James G. Blight et al.) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). The latter is based on the results of the Critical Oral History conference described by him in this volume. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is Deputy Director of the Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States and a

Contributors   xi Research Fellow at LSE Global Governance. His research focuses on the history of Iraq and political and security trends in the Gulf. He is the author of three recent books: The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–1922 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Insecure Gulf: The End of Certainty and the Transition to the Post-­Oil Era (Hurst and Co., 2011), and (co-­edited with David Held) The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order (Routledge, 2011). Chris Emery is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. He is currently writing a book examining U.S. policy in Iran during the Carter Administration, with an emphasis on the post-­revolutionary period. His most recent publication is ‘The Transatlantic and Cold War Dynamics of Iran Sanctions, 1979–1980’, which appeared in Cold War History in 2010. Elliot Hentov received his Ph.D. in contemporary Turkish and Iranian affairs at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. His publications have appeared in the New York Times, Financial Times, the Washington Times, Foreign Policy, The Washington Quarterly and the Middle Eastern Review of International Affairs and he has also been a featured speaker on Middle Eastern affairs at events sponsored by the Stimson Center, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, as well as New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. Rob Johnson is the Director of the Oxford Changing Character of War Programme at Oxford University. The programme brings together academic, political, professional and armed services personnel in the study of contemporary conflicts, encouraging new avenues of research across all disciplines. He is the author of a number of publications including The Iran–Iraq War (Palgrave, 2011) and The Afghan Way of War (OUP, 2011) with other work on the Gulf, Iran and Iraq. His current research is on specific conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia, particularly insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Artemy Kalinovsky is Assistant Professor of East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) and co-­editor, with Sergey Radchenko, of The End of the Cold War and the Third World (Routledge, 2011). Ibrahim al-­Marashi is Assistant Professor of Middle East History at California State University San Marcos. His research deals with the security issues in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. He is the co-­author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2009). He obtained his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He is an Iraqi-­American who has lived at various times in Saudi

xii   Contributors Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey, and has travelled extensively through the Middle East. Williamson Murray is Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia. He studies military and diplomatic history and is currently working on a project that investigates the ability of military institutions to adapt to the challenging conditions of combat. In the past, he has served as the Harold Johnson Professor of Military History at the United States Army War College and has published widely on topics dealing with military and strategic history, including The Iraq War: A Military History, published by Harvard University Press. Farzin Nadimi has a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester, and an M.A. in War Studies from King’s College London. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the York Centre for International and Security Studies at York University in Toronto. His research has covered Persian Gulf security and Iran–Iraq War military history, energy security and geopolitics, airpower, economic warfare, crisis management in war­torn civilian organisations with emphasis on oil and gas industries, and organizational behaviour in contingency situations. He has worked extensively with the Iranian oil industry, and travelled to the oil regions, to document its wartime performance. Glen Rangwala is a Lecturer in Politics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. His main research interests are in the contemporary politics of the Levant and the northern Gulf. He is the co-­author (with Eric Herring) of Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and its Legacy (Hurst and Cornell University Press, 2006). Pierre Razoux is a French Senior Civil Servant authorized to work as a full Professor and Research Director. A specialist on the Middle East, he is currently Senior Adviser at the Research Division of the NATO Defense College in Rome. He served previously in the Delegation for Strategic Affairs of the French Ministry of Defence and in the Policy Division of the British Ministry of Defence as an exchange officer. He has published several books on the Arab–Israeli Wars, has long experience in the field of international affairs, and is in the process of publishing a new book on the Iran–Iraq War (Perrin, Paris). Kevin Woods is on the research staff of the Institute for Defense Ana­lyses. He is the lead author of numerous military histories of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq including: The Iraqi Perspectives Report: Saddam’s Senior Leadership on Operation Iraqi Freedom (2006); The Mother of All Battles: Saddam Hussein’s Strategic Plan for the Persian Gulf War (2008); Saddam’s War: An Iraqi Military Perspective of the Iran–Iraq War (2009); and The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime 1978–2001 (2011). He

Contributors   xiii holds degrees from Auburn University and the Naval War College, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Leeds. Judith Yaphe is Distinguished Research Fellow for the Middle East in the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at National Defense University in Washington DC and Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. Before joining INSS in 1995, she served for twenty years as a senior analyst on Near East–Persian Gulf issues in the Directorate of Intelligence at the CIA. She received the Intelligence Medal of Commendation and other awards for her work on Iraq and the Gulf. Her publications include studies on Reassessing the Implications of a Nuclear-­Armed Iran (2005), The Middle East in 2015: The Impact of Regional Trends on U.S. Strategic Planning (2002) and articles on Iraq, Iran and the strategic environment in the Gulf region. She received her Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History from the University of Illinois, Champaign-­Urbana.

Acknowledgements

This book is the happy product of a conference held on the ‘International Impact of the Iran–Iraq War’ at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in September 2010. The conference coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War and we were fortunate in being able to assemble an oustanding group of international specialists in various aspects of the international history of the Gulf region and the Middle East as a whole. The conference could not have taken place without the generous sponsorship of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, the HEIF4 Bid Fund, the LSE’s Centre for Global Governance, and BP. In addition, the IDEAS Centre at LSE provided an outstanding venue for the event and the organisers are very grateful to the Centre Directors Arne Westad and Mick Cox, and the Centre Manager Emilia Knight for their generous support for the event. An important role in the organisation of the event was also played by Ranj Alaaldin to whom we would like to express our gratitude. In assembling this volume the editors have incurred a number of further debts. We are grateful to Andrew Humphrys, the Senior Editor for Strategic Studies at Routledge, for scrutinising our proposal so carefully and for his support in the publication of this volume. We are also particularly grateful to the contributors to this collection for their cooperation in turning their original conference papers into polished chapters. We appreciate their attention to points of detail and their tolerance of our dogged pursuit of stylistic homogeneity. Most importantly, all of the contributors proved willing to work with us in pursuing the central theme of this volume: the international impact of the Iran–Iraq War. Drawing this defining conflict out from under the shadow of subsequent events, especially the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Western invasion of Iraq in 2003, is a large part of the goal of this volume. We also seek to further certain existing histori­ ographical debates about the war as discussed in our introduction. While the reader will be the final judge of how far these goals are successfully achieved here, we believe this volume advances scholarly understanding and debate about this pivotal conflict. Any shortcomings or errors which may remain here are of course the sole responsibility of the editors.

1 Introduction Nigel Ashton and Bryan Gibson

Three decades ago Iraq and Iran became embroiled in a devastating eight-­ year war. Much more than a bilateral struggle, the Iran–Iraq War served to re-­define the international relations of the Gulf region. It drew in a particularly wide array of outside powers including the United States, France, Turkey, Israel and the Soviet Union, all of which played controversial roles. The Iran–Iraq War stands as the only significant Cold War era conflict in which the interests of the United States and Soviet Union unwittingly aligned, with both superpowers supporting the Iraqi regime. The significance of the war has proven enduring in terms of the re-­shaping of Iraqi and Iranian society, with the former embarking upon a genocidal campaign against the Kurds and the latter solidifying its revolutionary status, as well as in terms of the geopolitics of the Gulf region, with Iraq subsequently launching the 1990 invasion of Kuwait which led to the introduction of sanctions and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Our knowledge of the Iran–Iraq War has advanced considerably in recent years, with much new documentary evidence becoming available thanks in particular to mandatory reviews of documents in Western archives and the release of captured Iraqi materials. In the light of this wealth of new evidence, this volume re-­assesses our current understanding of the Iran–Iraq conflict in an international context. It addresses a number of its central features, including Iraq’s regime politics, the economic dimensions of the war, the formulation of American policy, the war’s impact on the Gulf, and the role of other players including the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Soviet Union, France, and Turkey. It is particularly important to re-­examine the conflict at this juncture for a number of reasons. Firstly, with the withdrawal of American troops at the end of 2011, Iraq’s potential to exert influence throughout the Gulf as in independent actor has increased significantly. Meanwhile, Iran’s continuing clash with Western interests in the region, which also manifests itself in Iraq itself, might well lead to further conflict in this economically and strategically vital region. Since the Iran–Iraq War was a defining historical moment for both countries, and continues to shape the outlook of the political elite, particularly in Tehran, it is essential to grasp the impact

2   N. Ashton and B. Gibson of the war in order to understand Iran and Iraq’s subsequent and current foreign policies. The historiography of the Iran–Iraq War has gone through four distinct phases, precipitated in large measure by events in the region. The first phase of scholarship coincided with the waging of the war itself and its immediate aftermath. Scholars and analysts attempted to judge the dynamics of the conflict from inside the events themselves. The majority of works consisted of journalistic accounts and think-­tank analyses, although a few serious academic studies did appear, mainly towards the end of the war. But with the conclusion of hostilities on 20 August 1988, the war ceased to provide cover stories depicting the gruesome realities of modern warfare, and interest in its study outside specialist academic circles slowly waned. Indeed, one commentator lamented in early 1990 that ‘in the relatively short time since Iran accepted a ceasefire with Iraq, the Gulf war has faded from public view and concern with remarkable speed.’1 This first phase of scholarship was subject to all of the familiar pitfalls of the writing of very contemporary history including a relative dearth of primary sources, particularly pertaining to decision-­making and strategy, the distorting effects of propaganda, and straightforward uncertainty as to the war’s outcome. Initially, serious scholars were reluctant to engage in analysis of the war. Scholarly caution was prudent to the extent that Iran had just undergone a revolution and uncertainty prevailed over how it would frame its foreign policy. Would Ayatollah Khomeini behave like a ‘turbaned Shah’ or would he pursue a novel, ideologically driven foreign policy?2 Saddam Hussein’s calculation in launching the war in September 1980 was by contrast relatively straightforward: Khomeini constituted an implacable ideological foe, and the opportunity presented by perceived Iranian weakness in the wake of the revolution and the purging of the armed forces should be seized. While initially apparently successful, the Iraqi invasion was characterised by gross strategic errors and before long Iranian resistance began to turn the tide of battle. This was not what Saddam – or anyone – had expected. Because of the dramatic shift in the regional balance of power, it took experts some time to adjust to the situ­ ation and begin to draw conclusions. But as the war progressed, and Iran evicted Iraqi forces from its territory, a small number of scholarly works began to appear, offering a first glimpse of how the war was viewed in the West. The first detailed study of the Iran–Iraq War by Stephen R. Grummon appeared in 1982, entitled The Iran–Iraq War: Islam Embattled. This provided a valuable initial analysis of the conflict, examining its root causes, the first two years of hostilities, the role of third-­party mediators, and the superpowers’ responses to the war. It was, however, limited by its brevity and the dearth of primary sources.3 Later that same year Shahram Chubin, an Iranian expert, published Security in the Persian Gulf 4: The Role of Outside Powers, which analysed the military-­supply relationships between the three

Introduction   3 regional powers – Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia – and the United States and the Soviet Union. Though not dealing specifically with the Iran–Iraq War, Chubin’s work presented detailed background information on the military-­supply relationships in the region that existed prior to the conflict.4 As the war moved to Iraqi territory from 1982 onwards, uncertainty continued to prevail over its outcome, with Iraq fighting a series of desperate defensive battles to blunt successive Iranian offensives. Scholarly caution continued to prevail and commentary on the war still remained confined to the domain of journalists and think-­tank analysts. In 1987, President Reagan’s controversial decision to re-­flag Kuwaiti tankers and the revelations regarding America’s complicity in the Iran–Contra scandal, which had broken in November 1986, catalysed a heightened interest in the war. Although the Middle Research and Information Project (MERIP)’s reports had already focused a great deal of attention on the war, the increased American presence in the Gulf in 1987 prompted other scholarly journals to follow suit. Thus, in the spring of 1987, an important issue of Foreign Affairs appeared, featuring a number of seminal articles on the war. In particular, Nita M. Renfew’s ‘Who Started the War?’ and Shireen T. Hunter’s ‘After the Ayatollah’ offered penetrating analyses of the causes and likely effects of the war. Renfrew challenged the established notion of Iraqi culpability for the outbreak of the war, arguing that Iran had initiated the conflict by aggressively seeking to subvert Iraq’s secular order. At the same time, Hunter focused on the precarious political situation in Iran, including the declining health of Ayatollah Khomeini and the domestic impact of the seemingly endless war. She speculated about the future course of Iranian policy in the light of these developments. Later that year, in its winter 1987 issue, Foreign Affairs published a piece by Barry Rubin titled ‘Drowning in the Gulf ’, which provided a thought-­provoking analysis of the reasons behind Reagan’s decision to re-­flag Kuwaiti tankers. Rubin argued that the Kuwaitis had skilfully manipulated the Reagan Administration by playing off American and Soviet antagonism through the tactic of presenting the same request to both powers, knowing that each would try to outbid the other. In doing so, the Kuwaitis ensured that their interests were safeguarded.5 The themes of culpability for the outbreak of the war, the role of ideology in Iranian politics and the relationship between local actors and the superpowers raised by Renfrew, Hunter and Rubin became key, enduring areas of subsequent historiographical debate about the war. They are reflected in particular in the contributions to this volume by Chris Emery, Rob Johnson, Artemy Kalinovsky, and Kristian Coates Ulrichsen. The events of 1987 also prompted the appearance of a number of broader studies of the war, whose authors could not be aware that the conflict would soon end. For instance, in 1987 Edgar O’Ballance, a prolific writer on modern warfare, published The Gulf War. O’Ballance worked as a

4   N. Ashton and B. Gibson freelance journalist throughout much of the 1980s, and was able to obtain first-­hand details of the conflict. While his work was for the most part one of narrative, O’Ballance did provide a useful technical account of the military operations of the war. Unfortunately, due to the timing of its publication, O’Ballance’s narrative stops in April 1987, just short of the significant events of late 1987 and 1988.6 Similarly, Anthony H. Cordesman’s painstaking analysis of Iran and Iraq’s military action between 1984 and 1987, The Iran–Iraq War and Western Security, 1984–1987, stops short of the war’s dramatic conclusion. Nevertheless, Cordesman’s work is valuable because it was the first major politico-­military analysis of the war’s impact on US security.7 The impact of the war on the US role in the Gulf has loomed large in its subsequent historiography and is reflected in the contributions to this volume by Judith Yaphe, Malcolm Byrne, and Chris Emery. Unlike O’Ballance, who never returned to complete his work on the war, in 1990 Cordesman, with the help of Abraham R. Wagner, published a more comprehensive study, entitled The Lessons of Modern War, II, The Iran–Iraq War. Like Cordesman’s earlier work, this book made a significant contribution to the historiography of the war, this time more specifically in the field of military history, offering a detailed analysis of the forces, operations, and weaponry used.8 A final addition to this group of scholars writing originally just before the war’s conclusion is Majid Khadduri, whose book The Gulf War: The Origins and Implications of the Iraq–Iran Conflict appeared in 1988. Khadduri developed a new approach to the historiography of the outbreak of the war, arguing that its root cause was the confessional divide between Sunni-­dominated Iraq and Shi’a Iran. Building to some extent on the work of Renfrew, Khadduri argued that revolutionary Iran had goaded Iraq into attacking it pre-­emptively. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 was effectively an act of national self-­ preservation.9 While interest in the war declined somewhat in its immediate aftermath, in 1989 John Bulloch and Harvey Morris published The Gulf War, which was effectively a popular history of the conflict which cut little new historiographical ground.10 More significant in terms of trends in the war’s historiography was the publication in 1989 of Behrouz Souresrafil’s The Iran–Iraq War. Though Souresrafil is a journalist by trade, his book was a well-­researched and detailed historical account of Iran–Iraq relations and the factors which led the two countries to go to war. Significantly, Souresrafil argued that the main cause of the war and its prolongation was Khomeini’s need to secure his position and his revolution.11 To this extent Souresafil furthered the debate about the Iranian role in the origins and perpetuation of the conflict sparked by Hunter’s work. A more general work of some significance which appeared in this immediate post-­bellum period was Dilip Hiro’s The Longest War: the Iran–Iraq Military Conflict. While this work is marred to some extent by Hiro’s uncrit­ ical acceptance of various conspiracy theories about the war and his limited

Introduction   5 analysis of the political struggles which took place inside Iran between 1985 and 1987, it did offer a detailed analysis of the war informed in part by Hiro’s first-­hand experience as a journalist behind the front line.12 During the same period, scholars also turned their attention to a more comprehensive analysis of the international context of the war. Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp’s Iran and Iraq at War, published in 1988, challenged the notion that the war had persisted because it served the purposes of the superpowers, Israel, and the Arab states. They argued instead that Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini both saw the war as an opportunity to consolidate their power and to crush opposition, while rallying the majority of their citizens to the flag.13 The end of the war also sparked a number of studies resulting from academic conferences. The first major contribution was a book edited by Efraim Karsh, The Iran–Iraq War: Impact and Implications, published in 1989 by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, which was the product of a conference on the war held in September 1988. The scope of this work was wide-­ranging. It offered a detailed analysis of the belligerents, the regional implications, including the war’s impact on the Gulf States, Turkey, and Israel, the international implications, including chapters on American, Soviet, and European policies toward the war, the war’s economic consequences, and finally its strategic and military implications. To date, this work remains the most comprehensive single-­ volume analysis of the Iran–Iraq War.14 At the same juncture, Christopher C. Joyner edited a volume of papers from the International Studies Association’s annual conferences in 1988 and 1989. This wide-­ranging collection, The Persian Gulf War: Lessons for Strategy, Law, and Diplomacy, published in 1990, also opened up new avenues in the historiography of the war. Its particular value lay in its analysis of the war’s diplomatic and legal dimensions, including articles on the re-­flagging of Kuwaiti tankers, the role of the United Nations, the war’s implications for maritime warfare and neutrality, and a penetrating analysis of the legal issues facing Iranian and Iraqi negotiators.15 It would be misleading to suggest that only Western academics were interested in analysing the implications of the Iran–Iraq War at this juncture. In 1988, a coalition of Iranian universities and research centres convened the International Conference on Aggression and Defense to discuss the war. The result was a volume of papers edited by Farhang Rajaee, many of which had been translated into English from Farsi, which analysed the genesis and persistence of the war, the role of superpowers, and the international legal implications, including debates over the right of self-­defence and the need to reform and modernise the laws of war.16 This volume enriched the historiography of the war in English by providing a wide range of Iranian perspectives.17 Interest in the lessons of the Iran–Iraq War was dramatically revived by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990. This ushered in the second

6   N. Ashton and B. Gibson phase in the war’s historiography during the 1990s, as scholars sought to re-­assess the conflict through the prism of subsequent Iraqi and Western actions. Familiar Western historical paradigms were mined to explain Iraqi actions, and Saddam Hussein was recast in the role of a 1930s dictator, bent on ruthless territorial expansion. This period also saw revisionist efforts aimed at casting American support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War in a new light, which were the by-­product of the volte-­face in America’s policy towards Iraq, and especially towards its leader, Saddam Hussein. A number of specialised analyses of the war, dealing with specific issues such as its social origins,18 the implications of the attacks on maritime shipping,19 and its economic implications,20 were also published. In 1990, an important study on the military implications of the Iran– Iraq War, Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East, was published by the United States Army War College. Authored by Stephen Pelletiere, Douglas V. Johnson II, and Leif R. Rosenberger, it examined the implications of the war for American security following Iraq’s victory over Iran. The authors came to two important conclusions. First, that despite Iran’s decision to settle for the status quo ante, by the time of its victory at Fao in 1986, Iraq had implemented a process of creating a flexible army which was capable of dominating the region after the war. This conclusion was significant because it helped explain Saddam Hussein’s actions toward Kuwait in late 1990. The second conclusion of this work was controversial: the authors suggested that Iran had used chemical weapons during the war and that the gassing of the Kurds at Halabja might not have been perpetrated by Iraq but by Iran as well.21 While the first conclusion has been supported by significant evidence, the second conclusion remains in dispute. For instance, in 2007 Joost Hiltermann published A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja, which examined this question in detail. He concluded that there was no evidence to support the conclusion that Iran had used chemical weapons either during the Iran– Iraq War or at Halabja.22 In any event, the Army War College study spurred an important strand of historiographical debate surrounding the development of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme and the use of chemical weapons against civilians and on the battlefield during the Iran–Iraq War. Hiltermann’s detailed and authoritative study is the most important additional contribution in this field to date. A further work which excited new controversy about the war appeared in 1991, not long after the end of the Gulf crisis. Entitled My Turn to Speak, the memoirs of former Iranian premier Abolhassan Bani-­Sadr, provided new material which fuelled the existing debate about the United States’ role in instigating the conflict. Bani-­Sadr alleged that the United States, Israel, and Iranian royalists, had plotted the destruction of the Iranian regime ‘by means of an external war’.23 He went on to claim that President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had met with Saddam Hussein during a visit to Amman in July 1980, where he gave

Introduction   7 24

Saddam the approval to attack. This was the first instance in which the United States was accused directly of providing Iraq with a so-­called ‘green light’ to attack Iran. This allegation has continued to provoke histori­ ographical debate. Chris Emery examines this question in detail based on the most recently available sources in this volume. In 1992, Stephen Pelletiere published another important contribution to the study of the war titled The Iran–Iraq War: Chaos in a Vacuum. While his earlier study had proven to be quite controversial, this work was a detailed politico-­military analysis of the war. Significantly, Pelletiere argued that Iraq’s victory in the war was not the result of a combination of its attrition strategy and good fortune, but that the Iraqis had spent two years preparing for their final offensive. This work was an important contribution to the understanding of why Iraq managed swiftly to defeat Iran at the end of the war, an outcome which surprised most observers at the time.25 Few further major contributions to the historiography of the conflict were made during the remainder of the 1990s. The only significant exception was Adam Tarock’s The Superpowers’ Involvement in the Iran–Iraq War, which appeared in 1998. This work tied the Iran–Iraq War to the Gulf crisis, pointing to the increased American involvement in the initial conflict on Iraq’s side and contrasting it with the post-­Gulf crisis relations between the two states. It identified Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran–Iraq War as the primary catalyst for America’s hard line against the Iraqi regime throughout the 1990s. Tarock examined the roots of the war, the Soviet response to the war’s outbreak, the developing American ‘tilt’ towards Iraq, and the unintended alignment of American and Soviet interests. He argued that the superpowers’ involvement in the conflict fuelled the fire of war and encouraged, at times, Saddam’s belligerency and aggression.26 From 2002 onwards, a third phase in the historiography of the war began. With the prospect, followed by the reality, of an American invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Iran–Iraq War was revisited, and selectively mined for vindication by commentators seeking to justify or condemn American actions. This phase of the debate about the war was characterised by a preponderance of polemics over dispassionate scholarship. Numerous works on Iraq flooded the market, with journalists, scholars, and analysts either trumpeting or disputing the George W. Bush Administration’s claims that Iraq possessed WMD and posed a threat to the West. One of the best examples of this polemical turn is Stephen Hughes’ The Iraqi Threat and Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. This work even went so far as to attempt to tie Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, in an effort to make the case for war.27 This work, and another by Kenneth M. Pollack,28 slanted the historical discourse of the Iran–Iraq War by emphasising Iraq’s use of WMD in the 1980s as a basis for the American invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately for the authors who developed this

8   N. Ashton and B. Gibson argument, it has subsequently become clear that the case for war in terms of the threat presented by Saddam’s WMD capabilities was grossly exaggerated. At the same time, other well-­known writers, such as Dilip Hiro in his work Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm, entered the fray to counter exaggerations and debunk a number of myths about Iraq’s capabilities.29 In among the various polemics, some important new scholarship about the Iran–Iraq War did appear.30 Efraim Karsh’s survey of the war, published in 2002, examined a number of unexplored issues, including the role of child soldiers.31 Kenneth M. Pollack’s Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness 1948–1991 discussed the Iran–Iraq War at length and provided a detailed assessment of Iraq’s military capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Pollack’s book was particularly helpful in developing understanding of the dramatic transformation of the Iraqi Army as the war progressed, building upon Pelletiere’s earlier works.32 Finally, Lawrence Potter and Gary Sick’s edited volume, Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War, presented an important collection of papers originally delivered to an international conference held in October 2001. Many of the contributors, including Richard Schofield, M. R. Izady, Joost R. Hiltermann, and Gerd Nonneman, were leading authorities in their respective fields. Significantly, the volume examined a number of relatively unexplored issues, such as how tensions surrounding the Shatt al-­Arab waterway contributed to the outbreak of the war, the role of the Kurds in the conflict (beyond Halabja), how Iraq’s Shi’a population experienced the war, the impact of the war on Iran, the perspective of the Gulf States towards the conflict, and the use of chemical weapons. To date this volume remains the most innovative collection of papers on the war.33 In addition to these works, several authoritative histories of Iraq were published or appeared in revised editions during the early 2000s.34 The 2003 invasion of Iraq, while calamitous from almost every point of view, did at least eventually produce an unexpected boon for researchers, in the shape of the vast trove of Iraqi documents captured by American forces. These are now lodged at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, Washington DC and the Hoover Institution attached to Stanford University.35 They provide researchers with the potential to gain unprecedented insights into the decision-­making process of Saddam Hussein’s regime and include audio recordings of Saddam’s meetings with his inner circle and generals going back to the beginning of the 1980s. As a result, new perspectives on the way the Iraqi political system operated during the Iran–Iraq War are now beginning to surface. The first major contribution to draw on these sources was Kevin M. Wood’s 2009 book, Saddam’s War, which has since been followed up with two other books, The Saddam Tapes and Saddam’s Generals, both in 2011.36 Other researchers, including one of this volume’s editors, Bryan R. Gibson, have also used declassified documents obtained in American archives to develop new perspectives on the war.37

Introduction   9 At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-­first century, then, as the American invasion and occupation begin to take on the guise of historical events rather than contemporary politics, we appear to be entering a new, fourth phase of scholarship on the Iran–Iraq War. In the light of the newly available sources, particularly those from inside Iraq, the Iran– Iraq War can be reconsidered as an event in its own right, rather than as a curtain-­raiser for the invasions of Kuwait in 1990 and Iraq in 2003. The contributors to this volume have drawn considerably on these newly available sources in preparing their chapters. For example, the chapter by Kevin M. Woods and Williamson Murray considers the Iraqi conduct of the war, using the captured high-­level Iraqi sources. Ibrahim al-­Marashi’s chapter likewise draws heavily on these sources to consider civil–military relations under the Ba’athist regime and the techniques employed to control and mobilise the Iraqi population. Pierre Razoux’s contribution on French policy utilises previously unavailable classified French documents to chart the changing course of France’s relations with both belligerents, particularly Paris’s arms-­supply relationship with Iraq and the tortured course of the Franco-­Iranian antagonism. Elliot Hentov considers the Turkish role as a neighbouring regional power which was able to profit economically from the war while maintaining a delicate political balancing act. He also shows how the war played an important role in affecting Turkey’s handling of the Kurdish question. Meanwhile Artemy Kalinovsky uses newly available Soviet sources to reconsider Moscow’s own balancing act during the war, attempting to maintain its client relationship with Iraq at the same time as it sought to cultivate Iran as the key regional power. The volume is organised around a series of sections addressing the following themes. Part I considers the waging of the war from both the Iraqi and Iranian perspectives and includes the chapters by Kevin Woods and Williamson Murray, Ibrahim al-­Marashi, and Rob Johnson. Part II looks at the economic dimensions of the war, with contributions from Farzin Nadimi on Iranian oil policy and Glen Rangwala on the financing of the war. Part III covers regional perspectives, including a chapter on the role of the Gulf States by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen and the chapter on Turkey by Elliot Hentov. Part IV looks at American policy towards the war with contributions from Judith Yaphe, Malcolm Byrne, and Chris Emery. Finally, Part V considers international perspectives and includes the chapters by Pierre Razoux on French policy and Artemy Kalinovsky on the Soviet role. In sum, this volume seeks to advance the ongoing historiographical debate over the international impact of the Iran–Iraq War through the application of new sources and fresh approaches. The discussion of the evolving historiography of the war above serves to underline that the salient features of any event will change depending on the vanishing point from which light is shed upon it. Nevertheless, this volume aims to move beyond the monotone shades cast by the invasions of Kuwait and Iraq and

10   N. Ashton and B. Gibson to recognise the Iran–Iraq War as a complex, defining event in itself, worthy of discrete study irrespective of the teleological pull exerted by the events of 1990 and 2003.

Notes   1 S. Heydemann, review of Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp, ‘Iran and Iraq at War’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 508, March 1990, p. 193.   2 S. Chubin and C. Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1988, p. 26.   3 S. R. Grummon, The Iran–Iraq War, Islam Embattled, Washington DC: Praeger Publishers, 1982.   4 S. Chubin, Security in the Persian Gulf 4: The Role of Outside Powers, Totowa, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun & Co. Publishers, Inc., 1982.   5 S. T. Hunter, ‘After the Ayatollah,’ Foreign Policy, No. 66, Spring 1987; N.  M. Renfrew, ‘Who Started the War?’ Foreign Policy, No. 66, Spring 1987; and Barry Rubin, ‘Drowning in the Gulf,’ Foreign Policy, No. 69, Winter 1987–88.   6 E. O’Ballance, The Gulf War, New York: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1988.   7 A. H. Cordesman, The Iran–Iraq War and Western Security, 1984–1987, London: The Royal United Services Institute, 1987.   8 A. H. Cordesman and A. R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, II, The Iran–Iraq War, Boulder, CO and San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 1990.   9 M. Khadduri, The Gulf War: The Origins and Implications of the Iraq-­Iran Conflict, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 10 J. Bulloch and H. Morris, The Gulf War: Its Origins, History and Consequences, London: Methuen London Ltd., 1989. 11 B. Souresrafil, The Iran–Iraq War, Plainview, NY: Guinan Co. Inc., 1989. 12 D. Hiro, The Longest War, The Iran–Iraq Military Conflict, New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1991. 13 S. Chubin and C. Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1988. 14 E. Karsh (ed.), The Iran–Iraq War: Impact and Implications, Tel Aviv: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 1989. 15 Christopher C. Joyner (ed.), The Persian Gulf War, Lessons for Strategy, Law, and Diplomacy, New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. 16 F. Rajaee, The Iran–Iraq War: The Politics of Aggression, Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1993. 17 After the war, the Iranian government set up the Specialized Library of War, which is housed at Hozeh Honari, to keep track of research on the war. This houses nearly 4,000 works on the war in Arabic, English, and Farsi. 18 W. T. Workman, The Social Origins of the Iran–Iraq War, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1994. 19 See M. S. Navias and E. R. Hooton, Tanker Wars: Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran–Iraq Crisis, London: I.B. Tauris, 1996; and N. el-­Sayed el-­Shazly, The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq’s Maritime Swordplay, New York: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998. 20 See K. Mofid, The Economic Consequences of the Gulf War, New York: Routledge, 1990; and A. Alnasrawi, The Ecomomy of Iraq: Oil, Wars, Destruction of Development and Prospects, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994. 21 S. C. Pelletiere, D. V. Johnson II, and L. R. Rosenberger, Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East, Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 1990, p. 51.

Introduction   11 22 J. Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 23 A. H. Bani-­Sadr, My Turn to Speak, Washington DC: Brassey’s, 1991, p. 13. 24 Ibid., p. 70. 25 S. Pelletiere, The Iran–Iraq War: Chaos in a Vacuum, New York: Praeger, 1992. 26 A. Tarock, The Superpowers’ Involvement in the Iran–Iraq War, Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 1998. 27 S. R. Hughes, The Iraqi Threat and Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Victoria, Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2002. 28 K. M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, New York: Random House, 2002. 29 D. Hiro, Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002. 30 See E. Willett, War and Conflict in the Middle East: The Iran–Iraq War, New York: Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2004. 31 E. Karsh, Essential Histories: The Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988, London: Osprey Publishing Ltd., 2002. 32 K. M. Pollack, Arabs at War, Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 33 L. Potter and G. Sick (eds), Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 34 General histories of Iraq which appeared or went through new editions during this period include: P. Marr, A Modern History of Iraq, London: Westview Press, Inc., 1985, 2003, and 2011; C. Tripp, A History of Iraq, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; and M. Farouk-­Sluglett and P. Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001. 35 For the records stored at the National Defense University see: www.ndu.edu/ inss/index.cfm?secID=138&pageID=4&type=section; for those at the Hoover Institution see: www.hoover.org/library-­and-archives/collections/middle-­east/ featured-­collections/iraq-­memory-foundation (both accessed 9 August 2012). 36 K. M. Woods, W. Murray, and T. Holaday (with M. Elkhamri), Saddam’s War: An Iraqi Military Perspective of the Iran–Iraq War, Washington DC: National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, 2009; K.  M. Woods, D.  D. Palkki, and M.  E. Stout, The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime, 1978–2001, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; and K.  M. Woods, W. Murray, E. A. Nathan, L. Sabara, and A. M. Venegas, Saddam’s Generals: Perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War, Washington DC: Bernan Association, 2011. 37 B. R. Gibson, Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence, and the Iran– Iraq War, 1980–88, Oxford: Praeger Securities International, 2010. Another valuable recent work on the war is R. Johnson, The Iran–Iraq War, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Part I

Waging the war

2 Lessons learned Civil–military relations during the Iran–Iraq War and their influence on the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War Ibrahim al-­Marashi Introduction Thirty years after the Iran–Iraq War, few studies exist analyzing the inter­ nal politics in Baghdad which formulated Iraq’s military strategy during this conflict. Furthermore, few scholars have examined what the Iraqi state learned from this conflict, and how it adapted these lessons during the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars. Formerly classified Iraqi documents, now avail­ able through the Kuwait Data Set and the Iraq Perspectives Project, serve as valuable archives, providing internal documentary records of Iraq’s wars from the perspective of the state. An analysis of these documents can rewrite the history of large segments of Qadisiyyat Saddam. This chapter sets out to utilize these documents as a primary source to obtain an insight into the lessons learned from the eight-­year war from the viewpoint of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi state and its security apparatus, and how it applied them in the 1991 and 2003 wars. Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party used an extensive intelligence network and a communication campaign to prepare the nation for three wars, while ensuring political control over the Iraqi military. The Iraqi security and intelligence services as well as communiqués from the politi­ cal leadership were employed in strategies and techniques for both con­ trolling and mobilizing the Iraqi armed forces and population. From 1982, when Iranian forces expelled the Iraqi military across the border, to the 1991 and 2003 wars, it is evident that Saddam Hussein chose a defensive strategy based on his hope that his enemies would lack the patience or courage to continue the war and that domestic and international pres­ sures would force his opponents to let his regime survive. Thus, in all three cases, he sought to force a lengthy war of attrition as his best pos­ sible tactic. This study analyzes how Nordlinger’s totalitarian-­penetration military model carried over from the Iran–Iraq War and perpetuated itself through the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War. The totalitarian-­penetration model is based on a highly centralized single party or a personal dictatorship, or a combination of both. The defining feature of this model is a centralized

16   I. al-Marashi and authoritarian party that is in political control of the military. If the military is to be penetrated by a single package of political communication and ideals there cannot be other parties which can articulate competing ideologies.1 The rise of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath party in 1968 marked the end of military praetorianism in Iraq, and the restoration of civilian control with the totalitarian-­penetration model. The military and militarism were dominant in Iraqi society, especially during its three wars; however, it was Saddam Hussein and the civilian Ba’athists who exercised supreme political authority. In the totalitarian-­penetration model civilians from a single party ensure that the military remains loyal and obedient by penetrating the military with political communications and ideology. The goal is to remove any tension between a civilian party and the military by ensuring political conformity through the creation of an ideological military. Political com­ missars are infiltrated into the armed forces at all levels to disseminate political communications and hold political discussions within the military units. The party commissars ensure that all decisions taken by the military meet the party’s approval. Their responsibility is to the civilian leadership of the party, rather than to military officers or to a ministry of defense. Besides providing ideology, they are the ‘eyes and ears’ of the party, ensur­ ing that political communications and ideas are put into practice. Ideolog­ ical education is given to both professional officers and the ranks of the enlisted. The party’s tenets are imbued through military education at various academies or at mass-­indoctrination gatherings. Promotions are usually granted to officers who demonstrate political loyalty, often at the expense of their demonstration of military capability or experience.2 Loyalty within the military is also maintained through the use of surveil­ lance and punishments including purges, imprisonment or executions. The military is monitored through the use of secret police or military intel­ ligence agencies. Informers from these networks also report directly to the party establishment, or to the military intelligence agencies under the control of civilians in the government. These networks prevent the officers from launching a coup or conspiring with other civilians against the ruling civilian elite.3 The party creates its own parallel military units and intelli­ gence forces to challenge the strength of the regular armed forces. The goal of this relationship is to ensure that the officers lack organizational independence, even if it means hurting their overall professionalism for the sake of keeping the armed forces out of domestic politics.4 This pattern of civil–military relations was initiated in 1968, culminated in the Iran–Iraq War and continued through the 2003 Iraq war.

The documents The documentation on Iraq’s military and security network that illustrate the totalitarian-­penetration dynamic became available after February 1991,

Lessons learned   17 when the remaining elements of Iraq’s security and military apparatus made a panicked retreat from Kuwait City, as Coalition military forces quickly approached. Local Kuwait authorities seized the documents pro­ duced by the Iraqi military, which they discarded in Kuwait after their hasty departure.5 United States forces acquired documents of a military nature from Iraqi combat personnel who surrendered en masse, along with documents that were captured after military engagements. Com­ bined, these documents form what is known as the Kuwait Data Set (KDS) of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP).6 The IRDP was envisioned by an Iraqi writer, Kanan Makiya who, with the aid of U.S. Senate staff member Peter W. Galbraith, lobbied Congress to provide the funds to transfer most of these Iraqi government documents to the U.S. State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency for analysis, scrutiny and classification.7 Once the documents had been declassified by these government bodies for public use, the IRDP, based at Harvard University, and the Iraq Foundation, an NGO in Washington DC, was granted U.S. government funding to classify and catalogue the documents. The work carried out by the IRDP is now under the rubric of the Iraq Memory Foun­ dation based in Iraq and the United States. Other documents including Iraqi military correspondence, training drills and defense plans were provided by Kuwaiti and Iraqi organizations, such as the Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait. Still others were released directly by the U.S. military, which had captured documents during the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars. In early 2006, the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) issued a study entitled the Iraqi Perspectives Project, which gave a detailed analysis of Saddam’s defense strategy in 2003, based on interviews with former senior Iraqi military and political leaders and thousands of captured Iraqi files.8 Collectively, these declassified Iraqi documents revealed a dramatically different picture of Iraqi politico-­military communications and strategy from 1980 to 2003. The documents provided an unprecedented insight into the internal workings of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and a window into the machinations of how the Ba’ath communicated and managed its totalitarian-­penetration military. The documents provide a picture of the internal military and political dynamics during ‘Qadisiyyat Saddam’, the ‘Mother of All Battles’ and ‘The Defining Battle’, the titles Saddam Hussein used to refer to the eight-­war war, 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War respectively. Through the examination of documents, the dominance of Saddam Hussein and the Party, with its rhetorical and ideological campaign to inspire the armed forces, repeated fear-­inducing communiqués, the infil­ tration of its commissars, the numerous parallel militaries and the con­ stant surveillance of multiple competing intelligence agencies bore all the hallmarks of a totalitarian-­penetration military and was present during the three wars.

18   I. al-Marashi

Labeling the Iran–Iraq War To understand Saddam Hussein’s grand strategy during the eight-­year war, an examination of the rhetorical tools used to justify his actions and discredit his enemies is needed. The documents provide a unique insight into the language of power used by Hussein and his security network. The Iraqi leadership developed a unique discourse to vilify the enemies of the state and their activities and at the same time to glorify the Iraqi nation, creating external foes as a means of maintaining internal cohesion in Iraq. Lisa Weeden’s study examines how the Ba’athist state in Syria attempted to control a political ‘symbolic world’ by manipulating and managing ‘systems of signification’. Just as in Syria, Ba’athist rhetoric and symbols in Iraq served as a ‘form of power in their own right’.9 Iraqi Ba’athist rhetoric sought to enforce obedience to win support for Saddam Hussein and foster a collective solidarity to prepare the population for the three con­ flicts. Thus, not only did the intelligence and security apparatus ensure the survival of the regime, but rhetoric also played a crucial role in pro­ ducing political power in Iraq. The use of speeches during the conflict was an attempt by the regime to ‘create an emotional connection between leaders and followers’.10 The terminology, which proliferated through the documents, demonstrated the regime’s manipulation of language, history and Iraqi mythology. The mechanics of the regime’s indoctrination was a crucial part of the Iraqi President’s strategy in justifying the invasion of Iran to his security apparatus, the Iraqis, the Arabs and world opinion. As a result, the Ba’athist political rhetoric found in the documents was ripe with Iraqi nationalist symbols and other concepts based on a glorious past, with narrative devices employed to sanitize acts against the Iranians and justify an attack on Shi’a Iran among the numerous Iraqi Shi’a in the military. In this regard, the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88 was not referred to as such in the official and secret Iraqi discourse but rather as Qadisiyyat Saddam, coupling the leader’s name with the first battle between the Persians and Arabs, in which the Arab Muslims emerged victorious.11 As Ofra Bengio writes: The myths woven around al-­Qadisiyya are a most instructive example of the Ba’thi technique of using an event with a core historical truth that is deeply etched into collective memory in order to further the party’s ideology of Arab nationalism and to appeal to the public by means of a challenge of great emotional power.12 That earlier battle, which took place in ad 637, led by the Arab general Sa’d ibn Waqqas, lasted for three days, resulting in the death of the Persian general Rustum as well as the end of Persian Sassanian rule in Iraq. The collapse of the Zoroastrian Iranian forces at al-­Qadisiyya allowed

Lessons learned   19 the Arabs to spread Islam eastward, thus giving this battle a religious sig­ nificance. Hussein tried to undermine the Shi’a appeal of Iran’s Islamic Revolution by employing notions of Arab nationalism, especially among the Iraqi Arab Shi’a who were most likely to be influenced by Iran’s (Shi’a) Islamic Revolution. By invoking the name of al-­Qadisiyya, he justi­ fied his war as a continuation of the struggle between Persians and Arabs. Hussein’s labeling of the Iran–Iraq war as al-­Qadisiyya also revealed his vision of how the war should end: a decisive Arab victory over the Persian masses, leading to the complete surrender of the Iranian nation. The Iraqi leader and many of Iraq’s military officers were referred to as ‘heroes of Qadisiyya’, such as Bariq ‘Abdallah al-­Haj Hinta, head of the Special Forces during the Anfal campaign and the invasion of Kuwait, who signed all of his correspondence as ‘hero of Qadisiyya’. While the majority of documents refer to the Iran–Iraq War as Qadisiyyat Saddam, the Iranians were subsequently referred to as al-­’adu al-‘ajami. ‘Adu is the word for ‘enemy’ in Arabic, while the word ‘ajam has more nuanced connotations. The literal meaning of ‘ajam is ‘one who is illiter­ ate in a language’ and was originally used to refer to the non-­Arab peoples residing within the early Arab Islamic Empires who could not speak Arabic. Centuries later the word ‘ajam developed a derogatory meaning among Arabs when specifically referring to the Persians. Another racist term used by the security apparatus in the document set refers to Iranians as majus, which literally means ‘fire worshippers’. Such a term is an attack on the Zoroastrian faith and their use of the fire temple as a focal point of worship. By referring to the Iranians in these documents as majus, the security apparatus implies that the Iranians are not sincere Muslims, but rather covertly practice their pre-­Islamic beliefs. Thus, in their eyes, Iraq’s war took on the dimensions of not only a struggle for Arab nationalism, but also a campaign in the name of Islam. The documents demonstrate the ‘bureaucratization’ of such derogatory terms in the official corre­ spondence of the security agencies. During the eight-­year war, an interplay between terminology and strategic thinking depicted the nation of Iraq and the regime of Saddam Hussein as constantly threatened by internal and external actors. Internal actors were labeled with a variety of terms. The first was the ‘agent’ (‘amil) who was defined as ‘one of our citizens that works for the foreign intelligence under certain influences. He carries out his activities and hostile works within or outside the country.’ The second was the ‘spy’ (jasus) who was ‘an intelli­ gence element of the foreign or hostile intelligence services that carries out his hostile activity against the nation or its armed forces in secret’. The third threat is described as a ‘saboteur’ (mukharrib), who conducts ‘hostile activi­ ties that aim at harming or hindering military activities, so as to negatively affect the material and morale of the country’s military efforts’.13 During the Iran–Iraq war, the Kurdish guerrillas known as the peshmerga, or in Kurdish ‘those who face death’, were mentioned in the Iraqi

20   I. al-Marashi documents as mukharrabin or ‘saboteurs’. Similar terms were later applied to the Kuwait resistance as any reference to armed Kuwaitis resisting the occupation in Iraqi documents was prefaced with ‘the so-­called Kuwaiti resistance’ (ma yusamuha al-­muqawama al-­kuwaytiyya). Afterwards, the General Security Service sent an order that the term mukharrib must be used in referring to ‘those who commit acts of sabotage inside the prov­ ince of Kuwait’.14 On the other hand, the Kurds who fought in the pro-­ government militias were known as muqatil (pl. muqatilin), ‘fighters’ or ‘killers’. The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) was rarely mentioned as such in the documents but rather was referred to as salili al-­khiyana or ‘the offsprings of treason’, which most likely refers to the leader of the KDP, Mas’ud Barazani, the son of Mulla Mustafa Barazani, who was branded a traitor by the regime for leading the Kurdish insurgency since the 1960s. The names the Ba’ath security units gave to the Kurdish movement ranged from ‘that rebellious pocket of foreign agents’ to ‘a liberating national movement’ when relations between the Kurds and central gov­ ernment were improving.15 For example, Saddam Hussein, during a visit to the province named after Salah al-­din (himself a Kurd), said that Salah al-­Din was an Arab and that there was no contradiction ‘between the Kurd­ ishness of a Kurd and being part of the Arab nation’.16 On 11 March 1970 Kurdish autonomy was proclaimed, with the area referred to as mintaqat al-­hukm al-­dhati (‘the area of autonomy’) opposed to Kurdistan.17 In the first years of the proclamation the Kurdish Democratic Party was referred to as a haraka taharruriyya, ‘a liberation movement’, but soon after hostili­ ties began in 1974, when the agreement broke down after the Ba’ath authorities failed to demarcate the boundaries of the Kurdish entity, the KDP was referred to as al-­jayb al-‘amil al-­mutamarrid, ‘the rebellious pocket of agents’. The term ‘agents’ meant that they were in the service of the ‘enemy’, referring to the Iranians who were supplying them.18 A military directive, entitled ‘Subject: Terminology’, stated: ‘the com­ mander of the Mukhabarat had issued an order that the so-­called Kuwaiti resistance be called saboteur gangs or rebellious gangs, because the previ­ ous name Kuwaiti resistance was inaccurate and inappropriate’.19 This order demonstrated that the inhabitants of Iraq’s Nineteenth Province had to be categorized as Iraqis. Any member of an Iraqi opposition group was referred to as an ‘amil or ‘agent’, with connotations that they were in the service of foreign powers. For example, during the Iran–Iraq war, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) was referred to as ‘‘umala’ Iran’ (‘umala’ being the plural of ‘amil), since the PUK had forged an alliance with the ‘Persian enemy’. As Iraqi forces hunted members of the opposition Iraqi Shi’a party, al-­Hizb al-­ Da’wa, during the Iran–Iraq War, the documents referred to the organiza­ tion as ‘the agent al-­Hizb al-­Da’wa Party’ (al-­hizb al-­da‘wa al-‘amil). The manual defines Iraq’s threats as both internal and external. The internal threats are first ‘the parties of the primitive, hostile sectarian movements’

Lessons learned   21 (parties such as al-­Hizb al-­Da’wa) and, second, ‘the traitor Iraqi Commu­ nist Party,’ both of which were considered as ‘amil entities since the Iraqi state viewed them as ‘agents’ of Iran and the Soviet Union.20 The Iraqi state discourse consisted of a hybrid of Iraqi nationalist and Islamic symbols. For example, military units of the Ba’ath Party’s Popular Army were named after the warriors of Qadisiyya, such as the Sa’d Ibn Waqqas21 Unit. The use of such historic ‘warrior icons’ was a potent symbol in the justification of Iraqi military exploits during the eight-­year war. Lessons in rhetoric and terminology from the Iran–Iraq War were evident during the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Iraqi President announced his order to annex Kuwait at a session of the Revolutionary Command Council on 8 August 1990.22 Weeden argues that this speech served as a prime example of Hussein employing a constructed past, where Iraq and the Arab world suffered colonial humiliation, to his advantage.23 Saddam Hussein addressed ‘the great people of Iraq, from the land to the sea’, as he opened by criticizing the impact of the colonial legacy on Iraq: Even though direct colonialism was gone, foreign rule still dominated our region through their agents and lackeys. One of the worst crimi­ nal acts of colonialism was when they divided the Arab nations (who were as one, when Baghdad was the capital of the Arab nation) and even after many of the Arab areas got their independence the enemy still continued with their evil actions.24 Equating the Abbasid Empire with the ‘Arab nation’ was a deliberate attempt to place Baghdad as the capital of the Arab and Islamic world, invoking the second and third images of the Iraqi nation, simultaneously. Hussein then proceeded to threaten the West, as well as pro-­Western Arab countries: ‘We have taken this decision and we say to the all the evil ones and conspirators that all their navies and air fleets and all centres of evil power, whether within the Arab world or outside of it, will not shake any palm trees in Basra or Al-­Qadisiyya or Kuwait or Nada’ or Muth­ anna.’25 Continuing to address foreign powers, he stated: ‘Our homes deserve any sacrifices given by Arab strugglers and martyrs. And you will be burned by the blood of our martyrs, who will keep Iraq dignified and proud of all its regions and especially its southern regions that the Iraqis hold very dearly.’ In this instance, he referred to Kuwait as southern Iraq, as he had not yet declared that Kuwait was officially the Nineteenth Prov­ ince at this point.26 The statements on 8 August were examples of the rhetoric used by Saddam Hussein to justify his actions, from the absorption of Kuwait to the waging of war against the ‘infidels’ and ‘foreign colonial powers’. He consistently tried to project an image of an Iraq that stood up to injustice and whose aims were altruistic, noble and spiritual. Invoking the elevated ideals of God and nation, he constructed motives for invasion designed to

22   I. al-Marashi appeal to both secular and religious components of the populations both in Iraq and in the Arab and Muslim world. Hussein’s revised strategy to absorb Kuwait into Iraq was most likely borne out of his experience in the Iran–Iraq War. Although the Iraqis were able to invade the Iranian province of Khuzestan in 1980, the Iraqi military ostens­ ibly felt little connection to the area, offering little resistance to the Iranian forces that subsequently expelled the Iraqi Army only two years later. However, as the Iranian forces continued to advance into Iraqi territory, Hussein was able to rally Iraq’s communities, including the Arab Shi’a, around notions of a common Iraqi identity to repel the Iranian advances. But the fact of the matter was that he was never able to convince the Iraqis that Khuzestan was an integral part of Iraq or even gather the support of the Arab population of Khuzestan. His efforts to create an ‘Arabistan’ failed, an outcome he did not want repeated in the 1990 crisis. Hussein began to witness a similar response in Kuwait as the attempts to create a pro-­Iraqi gov­ ernment in Kuwait in the first days of the war had little credibility and the Kuwaitis failed to welcome the Iraqis as liberators: ‘Not only did they not rise in large numbers to greet their self-­styled liberators, but this peaceful, soft nation proved to be far more resilient than anticipated.’27 The difference in this case, as opposed to the invasion of Iranian Khuz­ estan, was that Saddam Hussein was able to invoke an alleged historical prec­ edent for returning Kuwait to its ‘Iraqi roots’. By arguing that the annexation of Kuwait rectified the unjust borders imposed by the British, he struck a popular chord among the Iraqis and the Arab world. Thus, the incorpora­ tion of Kuwait was an intricate part of his defensive strategy, as it served the purpose of convincing the Iraqis that they were actually defending their pat­ rimony. In order to convey this message to his people, along with a set of other justifications of defence and liberation, Saddam Hussein instigated a systematic campaign of rhetoric and indoctrination that included the physi­ cal elimination of all traces of the al-­Sabah monarchy and the state of Kuwait. Mohamed Heikal has argued that Kuwait was annexed to return the province to its historical Iraqi roots: ‘The belief that Kuwait was part of Iraq, and had been wrongly taken from it by the British, was deeply embedded in the Iraqi consciousness, and was a cause the Iraqis would defend with their lives.’28 By returning Kuwait to Iraq, Hussein hoped – and perhaps gambled – that the Iraqis would be willing to sacrifice their lives, especially on the bat­ tlefield, for the sake of rectifying past colonial injustices. Ghareeb and Khad­ duri also support the argument that the Hussein regime’s annexation of Kuwait sought the support of Iraq’s public opinion.29 Freedman and Karsh state: ‘Fearing that he would have to face an American attack, he believed that his forces would be more inclined to fight unto death if they were pro­ tecting their own territory.’30 Learning from the 1980 lesson of a failed ‘Ara­ bistan’, the declaration of annexation was essentially a defensive tactic to give the Iraqi masses and military forces the illusion that they were essen­ tially defending Iraq itself.

Lessons learned   23

Iraqi military defence preparations During the three wars military defence was designed within a totalitarian-­ penetration system by a political organ of the Party. Plans were coordi­ nated by Saddam Hussein through the Ba’ath Party Military Bureau, the body which managed Iraqi defence and security issues. The Bureau was subordinate to the party chairman, Saddam Hussein, who was also its General Secretary. Saddam Hussein, in his honorific capacity as Com­ mander in Chief of the Armed Forces, not the Minister of Defence, was the highest military authority in Iraq. Given the nature of the system he established, his active and direct control was absolutely necessary for ensuring the loyalty of the Iraqi armed forces to his leadership. In reality, the Military Bureau served as a mere bureaucratic layer between the lead­ ership and the military. Military officers debriefed after the 2003 Iraq War complained that all tactical military orders essentially came from Saddam Hussein or his youngest son, Qusay.31 In all of Iraq’s three wars, the Iraqi military was monitored by virtually all intelligence organs including the domestic security organ, General Security (Al-­Amn al-­Amm), the domestic/foreign organ, General Intelli­ gence (Al-­Mukhabarat al-­Amma), Military Intelligence (Al-­Istikhbarat al-­ Askariyya), and the elite, overarching Special Security (Al-­Amn al-­Khas). Ba’ath Party representatives were placed in every military unit. All these bodies provided detailed reports on the daily conduct of Iraqi military units and individual soldiers to the Iraqi leadership. The objective of this intensive monitoring of the Iraqi forces was twofold. First was the normal and daily surveillance over the activities of the military that the Ba’ath rou­ tinely conducted to curb dissent and make sure that no entity within the Iraqi armed forces emerged as a threat to the leadership. Second, the Ba’ath leadership wanted to make sure that the military did not falter in the defence of Iraq. Documentation demonstrating the nature of the totalitarian-­ penetration system emerged in the defense plans during both the eight-­ year war and the 1990 to 1991 Gulf Crisis. Political planning in military affairs, as occurred during the Iran–Iraq war, was prevalent from the first days of the invasion. In the first weeks of August 1990, the Iraqis had begun planning for an attack against their forces. In one defence plan by the Army Chief of Staff, the Army commanders were told that ‘the units should engage the paratroopers, without relying on the benefit of air support. Their activities should be based on artillery and other weapons.’32 The language was reminiscent of the early battles during the Iran–Iraq War around Basra or the Battle of Mehran, where ground forces faced off against the Iranians with air support arriving too late or never at all. A paramount concern of the Iraqi leadership was the security and avail­ ability of food and water resources in Kuwait and Iraq. A message in a threatening tone from the Iraqi President ordered Iraqi armed forces to

24   I. al-Marashi secure water resources. In one of his communiqués, the President as mili­ tary commander instilled fear among the ranks in a direct fashion. He declared: ‘I will deal severely with whoever underestimates the importance of this order. Failure with regard to the following order is not allowed.’ He ordered the military not to repeat the mistake in the Iran–Iraq War when water tankers were stored above ground, allowing them to become targets. He considered that this negligence had prevented the soldiers from fight­ ing effectively during certain battles.33 In both these messages, regarding the rationing of food or securing of water, fear is projected onto the mili­ tary from the leader, Saddam Hussein. Intricate military matters, such as digging water depositories underground, might be expected to come from commanders in the field, but in the Iraqi system such orders are examples of Saddam’s micro-­management of the war front. The implementation of the plan to secure vital resources was done through the parallel militaries and intelligence units – an intrinsic feature of the totalitarian-­penetration system. The Iraqi leadership feared that the anti-­Iraqi Coalition would attempt to sabotage Kuwait’s potable water sup­ plies. General Hussein Kamil, the Commander of the Republican Guards and Saddam Hussein’s son-­in-law, informed the presidential office that he had ordered his forces to secure water supplies coming from the desalini­ zation plants. The security threat, however, was that most workers in those stations were foreigners, and thus vulnerable to sabotage and acts of poi­ soning that it was feared would be carried out in tandem with an enemy attack. Therefore, Kamil ordered that undercover General Intelligence and Military Intelligence agents spy on the employees.34 As totalitarian-­ penetration systems feature numerous competing intelligence agencies, the aforementioned report demonstrated how such tendencies were inter­ nalized in Iraq. Such a vital strategic asset had to be monitored by not one but two competing intelligence services: one that specialized in domestic/ international espionage and the other that was tasked with spying on the military. Just as political communications imbued with war populism were used by the political leadership to instil the military with a fighting ethos during the Iran–Iraq War, so too was this tactic employed prior to the 1991 Gulf war. The equivalent of the rhetorical Qadisiyya emerged on 20 September, when the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council declared that Iraq would not retreat from Kuwait, and introduced Iraq’s euphemistic term for the Gulf War, ‘the noble battle of the mother of all battles’ (al-­munazala al-­ sharifa l-­ma‘rakat um al-­ma‘arik), otherwise referred to as ‘the mother of all battles’ (umm kul al-­ma‘arik). This title for the crisis revealed the Iraqi lead­ er’s emphasis on the scope and severity of an impending war with the United States. This political communication also conveyed to his military the grave significance of the conflict and prepared them for a committed and involved entanglement. Nevertheless, the leadership attempted to convince the armed forces that it would emerge victorious in such a battle.

Lessons learned   25 In a memo circulated among military units it states: ‘We are guaranteed victory because we are standing up to thirty nations, and that is a point of pride for us.’35 This statement indicated that if Iraqis alone survived the ‘mother of all battles’, it would mean a victory no matter what happened on the battlefield itself. By the end of September 1990 the Iraqi political leadership had com­ manded the Iraqi military to be prepared for an attack that could begin without any warning and to hold their positions in Iraq near the Saudi border and in Kuwait. The Iraqi military was charged with preparing a strategy of ‘dig-­in’ and ‘hold the line’ without withdrawing unless ordered, and inflicting massive casualties on the enemy. It was the same military strategy orchestrated by the political leadership in the years 1982 to 1987 during the Iran–Iraq war. While it was employing the same strategy, the Iraqi leadership reminded its forces that the American ‘enemy’ was very different from the Iranians: ‘Fighting the American enemy is much more different that fighting the Iranians due to their advanced weaponry. The differences can be simple like the greater accuracy of their weapons and that they are more reliant on oil.’36 The aforementioned statement by the President had been internalized in Iraqi military documents. For example, in instructions from the Iraqi Army Chief of Staff to all Army units, the stress on the qualitative differ­ ences between the Iranian and American enemies is reiterated.37 By 25 September, the Iraqi Chief of Staff al-­Khazraji had clearly stated: ‘Do not consider the battle of Qadisiyyat Saddam as an adequate measurement for the upcoming war.’ He warned that in the Iran–Iraq war ‘Iraq had many resources to acquire weapons and materials’. Due to the embargo, ‘we need to maximize the capabilities of our current weapons’.38 On 17 October, an Iraqi general circulated another set of directives from Hussein entitled ‘How Fighting the Americans Differs from Fighting the Iranians’. The argument stated that fighting ‘the American enemy is different than fighting the Iranian enemy, and dealing with them is also different due to the quality of their weapons. They will be selective in their target selection, because they want to use the oil after the end of hostilities.’39 The general warned the fighters about the abilities of the American weapons, but advised them to avoid exaggerations that might scare the fighters.40

Conditions of the military during war Just as during the Iran–Iraq War, the Iraqi leadership’s goal in 1991 was to draw out the fighting to the point where the enemy’s morale at home would make continued engagement untenable. The Iraqi leadership’s energies in ordering the military to inflict as many possible casualties on the Iranian or Coalition forces demonstrated a belief among the higher echelons of political power in Iraq that domestic pressure in countries such as Iran or the United States would compel their leaders to seek a

26   I. al-Marashi negotiated end to the wars. Hussein employed tactics which would result in the Iranians or Coalition breaking before the Iraqi military did. Such scenarios could be played off as a victory for Saddam Hussein, ensuring his security within Iraq from a potential coup and securing him as a regional hero in the Arab world. This tactic worked in 1988. Thus if a similar scenario could have been pulled off in 1991 or 2003, where growing casualties would force American public opinion to call for an end to the war, as it did in Vietnam, certainly the Coalition could not continue the war without the United States. Essentially, the Iraqi President’s end game was neither a victory for the Iraqi nation nor for the military, but a victory for the leadership itself. Such efforts failed to address one of the greatest crises facing the Iraqi armed forces – the increasing number of desertions. The desertion phe­ nomenon not only decreased the Iraqi military’s fighting capability but demonstrated to the enemy that their fighting ranks were collapsing. During the 1991 war, the Iraqi leadership adopted a strict policy punish­ ing acts of desertion. The domestic security organ General Security had cir­ culated a plan of action to deal with the problem of desertion in the military where committees consisting of military and Ba’athist civilians would stay behind the military zones and apprehend deserters, similar to the tactic used in the Iran–Iraq War.41 These committees would select two out of every ten deserters to be executed. The committees were to be headed by the Party supervisor in each military division, and he would be responsible for the Party commissars at the brigade level tasked with appre­ hending deserters. Party commissars in charge of capturing deserters were also to be formed at the battalion level. These Party members were to coor­ dinate their activities with a member of the Ba’ath Party National Command and General Security Service. Once a deserter was apprehended their name and address and a photo would be handed over to the closest General Security branch immediately. Thereafter the family of the deserter would be found and harassed. The report stated: ‘We will turn the families into collaborators with the Party. We will portray this phenomenon of desertion as a hated and despised act that will be combated by all our people.’ This would be General Security’s most important mission during the ‘mother of all battles’ as the phenomenon of desertion affected morale and was a demonstration of overall weakness among the combat units.42 The General Security plan symbolized the ethos underlining the rela­ tionship between the political authority and the military in Saddam Hus­ sein’s Iraq. The nature of totalitarian penetration is demonstrated by political infiltration from the both the Party and an intelligence agency, General Security. What was essentially a military affair was handled by the domestic security service, serving as a symbol of fear that affected not only the soldier but his family at well. Yet, at the same time, both the Party’s and General Security’s duties overlapped in monitoring and punishing deserters.

Lessons learned   27 In addition to the Party and General Security’s role in punishing and executing deserters, officers were also warned by the Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Army that they were responsible for dealing with this issue as well and that they should ‘severely punish’ the violators: ‘The commanders will carry out their duties according to the guidelines allotted in our secret book and will deal with deserters immediately.’43 On 22 February 1990, the Coalition issued an ultimatum to Iraq that it withdraw from Kuwait or face a ground assault within twenty-­four hours. The Iraqis did not withdraw and on 24 February Allied forces moved into Iraq and Kuwait, leading to a devastating defeat of the Iraqi forces. Never­ theless, Saddam was able to portray the massive defeat on the battlefield as a political victory. The Iran–Iraq War took a tremendous toll on Iraq in terms of manpower and financial resources. Just as in 1988, the destruc­ tion of the military units on the front line in Kuwait constituted a victory since the regime itself survived. Accordingly, the fact that the leadership had stood up to Khomeini’s Iran, or a Coalition of thirty nations, revealed that ‘the mother of all battles’ was a victory no matter what happened on the battlefield itself. Essentially this basic strategy worked in 1988 and 1991 to save Saddam Hussein. The leadership portrayed both conflicts as a con­ spiracy to unseat the government of Saddam Hussein. The fact the he sur­ vived both ‘conspiracies’ made them victories in his view. And by this measure the leadership could well claim to have won both the 1980 and 1991 wars. After the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi Republican Guard had inter­ nalized this discourse, evidenced by the following comment delivered at a military conference: ‘After the liberation of our land in Kuwait, and despite the fact that more than thirty countries headed by the occupation forces of the U.S. rushed madly upon our Republican Guard, our perform­ ance was heroic.’44

Military strategies and preparation prior to the 2003 Iraq War An examination of Saddam Hussein’s strategy in the 2003 war shows how it parallels the strategy used in the 1980s and in 1991. Hussein realized that he could not overthrow Khomeini’s government after 1982, or achieve a direct military victory against vastly superior U.S. forces. His goal in all of the conflicts was to emerge with a political victory by ensuring the survival of his regime. The manner in which Saddam Hussein organized the defence of Iraq in all three wars demonstrated that survival was thus equivalent to victory. In an interview, Ibrahim Ahmad Abd al-­Sattar al-­Takriti, the general who was made Chief of Staff in 2000, stated that Hussein held the belief that a war of attrition strategy similar to the Iran–Iraq War or the 1991 war could produce results: ‘. . . Saddam also thought his “superior” forces would put up “a heroic resistance and . . . inflict such enormous losses on the

28   I. al-Marashi Americans that they would stop their advance” ’.45 These assessments echo the goals laid out for the Iraqi military in the two previous wars. As in the previous two wars, the Iraqi armed forces in 2003 were infused with morale through political communications from the political leader­ ship. For example, Political Direction Officers in all the units of the Air Force were instructed to give psychological lectures to boost morale.46 These orders demonstrate the political influence within this service of the Iraqi armed forces. The totalitarian-­penetration model was characterized by the presence of political directorates infiltrated within the branches of the military. In this instance, the Iraqi Air Force Major General Hussein Zibin Hassan served as the head of the Political Directorate of this branch. Alongside Morale Directorates in the Iraqi armed forces, these organiza­ tions were charged with infusing a fighting spirit in the military through political communications in the name of the Iraqi leader and the Ba’ath Party. On 18 February 2003, a mere month before the American invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein met directly with the leadership of the domestic/ foreign General Intelligence agency to coordinate defence operations. Saddam Hussein started the meeting by asking of the agency’s heads: ‘You are Iraqis and you are the intelligence, and you observe our military, polit­ ical and mobilization efforts. Can you recommend something that has not occurred to us?’47 In the statement the Iraqi President acknowledged the overlapping responsibilities that he fostered among the intelligence serv­ ices in monitoring the military, one of the characteristics of the totalitarian-­penetration system he had created. In 1973 General Intelli­ gence was tasked to monitor domestic and international threats while Mili­ tary Intelligence was initially charged with all military-­related security matters. By the mid-­seventies, the omnipresence of General Intelligence, known as the dreaded Mukhabarat in Iraq, reached well into the branches of the armed forces. During this meeting Hussein instructed General Intelligence’s leader­ ship that military generals and theatre commanders did not have the authority to control the movements of the Iraqi military. Saddam Hussein had implicitly stated his distrust of military commanders in this meeting. He had essentially announced that he wanted to maintain control over large Iraqi troop movements following an invasion to make certain that the Iraqi military actually fought and did not turn against him. He declared: ‘As it relates to military force we have decided not to squander our forces and not to engage the enemy with large numbers when it is away from the cities, rather through harassment and Fidayin operations.’48 This refers to the Fidayin Saddam, a paramilitary unit founded in 1994. Saddam Hussein had laid out the defining nature of Iraq’s military strat­ egy. During the 1991 Gulf War Iraq’s forces were mauled in open spaces. However, rather than defending the capital, the Fidayin Saddam would be deployed to the south to harass enemy lines. He further commanded: ‘To

Lessons learned   29 minimize our losses, when the enemy conducts symbolic activities in open areas, the order for the movement of large forces is not delegated to the theatre commander, rather it is made at a higher level.’49 The Iraqi leader clarified that Iraqi Army generals in the field did not have the authority to order large troop movements on the battlefield. However, he did not specify what constituted the higher levels. It was this same restriction on military commanders in September 1980 that hurt Iraq’s ability to take the initiative during the initial stages of the invasion of Iran. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein reminded the intelligence agency that ‘America is the strongest country but it is not the most capable . . . we plan to fight with a rifle and a handgun, as a result the enemy can destroy but he cannot occupy.’50 It is unclear whether Hussein was hinting that the Iraqis would resist the invading forces during the actual combat phase or that he had planned a long-­term contingency plan that emerged into what became known as ‘the Insurgency’. Nonetheless, the meeting between Saddam and the General Intelligence agency served as the ultimate dem­ onstration of the extent of politicized infiltration of the armed forces. Despite the fighting capability of the military in the last years of the Iran– Iraq war, where Republican Guard generals were given tactical freedom during their liberation of the Al-­Fao campaign, the tactical freedom offered to field commanders had been denied prior to the 2003 Iraq War. In this impending conflict the military could not issue commands in either a strategic or a tactical sense. Two political institutions that served as reflection of the totalitarian-­penetration system, the Office of the Presi­ dent and the General Intelligence agency, had finalized Iraq’s military plans with the freedom of the Iraqi commanders in the field constricted. By March 2003, Coalition forces had begun the invasion of Iraq, which was met by resistance from Iraqi Fidayin Saddam and Republican Guard forces. Elements of the Republican Guard Madina division engaged the Third Infantry Division outside the city of Karbala, placing U.S. forces within eighty kilometers of the Iraqi capital. The next day, powerful sand­ storms began and continued for two days, delaying the U.S. advance in the south of the country and providing a natural defence for the Iraqi divi­ sion, although U.S. aircraft were still capable of striking Republican Guard positions. During the sandstorms and the ensuing pause in the fighting, the Iraqis conducted assessments of their opponents’ strategy and how to counter it. Four days after the onset of the American-­led invasion, the office of the Iraqi Army Chief of Staff conducted a study with Military Intelligence of the tactics employed by the United States. The objective of the study was to determine likely American tactics and strategies in the remainder of the conflict, as well as appropriate countermeasures needed to be taken by the Iraqi Army to hinder the invasion. The committee tasked with the study met at 9:00 am on 26 March 2003 and issued its findings. Under the heading of ‘Capabilities of the Enemy’ the report highlighted the obvious

30   I. al-Marashi military advantages, including the technological edge of their armored vehicles, aerial reconnaissance aircraft and missiles. However, among the military assessments, the Chief of Staff and Military Intelligence also acknowledged that the ‘enemy’ possessed an advanced capability to wage psychological warfare through the media.51 As of 28 March 2003, various Iraqi commands were still reporting to the Presidential Secretary with detailed reports of daily engagements with Coalition forces.52 In one of these reports it ordered the military to ‘work on the principle that the Army fights on the outskirts of the cities, while Al-­Quds Forces and other security forces defend inside the cities’. As illustrated in these instructions, it is evident that, despite the calamity of the situation and his fear for his leadership, Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath continued to distrust the Iraqi Army – a distrust that had existed since 1980. Due to his distrust of the Army and his worry that Army generals may pose a threat to his rule by turning against him, Saddam Hussein specifically ordered the Army to fight on the outskirts of the cities while defending them. He delegated the internal security of Iraqi cities to his more trusted security organs, includ­ ing Al-­Quds Forces and the Special Republican Guards who would defend the cities from the inside. The divisions and political tensions between various elements of the Iraqi armed forces severely limited the leadership’s ability to use its armed forces in the defense of the nation and the capital. There seemed to be no coordi­ nating body in the regime to organize the Special Republican Guards (SRG) or Fidayin to defend the city, thus relieving the difficulties of urban combat for the Americans. The lack of a grand battle for the capital could be attrib­ uted to this reduced loyalty and the disabling of Saddam Hussein as the mili­ tary commander. Whether or not they believed he was killed, wounded or merely forced into hiding, Hussein was not visibly directing these forces, unlike in 1991, and this fact could have led to a demoralizing confusion, paralysis or a belief that defeat was inevitable. While the SRG and other units decided that there was little point in continuing the fight for the capital, these forces would be available to fight the Coalition after the combat had ended, thus providing the manpower for Iraq’s post-­war violence.

Conclusion It is possible to obtain a good sense of how Saddam Hussein saw his adver­ saries. He was highly influenced by his perception that Iran and America would be defeated by a lack of courage and willpower, a limit on their patience and an inability to sustain casualties. His best hope was that his foes would tire of losing casualties and there would be domestic demands to end the war. Saddam Hussein knew that this basic strategy had worked in 1988 and 1991 to save him. He thus understandably believed that this defensive strategy was his best bet for the regime’s survival in 2003, and he was willing to pay the cost of Iraq’s utter destruction to serve that end.

Lessons learned   31 Thus, Iraq’s mammoth security apparatus and a dedicated political com­ munications campaign were employed from 1980 to 2003 to ensure that the Iraqi armed forces – a force that he inherently mistrusted – remained committed to this goal.

Notes   1 E. A. Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics: Military Coups and Governments, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1977, p. 18.   2 Ibid., p. 15.   3 Ibid.   4 M. Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in Developing Nations, Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago, 1977, pp. 188–9.   5 For a sample of the documents held by the Kuwaitis see Ali Abdul-­Lateef Khali­ fouh and Youssef Abdul-­Moa’ti, Kuwait Resistance as Revealed by Iraqi Documents, Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 1994. This volume is also available in Arabic from the same center under the title al-­Maqawama al-­ Kuwaytiyya Min Khilal al-­Watha’iq al-­’Iraqiyya.   6 Both sets of documents were released by the IRDP when it was based at Harvard University from 1996 to 2003. After 2003, the IRDP was reorganized under the title the Iraq Memory Foundation and was moved to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and can be found on the following URLs: www.iraqmem­ ory.org/documentation/NIDS/index.html and www.iraqmemory.org/en/ Doc_KDS.asp (both accessed 2 September 2012).   7 See United States Senate, Saddam’s Documents: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, May 1992.   8 K. M. Woods, Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership, Norfolk: Joint Center for Operational Analysis, 2006.   9 L. Weeden, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 5. 10 Ibid., p. 10. 11 S. al-­Khalil, The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq, London: I.B. Tauris, 1989, p. 11. 12 O. Bengio, Saddam’s Word: Political Discourse in Iraq, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 173. 13 Iraq Research and Documentation Project, Kuwait Data Set (KDS) Folder CD7 File 096–6–003, pp. 1–31. 14 KDS Folder 90810 File 908–3–116, p. 52. 15 Bengio, op. cit., 109. 16 Al-­Thawra, 23 February 1979. 17 Bengio, op. cit., p. 113. 18 Ibid, p. 115. 19 KDS Folder 90809 File 87–1–001, p. 4. 20 KDS Folder CD 10 File 108–10–037, pp. 1–35. 21 The Arab general of the battle of Al-­Qadisiyya. 22 KDS Folder 1215–1429 File 565–2–3, pp. 76–8. 23 Weeden, op. cit., p. 10. 24 KDS Folder 1215–1429 File 565–2–3, pp. 76–8. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 L. Freedman and E. Karsh (eds.), The Gulf Conflict 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 68.

32   I. al-Marashi 28 M. Heikal, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, London: Harper Collins, 1992, p. 26. 29 M. Khadduri and E. Ghareeb, War in the Gulf: The Iraq-­Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 140. 30 Freedman and Karsh, op. cit., p. 99. 31 Woods, op. cit., p. 64. 32 KDS Folder CD 7 File 096–4–009, p. 44. 33 KDS Folder CD 1A File 104–1–17, p. 146. 34 KDS Folder 90810 File 908–3–116, pp. 361–3. 35 KDS Folder 90809 File 681–1–3, pp. 4–7. 36 KDS Folder 1215–1429 File 524–2–7, p. 4. 37 KDS Folder CD 7 File 096–4–009, p. 44. 38 Ibid. 39 KDS Folder 90809 File 500–1–15, p. 2. 40 Ibid. 41 KDS Folder CD 7 File 096–4–001c, p. 62. 42 Ibid. 43 KDS Folder CD 7 File 096–4–001a p. 2. 44 Woods, op. cit., p. 47. 45 K. Woods, J. Lacey, and W. Murray ‘Saddam’s Delusions: The View from the Inside’, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006, p. 3. 46 US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office Harmony File, ISGP-­2003–00026130. 47 Harmony File ISGP-­2003–00011423, p. 1. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Harmony File ISGP-­2003–00011423, pp. 6–7. 51 Harmony File ISGZ-­2004–018178, pp. 1–4. 52 Harmony File ISGQ-­2003–00055741.

3 Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War Rule from the top Williamson Murray and Kevin Woods 1

During the past seven years, the authors have been a part of a team at the Institute for Defense Analyses that has examined the various wars Saddam Hussein’s Iraq waged between 1980 and 2003.2 In that effort, we have interviewed a number of the senior generals who participated in Saddam’s wars, and we have drawn upon the vast database of Iraqi documents captured by Coalition forces after the fall of the Ba’athist regime. At present, we are in the final stages of completing a major history of the Iran–Iraq War from Saddam Hussein’s perspective. The basis for that effort lies in the collection of recordings of telephone and ministerial discussions the dictator held with his advisors and military leaders as well as with visiting dignitaries. Here, we want to describe how Saddam and Iraq came to be involved in one of the largest conflicts of the twentieth century; the results of Iraq’s flawed assumptions that led it to invade Iran in September 1980; the desperate Iraqi attempts to halt Iran’s human-­wave assaults; the Iraqi recovery as Saddam learned a modicum of knowledge about military effectiveness; and finally, after the disastrous Iraqi defeat on the Fao Peninsula in March 1986, how Saddam turned the war around in 1988. In retrospect, the Iraqis triumphed more from their opponents’ incompetence than from their own military effectiveness. Nevertheless, Saddam played the key role, not only in the initial disasters, but also in the eventual Iraqi recovery.

Saddam: the ruler It is easy to dismiss Saddam as a buffoon incapable of standing up to the realities of the world outside Iraq. Indeed there are innumerable quotes sprinkled throughout the recordings of his meetings that suggest he was little more than an Iraqi version of the Sopranos television series.3 Nevertheless, whatever the nature of Saddam’s comments, one should not underestimate his capabilities. In the murderous world of Iraqi politics, he remained in power for twenty-­four years. During the course of the Iran– Iraq War, he adjusted to the situation Iraq confronted more quickly than

34   W. Murray and K. Woods did most of his military advisors. Iraq’s survival in this conflict owed much to his ability to adapt; more often than not, he proved perceptive and intelligent, albeit paranoid and murderous as well. Virtually all of the Iraqi generals we interviewed described Saddam as a Bedouin in terms of his approach to military matters: inclined to value courage and ruthless determination more than military professionalism or thoughtful calculations of tactical and operational issues. In his initial months in power, what mattered when choosing senior commanders was, first, an idealized notion of tribal courage and, second, loyalty to his person. Not surprisingly, Saddam appointed those who were from his family, tribe, or his native town Tikrit, in that order. An Iraqi general described Saddam in the following words: [When Saddam] looked at you, it was as if he were looking inside of you. What was scary was that you never knew what was on his mind. Saddam had more than one personality – at times sophisticated, or sympathetic, or hostile, or grimly evil. . . . He could listen at times willingly, but then he would not let others say anything. He could be generous and then turn extremely stingy. He was often good at synthesizing. But he applied tribal, tactical thinking to almost every problem he confronted administering Iraq or conducting war. At the political level he was an excellent tactical player. He could have strategic concepts, but 99 percent of them were wrong.4 Another general described dealings with Saddam in these terms: ‘Saddam could listen when he wanted to, but you had to be careful in how you phrased your answer to his question.’5 Saddam’s vision of himself as the self-­appointed leader of the Arab world had emerged by the early 1970s. By the outbreak of the war with Iran, that vision had come to dominate how he thought about himself and his decision-­making in the international arena. As for Iraq’s position in the Middle East, he noted in early 1981: Iraq can make [the Arab nation] rise and can be the centre post of its big [tent]. There are always smaller posts, but it must always be that Iraq feels the responsibility and feels it is the central post of the Arab nation. If Iraq falls, then the entire Arab nation will fall. When the central post breaks, the whole [tent] will collapse.6 Saddam was deeply influenced by Ba’athist ideology, which fit neatly into his belief that he possessed a unique mission to make the Arab nation a great power, if not a super power.7 He was also a great admirer of Stalin. He remarked to his entourage on one occasion that the Soviets were powerful because of their military ‘. . . this is because of [Stalin], he squeezed their bones to focus on weapons and he was right. Don’t tell

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   35 me [the Soviet Union] would be spreading its clout [around] the world if it weren’t armed.’8 Underlying Saddam’s worldview was an almost pathological hatred for Jews, Israel (normally termed the ‘Zionist entity’), and the Persians. The title of a pamphlet written by his uncle in the 1930s and reissued by Saddam provides a glimpse of the dictator’s priorities: ‘Those Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies.’9 Beside his hatred of the ‘Zionist entity,’ Saddam held a deep suspicion for the Iranians, whom he invariably connected in his monologues with Zionism. In 1987, he warned officials of the regime: [Y]ou should not belittle [the Iranians], and regard them as turbans. No they are not turbans, the Iranians are satanic turbans, and they know how to conspire, and they know how to communicate with the world, because they are not the ones doing the communicating. . . . It is Zionism, it is Zionism that is guiding [the Iranians]. Zionism is taking the Iranians by the hand and introducing them to each party, one by one, channel by channel. I mean Zionism – come on comrades – do I have to repeat this every time?10 Much like Stalin when he reached the top of the Soviet system, Saddam carried out a brutal purge of the Ba’ath Party, not only to destroy his rivals, but potential rivals as well.11 He recognized that Iraq’s army represented the only significant threat to his position. Although he did purge Iraq’s military as drastically as Stalin did the Red Army, Saddam replaced nearly all of the senior commanders with officers who were remarkable only for their loyalty to the Ba’ath Party and him personally. Most had never commanded at the brigade level, nor had they attended the staff college. Thus, they had had virtually no preparation for high command. As one professional officer told the authors: ‘so these . . . promotions . . . were a major shock to the Iraqi Army . . . then the war with Iran began.’12

The origins of the conflict In 1979, both Saddam and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. The nature of their political and ideological views of the world made a major conflict between them inevitable. At first Saddam greeted the Iranian revolution with considerable optimism, since he deeply hated the Shah.13 But the Ayatollah turned out to disappoint the Iraqis. From his first moments in power and despite the tenuous nature of his control, Khomeini and his followers unleashed a campaign of subversion against Iraq by mobilizing its Shi’a population against the regime. These actions reflected Khomeini’s expansive revolutionary goals, whose policies merged the tenets of a particularly aggressive form of Shi’a Islam with Persian nationalism. As reflected in the rhetoric emerging from Tehran, Khomeini sought

36   W. Murray and K. Woods nothing less than to overthrow the regional order. In his vision, there was no room for secularists like Saddam.14 To Saddam’s overture for better relations between the two countries, Khomeini replied: ‘That dictator will last no longer than six months because he is threatened by a revolution like ours. He wants to find a way out by making us an offer. I will not justify that pig.’15 The Iranian revolutionaries backed their words with deeds. Attacks by Shi’a terrorists reached their peak in April 1980. On the first of the month, they attempted to assassinate Iraq’s Deputy Premier, Tariq Aziz. During the course of the month, no fewer than twenty senior Ba’athist officials were assassinated by those whom the Iraqi regime identified as Iranian agents.16 The Iraqis replied in kind. In that same month, a group of Iranian Arabs, funded and trained by the Iraqis, seized the Iranian embassy in London. The standoff ended when the terrorists murdered one of the Iranian diplomats. The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher responded by sending in the Special Air Service (SAS), which killed all the terrorists except for one it mistakenly assumed was a hostage.17 Tension between the two powers escalated throughout spring and summer 1980. By August, artillery duels, initiated by both sides, were occurring routinely.18 One of these, near the obscure towns of Zain-­anQaws and Saif Saad on 4 September, provided the official excuse for the Iraqis to initiate hostilities. What makes these artillery duels inexplicable on the Iranian side was the deplorable state of the Shah’s military due to the purges attending Khomeini’s seizure of power. Throughout summer 1980, Saddam received a constant flow of reports on the collapsing state of the Iranian military after the fall of the Shah’s regime.19 Nevertheless, the tensions with Iran did force the Iraqi military to turn its attention from the west – and Israel – to the east. In July 1980, a major conference of Iraq’s corps and division commanders and their staffs took place, in which the Army Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Abd al-­Jabbar Shanshal, warned that a conflict with Iran was in the offing. The participants took away from the meeting a belief they would have two years to prepare for war; however, in the next two months (that preceded the conflict), little planning occurred on the Iraqi side except to deploy much of the army’s armored strength to the south in case Saddam decided on war.20 At the political level, Saddam appears not to have decided to invade Iran until the last moment. A lengthy discussion that took place on 16 September 1980 among the senior ministers makes clear that Saddam had not yet determined exactly what the invasion of Iran should achieve beyond a set of vague and, at best, indirect benefits. One of Saddam’s advisors and most loyal confidants, Izzat al-­Duri, argued that: This is our chance. This is an historical chance. . . . It does not mean that we get back [just] the Shatt al-­Arab. . . . It means a whole lot more

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   37 than [that] . . .. Through this Iraq can take big steps . . ., whether they are within Iraq or the [Arab] nation. Benefits [include] building the armed forces for the Arab nation. This [war] will elevate [the Arab nation’s] psychological level and its spiritual level, and its military and technical level to an elite level. We will save a lot of time [in achieving our goals] . . .21 Al-­Duri then assessed the risks involved in launching an invasion: ‘My personal belief is that Iran will not [fight] in a big way. If they react in a big way how far are they going to go?’ Saddam replied: ‘In other words do they have the brains to fight us while they are in this bad military condition?’22 The transcript suggests Saddam went to war with a mixed bag of motives, an ambiguous set of war aims, and only the most tenuous theory of victory. First, he had no intention of allowing Khomeini and his ‘turbans’ to get away with their direct and indirect assaults on his regime; thus, in terms of personality, there was a strong desire on his part to pay the Iranians back for their insults.23 Second, he appears to have believed military operations would pull the Iranian militias supporting the religious revolutionaries out of Tehran, which would enable Khomeini’s opponents to overthrow the emerging theocratic regime.24 Undoubtedly the degenerating state of the Iranian military encouraged Saddam to believe war with Iran would be an easy matter. Finally, in the case of an overwhelming Iraqi victory, Saddam and his political cronies believed such a victory would represent a stepping stone to unifying the Arab nation under Saddam. In all of this, one should not discount a dose of megalomania.

The invasion and initial operations, 1980–81 To reach such goals, the Iraqis had to defeat the Iranians on the battlefield. Here the Iraqis displayed gross incompetence even by the standards of Middle Eastern militaries.25 Having removed most of the military professionals from the top ranks of the army, and as a result cowing many more, Saddam led amateur hour in Baghdad. Soon to promote himself to the rank of field marshal, the Iraqi dictator queried his minister of war about the army’s proposed operations eight days before the invasion: ‘[W]hat is stopping us from moving forward on all axes and surrounding their armies and capturing them? . . . No one is saying there [will be] no resistance; no one is saying there will be no losses, or dead, but the result of our military calculations is that we will be able to reach the heart of Iran.’26 The war began on 22 September 1980, with the Iraqis attempting to replicate the successful Israeli strike against the Egyptian Air Force in June 1967. Yet, the frontline squadrons only received notification and orders on 20 September for the impending operations. They almost lost the entire strike force when planners in Baghdad miscalculated the fuel

38   W. Murray and K. Woods requirements for aircraft to return from strikes deep in Iran. Upon discovering the error, frontline squadron commanders desperately queried air force headquarters and got permission to exchange a part of their bomb loads for drop tanks.27 The attack was a dismal failure, because most Iranian aircraft were in their shelters and the attacking aircraft possessed no bunker-­busting bombs. About the best the attacking aircraft could do was to crater the runways, which the Iranians quickly repaired with their excellent American-­made runway repair kits.28 The ensuing air effort was no more successful, with heavy losses due to the surprisingly quick response of the Iranian Air Force and effective anti-­aircraft fire. Support for the army was little better. In early October the Tenth Armored Division reported it confronted major Iranian units, but air reconnaissance failed to confirm these reports. This led one of Saddam’s officers to explode at the air force reconnaissance unit responsible for the area: ‘It is not acceptable to have this large enemy concentration . . . and when we ask for air reconnaissance, the answer is “nothing” seen in the area. How is that possible? Did the [enemy] wear invisible hats? Where did they go?’29 The Iraqi ground offensive was no more successful in the sense of achieving significant strategic or operational gains. On September 22, the Iraqi Army launched no fewer than six loosely coordinated drives with eleven divisions. One Iraqi general, eventually a corps chief of staff, suggested to the authors that no higher headquarters coordinated the advance of the divisions. When they reached the end of their logistic tether, they simply halted, whether the position was defensible or not. Not only did the Iraqis fail to drive to the passes issuing from the Zagros Mountains, which were crucial for the Iranians to deploy forces from their heartland to the main battlefront, but the Iraqis failed to target the strategic highway that lay behind the towns of Susangard, Ahvaz, and Khorramshahr.30 These operational errors removed any hope that Iraq could dictate the field of battle and simultaneously increased the potential effectiveness of any Iranian response. On the open terrain to the south, the Iraqis advanced considerably, at least until they ran into built-­up urban terrain where the Iranians had hunkered down. Khomeini’s forces were even less prepared for serious fighting. A local Pasdaran commander in Khorramshahr offered the following words of comfort to his beleaguered troops: ‘Listen, guys, everything we have done this far and all our training was for such a day. Of course 15 days’ training is not enough, but we must demonstrate our power to the enemy.’31 Khorramshahr, where a substantial number of ill-­ trained, but fanatical, Pasdaran held out, proved to be a nasty fight for the Iraqis. The initial effort to take the city by armor failed dismally. The Iraqi command then ordered a three-­week pause to retrain a special-­forces brigade and infantry formations to work with armor. The fighting was so fierce that Iraqi monitoring of Iranian radio transmissions noted appeals

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   39 from the enemy’s frontline troops ‘to their commands that they cannot even move ambulance vehicles to evacuate casualties due to heavy artillery fire.’32 While the Iraqis eventually captured the city, they were content to surround Abadan and hoped to take the city by siege. While there was not much left of that city when the Iraqis retreated in 1982, the Iranians held on with the help of reinforcements and supplies brought by sea. Nothing makes clearer the disconnect between Baghdad and what was occurring on the battle front than Saddam’s hope that Iraq might gain a substantial portion of Arabistan and its oilfields. On one hand, in a meeting with his senior officers in late November 1980, the dictator suggested Iraq needed to use the velvet glove in dealing with the Arabs. For the benefit of his staff, he noted that Arabistan should be an autonomous region ‘closely linked with Iraq.’ He warned the head of military intelligence that, based on Iraq’s experience with the Kurds, Iraq needed to ‘take a human[e] approach’ with the local Arabs of the area: ‘if a garden is smashed by [our] tanks, they [should] receive a monetary compensation for such losses of up to four times the original worth.’33 Meanwhile, the Ninth Division’s commander in Arabistan, a certain Major General Tala al-­Duri, a notorious incompetent and favourite of Saddam, was busy shooting large numbers of the local Arabs, because they might be guerrillas.34 Despite the Iraqi armed forces’ initial success in occupying the border areas, Saddam was not happy with the army’s performance. On New Year’s Day, 1981, he commented, ‘Alas we suffer from a lack of discipline in our army.’ Obviously referring to the fanaticism the Iranians were already displaying, he added, ‘In this, the major apparent characteristic [is] faith not discipline.’35 In particular Saddam bemoaned the failure of frontline units to stand their ground against Iranian probing attacks. He added: We have to change this tendency in training . . . by education . . . I know this from a long time ago. You tell an Iraqi to go forward, two of them run [forward]! . . . But if you say to him ‘go back,’ the first two at the front will go back and also take thousands with them . . .36 The armored divisions of the Iraqi Army achieved a striking victory over the Iranian regular army in January 1981; however, during the following year, the Iraqi position deteriorated. For Saddam, the year was one of frustration and a growing realization that there was not going to be a quick resolution, not the least because Khomeini had set Iran’s goals at no less than obliterating Iraq’s Ba’athist regime, accompanied by a trial of Saddam and Iraq’s leaders. In a spring 1981 meeting Saddam indicated to his senior officers his belief that the conflict was leading in the direction of a long, drawn-­out war: We start another operation so that we keep them [the Iranians] occupied . . . so we do not give them a chance to pull together and start an

40   W. Murray and K. Woods [offensive] . . . I think they are not going to give up. They will start another offensive. . . . What will they do afterwards? . . . They will begin to think. They will give themselves a year so that they can secure military supplies and American spare parts. . . . We will then have to think what to counter within that case.37 Meanwhile, the fighting continued at an increased tempo as the Iranians mobilized the religious faithful to assault the apostate invaders.38 Iraqi intelligence warned Saddam in June 1981 that ‘The ability of the Iranian leadership, due to its spiritual prestige, to make Iranian fighters believe in the special position of those who get killed . . . encourages some of the enemy’s fighters to carry out [courageous] operations, although [such operations] are inconsistent with sound military logic. . . . We sense an unusual improvement in the enemy’s morale.’39 During the latter half of 1981 Saddam continued to lay out a two-­part strategy for the war – bleed the Iranians at the front while simultaneously destroying their economy. From Saddam’s point of view, the loss of territory that the Iraqis had captured in the first weeks of the war was of ‘more psychological than tactical or strategic value’ to Iran. A parallel track in Saddam’s thinking, one he believed would give ‘decisive results,’ would be to hit four vital targets: ‘refineries, crude oil, zones of export . . . and electricity.’ Such targets should be ‘pulverized’ to force a ‘peace solution’ and to ‘expand the historic gap in development of the Persians for a period of time.’40 Out of such thinking came the air and naval campaigns against Iranian shipping in the Gulf as well as increasingly heavy assaults on Kharg Island’s refineries and pipelines.41

Defeat and recovery, 1982–83 Beginning in March 1982, Iran mounted a series of major offensives that came close to breaking the Iraqi Army. The first of these, Operation ‘Undeniable Victory (Fath Al-­Mobin),’ shattered three Iraqi divisions, destroyed 200 tanks, and led to the surrender of 15,000 Iraqi soldiers.42 The Iraqi corps commander panicked and fled, while the Iraqi counterattack hit the Iranians where they were strongest. The Iranians even closed a pincer around several Iraqi brigades, which contributed to the bag of prisoners.43 The final stage of Iranian efforts to drive the Iraqis from their territory began on 30 April. The initial gains were impressive enough for Saddam to authorize Iraqi forces to pull back into Khorramshahr. The result was a general collapse, as Iranian human-­wave assaults broke through Iraqi defences. By the end of May, the city had fallen and the ­Iranians were claiming the capture of 361 tanks, 150 other armored fighting vehicles, and 25,000 Iraqi dead. Moreover, they captured 12,000 Iraqi soldiers.44 Not all of the battles turned out as badly for the Iraqis. Around Ahvaz, where there was more open ground than in the battles around

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   41 Khorramshahr, the Iraqi Fifth Mechanized Division gave the Iranian human-­wave assaults a severe beating by a combination of fixed defences, firepower, and reserve forces moving quickly to counterattack any penetrations of the front line.45 However, it was clear that the front was becoming increasingly unstable. Confronting the inevitable, Saddam ordered Iraqi forces to retreat to the pre-­war border. Saddam responded to the difficulties his forces were having in typical fashion. Beginning in fall 1981, he ordered draconian punishments for those who failed. Drum-­head court-­martials condemned individuals from private to division commander to death by firing squad. It appears the collapse of Popular Front militia units, which surrendered en masse during the last stages of the fight for Khorramshahr, resulted largely from fear of such justice. The demands of the war also forced Saddam into a massive expansion of his military forces to meet the threat; this involved not only the mobilization of Iraq’s population, but also aggressive efforts to purchase arms abroad. At the beginning of the conflict, the Iraqi Army had numbered 200,000 soldiers; by 1983 it would grow to 475,000, but proved barely sufficient to hold against the human-­wave assaults of the Iranians. For two weeks, beginning on 13 July 1982, the Iranians launched a series of major attacks on Iraqi positions north of Basra. Operation Ramadan began and ended with human-­wave assaults and not much military sophistication. So badly equipped were Pasdaran units that some militiamen did not even possess weapons. Nevertheless, the unarmed proved useful in clearing Iraqi minefields. After initial success, gained at huge cost, the Iranians were driven back to their start lines. Another major offensive came in August with the same results. The front settled back into stalemate. Saddam at least had time to reflect, and the catastrophes of spring 1982 forced him to rethink his approach to military issues. In a meeting on 21 July, he provided his initial assessment of recent events to a group of generals and cabinet ministers. He began on a positive note: ‘I would personally like to say at the beginning that I consider the battle with its military and political results [the defeat of Operation Ramadan] as equal to all our successful battles that the Iraqi Army had during the last two years.’ Nevertheless, he added, ‘colleagues, all of you know that we do not lack a military success, or the military capabilities to stop the enemy. But we have to present the facts as they are. During the past six months, Iran [has] achieved several successful military operations against our troops.’46 He then turned to the failure of Iraqi troops to defend Khorramshahr: The [Iraqi] counterattack did not happen at all. Cases like these and how to deal with these differ according to the nature of the system and the composition of the people who lead the regime. And some of them collapse. And some of them manage matters correctly. Our regime is not of the first sort, but of the second sort. When a mistake

42   W. Murray and K. Woods or carelessness or a gap happens, we do not leave this case or dissimulate what really happened. And we are not of those sorts who try to find a scapegoat in any given situation and assume that was enough. We face the difficulty as is, so when we go to bed we do not have to take a Valium. This means that we do not put an insulator between the bitter [truth] and ourselves.47

Stalemate, 1983–85 The period between 1983 and 1985 saw the war enter a period of stalemate. As the Iraqis fended off Iranian attacks on land, Saddam escalated the war in the air and in the Persian Gulf. The former involved steady increases in the use of Scud missiles, purchased from the Soviets or from the various nations around the Middle East that possessed these derivatives of the V-­2 rocket and that were little more accurate than Werner von Braun’s masterpiece. This effort represented nothing less than an all-­out terror campaign, aimed at breaking Iran’s will. By 1988, the Iraqis had developed the ‘al-­Hussein’ missile, a Scud variant with a smaller warhead but more fuel that could reach Tehran. The bombardment of 1988 forced nearly a million Iranians to flee their capital, but seems to have had little effect on the Iranian leadership, which fired large numbers of Scuds back at Baghdad. At the end of the war, the Iranians admitted that Saddam’s missiles had killed ten to eleven thousand civilians.48 In a conversation in November 1983, Saddam made explicit his intention to inflict wanton casualties on the Iranians: We will fire the missiles at the industrial site, and we will [target] a missile to strike Dezful city at night, because striking the city at night will have a better effect, since there will be larger numbers [of people] in the city at night than there would be during the daytime. Therefore, we will strike Andimeshk city during the daytime and strike Dezful at nighttime in the same day. When a staff officer queried whether Saddam meant the attack on Andimeshk for the daytime, the dictator replied: ‘Yes, during their business hours.’49 The naval campaign in the Gulf probably affected the Iranians more than the Scud terror campaign. In this case, the effort was aimed at undermining Iran economically. Beginning in 1982, Saddam unleashed his navy to execute an aggressive campaign against Iranian shipping. At first the Iraqis used Super Frelon helicopters, but then moved on to Super Étendards and Mirages, the former provided by the French during a period of increasing tension and open hostility between Paris and Tehran.50 In addition to attacks on tankers and freighter traffic to and from Kharg, by 1988 the Iraqis had launched long-­range air attacks all the way to the Gulf of

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   43 Hormuz against tankers shipping Iranian crude. Finally, the Iraqis increased their attacks on Kharg’s refineries and infrastructure, which increased economic pressure on the Iranians. These attacks were aided by the fact that the Iraqis had broken Iran’s codes.51 As both sides scrambled to expand their military forces, the Iranians maintained the initiative – a reality with which Saddam was less than pleased. Nevertheless, the opposing sides went in very different directions. The Iraqis emphasized a firepower-­intensive, heavy-­armor approach. Three corps of varying strength held the front, the southern two being especially strong. A fourth corps held in reserve comprised the best-­ trained and equipped units, which increasingly meant the Republican Guard, units of which trundled back and forth between Baghdad and Basra, depending on where the Iranians were attacking. The Iranians, on the other hand, dispensed with serious military professionalism and continued to place their faith in lightly armed human-­wave attacks. It was during the aftermath of the 1982 disasters that Saddam began to place increasing confidence and trust in the military professionals remaining in the Iraqi Army. Thus, while Khomeini’s mouthpiece, Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani, heralded the ‘Dawn’ offensive of February 1983 with the statement that ‘this Fajr [Dawn] offensive is the final move toward ending the war, and it should determine the final destiny of the region,’ the Iraqis were increasingly better prepared.52 Moreover, as mentioned above, they were also reading Iranian message traffic, which more often than not indicated when and where major Iranian offensives would occur. During 1983, the Iraqis broke four ‘Dawn’ offensives, while inflicting horrendous casualties. At the end of the year, Saddam mused on the lessons the war thus far had taught him: [T]he principal weapons in a long war are the tank and [artillery]. Since we have destroyed their air force, now more than ever the principal weapons are the cannon and the tank. . . . We went to war with an average of 130 shells [for] each cannon . . . but we have three times that amount of ammunition [now]. The numbers are big; we [have] bought so much ammunition that it is hard for me to forget the number. Memorizing numbers is not my cup of tea; but the extraordinary numbers and the need of this equipment and ammunition changed that. Now you mention any number that has to do with weapons of any kind only one time, and I will remember it . . .53 In 1983, the Iraqis began to explore the potential use of chemical weapons as means to defeat the human-­wave attacks. A letter from the armed forces high command, sent at Saddam’s behest, ordered the following: 1. Use of the current production of chemical agents and the accumulation of them to obtain an extensive striking power when . . . needed.

44   W. Murray and K. Woods 2. Make every possible effort to achieve [the] manufacture of toxic agents in large quantities as quickly as possible for use as a deterring factor, for sudden attacks directed at enemy concentrations of troops and its main civilian gatherings . . .54 At the beginning of 1984, Saddam held a lessons-­learned discussion with his senior officers. He began with an admonition that no Iraqi officer in his right mind could have taken seriously: ‘Even myself when I make mistakes, I need someone from among my colleagues to [inform] me.’ [W]hen we ask the commander of [a] division to attack [an] enemy position, and it takes him almost a month to put the required plan together, how can I understand him and . . . his psychology? . . . How can we prepare ourselves to put plans quickly into action to confront the enemy, not within a month, but in the case of a dynamic war . . .? So my brothers the usual methods that we are using [today] with the enemy . . . were born in our training. . . . We are dealing with these irregulars now, but at the same time we have to prepare ourselves [so] we can confront a regular army with good armament, so we have to prepare for both situations so this is not only theory but this can be obtained by practice . . .55

The logjam begins to break, 1986–87 The year 1986 proved a bad one for Saddam. In January, his forces attempted to retake the marsh island of Majnun with its valuable oil wells, which they had lost two years before.56 After a massive artillery bombardment and using chemical weapons, the Iraqis attacked. They regained most of Majnun, but failed to drive the Pasdaran entirely off the island. The failure of the Majnun offensive was followed by a more serious defeat, the second major Iranian victory of the conflict. From late 1985 into early 1986, the Iranians built up substantial forces, supplies, and equipment on the other side of the Shatt al-­Arab from the Fao Peninsula. The Iraqis on the scene picked up much of these preparations, but Saddam’s new chief of intelligence and the high command in Baghdad refused to believe local reports of an Iranian build-­up.57 There were three reasons for the intelligence failure. First, the offensive was being coordinated by the Pasdaran and, unlike the Iranian regular army, the revolutionary forces did not rely on signals but instead passed orders by land lines and messengers. Thus, the extensive signals intelligence and decryption efforts Iraq had come to rely on failed to provide significant warning.58 Second, the high command in Baghdad, including Saddam, was taken in by Iranian deception efforts that seemed to indicate major operations north of Basra. Finally, Saddam’s new chief of intelligence proved more interested in providing his superiors with intelligence that fit their preconceived notions.59

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   45 On 11 February, the Iranians struck the ill-­trained and under-­strength 29th Infantry Division, which almost immediately collapsed. Within two days, the Iranians seized the peninsula. The loss of the Fao Peninsula led to a series of costly Iraqi counterattacks, all of which failed. Iraq’s response was not only major ground force counterattacks, but massive artillery and air attacks that included chemical agents.60 In this case, gas warfare proved a dismal failure, because the waterlogged terrain absorbed the artillery and the weather limited the effectiveness of chemicals. The Iranians almost broke through to Umm Qasr, but in the end the Iraqis bottled them up on the peninsula. Iraq lost approximately 50,000 soldiers in their counterattacks, but believed the Iranians lost considerably more. The extent to which the Iranian attack rattled Saddam is suggested by a recording of his comments to his staff in the midst of the battle: This will be decisive in terms of the fate of the battle; this will decide a battle; it will decide the war. I mean from now on, he who wins the battle here, he will win the war. Especially if we win this battle, we will win the war, because all of Iran will burn in that location. . . . We will advance [a] few meters at [a] time; we will achieve progress and crush them in the [swampy] area. The only thing we must do is to reduce our sacrifices through our daily efforts, and I emphasize the word daily, daily, daily; we have to improvise new techniques, because this is [a] battle [which] will settle this war, no doubt about that.61 In the end the battle did not prove decisive. Before it had even ended, Saddam was spinning the results. In a meeting with senior Ba’ath officials, he declaimed: The true meaning for us commanders [is] that the people observe the resistance and the strength of Iraqis to fight for their country. Although we lost Fao, we retained our strong will and our resistance. The enemy’s strategy was [to] destroy our willpower; the world will never forget how Iraqis handled the situation and converted it from defeat, to victory. We have shocked the world, especially the Western [world], although the Iranians have achieved their partial victory on land, they were surprised by the Iraqi strength in fighting to the end and they admit it.62 The Fao battles exhausted both sides until late in the year when the Iranians attempted to break out of the peninsula. Their target was Umm Qasr, but this time, alerted by signals intelligence, the Iraqis were ready.63 The result was once again an Iranian failure with casualties well over 10,000, at least according to U.S. intelligence.64 The evidence suggests that the Iranians were still firmly geared to their massed, light infantry attacks that had worked relatively well in their victories of 1981 and 1982, but that were

46   W. Murray and K. Woods succeeding less and less well as the conflict proceeded. But, like the British generals on the Western Front from 1915 through 1917, they were wedded to the idea that more of the same would eventually lead to the great breakthrough they were seeking at the behest of those whom Saddam termed ‘the turbans in Tehran.’

The last desperate throw of the dice, 1988 The Iraqis, however, had slowly but steadily improved their battlefield performance. Beginning with the Fifth Mechanized Division’s skilful defence of its position to the west of Ahvaz in May 1982, the Iraqis had promulgated a firepower-­intensive, defence-­in-depth, counterattack doctrine, which played to their strength and to Iran’s weaknesses. Equally important was the fact that Saddam displayed greater capacity to learn than did the leaders in Tehran. In 1983, he gradually began replacing generals who had proven incompetent, while promoting officers who displayed minimal competence. Nevertheless, the process of replacing the incompetents was not finished before the war ended. By 1987, Iraq’s military forces had reached the point where they could dominate the battles on the plains of the Mesopotamian Valley, although they had a tougher time fighting in the mountainous regions of Northern Iraq. Saddam also confronted the fact that Iraqi morale had fallen under the pressures of a seemingly endless conflict and the heavy casualties Iraq’s army had suffered. An Iraqi general reported to Saddam at the end of March that, between 1 December 1986 and 20 March 1987, no fewer than 24,952 Iraqi soldiers had deserted.65 But Saddam underlined there would be no weakening of Iraqi resolve: Saddam: 

Chief of general security, do you have a law which provides a bounty on wanted individuals . . . ? Chief of general security:  Yes we do by percentage. Saddam:  Yes by percentage! I do not mean that killing them is a good act; however, I would like you to study carefully the law . . . to find out if we [can] apply this law on slaughtering people. We are here to serve our nation, not to kill them, yet we are not that easy and whoever needs slaughtering, we will slaughter him! . . . We will even cut heads off, in order to serve 15 million people, if it is necessary.66 The year did not begin well for the Iraqis. They almost lost Basra. At the end of 1986, III Corps and IV Corps had blunted a relatively small Iranian offensive, ‘Karbala 4.’ But then the corps commanders, Generals Tala al-­ Duri and Abdullah Maher Abd al-­Rashid, had gotten into a contest as to who could inflate Iranian casualties to the greatest extent to position themselves more closely to Saddam. The Iraqi high command accepted the numbers on faith and concluded that the Iranians would not be able

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   47 to launch another major offensive for at least six months. Moreover, although the rainy season had turned much of the area north of Basra into a swamp, the weather did not deter the Iranians. On 6 January, they struck the Iraqi front lines to the south of Fish Lake with a force that numbered between 150,000 and 200,000 soldiers and Pasdaran. Catching the Iraqis by surprise, human-­wave assaults broke through five of the six rings of fortifications protecting Basra. Iraqi reinforcements, largely consisting of the Republican Guard, barely arrived in time and then held under great pressure. The ferocity of the Iranian attacks reflected Khomeini’s promise that Iran would defeat Saddam’s regime by the Persian New Year (March 1987). Massed artillery (in excess of 5,000 tubes) on both sides added to the slaughter. One Iraqi general, a staff officer at the time, described the situation in the following terms: The situation worsened to the point where my commander, [Major General] Ahmad Hammash could not use the phone to talk to higher headquarters and get support. . . . At one point an armored personnel carrier arrived at our headquarters. I went to the driver, who was a captain in one of the companies. They were desperate [terrified and disoriented]. I told him to keep moving to the front. . . . So I joined [the unit] again and told them to move, and they did until we reached al-­Da’ich, the front line. [It was] nothing but massacred tanks and dead people surrounded the area – tens of people every 100 meters [and] tens of tanks burning.67 The heavy fighting around Basra continued until April. What Saddam believed to be the continued failings of his senior officers led him to launch into a furious diatribe at a meeting with the corps commanders at the end of March 1987: I want specific analysis. This means measured analysis. It means it should be established on an [argument]. The [argument] should be logical, scientific or both. For example, why does the enemy surprise us? Do you have fewer weapons than the enemy? . . . No excuses shall be accepted by me from any leader, nor will you accept any excuses from a commander. Unless the enemy secures superiority against him with the ratio of three to one . . . Is the enemy’s training better than our training? Are they better armed than us? Your responsibility is to prepare the soldiers for the fight. My responsibility is to provide you with the people and my job is to make sure that you will not be shorted in regards to weapons.68 Toward the end of Saddam’s monologue, one of the generals suggested that Basra was a more important objective for the Iranians than any other

48   W. Murray and K. Woods target. Saddam then queried: ‘Basra is more important than Baghdad?’ The general then replied: ‘Not important, it is just closer to the heart [of the Iraqi people].’ At that Saddam exploded: No it is not closer! As the leader of the Iraqi state, I am telling you that al-­Basra is not closer . . . I am telling you that if Basra were to fall, we will fight, and if they were to reach the gates of the Republican palace in Baghdad, we will fight them and push them back to the border. . . . But the theory if they were to take over al-­Basra, it would be the end of the world; [no] it would not be the end of the world.69 By 1988, both sides were nearly fought out. Yet, the Iraqis enjoyed two important advantages. First, they had substantially reformed their tactical concepts and the professionalism of the army. Their opponents had not carried out such far-­ranging reforms, but rather relied on the belief that faith alone would bring Iran’s military forces to victory.70 The second advantage ironically lay in the collapse of oil prices, which hurt Iraq less than it hurt Iran. Desperately worried that Khomeini would triumph, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia bankrolled Saddam to keep the supplies of arms and ammunition flowing at high levels. No one, however, was going to lend the Iranians a cent, especially since they had managed to antagonize virtually everybody in the world except for the North Koreans, the Syrians, and the Libyans. The correlation of forces speaks volumes as to the shift toward Iraqi superiority in numbers. So low had morale sunk in Iran by early 1988 that, despite its far greater population, it could barely put 600,000 troops in the field against the one million soldiers Saddam’s commanders deployed.71 The numbers in terms of military equipment were even more favourable to the Iraqis: A four-­to-one superiority in tanks, a three-­to-one superiority in artillery, and a ten-­to-one superiority in aircraft, with most of the Iranians’ American-­built aircraft out of commission because of a lack of spare parts. As one Pasdaran commander noted after the war, ‘They had armor and we did not. . . . We were unarmed infantry against the enemy’s cavalry.’72 The first battles in 1988 did not go particularly well for the Iraqis. On the northeast sector of Khor Mal a fierce battle took place over the Kurdish town of Halabjah. The Iranians caught the Iraqis by surprise and almost entirely destroyed the 34th Division, capturing its commander. Despite some clear intelligence warnings of what the Iranians were up to, the Iraqi corps commander was caught by surprise.73 Iraq’s Tenth Armored Division launched a series of counterattacks in early April, but failed to regain the ground lost in early March. It was during this battle that the Iraqis conducted a massive chemical attack on the village of Halabjah killing several thousand Kurdish civilians. The Iraqi documents make clear that while the target was Iranian troops and Kurdish guerrillas supporting

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   49 them in the area, it was understood that there were also civilians in Halabjah. It would be a foretaste of the ruthlessness with which ‘Chemical Ali’ would conduct the Anfal campaign later that summer.74 But while the Iraqis were conducting a single-­division effort to drive the Iranians and their Kurdish allies back, Saddam and an elite planning group planned a major offensive in the south to regain the Fao Peninsula. The preparation was done within the Republican Guard, an indication of how dominant that force had become. Covering the operation was a deception plan that persuaded the Iranians that a major Iraqi offensive would come north of Basra.75 The offensive represented a last throw of the dice; as Lieutenant General Ra’ad Hamdani commented to us: ‘This was [Saddam’s] last chance to rectify the losses that had happened along the borders of Iraq.’76 The Iraqi offensive began at 0430 hours on 17 April and completely surprised the defenders. The extent of that surprise is suggested by the fact the Iraqis concentrated 100,000 soldiers, 1,400 artillery pieces, and a large number of tanks against 8,000 to 15,000 Iranian infantry defending the peninsula. The Iraqis planned to use a massive chemical attack to begin the offensive, but winds of over forty knots forced its cancellation.77 It made no difference; within the first hours of the offensive, the Iraqis had overwhelmed the defenders and Iraqi armor was driving down the two main roads. By the next day, Fao had fallen and the entire peninsula was in Iraqi hands. The Iraqis lost only 1,000 soldiers killed in action; their abortive attacks on Iranian positions on the Fao Peninsula two years earlier had cost them 51,000 dead. The Fao offensive put Saddam in a euphoric mood; he delightedly handed out medals by the bushel as well as cars and other tokens of his esteem to regiments that had particularly distinguished themselves. In one case he announced: ‘So, this regiment [is to receive] thirty bravery medals, plus four super cars, plus fifteen Brazilian cars.’78 The Fao success was followed within a month by two more offensives. The first at the end of May dealt an equally devastating defeat to the Iranians, as the Iraqis regained the ground they had lost around Basra in 1987. Two weeks later, the Iraqis retook Majnun Island with its valuable oil wells and destroyed all or parts of eight Iranian divisions. The imbalance between the opposing sides is suggested by the fact that the Iraqis threw in approximately 2,000 armored fighting vehicles against the sixty the Iranians deployed.79 Confronting a collapsing situation on the ground, military confrontation with U.S. forces in the Gulf, and almost complete isolation in the international arena, Khomeini finally agreed to drink ‘a bitter cup’ and concede defeat. The war was over.

Conclusion Examining the ferocity that marked the eight-­year conflict, one is struck by the incompetence and the deeply flawed assumptions with which each

50   W. Murray and K. Woods nation embarked on the war in September 1980. In the end, the Iraqis barely survived Saddam’s general ignorance of military affairs at the war’s beginning and his penchant for confusing ruthlessness and courage with military effectiveness. But at least he learned, albeit over far too long a period and at immense cost in terms of Iraq’s treasury and the lives of his soldiers. The same cannot be said for the ayatollahs in Tehran. One might have thought the extraordinary difficulties of the Iran–Iraq War would have suggested to Saddam the dangers of further military adventures. They did not. The dictator invaded his neighbour Kuwait two years later. The reason for that invasion, in addition to the serious economic difficulties in which Iraq found itself in the post-­war period, was Saddam’s belief that fate had ordained him to unify the Arab nation, destroy the ‘Zionist’ entity, and place himself, as the new Saladin, at the head of a new regional super power.80 Shortly after the ceasefire had ended the war with Iran, Saddam underlined to his collaborators the lessons he had drawn from the conflict. I am sure that in a thousand years and when the Iraqis are in dire need, they [will] appeal to this al-­Qadisiyyah [the Iran–Iraq War]81 in the same way that we appealed ourselves [to] the other al-­Qadisiyyah of fourteen hundred years ago. All of this could not have happened had it not been for the insistence and the togetherness of [our] leadership. It so happened that the togetherness was not a case of belief but rather it was a case of intellect and humanity. . . . It is based on the belief in a confrontational strategy. . . . This tremendous capital and this great experiment is a first event in the history of the Arab nation. Not only was it fought [for] eight years, because this is a given, but the world [has not seen] for a long time a war fought for eight years . . . I mean [that] after [a] thousand years and for a thousand years to come no country from the Arab nation has faced such a great challenge and such dangerous intermingling between the fighting arenas. And, let us call it, the sacred land.82

Notes   1 Views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. This chapter was written at the Institute for Defense Analyses as part of a project sponsored by the Department of Defense. Unless otherwise noted, information from Iraqi documents cited here is available to scholars at the National Defense University’s Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC). Such documents are cited by title, date, and CRRC document number.   2 As a result of that effort, our team has produced several monographs. See K. M. Woods, M. Pease, M.  E. Stout, W. Murray, J.  G. Lacey, The Iraqi Perspectives Report: Saddam’s Senior Leadership on Operation Iraqi Freedom, from the Official U.S. Joint Forces Command Report, Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006; K.  M. Woods, The Mother of All Battles: Saddam Hussein’s Strategic Plan for the

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   51 Persian Gulf War, Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008; K. M. Woods, W. Murray, T. Holaday, Saddam’s War: An Iraqi Perspective of the Iran–Iraq War, McNair Paper 70, Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 2009.   3 In 1988, in one of his rambling monologues, Saddam noted, somewhat sarcastically, ‘We could ask the public to carry machine guns to protect their women and children; however, I am concerned that they might use [them] on their wives.’ Recording of Saddam Discussing Military Operations with Senior Officers, Circa Summer 1988,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–637.   4 Ra’ad Majid Rashid al-­Hamdani (former Iraqi Lieutenant General). Unpublished interview. Amman, Jordan (6–7 November 2009).   5 Aladdin Hussein Makki Khamas (former Iraqi Major General). Unpublished interview. Cairo, Egypt (11 November 2009).   6 ‘Recording of Saddam Discussing Regional Situation, 1 January 1988,’ SH-­ SHTP-A-­000–626. Saddam was using the term ‘central post’ as an allusion to his belief the Arab nation was like a tent over its people. While there were many supporting posts, Saddam reasoned, there could only be one central post.   7 For Ba’athist ideology and its influence on Saddam see K. Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1989; E. Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2005; A. Baram, Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’athist Iraq, 1968–89, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.   8 ‘Transcript of a Recorded Meeting of the General Command of the Armed Forces, 7 January 1981,’ SH-­AFGC-D-­000–393.   9 J. M. Post (ed.), The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders: With Profiles of Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton, Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003, p. 377. 10 ‘Recording of Saddam Hussein’s Meeting with the High Ranking Officials Discussing the Iraqi–Iranian War, Circa Late 1987,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–561. That same year the chief of the Ministry of Defense’s political guidance department explained the conflict’s origin in the following terms: ‘There is no way to explain the many reasons that made the imperialists and Zionists let Khomeini out of his magic bottle and power in Iran. Yet, the principal reason was to deal with the situation in Iraq. They allowed him power so that Iran will once again be a tool of aggression against this country, to stop its growth, to rip it apart.’ ‘Lecture by Political Guidance Department on Al-­Qadisiyyah, 11 February 1987,’ SH-­BATH-D-­001–019. 11 In nearly every respect, Saddam modeled himself and his dictatorship on Stalin’s regime in the 1930s. 12 Lieutenant General Ra’ad Majid Rashid al-­Hamdani quoted in Woods, Saddam’s War, p. 25. 13 What particularly drove Saddam’s dislike for the Shah was the fact that he had had to negotiate the Algiers Accords in 1975 with the Shah’s representatives, and that agreement had represented a humiliation for the Iraqis. 14 See D. Menashri, Iran: A Decade of War and Revolution, New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1990, p. 102. 15 A. H. Bani-­Sadr, My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the U.S., Washington DC: Brassey’s Inc., 1991, p. 66. 16 Of course some of these assassinations may have had other causes not related to the Shi’a, but an increasingly active Da’wa Party (predominately expatriate Iraqi Shi’a supported by Iran) gave the Ba’ath a rallying cry. 17 S. R. Ward, Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009, p. 243.

52   W. Murray and K. Woods 18 From the Iraqi documents it appears that the Iranians were initiating as many of these duels as were the Iraqis. For reporting on these incidents, see ‘Intelligence Report from Director GMID to Bureau of Operations, September 1980,’ SH-­GMID-D-­000–332. For the Iraqi estimates of Iranian military readiness on the eve of the war see K. M. Woods, M. E. Stout, ‘Research Note: New Sources for the Study of Iraqi Intelligence During the Saddam Era,’ Intelligence and National Security, 25/5, 2010. 19 Among others, see ‘Memorandum from the Military Attaché, Tehran to Directorate of Military Forces General Staff/Directorate 3, No. 1/9/179, 19 April 1979,’ SH-­GMID-D-­000–845. 20 Aladdin Hussein Makki Khamas. Unpublished interview. 21 ‘Recording of Saddam Meeting with Senior Advisors to Discuss a Potential War with Iran, 16 September 1980,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–835. 23 Ibid. 23 Of course, as suggested above, Saddam was supporting terrorist acts aimed at the Iranians, but, in Saddam’s book, turnabout was not fair play. In the conversations immediately preceding the outbreak of the war, Saddam commented: ‘We have to stick their noses in the mud so we can impose our will on them.’ Ibid. 24 Woods, Saddam’s War, p. 30. 25 For a general examination of those standards, see K. M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 26 ‘Recording of Saddam Meeting with Senior Advisors to Discuss a Potential War with Iran, 16 September 1980,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–835. 27 Major General Alwan Hassoun Alwan al-­Abousi, ‘Memoir,’ 2003. General al-­ Abousi is a former commander of the Iraqi Fifth Ground Attack Squadron, Su-­ 22s. He made available to the authors a copy of the unpublished manuscript. 28 Ibid. 29 ‘Transcript of a Meeting Held by Saddam Hussein with Senior Military Officers, 6 October 1980,’ SH-­PDWN-D-­001–021. 30 Iranian analysts in one of their lessons-­learned reports expressed astonishment at the Iraqi failure to cut the main north–south highways. Political Bureau of the Corps of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, The Passing of Two Years of War, Tehran: Office of the Pasdaran Corps: 1982, Translated from Farsi, p. 41. 31 Parviz Mosalla Nejad, ‘The Hub of Resistance Literature and History: Khorramshahr,’ Bostan: International Affairs Committee of Foundation for Preservation of Monuments and Dissemination of Value of the Holy Defense, 2006, p.  3 (downloaded from www.sajed.ir/en/, 15 April 2009). The Pasdaran (Farsi for ‘guardian’) is the original name for what became the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Founded in the early days of the revolution, the Pasdaran grew into a parallel military force independent from established command structures. M. Roberts, Khomeini’s Incorporation of the Iranian Military, McNair Paper 48, Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 1996. 32 The information is cited in supporting documents attached to ‘Memorandum from GMID (Section 2) to Director General GMID, Subject: Summary of Interrogation (Iranian Oil Minister), 8 November 1980’, SH-­IISX-D-­001–025. 33 ‘Meeting between Saddam and His Senior Officers, 22 November 1980,’ SH-­ SHTP-D-­000–856. 34 Ra’ad Majid Rashid al-­Hamdani (former Iraqi Lieutenant General). Unpublished interview. 35 ‘Saddam Discussing Regional Situation, 1 January 1981,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–626. 36 ‘Transcript of a Recorded Meeting of the General Command of the Armed Forces, 7 January 1981,’ SH-­AFGC-D-­000–393.

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   53 37 ‘Saddam Discussing Regional Situation, 1 January 1981’, SH-­SHTP-A-­000–626. 38 The level of fighting is suggested by the fact that Iraqi artillery fired 53,000 rounds from 31 different systems during a one-­week period between 19 April and 25 April 1981 – a period during which little heavy fighting was occurring. ‘Report on Iraqi Field Artillery Directorate on Ordnance Expended from 19810405–19810425, June 1981,’ SH-­GMID-D-­001–020. 39 ‘GMID Intelligence Report to Armed Forces General Command, 14 June 1981,’ SH-­GMID-D-­001–031 (emphasis added by author). 40 ‘Recording of Saddam Meeting with the General Command of the Armed Forces, 25 August 1981,’ SH-­PDWN-D-­001–028. 41 For more information on the war in the Gulf, see M. S. Navias, E. R. Hooton, Tanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran–Iraq Conflict, 1980–1988, London UK: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1996. 42 For Iranian claims see Ward, Immortal. 43 Pollack, Arabs at War, p. 196. 44 Revolutionary Guard, The Passing of Two Years of War, pp. 79–80. 45 ‘Analysis Report of Ahvaz Battle, Prepared by the Fifth Mechanized Division’s Command, 30 July 1982,’ SH-­GMID-D-­001–018. 46 ‘Recording of Saddam Meeting with Senior Advisors, 21 July 1982,’ SH-­SHTPA-­000–710. 47 Ibid. 48 Ward, Immortal, p. 297. 49 ‘Recording of Saddam Hussein Discussing Targeting at a Meeting of the General Command of the Armed Forces, 11 May 1983,’ SH-­PDWN-D-­001–029. Andimeshk is a predominantly industrial town near Dezful. 50 See D. Styan, France and Iraq: Oil, Arms, and French Policy-­Making in the Middle East, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2006, pp. 129–66. 51 Mizher Rashid al-­Tarfa al-­Ubaydi (former Iraqi Major General). Unpublished interview. Dubai, United Arab Emirates (9 November 2009); and Abid Mohammed al-­Kabi (former Iraqi Lieutenant General). Unpublished interview, Cairo, Egypt (12 November 2009). General Tarfa was a senior analyst in the GMID in the Iran Branch. General Kabi was a commander in the Iraqi Navy, 1982–88. Interestingly, according to General Tarfa, the Iraqis were able to follow some of the movements of the U.S. Navy in the Gulf during the run-­up and conduct of 1991 Gulf War by decoding Iranian naval reports on those movements. 52 E. O’Ballance, The Gulf War: Nineteen Eighty to Nineteen Eighty-­Seven, London: Brassey’s Defense Publishers, 1988, p. 114. 53 ‘Recording of a Meeting between Saddam Hussein and Senior Military Officers, Circa Late 1983’, SH-­SHTP-A-­001–030. 54 ‘Memorandum from Secretary of the Armed Forces General Command to the Chemical Corps Directorate, Subject: Use of Chemical Agents (No. 3/6/2/2704), 27 November 1983,’ SH-­AFGC-D-­000–094. 55 ‘Recording of a Briefing by Senior Military Officers to Saddam Hussein, February 1984’, SH-­SHTP-A-­001–022. 56 They had attempted to regain the island the year before, but failed. 57 Ra’ad Majid Rashid al-­Hamdani (former Iraqi Lieutenant General). Unpublished interview. 58 A situation analogous to the failure of Allied intelligence before the Battle of the Bulge to provide any warning of the impending German offensive. K.  M. Woods, W. Murray, E.  A. Nathan, L. Sabara, A.  M. Venegas, ‘Project 1946: Phase II’, Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2010. Mizher Rashid al-­Tarfa al-­Ubaydi (former Iraqi Major General). Unpublished interview. 59 Ibid. Interview with Major General Mizher Rashid al-­Tarfa al-­Ubaydi.

54   W. Murray and K. Woods 60 ‘Analyzing the Chemical Targets for Al-­Bishah Area and the Eastern Side of Shatt Al-­Arab, 12 February 1986,’ SH-­PDWN-D-­001–024; A. H. Cordesman, Iraq and the War of Sanctions: Conventional Threats and Weapons of Mass Destruction, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999, p. 529. 61 ‘Recording of Saddam Hussein Receiving a Briefing on the Military Situation, February 1986,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–628. The discussions make it clear that the meeting occurred during the Iranian offensive on the Fao Peninsula, but there is no date on the recording. 62 ‘Recording of Saddam Hussein Meeting with Ba’ath Party Members Discussing the Iran–Iraq War, 6 March 1987,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­001–023. 63 Mizher Rashid al-­Tarfa al-­Ubaydi (former Iraqi Major General). Unpublished interview. 64 O’Ballance, The Gulf War, p. 191. 65 ‘Military Meeting between Saddam and the Military Corps Commanders, 28 March 1987,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–634. 66 ‘President Saddam Hussein’s Meeting with High Ranking Iraqi Officials Discussing an Accident of an American Frigate [and Other Matters], May 1987,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–958. 67 Interview with Lieutenant General Ra’ad Majid Rashid al-­Hamdani in Woods, Saddam’sWar; K.  M. Woods, W. Murray, T. Holaday, L. Sabara, M. Elkhamri, ‘Project 1946,’ Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2007. 68 ‘Military Meeting between Saddam and the Military Corps Commanders, 28 March 1987,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–634. 69 Ibid. 70 For the collapse in Iranian morale see Ward, Immortal, p. 292. 71 Ibid. 72 S. Chubin, ‘The Last Phase of the Iran: Iraq War: From Stalemate to Ceasefire’, Third World Quarterly, 11/2, 1989, p. 7. 73 For a devastating critique of the performance of Iraqi troops in the initial fight, see ‘Memorandum from Director of Intelligence Eastern Zone to General Military Intelligence Directorate (GMID), Subject: Halabjah Battles, 18 March 1988,’ SH-­GMID-D-­001–026. 74 Although Iraqi documents reviewed for this study do not indicate that civilians were an intended target, their presence was well known. Just before the initial chemical strikes, the Iranian attack was characterized as a mix of ‘guards and saboteurs’ numbering about ninety in ‘Intelligence Report from the GMID to the General Command of the Armed Forces, 15 March 1988,’ SH-­GMIDD-­000–468. The Iraqi Air Force attacked Halabjah on 16 March with a mixture of chemical and high-­explosive munitions. An Iraqi report dated 22 March from the GMID to the Army Chief of Staff notes ‘losses due to the special strikes were about 3,500 casualties including numbers from Halabjah area.’ A more detailed report, also from 22 March, notes that the bodies of some 3,000 ‘slain guards and volunteers’ were removed from Halabjah by the Iranians [an odd priority given the contamination and military situation], leaving civilian casualties counted around 4,000 . . . most of the casualties were the result of the chemical attack. See ‘Memorandum from Director of Intelligence System of the Eastern Zone to GMID (Fifth Directorate), Subject: Information, 22 March 1988,’ SH-­GMIDD-­001–026. For details of the Anfal campaign see HRW, ‘Genocide in Iraq–the Anfal Campaign against the Kurds,’ Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org/ reports/1993/iraqanfal/ (accessed 10 August 2012). 75 Woods, ‘Project 1946,’ pp. 126–7. 76 Ibid, p. 122.

Saddam and the Iran–Iraq War   55 77 ‘Saddam Hussein and High Ranking Officers in a Meeting to Discuss Military Situation, April 1988,’ SH-­SHTP-A-­000–568. 78 ‘Transcript of Audio Recorded Meetings between Saddam Hussein and Various Commanders Regarding the Iran–Iraq War and the Kurds, May 1988,’ SH-­ PDWN-D-­001–027. 79 Ward, Immortal, p. 293. 80 For a discussion of the factors that led Saddam to invade Kuwait in July 1990, see Woods, The Mother of All Battles, pp.  31–60. In a conversation with Yasser Arafat, Saddam went so far as to comment: We are ready for it, we will fight America, and, with God’s will, we will defeat it and kick it out of the whole region . . . we know that America has a larger air force than us . . . but I think that when the Arab people see real action in war, when it is real and not only talk, they will fight America everywhere. So we have to get ready to fight America; we are ready to fight when they do; when they strike, we strike. Woods et al., The Iraqi Perspectives Report, p. 6 81 The Battle of Qadisiyya occurred in ad 636 not far from the Euphrates in Iraq and saw the Arab army destroy the Persian army. That victory led to the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and its replacement by an Islamic regime. 82 ‘Meeting of Saddam Hussein Discussing General Issues, Circa Late 1988,’ SH-­ SHTP-A-­001–631.

4 Mustazafin and taghutti Iran and the war, 1980–1988 Rob Johnson

During the Iran–Iraq War Iran was ideologically and strategically isolated. The Gulf monarchies were fearful of its revolutionary agenda and most of the Muslim world was suspicious of Shi’ite claims to a new, radical doctrinal leadership. Iraq convinced the rest of the world of the possibility that the dangerous populist Iranian revolution might spread westwards, and the only way to neutralise that threat was to destroy the Iranian government while it was still struggling to gain control of the country. When Iraq’s ‘limited war’ strategy failed in 1980 to 1981, the Iranian leadership took the significant step of invading Iraq. The war that followed was characterised by the reports of ‘human wave’ attacks, the use of chemical weapons, and protracted trench warfare. Iran expressed fury that the world had failed to condemn Iraqi aggression, but for several years it was careful not to give the Western powers a pretext for military intervention by limiting its operations against oil facilities in the Gulf. However, Iran made attempts to cripple the Iraqi economy with small-­scale retaliatory attacks on tankers and mining operations after 1984. Ultimately these backfired. They dragged the Western powers into the war to the point where, in 1987 and 1988, the US Navy made a decisive intervention against the Iranian fleet. Iran’s initial objectives had been limited, namely to expel the invaders, but it had a more ambitious agenda for the long term. It hoped to galvanise the Muslim world against secular leaders like Saddam and spread the Islamic Revolution. It reasoned that unrest in other Muslim states in the region would weaken rival regimes, giving Iran regional power and influence, and protect the revolution. Revolutionary Iran even hoped to spread its influence beyond the Gulf. There was a hope that the Shi’ite population of Iraq would join the Islamic Revolution and that the mustazafin (‘oppressed’) across the Middle East would be inspired to join Iran. These proved to be hopelessly inaccurate expectations. Even the Kurdish Iraqis who cooperated with the Iranian forces in the second half of the conflict did so only from a position of self-­interest and not because of any ideological programme. Iran’s supporters saw advantages for themselves only in the form of arms sales.

Mustazafin and taghutti   57 As in many wars, the domestic agenda was as crucial as the foreign one: the war gave the Islamist revolutionaries the opportunity to subordinate and, where necessary, eliminate the opposition groups, especially the Mujahideen-­e Khalq. Wartime centralisation measures were couched in the rhetoric of the revolution but were also the means to consolidate power. The leadership exploited the outbreak of the war to deepen the commitment of Iranians to the regime, and make the revolution synonymous with the survival of Iran, their way of life, their territorial integrity and the Iranian identity. Despite the international emphasis on Iran’s threatening religious ideology, it was just one facet, albeit an important one, of other objectives. While demanding sacrifice on the battlefield, the regime was actually cautious in how it conducted the war strategically and economically. It did not escalate the war after the counterattack into Iraq, which was supposed to bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein al-­Tikriti. While labelling him taghutti (‘tyrannical’), they cooperated readily with the dictatorial regimes in Libya, Syria and South Yemen. Moreover, while generally critical of the West for its ‘support’ of Iraq and the failure to condemn Saddam’s invasion, Iran purchased arms and explosives from several European manufacturers. There were attempts to establish front companies in Europe and the United States, while deals were even struck with Israel.1 The purchase of foreign weapons and munitions was a substantial proportion of the cost of the war for Iran. However, the leadership in Tehran knew that the Iranian economy could endure less pressure than the Iraqis and it was aware that consequently there were limits on how far they could make demands on the Iranian public and what the economy could support. Considerable efforts were made to portray the war as one being fought on behalf of the poor, especially in domestic propaganda. There were also various experiments in restricting free markets. In its attempt to limit the war, beyond the acquisition of arms, Iran failed. Once foreign powers were involved in air and naval operations in the Gulf from 1987, and with the economy in steep decline because of unbearable costs, then Iran had to end the war. Tougher conditions at home, in terms of prices and the mounting human cost, indicated that the Iranian people were wearying of the conflict. By early 1988, when they no longer had positive battlefield results to show for their efforts, the shooting down of a civil airliner by an American warship became the pretext the regime needed to sue for peace. International interference has, over the last few decades, been much criticised and has sometimes been blamed for prolonging the war. However, the apparent inertia of the UN Security Council (UNSC) can be explained with reference to Cold War politics. The United States, concerned about Soviet manoeuvres, supplied intelligence to Iraq, but was also involved in the damaging ‘Irangate’ or Iran–Contras scandal, supplying arms to Iran in order to conceal clandestine CIA activities in Central

58   R. Johnson America. The USSR made some attempts to re-­establish links with Iran for fear the United States might engineer a rapprochement, but relations were strained. Despite some tentative involvement before 1987, the aim of the United States, the USSR, the Europeans and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states was primarily to contain the conflict. The Iranian leaders regarded international actors not only as obstacles in the path of its ambitions but also as potential suppliers for its arms needs. The following examines briefly the nexus between the Iranian decision-­ making, the domestic war economy and the international impact of the war, particularly the armed intervention of the West in the Gulf. Other chapters in this volume will deal with the critical role of arms supplies. Tracing the statements of the revolutionary regime, the links to their strategic decisions and their choice to end the war, we are offered a new perspective, beyond the simplistic rhetoric of mustazafin and taghutti, on how Iran conducted the war.

Khomeini’s war It was a paradox that the strategic objectives of revolutionary Iran coincided with those of the Shah’s regime. Iran had harboured plans for regional leadership by the subordination of neighbouring states such as Iraq for decades. Under the Shah, Iran had supported subversion and insurgency inside Iraq and established links with the Kurdish minorities, just as Iran was to do again in the mid-­1980s. For many contemporary observers, the war seemed to be between secular Arab nationalism and Iranian universalist religious ideology, but Iranian motives for fighting were also nationalistic. Even the defence of the revolution was, underneath, a desire to protect the nation state, and was not such a sharp division with the Shah’s regime as is sometimes assumed. Border disputes, which had existed for years, were also prominent as the casus belli in 1980. Irritation about alleged or actual interference in the sectarian disputes of each country deepened the antagonism. The Iranian idea of smashing Arab nationalism was only partly a theological argument, for it was also about defeating a coalition of Arab leaders who were apparently ranged against Iran. The revolutionary leaders nevertheless broke with a crucial aspect of Iran’s previous foreign relations, namely the country’s alignment in the Cold War. Iraq’s decision to turn its back on the Western powers following the military coup of 1958 meant improved relations with the Soviet Union. In 1959, the Shah moved closer to the United States, signing a Military Cooperation Agreement that gave it a guarantee of security against the USSR. The Shah later exploited this connection with the USA to funnel arms and cash to the Kurds in an attempt to destabilise and weaken Iraq, and increased oil revenues gave him the opportunity to conduct an arms race against the regime in Baghdad. In 1974 and 1975, Iran played a

Mustazafin and taghutti   59 dangerous game of brinkmanship with the Iraqi government through its support for the Kurds, leading to the shooting down of two Iraqi jets, the shelling of Iraqi forces, and limited incursion by Iranian military units dressed in Kurdish garb. Iraq’s capitulation resulted in a much-­disputed border revision in the Algiers Accords.2 Baghdad appealed to the Soviet Union for more arms, and the Shah acquired more aircraft and armour of his own. However, it was the Shah’s process of modernisation and secularisation, and heavy-­handedness by an increasingly militarised security force, which generated protests and dissent. In response to these excesses, exiled cleric Ayatollah Rulhollah Khomeini stepped up his criticisms of the Shah’s regime while in Paris and used the freedom to broadcast in Europe to great effect. He stated, with all his austere gravitas and certainty: ‘Our future society will be a free society, and all the elements of cruelty, oppression and force will be destroyed.’3 Khomeini condemned all governments that did not adhere to the precepts of the Koran as taghutti and called for the liberation of the mustazafin everywhere. He denounced attempts to separate politics and religion as a device of imperialists, and called on the faithful to remember the fact that the Prophet did not deliver only sermons, but organised, planned and fought for a just society.4 Khomeini claimed that his appeal was to all Muslims, although it was clear he was eager to effect a deep change in Iranian politics. Khomeini personalised the struggle, arguing that his role was to guide the people, even though he claimed he never wanted a political appointment. The consequence was that Khomeini’s ideological opinions shaped the attitude of the Iranian people and their view of Iraq.5 Khomeini refuted the idea that Islam could be reduced to a series of rituals and argued that Western imperialists had set out to do this so as to weaken the Muslims. What Khomeini offered was an agenda that put Islam at the very heart of the political culture of Iran, but Khomeini himself was more than that: he appeared as an icon of socio-­economic revolution, a representative of God’s divine favour, the antithesis of grubby materialism and, for some at least, the embodiment of the transmission of God’s ‘divine light’, the intimate and profound wisdom of the creator that was passed between carefully selected imams who had a mission to lead the Iranian people for the fulfilment of God’s purpose. Khomeini was therefore a Mahdi, a messenger of God, and the success of the revolution seemed to many to be irrefutable proof of this singular reality.6 Khomeini had been steeped in a religious way of life. The son of a member of the ulema, his father was murdered while he was still an infant, a fact curiously similar to his nemesis, Saddam, whose father had also been killed while he was young. Khomeini spent his youth in study for a religious career, attending madrasahs, praying at certain mosques and learning Arabic. In 1941 he published a book attacking secularism and Reza Shah Pahlavi’s dictatorship, and, by the end of the Second World War, he

60   R. Johnson had qualified as Hojatoleslam, which permitted him to acquire his own acolytes. In 1961, he published his interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence in Clarifications of the Points of the Sharia, which earned him the rank of Ayatollah. In 1963, he gave a series of lectures at Qom attacking the Shah’s ‘white revolution’ of reforms as a sham. He went on to make vitriolic attacks on the Shah’s pro-­Western policy, which attracted the attention and support of religious radicals. Khomeini understood the international dimensions of his struggle and would transmit his messages, often via tape recordings, known as the i’islamiya, to his followers in Iran. One journalist quipped that this was a ‘revolution for democracy against autocracy by theocracy using xero­ cracy’.7 Journalists who visited him testified that he was fearless, intolerant of secularism and pious. They noted how he held his listeners in rapt interest, his voice firm but often quiet. He was absolutely determined not to compromise with the regime, as he believed other opposition groups had done, and this strength in his own convictions was to reappear during the Iran–Iraq War with significant consequences. He argued that it was the duty of all Muslims to achieve an Islamic revolution in politics, to end injustice and corruption, and for the ulema to participate in the judiciary, legislature and executive of government. He did not call just for the fulfilment of some other-­worldly paradise. He had spelled out the practical steps, the programme of action, needed to establish an Islamic state. People, Khomeini argued, must become conscious of their oppressed nature and this is why the revolution must be led by clerics. He specifically called for the imposition of the divine law, the Sharia, which, since Allah was above the law, must be above the secular laws of the state. Transgressors of the divine law should be punished by Sharia, so this legal system had to be implemented fully. He advocated that the imposition of justice required the appointment of a just faqih (religious lawyer) who was expert on the interpretation and application of Islamic law. To assist him, a number of expert jurists were also required. Legislatures and an executive were needed only to resolve disputes that could arise in the process of applying the Sharia. The faqih was also to act as a guardian to these other bodies, ensuring they did not acquire too much power. The faqih himself had to be elected through the people and also through a selection process by the ulema. The secularisation of Iran by the Shah and the fear of corruption played into the hands of the radical theocrats, and when Iran experienced high inflation, fuelled by increased spending on the army and changes in the economic climate, there were protests. Further concessions merely emboldened the critics and the demonstrations grew in scale. In 1978, seventy students were killed in a protest against the United States, and, as crowds tried to protest about the killings on 8 September that year, the regime cracked down on the demonstrators. ‘Black Friday’ marked the imposition of martial law and a wave of arrests. In response, there were

Mustazafin and taghutti   61 strikes and more protests. At this point, Khomeini’s criticism became decisive. He articulated, through relentless rhetoric, the faults and inhumanity of the Shah’s regime. For the majority at street level, as historian Nikki Keddie notes, religion was less important. A cabal of left-­wing activists, clerics and workers led the revolution on the basis of a variety of bread-­ and-butter issues.8 The Shah fled, and Khomeini returned from exile amid hysterical crowds.9 He quickly established theocratic oversight of a government with a radical revolutionary style. He and his followers also unleashed a reign of terror against ‘counter-­revolutionaries’, which ensured that, despite the chaotic transfer of power, an inherent discipline was imposed on the political system from the outset.10 This made subsequent opposition to the running of the war effort more difficult. A new politically correct language was imposed, opposing the ‘corrupt West’ and tyrannical regimes such as Iraq. Amid the fervour of revolution, the US Embassy was seized and fifty-­three hostages were taken. When an American rescue attempt failed, relations between Iran and the United States were damaged irrevocably. The theocratic system which emerged from the revolution of 1979 alarmed neighbouring regional states not just because it required violent disorder to establish it, or because it had overthrown a powerful Shah with a strong security apparatus at his disposal, but because Khomeini insisted on advocating a world revolution. On 11 February 1979, he announced: ‘We will export our revolution to the four corners of the world because our revolution is Islamic; and the struggle will continue until the cry of “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet” prevails throughout the world.’11 Khomeini also warned his critics that ‘these American sympathisers and others must know that in a few hours we can throw them into the dustbin of annihilation any day that we wish to do so’.12 He reassured his followers that Iranians who had recently been abroad after the revolution had returned with the news that ‘all countries of the world love Iran’. That a leading Shi’a theologian should become an advocate of reform and revolution was a dramatic turnaround in Iranian political culture. During the revolution, Khomeini advocated that Arabs join the Shi’ite Iranians to establish an Islamic supremacy and eradicate differences on the grounds of ethnicity or nationality. At the same time he exhibited an extreme naivety in this regard: he did little to endear himself to Arabs by condemning the Umayyads, the dynasty that inherited the Prophet’s dominions whom many Arabs looked upon favourably, for distorting Islam. He equated Arabism with the ‘state of ignorance’ that had prevailed before the Prophet’s revelations, and he claimed that the Umayyad dynasty had deliberately promoted Arabism over the interests of a united Islam in order to establish the first caliphate. This litany of criticism was precisely the reason why Sunni Arabs detested the heresy of Shi’a Islam; they regarded the Shi’a as having departed from the true path of the Sunnah.

62   R. Johnson When Saddam expelled thousands of Iranians and condemned the revolutionaries, Khomeini raged that Saddam had declared war on Islam by his actions and he made a direct appeal to the Iraqi soldiers to disobey their dictator, and to the Iraqi people to overthrow their leader.13 Saddam regarded the Iranian revolution as a direct threat to his position but he also believed the collapse of the Shah’s regime offered an opportunity to assert Iraq as the pre-­eminent power in the region. His limited war strategy was initially successful but the stiffening of Iranian resistance at Khorramshahr changed the course of the war. The decision by Iran then to take the war into Iraq was not a simple one. Operations had already been carried over the border, but, despite counter-­offensives in September 1981 to March 1982, the Iranians had not yet recovered all of their own territory. The Supreme Defence Council in Tehran carefully weighed up the limitations of Iran’s armed forces and the risks inherent in any attacks deeper into Iraq. The senior officers of the regular armed forces argued that Iran simply lacked the hardware, particularly armour, artillery and fighter aircraft, to defeat the Iraqis on their own soil. More­ over, logistical arrangements were inadequate, the country having barely managed to defend Iranian territory in 1980 and 1981. Diplomatically, they risked squandering any sympathy they possessed against Iraq, which could mean the Libyans and Syrians might cut off existing and much-­ needed supplies of arms and ammunition. The ideologues on the Council nevertheless argued that Iranian revolutionary zeal had already produced battlefield successes contrary to professional military advice. They believed, wrongly, that the Shi’a population in Iraq was on the verge of revolt against Saddam. Iraq, they reasoned, would be crippled by insurrection. Moreover, they argued that Iran need only occupy some of Iraq’s oilfields to create a diplomatic advantage at the negotiating table. They won over many waverers by pointing out that Iraqi artillery still shelled Iranian settlements, and only by driving them well back inside their own territory could Iran be freed from the bombardment. There were other, less attractive arguments that were no less important. Rising oil revenues gave Tehran a surplus with which to wage war, and the continuing high unemployment rates provided a pool of available young manpower. Moreover, since the outbreak of the war, many Iranians felt they had to support the regime. An early settlement of the conflict might reopen old fissures in Iranian society and end the unifying effect of the war. When Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Majlis (Iran’s parliament), finally announced the Iranian terms for a ceasefire on 9 June 1982, there was little expectation they would be accepted by Iraq, and some hoped they would not. Tehran demanded the restitution of the terms of the 1975 agreement, which placed the Shatt al-­Arab in Iranian hands; the repatriation of 100,000 (Shi’a) Iraqi citizens; Iraqi acceptance of war guilt; the punishment of Saddam Hussein as a war criminal; and the

Mustazafin and taghutti   63 payment of a mammoth $100 billion in reparations.14 The United Nations responded to the Iranian demands by passing a Resolution on 12 July 1982 calling for an immediate ceasefire and a withdrawal to the pre-­war borders. Tehran rejected the UN proposal, arguing it failed to apportion all blame for the conflict on the Iraqis. Its response was to launch a massive offensive into Iraqi territory the following day. The supply of munitions to Iraq by foreigners was the cause of much bitterness in Iran. When Iraq acquired new French Super Étendard aircraft and Exocet missiles for use against Kharg Island, Iran’s largest oil complex in the upper Gulf, the Iranians responded by threatening the Western powers and others who supplied Iraq, by stating they would cut them off from their oil resources, an oblique reference to a potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This was a significant escalation of the conflict and could have created a coalition of states against Iran in the war. In the 1980s, some fifty ships a day used the channel, including up to twenty tankers carrying eight million barrels of oil per day. Approximately one-­fifth of global oil supplies transited through this waterway. There was no question of this being empty rhetoric. Iranian troops were moved to the Larak, Henquin and Sirri Islands in the Hormuz Strait. Anti-­aircraft guns and artillery batteries were moved to the Tunbs and Qeshm islands.15 France responded immediately, offering half a billion dollars’ worth of missiles and bombs, including more Exocets, to Iraq. Bahrain mobilised, Qatar closed its borders, and Oman deployed its armed forces to the shore of the Strait of Hormuz. Khomeini believed that the Islamic Revolution could provide the means for a truly independent foreign policy and could eventually draw on the strength of the entire Muslim world to counterbalance the superpowers. By contrast, he believed that Iraq was entirely dependent on foreign support. It was a naive assumption that would be exposed the moment the United States believed their primary interest, namely the security of the Gulf, was threatened more directly. In practical terms, Khomeini’s views owed more to rhetoric than reality. Without foreign arms and munitions, Iran’s war effort would have been particularly short-­lived. The defiance shown by Iran reflected a new discipline and determination in the regime. In May 1982, the government imposed Islamic law throughout the legal system. All secular laws were abolished in August. The Mujahideen-­e Khalq leader, Sadiq Qutbzadeh, was executed in September. More intensive Islamic education was introduced while Islamic associations of dedicated ulema were despatched like commissars to the frontline units. The Revolutionary Guards were re-­organised like regular battalions, but also acted as an internal security force, largely hunting down dissenters. More popular was the notion that, simply by dint of their own efforts and guided by the righteousness of their Islamic revolutionary cause, the people had overthrown a powerful dictator, ejected the Iraqi invaders from the country and were rebuilding the economy. Like the

64   R. Johnson communists of the 1920s, much was made of the startling improvements to the economy to ‘prove’ the correctness of the political agenda. There was a growing sense that Iran was isolated and would have to continue to rely on its own resources. Defying the world with a threat to the Strait of Hormuz merely reflected this feeling. In the Gulf, Tehran waged a war of words against the ‘unIslamic regime in Riyadh’, its corruption, and its willingness to serve the interests of the ‘Great Satan’, America, by selling oil. It waged a similar campaign against Kuwait. Iran calculated that it could keep the West out of the conflict by announcing that it would guarantee that the Hormuz Strait would remain open to free navigation. The West was content to localise the fighting and keep it out of the Hormuz area. Yet Iran had allies that could make trouble elsewhere with a more indirect strategy against Iraq and its Western ‘backers’. Syria’s President Hafiz Assad, for example, was an irreconcilable enemy of Saddam. Assad was the first to recognise the legitimacy of Khomeini’s seizure of power in 1979 and he condemned Saddam’s invasion of Iran as a futile distraction from the main effort, namely combating Israel and Zionist imperialism. Yet Syria went further, supplying Soviet weaponry via airlifts to Tehran and offering intelligence on Iraq, and its air force made incursions into Iraqi air space to divide Saddam’s forces. In October 1981, Syria signed an arms deal with Iran which was extended into a ten-­year trade agreement. Iranian oil was sold to Syria in return for cash, manufactured goods and agricultural supplies.16 Libya, too, threw in its lot with Iran. Colonel Qaddafi believed that America was behind the Iraqi invasion as an attempt to end the charismatic revolution in Iran and it, too, became a staging post for weapons destined for Tehran. The Iranian criticism of the United Nations was a consistent refrain. There were no fewer than twelve UN Resolutions during the course of the war, the majority of which called for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal to the original borders antebellum. However, the UNSC had first called for a ceasefire when Iraq still occupied Iranian soil, and Tehran was irritated that the UN had failed to condemn Iraq’s action. Iran felt the UN, as an institution, opposed their revolutionary regime and generally favoured Iraq. However, the members of the UNSC dared not give any encouragement to the revolutionary regime in Tehran. The Iranians had breached diplomatic protocol by storming the American embassy and it seemed determined to alter the status quo of the region by force. This attitude was reinforced by Iran’s subsequent invasion of Iraqi territory in 1982. United Nations Resolution 479 had been passed on 28 September 1980, just a week after the invasion, and was accepted unanimously. It called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, and demanded that both sides submit their grievances for mediation in order to avoid spreading the conflict across the region. Resolutions 540 and 552, in 1983 and 1984 respectively, called on the belligerents to respect freedom of navigation because of attacks on Gulf installations and shipping. In these, there was a

Mustazafin and taghutti   65 failure to condemn Iraqi attacks in the Gulf, which Iran used as evidence that the UN favoured Baghdad. In fact, Iraq was not making attacks on Kuwaiti and Saudi shipping as Iran was, and it was these two countries that had called for a Resolution. Iran was defiant of the Resolutions because it believed it could still win the war. It is difficult to see quite how the UN could accommodate Iran when Tehran consistently rejected any conditions for peace. Saddam, while clearly in breach of international law in 1980, had nevertheless sought to escape the consequences of the conflict by accepting UN terms each time they were presented. Iran sought to use the UN Resolutions as the means to justify the war rather than seek a genuine resolution to the conflict and restoration of the status quo ante bellum.

The home front Saddam was anxious about internal unrest throughout the war, not least from the Kurdish population, and he assumed that Iran faced similar problems. To capitalise on this he sought to terrorise or demoralise the Iranian public to such an extent they would turn on their government. The result was the ‘war of the cities’, an episodic bombing campaign against major urban centres. The Iranians did, indeed, face several internal crises caused by the crippling economic effects of the war, but, despite severe losses, Iranian morale remained intact until very late in the conflict. The harsh treatment of the regime’s opponents created a general sense of fear in the country that, nevertheless, lay alongside a desire to defend both Iran and Islam against the Iraqi ‘aggressors’. The revolutionary regime knew that Iran possessed greater manpower reserves, but a lot less equipment, and it therefore turned to the idea of a war of attrition where revolutionary enthusiasm would compensate for the inferiority of its arms. A striking enigma of the war was the willingness of the Iranians to endure a long, costly conflict. The capacity to field a large force is not sufficient to explain how the Iranians were able to sustain a strategy of attrition. While it is impossible to generalise, it is clear that many Iranians enlisted because of a faith in their ability to liberate themselves and others. The lifting of the siege of Khorramshahr in 1980 and the capture of the Fao Peninsula in 1986 reinforced the sense of national achievement. There was a strong sense of ethnic, Shi’ite and Iranian identity on which to draw, and the feeling that this was a war for national defence and the liberation of such symbolic cities as Najaf and Karbala. Nevertheless, the regime in Tehran bears a heavy responsibility for sending thousands to their deaths armed with promises of victory or Paradise. Inside Iran, however, the situation was bleak. War profiteers were condemned as ‘economic terrorists’, rationing was introduced, but black markets flourished. Controls on imports prioritised munitions, which increased scarcity and added pressure on prices. Inflation was officially 20

66   R. Johnson per cent, but many believed it was probably double that. Skilled manpower was lost to the war effort. Falling oil prices reduced potential revenues. In 1987, emergency measures were introduced to cut the purchases of industrial raw materials. Unemployment rose to 14 per cent. A drive for self-­ sufficiency increased agricultural output by 20 per cent, but only with greater sacrifices by the rural communities that the revolution had sought to eradicate in the first place. The armed forces consumed 30 per cent of the entire national budget, some $15 billion, but the strategy of large-­scale offensives and the tactics of swarming into Iraqi positions created a grotesque butcher’s bill. As so often occurs, the revolution consumed its own children. Power was centralised: the regime’s Guardian Council vetoed the decisions and complaints of the Majlis when it conflicted with their agenda. President Hojatoleslam Ali Khamenei defeated other selected candidates in elections, but all the other candidates were already in the government, making a sham of popular politics. An austere and disciplined form of Islam became the regulatory element in all private and public life. To ensure the smooth implementation of the new measures, no one could question the government’s policies without risk of severe penalty. On 1 January 1988, when President Khamanei stated that the government would exercise its authority in accordance with the Sharia, Khomeini announced that the government had a ‘God-­given absolute mandate’, which had authority over all other commandments, including the pillars of Islam. To break an impasse between the reform-­minded ministers and the conservative Guardian Council Khomeini appointed a Council for the Expediency of Islamic Order that drew personnel from both institutions. Policy was not driven by this new cooperation, but by the executive.

Iran’s strategy The Iranians were prepared to use unconventional warfare to achieve their strategic objectives. When a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb in a clear attempt to kill Kuwait’s head of state, Sheikh Sabah al-­Sabah, on 25 May 1985, there was widespread agreement it was an Iranian operation. An Iranian-­backed organisation committed to the imposition of strict Islamic rule throughout Iraq, the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was active from 1986 in aiming for regime change in Baghdad. Iran was also prepared to ally with Kurds and Iraqi secular opposition groups. In this, it was ruthlessly pragmatic: it did not demand a revolutionary agenda, believing it could create an Islamic state in Iraq after Saddam had been overthrown. Nevertheless, the Iranians failed to recognise that they had reached a tipping point in the war. The Iraqis accepted UNSC Resolution 598, which called for an immediate ceasefire, without question. Iran had delayed. When Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the UN Secretary General, visited Tehran in

Mustazafin and taghutti   67 the autumn of 1987, the Iranians demanded that Clause 6, the setting-­up of a commission to establish responsibility for the conflict, be asserted before Clause 1, the imposition of an immediate ceasefire. They argued that such a panel would likely find Iraq to be the aggressor, but in return for the reordering of the clauses by the UNSC, Tehran would offer a postponement of its demand for the deposing of Saddam Hussein and war reparations, which were intrinsic war aims. When de Cuéllar visited Baghdad, he found no acceptance of the Iranian proposal; the Iraqis wanted to proceed in accordance with the clauses as the UNSC had determined. Iran was bargaining without any real advantage. Moreover, its negotiations were insincere. Tehran had little interest in starting peace negotiations while it possessed what it regarded as the military advantage and might be on the verge of victory. In fact, that moment, if it ever existed, had already passed. Iraq aimed to reduce Iranian revenue and isolate Tehran further by waging an economic war against its oil facilities in the Gulf. By these means, it was thought Iraq’s air power would compel Iran to negotiate. The Iranians could not retaliate against the flow of Iraqi oil because all of its product was carried in tankers owned by other states, particularly Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iran therefore felt compelled to expand the war and target oil tankers across designated war zones close to the shores of the Gulf States. Iran also carried out retaliatory air strikes on civilian populations in Iraq. However, the Iranian strategy was laden with risks, since, aside from some short-­lived confrontations with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States looked to the Western Powers and the Soviet Union for greater protection. The Air Defence Interception Zone, popularly referred to as the Fahd Line, went some way to demarcating where Iran could not operate. Tehran had responded with diplomatic appeals rather than further military action when an Iranian fighter had been shot down on 5 June 1984 in Saudi airspace, and then tried to win over other Arab states and isolate Iraq. In August 1984, Rafsanjani stated that exporting the revolution did not automatically mean a resort to arms and the revolution was really a message of support for the world’s deprived and oppressed.17 References were made to the Prophet’s use of envoys, sent out to distant lands, to ‘establish proper relations’, to give the diplomatic campaign to Syria, Libya and Algeria some religious legitimacy. A deal was concluded with Saudi Arabia over the price of oil at $18 a barrel, but the other Arab states were unmoved. In 1985, Iran’s diplomacy was used in other ways. Damascus hosted the foreign ministers of Iran, Libya, Algeria and South Yemen to demonstrate the weight of its strategic alignment. Libya took the opportunity to secure the sale of Scud missiles to Iran, while Syria agreed to continue its threatening air demonstrations along the Iraqi border to tie down some of ­Saddam’s formidable air force. In return, Iran granted increased oil sales

68   R. Johnson to Syria at a discounted price, adding to an existing ten-­year economic pact. Each of Iran’s partners also boycotted the Arab League summit in Morocco that year. Iran tried to attract other supporters too. To offset any loss of its own revenue through damage to its facilities, it offered a short-­ term discount on its oil. A new diplomatic effort towards Moscow commenced in April 1985, which resulted in the Soviets agreeing that they would not stand by if the Americans took military action against Iran. The Soviets also slowed their flow of arms and war materiel to Iraq, urging other Warsaw Pact states to do the same. In return, the Soviets were rewarded with Iranian oil. China too continued to support Iran with weapons, despite official denials in Beijing. Iraq tried to provoke a stronger reaction from the Iranians in the Gulf that would draw in other powers against it by stepping up its air attacks. Iran was eager to avoid being trapped by the Iraqi strategy. It declared that it did not intend to close the Strait of Hormuz because of the detrimental effects on its own economy, and tried to deny responsibility for attacks on Gulf shipping. In fact, Iran simply lacked the capability to do more. It had only a limited number of operational aircraft (between sixty-­three and ninety) and too few ships. Many of its vessels had been damaged by the Iraqis and the regular navy had also suffered from purges of its personnel. Shortages of spares meant that Iranian ships lacked basic electronic facilities, such as radar for fire control. Iran therefore designed a strategy to best fit its capabilities. While always denying its responsibility, it harassed civilian shipping, particularly Kuwaiti and Saudi tankers, in the hope that these powers would abandon their support for Iraq and the international community would demand action against Saddam. For this approach, it was reliant on fast boats and missile strikes to make unexpected raids at night on unescorted tankers, and it deployed a variety of vessels and some helicopters to lay mines. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards were tasked to board freighters to check for arms and war materiel that seemed destined for Iraq. By November 1985, they had ‘inspected’ 300 vessels in this manner. To enforce their presence, bases were constructed on islands and old rigs in the Gulf. Subjected to further Iraqi air raids, Iran chose to retaliate against Iraqi oil installations in Kirkuk and elsewhere, but while aiming a Scud-­B rocket at a refinery outside Baghdad it hit a residential area. Artillery barrages against Basra were more deliberate attempts to damage the civilian infrastructure, and together they elicited another round of Iraqi air attacks on Iranian cities. In January 1987, 1,800 Iranians were killed and 6,000 more wounded in just one month of bombing.18 The Iranians in turn increased their attacks on Kuwaiti shipping, which prompted a request to have all their vessels ‘re-­flagged’ as American or Soviet ships. The Iranians threatened the Kuwaitis with a campaign of sabotage, and there were indeed a number of such incidents around the country. In late February 1987, the United States detected that the Iranians had test-­fired a Silkworm missile,

Mustazafin and taghutti   69 a weapon capable of destroying a tanker, in the Strait of Hormuz.19 This information, and the Iranian sea-­borne attacks, pushed the Americans into the protection of international shipping in the Gulf. Iran persisted with its unconventional techniques, even though they had only four British-­built frigates equipped with Sea Killer anti-­ship missiles, and four patrol boats with 40 mm and 76 mm cannon and harpoon missiles. However, there were a variety of small fast boats and dinghies with six-­man crews. These were difficult to detect by radar among the quantities of craft in the Gulf, and they were staffed by elements of the dedicated 20,000 strong naval element of the Revolutionary Guard. They also had light aircraft, trained frogmen and a specialist suicide-­bombing unit. Moreover, the Iranians were prepared to use any vessels they had, including ‘civilian’ ones, to lay mines. In short, the Iranian strategy was to wage a guerrilla war at sea. On 2 May 1987 Iranian Revolutionary Guards boarded fourteen vessels, and attacked three tankers from bases on Farsi Island and an oil platform. They came up alongside under cover of darkness and identified the vessel, then returned some hours later to shoot and fire rockets at the bridge or crew quarters. The tactics were clearly designed to terrorise the international personnel manning the ships. On land, there were similar attempts to use more unconventional techniques. Large numbers of men would attempt to infiltrate Iraqi positions at night and overrun them before the Iraqi high command had a chance to respond. A series of vast and more conventional offensives were then launched along the south, central and northern fronts. Small territorial gains were made at enormous cost, particularly in the battle known as Karbala V, where it estimated that 20,000 Iranian troops were killed and a similar number were wounded for only a few hundred square meters. The Iranian strategy at this point in the war was revealed in an interview given by Rafsanjani with the Iranian newspaper Ettela’at on 23 July 1987. Rafsanjani explained that Iran intended incrementally to obtain swathes of Iraqi territory in order to destabilise the Saddam regime and cause its overthrow. He noted that there was a war of attrition taking place, but he was concerned that the Iraqis could use time to their advantage – effectively bleeding Iran white. He felt that the direct involvement of another power in the conflict was ‘unlikely’, but he warned that such an eventuality would necessitate further mobilisation of manpower and resources, and then offensives, that would result ‘inevitably’ in the severing of Basra from Baghdad. He claimed that in addition to the 500 battalions raised, Iran could find 2,000 more, and that it would be able to fund all the logistical support these new troops would need. To date the war had cost billions, but the question of providing more, despite an economic downturn, was, to him, merely ‘a political choice’. However, he was prepared to acknowledge that the Iranian people, the mustazafin, might be reluctant to support the effort.

70   R. Johnson For all the rhetoric, Iran’s capacity for large-­scale offensives was declining and the effectiveness of their attacks was progressively being reduced. By the middle of 1987 the Iranians were back on the defensive. The attrition strategy had failed because Iraq had matched Iranian mobilisation, and Rafsanjani was prepared to admit that ‘a war of attrition can be dangerous as our enemies can use time against us’. In the Gulf, Iranian mines, missiles and aircraft were attacking Iraqi and Kuwaiti tankers, including those that had been ‘re-­flagged’ by the United States, prompting an American warning that if Tehran continued attacks there would be a response. While the UN, on American prompting, reiterated its calls for the implementation of Resolution 582, the call for a ceasefire, Iran rejected them all and threatened the United States. It staged high-­profile naval exercises, while Hasan Ali, commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ naval element, warned that the Americans would get a ‘bitter and unforgettable lesson’ if it challenged the Iranians in the Gulf.20 To avoid American retaliation, the Iranians used Silkworm missiles against unflagged vessels and Kuwaiti shore installations. More mines were laid, one of which was struck by the tanker Bridgetown on 24 July 1987, and there were other attacks through to 1988. The Americans caught and attacked the mine-­laying vessel Iran Ajr, and documents aboard revealed that mine-­laying was a calculated policy that, despite repeated denials, had been ordered from Tehran. In fact, Iraqi air raids were taking their toll and Iran knew that a more comprehensive response in the Gulf would evoke more retaliation from the Americans. In Tehran, there was some confusion about future strategy: Rafsanjani explained to the Tehran Times on 30 August that Iran could either continue the war of attrition or make multiple all-­out offensives into Iraq, but he continued to warn the Iranian people that more sacrifices, financial and otherwise, were likely. There was no mention of the Gulf strategy. Tehran nevertheless issued threatening statements and was probably responsible for a terrorist bomb attack on a Pan Am office in Kuwait. The pin-­prick attacks in the Gulf nevertheless revealed the weaknesses, rather than the strengths of Iranian strategy. Iran finally announced in November 1987 that it intended to launch another series of Karbala-­style offensives to give the Iraqis ‘no respite’. But no major offensive came. Iraqi intelligence indicated the Iranians had not assembled the usual giant concentrations of force even in the south. The revolutionary regime had simply not met its manpower targets, and was still suffering acute financial problems, an arms embargo, and consequently delays and shortcomings in technology and equipment. Despite Rafsanjani’s promise that Iran would provide all the manpower and materiel it needed to win the war, it was simply unable to do so. Conscription terms were changed from twenty-­four months to twenty-­eight months to sustain the armed forces’ numbers, but the Iranian people were reaching their limit. Following Scud missile attacks on Tehran which resulted in

Mustazafin and taghutti   71 2,000 deaths, there was a steady flight of civilians from the city.21 When Iranian offensives were resumed in early 1988, the Iraqis made more extensive use of chemical weapons, including their use against Kurdish settlements in Northern Iraq which were conducting their own insurgency against Baghdad with Iranian support. As Tehran Radio broadcast measures citizens could take to ameliorate the effects of gas, people speculated that it was only a matter of time before a chemical attack was made and many thousands died. Morale was sinking. Iraq recaptured the Fao Peninsular on 18 April 1988 in a surprise offensive, and then fought relentlessly using large armoured formations and gas behind Iranian lines. Iranian aircraft had been repositioned for an expected American strike following the mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Gulf and the Iranians therefore failed to halt the Iraqi onslaught. Despite strong initial resistance, five Iranian divisions retreated, many abandoning their artillery and equipment en route. Trenches were overrun, with weapons and unused ammunition falling into Iraqi hands, including anti-­tank munitions. With relatively light losses, the Iraqis in ten hours of fighting had taken an area that had cost the Iranians 50,000 casualties to secure over a period of three months. Iran had lost 10 per cent of its combat equipment. Iranian recruitment statistics went into steep decline.22 But Khomeini was still defiant, repeating that the war must be decided on the battlefield and not by negotiations. An Iranian counter-­ offensive was ordered to retake Shalamche, but having lost 18,000 casualties, the troops withdrew to their starting point. On 25 June, the Iraqis overran the Majnoon Islands in just one day. Tehran tried to blame the outcome on an ‘unholy alliance of Iraq, the United States and the Soviet Union’, but its call for more volunteers failed to move much of the population, which was alarmed by reports of Iraqi chemical warfare. In the Gulf, the Americans decided to make a limited retaliation for the mining of the Samuel B. Roberts, but the Iranians clearly interpreted the attack as a much larger offensive. Three Iranian frigates tried to engage the Americans with missiles, but were destroyed or sunk. Iran’s attempts to attack US ships were clumsy and probably mounted as a hasty response to the threat to their disused oil platforms that were being used as bases for fast boats and helicopters. On 3 July 1988, a pack of thirteen Iranian gunboats in three groups was observed challenging merchant ships and there were reports of gunfire. As USS Vincennes and Montgomery approached, so the Iranian gunboats started to close in on them. A surface fire-­fight broke out, but, at this point, an Iranian commercial airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, was on a bearing that appeared to approach the Vincennes. Mistaking the aircraft for an attacking fighter, the cruiser shot the plane down and 290 civilians died. Iran initially hoped the incident would revive international support, but it did not. President Reagan apologised immediately, and the Iranians remained as diplomatically isolated as ever. More crucially, the cost of the

72   R. Johnson war simply could not be sustained any longer. Iran’s war costs had reached an estimated $200 billion.23 In essence, Iran had spent four times its actual oil income and was mortgaging its future. Iran was also losing the military campaign on land. On 14 July, the Iranians withdrew from the last piece of occupied territory, and three days later, on 17 July, Iran requested a ceasefire.

Iran’s war in retrospect The alignment of international actors during the Iran–Iraq War reflected their individual national interests. However, the prospect of revolutionary Iran acting as a magnet for radical Islamist groups, and supporting those groups in the export of terror, meant that, surprisingly, both the USA and USSR supported Baghdad. Libya, Syria and North Korea sided with Iran because, in part, they believed they lay outside of international system dominated by the United States. Other countries limited their support to the sale of arms to Tehran, including China, Taiwan, Argentina, South Africa, Pakistan and Switzerland, with the most surprising contributions from Israel. However, Iran experienced a slow decline in the quantity and quality of its arsenal. The supply of weaponry and its uneven distribution also shaped the Iranian war effort. While Iraq could rely on armour and airpower as force multipliers, Iran was compelled to rely on the moral power of its manpower and the offensive. Iran appeared to be a threat not only because of its revolutionary rhetoric and its menacing remarks regarding the supply of oil from the Gulf, but because of the manner in which it waged war. Unable to defend its own vital economic facilities properly, Iran launched an unconventional campaign, attacking or mining ships in the Strait of Hormuz and the upper Gulf, and stepped up the scale of its ground offensives against Iraq. Moreover, it made terrorist attacks in Kuwait and was responsible for the sponsorship of similar attacks by its proxies elsewhere. However, Iran did not possess enough mines, aircraft, missiles or ships to close the Strait of Hormuz permanently against Western capabilities. What air assets it had were prioritised to support the land campaign further north and the Iranians were forced to use unconventional tactics to harass Gulf shipping. When it came to an actual confrontation with the US Navy, the Iranians were defeated swiftly. An Iranian victory on land had seemed a very real possibility after the offensives of 1985 and 1986 and the series of thrusts the following year which threatened to overwhelm Iraqi defences. Operations Badr and Fao (1986) marked the high-­water mark of Iranian successes. Nevertheless, Tehran found it had no strategic answer to the Iraqi bombing of its cities and the attacks on its oil industry or tanker fleet, except to step up its harassing policy against almost all international shipping in the Persian Gulf. This and the United States’ pursuit of a more vigorous Gulf policy in 1987

Mustazafin and taghutti   73 and 1988 also marked a turning point in UNSC attitudes towards Iran, not least with the introduction of Resolution 598. Western European powers, particularly Britain, took a more determined line against Iran when their interests in the Gulf were threatened directly. In the end, the combined effect of these factors, a crippled economy, decisive US Navy operations in the Gulf, and the fact that Iraq regained ascendancy on the battlefield in 1988, compelled the Iranians to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The war had profound consequences for Iran, the details of which lie outside the scope of this chapter. However, in essence, Iran’s desire to assert its regional influence, its anxiety about internal security, its sense of being encircled by hostile states, the fear of foreign intelligence operatives, its desire for an independent programme of nuclear enrichment and its deeply embedded aggressive, revolutionary ethos are all linked to the conflict. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 encouraged Tehran to believe it had a much better opportunity to establish its influence in the first decade of the twenty-­first century. That said, Tehran was deeply concerned by the contamination of Western, liberal-­democratic ideas, and anxious about domestic unrest, inspired perhaps by external forces. The Iran–Iraq War is therefore particularly important if we are to understand Iran’s fundamental desire to develop its own nuclear programme to enhance its national security.

Notes   1 Israel supplied arms to Iran simply as a means of keeping the war going, intending to exhaust both belligerents as a form of insurance against future targeting of Israel and a way of creating a diversion from the concurrent conflict in Lebanon. New York Times, 8 March 1982; Defence and Foreign Affairs Daily, 20 January 1983. See also T. Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.   2 See B. R. Gibson, ‘American Foreign Policy and the Kurdish-­Iraqi Civil War, 1961–1975’, forthcoming PhD, London School of Economics; and K.  M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.   3 Khomeini in an interview with Der Spiegel, 7 November 1978.   4 The Times, 8 July 1981.   5 V. Nasr, The Shia Revival, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, pp. 60, 68–9, 74–5.   6 G. Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, London: I.B. Tauris, 2008, pp. 109–10.   7 The Times, 8 July 1981, p. 9.   8 N. Keddie, Modern Iran, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, rev. edn, 2003, pp. 234 and 238.   9 Ibid., p. 227; Kepel, Jihad, p. 110. 10 R. Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power, London: Croom Helm, 1979. 11 S. R. Khomeini, Hukumat-­e Islami: Velavat-­e faqih, Tehran: Amir Bakir, 1979, p. 75. 12 Ayotollah Khomeini, Kawthar: An anthology of the speeches of Ima- m Khomeinı- (r) including an account of the events of the revolution, vol 1, The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Ima- m Khomeinı-’s Works; International Affairs

74   R. Johnson Department, n.d. Available at: http://rkhomeini.org.temporaryurl.net/eBook/ imam_eBook.cfm?book_id=238&start_page=1 (accessed 15 August 2012). 13 ‘Developments Concerning Relations with Iraq’, Daily Report. South Asia, FBIS-­SAS-80–078 on 21 April 1980, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, p.  I8; and the response can be found at: ‘Ath-­Thawrah criticises Iranian Regime’, Daily Report, Middle East and Africa, FBIS-­MEA-80–077, ‘Iraq’, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 18 April 1980, E3; Washington Post, 18 April 1980. 14 T. Y. Ismail, Iraq and Iran: Roots of Conflict, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Pres, 1982, p. 66. 15 E. O’Ballance, The Gulf War, London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1988, p. 127. 16 New York Times, 19 April 1982. 17 D. Hiro, Iran under the Ayatollahs, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, reprtd. 2000, p. 239. 18 A. Cordesman and A. R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, II, The Iran–Iraq War, Boulder, CO and San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 1990, ch. 10 and fig 10.1. 19 See Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Near East and South Asia Review: The Growing Iranian Threat to Persian Gulf Shipping,’ December 5, 1986, CIA-­ FOIA, p. 5. 20 Washington Post, 24, 25, 27 and 29 June 1987, cited in Cordesman and Wagner, op. cit., p. 291. 21 Cordesman and Wagner, op. cit., pp. 363–7. 22 Ibid., p. 383. 23 Cordesman, citing other sources, estimated the costs to Iran during 1980–1985 as $108.2 billion for the oil sector (of which $23.4 billion was forgone revenue), $30.3 billion non-­oil GDP loss, $23.4 billion on military expenditure, $76.5 billion in fixed capital loss formation, and $25.9 billion for destruction of facilities. Cordesman and Wagner, op. cit., pp. 1–2.

Part II

Economic dimensions of the war

5 The role of oil in the outcome of the Iran–Iraq War Some important lessons in historical context Farzin Nadimi Introduction Iran is the world’s fourth-­largest producer of petroleum and natural gas, although with sixty-­six million litres per day it also has one of the highest domestic gasoline consumption rates,1 one-­third of which needed to be imported until recently to complement the domestic production. This vulnerability gave rise to a hope among the Western world, especially the United States, that restricting the flow of imported fuel into Iran would effectively compel the ‘Islamic Republic’ to change its course with regard to its nuclear programme. But the question here is whether those who advocate such a move, without debating its virtues here, are aware of the recent history and core potentials of Iran’s oil industry. The aim of this chapter is to contribute toward such awareness. Major oil-­producing countries are usually heavily dependent upon export of their crude oil, and their entire economy, especially at the time of emergencies such as war, circles around this commodity. A dynamic society also depends on a variety of petroleum-­derived fuels to run its industries, transportation system and military forces. As a result, military planners have favoured targeting oil systems – whether production and processing, refining, transportation, import/export and distribution networks – ever since oil became an indispensable part of the societies and military operations in the early twentieth century. The Iran–Iraq War was no exception. When this conflict finally came to an end in the summer of 1988 after the Iranian leadership accepted a UN-­brokered ceasefire, no less than 2,889 days of fighting had left behind hundreds of thousands of casualties, and damage aggregated at hundreds of billions of dollars. Iran’s oil industry was battered but still producing and exporting at substantial rates. So the main overlapping questions here are to what degree Iran’s oil industry was affected by Iraq’s comprehensive resource denial and access campaign, which was part of its wider economic warfare strategy, and how it adapted to the changing demands and conditions of an evolving war.

78   F. Nadimi One of the key, yet least studied, aspects of the war was the use of innovative administrative and technical measures by Iran’s oil industry to alleviate Iraq’s oil denial campaign (hereafter the Oil Campaign). Sanford Lieberman called such efforts the ‘use of extraordinary forms of administration and control’.2 Therefore, borrowing Lieberman’s words, this chapter also outlines the use of such extraordinary forms of administration and contingency plans for creating an elastic or resilient adaptive oil system during the war, in an attempt to gain insights not only into what the process itself involved, but also into the larger question of crisis management by the Iranian oil industry at the time of war. The aim here is to show that Iran’s oil industry did not collapse under the heavy weight of war, a success that could be attributed to the use of such mitigating measures. This chapter includes a summary history of Iran’s oil industry and its significant milestones, followed by an overview of the Iraqi Oil Campaign against Iran and a conceptualisation of oil resilience in the face of denial efforts short of a total war, within that context. At the end I will return to the present day, and summarise some lessons from history. I should acknowledge here the assistance of the National Iranian Oil Company, National Iranian Offshore Oil Company, and National Iranian Tanker Company in conducting my field research, as well as many anonymous veteran oilmen I had the privilege of interviewing.

Historical background Oil in the Middle East was first found in Masjed Soleiman, in what was then Persia, in 1908 by a British expedition, with the first export shipment dispatched three years later. Therefore Iran was the first country in the Middle East in which commercially viable petroleum resources were discovered, and the British wasted no time in developing the rights under their concession into a substantial petroleum industry.3 The significance of this Persian oil was just beginning to become clear when the First World War ended in 1918. However, the ‘Persian Oilfields’ quickly gained a priority military status, as the Anglo-­Persian Oil Company had to cope with a sharply increasing military demand for its oil products, and to devise measures to defend the oilfields against competing regional and world powers. The situation, though, was very different when the Second World War started, by which time Iran’s oil production had reached over 214,000 barrels per day. The high-­octane aviation spirit and bunker oil produced at the Abadan refinery, on the banks of Shatt al-­Arab close to the northern Persian Gulf, were in high demand; particularly in the Pacific theatre during the last three years of the war.4 The war also brought the major Allied powers to the country to defend the Persian oilfields from a possible German takeover, among other reasons. Such measures included interconnecting some Iranian and Iraqi oilfields and refineries to ensure

The true role of oil in the Iran–Iraq War   79 continuity of fuel production in case of a partial German advance, or total destruction – or ‘neutralisation’ – of the oilfields in the most serious circumstances.5 Nevertheless, the resentment among the Iranians caused by the occupation of their homeland and opposition to the terms of the concession gradually built up and culminated in the nationalisation of the oil industry in Iran in March 1951. It led to an oil embargo imposed on Iran by the major oil companies, which almost bankrupted the country. Iran’s refinery output, which had reached thirty-­five million tons a year, plummeted to a virtual standstill. During the following two years Iran’s exports equalled less than a day’s output under the Anglo-­Iranian regime. This condition did not last long, as the so-­called 1953 coup d’état was followed by the creation of an international oil consortium in Iran in which the American companies played a major role. In the 1960s, Iran and the Consortium planned to increase oil production to 8 mb/d (million barrels per day) by the late-­1970s, and completion of the infrastructure required to reach such a target was well under way.6 The outstanding capacity-­ expansion endeavour set in motion by the former Shah of Iran was crucial in Iran’s later success in self-­organising as a resilient adaptive system. So, in the late 1970s, Iran’s thriving upstream oil industry consisted of no fewer than twenty-­four oilfields with 304 producing wells, sixty production, treatment and booster units; 7,000 km of pipelines, and two main crude oil and products terminals at Kharg and Mahshahr. The Gachsaran oilfield was one of the largest in the world, Gorreh pumping station was the largest of its kind, the Genaveh manifold on the shores of the Persian Gulf was the single converging point of all the pipelines from the fields, and finally Kharg deep-­water oil terminal had a staggering eighteen million barrels storage capacity and a loading capacity of 6.5 mb/d at vast loading berths to its east and west capable of receiving tankers as large as 500,000 dwt. The downstream sector in Iran, on the other hand, had 1.2 mb/d refining capacity at seven refineries, the largest of which, actually the largest in the world, was at Abadan with a refining capacity of around 630,000 b/d. All those elements together had to all intents and purposes formed a vastly complex oil system that influenced almost every aspect of the Iranian economy and society, and the loss of each element could have profound consequences. Therefore it was no wonder that one of the most important landmarks of the 1979 revolution was a widespread general oil workers’ strike, in which the offshore oilmen were pioneers. Those strikes proved crucial in paralysing the Shah’s government. The revolution had an empowering effect on the oilmen, and promoted the idea of preserving natural resources for future generations, and therefore it was decided to lower the production rate when oilmen went back to work in February 1979. It did not last long, however.

80   F. Nadimi

The war Contemporary military history has time and again demonstrated the significance of access to oil, or the lack thereof, to the outcome of modern conflict. One such example began to take shape on 22 September 1980, when the Iraqi armed forces invaded Iran, triggering a war between the two major oil-­producing Middle Eastern states which turned into one of the longest and costliest conventional conflicts of the twentieth century. An integral part of this conflict had been the extensive campaign fought by both the protagonists against their opponent’s oil industry, spanning the entire war, with repeated periods of escalation. Iraq’s oil interdiction campaign, which consisted of two tiers – denial of export (of crude oil), and denial of production and import (of refined products) – took Iran’s oil industry completely by surprise. With the start of the war Iran abandoned conservation in favour of maximal production to finance its war effort. From then on oil production and export weighed heavily on the minds of the Iranian leaders. But the long distance to the oil markets and a lack of a pipeline export system, unlike Iraq, forced Iran to rely exclusively on the Persian Gulf sea lanes and loading terminals for exporting its oil. This pressed Iran’s export capacity closer to its critical threshold, a fact that was not overlooked by the Iraqi military planners. As shown in Figure 5.1, the Iraqi military initially targeted Iran’s downstream oil facilities, especially transportation, refining and storage, hoping to create fuel shortages severe enough to directly undermine effective

Number of effective air raids

140 120 100 80 60 40 20

Kharg Terminal Onshore production facilities Offshore production facilities Pipeline facilities Iranian tankers Refineries Gas facilities Petrochemical plants Fuel distribution facilities

0 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 Persian 1359 1359 1359 1359 1359 1359 1359 1359 1359 year

Figure 5.1  Breakdown of the Iraqi Oil Campaign.1 Note 1 Compiled using National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), National Iranian Southern Oilfields Company (NISOC) and National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) war records.

The true role of oil in the Iran–Iraq War   81 Iranian defensive measures. Bombings and artillery and mortar barrages created an inferno as they targeted fully loaded storage tanks, pipelines and other related facilities. Numerous trends suggest Iraq was following a limited strategy for its Oil Campaign at the beginning of the war, aiming mostly at paralysing Iran’s storage and export capacities for the limited period of time the Iraqi blitzkrieg was expected to be prolonged. Iraq was on the offensive on the land fronts, yet at the same time seemed unwilling to push Iran’s then powerful air force toward launching more retaliatory strikes against its own oil installations.7 In the beginning, the Iranian upstream oil sector was largely left intact, which could also be an indication of Iraq’s initial intention to keep Iranian territories under occupation, and to possibly utilise their oil resources later.8 Interestingly, Iran’s main oil production units, which had continued to work at full capacity, did not come under attack until April 1986. Strategic attacks against Iran’s other oil facilities, though, continued intermittently, but declined in numbers and intensity whenever there were fierce battles on the land fronts, such as in 1981 and 1983. The initial Iraqi Oil Campaign failed to curb Iran’s oil export largely because their air force lacked suitable training, equipment and intelligence.9 However, Iraq’s forced retreat from major Iranian occupied territories, followed by Iran’s launching of a chain of ground offensives into Iraqi territory to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime from July 1982, caused a fairly long lull between 1981 and 1984 in the Oil Campaign, with several

Map 5.1  The Gulf.

82   F. Nadimi exceptions such as a partial hike in attacks in 1982, largely against Kharg. It included Iraq’s first use of long-­range R-­17 (Scud-­B) surface-­to-surface ballistic missiles against the island – in fact the first ever application of SSMs against economic targets – and therefore a noticeable development in Iraq’s military strategy. This lull and the new trends in the war gave Iraq enough time, and motivation, to prepare for the next phase, by improving its weaponry and training, and collecting vital intelligence. In the meantime, Iraq spent a good part of 1983 targeting the Iranian offshore oil platforms in the northern Persian Gulf, creating an ecological disaster as many safety valves at well-­heads failed to operate properly and caused uncontrollable spills. While capping the leaking wells in record time, Iran also kept most of its surviving offshore platforms manned, and operational as long as possible, for both technical and political reasons.

Fuel import scheme Iran also had urgently to deal with fuel shortages caused by the interruption of its refining operations. In 1981 a plan was put in place to import fuel via the Persian Gulf and transport it inland using a system of stand-­off offloading points at Sirri and Lavan islands (the floating Terminal-­18), where small product carriers took the payload further up the Persian Gulf, initially to Mahshahr, and later to Bahregan, from January 1982, and finally – from January 1987 – the Kharg Island itself. This task fell on the shoulders of the Iranian Offshore Oil Company (IOOC), as the production in northern offshore fields had already fallen to insignificant levels, making the existing IOOC infrastructure, including storage capacity, available at the oil islands. It was one of the largest ship-­to-ship fuel-­offloading operations in history, resulting in delivery of more than 570 million barrels of various refined products – equal to 2.5 years of Abadan refinery’s output at full capacity – by a thousand visiting tankers to over 1,200 smaller product carriers (forty-­six ships per month on average). Strategically important, yet very vulnerable, elements of the system were eight huge supertanker ­motherships used for both storage and mooring purposes. Overseeing the immensely complex operation was the task of a very small team of professional Iranian oilmen from various branches of the industry, but mainly the offshore oil company.10 The offloaded fuel on the mainland was then transported to the military and civilian storage depots using the existing crude oil, fuel or liquid gas pipelines. From October 1987, when the Bahregan floating SBM (single buoy mooring) terminal was destroyed during an Iraqi air strike, the Iranians almost exclusively depended on the route via Kharg, where gas turbines were rushed in and installed to help pump the offloaded fuel inland

The true role of oil in the Iran–Iraq War   83 through one of the existing crude lines, and this all happened right under the nose of the unwary Iraqis and at the same time that the island was under the most severe attacks. Iran also shipped crude oil to refineries abroad for refining, modified its existing refineries to work beyond their normal design capacities, and changed their output to match the demand, as in the case of Lavan refinery, where the naphtha or low-­grade gasoline output was blended with imported super-­premium gasoline, to quickly produce regular gasoline for the domestic market. And finally several NGL (Natural Gas Liquid – the associated gas extracted with crude oil is refined and liquefied in the so-­ called NGL plants often within the geographical area of the oilfield) plants, not far from the warfronts, were modified to produce low-­grade kerosene and gasoil, and wherever they lacked storage capacity, road tankers were mobilised to load the products directly for the warfronts. To these measures should be added the fuel rationing, and modification of factories to burn either natural gas or fuel oil, in place of the scarce gasoil. Bahregan Oil Centre (BOC) also played a crucial role in importing the much-­needed fuel. The Bahregan area, locally known as Imam Hassan, is located on the coast of the Persian Gulf 60 km north of Kharg, making it the closest Iranian offshore oil block to Iraqi territory, at about 160 km. Considering its expanse of oil installations, Bahregan was one of the hardest-­hit Iranian oil facilities, perhaps second only to Kharg. In addition, the submerged MBM (multiple buoy mooring) and floating SBM terminals several kilometres off the coast of Bahregan were made fully operational for offloading gasoil, kerosene and gasoline (the latter from 1986), for shipment to the warfronts, among other areas in need, using a purpose-­built road tanker terminal erected at the BOC. In addition, the majority of the offloaded fuel was shipped to Gorreh using two pipelines that were laid in less than two months, often under threat of enemy attack, and then further inland to warfronts and elsewhere using the existing crude oil pipeline network. However, despite the fact that the crucial fuel-­offloading operation had started at Bahregan SBM as early as 1982, and at its MBM a year after that, Iraq did not begin attacking the facility until September 1986, only a few days after Iran had started gasoline offloading there. In total, between January 1982 and February 1990 more than 500 product-­carrier tankers offloaded almost 158 million barrels of kerosene, gasoil and gasoline, roughly equal to 54,000 b/d, at Bahregan, enabling the BOC offloading and distribution system to supply the majority of fuel requirements of the warfronts. As a result Iraq kept it under substantial pressure by frequently bombing it, although it was repaired after every attack. The Bahregan products import scheme was seen as a ‘masterpiece of its own proportions’,11 in spite of the fact that Iraq’s 14 October 1987 air raid, which precisely targeted and partially sank the floating SBM

84   F. Nadimi superstructure, finally managed to effectively terminate the offloading operation at the Bahregan SBM for the remaining nine months of the war, and forced Iran to rely mainly on its other import routes. Therefore the successful launch of Iran’s refined products import programme, which unlike the export system had to start from scratch, showed an admirable capacity to adapt to new situations, as demonstrated by the BOC as both an import chokepoint and an adaptive system.

The ‘Tanker War’ In 1984 Iraq added another dimension to its Oil Campaign which was later nicknamed the ‘Tanker War’. It involved aerial attacks against oil tankers and support vessels heading to or from Kharg, and later forced Iran to completely shift its crude export operations further down the Gulf to a temporary floating terminal (Terminal-­14) originally at Sirri (from February 1985), and then at Larak (from June 1986) using the ship-­to-ship loading technique. A crucially important related development was the appointment of the new Iraqi Air Force commander, General Hameed Sha’ban, who – as Iraq’s ‘Bomber Harris’, or perhaps rather Carl Spaatz – overhauled the Iraqi Air Force’s strategic thinking and advocated an aggressive aerial campaign against Iran’s centres of gravity, especially its oil industry, using Westernised methods.12 Therefore from the beginning of 1985 Iraq started pounding Kharg with MiG-­25RB high-­altitude area bombing raids, as well as more precise low-­altitude strikes flown by new Mirage F.1EQ-5 strike fighters Iraq had been receiving from late 1984, and which were capable of carrying French-­made AM.39 Exocet anti-­ship missiles.13 Technology had come to the aid of General Sha’ban, as had been the case forty years earlier, when introduction of potent four-­engine bombers, as well as other technological breakthroughs greatly helped the RAF Bomber Command, headed by the newly appointed Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who was an avid advocate of strategic area bombing.14 Trying to keep pace with Iraq’s new and more advanced weapons systems, Iran began improving its defensive tactics from the end of 1984. It deployed static floating ‘corner reflector’ missile decoys in the shape of an arc shielding south-­eastern to south-­western Kharg, also along the route used by the tankers to approach the island, as well as towed decoys accompanying the convoys. When the Iraqis realised an increasing number of Exocets launched from its Super Frelon and Super Étendard aircraft were hitting the decoys, the French missile manufacturer made modifications to the Exocet’s seeker head.15 The Mirage F.1EQ-5s, delivered from October 1984, used such modified Exocets.16 This Mirage variant was also the first to use laser-­guided precision weaponry, as well as the vital range-­extending aerial refuelling capability. The Iraqis had realised that knocking out Iran’s oil export permanently required long-­range strike capability, and they were gradually obtaining the necessary means and skills to achieve that.

The true role of oil in the Iran–Iraq War   85 Iran in response deployed a detachment of its capable F-­14 Tomcat interceptors from Shiraz to Bushehr airbase 180 km closer to Kharg, which reduced their response time to scramble orders as well as their wear and tear by abandoning the previously practised long combat air patrol sorties flown over the Persian Gulf.17 It also started formulating both long- and short-­term oil export contingencies, as part of a project called ‘Moharram’, to cope with the possible complete loss of Kharg. The project involved setting up new outlets both on the Persian Gulf coast, and beyond the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf of Oman, connected to major oilfields by pipelines, with enough capacity to fully replace Kharg, at a rate of over 2 mb/d, using SBM facilities. It was reminiscent of the ‘Big Inch’ pipeline project from Texas to the East Coast of the United States in 1942, in response to the deadly German U-­boat operations against the vulnerable tanker traffic in American waters.18 However, none of these Iranian projects reached the operational phase, for strategic, practical and financial reasons. Up to this point, despite a rising trend in the land fighting, Iran was able to curtail severe fuel shortages caused by its reduced refining capacity through importing fuel and carrying it directly to the warzones. In addition, following a series of Iraqi strikes against Kharg in mid-­1985, which – even though particularly destructive – failed to shut down the island terminal, Iraq apparently began to realise the fact that a complete cut-­off of Iran’s oil export through physical dislocation of its terminals and other related transport/export facilities was impossible. So from 1986 they shifted their attention to onshore production means to prevent any attempt by Iran to diversify its oil export outlets.19 Saddam Hussein had decided to give the Iranians a taste of the ‘comprehensive war’ they seemed to desire, after ‘seeing their disregard for almost anything’.20 This development is highlighted in Figure 5.1 as a ‘convergence’ of lines, and can be seen as an indication that Iraq was contemplating a total blockade of Iran’s oil exports. New weapons and tactics were employed (such as targeting Genaveh SBM in January and February 1986 and Bahregan’s SBM in October 1987 using precision-­guided missiles) and larger aircraft packages, now also consisting of more modern Mirage strike aircraft, were put to effective use.21 Also, despite the fact that the Iraqi use of high-­speed area bombing from 65,000 ft (20,000 m) altitude against Kharg was largely inaccurate and did not produce the desired results, they continued to use this tactic for another year.

The summer of 1986 The haphazard Iraqi Oil Campaign so far meant the Iranians were almost completely unprepared when the real campaign kicked off in the summer of 1986. Almost no passive defences were in place and even personnel

86   F. Nadimi shelters were scarce. But this was to change soon. When Iraq launched the extensive and deadly 1986 campaign to completely destroy every large or small Iranian onshore oil facility, especially crude oil production units, Iran began to interconnect all producing wells and production units, covered pipelines with sand, sand-­bagged turbine houses and other sensitive machinery, erected sand berms or reinforced concrete walls around storage tanks, and built hardened control rooms underground. It was a substantial effort widely unnoticed by the international observers. At the same time Iraq warned Iran about its escalating economic warfare, when General Sha’ban pledged to subject the enemy to unbear­ able pressure and daily destruction ‘in the coming days . . . until Iran is brought to its knees’.22 Only a few days later, on 7 August 1986, Iraq executed a major air raid against Kharg, inflicting significant damage on air defences, loading terminals, pipelines and berthed tankers. This day is remembered by the Iranian oil workers as ‘Black Thursday’. Given the extent of the damage, Iraq was confident this was the decisive blow to Iran’s oil export. According to an American ex-­CIA officer in charge of liaising with the Iraqi military during the period in question, Iraq’s attacks of mid- to late-­ 1986 were so effective that ‘voices began to be raised in various world councils against them’, and ‘[f]ears were expressed that if this continued, Iran would in effect be bombed back to the Stone Age’.23 Despite such concerns, the Iraqi strikes on the Iranian economic targets continued in the months that followed, although in smaller numbers. When the main crude oil production plant near Ahvaz was destroyed in November of 1986, the next day a system was improvised that enabled a resumption of cumulative production in less than forty-­eight hours, during which many subsystems were reworked, moved, duplicated or eliminated, and new work flows were designed. This was a common trend at every bombed-­out plant and pumping/booster station. The substantial available surplus capacity usually made up for the damaged sections during the repair period. Iraq also managed to bomb Iran’s temporary floating export terminals at Sirri and Larak in 1986, but, despite inflicting considerable damage, it failed to continue such attacks as a result of factors such as range and other tactical difficulties. In total, the Sirri terminal was bombed only three times and Larak four times. Iraq, nevertheless, managed to keep up the pace of its overall attacks against Iran’s oil industry throughout 1987 and until the end of the war in the summer of 1988, in the meantime shifting its available assets from Kharg to other oil facilities and shuttle tankers, as well as land battles. The tanker attacks, however, failed to stop the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) from ever expanding its hauling capacity and journey rates within a convoy system. The convoy routes and timing were closely coordinated with the available Iranian surveillance assets, and protected by fighter jet patrols and naval vessels.24

The true role of oil in the Iran–Iraq War   87 As a result, despite around 300 destructive air and missile attacks and loss of over 75 per cent of its loading and about 70 per cent of its oil storage capacity, oil export from Kharg alone actually tripled between 1980 and 1988, at times using nothing but flexible hoses and mobile cranes instead of conventional loading arms.25 An Economist piece peculiarly titled ‘Iran’s jugular, and how to cut it’, called ‘Iraq’s failure to put 110 100

Oil products Crude oil

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

Figure 5.2  NITC crude and products haulage (mt).1 Note 1 National Iranian Tanker Company, NITC, 1988, p. 3, available at the NIOC Library.

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989

Figure 5.3  Number of NITC sea voyages.1 Note 1 National Iranian Tanker Company, NITC, 1988, p. 3, available at the NIOC Library.

88   F. Nadimi Kharg out of action’ a ‘seven-­year mystery’.26 The truth was that Kharg was never put out of action, not for a single day. In fact, keeping Kharg as the frontline of Iran’s economic resistance was a calculated move to both draw in and frustrate Iraqi strike assets which would otherwise be used elsewhere, and maintain morale among the war-­weary Iranians. The Iran–Iraq War once again demonstrated that while oil facilities may be highly susceptible to attack individually, the oil production and shipping infrastructure itself is less vulnerable even under the shadow of a periodically determined campaign. Developments of this war thus reinforced the Second World War’s lessons regarding the adaptability of the system of supply for vital resources under wartime conditions short of the most intensive and sustained ground and air attacks.27 In the Second World War, the Allies failed to sustain their attacks against the German synthetic oil plants, including the giant plant at Leuna, in mid-­1944, and as a result it did not take long for the synthetic fuel production to return to normal level.28 The persistent Allied attacks, together with strikes against the major Ploesti refinery complex in Romania, only preceded the D-­Day landings of 6 June 1944, and it was only two days after that day that denial of oil to Germany became the Allied air forces’ primary aim.29 Total paralysis of Iran’s oil industry could only have been possible under ideal conditions which Iraq never managed to create during the war. Despite managing to cause severe disruption to Iran’s oil system time and again, Iraq’s costly Oil Campaign failed as a result of the success of Iran’s oil industry in adapting to emerging situations and bouncing back by swiftly regaining and maintaining its production and export abilities. Therefore the campaign did not play a pivotal role in Iran’s decision-­ making process leading to the acceptance of the UN-­mediated ceasefire. 1,800

Million barrels

1,600 1,400 1,200 1,000

Total crude oil export from Kharg (NISOC statistics) Total crude oil export (Central Bank of Iran statistics) Total crude oil export, inc. oil sent to Aden refinery between 1981 and 1985 (National Statistics Org. of Iran Statistics)

800 600 400 200

0 Persian year

1357 1358 1359 1360 1361 1362 1363 1364 1365 1366 1367 1368

(1978/79) (1979/80) (1980/81) (1981/82) (1982/83) (1983/84) (1984/85) (1985/86) (1986/87) (1987/88) (1988/89) (1989/90)

Figure 5.4  Iran’s crude oil export (1978–90).1 Note 1 NISOC, Central Bank of Iran and National Statistics Organisation of Iran.

The true role of oil in the Iran–Iraq War   89 Iran’s oil structure was a complex system based on a series of processes that linked its working elements, or subsystems. So if we consider a complex system to be a collection of subsystems linked together by an interconnecting network of dynamic processes, all bound together on a platform named ‘infrastructure’, we can use chaos theory, and the complexity sciences, to explain the emerging behaviours of the system, as well as its subsystems, in chaotic (or disorderly) situations, when it reacts to disruption by self-­organising (or self-­regulating). This includes volunteer reactions by individuals or a group of individuals to restore order to their system or subsystem.30 War is a chaotic, complex phenomenon which can also transform a dynamic, complex system into an adaptive and self-­organising entity.31 In the case of an oil system caught in the middle of a war and actively targeted, as Iran’s was in the 1980s, such attributes can give the system managers – at every level – a unique opportunity to make their subsystems behave in a fashion that can make the variables driving their dynamics less discernible, and therefore significantly decrease the likelihood of longer-­ term predictability of the system as a whole, in turn reducing the vulnerability of an otherwise fully predictable and vulnerable system. A successful strategy of denial also requires accurate intelligence on the most vulnerable components of the enemy’s war economy.32 Thus by finding ways to limit the value and accuracy of the enemy’s intelligence analysis, the interdependencies on which the vulnerabilities in complex engineered systems depend cannot be readily identified.33 Therefore, the occasionally chaotic management of Iran’s oil industry might have willingly, or unwillingly, contributed to its own survival.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that, despite Iraq’s immense military investment and dedication, it failed in achieving any of its main economic warfare objectives of cutting off Iran’s oil exports by destroying storage and loading capacities at Kharg as well as other terminals; of stopping Iran’s shuttle tanker operations; and finally of halting its onshore oil production. For eight years the Iranian oil industry experienced intense periods of military as well as economic and financial pressures. However, despite all these, the Iranians managed to persevere and progressively adapt. When the war ended Iran’s production rate stood at 2.3 mb/d, which rose to 4 mb/d in no more than four years. A question might be asked as to whether this battle-­hardened industry is able to cope with any further level of ‘targeted sanctions’, ranging from some unsubstantial restrictions to even a gasoline embargo. Iran has set in motion contingency plans to increase the gasoline production to seventy-­ one million litres per day within two years, to boost the strategic reserves to ninety days of use, to accelerate the completion of new refineries or the

90   F. Nadimi expansion of existing facilities to achieve an overall refining capacity of 2.2 mb/d, and to convert several petrochemical plants to produce, of course more expensively, more than fourteen million litres per day of gasoline. These projects have already received governmental backing, but will surely get top priority, and sufficient domestic funding, if crippling sanctions are put in place against Iran. Sanctions will undoubtedly hamper technology transfers and project schedules, but Iran’s oil system has shown in the past that it can adapt and self-­organise. It leaves one to wonder if this oil industry can, as easily as some might envisage, be curtailed.34

Notes   1 This is the average figure for 2011, according to the Iranian government.   2 S. R. Lieberman, ‘The Evacuation of Industry in the Soviet Union during World War II’, Soviet Studies, 35/1, January 1983, p. 90.   3 N. Kemp, Abadan: A First-­hand Account of the Persian Gulf Crisis, London: Allan Wingate, 1953, p. 16.   4 A, Melamid, ‘The Geographical Pattern of Iranian Oil Development’, Economic Geography, 35/3, July 1959, p. 212.   5 Urgent cipher message to the British military command in Iraq – ARMINDIA from MIDEAST, GR/75584, 23 June 1941, AIR 23/974, United Kingdom National Archives.   6 Washington Post, 28 April 1973.   7 For an interesting view on the strategic aims of the both air forces see R. E. Bergquist, The Role of Airpower in the Iran–Iraq War, Maxwell AFB: Air University Press, 1988 (the text was written in 1982). Bergquist found it entirely probable that, had the Iranian air force not attacked the Iraqi oil targets massively early in the war, Saddam Hussein would have ordered his air force to destroy Iran’s, although one is then left to argue whether Iraq had the means to achieve such an objective so early in the war (p. 45).   8 Views expressed by B. Soroushi, head of the National Iranian Southern Oilfields Company (NISOC) War HQ at the time, and the former Iranian Petroleum Minister, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, interviewed by the NISOC’s Public Relations Office, Ahvaz. Interview transcript provided to the author.   9 A. Sadik, ex-­Iraqi Air Force Brigadier General, email interview, 18 August 2006. 10 Sirri IOOC records of December 1988. 11 B. Soroushi, interviewed by the NISOC. Interview transcript provided to the author. 12 See T. Cooper, A. Sadik and F. Bishop, “La Guerre Iran-­Irak: Les combats aériens”, Hors Série Avions, 2/23, December 2007, p. 50. 13 Ibid., pp. 84–6. 14 See T. D. Biddle, ‘Bombing by the Square Yard: Sir Arthur Harris at War, 1942–1945’, International History Review, 21/3, September 1999, pp. 626–64; and R. Neillands, “Facts and Myths about Bomber Harris”, The RUSI Journal, 146/2, pp. 69–73. 15 Sadik, email interview, 18 August 2006. 16 Ibid. 17 ‘The untold stories of a master aviator’ (title translated from Persian), interview with Brigadier General Shahram Rostami, Sanaye-­e Havai (Aviation Industries) magazine, Tehran, August 2009, p. 6. 18 D. Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, New York: Free Press, 1992, p. 369.

The true role of oil in the Iran–Iraq War   91 19 In fact many experts who had viewed Iraq’s mid-­1985 attacks as ‘the beginning of the end of the war’ were surprised to see an average Iranian crude production of 1.7 mb/d, which grew even further in the following months. See ‘The Iraqis Lack Conviction’, Economist, 2 November 1985, p. 58. 20 S. Chubin and C. Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War, London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1988, p. 63, quoting Saddam Hussein. 21 Cooper, Sadik and Bishop, “La Guerre Iran-­Irak: Les combats aériens, p. 86. 22 Middle East Economist Survey (MEES), 29/43, 4 August 1986, p. C2. 23 S. C. Pelletière, The Iran–Iraq War: Chaos in a Vacuum, New York: Praeger, 1992, p. 109. 24 Rostami, Aviation Industries magazine, p. 5. 25 Official NISOC figures. 26 Economist, 17 October 1987, p. 59. The Economist estimated that, given Kharg’s substantial surplus capacity, Iran would need only five working berths to meet the existing production rate at 1.5 mb/d, which was well below its 2.4 mb/d OPEC quota. When the war ended, in August 1988, Iran still operated up to eight of its fourteen loading berths at Kharg. 27 See I. O. Lesser, Resources and Strategy: Vital Materials in International Conflict: 1600-the Present, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1989, p. 145. 28 Yergin, The Prize, pp. 346–7. 29 See D. Richards, The Hardest Victory: RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War, London: Penguin, 2001, pp. 235–6. 30 A complex system tends to keep itself haphazardly balanced on the ‘edge of chaos’ (a term coined by Stuart Kauffman) by self-­regulating. See E. J. Felker, Airpower, Chaos, and Infrastructure: Lord of the Rings, Research Report, Air War College, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, July 1998, p. 12. 31 For more on the interactions between war and complex adaptive systems see A. Bousquet, The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity, London: Hurst & Company, 2009; N. F. Johnson, ‘Complexity in Human Conflict’, in D. Helbing (ed.), Managing Complexity: Insights, Concepts, Applications, Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-­Verlag, 2008; J. Gharajedaghi, Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity, 2nd edn, Burlington, MA: Butterworth-­Heinemann/Elsevier, 2006; Felker, Airpower, Chaos, and Infrastructure; S. E. Durham, Chaos Theory for the Practical Military Mind, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, USAF Air University, Air Command and Staff College, 1997; and G.  E. James, Chaos Theory: The Essentials for Military Applications, Newport: Naval War College, 1997. 32 Lesser, Resources and Strategy, p. 180. 33 See V.  M. Bier, L.  A. Cox Jr. and M.  N. Azaiez, ‘Why both Game Theory and Reliability Theory are Important in Defending Infrastructure Against Intelligent Attacks’, in V. M. Bier and M. N. Azaiez (eds.), Game Theoretic Risk Analysis of Security Threats, New York: Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2009, p. 2. 34 At the time of publication, Iran has already achieved self-­sufficiency in gasoline production, with gasoline output in March 2011 standing at seventy-­two million lit/d, with plans to increase it by twenty-­eight million lit/d by 2012. It will theoretically allow Iran to export 2.7 million litres of gasoline and other refined products per day.

6 The finances of war Iraq, credit and conflict, September 1980 to August 1990 Glen Rangwala

External debt, its accumulation and its dissolution, could easily be made into the master trope of the history of Iraq over the past thirty years. For each of the three wars that provide the most palpable benchmarks of that history, the issue of sovereign debt lurks as a key theme. The war against Iran from 1980 to 1988 was financed entirely through accruing debts, and its course and conclusion were guided to a significant extent by the actions of creditors; the 1990 invasion of Kuwait was justified on the basis of a claim that a creditor was bankrupting Iraq through its attempts to reclaim its debts; and the post-­2004 government of Iraq, a key participant in the most recent war, has been structured as much by the requirement to meet the conditions though which its indebtedness can be alleviated as it has by its need to eliminate challengers to its rule through the use of military force. There are old precedents for considering the curious persistence of this relationship between debt and war. Perhaps the most famous is Adam Smith’s final chapter of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith argued that borrowing gives the state the capacity to raise funds quickly in a way that taxation does not, and therefore is prone to being used at moments of immediate danger, such as the outbreak of war. Moreover, since taxation is set at a level as to only provide for peacetime expenses, without other sources of revenue war would bring a sudden and large increase in the tax burden, and would thus be unpopular. Without the ability of states to take out loans, Smith argued, ‘Wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken’.1 Borrowing, for Smith, therefore allowed costly and prolonged wars with only minor increases in taxation, which are converted into a sinking fund for repaying the debt. However, once the war is over, the funds set aside for repayment will in practice turn out to be inadequate, and new taxes will be even more keenly resented. There will be few within the country who will complain at the suspension of repayment, given the variety of new demands on the government’s finances. ‘Nothing’, wrote Smith, ‘but the necessities of a new war, nothing but either the animosity of national vengeance, or the anxiety for national security, can induce the people to

The finances of war   93 2

submit, with tolerable patience, to a new tax.’ A war-­torn people will be reluctant to pay for the servicing of wartime debts, and will only be dimly aware of the need for future credit. Instead, states will do things that harm their credit ratings: debasing their currency, inflating the debt away, and sometimes defaulting. Ultimately, rulers and regimes who need foreign credit will often try to solve the problem of war debts by embarking on new wars. Concern over the relationship between debt and war was mounting at the end of the eighteenth century: Immanuel Kant thought it a requirement for perpetual peace that sovereigns could not be indebted to external creditors; David Hume argued that sovereign debt led inexorably to public disorder.3 It is Smith, though, who makes perhaps the most pessimistic pronouncement on this relationship between war and debt, in a rare but unmistakeable moment of hyperbole: it ‘will in the long-­run probably ruin . . . all the great nations of Europe’.4 Hyperbole it may be, but does the relationship between war and credit explain the ruin of a great nation of the Middle East? There are immediate differences that stand out between Smith’s late-­eighteenth-century Europe and Iraq of the 1980s; state borrowing of the past drew primarily upon the domestic bond-­holder for resources, while modern states rely to a much greater extent on international finance, as will be discussed below. For Smith, though, this was an extraneous factor: he recognised that external lenders including foreign states have a significant role in lending, and in a different context acknowledged that this does not change the balance of political incentives. Smith could not have foreseen the expansion of external credit, but it does not change the argument outlined here if the main creditors are foreign states rather than local merchants and manufacturers. What matters is the government’s ability or inability to persuade its citizens of the need to accept inconveniences for themselves that come out of the expenses of war. It goes almost without saying that Smith’s argument has been extensively criticised, most obviously because what it provides as an historical explanation of the political problems of servicing debts incurred through war does not match subsequent historical experience.5 Nevertheless, there is a degree of coherence to the account and an instinctive plausibility in applying its analysis to recent Iraqi history. So it may be productive to ask what works, and what does not work, in seeing how that general argument stands in relation to the Iraqi case from September 1980 to that moment at 2 am on 2 August 1990 when four Republican Guard divisions crossed Kuwait’s western border.

The war Iraq’s system of economic management prior to the 1980–88 war provides the context for understanding its strategy during the war. Iraq had adopted a system of economic planning from 1950 that was not

94   G. Rangwala uncommon for a developmental state but was nonetheless fairly rigid in its form. Five-­year economic plans were drawn up, with a specific share of national revenues allocated to them, through which funding allocations were made. Originally 70 per cent and later 50 per cent of all oil revenues were dedicated to what was first called the Development Board, and later turned into the Ministry of Planning. Moreover, the process of drawing up five-­year development plans was to a considerable extent left outside the hands of the rulers of the day. The 1958 revolution, the 1963 coup, the countercoup later that year, and the 1968 Ba’athist coup that came to be dominated by Saddam Hussein all had one thing in common: all the victors inherited five-­year national development plans, of increasing sophistication, from their predecessors and then proceeded – notwithstanding their rhetoric on changing Iraq’s trajectory – to put those plans into operation with only minor amendments. The only incoming government that did not make any amendments at all was the new Ba’athist regime from 1968; they like their predecessors left in place a set of officials in the Ministry of Planning who received 50 per cent of the country’s export revenues to spend on ‘national development’ (broadly defined), with the plans drawn up over the two years preceding the commencement of their implementation. Iraq’s experience over this period was that, notwithstanding all the inefficiencies of planning through advanced models, the development plans offered noticeable improvements in infrastructure and income. A significant political result was that the Ministry of Planning became a centre of power in its own right, separate from the presidential office and with its own de facto budget. This budget was by the late 1960s considerably larger than the budget that came under the direct authority of the presidency.6 This separation of the institutions of planning from the ultimate seat of sovereign power began to untangle to some degree after the 1973 oil price rise. Most obviously this led to a huge expansion of revenues available to Iraq. The Dutch disease also kicked in: the decline of Iraq’s non-­oil sector followed, with the collapse of agriculture and manufacturing as the Iraqi exchange rate increased and imports came to dominate the consumer market. Iraq’s oil export revenues came to amount to over 99 per cent of its entire export revenues by 1980 (Table 6.1).7 This spelled the effective end by the government of Iraq to seek alternative sources of revenues for its official budget. No system of taxation was devised in this era. It also led to the uncoupling of oil revenues from the development budget; in 1974, the fixed link between the two was abolished, and instead a specified sum was committed in advance to the five-­year plans that had been drawn up by the Ministry of Planning, based upon a sense of confidence of increased future revenues. In this context, there was a National Development Plan in place in 1980, with a pre-­planned budget for 1981–85 that was due to kick in as the 1976–80 plan came to an end, when Iraq launched its war against

The finances of war   95 Table 6.1  Revenues from oil exports and total export revenues (1973–86)1 Year

Oil export revenues (millions of dinars)

Total export revenues (millions of dinars)

Oil revenues as a percentage of total export revenues

1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986

555 1,921 2,415 2,692 2,807 3,204 6,287 7,718 3,068 3,014 3,000 3,495 3,862 2,752

588 1,949 2,450 2,738 2,850 3,266 6,329 7,760 3,110 3,056 3,042 3,545 3,903 2,792

94.4 98.6 98.6 98.3 98.5 98.1 99.3 99.5 98.6 98.6 98.6 98.6 98.9 98.6

Note 1 Adjustments are to 1990 dinar rates.

revolutionary Iran. This is where we come back to Smith: the war that the Ba’ath regime opted to begin in September 1980 could not have been financed out of the state’s budget because this would have necessitated the removal of funds from a budget that had already been allocated; public and institutional expectations were firmly established. Instead the war-­ fighting effort had to come from funds to be raised by the presidency. Calamitously, there was an additional problem: oil revenues reduced – from an unanticipated high of $26 billion in 1980 to $10 billion in 1981 and stagnated thereafter. This was due to a number of reasons: Iranian bombing of Iraq’s oil exporting facilities in 1980 and then its offshore oil terminals; later a decrease in oil prices (steadily descending from 1981), and then Syria’s closure of the oil pipeline across its territory in 1982 as it came to side with Iran in the war. The result was that the planned development budget alone ended up exceeding Iraq’s entire export income from late 1980. Without even the cost of war, planned development expenditure exceeded state income. In 1979, the commitment to development spending was 2.85 billion dinars, 45 per cent of the state’s income coming from exports; by 1981, the commitment to development spending had risen, ambitiously, to 5.85 billion dinars, which turned out to be 188 per cent of actual export income. The following year, pre-­allocated spending alone amounted to more than double – 219 per cent – the income earned from exports. The presidency could do a number of things both to finance the shortfall in development spending and to fund the war. It could spend its foreign reserves, which amounted in 1980 to US$36 billion, and it did so

96   G. Rangwala fairly quickly. It could also borrow money from its own banking system. As this was a state monopoly, with the central bank state-­owned, this had a straightforward inflationary effect when tried: it amounted in practice simply to printing money. Or it could issue bonds. It did so on quite a few occasions from 1982 – an example is from 1985, named like so much else in the war after the battle of Qadisiyya in ad 637 against the Persian Zoroastrians. Holders of the Qadisiyyat Saddam bond received generous annuities, entry into a national lottery, and the signature of the President guaranteeing repayment. These seem to have been fairly small in scale, with some tens of thousands of subscribers across the six years in which they were issued. The Central Bank of Iraq reported at the time that the last issue in 1988 raised $300 million, but it has not been possible to confirm the validity of this; it seems improbably high. The major source of revenue, unsurprisingly, was foreign creditors. As has been amply documented elsewhere, the international coalition that supported Iraq’s war-­fighting efforts was both broad and deep-­pocketed; what is less clear is how significant its actions were to the actual conduct of the war. Before that can be evaluated through, some preliminaries are needed. One grave difficulty in disentangling the effect of Iraq’s external borrowing from 1980 to 1988 is how uncertain the numbers remain. This has become all the more apparent after 2003, as foreign creditors have pressed their case for the repayment, in whole or in part, of their loans. Claims have been made, substantiated, contested and sometimes abandoned over the past seven years, bringing both new light and sometimes new puzzles to untangling the finances of the war. There have been many attempts since 2003 to pull together this data into a single chart of Iraqi debts; Table 6.2 provides a range of estimates for debts accumulated during the war itself, and thus excluding pre-­existing debts or those accumulated between 20 August 1988 and 2 August 1990, and adjusted to 1990 US dollars.8 As can be seen from Table 6.2, the uncertainties remain large. For some creditors, there are unresolved questions about the validity of the data (such as in the case of China). For many others, the uncertainty arises because it was unclear at the time of disbursement, and remains contested now, if the funds provided constituted loans or grants. This may seem extraordinary in light of the huge sums of money involved, especially the $35 billion from Saudi Arabia. Many of these disbursements were reported in the Saudi press and some specialist literature at the time as loans, but there is no public record available in any form that specifies terms or amounts of repayment, or indeed a record of a contract that was agreed and passed between the governments specifying these common features to any loan. This was later to prove critical. As that element of controversy was becoming apparent, one private and well-­respected Iraqi economist

The finances of war   97 Table 6.2  Iraq’s debts accumulated from September 1980 to August 19881 Japan France West Germany U.S. Italy UK Other OECD (in 1990) Saudi Arabia Kuwait Other Arab States Soviet Union Romania Yugoslavia China Other sovereign creditors Multilateral organizations Commercial creditors

4,109 2,994 2,304 2,192 1,726 931 2,966 Up to 35,000 Up to 10,000 Up to 5,000 3,450 1,700 1,400–1,600 200–1,100 950–2,050 500 11,500

Note 1 Figures are in millions of 1990 US dollars.

characterised them as insh’allah loans – to be repaid in kind, God willing, on the basis of moral obligation when Iraq had the capacity to afford it. That may be so, but there is also a realpolitik interest for lenders in maintaining a situation of ambiguity: demonstrating solidarity and not making unsustainable demands upon Iraq while at war, but giving the creditor the ability at some later date to reclaim – or to ‘forgive’ – large sums of money as a way of controlling the actions of that country. If Iraq were to emerge victorious from the war, as its major state creditors hoped, it would then need to be restrained from exercising its newly found dominance in the region. This distinguishes the political significance of the loans from other forms of assistance granted primarily by Arab Gulf States, including their provision of subsidies, basing rights, re-­flagging opportunities and oil supplies. Whereas these were one-­way supplies of facilities to assist war efforts, loans served to tie Iraq into broader and longer-­term structures of control and discipline within the Gulf region. This becomes clearer when one looks at the timing of the loans. The first wave of Gulf War assistance through loans occurred when Iraq was in a position of comparative strength vis-­à-vis Iran; Saudi Arabia committed itself to an initial series of loans worth $10 billion in total from October 1980 through to December 1981; Kuwait undertook its series of three $2bn loans with instalments in late 1980, April 1981 and December 1981. Abu Dhabi and Qatar each gave $1 billion loans in 1981. During this period Iraq did not have to curtail its social expenditure; in fact, it increased over this period, and its consumer imports in particular grew. Funds were not earmarked for war efforts, and few were project specific. .

98   G. Rangwala They could be considered ‘productive debt’, in that they helped to fund civil infrastructure and other development causes. For example, the project to launch the Baghdad metro was announced 1981, with the aim of easing traffic congestion, albeit at a huge price. This announcement came shortly after another large Saudi loan was announced. There were rumblings from Saudi malcontents that it disapproved of the Government of Iraq spending their money on luxury items; they clearly had a point because it was already apparent that the scale of foreign credit was exceeding the actual costs of war. These ‘luxury’ loans did not stop from late 1981, but they tailed off after Iran retook Abadan in the autumn of 1981, and even more so with the Iranian counterattack on the oil facilities in al-­Fao in April 1982. The reversal of the war brought with it the drying up of credit facilities from the Gulf States. This process of lending when succeeding and curtailing credit when struggling goes against the common view that Gulf funding was shaped by a defensive strategy against revolutionary Iran. Instead, it indicates that credit was extended in the expectation of likely victory, in which the state that is left dominant militarily must be tied into relations of reciprocity with its southern and eastern neighbours to avoid that military supremacy extending into regional hegemony. If that follows, loans had served as a way to secure influence over Iraq’s conduct of the war, and to bring it into a system of coordination with the alliance of Arab Gulf States that had formed into the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981. However, in this respect one could argue that they failed. Iraq did finally in 1982 have to curtail its social expenditure to offset funds for its military; for the first time since the outbreak of the war, it had to pay for its own war. Nevertheless, the Baghdad government was still confident of raising a high proportion of its revenues from external sources indefinitely. They surely must have calculated that Iraq’s creditors were now tied in economically as well as politically into preventing an Iranian victory. It was well known that if Iran succeeded in toppling the Baghdad government and replacing it with a duplicate of their own, the chances of any repayment of loans was minimal: Iran had not taken loans from any of these states, and had already repudiated pre-­ revolutionary debts. Debt in this sense became part of the creation of a system of mutual dependency: creditors needed to keep supplying Iraq with enough finance to make the future servicing of its existing loans likely. As a result, there was little point extending further credit, but every point in keeping Iraq afloat. The direct transfer of resources which took place subsequently, particularly in allocating revenues to Iraq from sales of oil from within the ‘neutral zone’, the border region between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait where sovereignty had been left undefined, at the rate of some 330,000 barrels per day, reflected this thinking. From 1982, a number of Gulf States considered that Iraq should be doing more to bring the war to an end, including through contemplating the payment

The finances of war   99 of reparations to Iran, with Saudi Arabia’s change of approach especially significant in this regard. Nevertheless, past and prospective lending had not given them the mechanism to enforce this will; all that was left was the need to keep funding Iraq’s military effort. Iraq’s confidence in its ability to make autonomous decisions may therefore have come partly from this knowledge that the Arab Gulf States were trapped with sunk costs, and could not avoid throwing at least some good money after bad. However, it also came from its ability to diversify its creditors, even potentially to play them off against each other. There was no shortage of potential lenders who were willing to offset the risks that came from Iraq’s short-­term liquidity problems against its highly reliable long-­term future income; the queue of creditors meant that there was little prospect that Iraq’s heavy indebtedness would translate into its being reduced to client status. Loans and commercial credits were secured from a mix of private companies and governmental agencies from Japan in 1982, totally $3.9 billion over the forthcoming period. The United Kingdom, France and West Germany started lending in 1983, with $500 million lent in the first year. The United States opened up its trade credits from early 1985, lending a total of $4 billion over the next four years. Finally, the Soviet Union opened up a credit line and loan arrangement through 1986 and 1987, completing Iraq’s full house of borrowing from all major sovereign creditors. Both the United States and USSR entered into their first lending arrangements after Iraq’s first difficulties in servicing its external debts in 1984, some of which were renegotiated on a case-­ by-case basis. Iraq’s strategy at this time was to continue borrowing from new creditors in order to pay off in part older ones. Extra-­regional creditors kept Iraq solvent over the middle period of the war, until Saudi Arabia and Kuwait re-­entered the picture with large new loan arrangements in late 1986. Iraq was able to continue to import weapons and supplies despite a level of indebtedness that would for many countries have been debilitating.

Debt The reason why many of Iraq’s wartime debts became so politically significant is of course because of the failure of Iraq to organise the repayment of its debts prior to 1990, and the relationship of that situation of indebtedness to the invasion of Kuwait. The unpaid debts have been pored over and debated in multilateral creditor forums, bringing in political and ethical debates about the legitimacy of demanding the payment of the Ba’ath regime’s debts from the post-­Ba’ath government. What has been ignored in these discussions, quite understandably, is the debts that were actually repaid once the war was over. To explain what may be interesting about the debts repaid before 1990 again requires a few words of background.

100   G. Rangwala One argument that explains why, since 1945, there have been relatively few outright defaults on sovereign debt agreements compared to the earlier eras is that these defaults have been forestalled by the arrangement of multilateral debt rescheduling agreements. In short, creditors of states do not wish to see states default, because they have no way in the modern world to convert defaulted loans into assets; creditors cannot move into a defaulting state to auction off its resources. They are also worried about a domino effect; when one state demonstrates how easy it is for them to renege on a loan, others may follow. So, in short, they cooperate between themselves to reschedule the debts, often incurring considerable losses along the way. This is possible because of the small number of creditors involved in any one debt arrangement who can cooperate to reschedule the debt, and the willingness of sovereign debtors to cooperate with those creditors, in the knowledge that they will inevitably have to borrow from them again in future. The World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Paris Club promote cooperation between debtors and creditors to ensure rescheduling, and creditor cooperation has been institutionalised in the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee.9 In the case of Iraq immediately after the end of the war with Iran, however, there was a de facto default on its debt, with the government taking the strong position that its debts could not be repaid. Iraq accused Kuwait (and implicitly Saudi Arabia) of ‘economic warfare’ against it by trying to reclaim its debts; in a much-­publicised international statement it made in mid-­July 1990 – two weeks before the invasion – it said that Kuwait’s actions were ‘tantamount to military aggression’, listing Kuwaiti demands for the repayment of its debts alongside overproduction of oil and its extraction from a cross-­border oilfield as proof of Kuwait’s attempts to bankrupt Iraq. Almost all the major histories of Iraq attribute the decision to invade Kuwait to the economic crisis in Iraq, which is inextricably linked to its indebtedness; Wajeeh Elali goes so far as to say that ‘the decision to invade and annex a tiny, but rich and defenceless country such as Kuwait in August 1990 was driven primarily by the Iraqi government’s desire to find a quick fix to its deepening economic and financial crisis’.10 Tariq Aziz, then Iraq’s foreign minister, and speaking to a journalist immediately after the invasion, directly linked debt repayments to the decision to invade: The economic question was a major factor in triggering the current situation. In addition to the forty billion dollars in Arab debts, we owe at least as much to the West. This year’s state budget required seven billion dollars for debt service, which was a huge amount, leaving us with only enough for basic services for our country. . . . We were now desperate, and could not pay our bills for food imports. It was a starvation war. When do you use your military power to preserve yourself?11

The finances of war   101 Going back to Adam Smith’s perspective, this argument makes good sense. The Iraqi government had accumulated debts on a huge scale during war, had not made adequate provision for servicing those debts, was not cutting its domestic expenditure, and was unable to justify politically its retreat from social provision. The quick fix to an economic crisis borne of indebtedness from this perspective was to threaten Kuwait with a new war, and with Kuwait unwilling to forgive Iraq’s debts or change its oil policies, Iraq’s brinkmanship turned into military aggression. The argument has a compelling logic to it, but does it work? Not every state that enters an economic crisis invades its neighbours. Nor is the size of a debt a good indicator of the onset of economic crisis; it is the ability of a state to service its debt, which depends in turn on a repayment schedule, and not the gross value of that debt, that is the important factor for the state’s economic well-­being. One factor that made the case of Iraq distinctive was the numerous and highly dispersed nature of its creditors. Out of those who considered themselves creditors, the largest ones were not OECD members. They were not collectively institutionalised into clubs organised for the rescheduling of debts. As a result, coordination of the rescheduling of Iraq’s debts never took off. The set of ‘nested games’ that usually constitute negotiations for debt relief did not start when Iraq found itself from 1984 unable to service many of its debts from different creditors. This became a more significant problem for Iraq after the war against Iran ended. Iraq had, in some sense, won that war: Iran had accepted a ceasefire on terms that Iraq had already accepted but that Iran had for a long time resisted. But the mutual dependence mentioned earlier had dissipated: Iraq’s creditors no longer needed to take into account the extent to which their demands on Iraq to repay its debts would weaken it, and the government of Iraq must have known this. However, Iraq did have a record of successfully managing to play creditors off against each other, and this is what it tried again from 1988 to 1990. That is, it did not try to engage in bargaining collectively with a group of creditors, but preferred the servicing of the debts of some countries over those of others. By autumn 1987, most of the OECD was reluctant to extend credit to Iraq, with export insurance cover limited to 180-day terms. The exceptions were the United States and United Kingdom, which continued to extend credits and insurance cover. The Export Credits Guarantee Department in the UK noted at the time that Iraq was generally up to date with repayments, but that it was concerned that Iraq had considerable repayment arrears to other countries; it even briefly delayed the final approval of contracts at one point until Iraq reduced those arrears.12 The main credit from the United States was for an agricultural credit programme – it was one of United States’ largest in the world, administered through the Agriculture Department’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). Iraq had made these payments, in the term used by the CCC, ‘scrupulously’.13 By

102   G. Rangwala the late 1980s Iraq was a significant export market, the ninth largest customer of agricultural commodities, especially of rice, for which it was the largest US export market. By April 1989, the US Export-­Import Bank (Eximbank) reported that although Iraq faced a severe debt crisis, and would need rescheduling of repayments given their present unsustainable level in relation to its oil revenues, it was still willing to advance $200 million to Iraq in development loan credits. From the perspective of the United States, Iraq’s level of indebtedness was not a hindrance to its trade; after all, Iraq was keeping up with its debt repayments to the United States.14 With other significant powers outside the Middle East, it reached consensual rescheduling agreements, including with Japan, West Germany, Italy and Austria. It seems plausible to infer that Iraq was keeping creditworthy with the world powers it saw as influential, in the expectation that this would protect it from other creditors – that placating Peter would throw Paul off-­guard. The discrepancy between the sources of Iraq’s debts and the recipients of its actual repayments can be seen by comparing the value of Iraq’s debt (as claimed by the creditor) with its servicing of that debt. In 1990, 31.8 per cent of Iraq’s external debts were owed to the OECD and commercial creditors (using the data in Table 6.2, above). Over the period from 1980 to 1990 95.6 per cent of Iraq’s servicing of its debt was to these creditors. Multilateral organisations held 0.6 per cent of Iraq’s debt, but received 2.1 per cent of the value of Iraq’s repayments. The contrast is with Iraq’s non-­ OECD sovereign creditors: they held 67.6 per cent of Iraq’s debt, but had received only 2.3 per cent of its repayments.15 This may be the moment of high irony. If, as I have speculated here, Iraq was selectively paying or agreeing the rescheduling of the debts of its most powerful creditors, this implied that there was no major power there to coordinate attempts to reschedule its largest debts. Each of Iraq’s creditors wanted their debt to be serviced and the institutional mechanisms – specifically in this case the mismatch between the major external political actors (the United States, Japan, Europe) and the major creditors (Gulf States) – could be seen as crucial to the perception that Iraq’s economic woes were irresolvable in 1990. Iraq’s experience would show that the attempt to split one’s creditors, to be in default to one but in good standing with another, does not work; if one creditor declares a default, creditworthiness as a whole suffers. Kuwait did not take part in any attempt to reschedule Iraq’s debts, in the way that many Western creditors had done. Kuwait’s attempts to push for a schedule for repayment of the debts it was owed in 1990, followed closely behind by Saudi Arabia’s stated concerns, thus placed Iraq in the very bind it had thought it had avoided. Irrespective of the position of the OECD countries, if Kuwait declared Iraq to have defaulted, its credit line would suddenly dry up; Kuwait would be able to pursue its claims on Iraq’s external assets through foreign courts, in the way Costa Rica had recently

The finances of war   103 been pursued through the New York courts after it had defaulted on its loan repayments. Already cash-­strapped and dependent on credit for basic imports and military supplies, Iraq’s economic position was perilous in the absence of any legitimate means to delay its debt repayments to Kuwait. The translation of military threats intended to deter Kuwait from pressing its debts upon Iraq into the actual use of military force, of course, cannot be explained as an economic action alone. But the setting within which Iraq’s vulnerability to the claims of a creditor, in large part resulting from having manoeuvred itself into a position where rescheduling was not an option, is one that eighteenth-­century authors would have rightly linked to the dangers of war.

After An indication that Iraq’s strategy for repaying its debts was flawed can be seen in the post-­2003 rescheduling arrangements. The international context, of course, is completely different, with a high degree of international sympathy from the United States and European states, among others, for putting Iraq back on a sustainable footing. To assume straightforwardly that the Ba’ath regime could have done after 1988 what the post-­invasion government was able to do would be absurd. However, with that large caveat in mind, the comparison may still be instructive. The post-­2004 government of Iraq has notably not made any attempt to repudiate Iraq’s prior debts. It considered but did not make the case that it could resurrect the doctrine of ‘odious debts’ to repudiate Ba’ath era debts, despite the urgings to do so by some within the US Congress. Instead it engaged in concerted international bargaining for a deal that would be acceptable to its creditors and would thus restore its creditworthiness; this involved a staged write-­off of its debt from the Paris Club of major sovereign creditors that coordinated with terms from non-­Paris Club members and commercial creditors, debt-­for-bond swaps on agreed terms, and restructuring of payment schedules. These negotiations have been coordinated by the United States, which of course has strong political reasons for restoring Iraq’s economic stability. These multilateral efforts have not been completed, but Gulf negotiators have not yet broken ranks and pushed for a speedier form of repayment. The only significant exception has been the action by Kuwaitis, particularly Kuwait Airways, to seek restitution for Iraq’s seizure of property in 1990. The Kuwaiti government has not, by contrast, tried to seek restitution for non-­repayment of debts incurred in the period from 1980 to 1988. Just as instructively, Iraqi bond values have held their price throughout the height of the Iraq’s post­invasion civil war, indicating a level of market confidence in the reliability of the Iraqi government to pay back its debts on schedule. Eric Chaney has translated Iraqi bond prices into estimations of risk; although there is market uncertainty, the bond values indicate that even in 2006, after the

104   G. Rangwala bombing at the Samarra’ shrine of al-­Askari and the subsequent blood-­ letting, the market estimation that Iraq would not default within a year remained no lower than 94 per cent.16 The slow but ongoing alleviation of the debts of the Iran–Iraq war comes at a considerable price in terms of Iraq’s economic restructuring under International Monetary Fund (IMF ) supervision, but it does have the potential to restore Iraq to financial normality. Could this have been done twenty years ago, or was Iraq’s economic disaster an inevitable consequence of the war? No final answer is possible, but there is good reason to think the former view credible. The scale of Iraq’s partial debt write-­off after 2003 has been huge, but not historically unprecedented, although it could only have been organised within a multilateral setting of the sort that the Ba’ath regime deliberately abjured. One final, fitting irony comes from Chaney’s paper referred to above: an increase in Iraqi bond risk premiums is correlated highly with signs that relations between Iraq and Iran are deteriorating. The debts that Iraq incurred to fight Iran are now rendered sustainable through cultivating good relations with it.

Notes   1 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1776], section V.iii.51.   2 Smith, Wealth of Nations, section V.iii.39.   3 I. Kant, ‘Perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch’, in Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1795], pp.  93–131; and D. Hume, ‘Of public credit’, in Political Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1752].   4 Smith, Wealth of Nations, section V.iii.9.   5 The most thorough critique comes from J. Macdonald’s superb A Free Nation Deep in Debt, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.   6 An extensive review can be found in A. Alnasrawi, The Economy of Iraq: Oil, Wars, Destruction of Development and Prospects, 1950–2010, Westport: Greenwood, 1994, pp. 17–78.   7 The sources of the data are K. Mofid, The Economic Consequences of the Gulf War, London: Routledge, 1990, pp.  35–40; OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletins 1996–1998; Alnasrawi, Economy of Iraq, pp. 11, 55–104.   8 The sources of this data are numerous; the main documents drawn upon are IMF, ‘Use of Fund Resources – Request for Emergency Post-­Conflict Assistance’, Country Report No. 04/325, September 2004, Appendix 1, p.  38; Congressional Research Service, ‘Iraq’s Debt Relief: procedure and potential implications for international debt relief ’, 2 October 2008, pp.  1–5 et passim, and previous CRS reports; F.  D. Barton and B.  N. Crocker, A Wiser Peace: An Action Strategy for a Post-­Conflict Iraq; Appendix I: Background Information on Iraq’s Financial Obligations, Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 2003; Mofid, The Economic Consequences of the Gulf War, op. cit.; K. Bradsher, ‘After the war: reparations, war damages and old debts could exhaust Iraq’s assets’, New York Times, 1 March 1991; G. Nonneman, ‘The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq war: pattern shifts and continuities’, in L. G. Potter and G. Sick (eds), Iran, Iraq and the Legacies of War, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; and A. Jiyad, ‘An economy in a debt trap: Iraqi debt 1980–2020’, Arab

The finances of war   105 Studies Quarterly, Fall 2001. A trawl through the Middle East Economic Digest and other news sources from the 1980s has considerably supplemented these sources.   9 C. Suter and H. Stamm, ‘Coping with global debt crises: a comparative analysis of debt settlements, 1820–1986’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, October 1992; and more generally, H. Thompson and D. Runciman, ‘Sovereign debt and private creditors: new legal sanction or the enduring power of states?’, New Political Economy, 11/4, December 2006. 10 W. Elali, ‘The international debt crisis of Iraq’, Economia Internazionale, L/3, August 1997, p. 7. 11 M. Viorst, ‘Report from Baghdad’, The New Yorker, 24 June 1991, p. 90. 12 As reported in Middle East Economic Digest, 29 August 1987; and retrospectively, on 11 May 1990. 13 J. Crusoe, ‘Iraq’s creditors weigh up the risk’, Middle East Economic Digest, 4 September 1987, p. 5. 14 Z. Karabell, ‘Backfire: US Policy toward Iraq, 1988–2 August 1990’, Middle East Journal, 49/1, 1995, pp. 28–47. 15 The data on repayment comes from A. Jiyad, ‘An economy in a debt trap: Iraqi debt 1980–2020’, Arab Studies Quarterly, Fall 2001, p. 20. 16 Eric Chaney, ‘Assessing pacification policy in Iraq: evidence from Iraqi financial markets’, Journal of Comparative Economics, vol. 36, 2008, p. 5.

Part III

Regional perspectives on the war

7 The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War Cooperation and confusion Kristian Coates Ulrichsen

This chapter examines the role of the six Arab Gulf States (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) during the Iran–Iraq war. The course of the conflict between two of the three traditional regional powers directly and indirectly impacted Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States. It led to the formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in May 1981 and, eventually, to the visible and intensifying involvement of external powers in Gulf security in 1987 and 1988. Decisions taken during the eight years of war created the contextual parameters for the outbreak of the second Gulf War, triggered by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, which itself ultimately led to a third inter-­state war in the Gulf in 2003. Thus the Iran–Iraq war constitutes the beginning of more than two decades of conflict in the Gulf, and had profound short, medium and long-­term consequences for the Gulf States. There are three sections to this chapter. The first explores the origins and continuities of policy-­making in pre-­war patterns. It argues that there was a pattern of continuity between pre-­1980 trajectories and the decisions taken at the beginning of the war, in relation to the two belligerents. The second section examines the subsequent evolution of foreign policy and the intra- and international relations of the Gulf States. This section documents the nuanced and shifting balance of policy-­making in each of the six Gulf States and emphasises the plurality of regional approaches to the war. It also examines in greater detail the emergence of the GCC as a regional entity and the internationalisation of the Gulf in the latter stages of the war. The third section concludes with a consideration of the multiple legacies of the Iran–Iraq war for the Gulf States, and contextualises the conflict within a broader historical time-­span. The chapter draws throughout upon the theoretical concept of ‘omnibalancing’ developed by Gerd Nonneman, in which policy-­making balances competing and fluid determinants occurring simultaneously on domestic, regional and international levels.1 This is particularly relevant when analysing the conduct of foreign and security policy in the relatively youthful sovereign states in the Gulf. In 1980 the Gulf States were less than a decade removed from full independence, and still engaged in the

110   K. Coates Ulrichsen processes of state consolidation and institution-­building designed to manage the influx of massive oil rents and the resulting socio-­economic transformations.2 Meanwhile the smaller Gulf States still felt the loss of the external security guarantee hitherto provided by the British military presence, and were acutely aware of their vulnerabilities vis-­à-vis their larger and more powerful neighbours. These trends converged in the tumultuous period from 1979 to 1980 with the successive shocks of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the popular and militant uprisings in Saudi Arabia, and finally the Iraqi invasion of Iran. Their intersection changed the political and security landscape in the Gulf and set out the parameters that continue to frame Gulf security considerations three decades on. Bordered by Iran to the east, Iraq to the north and the Arabian Peninsula to its west, the Persian/Arabian Gulf has long represented a ‘regional security sub-­complex,’ as defined by Barry Buzan and Ole Waever. It revolves around a tri-­polar competition for influence in shaping the regional order.3 Alternating periods of conflict, cooperation and uneasy co-­existence between the three major regional powers of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have determined the fragile and shifting balance of regional power. Strategic re-­alignments periodically occurred in response to underlying changes in regime perceptions of domestic and regional interests, and in reaction to specific events. Thus, the Twin Pillars policy of the 1970s balanced the conservative and anti-­communist regimes of Saudi Arabia and Iran against the early revolutionary zeal of the pan-­Arab socialist experiment in Iraq, only to give way to the pragmatic re-­alignment of objectives between Saudi Arabia and Iraq following the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.4 Nevertheless the Gulf was (and remains) a site of human and ideational cross-­currents stretching back into antiquity. Before the establishment of national boundaries and modern forms of statehood in the twentieth century, the littoral communities on the Persian shore, the eastern coastline of the Arabian Peninsula and in southern Mesopotamia arguably shared more in common with each other than with their future inland capitals. Complex interconnections grew up over centuries of settlement and exchange that survived until the imposition of state structures.5 Patterns of migration and trade tied the peoples of the Gulf into overlapping communities and contributed to the rise of trans-­national forms of identity that ran across the new political boundaries. A strong degree of fluidity thus characterised (and continues to characterise) internal and external concepts of security in the Gulf. Sub- and supra-­state alternatives to regime legitimacy exist in the form of cross-­border tribal and religious affiliations. These erode the barriers between the domestic and international domains and heighten rulers’ awareness of the interlinked nature of the security challenges they face. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sheikhs of the Arabian Peninsula regularly played on local and regional events and great

The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War   111 power rivalries to their advantage. A cycle of external penetration and local accommodation thus developed as rulers sought to maximise their own autonomy and prestige within the parameters available to them.6 This formative period encompassed the transformation of the smaller Arabian sheikhdoms into proto-­state entities, in addition to the creation of increasingly powerful and centralising states in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. Importantly, it led to the embedding of the principle of the external security guarantee in the security calculations of the Arabian Peninsula states. However, it also witnessed the origin of a number of boundary disputes both within the Arabian Peninsula and with Iraq and Iran. This complicated intra-­Gulf relations throughout the twentieth century, and, in the case of Iraq’s claim on Kuwait, a combination of ideational and material threat led to invasion and military conflict in 1990.7 Divergent political trajectories in Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia after the First World War thus transformed the dynamics of the nascent security system in the Gulf. The rise of modernising states in Iraq and Iran shifted the centre of gravity in the Gulf away from the British-­protected sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula, and interfered with the web of cross-­ waterway linkages as new political boundaries and nation-­states developed. The gradual centralisation of authority following the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 similarly changed the balance of power on the peninsula itself, away from the coastal city-­states. Meanwhile, contemporaneous developments in Iraq and Iran posed challenges of a different sort from that presented by Saudi Arabia, which despite the periodic flare-­up of boundary tensions did not present an ideational threat to the political survival of the similarly conservative Gulf monarchies. In Iraq, the July 1958 military coup bloodily overthrew the pro-­British ruling elite and triggered a thoroughgoing political and social revolution.8 Meanwhile in Iran the restoration of the Shah in 1953 led him to entertain grandiose ambitions of attaining Iranian hegemony in the Gulf through an increasingly southward-­oriented and interventionist policy toward the region.9 These events fundamentally reshaped the international relations of the Gulf and introduced into the regional mix expansionist actors with designs to reclaim supposedly ‘lost territories’ on the Arabian Peninsula.10 This occurred during a state of flux in the British-­protected security system in the Gulf. A combination of economic stringency and financial difficulty, the accelerating pace of decolonisation in the 1960s and military setbacks in Aden in 1967 prompted a reconsideration of British defence priorities and the decision to withdraw from all commitments east of Suez.11 The period of British withdrawal from the Gulf between 1961 and 1971 presented existential dangers to the small Arabian Peninsula sheikhdoms on the cusp of independence. The loss of their erstwhile protector encouraged Iraq and Iran to renew territorial claims on Kuwait and Bahrain respectively. Immediately after Kuwaiti independence in 1961, the Iraqi prime minister, Abd al-­Karim Qasim, declared it to be an ‘integral part’ of Iraq. This

112   K. Coates Ulrichsen necessitated the intervention of 7,000 British troops to forestall any putative invasion.12 Iran maintained a long-­standing territorial claim on Bahrain that intensified following the unexpected British announcement in January 1968 of full military withdrawal from the Gulf by the end of 1971.13 The issue was settled by a United Nations mission that visited Bahrain in April 1970 and conclusively reported that Bahrainis favoured an independent Arab state.14 Qatar also faced a long-­standing territorial dispute with an expansionist neighbour, in its case Saudi Arabia. The Peninsula historically had competed with Saudi hegemonic designs on the Arabian Peninsula that expanded into outright territorial claims in 1835 and 1851, and culminated in the 1930s when King Abdul-­Aziz Al-­Saud ‘informed’ the ruler of Qatar that those living on the peninsula were his subjects and part of his tribal territory. Rather more worrying was Iran’s seizure of the islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs from the emirates of Sharjah and Ras al-­Khaimah respectively, on the day before Britain’s withdrawal in November 1971.15 This confirmed the fears initially expressed by the rulers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, who in 1968 had reacted to the sudden news of Britain’s impending military withdrawal by offering to meet the annual operating costs of British forces and thereby prevent the withdrawal of their external security guarantor.16 For the smaller newly independent Arab Gulf States, the 1970s were thus a highly dangerous time. Rulers felt themselves caught between their three larger and powerful neighbours yet they lacked the protection of their external security guarantor. Consequently the decade between the British withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971 and the enunciation of the Carter Doctrine in 1980 was one in which threats and opportunities intermixed dynamically at the national, regional and international levels. This complicated the conduct of foreign policy and security formulation, as did the spectre of their larger and more powerful neighbours. Between 1965 and 1975 a long-­standing rebellion in the Omani province of Dhofar saw the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) and its Chinese and Soviet supporters give material and ideological assistance to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG). The organisation’s revolutionary objectives heightened the young Gulf States’ sense vulnerability. This was further stretched by Iraqi involvement in the coup against the ruler of Sharjah in 1973,17 and in Baghdad’s support for, and hosting of, revolutionary cells of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman until 1975.18 Two important trends characterised the period leading up the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war in September 1980. The first was the gradual rapprochement between Iraq and the Arab Gulf States after 1975 while the second was the perceived threat to the Gulf States’ legitimacy, internal security and external stability resulting from Iranian pan-­Islamism after 1979.19 Iraq’s foreign policy became more pragmatic and shed its revolutionary and socialist strands as Saddam Hussein prioritised pan-­Arabism as

The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War   113 part of a bid for regional leadership. Normalisation of relations with Iraq’s Arab neighbours accelerated following the ostracism of Egypt in the Arab world in the aftermath of the Camp David accord with Israel in 1979.20 In sharp contrast was the threat posed by the Iranian revolution to domestic security and regional stability, especially during its initial period when Iranian leaders proclaimed their intention to export their revolution. The new Islamic Republic rejected the regional status quo and challenged the legitimacy of the regimes in power in the Arab Gulf States. Khomeini himself stated that monarchical and secular-­nationalist forms of governance were incompatible with the requirements of ‘Islamic governance’.21 For Saudi Arabia in particular, this struck at the al-­Sauds’ self-­ legitimating connection of religion and state institutions. In November 1979 it coincided with two formative episodes of domestic opposition, as Sunni Wahhabi radicals stormed and seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. This overlapped with seven days of bloody street violence between state security forces and thousands of frustrated Shi’ites in the oil-­rich Eastern Province.22 The two events marked a watershed in Saudi politics, and while they primarily reflected domestic tensions and socio-­economic dynamics within Saudi Arabia, the popular appeal and ideational message of the revolution in Iran did play a role in mobilising Saudi Shi’ites against the regime.23 Elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, the impact of the revolution, and regimes’ responses to it, led to a sharpening of intra-­communal tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites (notably in Kuwait and Bahrain) or between groups with Arab or Persian roots (in Dubai and Qatar, for example).24 Saddam Hussein visited Saudi Arabia on 5 August 1980. A joint communiqué emphasised the common interests between the two countries, and it appears very likely (although unproven) that Riyadh was informed of, and acquiesced in, the plan to invade Iran. The outbreak of the war, together with the Shah’s downfall eighteen months previously, signified the ignominious ending of the US ‘Twin Pillars’ policy of working with the conservative, monarchical status quo bulwarks of Iran and Saudi Arabia to achieve regional security. Moreover, the violent upheaval in Iran carried ominous echoes of the Iraqi monarchy’s bloody demise in Baghdad in 1958 in the view of the ruling families in the Arabian Peninsula. Having witnessed the downfall of a second monarchical system, and with the recent disturbances in Saudi Arabia very much in mind, the needs of regime survival and self-­preservation came to the forefront of policy-­ making in this volatile period. All six Arab Gulf States reacted to the outbreak of war with varying degrees of support for Iraq. This reflected their conviction that there was no effective alternative approach to dealing with the revolutionary threat to their polities.25 Threats were perceived as operating at the trans-­national and inter-­cultural, as well as traditional inter-­state levels.26 Alarm at the outbreak of military conflict was consequently tempered by concerns for

114   K. Coates Ulrichsen domestic and regional stability, and regimes’ calculations that an Iranian victory would unleash revolutionary forces beyond their capability to contain. This influenced both the initial decision to create the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Gulf States’ subsequent balancing of internal and external policy during the eight years of war that followed. However, it was not consistent across all six states, and diverging patterns of policy meant that Gulf States’ policies toward the war were characterised by considerable plurality that, at times, appeared to be working at cross-­purposes with each other. This section turns to the two macro-­trends in the foreign policy and international relations of the Gulf States during the war. These were the formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981 and the gradual internationalisation of the Gulf region. The actual creation of the GCC in May 1981 was an immediate and ad hoc reaction to the situation of profound uncertainty occasioned by the Iranian revolution and the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war.27 The new body was neither a political nor a military alliance and lacked an integrative supra-­national decision-­making institution for the sharing of sovereignty akin to the European Commission.28 It also suffered from lingering suspicion among the smaller Gulf States, particularly Qatar but latterly also the United Arab Emirates, at the potential for Saudi hegemony or dominance within the new organisation.29 It also represented the outcome of several competing visions of regional cooperation extending back to a meeting of the foreign ministers of all eight Gulf States in Muscat in 1976. Notably, however, Iraq, in addition to Iran, was excluded from the regional organisation that was launched in Abu Dhabi on 25 May 1981. From the beginning, the GCC saw itself as a cautious status quo entity, intended to shield its member states and societies from the trans-­national and unconventional threat of spill-­over from the warring parties.30 All six member states shared a broad desire to see an end to the war, avoid an Iranian victory, and bolster their collective security. Indeed, its first Secretary-­General, Abdullah Bishara, quickly identified Iran’s search for regional hegemony as constituting the major threat to the GCC states’ stability.31 Within this overarching framework, two camps nevertheless emerged. Their geographical position in the northern Gulf and greater intermixing of Sunnis and Shi’ites exposed Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to a range of material and ideological threats to their security. Attacks (from both sides) on oil infrastructure and commercial shipping passing through the Gulf demonstrated how internal and external aspects of security were intertwined as they threatened to disrupt the mechanisms of wealth generation and rent accrual that underpinned social cohesion in these redistributive states. Kuwait came under rocket and mortar fire as early as November 1980, while instances of terrorism and political violence escalated, including attacks against the US and French embassies and Kuwaiti oil installations in December 1983 and an assassination attempt

The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War   115 against the Emir in May 1985. These incidents raised internal tensions in Kuwait and highlighted the interlocking trans-­national threats to domestic security as the pro-­Iranian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility while the majority of those arrested were Iraqi Shi’ites.32 Bahrain, too, witnessed acts of political violence and terrorism, most notably an attempted coup in December 1981 plotted by the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, with clear links leading back to Iran.33 Furthermore, the politicisation of Shi’ite movements led them to articulate their own political ideologies and translate them into political organisations. This was strongest among the Shiraziyyin (followers of Mohammed and Hasan Al-­Shirazi, scions of a prestigious Iranian clerical family based since the nineteenth century in the Iraqi city of Karbala; during the 1970s, increasing repression of political and religious dissidents in Iraq caused them to flee to Kuwait, while the organisation also developed significant followings among Shi’ite communities in Saudi Arabia, as well as Bahrain).34 The Shiraziyyin strongly believed in exporting the Iranian revolution, which they saw as the beginning of a process of a world (rather than specifically Iranian) revolution. They played a central role in the creation of the Office of the Liberation Movements in Iran in 1981. This was tasked with coordinating armed operations against ‘oppressive rulers’ in neighbouring countries and singled out Bahrain (along with Iraq) for its material and ideological support of domestic Shi’ite movements.35 These attempts to foment domestic instability focused GCC policy-­ makers’ attention on the ideational threat emanating from Tehran and led to a hardening of stances toward Iraq, with Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul-­Aziz labelling Iran ‘the terrorist of the Gulf ’. Most spectacularly, Saudi Arabian pilots later shot down an Iranian F-­4 fighter over the Kingdom’s territorial waters in June 1984 in the first example of the use of Saudi military force against Iran.36 Saudi Arabia’s hard-­line stance reflected its concern for the intermixing of external Iranian support and its internal Shi’ite communities, particularly in the oil-­rich Eastern Province. Saudi Shi’ites complained of systematic discrimination and marginalisation arising from the politics of uneven development across the Kingdom. Although Saudi officials reacted to the violent Shi’ite uprising in 1979 with a combination of repression and political concessions, they retained an enduring suspicion of an Iranian ‘Shi’ite threat’ that, to most policy-­makers in Riyadh, constituted the most serious challenge to the Kingdom’s regional security and stability.37 Saudi Arabia and Kuwait therefore led the way in providing generous loans, financial assistance and oil- and non-­oil support to Iraq throughout the war, amounting to an estimated $25 billion from Saudi Arabia alone. The Kingdom also provided for the transhipment of civilian and military supplies to Iraq, while direct financial assistance was also forthcoming from Abu Dhabi and Qatar.38 Kuwait provided a further $13.2 billion in non-­ collectible ‘war relief subsidies’ as well as loans, and provided Iraq with vital

116   K. Coates Ulrichsen deep-­water facilities at its ports of Shuwaikh and Shuaiba. These made possible the overland flow of arms into, and oil out of, Iraq, thereby bypassing the Iranians’ naval supremacy in the northern Gulf. Kuwait City was only 150 ­kilometres from the war zone and Kuwait trade and commercial shipping was directly affected by this supremacy, and by the fighting more broadly, with its volume of trade reportedly falling by one-­third as a result of the war. Beginning in 1982, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also supplied 330,000 barrels of oil per day from their shared neutral zone to compensate for Syria’s closure of the pipelines running through its territory to Iraq.39 Beginning in the following year, the two countries also transferred the profits of oil production in their shared Khafiji oilfield to the Iraqi governments.40 Conditions in the lower Gulf lacked the immediate threat to security found in the northern states, both externally, in terms of actual proximity to the battlefield, and internally in the northern states’ possession of sizeable Shi’ite communities that they feared might become radicalised or manipulated by Iran. Policy-­makers in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman sought to balance their limited financial and declaratory (through GCC communiqués) support for Iraq with their continuing commercial relations with Iran. This delicate balancing act reached extreme proportions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where Dubai, Sharjah and Umm al-­Qaiwain supported Iran and maintained extremely close trading ties with Tehran. Dubai additionally benefited greatly from damaged ships calling at the extensive dry-­dock repair facilities at its massive new port in Jebel Ali. This had been decried as a white elephant when it opened in 1979, but the rising demand for ship repair facilities provided a significant economic boon for the emirate.41 The other four emirates of Abu Dhabi, Ras al-­Khaimah, Ajman and Fujairah all sided with Iraq, with Ras al-­Khaimah offering Baghdad the opportunity to establish air bases on its territory.42 The war thus split the fragile federation down the middle and severely complicated attempts to formulate a common foreign and security policy. The lower Gulf States also took the lead in calling for diplomatic mediation and exploring the basis for a settlement of the war. Omani officials cited their delicate geostrategic position – caught between antagonistic powers and local and international processes of interference – as reason for a consensual approach to foreign policy-­making.43 This pragmatic stance culminated in 1987 when Sultan Qaboos of Oman appointed a special representative to facilitate the resumption of diplomatic contacts between Iran and Iraq. Similarly, Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi was mandated by the GCC to open a dialogue with Iran with a view to persuading Tehran to accept UN Security Resolution 598 calling for an end to the fighting.44 Qatar also advocated a diplomatic approach in an early sign of its evolving auto­ nomy from Saudi Arabian foreign policy positions. This began a trend that would gather momentum and cause significant friction between the two countries in the 1990s, and gain global recognition in the 2000s.45

The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War   117 Policy-­formulation at the GCC level was thus complicated by numerous factors. These could, in part, be attributed to the growing pains of a new international organisation, although the difficulties persist to this day. They reflected the loose nature of the political and economic alliance that was created in 1981 as well as the concentration of power and decision-­ making authority within small circles in each member-­state. The trajectory of the Peninsula Shield collective defence force was emblematic of the tensions that existed between the national and regional levels. The force was established in 1984 but never developed a meaningful concept of, or capacity for, integrated operations. Instead, each GCC state continued to function as a separate armed force, and the Peninsula Shield was viewed with considerable suspicion by the smaller states as a potential tool for Saudi domination over the Arabian Peninsula. The force was eventually disbanded in 2005 after the proliferation of bilateral defence agreements with the United States rendered effectively meaningless the notion of a collective force.46 Divisions between the GCC on the urgency and nature of the threats posed by the Iran–Iraq war thus intersected with powerful centrifugal tendencies on the part of Gulf policy-­makers. These undermined collective approaches to addressing the conflict and paved the way for its internationalisation. Most notably, in November 1986 Kuwaiti officials requested the GCC to provide maritime protection to Kuwait’s oil and merchant fleet, which was coming under sustained attack. They also called for the Peninsula Shield to station a contingent of Peninsula Shield troops on Kuwait’s Bubiyan Island, partially to counteract Iran’s seizure of the Fao Peninsula the previous February, but also mindful of forestalling possible expansionary Iraqi designs on the strategically located island blocking Iraq’s maritime access to the Gulf. Yet their request was declined owing to unwillingness to confront Iran politically or militarily, with Oman and the UAE displaying greatest opposition to the proposals. This left Kuwaiti officials with little option but reluctantly to turn to external powers to provide the maritime protection for its fleet, leading to the re-­flagging and chartering of Kuwaiti vessels in 1987 and 1988.47 The internationalisation of the Gulf after 1986 further undercut the incipient regionalist project by reinforcing bilateral approaches to dealings with external powers. This occurred as the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, France and Italy all sent warships to conduct convoy operations for re-­flagged and chartered vessels. By the end of the conflict in 1988 there were a total of 82 Western vessels, including thirty-­ three combat ships, in the Gulf and adjacent areas, along with a further twenty-­three combat Soviet ships, minesweepers and support vessels.48 Iranian attacks on re-­flagged ships now invited external retaliation, as when US ships destroyed Iranian offshore oil platforms in response to attacks on US-­flagged ships in October 1987 and April 1988.49 The US Navy also shot down an Iranian civil airliner carrying 290 passengers and

118   K. Coates Ulrichsen crew on 3 July 1988 after officers on the USS Vincennes allegedly mistook it for a fighter jet preparing to attack the vessel, which was traversing the Strait of Hormuz at the time. Highly controversial at the time and ever since, the tragedy reflected the atmosphere of mutual mistrust and bellicosity that characterised Western relations with Iran during this period. Although the United States only acquired large-­scale basing rights in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, developments between 1986 and 1988 brought a sizeable external naval force into the Gulf for the first time since Britain’s departure from the region in 1971. They represented a striking departure in the GCC states’ policy of avoiding entanglement in superpower politics and pre-­1980 conviction that regional security was the preserve of the Gulf States themselves. It demonstrated how the war posed a threat to security on multiple levels, both directly in actual physical attacks on (primarily Kuwaiti) shipping and territory, and indirectly through targeting the flows of oil revenue, without which the redistributive mechanisms binding the social contract and state– society relations could not function. While the positioning of large-­scale American forces in the Gulf only occurred during and after the second Gulf War of 1990–91, the decisions taken between 1986 and 1988 marked the definitive end of the post-­1971 era of Western disengagement from the direct security and stability of the Arabian Gulf States. Although the Iran–Iraq war ended with the combatants in nearly the same positions as when they started, and did not directly involve the GCC states (as in the second Gulf War in 1991), decisions taken during it held significant regional and short, medium and longer-­term implications for the Gulf States. At a regional level it introduced the GCC into the triangular balancing act that hitherto had comprised Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. As the foregoing suggests, this transition was far from seamless and uncontested. It introduced new inter-­GCC and bilateral–multilateral tensions into the regional security equation. These remained unresolved during the war, as the Gulf States’ inability to graft a substantive approach to collective security paved the way for the internationalisation of the Gulf and the direct introduction of external actors. This disequilibrium, and the semi-­contradictory processes that underpin it, continue to hamper collective responses to regional security. It reached its apogee during the George W. Bush Administration (2001–2009) when US officials refused to negotiate with the GCC as a bloc entity and bilaterally granted Major Non-­NATO Ally status to Kuwait and Bahrain.50 Decisions taken during the Iran–Iraq war had other long-­lasting implications for the Gulf States. In the short term, the temporary convergence of Kuwaiti and Iraqi interests between 1980 and 1988 left unresolved a slew of boundary and territorial issues between the two countries. These included Iraq’s strategic desire for greater access to Gulf waters and lingering friction over the Kuwaiti islands of Warba and Bubiyan. The two islands directly blocked the approaches to Iraq’s only deep-­water port at

The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War   119 Umm Qasr. Iraqi officials considered provocative Kuwait’s construction of a bridge linking Bubiyan to the Kuwaiti mainland. This was magnified by Umm Qasr’s increasing importance as a port to the Iraqi war effort owing to Basra’s vulnerable location astride the front line with Iran. Iraq also experienced a financial crisis after 1988, attributable partially to its war debts to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but also to low oil prices, which Saddam Hussein suspected were the result of deliberate GCC state policies.51 All of these issues provided elements of the basis for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, only two years after the end of the Iran–Iraq war. This fitted into a historical pattern of Iraqi expansionary designs against its southern neighbour. Claims of territorial sovereignty over Kuwait originated in differing interpretations of the Anglo-­Kuwaiti Agreement in 1899 and the subsequent Anglo-­Ottoman Convention in 1913 that defined the limits of Ottoman jurisdiction in the Persian Gulf.52 In December 1922, the Uqair Protocol defined the boundaries between the then-­ British mandate of Iraq, Kuwait and what later became Saudi Arabia. Although the established border was subsequently accepted by Kuwait and Iraq in 1923 and reaffirmed in 1927, Iraqi leaders periodically revived the issue and claimed Kuwait as Iraq’s ‘Nineteenth Province’.53 As described earlier, this occurred immediately after Kuwaiti independence in 1961 and was based on Kuwait’s pre-­1899 status as a part of the Ottoman province of Basra.54 Despite being rebuffed, Iraq repeatedly requested a lease on Bubiyan island and initiated a series of border incursions throughout the 1970s. Taken in this longer context, and culminating in the 1990–91 invasion and occupation, the two countries’ close cooperation during the first Gulf War becomes all the more striking. Moving to the medium term, the Iran–Iraq war dislocated, but did not destroy, the triangular balancing act of power relations in the Gulf. Instead, this occurred during and after the second Gulf War in 1991 and the US-­led policy of ‘Dual Containment’ of Iraq and Iran that followed. Significantly, the war and its aftermath led to the escalation of the United States’ military footprint in the Arabian Peninsula. This had its roots in the Carter Doctrine of 1980, and built on existing small-­scale agreements such as the access to facilities agreement in Oman, the MIDEASTFOR base in Bahrain, the reorganisation of the Rapid Deployment Task Force into Central Command, and the long-­standing web of security arrangements with Saudi Arabia.55 Nevertheless, Washington’s initially lukewarm reaction to Kuwait’s request in late 1986 to re-­flag its fleet is a useful reminder that this transition was reluctant – and far from predetermined – in the mid to late 1980s. Indeed, the transformative shift in the international relations of the Gulf came after 1991 with the insertion of the United States as the major (and external) regional actor. The United States emerged from the Gulf War as the overwhelming military power in the region, as in the wider world. Successive presidential administrations under George H.  W. Bush

120   K. Coates Ulrichsen and Bill Clinton designed a ‘Dual Containment’ policy that excluded Iraq and Iran from regional security structures, while deepening their military relations with the GCC states.56 This was achieved through the signing of separate defence cooperation agreements with Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (with the first two also being accorded Major Non-­NATO Ally status in 2002 and 2004 respectively). The GCC states developed into major logistical and command-­and-control hubs for the US Fifth Fleet in Manama in 1995, and the forward headquarters of US Central Command (CENTCOM) in Doha in 2002, while substantial stocks of military equipment were pre-­positioned at airbases and ports in the UAE and Kuwait, which became the administrative and logistical lifeline for multinational forces in Iraq after 2003.57 Rather than the Iran–Iraq war, it was the legacy of the decisions taken between August 1990 and February 1991 that exerted a decisive and destabilising influence on the evolution of security policy in the Gulf. The permanent – and increasingly visible – presence of US troops and bases in the Arabian Peninsula led to a growing divergence between political and public opinion as the American military footprint deepened throughout the 1990s. This arose partially as a result of the growing influence of Islamism as a social and political force in all GCC states after 1990. It also reflected greater scepticism of US motives and perceptions of regional threats, especially after the election of President Khatami in 1997 was greeted with cautious optimism in the Gulf States and a move to normalise relations between the GCC and Iran.58 The emerging gap between regime and public opinion opened up a space for oppositional voices to register their discontent at the direction of policy. This occurred on several levels and was most visible among Islamists, although it encompassed secular and nationalist strands of opinion as well. Most notably, it provided the background to Osama bin Laden’s notorious declaration of ‘Jihad against Jews and Crusaders’ on 23 February 1998, which represented a paradigm-­ altering and existential threat to the ideational and moral legitimacy of the GCC regimes.59 The third trend becomes clear when the longue durée historical perspective is applied to the study of Gulf security structures. It relates to the presence of an external guarantor of security. Looked at in this context, the period between the British military withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971 and the internationalisation of the Iran–Iraq war in 1987 constituted an anomalous interregnum. During this decade and a half the smaller Gulf States lacked an external security umbrella while the three larger powers jockeyed for position in the new regional order.60 This period was one of considerable danger for the newly independent states in the Arabian Peninsula. Ruling elites confronted an array of material and ideological threats to internal security and regional stability, in addition to multiple challenges to their political survival, from the Iranian seizure of the UAE islands in 1971 to Iraqi Ba’athist and South Yemeni support for radical opposition movements in

The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War   121 the early 1970s, the 1979 Iranian revolution and Saudi unrest, and culminating in the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war in 1980. With this in mind the period between 1971 and 1987 stands out as one of great danger to the young states of the Arabian Peninsula. This formative era of state-­building and institutional consolidation was magnified by the accrual of substantial oil revenues following the 1973 oil shock and the resulting oil-­price boom. The Carter Doctrine in 1980 recognised their strategic and commercial importance but the Gulf States struggled without the external protection formerly provided by the United Kingdom. Beginning in 1987–88 and solidifying into a permanent posture in 1990 the US projection of force and provision of security superseded the era of British protection. However, there were significant differences between them, notably the vastly greater capability and reach of US protection and the fact that it was launched in agreement with, rather than through subjugation over, local actors. The impact of the Iran–Iraq war on the Gulf States was therefore multi-­ dimensional. In 1981, the formation of the GCC reshaped the regional architecture in response to the dangerous new conditions of regional instability. Its subsequent durability over three decades and three inter-­ state wars is itself an important legacy. Moreover, its emergence complemented the transformation of several of the Gulf States, notably Qatar and the UAE, into influential and powerful global actors. In spite of its organisational weaknesses and inability to work toward political or economic integration the GCC has represented the most successful sub-­regional experiment in the Middle East. This represents a significant legacy of the decisions taken during the Iran–Iraq war. Moving from the regional to the national level, the war had uneven repercussions on each of the six GCC states. Nevertheless, it did constitute the first of three wars in the Persian Gulf that followed and reflected the unresolved tensions and legacies of the preceding conflict. These wars decisively altered the internal and international relations of the region, and particularly the positioning of the GCC states vis-­à-vis Iraq and Iran. Significantly, they led to the gradual meshing of US-­led (‘Western’) and Gulf State strategic objectives. This sealed the earlier convergence of geo-­ commercial oil-­based interests into an interlocking relationship based on shared interests in regional stability, however narrowly defined.61 For all of the reasons listed above, the multiple legacies of the Iran–Iraq war on the Gulf States far outlasted the end of hostilities and continue to make themselves felt three decades on.

Notes   1 G. Nonneman, ‘Determinants and Patters of Saudi Foreign Policy: “Omnibalancing” and “Relative Autonomy” in Multiple Environments’, in P. Aarts and G. Nonneman (eds), Saudi Arabia in the Balance: Political Economy, Society, Foreign Affairs, London: Hurst and Co., 2005, p. 351.

122   K. Coates Ulrichsen   2 Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates became independent states in 1971. Although nominally independent, Oman only emerged as a nation-­state in 1970 following Sultan Qaboos bin Said’s takeover. Kuwaiti independence preceded them by a decade (1961). The modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was formed in 1932.   3 B. Buzan and O. Waever, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 191–2.   4 H. Furtig, ‘Conflict and Cooperation in the Persian Gulf: The Interregional Order and US Policy’, Middle East Journal, 61/4, 2007, pp. 627–8.   5 W. Beeman, ‘Gulf Society: An Anthropological View of the Khalijis – Their Evolution and Way of Life’, in L. Potter (ed.), The Persian Gulf in History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 147–9.   6 F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 172.   7 M. S. Casey, The History of Kuwait, Westport, CO: Greenwood Press, 2007, p. 79.   8 H. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 1116.   9 Prominent examples of Iranian intervention in the 1960s and 1970s included the military assistance provided to Oman during the Dhofar rebellion, the seizure of three islands belonging to Ras al-­Khaimah and Sharjah in 1971, and its long-­standing territorial claim on Bahrain. See F. Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 103. 10 W. R. Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization, London: I.B. Tauris, 2006, p. 893. 11 F. Halliday, Arabia without Sultans, London: Saqi Books, 2nd edn, 2002, p. 456. 12 S. Smith, Kuwait, 1950–1965: Britain, the al-­Sabah, and Oil, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 116 and p. 120. 13 Telegram from the British Ambassador to Iran to the Foreign Secretary, 29 December 1970, The National Archive (TNA), FCO 8/1372. 14 Winspeare Guicciardi, ‘Good Offices Mission Bahrain’, 24 April 1970, TNA, FCO 8/1370. 15 W. R. Louis, ‘The British Withdrawal From the Gulf, 1967–71’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31/1, 2003, p. 102. 16 C. Davidson, Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success, London: Hurst & Co., 2008, p. 63. 17 Ibid., p. 251. 18 M. Valeri, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State, London: Hurst and Co., 2009, p. 60. 19 F. G. Gause, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 49–50. 20 C. Tripp, ‘The Foreign Policy of Iraq’, in R. Hinnebusch and A. Ehteshami (eds), The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, London: Lynne Rienner, 2002, pp. 175–6. 21 A. Adib-­Moghaddam, The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 29. 22 G. Okruhlik, ‘Rentier Wealth, Unruly Law, and the Rise of Opposition: the Political Economy of Oil States’, Comparative Politics, 31/3, 1999, p. 299. 23 T. Jones, ‘Rebellion on the Saudi Periphery: Modernity, Marginalization, and the Shi’a Uprising of 1979’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 38/2, 2006, p. 213. 24 L. Louer, Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf, London: Hurst and Co., 2008, p. 155.

The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War   123 25 G. Nonneman, ‘The Gulf States and the Iran–Iraq War: Pattern Shifts and Continuities’, in L. Potter and G. Sick (eds), Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 173. 26 Adib-­Mughaddam, International Politics of the Persian Gulf, p. 29. 27 Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, ‘The Gulf Cooperation Council: Nature, Origin and Process’, in M. Hudson (ed.), Middle East Dilemma: The Politics and Economics of Arab Integration, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 154. 28 Abdulla Baabood, ‘Dynamics and Determinants of the GCC States’ Foreign Policy, with Special Reference to the EU’, in G. Nonneman (ed.), Analyzing Middle Eastern Foreign Policies, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 147. 29 A. Cordesman and Khalid Al-­Rodhan, ‘The Gulf Military Forces in an Era of Asymmetric War: Qatar’, Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2006, p. 11. 30 Personal interview with Abdullah Bishara (Secretary-­General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, 1981–93), Kuwait City, 21 October 2009. 31 J. Kechichian, ‘Can Conservative Arab Monarchies Endure a Fourth War in the Persian Gulf?’ Middle East Journal, 61/2, 2007, p. 287. 32 Abdul-­Reda Assiri, Kuwait’s Foreign Policy: City-­State in World Politics, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990, p. 72. 33 R. Said Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States, Reading: Ithaca Press, 1998, p. 171. 34 Louer, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 67–8. 35 Ibid., pp. 179–82. 36 Nonneman, Gulf States, p. 178. 37 M. Yamani, ‘The Two Faces of Saudi Arabia’, Survival, 50/1, 2008, p. 153. 38 Ibid. 39 Assiri, Kuwait’s Foreign Policy, pp. 69–71. 40 Adib-­Mughaddam, International Politics of the Persian Gulf, p. 42. 41 Davidson, Dubai, pp. 106–7. 42 C. Davidson, The United Arab Emirates: A Study in Survival, London: Lynne Rienner, 2006, p. 206. 43 Badr bin Hamad Al Bu Said, ‘Small States’ Diplomacy in the Age of Globalization: An Omani Perspective’, in G. Nonneman (ed.), Analyzing Middle East Foreign Policies and the Relationship with Europe, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 261. 44 Valeri, Qaboos State, p. 78; Nonneman, Gulf States, p. 184. 45 Personal interview, Qatar, December 2008. 46 Cordesman and Al-­Rodhan, ‘Gulf Military Forces Qatar,’ p. 11. 47 Assiri, Kuwait’s Foreign Policy, pp. 101–2. 48 Ibid., pp. 113–14. 49 Ibid., pp. 107–8. 50 J. W. Fox, N. Murtada-­Sabbah and M. Al-­Mutawa, ‘The Arab Gulf Region: Traditionalism Globalized or Globalization Traditionalized?’ in J.  W. Fox, N. Murtada-­Sabbah and M. Al-­Mutawa (eds), Globalization and the Gulf, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 24–5. 51 Nonneman, Gulf States, p. 187. 52 B. J. Slot, Mubarak Al-­Sabah: Founder of Modern Kuwait, 1896–1915, London: Arabian Publishing Ltd, 2005, pp. 115–18. 53 Casey, History of Kuwait, pp. 55–7. 54 Said Zahlan, Making of the Modern Gulf States, p. 47. 55 G. Sick, ‘The United States and the Persian Gulf in the Twentieth Century’, in L. Potter (ed.), The Persian Gulf in History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 298–9. 56 Buzan and Waever, Regions and Powers, p. 201. 57 Gause, International Relations of the Gulf, p. 127.

124   K. Coates Ulrichsen 58 Abdullah Al-­Shayeji, ‘Dangerous Perceptions: Gulf Views of the U.S. Role in the Region,’ Middle East Politics, 5(3), 1997, pp. 1–13 at p. 1. 59 ‘Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders’, World Islamic Front Statement, 23 February 1998. Available at www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm (accessed 15 August 2012). 60 J. R. Macris, The Politics and Security of the Gulf: Anglo-­American Hegemony and the Shaping of a Region, New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 189. 61 It took the 2011 civil uprisings in the Gulf (as in the wider Middle East) to place this alliance of convenience under strain and scrutiny.

8 The ostensible ‘silent victor’? The long-­term impact of the Iran–Iraq War on Turkey Elliot Hentov

By the end of the war in 1988, the predominant view of Turkey’s role in the conflict was one of a fortunate benefactor, both in economic and in political terms, yet the long-­term evaluation should be more subdued. Economically, the particular political economy of the Iran–Iraq War greatly facilitated Turkish economic recovery from a severe crisis in 1979 and 1980. Both Iran and Iraq were structurally dependent on Turkish goodwill: Iran because Turkey remained the only viable trade and transport route during the war, and Iraq because its economic lifeline went through Turkey with the Kirkuk–Yumurtalik pipeline to the Mediterranean as the only secure route for its oil exports. The structural dependence of both Iran and Iraq allowed for subsidized energy supplies, covering Turkish consumption and generating transit revenue. In addition, Turkey earned foreign income and stimulated domestic industry through an export boom as the belligerent parties required a range of manufactured imports that were most easily procured from its neighbor. Politically, Turkey also appeared victorious by proving adept at navigating the region’s complexities and maintaining credibility as a neutral party. It was a key player in the mediation efforts of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), whose failure did not reflect poorly on Ankara. On the contrary, both Iran and Iraq gave credence to Turkish leadership by entrusting their diplomatic representation to Turkey in the final year of the war. When the ceasefire arrived in the summer of 1988, the relative balance of power had shifted greatly in Turkey’s favor, as two major rivals and neighboring threats were exhausted by the devastating eight-­year war. However, as persuasive as this assessment seemed then, twenty years on the effects of the Iran–Iraq War should be more balanced. The most dramatic impact of the war was the deepening and professionalizing of the insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which thrived on the wartime dynamics in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Iranian military revival in 1982 pushed the military battles into Iraqi territory, both in the south and along the Kurdish-­inhabited areas. In this context, both Baghdad and Tehran engaged with various Kurdish militias as proxy or allied forces. For

126   E. Hentov Turkey, the outcome of this proxy battle was a political situation that enabled the large-­scale build-­up of PKK bases in proximity to Turkish soil. It was only in 1984 that the PKK insurgency began in earnest and grew to become a mortal threat to the Turkish state. In fact, it was the most severe armed conflict in the history of the republic, lasting intensely for fifteen years and counting more than 35,000 casualties. In addition to domestic political instability, the conflict with the PKK greatly limited Turkish influence abroad as it drained resources and hostile states instrumentalized the PKK in order to weaken Ankara, in turn complicating Turkey’s foreign relations with Syria, Iraq, Iran and even Greece. Therefore, as the main legacy of the Iran–Iraq War, it severely hampered Turkey for more than a decade beyond the war and the ‘silent victor’ was perhaps not so victorious after all. This chapter sets out to analyze the impact the Iran–Iraq War on Turkey during the course of the eight years before evaluating the long-­ term implications. Particular attention is paid to Kurdish violence, economic developments and Turkish ties with Iran – given that the Islamic Revolution was ideologically opposed to Kemalist Turkey and relations would become adversarial later on.

Regime consolidation (1980–83) Ten days before the start of the Iran–Iraq War, Turkey experienced its third military coup. The coup ended a period of quasi-­civil war with over 4,500 deaths in the preceding four years, with a monthly average of 183 killings by the summer of 1980.1 Simultaneously, Turkey’s economy had been in a severe recession and financial crisis. The economy shrank both in 1979 and 1980, inflation was triple digits and two-­thirds of foreign earnings were swallowed by Turkey’s energy bill. While trying to manage the political and economic hardships, Ankara’s new military leadership first sought to consolidate its new regime. The operational aspect of the coup had proceeded very smoothly, putting the country firmly in control of the generals and quickly bringing about stability. And though the coup leaders declared their intention to ultimately return to democracy, their overriding goal was a multi-­year process to transform Turkey’s political system. This was not well received among Turkey’s Western allies, even if most acknowledged the strategic importance of their southern NATO member. Therefore, the military coup effectively ‘froze relations between Turkey and the European Community’.2 Turkey was sidelined in the transatlantic alliance, but no severe measures followed that would have further harmed its weak economy.3 The appointment of a technocratic government led by Bülent Ulusu reflected the generals’ aim to steer the country out of the balance of payments-­generated economic crisis, which had been fueling political instability. Just one day after the Ulusu government was appointed, the

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   127 Iran–Iraq War broke out and pitted Turkey’s two main energy suppliers against each other. In this regard, Turkey’s priority was damage control and an attempt to guard the status quo, though it quickly recognized an opportunity to improve its economy through increased trade with both warring nations. Moreover, the Turkish approach was to safeguard its interests through active engagement of both parties in all spheres, a policy known as ‘active neutrality’ and announced on 2 October.4 Turkish neutrality came as a surprise to Iran, given that Majlis Chairman Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani famously termed Turkey ‘a functional ally of the oppressor world’5 and therefore expected Turkey to back Iraq. On the fourth day of the war, Iran’s Ambassador to Turkey, Habibullah Assefi, tried to persuade Turkish audiences that the Islamic Republic was simply a leader of the non-­aligned movement: ‘The West is supporting Iraq. Iran’s sin is that it does not want to be dependent on either west or east.’6 He added that the war was not going to affect Iran’s good relations with Turkey, which had become the only country with open trade and travel to Iran.7 Similarly, Iraq invested much diplomatic energy in securing Turkish goodwill. At the start of the war, both Iran and Iraq made strong efforts to assure Turkey of the continued flow of oil and to affirm Turkey’s declaration of neutrality. In the following weeks, both Iraq and Iran engaged Turkey to gauge its commitment to neutrality. Iraq sent its Minister for Trade, Tahir Tawfiq, as Special Representative to Ankara to ask for Turkish mediation of the conflict, while President Bani-­Sadr met twice within one week with Turkish Ambassador Turgut Tülümen to ascertain Ankara’s credibility as a mediator.8 The Iraqis then stepped up a campaign to woo Turkey, with Saddam Hussein publicly emphasizing that Iraq’s relations with Turkey had a ‘special place’, and therefore Iraq had dispatched Special Representative Tawfiq to Ankara.9 Coup leader Kenan Evren received Tawfiq again on 10 December 1980, leading to the creation of a joint economic commission to advance trade. Meanwhile, Turkey focused on brokering a return to the status quo ante following Iraq’s invasion, calling for an immediate ceasefire. As the war continued, Turkish diplomacy focused on protecting its oil supplies from its two neighbors. But they also cautiously hedged their bets: on 17 November 1980, Ankara concluded a deal with Saudi Arabia to cover any expected supply shortage caused by the war.10 Shortly thereafter, Turkey was able to extract specific deals with both Iraq and Iran for the delivery of oil on more preferable terms than previously.11 In particular, these terms were increasingly based on barter or credit, and both warring parties demanded a wider list of Turkish products in return, which enabled Turkey to shrink its trade deficit and improve its economic prospects. In spite of this, Turkish diplomats continued to push both belligerents toward a ceasefire. In early 1981, Ankara explained that there had been no opportunity for Turkish mediation between Iraq and Iran but that it

128   E. Hentov was still offering its services to the two belligerents.12 In addition, Turkey was a key member of the Islamic Peace Committee of the OIC, whose vigorous shuttle diplomacy during the first years of the war ultimately yielded no result. Despite the political gestures, Turkey acted quickly to translate Iran’s wartime despair into economic largesse. Turkish Trade Minister Cantürk visited Tehran on 22 April 1981, in what was the highest-­level bilateral visit since the start of the war. He secured a generous credit line of $500 million, of which $300 million would cover oil purchases.13 Part of the trade deal also covered maintaining a twenty-­four-hour border crossing and exploring the development of better transportation links. On 5 May, the two countries then signed a special protocol on cooperation linking their respective transport and telecommunication systems. Iran also requested the dispatch of Turkish doctors, with over 100 going to Iran during the summer of 1981 to help fill the wartime shortage of medical personnel.14 But despite Turkey’s strategic importance, Iran was largely a passive player in their relationship, eager to please but without presenting an agenda of its own. The notable exceptions were issues that pertained to the strength of the Islamic Revolution. For example, Iran complained about Turkey’s policy of granting temporary asylum to Iranian refugees and even demanded the return of higher-­profile figures, such as Air Force Colonel Javad Hussein, who managed a spectacular escape with an air force plane on 16 March 1981.15 Evidence suggests that Ankara understood that the war and its consequences shifted the power balance in the Middle East greatly in Turkey’s favour. Indeed, because of Iran’s isolation internationally, it did not take long before it was reliant on Turkish cooperation. For instance, within the contained arena of the Iraqi–Iranian conflict, tacit Turkish support for warfare emerged early on with the clandestine permission for both countries to use Turkey as a transit route for arms. As early as November 1980, the American embassy in Turkey reported ‘substantial quantities of Israeli goods transit Turkey to Islamic belligerents’. In particular, the cable noted 17,000 tons of Israeli chemical products awaiting shipment to Iran.16 Not only does this indicate that Israeli arms transfers to Iran began early in the war, but that Turkey was a willing accomplice in these transactions. Turkey’s apparent duplicity became public knowledge on 18 July 1981 when a cargo plane carrying Israeli arms destined for Iran crashed on the Turkish–Soviet border.17 This pattern of Turkish behavior was evident for most of the Iran–Iraq War, with Turkey actively engaged in garnering economic benefits while ensuring war supplies reached both Iran and Iraq. All the while, top officials issued repeated denials, including Prime Minister Ulusu’s statement that his ‘country would never be used to gang up against another country’.18 It is important to note that this period of ‘Turkish opportunism’ engraved itself in the memory of Iranian policy-­makers.19

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   129 Meanwhile, Turkey was also undergoing a dramatic re-­shaping of its political system, which heightened its need for an improvement in economic affairs. The military leaders had arrested over 120,000 people in the year following the coup, of which 80,000 still languished in prisons awaiting trial by September 1982.20 The return to democratic rule took place very gradually, and under severe restrictions. In October 1981, the military convened a consultative assembly to draft a new constitution that was subject to a referendum in November 1982. On the basis of that constitution, which granted the military a central role and General Evren the first seven-­year presidency, competitive elections took place in October 1983.21 Turkey’s European allies, who repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the military leadership and drew attention to human rights violations, heavily criticized this slow transition. The European position was an incentive for Turkey’s generals to boost their standing in the Middle East, thus partially explaining Turkey’s increased interest in closer economic and political relations.22 Similarly, Turkey’s civilian leadership foresaw the eventual return of democratic politics, and the economic sphere offered the scope both for greatest freedom and for potential success. These efforts were led by Deputy Prime Minister Turgut Özal, who received his post based on his record of economic competency in the Demirel government prior to the coup. On the contrary, the coup proved a blessing for him: First, the coup eliminated Özal’s political rivals by banning old politicians like Demirel, Ecevit, Türkes¸ and Erbakan. Secondly, Özal’s co-­ operation with the Kemalist army legitimized his ideology in the system. Özal’s co-­operation with the Army and the authoritarian nature of the Army rule also contributed to implementation of the economic reforms. For Özal the coup provided stability and order needed for economic success. . . . Nevertheless the Army was a political rival for Özal too and the military elements were gradually banished from politics by the Özal governments. Third, the lack of political rivals granted Turgut Özal a respite to concentrate on the country’s problems.23 As a result, he was determined to improve Turkey’s economic fortunes, with a special emphasis on expanding Turkish influence in Middle Eastern markets. While there already was a joint Turkish–Iraqi economic commission, relations with Iran lagged behind. This prompted Özal to focus more on Tehran and throughout 1982 Turkish–Iranian cooperation blossomed, as evidenced through intense diplomatic and economic exchanges. For instance, on 2 January 1982, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati visited Ankara where Özal first raised the idea of barter trade based on Turkish food exports for Iranian oil. Sensing a chance to lessen its

130   E. Hentov isolation and perhaps pull Turkey closer to its side, Iran embarked on a charm offensive. On 14 January, Iranian Minister of Industries Mostafa Hashimi signed an economic protocol in Ankara with his Turkish counterpart Mehmet Turgut.24 In February, just days apart, both Velayati and President Ali Khamenei reached out to the Turkish public by granting front-­page interviews to Cumhuriyet, the staunchly Kemalist newspaper.25 A few days later, Velayati returned to Turkey, in preparation for Özal’s unprecedented five-­day visit to Tehran from 5 to 10 March, where he arrived with a 118-member delegation, almost exclusively aimed at securing economic deals.26 In Tehran, he also outlined a grander vision for the construction of an Ahvaz–Iskenderun oil pipeline as well as a gas pipeline to transport Iranian gas to Europe. Upon his return to Turkey, he predicted that Turkish exports would exceed $1 billion the following year. Given that Turkey only had exports worth $85 million in 1980, this was an ambitious claim, and one that indeed materialized. In short, the trip brought Turkey tangible economic benefits and gave Özal plenty of good publicity. In line with its ‘active neutrality’, only a week later Turkish Prime Minister Ulusu went to Baghdad to reaffirm Turkish–Iraqi relations and seek comparable economic agreements, though his claim that exports to Iraq would exceed $800 million failed to become reality.27 Despite offering ideological explanations for sending a strong signal of unity between two Muslim nations of the Third World, the reality was that Iran was disappointed, as ‘unfortunately, political and cultural relations were not on par’ with the economic relationship.28 Regardless of the Iranian deal, the Turks persisted on the same course, though it was increasingly Özal who was seen as the architect of the economic recovery. In this light, all other Turkish engagement was viewed as underpinning his economic strategy. For example, Prime Minister Ulusu’s visit to Iran in early August 1982 was perceived more as a peace-­making effort, seeking to mediate in line with OIC initiatives.29 Similarly, Foreign Minister Türkmen’s visit in October finalized a transportation agreement as well as the feasibility studies for oil and gas pipelines that Özal had engineered,30 so neither could claim credit for the trade-­generated economic boom. The Turkish effort to reap economic rewards did not only apply to promoting Turkish goods, but also to the generation of income as a transit route, given that Iran had few viable alternatives. As such, Iranian leaders made sure not to antagonize the Turks, maintaining a regular high-­level engagement with their Turkish counterparts throughout the mid-­1980s. This approach was also echoed in public. For instance, Rafsanjani proudly stated in the summer of 1983 that Iran had ‘extensive relations’ with Turkey and posed ‘no threat to Turkish interests in the region’.31 As Turkey’s economy boomed, it was Özal who received credit when the military regime reinstated democratic rule. In the elections of 6 November 1983, Özal’s Motherland Party won a resounding victory, making him the first democratically elected prime minister since the coup. The success of

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   131 Özal’s economic strategy encouraged a ‘trade obsess[ed]’ foreign policy.32 His new government immediately sought more ways to enhance Turkish trade relations, both with Iraq and particularly with Iran, which had become Turkey’s largest trading partner. These efforts culminated in Özal’s next Iran visit on 27 April 1984, where even arch-­secularist President Evren was compelled to describe the atmosphere as ‘positive’. Özal’s philosophy was that strong economic ties would eventually help resolve political issues.33 However, perhaps the reverse was closer to the truth, namely that strong economic ties prevented political issues from interfering. For example, Turkish–Iranian relations were seemingly unperturbed during Özal’s visit, despite the grave fact that Turkish diplomatic staff in Tehran had been attacked and killed by Armenian terrorists on the same day. While this was the era of Armenian assassinations, Iran was the only Muslim country where such attacks took place.34 Looking at Turkish trade statistics in Figure 8.1, the numbers confirm the success of the Turkish approach. By 1985, Turkish exports to Iran were twenty-­five times the amount in the late 1970s, and fifteen times with Iraq. Together, trade with Iran and Iraq outweighed trade with the European Community, and in 1985 Iran was Turkey’s largest trading partner.35 More importantly, Figure 8.2 reveals how the Iran–Iraq War enabled Turkey to briefly close its perennial trade deficit with the two energy suppliers. However, the decline in trade after 1985 was evidence that this was not a relationship of economic complementarities, but rather of a cyclical nature. In fact, the economics of war overshadowed the fact that ‘unless compelled by circumstances, Iran would not seek Turkish products altogether.36 Rather, there was resentment at Turkish demands for high prices for goods of an inferior quality to European products.

2,100

Exports to Iran Exports to Iraq

1,400

700

0

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

Figure 8.1  Turkish exports to Iran and Iraq 1980–88.1 Note 1 International Monetary Fund, Direction of Trade database.

1986

1987

1988

132   E. Hentov 200 0 –200

+128 1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

–400 –600 –800 –1,000 –1,200 –1,400 –1,600 –1,800

–1,702

Figure 8.2  Turkish combined trade balance with Iran and Iraq 1980–88.1 Note 1 International Monetary Fund, Direction of Trade database.

Shifting calculus: Iran’s gain in Iraq is Turkey’s loss (1983–86) From the middle of 1983 onwards, the changes on the battlefield of the Iran–Iraq War gradually reverberated in Turkey’s geopolitical position. After the initial occupation of Iranian territory, Iraq was faced with a resurgent Iran. By mid-­1982, Iran had liberated its occupied areas, gained the military initiative and was threatening to invade Iraq. Yet, when Iran attacked, it failed to extract a larger strategic gain from its improved military outlook. On the contrary, the perception of Iran’s impending victory impacted Western states’ view to support Iraq. In a more detailed military analysis toward the end of the war, Daniel Segal summarizes the six-­year period from 1982 to 1988 as Iran using its superior manpower and ‘slowly winning the war on the ground, while losing it on the economic and diplomatic fronts’.37 Because much of the fighting in the earlier part of the war took place on the southern front, near Basra, Turkey did not perceive Iran as a military threat. But when Iraq’s northern Kurdish region became an active theater of war in 1983, Turkey was greatly disturbed as this region presses up against its southern flank. This brought two strategic threats immediately to the fore. First, there was the direct threat of warfare affecting Turkish–Iraqi trade, especially the oil flowing through the Kirkuk– Iskenderun pipeline. This pipeline was of vital strategic importance as since 1977 it had been Turkey’s energy lifeline, not to mention the revenue generated from a lucrative transit fee (nearly 40 percent of oil volume).38 The pipeline was also crucial to Iraq’s economic survival, as it

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   133 was one of its only means of exporting oil, particularly after it could no longer export oil through the Gulf or its pipeline through Syria. As a result, Iraq nearly tripled its total output through the construction of a parallel line through Turkey.39 While this threat was more pronounced later in the war, Iran’s initial foray into Northern Iraq in August 1983 sparked thinking about the prospects of an Iranian bombardment of the pipeline. Turkish Foreign Minister Türkmen was asked at a press conference about a possible Turkish response, and he cited Turkey’s well-­ known policy of ‘active neutrality’. This prompted his Iranian counterpart Velayati to publicly acknowledge Turkish concerns.40 Second, more gravely, were the indirect consequences of the Iraqi–­ Iranian conflict, which sparked new dynamics among Kurdish factions in Northern Iraq. Until the early 1970s, when the Shah supported the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) against Baghdad to improve his negotiating position vis-­à-vis Iraq, brashly ‘playing the Kurdish card’ against a neighboring country became a regional taboo. The Shah’s patronage and successful manipulation of Iraqi Kurdish politics had caused great anguish in Ankara, which was relieved when Iraq and Iran came to an agreement at Algiers in March 1975.41 Along these lines, Turkey was further relieved when the Shah was overthrown and was hopeful that Iran’s new revolutionary regime would be less inclined to stir up trouble among the Kurds. Problematically, Iran’s revolution also provided an ‘unrivalled opportunity [for Kurds] to exercise their right of self-­determination in Iran’. Unsurprisingly this only reignited Turkish fears of their own Kurdish minority.42 Meanwhile, Kurdish separatism in Turkey was rejuvenated as a by-­ product of the Left–Right war in the late 1970s. The socio-­economic backwardness of Turkey’s southeast (majority-­Kurdish areas) made Marxism appealing to the Kurdish intelligentsia, who broadly joined leftist ranks during decades of civil strife: During the 1970s, leftist radicalization intensified as migration to urban areas of western Turkey continued and enrolment in higher education increased. These parallel processes heightened awareness of economic and political disparities between the southeast and the rest of the country, and Kurds were socio-­economically predisposed to be absorbed into the leftist climate predominant among the student body in Turkish universities. Gradually, however, Kurdish leftists became alienated from their Turkish colleagues and formed separate political movements.43 On 27 November 1978, Abdullah Öcalan founded a Marxist-­Leninist Kurdish political party known as the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which advocated the creation of a Marxist Kurdish state. Given its ideology, the PKK pitted itself against two enemies: the Republic of Turkey and the Kurdish social structure based on tribal or feudal

134   E. Hentov leadership. Had it not been for the 1980 coup the PKK likely would not have been able to grow into a formidable adversary to the Turkish state. As Martin Van Bruinessen notes: The military succeeded in decimating the radical left and preventing the emergence of a new generation of left radicals. Their brutal suppression of the Kurdish movement, however, resulted in the emergence of a strong Kurdish cultural and intellectual movement in European exile and in the emergence of the radical and violent Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) as the strongest political movement of Turkey. The PKK gained a massive degree of popularity among Turkey’s Kurds that it would never have achieved without the army’s senseless harassment of Kurdish civilians.44 In the face of such an onslaught, the PKK fled to the mountains of the southeast and eventually over the border into Syria and Iraq. In 1983 and 1984, when the Iran–Iraq War expanded into Northern Iraq, the PKK established working relations with the KDP, which controlled most of the territory. The result was that Iraqi border areas and the hinterland became a primary launch pad for PKK attacks on Turkish soil.45 The consequence was Turkish military retaliation not only against Kurdish guerrillas and civilians inside Turkey, but in Iraq. In May 1983, Turkish forces conducted operations against PKK targets that had moved across the border into Iraq.46 This cyclical dynamic of Kurdish guerrilla attacks followed by Turkish military retaliation became entrenched in 1984, which is commonly cited as the beginning of the PKK insurgency in Turkey. As the Kurdish insurgency drew Turkey closer toward the Iran–Iraq War, Turkish foreign policy became guided by military and strategic imperatives. In this light, Turkey’s relations with both Iran and Iraq became secondary compared to the events in Northern Iraq. The situation got worse in July 1983 when Iran launched an offensive into Northern Iraq near the Kurdish stronghold at Haji Omran. This offensive had a tremendous impact on Turkey’s strategic calculus. Losing small pockets of Iraq’s northern territory to Iranian troops was one thing, but Iran’s new alliance with the KDP was entirely different. This perturbed the Iraqis too. Saddam Hussein responded by seeking an agreement with the KDP’s rival faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which had split from the KDP in 1975, following the Algiers Accord. The PUK sensed an opportunity to extract far-­reaching concessions from Baghdad and in December 1983 signed a ‘Comprehensive Political and Security Agreement’ with the central government. The core tenets of the agreement were recognition of limited autonomy, release of PUK prisoners, and the permitting of PUK fighters to rejoin the Iraqi Army.47 Baghdad’s deal with the PUK caused great concern in Ankara for three reasons. First, it set a clear precedent in favor of granting the

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   135 Kurds autonomy and weakened Turkey’s unbending denial of any form of autonomy for its own Kurdish population (Ankara denied even the existence of such a populace, referring to them instead as ‘Mountain Turks’). Second, by releasing PUK fighters or re-­enlisting them in Kurdish units of the Iraqi Army in the north, Baghdad was de facto arming Kurdish warriors, whose equipment and expertise could potentially be used against Turkey. Finally, even if Baghdad allied with the PUK to push back against the Iran-­KDP alliance, the Turks were concerned that the tangible outcome of these proxy wars was instability and a lack of authority in Northern Iraq, which created an ideal base for the PKK’s guerrilla attacks.48 The implications were that Turkey sought closer cooperation with both Iraq and Iran in constraining the freedom of action of the PKK, though Iraq had a more central role, as it was more likely to reassert control over Northern Iraq. Ankara was not alone in repositioning itself in response to events on the ground as Western allies began to extend support to Baghdad. Explicit Western backing for Baghdad in the Iran–Iraq War did not impact on Turkey’s declared neutrality and deepening economic relations with Iran. However, the economic dimension had to increasingly compete with security considerations in 1984 and 1985, and the PKK issue dominated Turkish foreign policy in the latter years of the war. In 1984, while the PUK and Iraq’s central government were attempting to foment a proper alliance, Turkey became increasingly concerned about how to combat the PKK challenge across the border. Iran sensed Turkish concerns. Consequently, Velayati used his visit on 1 August 1984 to reiterate Tehran’s satisfaction with Turkish neutrality and the prospect of increased oil deliveries.49 By late 1984 it became clear that security was an overriding concern of the Turkish government. On 15 October 1984, Turkey signed a security protocol with Iraq that allowed for ‘each party to enter the other’s territory for 5 km without prior consent’. In other words, Iran and Turkey were colluding against the Kurds.50 For the sake of neutrality, and because PKK members had fled from the Turkish assault into Iraqi territory, Ankara sought a similar arrangement from Tehran. However, Prime Minister Mousavi denigrated the Turkish request as an infringement of its sovereignty and sowing doubts about Iran’s ability to control its internal affairs.51 Moreover, Iranian officials had warned Turkey against agreeing to the security protocol with Iraq, with Rafsanjani saying: Iraq wants to protect its oil-­producing regions with the aid of a NATO member. We warn the Turkish state not to place itself in opposition to the wishes of the Iraqi people. We shall not allow the Ba’ath Party [the Iraqi regime] to stay for long in the region. You [the Turks] cannot solve the problem with the Ba’ath party.52

136   E. Hentov Despite this rhetoric, realpolitik demanded an Iranian signal that it was not oblivious and indifferent to Turkish apprehensions. Just a month after the Turkish incursion into Iraq, Iran and Turkey signed an agreement that committed both countries to preventing their territory being used for attacks on the other or to provide sanctuary to hostile groups.53 The deal was also used as an opportunity to stress the bilateral friendship and to announce a reciprocal visit of Mousavi in January 1985. This and many other measures stalled, but could not prevent the inevitable divergence of strategic interests engendered by Iran’s growing superiority in the Iran– Iraq War. There is an element of irony that the first downward turning point in Turkish–Iranian relations began at the very moment when Iran’s revolutionaries started to abandon their radical positions on the global stage. Rather, Khomeini declared the ‘Open Window’ foreign policy in July 1984 in an attempt to dilute its international isolation and improve its international relations.54 In a departure from Khomeini’s classic phrase that Iranians ‘needed to be separate to be independent and free’,55 he cited the Koran and how the ‘Prophet . . . sent ambassadors to all parts of the world to establish proper relations’.56 President Khamenei expressed it in political terms, stating that ‘Iran seeks to have rational, sound and healthy relations with all countries.’57 In other words, realism began to trump the revolution’s universal principles in light of international support for Saddam Hussein’s regime. Notably, Iraq was able to restock military equipment as well as upgrade to new technology throughout the war, with each step rolling back any Iranian achievements.58 Thus, Iran’s attempts to improve relations with several countries stemmed from a defensive view that it needed to forestall more countries from falling into Iraq’s camp. In this context, Iran’s relations with Turkey (as well as Pakistan) were considered crucial, as either country’s backing of Iraq would have had major strategic implications. On 16 January 1985, Prime Minister Mousavi visited Ankara to gauge the temperature and to explore opportunities for deeper bilateral economic ties. It was during this visit that Turkey and Iran signed a preliminary agreement to construct an oil and gas pipeline through Turkey to the Mediterranean.59 Then and later, Iran never made great efforts to make the pipeline a reality and it was likely to have been an Iranian ploy to maintain Turkish interest in close relations. This interpretation appears even more credible in light of Iran’s initiative to re-­create the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD), a Turkish–Iranian–Pakistani organization that was conceived in the 1960s, but became defunct in the late 1970s as a result of domestic turbulence among its member states.60 On 29 January 1985, representatives of the three countries signed an agreement to revive the RCD under the new name of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO).61 The ECO was designed to promote economic, technical and cultural cooperation, as a means to expand

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   137 economic relations beyond oil sales. Yet, the ECO remained a passive organization for most of the 1980s, suggesting that Iran’s greater motivation was to use the promise of closer economic links as an incentive to ensure the continued neutrality of its two neighbors. Turkish relations with Iran remained smooth for most of 1985, as the Kurdish threat had not worsened and Tehran sought to assure Ankara that its alliance with Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq would ‘do no harm’ to Turkey.62 Meanwhile, Iraq had drawn Turkish ire for mistakenly targeting Turkish ships in the Persian Gulf. Ankara was also not pleased with U.S. policy toward Turkey. On the one hand, the CIA clandestinely had used Turkey’s airspace for secret arms shipments to Iran. On the other hand, the State Department had publicly demanded that Turkey deny Libya the use of its airspace to supply weapons to Iran. This approach was hard to understand in Ankara, which believed that its NATO allies were taking its contributions for granted. The result was that Turkey was further incentivized to pursue an independent course vis-­à-vis Iran and Iraq, defying the Western consensus.63

Damage control: maintaining neutrality as a wartime participant (1986–88) The 1985 boom in Turkish–Iranian trade was followed by a rapidly declining trade relationship. Above all, this was due to the collapse of oil prices. In detail, crude oil prices dropped more than 50 percent during the course of the first two months in 1986,64 leaving Iran cash-­strapped while still coping with a wartime economy. Under those conditions, Iranians became increasingly resentful of Turkey’s pricing of its exports to Iran, which used its bargaining power to sell second-­rate Turkish manufactures to Iran at prices equivalent or higher to first-­rate West European products. Until 1986, Iran had tolerated the deals due to its international isolation and exclusion from international markets. Furthermore, the state-­sanctioned barter deals eliminated any natural market pricing of goods. However, after the fall in oil prices, Iran was unable to afford any barter deals and insisted on cash deals, even though Turkey continued seeking to extract a premium on its exports to Iran. The nature of Turkish–Iranian bargaining reversed, with Iranian dignitaries seeking preferential deals from their Turkish counterparts,65 but receiving nothing, as Turkish commercial interests were not guided by political calculations. Turkish bargaining during the war years caused longer-­term resentment among Iranians involved. As the Iranian President of the Chamber of Commerce warned at the time, ‘We will not accept such trade relations after the war.’66 But trade relations had already plunged due to the drop in oil revenues, and by mid-­1986, Iran had actually only completed 20 percent of its orders of iron and steel from Turkey.67

138   E. Hentov The sudden collapse of Iran as a preferred export destination, Iranian attacks around Kirkuk, and the continued strength of the PKK prompted Ankara to pursue a more interventionist approach to Northern Iraq. On 13 August 1986, the PKK managed a high-­profile attack on a military outpost in southeastern Turkey, killing twelve soldiers. In response, Turkey launched a massive air raid against PKK targets across the border, killing over 165 PKK militants.68 Such an audacious military maneuver attracted criticism from the Iranian side, which was worried about Turkey striking its Kurdish allies inside Iraq. In fact, Turkish neutrality was put into question by Mustafa Qaderi, a Kurdish Majlis Deputy, accusing Turkey of ‘collaborating with the Iraqi regime and its mercenaries’ and warning that Ankara ‘should not covet’ the province of Kirkuk.69 These tensions were dramatically exacerbated after Turkey followed up with a ground operation on 23 August 1986, sending in over 1,000 troops who managed to capture thirty-­five PKK militants deep inside Iraqi territory.70 A day later, Khomeini himself used a sermon to express his strongest criticism of the underpinnings of the Republic of Turkey. Labelling Ataturk as one of the tyrants and oppressors, Khomeini chided the Turkish ulema as being lackeys [that] preferred to obey Ataturk, who destroyed the rule of Islam, instead of obeying the orders of the Prophet . .  [they] tell them to obey the infidels and thus to become infidels themselves . . . these deviations are the work of the enemies of Islam.71 Foreign Minister Halefoglu went to Iran two days later for consultations to prevent wider fallout from Turkish military action and to reiterate his country’s steadfast neutrality. However, the repeated military incursions and increased Iraqi oil exports through Turkey began to portray Ankara as a party to the conflict. In September, the official radio of the Iran-­allied KDP announced that it was joining forces with the PKK and that they would strike together at Kirkuk. In Tehran, Turkish entry into the war was considered a looming prospect and Iranian leaders worked to discourage Turkish intervention. In late October, Mousavi cautioned against the territorial ambitions of neighboring countries and that the ‘Islamic Republic of Iran strongly defends Iraq’s territorial integrity and . . . that Iraq’s borders should be respected by all countries’.72 The continued raids by Turkey sharpened the rhetoric emanating from Tehran and aroused suspicions of ulterior motives. Rafsanjani spoke of Kirkuk’s oil wealth as belonging to the Kurdish people, contrasting it with Turkish claims to Northern Iraq and its assertion that Kirkukis were majority Turkmen.73 At the Iranian-­sponsored conference of Iraqi resistance groups, titled ‘Cooperation Conference of Iraqi People’ in December 1986 in Tehran, ‘President Khamenei confirmed Iran’s commitment to an independent and free Iraq within its recognized international borders and [issued] a clear warning that Iran would not hesitate to challenge any intervention in the affairs of Iraq’.74

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   139 While Turkey remained passive in the face of these threats, this changed in 1986 after Iran’s Ambassador to Turkey, Manuchehr Mottaki, openly identified the Kirkuk pipeline as a legitimate economic target as it supported the Iraqi war effort. Özal felt compelled to stress Turkey’s determination to protect the pipeline.75 Moreover, Turkey had agreed with Iraq on the construction of a parallel second line that became operational in June 1987. The larger impact on Turkish–Iranian relations went far beyond the strategic importance of the Kirkuk pipeline. The mutual suspicion drew attention to the ideological gap between Tehran and Ankara. Despite the example of Khomeini’s sermon cited above, Iran’s clergy still directed most of their venom toward their mortal enemy: Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party. In contrast, it reverberated in Turkey to a much stronger degree. The simmering dispute with Iran drew attention to the activities of Iranian refugees, who contained both benign (genuine Iranian refugees) and malicious (agents of the Islamic Republic) individuals.76 More dramatic was the effect on Turkish domestic politics. Uneasy with Iran’s behavior, the military raised the specter of Islamic fundamentalism as a core threat to the Republic of Turkey. On 8 January 1987, President Kenan Evren gave a major speech at Cukurova University, identifying Islamic fundamentalism as a threat equivalent to communism. In his memoirs, he writes that the Khomeini regime had sensitized him, adding that Iran seemed to have been exacerbating the domestic headscarf debate.77 A week later, Mousavi told a Turkish emissary that Turkey had to respect Islamic values to be able to play a role, in answer to which Evren told Özal that it was a ‘game [they were] not to join’.78 For the Turkish military, Iran was not a major factor in its decisions with regard to Northern Iraq. On 3–4 March 1987, the Turkish armed forces launched another military intervention against PKK targets in Northern Iraq. The Iranian response was to retaliate by postponing trade talks that had been scheduled for 8 March.79 In addition, Iran ratcheted up the rhetoric, condemning ‘Turkish aggression’80 and naming Turkey as an ‘implicit supporter’81 of the Saddam regime. In the words of the Foreign Ministry spokesman describing Turkey’s actions, ‘internal problems cannot serve as a pretext for entering a neighboring country and attacking innocents who are fighting against the regime in Baghdad’.82 Turkish–Iranian tensions continued to rise, prompting Rafsanjani to publicly defend Iran’s relationship with Turkey and efforts to diminish its international isolation. On 6 April 1987, referring to Turkey’s secularist outlook, he stated that ‘it was not that we have ignored our own [Islamic] principles’.83 But this became a short-­lived trend and Iranian authorities issued warnings to Turkey to stay on the sidelines of the Iran–Iraq War. Iran’s official mouthpiece Kayhan explicitly called for Turkey to maintain its neutrality, while Mousavi stated that ‘Saddam’s weakness should not

140   E. Hentov invite the territorial ambition’ of other countries.84 It is astounding that Iran would have risked such antagonism against Turkey at a time when its efforts at breaking out of its isolation were faltering and given developments in the theater of war with Iraq. While it had managed to gain the upper hand on the battlefield, particularly after the capture of the Fao Peninsula, Iraq’s international support was preventing an Iranian victory. In addition, international diplomacy had produced a ceasefire proposal that would eventually form the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 598 that was the basis for the end of hostilities a year later. But Iran refused to accept the resolution and continued to waste life and limb trying to break the deadlock militarily without an underpinning strategy. Meanwhile, Iran followed the usual pattern of offering economic incentives to placate Turkish concerns, but by this point the Turks were skeptical of Iran’s intentions and recognized that the continuation of the Iran–Iraq War was gradually eroding its neutrality. As a result, Özal sought to inject renewed vigor into Turkish mediation efforts in early 1988. On a trip to Tehran in February, he sought to convince his Iranian counterparts to accept UN Security Council Resolution 598.85 Yet these efforts failed and Turkish fears grew more pertinent when, on 27 March 1988, Iran bombed Habur gate, the main border crossing between Iraq and Turkey. The rationale was that Iraq had earlier bombed the Turkish–Iranian railway line inside Iran, violating Turkish airspace, but the retaliation was not proportional with regard to the damage and threat perception of Turkish decision-­makers.86 Turkey warned that violations of its airspace would be targeted by its military and it even began partial mobilization of its troops upon hearing the news that Iranian forces were advancing toward Suleimaniya, a major Kurdish stronghold.87 This turned out to be incorrect, but the mobilization proves the degree of Turkish sensitivity with Iran toward the end of the war. Viewed from Tehran, this only confirmed the return of Turkey to alliance politics (i.e., its NATO membership and status as an Amer­ ican ally being the formative pillars of its foreign policy). Turkey’s claim of neutrality and the fact that it operated as the diplomatic representation for Iran and Iraq in the final months of the war did not alter Tehran’s conviction that Turkey was operating on behalf of or in conjunction with its American patron.88 By the summer, the Iran–Iraq War was in its final stages and a UN-­sponsored ceasefire took hold on 20 August 1988, including a contribution of fifteen Turkish members among the 250-man military observation mission. By the end of the war, it was not only Turkish–Iranian relations that had become increasingly hostile. In addition, the PKK had entrenched itself in Northern Iraq, becoming an increasingly professional guerrilla force that could also not be dislodged with the end of the Iran–Iraq War. And economically, the twilight of the war also ended the boom in Turkish– Iraqi–Iranian trade.

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   141

Evaluating the longer-­term impact There is no doubt that the timing of the Iran–Iraq War was fortuitous for Turkey, though the scorecard is mixed. Economically, the country was in a severe crisis, and the war functioned as a major stimulus to the Turkish economy. The sudden boom in demand for Turkish products facilitated the creation of export-­oriented industries. In addition, with oil exports complicated by warfare, Iraq and Iran also permitted oil sales in barter form, thus saving Turkey the need for hard currency. By the mid-­1980s, Turkey was able to balance its trade deficit, which was no small feat for a country that had experienced a balance of payments crisis just half a decade earlier. Nevertheless, the reality is that the war was just a temporary stimulus with few long-­term benefits. The basic consumer goods that formed the backbone of exports entailed little value-­ added processes and few skills to augment Turkey’s labor force. And the booming export markets proved very temporary. By the early 1990s, exports to Iran and Iraq had reverted close to their pre-­war figures, and Turkey’s trade deficit returned. Yet this time it was even worse because the illusion of structural change had given rise to Turkish self-­ confidence, leading to a series of policy errors and premature economic liberalization in 1988 and 1989. Together with those mistakes, Turkey’s balance of payments deficit led to the economic crisis of 1994.89 Only major policy reforms in the early 2000s addressed these structural deficiencies. The same could be said for the geopolitical ramifications of the Iran–Iraq War. The strategic imperatives of the war allowed Turkey and Iran to temporarily ignore their ideological differences. The reactionary coup of 12 September 1980 was inherently antithetical to Iran’s revolutionary regime, but this ideological clash only mattered from the late 1980s, and particularly in the 1990s, when national interests diverged sharply. For Turkey’s national security as well as domestic politics, the 1980 coup in Turkey was aimed at, and succeeded in, reining in violence between leftist and rightist groups. By the time of the return of civilian rule in 1983, most groups had been disbanded, arrested or executed. While the PKK was one of several militant groups at the time of the coup, it was unique in that it managed to survive in exile in Syria and Northern Iraq. In this regard, it is doubtful whether the PKK could have survived as a passive political force in exile. However, the vagaries of the Iran–Iraq War eventually created a safe haven along Turkey’s rugged border and adjacent to the Kurdish population in Turkey. As such, the PKK gradually morphed into a major security challenge for the Turkish republic. It took advantage of the geopolitics of war to build an independent resource base and its invincibility as a guerrilla group in the mountains of Northern Iraq raised its prestige among Kurds. It was thus under the shadow of the Iran–Iraq War that the PKK was able to develop and grow.

142   E. Hentov

Notes   1 S. Sayari and B. Hoffman, Urbanization and Insurgency: the Turkish Case 1976–1980, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Publishing, 1994, p. 11.   2 Federal Research Division, Turkey: Country Study, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010, p.  252. Following the coup, several West European allies instituted visa requirements for Turkish citizens, starting with the United Kingdom, West Germany, France and the Benelux countries.   3 H. Arikan, Turkey and the EU: an awkward candidate for EU membership?, London: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2003, p.  185. Despite the freeze in relations, the EC maintained the commercial workings of the previously agreed Association Agreement. Further penalties were enacted in the years from 1981 to 1983 when a lack of democratic rule was accompanied by widespread human rights abuses on the part of the military. These sanctions then included the cancellation of financial assistance by the EC and the banning of Turkey from the Council of Europe, both in 1981.   4 M. Saray, Türk-Iran Ilis¸keleri, Istanbul: Ataturk Research Centre, 1999, p. 155.   5 The statement was made on 25 February 1983, a time when relations with Turkey were strong, further underlining Iranian expectations of Turkish behavior. Quoted in R. Cottan, ‘Iran’s perceptions of the superpowers’ in B. Rosen, Iran since the Revolution: Internal Dynamics, Regional Conflict, and the Superpowers, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 138.   6 Ayın Tarihi, Office of the Prime Minister, Directorate General of Press and Information, 26 Eylül 1980.   7 Ibid.   8 One can reasonably conclude that Iranian efforts were evidently fruitless and without direction. Describing these weeks in Tehran, Ambassador Tülümen in his memoirs details Iranian power politics as well as the various foreign policy activities by Prime Minister Rajai and President Bani-­Sadr, which were unconnected or in contradiction to each other. He omits mention of his own meeting. See T. Tülümen, Iran Devrimi Hatıları, Istanbul: Bog˘ aziçi Yayınları 1998, pp. 162–88, also Ayın Tarihi, Ekim 1980.   9 Ayın Tarihi, 11 Kasım 1980. 10 Ayın Tarihi, 17 Kasım 1980. 11 During negotiations in late December 1980, Iraq initially agreed to deliver 7.2 million tons, before raising it to 8.5 million. Iran committed to deliver 3.5 million tons two weeks later. Notably, the Iranian amount would be 40 percent higher than in 1980 and virtually all based on barter or credit arrangements, thus a favorable deal for Turkey, which was short on foreign currency. Exports to Iraq quadrupled by the end of 1980 and continued increasing throughout 1981. Analysis and comparison to prior years from A. Liel, Turkey in the Middle East: Oil, Islam and Politics, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001, pp. 90–5. Figures and dates are from Ayın Tarihi, Aralık 1980 and 9 Ocak 1981. 12 On 17 January 1981, FM Türkmen explained this in view of the upcoming 25 January OIC summit in Taif; PM Ulusu repeated Turkish support for mediation on 26 February 1981 and Turkey claimed to be actively collaborating with other Arab and Muslim states to bring about a ceasefire. 13 Liel, op. cit., p. 92. 14 All of the bilateral deals from A. Shmuelewitz, Republican Turkey, Istanbul: Isis Press, 1999, p. 232. 15 Shmuelewitz, op. cit., p.  232 and ‘Turkey weighs asylum for Iran Air Force Defector’, New York Times, 18 March 1981. While Turkey contemplated Iran’s request before rejecting it, it promptly returned the C-­130 aircraft and its ten crew members.

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   143 16 American Embassy Ankara to Department of State, Ankara 08466, 21 November 1980; see National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980–1984. Avail­ able at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq01.pdf (accessed 16 August 2012). 17 New York Times, ‘Israel is said to be supplying U.S. arms to Iranians’, 26 July 1981, p.  14. To be precise, the plane was allegedly shot down by the Soviets upon its return from Iran, but investigations quickly bore out the nature of the cargo it had transported to Western Iran and the Turkish authorities’ acquiescence to the overflight. 18 Ayın Tarihi, 13 Ocak 1982. 19 Interview with Farideh Farhi, independent scholar at the University of Hawaii-­ Manoa and former employee at the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ subsidiary research institute, Institute for Political and International Studies, 18 December 2008. 20 E. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, London: I.B. Tauris, 2004, p. 279. 21 F. Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 184–9. 22 K. Evren, Kenan Evren’ in Anıları (Memoirs), vol. 2, Istanbul: Milliyet yayinlari, 1990, p. 224. 23 S. Laciner, ‘Turgut Özal Period in Turkish Foreign Policy: Özalism’, Journal of Turkish Weekly, 9 March 2009, p. 5. 24 Milliyet, 16 January 1982 and Ayın Tarihi, Ocak 1982. 25 Çengiz Çandar conducted both interviews for Cumhuriyet, 17 February 1982 (Foreign Minister Velayati in ‘Türkiye ile ilis¸kileri gelis¸tirmek istiyoruz’, p.  1) and 22 February 1982 (President Khamenei in ‘Ilis¸kerimiz gelis¸meli’, p. 1). 26 Ayın Tarihi, Mart 1982. 27 Ibid.; and see Milliyet’s extensive coverage of Özal’s trip from 8 to 11 March 1982. 28 For Iran’s disappointment, see Gholamreza Babai, Tarikh-­e siyasat-­e khareji-­e Iran, Tehran: Darosa, 1996, p.  384; for ideological justification, see Deputy Prime Minister Nabavi’s interview in ‘Tarihimizin en büyük ekonomik anlas¸masını Türkiye ile imzaladık’, Milliyet on 11 March 1982. 29 D. Hiro, Iran under the Ayatollahs, London: Routledge, 1987, p. 350. 30 Ayın Tarihi, Ekim 1982; Two weeks later, Turkey sent its transport Minister Mustafa Aysan to conclude a similar deal with Baghdad. 31 Hiro, op. cit., p. 351. 32 H. Barkey, ‘Turkey = Silent Victor’, in Efraim Karsh, Iran–Iraq War: Impact and Implications, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989, p. 137. 33 A. Eralp, ‘Post-­Revolutionary Relations with Iran’ in H. J. Barkey, Reluctant Neighbor: Turkey’s role in the Middle East, Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1997, p. 98. 34 I. Gürkan, ‘Turkish-­Iranian Relations: Dynamics of Continuity and Change’, Turkish Review of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 7, 1993, p. 81 and see www.ermenisorunu.gen.tr (accessed 16 August 2012) for a complete listing of all attacks. In 1983, Iran was also one of a few countries whose Armenian publications were banned in Turkey, along with the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, Israel (Armenians of Occupied East Jerusalem) and West Germany. 35 International Monetary Fund, Direction of Trade database. Turkish imports from Iran and Iraq have virtually all been hydrocarbons, mainly oil. During the 1980s, Turkey did not pay for all its neighbors’ oil with hard currency, but rather with barter deals that overvalued Turkish goods. 36 Barkey, op. cit., p. 138. 37 D. Segal, ‘The Iran–Iraq War: A Military Analysis’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 66, no. 5, p. 946.

144   E. Hentov 38 M. T. O’Shea, Trapped between the Map and Reality: Geography and Perceptions of Kurdistan, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 53 cites the December 1980 figure. 39 Ibid. 40 Ayın Tarihi, Ag˘ ustos 1983. 41 Entessar, Nader, ‘Kurdish Conflict in Regional Perspective’ in M. E. Ahrari, Change and Continuity in the Middle East, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996, pp. 50–53. 42 Ibid., p. 54. 43 S. Cornell, ‘Land of Many Crossroads: The Kurdish Question in Turkish Politics’, Orbis, January 2001, p. 39. 44 M. van Bruinessen, ‘Kurds, Turks and the Alevi revival’, Middle East Reports, no. 200, Summer 1996, also available at http://igitur-­archive.library.uu.nl/let/20070323-200301/bruinessen_96_kurdsturksandthealevi.pdf (accessed 16 August 2012), p. 6. 45 F. Keskin, ‘Turkey’s Trans-­Border Operations in Northern Iraq: Before and after the Invasion of Iraq’, Research Journal of International Studies, pp. 60–1. 46 E. Pirincciog˘lu, ‘Haydutlar askerimizi s¸ehit etmis¸ti’, Milliyet, 28 May 1983, p. 1. 47 M. Gunter, ‘Foreign Influences on the Kurdish Insurgency in Iraq’, Conflict Quarterly, Fall 1992, p. 14. 48 F. Borovali, ‘Kurdish Insurgencies, the Gulf War, and Turkey’s changing role’, Conflict Quarterly, Fall 1987, pp. 36–7. 49 Milliyet, ‘Velayeti: Türkiye’nin tutumundan memnunuz’, 2 Ag˘ ustos 1984, p. 6. 50 Ö. Kürkçüog˘lu, and M. Firat, ‘Arap Devletleriyle Ilis¸kiler- Irak ve Suriye-­yle sorunlu ilis¸kiler’ in B. Oran, Türk Dıs Politikası, Kurtulus Savasından Bugüne Olgular, Belgeler, Yorumlar, vol. 2, Istanbul: Iletisim, 2001, p. 134. 51 See coverage of Iranian rejection in Milliyet issues on 22–24 October, especially ‘Iran terör için is¸birlig˘ine yanasmıyor’, 24 October 1984. 52 Ü. Gündog˘ an, ‘Islamist Iran and Turkey: 1979–1989’, Middle East Review of International Affairs, vol. 7, no. 1, March 2003, p. 5. 53 Milliyet, ‘Türk-Iran sınırında güvence’, 29 Kasım 1984, p. 6. 54 S. Bakhash, Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution, New York: Basic Books, 1994, p. 257. 55 This remains a feature of popular Iranian foreign policy debate. See for example ‘Ba tasis-­e daftar bayad dar entezar-­e vaghuh-­eh enghelab-­e sevom va taskhir-­e mojaded lane jasusi’, available at www.motalebe.ir/index. php?action=show_news&news_id=4434 (accessed 16 August 2012). 56 R. Ramazani, ‘Iran and the United States’, in Robert Freedman (ed.), The Middle East from Iran–Contra to the Intifada, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991, p. 176. 57 Ibid. 58 See Hiro, op. cit., pp.  94–5 for equipment supply to Iraq and its military implications. 59 Ayın Tarihi, Ocak 1985. The visit was timed to coincide with a meeting of the Joint Turkish–Iranian Economic Council, which had been created following Turkish Prime Minister Özal’s visit to Iran a year earlier. 60 From its inception in 1964 onwards, the RCD had been an active, albeit not influential, organization promoting economic and infrastructure links among its three members. In 1976, RCD members agreed to a vast upgrading of the organization in the Izmir Treaty, which was never ratified as all activity ceased when Turkey went through the violence of late 1970s and military coup in 1980, Iran experienced the revolution from 1978 to 1980 and Pakistan endured similar turmoil during and after the military coup of 1977. 61 Ö. Kürkçüog˘lu and M. Firat, ‘Arap Olmayan Devletleriyle Ilis¸kiler- Iran’la ilis¸kiler’ in B. Oran, Türk Dıs Politikası, vol. 2, p. 157.

The ostensible ‘silent victor’?   145 62 Milliyet, ‘Bayan gazeticilere bas¸örtü’, 22 September 1985, p. 5. 63 G. Gruen, ‘Turkey between the Middle East and the West’, in Robert Freedman (ed.), The Middle East from Iran–Contra to the Intifada, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991, p. 405. 64 See dataset on daily crude oil prices in 1986 at http://futures.tradingcharts. com/historical/CO/1986/0/continuous.html (accessed 16 August 2012). 65 Cumhuriyet, 22 April 1986, ‘Petrolde aylık fiyat önerisi’, p. 1, where Oil Minister Aghazadeh’s interview calls for Turkey’s prices to be lowered to reflect drop in oil prices. 66 Gündog˘an, op. cit., p. 4. 67 Hiro, op. cit., p. 175. 68 Milliyet, ‘Jetlerimiz tepeledi’, 16 August 1986, pp. 1, 7. 69 Kayhan, 15 August 86; ‘Turkey advised to maintain neutrality’, in Borovali, op. cit., p. 39. 70 Ayın Tarihi, Ag˘ ustos 1986. 71 E. Özbudun, ‘Khomeinism – A danger for Turkey?’ in D. Menashri, Iranian Revolution and the Muslim World, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991, pp. 244–5. 72 Borovali, op. cit. pp. 39–40, and ‘Rejim-­e Eraq beraye bargharari-­ye amniyat-­e Kerkuk az torkiye taghazaye komak kard’, in Kayhan Havai, 5 November 1986. 73 S. Bölükbas¸ı, ‘Turkey copes with Revolutionary Iran’, Journal of South Asian and Middle East Studies, p. 104 and Ayın Tarihi, Kasım 1986. 74 Afkar-­Inquiry, ‘Opposition Regroups’, February 1987, p. 9. 75 Kayhan, ‘Bomb-­e afkanha-­ye Iran monabe-­ye eghtesadi-­ye 3 shahr-­e Eraq ra dar ham kubidand’, 29 November 1986, p. 2. 76 Milliyet, ‘1 milyon Iranlı’, 30 November 1986, pp. 1, 10. 77 Evren, op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 16–29. 78 Ibid, p. 30. 79 Bölükbas¸ı, op. cit., p. 103. 80 Hürriyet, 5 March 1987. 81 M. Djalili, Diplomatie Islamique: Strategie Internationale de Khomeynisme, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, p. 185. 82 ‘L’Iran se déclare ‘préoccupé par le raid de l’aviation turque contre des positions kurdes en Irak’, Le Monde, 6 March 1987, p. 4. 83 Ramazani, op. cit., p. 177. 84 Kayhan, 1 Nov 87. 85 Ayın Tarihi, Subat 1988 and preceding; there had been a flurry of diplomatic exchange between the two countries, but with no result. Economic deals in the energy sector remained purely rhetorical and thus were not even signed by high-­level Turkish officials, but by lower substitutes such as the Deputy Undersecretary for Economic Relations in the Foreign Ministry who acted as the counterpart to Iran’s oil minister in January 1988, a clear diplomatic signal of disinterest. Similarly, Foreign Minister Velayati’s visit to Ankara in February ended with no tangible outcome. 86 Gündog˘ an, op. cit., p. 6. 87 E. Picard, ‘Relations between Iraq and its Turkish neighbor: from ideological to geopolitical constraints’, in D. Hopwood, H. Ishow and T. Koszinowksi (eds.), Iraq: Power and Society, Ithaca, NY: Ithaca Press, 1993, p. 349. 88 Interview with Iranian Ambassador to the UN in 1988, conducted on 11 November 2008. 89 Celasun, Oya, ‘The 1994 Currency Crisis in Turkey’, available at www.econturk. org/Turkisheconomy/kriz.pdf (accessed 16 August 2012).

Part IV

American policy and the war

9 Reappraising the Carter Administration’s response to the Iran–Iraq War Chris Emery

The Carter Administration’s response to the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War continues to be seen as little more than a footnote to the more lurid narrative of the Reagan years. Most of the major studies of the conflict assign little more than a few paragraphs to the Carter period. Many of the acclaimed works examining the Carter foreign policy contain only a couple of sentences, some even less. Carter himself dedicates only five passing mentions to the conflict in his memoirs. More fruitful sources are examinations of U.S.–Iranian or U.S.–Iraqi relations in the Carter period.1 Inevitably, given the seismic events in Iran that occurred on Carter’s watch, the former massively outweigh the latter. A corollary to this is that the response to the outbreak of hostilities has inevitably been swallowed up by the ongoing effort to secure the release of the American hostages. On the one hand these studies have added greater understanding of the conflict’s impact on the hostage negotiations.2 On the other, they have a tendency to reduce all aspects of U.S. policy in Iran to a facet of that ongoing effort, becoming detached from wider foreign and domestic policy objectives. Nevertheless, within the limited scholarship reside some widely divergent interpretations. To some scholars and former U.S. officials, including Carter himself, the Iraqi invasion was an unpleasant surprise.3 To others, the initial phase of Iraqi victories provoked barely concealed satisfaction.4 The debate has much more than scholarly significance inside Iran, where the assumption of an American ‘green light’ to Iraqi aggression continues to frame contemporary U.S.–Iranian relations. Within this Machiavellian narrative lurks not just the possible origin of America’s ‘tilt’ towards Iraq, but also the subsequent arms-­for-hostages deals that evolved in the Iran– Contra scandal. In essence, therefore, there have been at least some suggestions that two of the most controversial episodes of the Reagan policy can be linked to the previous administration. This chapter argues in opposition to this suggestion. It unpicks the origins of Washington’s response to the Iran–Iraq conflict by charting U.S. assessments of deteriorating Iran–Iraq relations and placing them in the context of American objectives. In the light of allegations of America’s collusion with Iranian

150   C. Emery opposition groups, who undoubtedly encouraged Iraq to attack the Islamic Republic, it re-­appraises the nature of this relationship.5 It then examines how the hostage crisis and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan refashioned U.S. policy vis-­à-vis both Iran and Iraq. It addresses the question of what the United States understood to be Saddam’s intentions and their impact on American interests, Cold War dynamics and domestic politics. It finds that, despite being aware of an increased likelihood of war, U.S. officials were genuinely caught by surprise when hostilities broke out.

Unpacking the ‘green light’ theory Long before the Iraqi invasion on 22 September 1980, the Iranian leadership had announced that it would consider America complicit in any attack by Iraq. Albohassan Bani-­Sadr, the first elected president of the Islamic Republic, has subsequently written that in early August 1980 his government purchased detailed accounts of several conversations between former Iranian generals and politicians, Iraqi representatives and American and Israeli experts.6 Bani-­Sadr alleges that the United States deliberately leaked information that would encourage an Iraqi attack. The former president is not a perfect witness; he is still blamed by many in Iran for the Iranian military’s lack of preparedness on the eve of Iraq’s attack and perhaps has an interest in disseminating a version emphasising covert American support.7 It is perhaps ironic that Bani-­Sadr, who barely escaped Iran with his life in 1981 and continues to seek protection from the current Iranian regime, has done much to reinforce a theory held most dearly by the regime that ousted him.8 Iran’s leaders regularly cite America’s green light to Saddam within the litany of nefarious American attempts to overthrow the Islamic Republic. For example, in his first official speech following Barack Obama’s 2009 Nowruz greeting, the Supreme Leader reminded his audience that: They showed Saddam a green light. This was another measure by the American government to attack Iran. If Saddam did not have the green light from the Americans, he would have not attacked our borders. They imposed eight years of war on our country. About 300,000 of our young people, our people were martyred in this eight-­ year war.9 Iran’s case appeared strengthened when in 1995 a memorandum surfaced written by Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig. Written while Haig travelled to the Middle East in April 1981, Haig noted that ‘It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd.’10 Both Haig and Carter subsequently refused to respond to questions arising from Haig’s ‘talking

The Carter Administration’s response   151 points’. The question has been revisited a number of times in conferences, lectures and private interviews involving former members of the Carter Administration who were directly involved. All have unanimously and vociferously denied that any U.S. encouragement was given to Iraq to invade Iran, including several former officials this author has spoken to.11 A variation of the ‘green light’ conspiracy is the suggestion that, although not directly sanctioning an Iraqi attack, the United States was involved in passing intelligence to the Iraqis emphasizing Iran’s military vulnerability. According to Richard Sale, an investigative journalist working in Paris at the time and in contact with U.S. officials and members of the Iranian opposition, the Pentagon sent doctored intelligence reports to Saddam via Iranian dissidents. These reports suggested that Iran’s military was in disarray and that in Khuzestan and other provinces Iraqi forces would be greeted as liberators. Sale states that Shapour Bakhtiar told him personally that Iranian forces would be defeated in three days and many Iranian Arabs would rise in support.12 Another twist in the story is provided by Saddam’s biographer Said K. Aburish, who states that Saddam met with CIA agents to discuss plans for invading Iran on two separate occasions, both in Jordan. The first meeting is alleged to have occurred sometime in the summer of 1979, shortly before Saddam seized the presidency from General Ahmed Hassan al-­ Bakr. The second meeting allegedly occurred in July 1980, with King Hussein acting as an intermediary between Saddam and several CIA agents.13 Bani-­Sadr apparently told the journalist, Larry Everest, that during this meeting Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘assured Saddam Hussein that the United States would not oppose the separation of Khuzestan (in southwest Iran) from Iran’.14 The story is moderated by Aburish and Kenneth Timmerman, who state that Brzezinski was not present but the ‘top-­secret negotiating session was Brzezinski’s idea’.15 Brzezinski was compelled by Timmerman’s book to write a letter to the Wall Street Journal; not only to deny any suggestion of a meeting with Saddam but to assert it was ‘also false to suggest that the Carter Administration in any fashion whatsoever, directly or indirectly, encouraged Iraq to undertake a military adventure against Iran’.16 Timmerman had also included a quote apparently provided by Gary Sick suggesting a degree of implicit encouragement. Brzezinski was apparently ‘letting Saddam assume there was a U.S. green light for his invasion of Iran, because there was no explicit red light’. Sick is then quoted as saying ‘But to say the U.S. planned and plotted it all out in advance is simply not true. Saddam had his own reasons for invading Iran, and they were sufficient.’17 Having consulted Brzezinski in the course of writing his own book, Sick suggests there could be no tactical (vis-­à-vis the hostages) or geopolitical rationale for encouraging an Iraqi attack. In an interview given to another historian, however, Sick is quoted as saying that Brzezinski ‘made no secret of the fact that he saw the Iraqi attack as a potentially

152   C. Emery positive development that would put pressure on Iran to release the hostages’.18 According to Sick’s own book, when that attack actually occurred, Brzezinski changed his mind and quickly encouraged Carter to oppose the Iraqi attack.19 In the gap between the LSE conference in London and the publication of its accompanying volume, two further studies have strongly challenged various aspects of the ‘green light’ conspiracy theory. Hal Brands argues that the available evidence suggests Saddam believed Washington would strongly oppose his attack.20 Mark Gasiorowski, although not explicitly setting out to disprove the possibility of a U.S.-inspired attack, attacks any suggestion that U.S. officials were instinctively hostile to the Islamic Republic. Gasiorowski’s research suggests that U.S. officials had ‘warned Iran’s leaders of Iraqi invasion preparations and told them how they could monitor these preparations and thus take steps to counter them.’21 Gasiorowski argues that it was the deliberate sabotage of U.S.–Iranian relations by those in Iran seeking to radicalize the revolution that ‘prevented its leaders from heeding the U.S. warning and taking steps to deter the September 1980 invasion’.22 It is difficult to explain why, in an election year especially, Carter would solicit actions that would further destabilise the Persian Gulf, distract attention from the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and risk both the hostages’ lives and rising oil prices. The Haig memo was written by an individual outside government in 1980 and the circumstances in which he reached his interpretation remain unknown. Given the difficulty U.S. intelligence officials faced in persuading Saddam to accept intelligence after the Reagan Administration fully ‘tilted’ towards Iraq, the extent to which they could influence Saddam’s decision-­making in 1980 is highly questionable. If the charge of direct American collusion is dismissed, the question of what America knew of Iraqi plans, and more importantly when, remains open. The majority of American officials plead ignorance; the Iraqi invasion was apparently greeted with unwelcome shock. Given the challenge to this narrative presented by Gasiorowski’s analysis, as well as some documentary evidence uncovered here, it is necessary to explain what the United States did know of Iraqi plans. It is important to situate this within the wider context of U.S. assessments and objectives in the region.

U.S. policy before the hostage crisis By the time Mehdi Bazargan was appointed Iran’s provisional prime minister on 5 February 1979, the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy had decided that support for the new government was essential.23 Washington’s interests had been threatened, but not fundamentally altered in Iran. The new government was dominated by western-­educated technocrats, broadly supportive of continued relations with the United States, broadly suspicious of the Soviet Union and Iraq, and committed to continuing Iran’s position as oil

The Carter Administration’s response   153 purveyor to Washington’s allies. Ayatollah Khomeini was believed to have little interest in micro-­managing foreign policy and, in any case, apparently possessed suitable anti-­communist credentials. In short: there was reasonable hope that a new relationship could be forged. The resulting engagement strategy was based on the conflicted proposition that Washington should demonstrate its acceptance of the revolution while striving to preserve the essential features of the Pahlavi era strategic relationship. Lacking any real contact with Khomeini’s inner circle, the United States had pinned its hopes of U.S.–Iran reconciliation on a relatively small group of apparent moderates working in the Bazargan government. This included primarily Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, Deputy Prime Minister Abbas-­Emir Entezam and Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi. It seemed eminently sensible to demonstrate to these individuals the value of retaining bilateral relations by emphasizing the threats (principally the Soviets and Iraq) that both countries still shared. Contradicting this impulse was the realization that Iraq was steadily drifting away from the Soviet bloc. As one National Security Council (NSC) paper put it, ‘A crucial objective for promoting a better regional balance should be to draw Iraq away from its current dependence and frequent alignment with the Soviet Union.’24 The weight placed upon engaging Tehran, however, effectively ruled out a dual-­track approach to Baghdad. Several studies by the intelligence community, including a March 1979 National Intelligence Estimate, had noted a substantial increase in Iraq’s military advantage over Iran.25 In July, Howard Teicher, a Pentagon analyst, concluded that Iraq was in all likelihood preparing to invade Iran and seize the Khuzestan oilfields. Teicher’s analysis was, however, rejected by both Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Brzezinski, presumably on the grounds that it did not constitute actionable information regarding the timing, scale and aims of an imminent attack.26 This did not mean the Iraqi threat was dismissed. Bruce Laingen, the acting head of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, had quickly recognized that the Iranians were extremely receptive to information about Iraq. In his judgment it was ‘as important a signal as I was able to make that summer that we really meant business about rebuilding a relationship’. We went to the degree of actually sitting down with elements of the Provisional regime in Tehran and talking about how we saw the Iraqi ‘threat’ to Iran. We were prepared to cooperate with them in providing them our judgment, to some degree our military intelligence estimates of Iraqi intentions and movement vis-­a-vis Iran at that time. And some very, very sensitive classified conversations occurred at the level of the Prime Minister, where I talked to him and talked about how we saw Iraq as a force in the Middle East and particularly as we judged the provisional regime’s concern that Iraq had malice of forethought vis-­a-vis Iran.27

154   C. Emery Bazargan, Entezam and Yazdi had been making requests for U.S. intelligence briefing, including information on Iraqi intentions in Iran, since at least May. In July, Laingen persuaded Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders to set up an appropriate intelligence-­sharing channel. This initially consisted of Under Secretary of State David Newsom asking State Department official John Stempel and George Cave to meet with Entezam in Stockholm. This confidence-­building measure developed into the first CIA briefing delivered on 22 August in Tehran by Robert Ames, a CIA officer then serving as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East. Ames was accompanied by Laingen and Victor Tomseth with Bazargan, Yazdi and Entezam the only Iranians present. The briefing was well received but contained little detailed intelligence on Iraq. Newsom instructed George Cave, an experienced CIA station chief, to travel to Tehran on 15 October to provide Yazdi and Entezam with a comprehensive intelligence briefing.28 According to Mark Gasiorowski, who has interviewed Cave, the presentation provided extensive evidence of Iraqi military exercises that could only be explained as preparations for a major invasion of Iran. Cave also warned that Iraq was pre-­positioning military materiel around the border and undertaking engineering projects to facilitate an invasion. The Iranians were informed of covert Iraqi operations designed to support an invasion, including the creation of an organization called the Arab Liberation Front that would launch a coordinated uprising among the Arabs of Khuzestan as Iraqi troops attacked. Cave concluded that Iraq had not yet made any final decision to invade, but urged the Iranians to make use of the IBEX listening posts the CIA had constructed in northern Iran, largely paid for by the Shah, which could provide invaluable tactical information regarding Iraqi troop movements.29 This version of events is controversial to some former members of the Carter Administration. Wayne White, then a leading analyst of Iraq for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), contends that if the United States was in possession of evidence of advanced Iraqi war preparations then it would be unthinkable that he, the rest of INR, Gary Sick (Head of Iran desk, NSC) and Henry Precht (Head of Iran desk, State Department) would be unaware of it. Precht adds that he met both Yazdi and Entezam the day after and neither mentioned anything about Iraq.30 There is of course the possibility that such intelligence was withheld from senior State and NSC officials with a responsibility for Iran. This seems unlikely, however, given that withholding such crucial intelligence would render the entire INR unable to fulfill its high-­priority ‘Global Warning Function’ and cut out some of the most senior analysts responsible for Persian Gulf Affairs in the State Department and NSC. White had been covering the Iraq–Iran account in minute detail from September 1979, and recollects the situation thus:

The Carter Administration’s response   155 The Iraq army was doing little more than continuing its well-­known annual schedule of primarily battalion and brigade-­level training exercises. We would watch units going out to their well-­known exercise areas or firing ranges, conducting normal exercises, and returning to their garrisons. Very little of the Iraqi military was anywhere near the Iraqi–Iranian frontier.31 White’s view is strengthened by the fact that even when, as will be shown later, sections of the Intelligence Community (IC) began issuing warnings of an imminent Iraqi threat in April 1980, they were still premature by five months. Cave remains the only source under the impression that an Iraqi attack was likely at any point in 1979. Henry Precht, head of the State Department’s Iran Desk, confirms: I had no impression at the time that anyone believed Iraq was planning a major attack although we thought that Saddam might be stirring up the Kurds. At the time I did not think he would take on his larger and still probably more potent neighbor.32 There is a possibility Cave was passing on doctored intelligence exaggerating the Iraqi threat. Though unverifiable at this point, there is some logic to this hypothesis. There is no doubt that the CIA was extremely anxious about losing the listening stations in northern Iran vital to monitoring, among other things, Soviet missile testing. Since at least March 1979, U.S. officials had used intelligence briefings to ingratiate themselves with Iranian officials and highlight the mutual benefits of maintaining the intelligence facilities.33 If a body of purported evidence, including imagery certain officials believed indicated Iraq was preparing to invade Iran, existed in mid to late 1979 and was passed on to Iranian officials, then this was intelligence that would have been heavily disputed by other parts of the U.S. intelligence community. That may be the most likely explanation as to why it was not passed around. The CIA nevertheless continued to receive reports of worsening Iran– Iraq relations throughout the rest of 1979 and into 1980. These were guided by the attempted assassination of deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, Khomeini’s continued incitement to the Iraqi Shi’a, increasing border skirmishes, the ongoing hostage crisis and the aftermath of the Nuzhih plot. Relations rapidly deteriorated, particularly after June 1979, when Iraqi security forces arrested Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-­Sadr on the eve of a scheduled trip to Tehran. Prominent Iranian clerics, including Khomeini, harshly criticized al-­Sadr’s house arrest, provoking Iraqi claims that Tehran was encouraging and exploiting internal divisions in Iraq. Despite this, there was some evidence that the Iraqi government was continuing to put out diplomatic feelers, unsuccessfully inviting a delegation led by Bazargan to visit Iraq in July 1979.

156   C. Emery Meanwhile, the ethnic rebellions occurring inside Iran at the time, which the new regime blamed principally on the Iraqis, United States, Israelis and Soviet Union, remained an obstacle to building a relationship with Iran. Almost immediately after the revolution, Arab, Azeri, Baluchi and Kurdish minorities had sensed an opportunity to establish varying degrees of autonomy. The new regime struggled to suppress their subsequent revolts, particularly the Azeri and Kurds. To Washington, these insurgencies represented an easy gateway for Soviet meddling and a serious challenge to the authority of the moderate provisional government.34 If America was to convey its sensitivity to Iranian security concerns, it needed a clearer picture of the threats it perceived. The United States began to closely monitor the Kurdish problem. Quite apart from Washington’s specific objectives in Iran, aroused Kurdish agitation, and the resulting military response by Iran and other powers, had the potential to embroil Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Syria and the Soviet Union in a regional conflict. The previous year had seen Iranian and Iraqi armed forces launching joint military ‘pacification’ operations in Kurdish areas. These operations were a direct consequence of the 1975 Algiers Accord, whereby the Shah agreed to end his support for the 1961–75 Kurdish revolt in Iraq. With the collapse of the Pahlavi regime came the end of military cooperation. The Kurds once again became a source of considerable tension, particularly because of their belief that they could lever a degree of autonomy from the vulnerable post-­revolutionary government. While both countries still had an interest in keeping a lid on the national aspirations of their respective Kurdish populations, the Kurds now posed a far graver threat to the Islamic Republic than they did to the government in Baghdad. This sense of vulnerability was keenly felt in Tehran, and as bilateral relations deteriorated the Iranian media increasingly alleged Iraqi involvement in the ongoing Kurdish revolt.35 The tense atmosphere was further aggravated by violent clashes in Kurdish border areas, including attacks by the Iraqi Air Force on Iranian villages suspected of sheltering Iraqi Kurdish insurgents. In response, the Iranians provocatively welcomed the sons of a well-­known Kurdish leader who had crossed the border seeking sanctuary.36 The situation with the Kurds and Arabs was discussed in a meeting on 18 June between Iranian Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi and the U.S. chargé d’affaires Charlie Naas, who was keen to hear Iran’s view on why tensions were apparently escalating with Iraq. Yazdi explained that Iran had evidence that ‘Iraqi support of these organizations continues and that relations between the two countries could not improve until it ceases.’ Responding to a direct question from Naas, Yazdi stated that the Provisional Government of Iran (PGOI) ‘does not know what might be bothering Iraq’ and that ‘certainly we have done nothing to bother them’.37 Yazdi conceded that there was a potential ‘spill-­over’ effect from the revolution among Iraqi Kurds and Shi’as, but categorically denied that this was ‘contrived’ or ‘exploited’ by the provisional government. The Islamic Republic

The Carter Administration’s response   157 had a definite interest in the condition of religious centers in Najaf and Karbala, which he claimed were being threatened by the Iraqi government. According to Yazdi, it was this interest that had provoked Khomeini to protest over the arrest of Ayatollah al-­Sadr. The increasingly bitter propaganda battle was the subject of another meeting the next day, this time between Naas and deputy prime minister Abas Amir-­Entezam. On this occasion, Naas had been summoned in order for a visibly agitated Entezam to lodge a complaint over recent Iraqi broadcasts. Naas agreed that the content was ‘pretty vile’ but added that Iranian radio had broadcast similarly offensive content aimed at Iraq. In response to Entezam’s surprised protestations, Naas commented that he may not have listened to the kind of broadcasts Sadegh Ghotbzadeh was sanctioning in his role as managing director of National Iranian Radio and Television. Naas duly selected some of the more egregious examples from the transcripts sent to him by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and passed them on to Entezam’s office. According to Naas, the matter was never raised with him again.38 To him the episode was another salient example of the limits of his government’s control of Iran’s foreign policy. On this occasion Naas’s report suggested that Ghotbzadeh ‘may have been making foreign policy’ without the knowledge of the office of the prime minister.39 The ability of the Iranian government to manage its relations with Iraq was now seriously questionable. The United States had retained some good contacts with the Kurds, having only reluctantly abandoned their support for the peshmerga when the Shah unexpectedly cut them off in March 1975. The peshmerga’s leader, Mustafa Barzani, had been allowed entry to the United States for medical treatment.40 Barzani died in Washington in March 1979, but his entourage remained significant figures in Kurdish politics and became important sources of information on Kurdish and regional affairs. One such individual was Mohammed Dosky, a Kurd from a prominent family in Northern Iraq with an American wife. In May 1979, Dosky was operating as a Kurdistan Democratic Party representative in Washington and was in contact with David Reuther, who worked on Iraq policy for the State Department. Dosky advised that Khomeini had resented the conditions of his exile in Iraq and was not ‘particularly disposed toward Baghdad’.41 Dosky’s view was that Iraq’s overriding goal was to persuade the new government in Tehran to live up to the conditions of the Algiers Accord. He suggested that Baghdad would attempt to emphasize Iraq’s ability to stir up factional tensions within Kurdish parties, alleging that Iraq was supporting a force loyal to Jalal Talabani, which had recently clashed with the Barzani faction. He put out the view that Iraq was using Kurdish groups not out of a sense of opportunism, or as a prelude to the coming conflict, but in order to consolidate agreements made with the Shah. A detailed CIA study of the ‘Kurdish Problem’ was completed on 1 August 1979. It reported little hope for Kurdish autonomy but noted that

158   C. Emery if the Iranian government failed to gain control over areas taken over by Kurds, it would be compelled to suppress their demands and thereby incite other Kurdish groups in neighboring countries, particularly Iraq.42 An alternative view was provided by the U.S. defense attaché in Tehran. Having spoken at length to a colleague just returned from a secret five-­day trip to Western Iran, he informed Washington that the situation was being grossly exaggerated by the Iranian press. The attaché stated that ‘It appears that there has been an attempt by someone or group in the government, possibly even Khomeini, to purposefully magnify and distort the situation in Kurdistan in an attempt to rally mass opinion or at least provide sufficient justification for major and more drastic decisions.’43 His conclusion was that the Kurds posed no threat to the central government, but the Iranian regular and irregular military was in no position to effectively pacify them in their own region. The United States started to make other enquiries regarding Iraqi support for the Kurds, not least because they were still in search of intelligence they could provide to the Iranians as proof of their goodwill. In Beirut the CIA station received information from contacts in Fatah that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had confirmed that Iraq was indeed supporting the Kurds. The same sources claimed that Saddam Hussein himself was directly involved in supervising these operations and had even sent high-­ranking Iraqi officers to train and organize Kurdish fighters.44 The CIA may have taken the claim of Saddam’s personal supervision with a pinch of salt, but the Agency could assume that the PLO had reasonably good information. A high-­level member of the KDPs Politburo, Kerim Hissami, was known to be in contact with a PLO representative in Baghdad. Hissami was also known to have headed a KDP delegation that had visited Lebanon to meet PLO leaders.45 On 8 September, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance sent a memo to the U.S. interest section in Baghdad soliciting information on the Iraqi version of events. Unsurprisingly, this proved fruitless, so the United States turned to Turkey. The U.S. Ambassador in Ankara, Ronald Spiers, requested a meeting to discuss the matter with the Director of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responsible for the Middle East. The Turkish official offered no hard evidence of Iraqi support but considered it probable. Spiers was told the Turkish government did not have a clear idea of what game Iraq was playing vis-­à-vis the Kurds.46 The CIA next proposed establishing a relationship with Sadar Jaff, a Kurd from a prominent family in Kirkuk. Jaff had been an associate of the Barzani faction, which had received considerable assistance from the Shah before 1975. After the revolution he was forced to flee to Baghdad, where he established a reasonably good relationship with the Iraqi government. Despite some reservations about his reliability, in late September the CIA agreed to underwrite his flight from Baghdad to Bonn if he agreed to report back any information he acquired. Jaff ’s statement was unequivocal:

The Carter Administration’s response   159 the Iraqi government had been helping the Kurds ‘tremendously’; offering Kurdish organizations ‘carte blanche to obtain assistance from Iraq’.47 According to Jaff, Iraq was the only foreign sponsor of the Kurds with the Soviet Union ‘doing nothing’ to help them.48 Saddam was reportedly extremely angry with the Kremlin for not supplying weapons for him to provide to the Kurds. Of significance to later events, CIA agents in Bonn and Paris also believed that during his trip to Europe, Jaff had met with Bakhtiar. The inability of the CIA to establish a link between the Soviet Union and the Kurds was troubling to some in the Administration. Paul Henze, an official in the National Security Council, railed against both the CIA and the State Department for reporting that there was no evidence of Soviet support. Despite having no particular expertise on the region, he denounced the report as ‘typical of the flaccid naiveté we have been observing for months in both State and CIA reporting and analysis of this subject’. Henze bitterly complained that ‘because clear-­cut, court admissible evidence does not drop into our laps we smugly maintain that we have no evidence!’49 Another area in which Iran cited Iraqi meddling was in Khuzestan. As in Kurdish areas, allegations of Iraqi support for Arab organizations in Khuzestan went back to the period of confrontation between Iraq and the Shah. At that time dissident organizations such as the National Liberation Front of Arabistan were allegedly allowed to establish offices in Basra and Baghdad. The State Department began making enquiries with the Kuwaitis regarding Iraq’s involvement in Khuzestan. In a meeting between the political chief of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait and a senior Kuwait advisor for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it became apparent that the Kuwaitis took it for granted that there was some Iraqi involvement. In an apparent indication of Washington’s disapproval of such activities, the U.S. political chief posited whether ‘Kuwait might take the further step of encouraging Iraq to curtail its rumored activities in Khuzestan’. The Kuwaitis replied that this was unlikely.50 In the period before the hostage crisis, the picture of Iran–Iraq relations was confusing. The United States was confident that Iraq was supporting the Kurds, though its motivation was not entirely clear. At the same time, Saddam had begun to play on the anxieties the Iranian revolution had provoked in the Arab world. Over the Autumn of 1979, he began raising the issue of Iran’s 1971 seizure of the three Tunbs from the UAE. In February 1980 Saddam would use the issue as a platform to unveil his ‘Arab National Charter’, which represented a bold assertion of his leadership of the Arab world.51 By early November 1979, members of the provisional government were increasingly worried about deteriorating relations with Iraq. The CIA had been alerted to this just days before the hostage crisis by Abbas Amir-­ Entezam, who had recently returned to Tehran before taking up a permanent ambassadorship in Stockholm.52 Despite Cave’s apparent warning in

160   C. Emery the October briefing, a CIA cable in early November 1979 said that Iraq hoped ‘to settle its differences with Iran through negotiations’.53 Their preference would be to deal with the moderate Bazargan government, but the Iraqis were concerned by its lack of authority and Saddam Hussein was understood to be unwilling to negotiate with the clerics. Saddam, like most other countries, perceived a dual government in Iran. He recognized that the Bazargan government understood the need for correct relations with Iraq, but considered Khomeini to be implacably hostile towards Iraq. Saddam’s policy was remarkably similar to Washington’s in so far as he saw a proper relationship with the Bazargan government as the best means of supporting their struggle against more radical elements. One policy initiative suggested by Precht was to approach the Iraqis on the basis of a mutual interest in avoiding actions that would further undermine the moderates. Precht, who was well aware of Iraqi support for the Kurds, advised that the Iraqis be reminded of the damage the ethnic rebellions were inflicting on the provisional government. Baghdad could then hopefully be persuaded to take steps to ‘reduce pressure on the Bazargan government’.54 The demise of the moderates would profoundly change Saddam’s decision-­making calculus. In another apparent case of symmetry between the United States and Iraq, the Iranian moderates feared a backlash from their efforts to defuse relations with Iraq. In October, Yazdi met with Saddam Hussein on the margins of the non-­aligned conference in Havana. Yazdi reassured Saddam on all the major issues of concern to Iraq; Iran was not agitating the Shi’a population in Iraq, had no territorial designs over Bahrain and was not seeking to export the revolution abroad. They agreed to further meetings to discuss the issue, but Yazdi returned to strong criticism in the Iranian media for meeting Saddam. Yazdi and other moderates became acutely afraid that any public statements in support of this aim would invite further criticism. But it would be the much greater backlash provoked by Bazargan’s meeting with Brzezinski in Algiers that would apparently provoke the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and change the course of U.S., Iranian and Iraqi foreign policies.

After the hostage crisis On 9 November 1979, five days after the embassy was seized by radical students, Paul Henze, a staff member in the National Security Council, underlined the need to ‘think beyond the current imbroglio and not let emotions generated during it undermine our long term interests in this part of the world.’55 The United States had defined its long-­term interests as best served by a restored working relationship with the new regime in Iran. In order to do so, it had attempted to persuade Tehran of Washington’s acceptance of the revolution and their continued correlation of interests, particularly in deterring both Soviet and Iraqi aggression. That

The Carter Administration’s response   161 effort had failed in part because Washington’s desire to restore the fundamental elements of America’s relationship with the Shah sat incongruously with its claim that it had accepted the revolution. Rather than seeing the United States as a protector of the revolution, Khomeini and most of the clerics, as well as radicals on the left, were convinced that America was colluding with the regime’s enemies. The hostage crisis consolidated clerical power and prompted the mass resignation of the Bazargan government, who had attempted to improve bilateral relations. Baghdad was aware that Khomeini was poorly disposed towards them and Saddam was broadly unwilling to do business with him. Tehran was conscious that America and Iraq’s interests correlated now more than ever. Brzezinski in his weekly report to the President, dated 21 December, reported a similar feeling: I have checked with Cy Vance, and he agrees with the notion that it might be useful for Jim Schlesinger to pay a personal visit to Iraq early in 1980 and to engage the Iraqi leaders in a wider discussion.56 Brzezinski’s view crystallized further after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. From early 1980, both Iraqi and American leaders indicated a growing coincidence of interests in their public statements.57 Following a speech by Saddam denouncing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Brzezinski began thinking about practical steps he could take to bring Iraq into his vision of a new regional order. Saddam’s attempt to position himself as leader of the Arab world, encapsulated in his announcement on 8 February of the pan-­ Arab ‘National Charter’, encouraged the view that a degree of cooperation with Iraq was necessary to maintain Arab support against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Following statements that neither country was fundamentally opposed together in areas of mutual interest, by February 1980 the United States and Iraq had publicly agreed to cooperate on an informal basis.58 Iraq’s importance to the region’s dynamics lay firstly in Egypt’s diplomatic isolation, rendering Iraq the most powerful Arab country opposing Israel. More pressingly, as Iran’s most potent regional threat, those Arabic countries anxious about Iranian intentions and capabilities were drawn towards it. As the border dispute between Iran and Iraq erupted in frequent skirmishes, on 9 April King Hussein of Jordan urged all Arabs to support Iraq. Soon after, Hussein’s effort to mediate a rapprochement between Iraq and Saudi Arabia was realized. On 10 April, U.S. Undersecretary of State David Newsom publicly declared that ‘The United States is prepared . . . to resume diplomatic relations with Iraq at any time.’59 Following the release of the transcript of a meeting between Saddam Hussein’s and U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie on 25 July 1990, it appears Saddam took the decision to accept this offer during the two months before Iraq’s invasion of Iran. According to Saddam, the decision was postponed ‘when the war started . . . to avoid misinterpretation’.60

162   C. Emery These diplomatic maneuverings were not unnoticed in Tehran, where talk of American retaliation had become a national preoccupation. The combination of escalating violence on the Iran–Iraq border, a failed U.S. military rescue attempt on 24 April, continued unrest amongst the Kurds and the knowledge of exiled Iranian dissidents traveling freely between Iraq and the West led to a predictable outcome. It became immediately apparent that if the Iraqis did launch an attack, America would be charged as its accomplice. On 25 August, Keyhan, the hard-­line tribune of the regime, quoted sources confirming the hand of the ‘Great Satan’: Although the part played by America and by its dependent elements in the Iraqi Ba’athist Government’s provocations is evident, the joint American–Iraqi plan to attack Iran simultaneously in the south and the west was foredoomed.61 Even before the failed rescue attempt, some in Iran suspected America would use Iraq as a proxy for its retaliation against the hostage-­taking. On 10 April, Carter noted in his diary that ‘The Iranian terrorists are making all kinds of crazy threats to kill the American hostages if they are invaded by Iraq – whom they identify as an American puppet.’62 Carter admits that the increasing likelihood of an Iraqi attack formed part of the rationale for risking the hostages’ lives by attempting a rescue attempt. Recent documentary evidence confirms that in April, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had received intelligence suggesting that the chances of that attack had risen considerably. The DIA now reported that ‘the situation is presently more critical than previously reported’. The source, which is described as reliable, put the chance of an imminent Iraqi attack at about 50 percent.63 A separate intelligence memorandum, produced by the CIA two days later, was clear: ‘Evidence indicates that Iraq had probably planned to initiate a major military move against Iran with the aim of toppling the Khomeini regime.’ As well as stating that the situation was ‘moving uncontrollably toward war’, the report confirmed that the Iraqis had tried to use Kuwait as intermediaries for obtaining ‘United States support or approval’ for an attack.64 These two analyses provoke legitimate questions, as two very senior U.S. officials responsible for Persian Gulf affairs maintain that the United States had at most twenty-­four hours’ notice of the Iraqi attack.65 The warnings were widely disseminated, but the most likely explanation why they were not acted upon is that those who doubted they amounted to compelling evidence won the argument. In effect, they were right. Only in early July did U.S. observers note the movement of Iraqi assets out of garrison with war-­related ‘basic loads’ of ammunition and certain extra equipment typically left behind in garrison during exercise deployments. In the first week of September Iraqi troops had successfully moved into a

The Carter Administration’s response   163 disputed pocket of territory that had been awarded to Iraq under the 1974 Algiers Accord but never evacuated by the Iranians. Iranian sources frequently cite this date, 4 September, as the beginning of hostilities. On 17 September, a CIA intelligence memorandum reported significantly increased Iraqi troop movements on the border and stated that ‘the intensification of border clashes between Iran and Iraq has reached a point where a serious conflict is now a distinct possibility.’66 The Agency noted the extreme risks associated with a major Iraqi offensive in Khuzestan, warning that it would involve Iraq in a ‘costly and protracted conflict’. Another intelligence report indicated that Saddam had been emboldened by the relative ease with which Iraqi forces had dislodged Iranian troops from the disputed border territory. In fact, however, these small pieces of terrain had only contained Iranian gendarmerie, not regular Iranian forces.67 Nevertheless, as Wayne White notes, ‘the outbreak of war did, in fact, come as a surprise to most of us because a decent portion of Iraq’s ground forces were still in garrison. The hasty movement of the remaining units up to the front immediately after the beginning of major hostilities was the activity that tended to nudge me toward the abrupt scenario in which Saddam ordered the attack before all military preparations had been completed.’68 When the invasion did occur on 22 September, it was unclear whether Saddam had simply fallen into a rage following a smaller skirmish. The ongoing war of words and a tendency on both sides to posture for domestic and international audiences made detaching Saddam’s intentions from rhetoric a difficult undertaking. Ambassador Nathanial Howell, then Director of the State Department’s Office of Lebanon, Jordan, Syrian Arab Republic, and Iraq Affairs, describes a common view of Saddam’s intentions. We all watched Saddam’s actions and rhetoric closely but most people I knew tended to believe he was posturing. So far as I am aware, I was the first official to act on that judgment. The evening before the invasion began, I sent a cable to USINT Baghdad instructing them to advise American contractors working on a refinery to evacuate to Kuwait. The war began before the evacuation could be carried out. I took this action with the knowledge of my superiors but not on the basis of any decision within the USG.69 Once it was clear Iran was under attack, Khomeini declared that ‘We are at war with America’ and that ‘the hand of the U.S. has appeared from the sleeve of Iraq.’70 There was political utility in declaring a hidden U.S. hand, but his conviction also reflected his misguided view of relations between U.S. intelligence and Iranian dissidents. With a pressing need for intelligence on internal Iranian affairs, the United States had established a line of communication with these exiles even before the hostage crisis.

164   C. Emery The State Department generally disapproved of these contacts, but the CIA saw them as useful sources of intelligence.71 The Iranian militants occupying the embassy found dozens of documents detailing these contacts, but read them extremely selectively. One report, which detailed a second request by Bakhtiar to meet with high-­level U.S. officials, stated that the American position was clear: it would not ‘fund, assist, or guide his movement, but [was] providing the channel as a means by which he could provide us information on his intentions and capabilities’.72 A corollary of Washington’s refusal to support the nascent Iranian opposition, coalescing around the Shah’s last Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, was that they approached Iraq for assistance.73 Gary Sick writes that ‘The leaders in Iran were no doubt aware that the United States was maintaining contact with a number of Iranian exiles in Europe, some of whom were independently providing advice and encouragement to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran.’74 Another figure known to be both actively plotting against the Khomeini regime and encouraging Saddam to attack the Islamic Republic was General Oveissi, the former Chief of Staff of the Iranian armed forces. Oveissi’s presence in Baghdad was reported in the Washington Post on 20 May 1980, and the New York Times reported a subsequent visit to Washington on 19 June. The Post reported that Oveissi was ‘preparing an exile army to invade Iran from seven points’. The CIA was also well aware of Bakhtiar’s frequent visits to Baghdad. There is no evidence to suggest, as some have, that either or both were encouraging Iraq to attack on behalf of the United States.75 In fact there is no evidence that either had any influence on Iraqi decision-­making. Yet it would seem plausible that if the Iranian opposition groups were aware and involved with Iraqi plans, and they maintain that they were, then so was U.S. intelligence. The Nuzhih plot greatly increased the Iranian government’s paranoia. The plot occurred on the night of 9 July, with an attempt by several hundred active and retired Iranian paratroopers to initiate a coup d’état against the Islamic Republic. The Iranian authorities had, however, been tipped off; some allege by Iraqi intelligence, who recognized the damage the subsequent purge would inflict upon the Iranian military.76 Bakhtiar was helping to fund both of the chief instigators of the coup, Colonel Muhammad Baqir Bani-­Amir and Colonel Ataullah Ahmadi. This money was in turn provided by Iraqi intelligence, which was aware of the plot but not involved in its planning. In order to bolster the confidence of the coup leaders, Bakhtiar informed them that the United States had given its blessing. He was lying; the United States knew nothing about the Nuzhih operation and would have likely opposed it on the grounds that it would endanger the lives of the hostages.77 Yet, once the coup was foiled, it was for the Iranians the final casus belli for American complicity in any Iraqi attack.

The Carter Administration’s response   165

Responding to the Iraqi invasion Once hostilities broke out, the Carter Administration’s response was guided by four key concerns: the hostage crisis; oil supplies; the Soviet threat and America’s strategic alliance network. The United States was unsure of the implications for them all. Nat Howell was charged with drafting the State Department’s official policy position, to be announced by Warren Christopher. There was no clear consensus; some argued that ‘Iran is the strategic choice’ and others leaned toward saving positions in the Arab world.78 The resulting document took a middle ground, reiterating America’s opposition to the acquisition of territory by force but emphasizing the need to maintain right of passage by non-­belligerents in the Gulf. If there was an immediate practical tilt towards Iraq, it was seen mostly in terms of the energy policy. It was an election year and oil prices were certain to be a political issue. Iranian retaliatory strikes had, by the first week, caused the suspension of Iraqi oil exports.79 This concern had been voiced in earlier documents discussing the potential for conflict between Iran and Iraq. It also appears to have been discussed with the Saudis. Once hostilities did break out, the Saudis went some way to ameliorate the loss in production by significantly increasing its own output.80 Yet, as a senior source in the Energy Department confirms, the United States also took active steps to make sure that Iraq’s ability to export through the Gulf was unimpaired and could be quickly restored after the cessation of hostilities, primarily by expediting the purchase and early placement of single point mooring buoys in the Gulf. To facilitate these purchases, an Iraqi official was granted a visa to visit Houston, where a member of U.S. intelligence advised him on buying and positioning the appropriate equipment.81 As it turned out, they had only limited effect, given the scale of Iranian retali­ atory strikes. Nevertheless, in part because of the increased production of Saudi Arabia and other non-­OPEC producers, the feared spike in oil prices did not materialize. Beyond energy policy, the implications for the hostage crisis loomed largest. It appears that Iraq had hoped that the fighting would be confined to the border area, and had retained most of its troops in garrison. Baghdad had not banked on Iran’s response of total war. Washington hoped that immediate, but fairly limited, Iraqi successes would persuade the Iranians to reach a settlement on the hostages. Brzezinski was himself convinced that the Iranians would have little choice but to acquiesce in an arms-­for-hostages deal. This hope soon faded.82 The conflict immediately plunged an already chaotic Iranian decision-­making process into a state of panicked distraction. The Iranians believed that Iraq was acting as Amer­ ica’s proxy and once they were able to source most of the military equipment they required from Israel, the Soviet Union and European arms dealers, they were not in the mood to look favorably on the hostage issue.

166   C. Emery The United States eventually managed to dissuade Israel from selling arms to Iran while Americans were held hostage in Tehran, but CIA sources indicated that European arms dealers were providing it with weapons with or without government approval.83 Privately, Brzezinski and other high-­ level U.S. officials suspected that the Begin government would continue to covertly support Iran. This was in part because they recognized that Israel’s fear of Iraq greatly surpassed that of Iran, but also because Brzezinski suspected that Begin hoped for Carter’s electoral defeat.84 Perhaps the most decisive U.S. intervention in the early days of the war was the steps Washington took to prevent Iraq from mounting attacks against Iran from neighbouring Gulf countries. Just days into the conflict, U.S. intelligence reported that Iraqi MIG-­23 aircraft, a small number of helicopters, and even transporters carrying Iraqi special forces, were attempting to land in Kuwait, Bahrain, Dahran, the UAE and Oman. It was soon clear that, with the probable exception of Oman and Ras al-­ Khaimah, the Gulf States had not permitted their territory to be used and most made frantic attempts to dissuade the Iraqi aircraft from landing; Bahrain even physically blockaded its runways. Saddam’s precise intentions were unclear; certainly the bases offered the opportunity to mount air strikes against targets in South-­Central and South-­Eastern Iran, but sustained operations outside Iraqi territory would require substantial additional operational support. The presence of Iraqi special forces may have suggested commando operations around Bandar Abbas or a potential invasion of Abu Masa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, both of which would have drawn Iranian troops away from the main fighting in Khuzestan.85 The political implications were clearer; by drawing in the Gulf States, Saddam could demonstrate to Iran that it faced a broad Arab front. Unfortunately for Saddam, Iraqi aircraft failed to land, or were quickly sent packing, in all the Gulf States apart from Oman and Ras al-­ Khaimah.86 American officials had been caught off-­guard by this development and were clearly horrified. Faced with a potential spread of the conflict into the wider Gulf region, including states where the U.S. had security arrangements, Carter and his senior advisors quickly resolved to bring all possible pressure to bear on Oman and Ras al-­Khaimar to not to allow Iraq the use of their territory to attack Iran.87 Carter was in a strong position to force them to back down, given the opposition of virtually all other Gulf States to Iraq’s actions, and a recent agreement with Oman that substantially strengthened economic relations and allowed U.S. access to virtually every military facility inside Oman. After a series of telephone conversations between the White House, Sultan Qaboos and Sheik Sakr, the Iraqis were swiftly sent on their way.88 The episode represented a constructive intervention by Washington and further contradicts the ‘green light’ conspiracy theory. It also demonstrates that if there was any initial tilt towards Iraq, it was extremely limited and almost exclusively confined to assistance

The Carter Administration’s response   167 to Iraq’s energy sector. On 28 September, Secretary of State Muskie met with the Iraqi Foreign Minister Sa’dun Hammadi and outlined U.S. opposition to ‘any escalation of the conflict’. Despite Hammadi’s claim that Iraq’s objectives were limited, on the same day, Warren Christopher outlined Washington’s objection to the ‘dismemberment of Iran’.89 This was also privately communicated to the Iraqi leadership via a back-­channel that had been established via Jordan, with King Hussein embracing his role as intermediary with enthusiasm. Early on in the war, Nick Veliotes, then U.S. Ambassador to Jordan, was told by King Hussein that Saddam was contemplating annexing oil-­rich Khuzestan, which he argued would benefit the West as the oilfields would be protected from the Soviets. Veliotes replied that ‘the U.S. was unalterably opposed to any efforts to dismember Iran’; shortly afterward he was instructed to ‘tell Hussein that the U.S. would not tolerate Iraqi efforts to widen the war by using airbases in the Gulf to attack Iranian targets’.90 This is not to say, however, that the United States still hoped that modest Iraqi gains would equate to leverage on the hostage issue. This hope would soon fade, as Iran was able to source the necessary resources it needed to keep fighting. On 11 October, the Iraqi government severed diplomatic relations with Syria, Libya and North Korea, all of whom were supplying Iran with weaponry.91 More ominously for the United States, Moscow began to move closer towards both Iran and Syria, signing an official treaty of alliance with Syria, which contained a clause stressing the importance of the Iranian revolution. Thus, although Iran was diplomatically isolated in the UN, and would soon demonstrate a more urgent interest in the return of its frozen twelve billion dollars of assets, the initial hope for an arms-­for-hostages deal passed. Brzezinski concluded that the ‘the Iran–Iraq war created less of an opportunity for negotiation than we may have thought’.92

A shift in U.S. strategy As the Iraqi offensive quickly faltered, most regional parties started pushing for a settlement.93 Iran and Iraq refused. The United States was forced to reconsider its policy position. The drain on Iran’s resources was beginning to mobilize some urgency on the hostage crisis, but there was no sense of a dramatic change in Iran’s negotiating position. Indeed, it appears that the most significant progress had been made shortly before Iraq’s intervention, with the approach of Sadeq Tabatabai.94 The demands made by Tabatabai were not substantially different to previous ones, but for the first time the U.S. was dealing with a representative who was a relative of Khomeini.95 The consensus emerged in Washington that the Iraqi invasion had disrupted the momentum behind this initiative but that eventually Iran’s economic and political isolation would convince the Iranians to settle the hostage issue.96

168   C. Emery The view that the conflict offered only limited active leverage on the hostage crisis dovetailed with the view that Iran’s military would regroup and the conflict would remain a stalemate.97 Brzezinski now advised Carter that Iraq had ‘bitten off more than it can chew’ and predicted a war of attrition. Although the implications of this were still unclear, there were still strategic interests to protect and even opportunities to exploit. Brzezinski believed the threat to regional security offered the United States a unique opportunity to consolidate its security position in a manner ‘even a few weeks ago would not be possible’.98 In particular the Saudis and other Gulf Arab states became anxious to see a heightened U.S. military presence and enhance their own defenses by purchasing more U.S. hardware. The Saudis were declared accomplices in Iraq’s invasion and, fearing retaliatory attacks by Iran, urgently requested the deployment of American AWACS planes and further intelligence-­sharing arrangements. This prompted a dispute between Brzezinski and Brown, who both supported strong support for the Saudis, and Muskie and Christopher, who feared further U.S. intervention on behalf of the Arabs could provoke Soviet retaliation.99 In the end, Brzezinski won the argument and the AWACS were deployed. Nevertheless, technical issues and problems with the Saudi command-­and-control structure delayed their effectiveness for the early part of the war.100 Brzezinski, having initially preferred swift, but limited, Iraqi gains, began to contemplate a tilt back towards Iran. He outlined his objectives thus: We need to initiate both more subtle and more covert initiatives regarding Iran. While reinforcing our position in Saudi Arabia, and while not clashing with Arab aspirations (and thus while not openly opposing Iraq), we should actively seek new contacts with Iran to explore the possibility of helping it just enough to put sufficient pressure on Iraq to pull back from most, if not all, of its current acquisitions. Only by attempting to do this can we make the needed effort to safeguard Iran from Soviet penetration or internal disintegration.101 This reflected a long-­standing fear that, should the Iranian regime collapse, it could be replaced by a pro-­Soviet left eager to maneuver Iran into the Soviet orbit. This had complicated the U.S. response to the hostage crisis; in particular the economic sanctions adopted by the United States and its allies. In October the State Department outlined U.S. objectives: Maintain our sanctions as part of a policy of doing no business with Iran, but permit our allies to resume trade and the provision of services to Iran to partly end Iran’s isolation and allow some repair of sanctions/war/revolution caused damage to the economy.102

The Carter Administration’s response   169 Although Brzezinski talked of seeking new contacts with Iran, the United States simply did not have the capability to find them. Washington did make a last attempt to revive the arms-­for-hostages deal, with Gary Sick preparing an inventory of non-­lethal Iranian spare parts valued at $150 million.103 In reality, however, most involved were not optimistic that Iran would release the hostages anytime soon.104 The extent of the ‘tilt’ back towards Iran simply meant a much more strict posture of neutrality and public support for Iran’s security. In a speech in Pennsylvania on 15 October, Carter affirmed America’s commitment to the ‘proposition that the national security and integrity of Iran is in the interest of national stability. We oppose any effort to dismember Iran.’105 The Carter Administration began to actively try to prevent arms shipments to Iraq. They were, however, unable to prevent significant amounts of arms reaching Iraq from Jordan, despite appeals to Amman.106 The Saudis also continued to expand their assistance to Iraq.107 Nevertheless, the United States had moved away from Iraq enough for Saddam to claim in December that it was supporting ‘Iran’s “aggression” against Iraq’.108 There was one unexpected boon for the United States. As the conflict went on it became apparent that, despite Carter’s broadly neutral posture, there was an opportunity to maneuver Egypt out of its isolation; a consequence of the peace it had made with Israel. Some in Washington felt responsibility for Egypt’s reduced influence and were eager to exploit the opportunity for Cairo to re-­ingratiate itself with the Arab world. The opportunity lay in Iraq’s growing need for Soviet-­origin weapons, which Egypt was able to provide. The United States also gave its tacit acceptance to the passing of intelligence from Egypt to Baghdad. As Howell notes, ‘In return, Iraq led the way in reintegrating Egypt into the Arab world.’109

U.S. policy and the Soviet threat As border skirmishes intensified in April 1980 and an Iraqi attack appeared increasingly plausible, the CIA had begun to sketch the implications for the Soviet Union. They reported that recent information suggested a probable tilt towards Iran in the event of a war. The CIA’s Strategic Warning Staff, influenced by Moscow’s apparent support for Tehran’s position on the hostage crisis, and conscious of deteriorating U.S.–Soviet relations and improving U.S.–Iraqi relations, made the following judgment: We believe this tilt toward Iran could presage more concerted support for Tehran by Moscow in the event of large-­scale hostilities with Baghdad. Although long and generous supporters of Iraq, the long history of Soviet–Iraqi relations has shown the Iraqis to be unreliable and resistant to Soviet efforts to meddle in Iraqi internal affairs.110

170   C. Emery The report’s authors also suggested that Iran would be inclined to accept Soviet support, overcoming both ideological and historical hostility to their northern neighbour. The report was in some respects an accurate prediction; on 4 October, the Soviet Ambassador to Iran, Vladimir Vinogradov, met Iranian Prime Minister Raja’i and offered Soviet military equipment to Iran. Raja’i made Vinogradov’s offer public in order to encourage the rift in Soviet–Iraqi relations. Despite his claims that he had refused Soviet arms, within days Moscow was assisting Libya, North Korea, Syria and Vietnam to supply arms to Iran. It was even reported by Israeli media that an Iranian delegation had travelled to Moscow to purchase U.S. weapons captured by the Soviet Union and transferred to the USSR.111 A degree of resemblance can be observed in U.S. and Soviet concerns. Both were clearly uncertain how each other would react. In the early days, Soviet arms carriers en route to Iraq were closely monitored for clues to the Kremlin’s thinking. When one in the Indian Ocean turned around it was taken as a sign that they were as uncertain of how to respond as Washington.112 Both superpowers saw the conflict as potentially enhancing their adversary’s position by providing the necessary justification for projecting their military power. The Americans feared the crisis would overshadow the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and split Arab resistance to it. The Soviets mirrored this concern with their fear that the Iran–Iraq conflict would split the Arab world and overshadow the significance of the Arab– Israeli conflict, which was hitherto Moscow’s traditional vehicle of influence in the Middle East. Both were concerned about the effects of the war on Iran’s internal political dynamics. Both were disadvantaged by the accompanying consolidation of the clerical position inside Iran and sought to encourage the ascendency of favored secular alternatives. Neither was successful in doing so. The Soviet Union’s geographic proximity to Iran, and the concerns it had regarding its own sizeable Muslim demographic, appear to constitute a significantly more immediate threat from the consolidation of radical theocracy in Iran. The dynamic was slightly different from the U.S. perspective; yet Washington’s claim over the Gulf as a sphere of influence went some way to replicating Moscow’s closer geographic proximity. On the other hand, an Iranian victory portended a fundamental reorientation of the balance of power in the region that neither Washington nor Moscow considered acceptable. This symmetry reinforced the posture of neutrality both sides adopted for the first two years of the conflict. There was continued fear that Iran would seek to improve relations with the opposing superpower in order to better resist Iraqi forces. Also driving this fear, particularly in Moscow, was the fact that Iraq relied on Soviet-­origin military hardware while Iran’s military was broadly configured to use American equipment. With little question of the United States resuming arms shipments to Iran, Moscow, which was still supplying

The Carter Administration’s response   171 Iraq before its attack, appeared to have greater leverage. The intelligence memorandum released just days before the start of hostilities noted that Moscow would be conscious that shutting off supplies to Iraq, which it did, could push Iraq further towards the West.113 The United States correctly predicted that Moscow would be highly dissatisfied with Iraq’s action. The United States was also troubled by Saudi opposition to Washington’s embargo on arms to Iraq. The Kingdom even took tentative steps toward improving relations with Moscow in the hope that the Kremlin could be persuaded to drop its own embargo. The Saudis also began strengthening its security ties with France, Iraq’s second major arms supplier, which was critical of Washington’s militarization of the Gulf and abandonment of détente. To make matters worse the Saudis made some positive noises about Brezhnev’s December call for the use of force by great powers to be banned in the Gulf. It appears most likely, however, that this was connected to the Saudis’ desire to see Soviet arms reach Iraq via Saudi Arabia.114

Conclusion Iraqi fears of aggressive Khomeinism, and the promise of lucrative territorial gains in provinces believed to be friendly to Iraq, and not foreign manipulation, appear by far the most reasonable explanation for the outbreak of war. The hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Iraq’s growing rift with the Soviet Union, encouraged a warming in U.S.– Iraqi relations.115 Nevertheless, throughout most of 1980, the United States continued to offer a future strategic relationship with Iran if they released the hostages. One message passed to the Iranians via the Swiss Ambassador in February 1980 mentioned an offer to ‘enhance the security of Iran, including the resumption of the supply of military spare parts by the United States to Iran’.116 On the matter of what the United States knew of Iraqi intentions, this essay has shown that it is unlikely that the United States was ever in possession of any clear evidence of Saddam’s intention to invade Iran. Although the Carter Administration drastically underestimated the scale of Saddam’s plans, the disorganized and apparently impetuous nature of the invasion, with much of the Iraqi Army still in garrison, and occurring in the context of border skirmishes and aggressive propaganda, muddied the waters for U.S. observers. If the United States was, as Cave contends, passing on warnings (verified or doctored) of advanced Iraqi war preparations as early as 1979, the Iranians did not act upon it. Conscious of being labeled pro-­American, and unwilling to detail their secret dealings with U.S. intelligence officials, it is possible that the Bazargan government would not have informed Ayatollah Khomeini’s office. The administration’s initial hope was for Iraqi forces to make limited gains; almost exclusively because of the leverage it could offer the United

172   C. Emery States on the hostage crisis. At the same time they moved quickly to try to protect Iraq’s oil-­producing capacity. Of far greater significance to the latter concern was Saudi Arabia’s decision to increase it own oil production. Both goals reflected pressing domestic concerns just weeks before the U.S. public would go to the polls. Within little more than a week the Iraqi offensive had begun to stall and, with Iran able to source weapons elsewhere, albeit at a premium, the initial hopes that Iran would be compelled to resolve the hostage crisis receded. Interestingly, the failure of the Iraqi military to exploit their early successes appears to have been blamed on Baghdad’s ineptitude rather than credited to the surprising resilience and cohesion of the Iranian military.117 The danger then was that the conflict would spread to Saudi Arabia, Syria or Jordan and that Iran and Syria would move closer towards the Soviet Union. Washington had already been instrumental in preventing the entanglement of some Gulf States. By October 1980, Brzezinski was counseling President Carter to oppose the Iraqi occupation of Iran, because of the danger that it would encourage Soviet penetration.118 The policy that emerged was characterized by a desire to preserve all options, while trying to avoid actions that would undermine the Carter Doctrine or establish an opening for the Soviet Union. The impetus for America to adjust its policy of neutrality, and take a definitive position on which side to back, came in 1982, when the Iranian military threatened to overrun Iraq. After the Iranian revolution, Carter’s Iran policy reflected an overriding fear that Iran’s destabilization could provoke either a Soviet–Iranian alliance or Soviet intervention. The Iran–Iraq War reinforced this Soviet­centric mindset. At the very twilight of the Carter presidency, a future rapprochement with Iran was still considered desirable, recognizing the sensitivity of Arab allies to this notion. The State Department’s transition team advised the incoming government against supporting Iranian dissidents. None of these groups, they observed, had ‘real support among any significant part of the Iranian public and many, by associating themselves with Iraq and/or attacking Khomeini when criticizing the clerics, have alienated even potential supporters’.119 Support for opposition groups or military threats would only ‘make an eventual rapprochement with Iran more difficult’.120 The Carter and indeed Brezhnev governments had spent a considerable amount of time working out how to ingratiate themselves with the Iranians without burning their bridges with the Arabs. The Reagan Administration would exhibit an even greater impulse to contain the Soviet threat but add to it a much greater anxiety regarding the spread of Iran’s revolutionary ideology. Nevertheless, the notion of Iran as ‘the strategic choice’ did not disappear. The same balancing act that Brzezinski had grappled with would go on to preoccupy the next U.S. administration, particularly Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s second National Security Advisor.

The Carter Administration’s response   173

Notes    1 This is not always the case. J. Bill’s widely celebrated The Eagle and the Lion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) includes almost no reference to the administration’s response to the conflict. The same can be said of R. Cottam’s Iran and the United States: A Cold War Case Study (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988).    2 Examples are R. L. Moses, Freeing the Hostages, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996, and C. Warren (ed.), American Hostages in Iran: Conduct of a Crisis, New Haven: Council on Foreign Relations and Yale University Press, 1985.    3 G. Sick, All Fall Down, New York: Random House, 1985; Cottam, op. cit.; J. Carter, Keeping Faith, London: William Collins and Sons, 1982; H. Jordan, Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency, New York: Putnam, 1982.    4 S. Chubin and C. Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991; Stephen C. Pelletiere, The Iran–Iraq War: Chaos In A Vacuum, Boulder, CO: Praeger, 1982, p. 43.    5 As suggested by Sasan Fayazmanesh, Graig Unger, Dilip Hiro, and journalists Robert Parry and Richard Sale.    6 A. H. Bani-­Sadr, My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the U.S., Washington DC: Brassey’s, 1991, p. 70.    7 See for example Rafsanjani’s speech at Friday Prayers in Tehran on 24 September 2006. BBC Worldwide Monitoring Service.    8 Dilip Hiro uses Bani-­Sadr’s account to write that ‘By supplying secret information, which exaggerated Iran’s military weakness, to Saudi Arabia for onward transmission to Baghdad, Washington encouraged Iraq to attack Iran.’ D. Hiro, The Longest War, The Iran–Iraq Military Conflict, New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1991, p. 71.    9 BBC Worldwide Monitoring Service, 22 March 2009.   10 The document was discovered by journalist Robert Parry amid records from a Congressional investigation into the early history of the Reagan Administration’s contacts with Iran. Parry published the memo in 1995 on Consortiumnews.com.   11 Author’s interviews include Henry Precht (21/05/2008 plus email 20/12/2011); Charlie Naas, email (22/04/2010; 10/12/2011), Gary Sick (24/04/2007), email 31/01/2012); Harold Saunders (20/04/2008); Bill Quandt (06/05/2008); Ambassador Nathanial Howell (multiple interviews between 18/04/2008 and 10/05/2008; emails 20/05/2010; 21/01/2012); Wayne White, emails 20/01/2012 to 21/01/2012); and Nick Veliotes, email (19/01/2012).   12 Private email correspondence (17/10/2010).   13 PBS interview with Said K Aburish, available at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/aburish.html (accessed 16 August 2012).   14 L. Everest, ‘Fueling the Iran–Iraq Slaughter’, Z-­Net, 5 September 2002. See also Bani-­Sadr, p. 70.   15 K. R. Timmerman, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 76.   16 The Wall Street Journal, 18 June 1991.   17 K. R. Timmerman, p. 76.   18 H. Brands, ‘Saddam Hussein, the United States, and the invasion of Iran: was there a green light?’, Cold War History, 12 (2), 2012, pp. 1–25.   19 G. Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, 1992, pp. 106–7.   20 H. Brands.   21 M. Gasiorowski, ‘The US–Iran Intelligence Liaison Relationship, May-­October 1979’, p. 13. Unpublished draft quoted with permission.

174   C. Emery   22 Ibid., p. 14.   23 R. Cottam, pp.  131, 207; D. Murphy, US Foreign Policy and Iran: American-­ Iranian relations since the Islamic Revolution, London: Routledge, 2009, p. 27; O. Seliktar, Failing the Crystal Ball Test, Boulder, CO: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000, p. 130.   24 ‘Military Presence in the Middle East/Persian Gulf ’,18 June 1979, NLC-­20-242-1-0, JCL.   25 M. Gasiorowski, ‘The US-­Iran Intelligence Liaison Relationship’, pp. 6–7.   26 H. Teicher and G. R. Teicher, Twin Pillars to Desert Storm, New York: William Morrow, 1993, pp. 60–71.   27 Foreign Affairs Oral History Program, Association for Diplomatic Studies, Interview with Ambassador Bruce Laingen.   28 M. Gasiorowski, ‘The US–Iran Intelligence Liaison Relationship’, pp. 8–9.   29 Ibid., pp. 9–10.   30 Email to author, 30 July 2010.   31 Email to author, 20 January 2012.   32 Email to author, 30 July 2010.   33 See for example Thomas Thornton to David Aaron, ‘Message to the Vice President on Afghanistan’, 23 March 1979, NSC memorandum, Brzezinski donated material, country file, Box 1, ‘Afghanistan 1/77–3/79’, NLC-­6-1-1-120.   34 See for example ‘The Kurdish Problem in Perspective’, CIA Report, 1 August 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 31, pp. 1–41. IR02818.   35 Ibid., p.  64. See also D. Menshari, Iran: A Decade of War and Revolution, New York: Holmes and Meir, 1990, p. 101.   36 D. Hiro, p. 27.   37 ‘Iranian–Iraqi Tensions’, Cable, Tehran, 06292, Naas to State Department, 18 June 1979, Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 15, pp. 98–100. IR02687.   38 Interview with author, 22 April 2010.   39 ‘Irano-­Iraq Relations’, Cable, Tehran 06378, 19 June 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 10, p. 80. Interview with Charlie Naas 22 April 2010.   40 D. A. Korn, ‘The Last Years of Mustafa Barzani’, Middle East Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, June 1994, online edition.   41 ‘Kurdish Views on Iraq and Iran’, Memorandum, Department of State. Office of the Executive Secretary, 9 May 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 31, pp. 78–9. IR02540.   42 ‘The Kurdish Problem in Perspective’, CIA Report, 1 August 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 31, pp. 1–41. IR02818   43 ‘Conditions in Western Iran’, Secret Cable, Tehran, 09447, 26 August 1979. IR02929.   44 ‘Iraqi Support for Iranian Kurds’, Cable, Beirut 54572, Central Intelligence Agency, 6 September 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 44, pp. 37–9. IR02997.   45 See ‘Status of the Kurdish Movement in Iran’, CIA Report, 17 October 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 32, pp. 107–10. IR03308.   46 ‘Turkish Views on Kurdish Troubles in Iran’, Cable, Ankara, 06618, 10 September 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 31, pp. 123–4.   47 ‘Intelligence Information on Sadar Jaff ’, Cable, CIA Station Bonn, 85112, 5 October 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 32, p. 46.   48 ‘Information on Catomic/19 Meeting with Sadar Jaff ’, Cable, CIA Station Bonn, 85221, 10 October 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 32, pp. 47–9.   49 Henze to Brzezinski, ‘Kurds, Iran, etc.’, National Security Council, memo, 4 September 1979, DDRS, Document Number: CK3100528462.

The Carter Administration’s response   175   50 ‘Iraqi–Iranian and Kuwaiti–Iranian Relations’, Cable, Kuwait, 02807, 11 June 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 40, pp. 10–11. IR02668.   51 F. G. Gause III, ‘Iraq’s decisions to go to war, 1980 and 1990’, The Middle East Journal, Winter 2002, vol. 56, no. 1, p. 65.   52 Entezam had been exiled to Sweden by Bazargan, mostly for his own safety, after he had publicly opposed the establishment of the Assembly of Experts. The CIA tried to continue its relationship with him in Stockholm, but the uncovering of his contacts with American officials would have disastrous consequences for Entezam.   53 ‘Abbas Amir-­Entezam Concern about Iranian Relations with Iraq’, Cable, CIA, 543216, 31 October 1979. IR03446.   54 ‘Policy Initiatives – Talks with [Permanent Representatives]’, Memorandum State, 13 October 1979, in Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, vol. 16, pp. 129–33. IR03276.   55 Paul Henze to Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Thoughts on Iran’, memo, 9 November 1979. DDRS.   56 Memorandum, Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, ‘NSC Weekly Report #122’, Top Secret, 21 December 1979.   57 R. C. Thornton, The Carter Years: Toward a New Global Order, New York: Paragon House, 1991, p. 518.   58 Ibid., p. 519.   59 David Newsom, ‘US–Persian Gulf Relationship’, Department of State Bulletin, August 1980, p. 62. See also R. C. Thornton, p. 521.   60 The transcript, which was released by Iraq, was published in the New York Times, 23 September 1990, p. 19. See also G. Sick, pp. 106–7.   61 As published in Daily Report. South Asia, FBIS-­SAS-80-172, 3 September 1980.   62 J. Carter, p. 506.   63 Defense Intelligence Agency, ‘Iraq Goads Iran’, Intelligence Information Report, 01113, 9 April 1980. IG00021.   64 ‘Possible Iranian-­Iraqi Conflict’, CIA Memorandum, 11 April 1980, National Archives. CIA Records Search Tool. CIA RDP83B01027R000300170011-8. HN0 1992.   65 Email correspondence with Wayne White 4 April 2011. Gary Sick, Charlie Naas and Henry Precht repeated White’s sentiment in correspondence with this author.   66 ‘Iran–Iraq Conflict [Attached to Forwarding Memorandum]’, CIA Alert Memorandum, September 17, 1980: HN0 1999.   67 Email to author by Wayne White, 3 March 2012.   68 Email to author by Wayne White, 20 January 2012.   69 Email to author by Nat Howell, 5 May 2010.   70 B. Ganji, The Politics of Confrontation, London: I. B. Tauris, 2006, p. 207.   71 M. Gasiorowski, ‘The Nuzhih Plot and Iranian Politics’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 34, no. 4, November 2002, p. 649.   72 ‘Run-­down on SDRap/SD Pepper Operations’, Cable CIA, 535504, 19 October 1979. IR03326.   73 ‘SD Pepper/1 Reports that Shahpour Bakhtiar Wants American Aid for his Movement’, Secret Cable, CIA, 534442, 18 October 1979. IR03309.   74 G. Sick, p. 107.   75 For this claim see S. Fayazmanesh, The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment, London: Routledge, 2008, p. 21.   76 See M. Gasiorowski, ‘The Nuzhih Plot’, pp. 645–66.   77 Ibid., p. 652.   78 Email from Nat Howell to author, 5 May 2010.   79 B. Ganji, p. 209; R. C. Thornton, p. 523.

176   C. Emery   80 See Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, ‘NSC Weekly Report #156’, Secret, 3 October 1980.   81 This account was provided by a former senior official closely involved in U.S. Energy strategy at the time. They wish to remain anonymous.   82 R. C. Thornton, p. 522.   83 United States Embassy in Israel Cable from Samuel W. Lewis to the Department of State. ‘Conversation with [Excised]’, 12 December 1980.   84 Z. Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977–1981, Toronto: McGraw-­Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1983, p.  279. See also R.  C. Thornton, p. 524.   85 I would like to thank Mark Gasiorowski for sharing his own research into this episode.   86 Oman’s sympathy towards Iraq was well known, but Sultan Qaboos’ motivation is still unclear. What is clear is that he had been a close friend of the Shah and was probably convinced by Saddam that one decisive attack could bring the revolution down. In Ras al-­Khaimar, Emir Sheik Sakr had apparently taken the decision without notifyng the federal government, much to the alarm of other UAE leaders, but probably saw an opportunity to fulfil Ras al-­Khaimar’s specific claim on one of the disputed islands.   87 G. Sick, p. 106.   88 Email to author from G. Sick, 31 January 2012.   89 B. Ganji, p. 210.   90 Email to author from Nick Veliotes, 19 January 2012.   91 B. Ganji, p. 212.   92 Z. Brzezinski, p. 504.   93 Jordan was increasingly making hugely lucrative financial gains from the diversion of trade to the Jordanian port of Aqaba.   94 D. P. Haughton, US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 141.   95 R. L. Moses, p. 255.   96 Ibid., p. 269; See also H. Saunders, ‘Beginning of the end’, in P. H. Kreisberg (ed.), American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis, Derby, PA: Diane Publishing Co., 1997, pp. 290–1.   97 Ibid., p. 281.   98 Memorandum, Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, ‘NSC Weekly Report#156’, Secret, 3 October 1980. Conference reader from from ‘The Carter Administration and the “arc of crisis” 1977–81’, A Critical Oral History Conference, 25–26 July 2005, p. 64.   99 B. Ganji, p. 209. 100 See Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, ‘NSC Weekly Report#156’, Secret, 3 October 1980. Conference reader, p. 64. Also Howell’s email to author, 5 May 2010. 101 Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, ‘NSC Weekly Report#156’, Secret, 3 October 1980. 102 State Department: Iran Transitional Paper: #1, 4 December 1980. 103 G. Sick, pp. 313–4; and J. Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A Revaluation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 171. 104 G. Sick, p. 313. 105 Quoted in R. C. Thornton, p. 524. 106 B. Ganji, p. 213. 107 Ibid., p. 214. 108 CWIHP Conference Timeline, p. 3. 109 Howell’s email to author, 5 May 2010. 110 ‘Possible Iranian-­Iraqi Conflict,’ CIA Memorandum, 11 April 1980.

The Carter Administration’s response   177 111 B. Ganji, p. 212; R. C. Thornton, p. 523. 112 Howell’s email to author, 5 May 2010. 113 ‘Iran–Iraq Conflict [Attached to Forwarding Memorandum]’, CIA Alert Memorandum, 17 September 1980: HN0 1999. 114 B. Ganji, p. 212. 115 Ibid., p. 238. 116 Telegram to Ambassador Lang, 3 February 1980, Jimmy Carter Library, Hamilton Jordan Confidential File, Box 34B, 1977–80, Iran:11/79–03/80. 117 R. L. Moses, pp. 281–2. 118 G. Sick, pp. 106–7. 119 ‘Political Scenario for Iran Over the Next 3–5 Years’, Iran Transition Paper No. 1, State Department, 4 December 1980, Carter–Reagan Transition Papers, National Security Archive. 120 Ibid.

10 Changing American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War Judith Yaphe 1

When Iraq attacked Iran in September 1980, the United States was negotiating with the Islamic Republic of Iran for the release of the hostages seized in its embassy in Tehran in November 1979. The negotiations were long and difficult, and credit for obtaining release of the hostages was denied the Carter Administration on its last day in office, leaving a bitterness that would affect Washington for decades to come. Except for the brief flutter toward Iran known as Irangate in 1985–86, Washington has viewed Iran as a threat to regional security and a state sponsor of terrorism. Nor was the United States enamored of Iraq. Accounts of the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime were known but little attention was paid to Iraq, even when his regime attacked Iranian forces or Kurdish villages with chemical weapons. In 1980 the United States had only a minimal presence in and an absentee policy towards the Gulf. All this would change over the eight years of the war. Washington would talk about a war of attrition between two unlikeable regimes, both of whom were state sponsors of terrorism, intimidated their neighbors and people, opposed Egypt’s ground-­breaking treaty with Israel, and threatened access to oil and gas reserves. The United States helped Iraq by maintaining its arms embargo on Iran, protecting shipping in the Gulf, providing weapons and intelligence, and mounting a counterterrorist campaign against Iran. The tilt toward Baghdad was briefly countered by an Israeli-­encouraged arms deal in which the Reagan Administration thought it was providing some spare parts and TOW and HAWK missiles in exchange for help in the release of Americans held hostage by Hizballah, Iran’s surrogate in Lebanon, and the promise of talks with so-­called Iranian ‘moderates’. By the end of the war, the United States had become directly and deeply committed to preserving the security and well-­being of the Arab states of the Gulf. An intelligence estimate written after the end of the war predicted a quiet period while Iraq focused on repairing damage caused by the war. The prognosis was similar for Iran. It was not until Saddam invaded and occupied Kuwait two years later that the U.S. government was shaken from its complacency about its relations with Iraq. It remained mistrustful of the Islamic Republic.

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   179 This chapter will examine the changing views of the war and its combatants as the Reagan and Bush administrations tried to sort out what was in the national interest and how to maintain commitments to friends without expanding the U.S. role in the region. Several issues will be addressed. What was the basis of American foreign policy when the war began and how did it change over the period of the war? How did the United States view its growing commitments to the Gulf States? How did the Gulf States and Iraq view those commitments? What were the nature, purpose, and consequences of American intervention?

A short history of U.S. engagement in the Gulf From an American perspective, the greatest threats to Gulf security and U.S. interests in the region historically came from the Soviet Union and Great Britain, the former as part of the Cold War and the latter as a vestige of colonial patriarchy. Americans were persona non grata in the eyes of the British ‘protectors’, a competitor for influence, national interest, and arms sales far out-­weighing the danger from the ‘Evil Empire’. By contrast, Iraq’s revolutionary government was busy consolidating power and eliminating enemies and Iran seemed firmly anti-­British and anti-­American. American forces have been present in the Gulf region since 1947, when the U.S. Fifth Fleet took up residence in Bahrain. The U.S. Air Force also maintained a presence in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia from the 1940s through to the early 1960s. American policy towards the Gulf region was shaped by developments in the emerging Cold War. Direct American engagement in the Gulf began with the British withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971. Through the late 1960s and 1970s, while American attention was focused on the Vietnam War, Britain continued its retreat from the Middle East, announcing in early 1968 that it could no longer afford to protect the Gulf Arab states and would withdraw all forces from the region in 1971. The resulting power vacuum left by the British departure worried Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom feared possible Soviet encroachments in the Gulf. Reluctant to commit forces to the region, Nixon in 1971 decided to assume British responsibilities without deploying military forces. He announced his Twin Pillars policy and intention to use Iran and Saudi Arabia as America’s surrogates in the Gulf. In exchange for becoming our proxies, Nixon offered Tehran and Riyadh arms sales, including non-­nuclear military hardware and F-­14 and F-­15 supersonic jets. Iran agreed and over the next five years the Shah spent an estimated $16.2 billion on U.S. arms, planes, tanks, and warships.2

Transitioning from Shah to Ayatollah The years 1978 through 1980 saw developments that would profoundly change America’s perception of its role and interests in the Middle East

180   J. Yaphe and Persian Gulf region. American policy-­makers remained focused on the Soviet Union and saw Moscow invade Afghanistan, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat sign a peace agreement and receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Arabs, led by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Syrian President Hafiz al-­Asad, form a rejectionist front to punish Egypt and defeat prospects for additional peace progress. The Islamic Revolution in Iran succeeded in removing the Shah and began the process of purging the country of foreign (for which read American) influence and consolidating its control in Tehran. In Baghdad, Saddam declared himself president of the Republic, purged government and party of alleged rivals, and accused Damascus of plotting his overthrow. Within a year, Saddam would seize the opportunity to eliminate his greatest threat – the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the beginning of his presidency, President Carter embraced Nixon’s Twin Pillars Doctrine, but his willingness to rely on the Shah to prevent Soviet inroads and promote regional stability soon waned. Carter grew increasingly unhappy with the Shah’s limitless appetite for weapons, repressive policies on human rights, and diversion of money meant for economic development to arms purchases.3 As opposition to the Shah mounted, Carter sought to distance his administration from the Shah’s brutal repression of his opponents. Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski described the region from the Horn of Africa through the Persian Gulf as ‘an arc of crisis’. He saw Russia advancing to its goal of direct access to the Indian Ocean. The Shah left Iran for exile in 1979. The United States made several attempts to probe the new government in Tehran for mutual interests and cooperation. Shortly after the Shah’s departure, General Robert Huyser, Deputy Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, was sent to Tehran to assess ways of easing the Iranian military’s transition to the new government headed by Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar and prospects for cooperation with the revolutionary government. Ambassador William Sullivan opposed the mission, disagreed with the White House decision to find a way to encourage the Iranian military, and recommended the White House prepare for the success of the revolution. He concluded that Iran after the revolution would not be willing to work with the United States.4 Trita Parsi, however, wrote in his study Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States that all options remained open for Khomeini and Carter. According to Parsi, ‘Although the Ayatollah’s rhetoric was defiant and scornful of the United States, he initially did not intend to sever ties with Washington. As long as the United States respected Iran’s independence, a new relationship could emerge, he [Khomeini] reasoned.’5 Parsi argues further that: Declassified CIA documents show that Washington was well aware that Khomeini recognized areas of common interest between the two

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   181 countries and that he favored the continuation of oil sales to the United States. Washington too was eager to ensure that the revolution wouldn’t lead to a complete break with Iran, because that surely would benefit Moscow. But the radical cleric found himself out-­radicalized when a handful of Iranian leftist students stormed the US embassy on November 4, 1979 and took all diplomats and employees hostage.6 The U.S. officials concluded that there was no chance of re-­establishing the monarchy or the close relationship they had maintained with it. They believed the Bazargan government represented the best hope for moderation in Iran and constructive bilateral relations. They also understood that intense anti-­Americanism would prevent Bazargan from working closely with the United States and endanger any Iranian who did so. Accordingly, the new U.S. posture that emerged in this period called for supporting the Bazargan government, refraining from actions that might destabilize Iran or further enflame anti-­Americanism, working constructively to improve bilateral relations, and waiting for conditions to improve.7 At least one other emissary was sent to Iran. In October 1979 a CIA officer was sent to warn Iranian officials in Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan’s government of Iraqi preparations for war.8 The advice was rejected. The seizure of the U.S. Embassy one month later by radical students loyal to Khomeini settled the issue. Khomeini accepted the students’ action as a way of consolidating popular support and identifying the primary enemy of the revolution. Complicating the picture was growing concern in Riyadh and Washington after the fall of the Shah about Soviet troop movements along Russia’s border with Iran. Brzezinski noted that by late August 1980 ‘we had mounting intelligence that the Soviets were deploying forces on the Iranian frontier, in a mode suited for intervention in Iran’. He claimed that the Saudis viewed Saddam’s invasion of Iran one month later as an immediate threat to the security of their oilfields.9 Brzezinski, who had been drafting a Persian Gulf security strategy, felt that ‘American resolve to act firmly in order to reassure our friends’ was being tested. He wrote: I was alerted [that] . . . the Saudis had just urgently asked for the deployment of American AWACS, enhanced air defense, and greater intelligence support. Apparently the Iraqis were planning to stage an attack on Iranian facilities along the Gulf from the territory of some of the Arabian Gulf states, and the Saudis feared a retaliatory Iranian response, directed at their oilfields.10 Hostage crises would distract the Carter and Reagan Administrations throughout the 1980s. Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher conducted talks with Iranian negotiators through the 1980 election. According to Christopher’s account, the German ambassador in Washington

182   J. Yaphe reported in September 1980 that Ayatollah Khomeini had authorized an unidentified Iranian senior official to meet secretly in West Germany with an American counterpart to discuss an end to the hostage crisis.11 The Iranian official was Sadegh Tabatabai, the brother-­in-law of Khomeini’s son. They met on 15 September 1980. According to Christopher, ‘Tabatabai asked if military spare parts that Iran had on order in the United States, some of them already paid for, could be part of the deal. I told him such an arrangement would be difficult, and he didn’t press the matter again.’ They agreed to meet again in a few days.12 Christopher was convinced that the hostages would soon be released. Tabatabai, he wrote, appeared to be an authentic emissary who ‘reflected no indecision about his principals’ desire to close the hostage chapter’. One week later, on 22 September, Saddam launched his war on Iran and communications with Tabatabai ceased. ‘Despite our best efforts’, Christopher opined, the talks ‘could not be revived’.13 Christopher also mentioned ‘a deal-­breaking increase in their demand’ in early November. It is not clear if Christopher is referring to a new proposal made by Tehran in the days before the election or if perhaps Iran was seeking competitive bids from the Democratic and Republican candidates. Christopher had become increasingly frustrated by the Iranians’ seeming diffidence. Arnie Raphel, a Foreign Service officer who had served in Iran and accompanied Christopher to the meeting with Tabatabai, cautioned Christopher that ‘the Iranian negotiating style is grounded in the bazaar tradition, where the making of outrageous demands and haggling up to the last minute are routine’. This latest Iranian move ‘was a tactic, not a reversal of position’.14 In any event, Christopher denied the rumors that the Republicans had made a deal with the Iranians not to release the hostages before the elections, saying ‘I never saw any evidence of that.’15 Accusations by Carter loyalists that Reagan allies (Bill Casey and George H.  W. Bush in particular) had negotiated secretly with Iranian contacts in Europe before or after Reagan’s election persisted. Casey allegedly advised his Iranian interlocutors during a meeting in Europe that it was better to do a favor for the new administration, which could help Iran, rather than to a government on its way out. In his book October Surprise, Gary Sick wrote: The evidence suggests that [Bill] Casey and others may have seen possible manipulation of the hostage crisis by Carter as a more serious threat to their election plans than the risk of being caught in secret dealings with Iran. There was genuine and widespread concern within the Reagan–Bush campaign that Carter would launch an ‘October surprise’ that would win him the election.16 The warnings by Carter Administration loyalists that representatives of the incoming Reagan Administration were encouraging Iran’s revolutionary

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   183 government not to release the American hostages until Reagan had been inaugurated engendered intense partisan political and personal ill-­will which lasted for the next two decades. The allegations have never been resolved. In response to Iranian actions, as well as the perceived Soviet threat to the region, Carter declared that the United States had vital security interests in Middle East for which it would fight, with or without partners. He embargoed grain sales to Russia, withdrew from the 1980 summer Olympics which were to be held in Moscow, and created the Rapid Deployment Force, the precursor of CENTCOM and capable of airlifting U.S. forces to the Gulf at a moment’s notice. In late September 1980 U.S. Airborne Warning and Control Aircraft (AWACS) were ordered to be sent to Saudi Arabia to help Saudi defenses. Brzezinski placed much of the blame for the failure of the Carter Administration to deal effectively with first the Shah and then the post-­ Shah governments on the State Department. In his memoir, he describes conflicts in strategic security assessments between the National Security Council (NSC), which he headed, and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown on the one side, and on the other the State Department headed by former Senator Edward Muskie. Brzezinski and Brown favored an immediate and positive response to the Saudi request for AWACs, while both Muskie and his deputy Warren Christopher argued that the United States should hold back to avoid provoking Moscow or Tehran. When President Carter approved the movement of AWACS to Saudi Arabia, Muskie remonstrated that ‘we were plunging headlong into World War III’.17 Brzezinski accused the U.S. ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, of contributing to the indecision in Washington and Tehran by diluting the administration’s urgings that the Shah ‘act’. Brzezinski still believes that the United States should have made the decisions needed for the Shah ‘because of the enormous stakes involved. I fault myself ’, he wrote, ‘for not having been more convincing and persuasive in regard to the President.’18 Carter’s doctrine introduced U.S. forces into the Gulf. Over the next eight years, President Reagan would oversee the expansion of American commitments, force presence, and operations. Like Carter, Reagan was determined to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan and end Iran’s efforts to export its Islamic revolution by any means necessary. He got the Saudis to help in the war in Afghanistan and kept maximum pressure on Moscow to withdraw by ensuring that Soviet political, military, and other costs remained high while their occupation continued. Little attention was paid to the potential consequences of the war or to considering risks and benefits for U.S. interests. Most aspects of the Iran–Iraq war – its military operations, strategic aspects, the beginnings of acquisition by both countries of weapons of mass destruction, the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the abortive hostage rescue, the alleged October Surprise, Iran’s support and role in

184   J. Yaphe plotting international terrorism in the 1980s, Iran–Contra, and Halabjah – have received significant attention over the last two decades.19 I have no intention of repeating these tales or cataloging accusations of who did what to whom. Instead, several questions about aspects of American–­ Iranian and American–Iraqi linkages need to be addressed. Part of the problem is the subjective nature of most published accounts, and part of the problem is the lack of disclosure of classified material that would hopefully shed light on these issues.

Tilting towards Baghdad Iraq had broken off relations with the United States in 1967, following the humiliation of the Six-­Day Arab–Israeli war. Moreover, in a clumsy effort to take the lead in the opposition to Israel and Egyptian President Sadat, Saddam Hussein had hosted a meeting of Syrian, Libyan, and radical Palestinian factions in Baghdad in 1978 to create a rejectionist front against Egypt and Israel and rally Palestinian extremists. Several months later, Saddam proclaimed himself President of the Republic, retired his cousin and predecessor Ahmad Hassan al-­Bakr, and accused Syria of plotting to overthrow him. In September 1980 he invaded Iran, thereby launching eight years of war. Analysis of Saddam’s motives and intentions before and during the war was spotty and did not improve greatly after the war. A popular psychological assessment prepared by a CIA psychiatrist on the eve of the 1991 Kuwait War noted that while there was no evidence that the Iraqi leader was a madman or a psychotic, Saddam was a ‘wounded self ’, a ‘malignant narcissist’, and a ‘paranoid with no constraints on his conscience or aggression’.20 National security advisers to several American presidents and politicians saw him differently. According to Brent Scowcroft, who would later serve as President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Adviser, the United States turned to a policy of balancing off Iraq and Iran when the Shah fell. He wrote that the early tilt towards Baghdad by the Reagan Administration ‘came not out of preference for one of two reprehensible regimes, but because we wanted neither to win the war and were worried that Iraq would prove to be the weaker’.21 The Reagan Administration set out to institutionalize this relationship in a similar attempt to encourage acceptable moderate behavior on the part of Saddam Hussein. There was also the hope of securing a significant role for American business in what was assumed would be a substantial Iraqi reconstruction effort . . . these objectives seemed to us reasonable and, pending the outcome of the policy review, we continued to pursue them. It was not easy. Saddam Hussein was a tough, ruthless, and even paranoid dictator with little exposure to, and deep suspicion of, the West.22

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   185 Saddam Hussein apparently believed that the United States and Iraq had decided to re-­establish diplomatic relations, which had been broken off after the 1967 war with Israel, just before Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, but actual implementation was delayed for a few more years in order not to make the linkage too explicit. Saudi leaders would later claim that, alarmed by the Iranian revolution, they had urged Saddam to take the fight to Iran; their advice allegedly included a ‘green light’ for the invasion from President Carter.23 No one has been able to verify this claim. Did Saddam Hussein in 1980 need encouragement from the United States to attack Iran? It is doubtful.24 Carter may have thought that encouraging Iraq to attack Iran would force Iran to release the hostages, but this seems counter to Carter’s basic principles. Brzezinski wrote in his memoir that Carter ‘came to the Presidency with a determination to make U.S. foreign policy more humane and moral’. According to Brzezinski: [Carter] genuinely believe[d] that as President he could shape a more decent world. I share[d] in that belief, up to a point. For me, the highest form of attainment is to combine thought with action, and I believe that power should be a means for attaining morally desirable ends. Accordingly, I felt that the United States should use its power to improve the human condition, but I put stronger emphasis perhaps than Carter on the notion that strengthening American power was the necessary point of departure. Indeed, later on, when a choice between the two had to be made, between projecting U.S. power or enhancing human rights (as, for example, in Iran), I felt that power had to come first.25 More significantly, in 1982, the State Department removed Iraq from its list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ and fought off Congressional efforts to put it back on the list three years later. Such de-­listing made Iraq eligible to purchase dual-­use equipment and technology in the United States that could be used for either civilian or military purposes. This allowed the Reagan Administration one year later to issue a license permitting the export of six Lockheed L-­100 civilian transport aircraft to Iraq.26 According to declassified documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and published by the National Security Archive, the administration was well aware of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons (CW) as early as 1982 and its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.27 Yet, in 1986, despite evidence of the effects of chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers, the United States was the only country to vote against a UN Security Council statement condemning Iraq’s use of mustard gas against Iranian troops. Perhaps the most significant indicator that change was coming was the visit to Baghdad in late 1983 of Reagan’s special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, to meet with Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz. One result of the visit was a

186   J. Yaphe shift in American policy to sales of more advanced dual-­use technology to Baghdad. Tactical military assistance also was promised, including satellite photos of the battlefield. Rumsfeld’s meeting with Saddam was private, but Howard Teicher, an NSC staffer who had accompanied Rumsfeld to Baghdad, later described his meeting with Tariq Aziz in an unclassified affidavit. Teicher traced the U.S. tilt to Iraq to a turning point in the war in 1982 when Iran had gained the offensive and the Reagan Administration feared that Iran’s army might slice through Iraq to the oilfields of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Teicher wrote, ‘in June 1982, President Reagan decided that the United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran’. Teicher said he helped draft a secret national security decision directive (NSDD) authorizing covert U.S. assistance to Saddam Hussein’s military. Reagan signed it. Teicher also said that Rumsfeld brought with him a secret Israeli offer to assist Iraq. He wrote that Aziz refused even to accept the Israelis’ letter to Saddam offering assistance because ‘Aziz told us that he would be executed on the spot by Hussein if he did so’.28 According to Teicher, CIA Director William Casey led the effort to arm the Iraqis. He also claimed that Deputy Director Robert Gates ‘knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-­U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq’. While it is obvious that Casey, who loved covert operations and was a close adviser to the President, directed the planning for supplying arms and intelligence to Baghdad, Gates’ role remains unclear. As Deputy Director he should have been apprised of operational plans, but Casey, who at that time was suffering from a cancerous brain tumor, was not known for keeping other officials operationally informed. Teicher also claimed that Vice President George H.  W. Bush was a key figure in encouraging Saddam in war: In 1986, President Reagan sent a secret message to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran. The message was delivered by Vice President Bush who communicated it to Egyptian President Mubarak, who in turn passed the message to Saddam Hussein.29 Despite the provision of political, military, and economic assistance by the United States, its NATO allies and Middle Eastern friends to Iraq, Baghdad could not stop Iranian military advances. In January 1984 the United States informed its friends in the Persian Gulf that Iran’s defeat of Iraq would be ‘contrary to U.S. interests’ and that steps would be taken to prevent this result.30 Three months later Reagan signed two National Security Decision Directives that would enable the U.S. to provide more sophisticated military equipment to Baghdad and set the stage for a more confrontational stance against Tehran. The Reagan Administration let it be known that it would look ‘more favorably’ upon the sale of weapons to

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   187 Iraq by friends and allies of the United States government.31 In May, the Reagan Administration announced that it was prepared to intervene militarily in the Iraq–Iran War in order to prevent an Iranian victory that would install a radical Shi’ite government in Baghdad.32 Iraq would receive weapons, including cluster bombs, financial credits, intelligence, and strategic military advice. Another option under consideration was provision of helicopters to Iraq. While the provision of cluster bombs has not been confirmed, released evidence and testimony indicate that financial credits, intelligence, and strategic military advice were provided, and may have been ignored by Iraq.

Hostage redux A second and more prolonged hostage crisis began in 1982 when Iran’s newly created terrorist surrogate, Hizballah, began kidnapping Western hostages in Lebanon. What started ostensibly as an effort directed by Tehran to bring pressure to bear on the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and other European countries became a tool of Lebanese Shi’a clans to force Kuwait as well as western countries to release clansmen and relatives under arrest in Kuwait and Germany for terrorist operations. The first hostage taken in Lebanon was American University Beirut President David Dodge in 1982. He may have been taken in retaliation for the disappearance of three Iranian diplomats and their driver in Beirut. Dodge was held for a year in Iran, but very little is known about the circumstances of his kidnapping or release. Throughout 1985, Hizballah’s key terrorist leader, Imad Mughniyah, engineered attacks on American and French marine barracks in Lebanon, an assassination attempt on the Emir of Kuwait, hijacked American and Kuwaiti airliners, and took westerners hostage. The hostages were American, French, British, Irish, Russian, and German. With the exception of Terry Waite, the representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury who was kidnapped in Beirut in January 1987, while he was trying to negotiate the release of the hostages, all lived and worked in Beirut. Some were married to Muslim women, and some had converted to Islam or were known to be sympathetic to Lebanese and Palestinian interests. Most were seized in or near the American University of Beirut, where Hizballah had informants knowledgeable about peoples’ identities and movements.33 Freeing the hostages held by Hizballah was a high priority for Ronald Reagan. Although U.S. official policy was not to pay for hostages, the reality was that money and military equipment were traded for releases. Iran may not have ordered or provided assistance for all Hizballah terrorist operations but it supported and benefited from the activities of its clandestine surrogate while it aided the organization’s overt humanitarian and social outreach. Hizballah released three American hostages in 1985 as a result of Washington’s tilt toward Iran and promises of arms sales but it

188   J. Yaphe soon replaced them with three more American hostages. Details of the efforts by the United States and other governments whose citizens were held captive by Hizballah in Lebanon have not yet been fully disclosed.34 In the summer of 1985, Reagan’s National Security advisor, Robert ‘Bud’ McFarland, told the President that Israeli representatives had contacted him secretly to pass on information from a group of moderate, politically influential Iranians.35 According to the Israeli contacts, these Iranians ‘wanted to establish a quiet relationship with the US leaders as a prelude to reestablishing formal relations between our countries following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini’. Reagan noted that Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and other advisers opposed the president’s decision. They told Reagan that ‘Congress has imposed a law on us that we can’t sell Iran weapons or sell any other country weapons for resale to Iran.’ Shultz also thought this ‘violated our policy of not paying off terrorists’. Reagan replied somewhat disingenuously, ‘I claim the weapons are for those who want to change the government of Iran and no ransom is being paid for the hostages. No direct sale would be made by us to Iran but we would be replacing the weapons sold by Israel’.36 Reagan would later write: The truth is, once we had information from Israel that we could trust the people in Iran (meaning that they were not terrorists and/or sponsored terrorism), I didn’t have to think thirty seconds about saying yes to their proposal. What I was saying yes to was the action of another government, Israel. We wouldn’t be shipping any weapons to the people of Iran.37 Throughout the remainder of his presidency, Reagan remained determined to obtain the release of the American and Western hostages held in Lebanon. ‘It was the president’s duty to get them home. I didn’t want to rest or stop exploring any possible avenue until they were home safe with their families.’38 McFarlane resigned in early December 1985 and was succeeded by John Poindexter. Five months after McFarlane’s resignation, Poindexter contacted him and told him that the Iranians had finally agreed to initiate a political dialogue and hold a high-­level meeting in Tehran.39 McFarlane left for Iran on 25 May 1986, accompanied by George Cave, Howard Teicher, and a communications officer. The White House expected Majlis Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani, Prime Minister Mousavi, or President Khamenei to participate in the talks. McFarlane apparently believed Rafsanjani, whom he did not meet, was genuinely willing to make the talks succeed.40 As described by Reagan in his diary: The Israeli go-­betweens involved in the Iranian initiative told him that he would meet face to face with the moderate Iranians who supposedly

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   189 wanted to establish a dialogue with the US. Following the meeting, he was told, the four surviving hostages would be freed. . . . When Bud told them the deal was off, they said they wanted to continue negotiating, but in the end, he returned home without the hostages. It was a heart-­breaking disappointment for all of us.41 Reagan saw his role as president to set the policy and then turn its implementation over to ‘the specialists’. He would later tell the commission investigating Iran–Contra that, ‘Amid all the things that went on, I frankly have had trouble remembering many specifics of the day-­to-day events and meetings of that period, at least in the degree of detail that subsequent interest in the events has demanded.’42 He wrote later in his diary, ‘I just felt that the opportunities involved justified taking the chance. I didn’t expect the plan to fail, but if it did, I was prepared to take the heat.’43 All of this raises the question of who was advising the president to offer arms for hostages and why. Israel in the early to mid-­1980s had hopes of re-­establishing the relationship with the ayatollahs that it had enjoyed with the Shah. It also feared Saddam and Iraq’s special weapons programs far more than it worried about any threat from Iran. That there was money to be made was certainly clear to those involved in the day-­to-day planning for arms and money transfers. If John Poindexter and National Security Council staffer Oliver North saw this as a way to bypass the Congressional ban on any support to the Nicaraguan Contras, other unnamed and unindicted co-­conspirators in government saw an opportunity to use seemingly unrestricted resources and power to solve a mystery close to the President’s heart. Details of the accounts given by Reagan, Trita Parsi, and others are confused. According to Parsi, the Iranians proposed the formation of a commission to meet in secret to discuss ways to gradually improve relations. Parsi cites George Cave, a retired CIA case officer who spoke fluent Persian and who later claimed that the Iranians had selected four senior officials, including representatives of all factions, to meet with the Americans. The Iranians told Cave this demonstrated the broad consensus in Iran for improving relations with the United States. The secret commission first met in Germany in October 1985. Benjamin Weir was released in September 1985 after the delivery of 500 TOW missiles to Iran.44 Another hostage, Father Lawrence Jenco, was released in July 1986. Poindexter told Reagan that Father Jenco’s release was a result of MacFarlane’s May meeting, that it ‘had been arranged by the same Iranians and Israelis who had obtained Rev. Weir’s release, and that the same group expected to arrange the release of all of the hostages shortly’.45 The story of an arms-­for-hostage deal between Iran and the United States was leaked to al-­Shiraa, a Beirut newspaper, in June 1986. Reagan was told that an enemy of Rafsanjani, then Speaker of the Majlis and part of Ayatollah Khomeini’s inner circle, had leaked details of McFarlane’s

190   J. Yaphe trip to Iran in order to embarrass him publicly.46 According to Trita Parsi, the enemy was an associate of Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, who had lost his standing as Khomeini’s successor and was at odds with Khomeini and Rafsanjani for opposing vilayet-­e faqih – the system that lay at the heart of the revolution. Reagan conceded in his memoir: . . . looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight and the Tower Board’s report, it appears that, despite Israel’s repeated assurances that we were dealing with responsible moderates in Iran, some of those ‘moderates’ may have had links to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s government and were trying to obtain weapons under false pretenses. . . . During this process, apparently, Oliver North and others at the NSC agreed to certain things – such as promising secret US intelligence data to the Iranians for use in their war with Iraq – that I was never told about.47 And how did Iranians view these developments? In his 1989 inaugural speech, President George H.W. Bush promised Iran that ‘good will begets good will’. Did Bush intend a goodwill gesture to Iran? Many in the United States and in Iran thought so but, as Brent Scowcroft wrote later, ‘Though Iran helped secure the release of American hostages in Lebanon, Bush went back on his word and did not reciprocate the Iranian gesture. . . . When the hostages were all released [in 1991], we didn’t do anything.’48 The Bush Administration recognized that under Rafsanjani’s leadership Iran’s ideological zeal had waned but, Scowcroft wrote, ‘the memories of Iran-­Contra were enough to cause any American politician to shy away from Iran’.49 Iran, however, was eager to warm relations with the United States. Was this just a case of missed opportunity? Perhaps. Scowcroft acknowledged later, ‘it was our fault that when the hostages were finally released the Administration ignored him.’ But it would not be the only time past behavior would cloud efforts by Tehran and Washington to re-­ engage. Hopes for improved relations with Iran under the Clinton presidency were quickly dashed when he named Warren Christopher as Secretary of State. Christopher, who had been the lead negotiator after the U.S. Embassy was seized in 1979, was still smarting from the humiliation of their release to the Reagan Administration. There would be no warming with Iran on his watch.

Conclusion The Iraq–Iran War changed little strategically in the American view of Gulf security. Between 1947 and 1991, the U.S. military presence in the Gulf grew from three ships and an admiral offshore to re-­flagging operations to allow safe passage for oil tankers during the Iran–Iraq War and the deployment of 550,000 military personnel to free Kuwait from Iraqi

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   191 occupation in 1991. Challenges to regional security came from Iranian efforts under the Shah and Ayatollah to ensure Iranian hegemony across the Gulf, Saddam Hussein’s efforts to reshape Gulf security in his image, and from rival claims from Baghdad and Tehran for the right to dominate regional politics and power. The U.S. commitments to the more fragile states of the Gulf – to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman – were intended to support a stable and secure regional environment safe from predators and ensure international access to the region’s oil and gas resources. The tactics of the final years of the war, including Operation Earnest Will, the naval battles with the Iranians, the unintended shooting down of the Iran Air civilian plane, and operations to destroy Iran’s military infrastructure, were part of the overall strategy laid out under Presidents Carter and Reagan. Why the tilt towards Iraq? Why the brief tilt towards Tehran? On the one hand, one could say that these two policies are prime examples of a cynical application of national interest to a misunderstood region. The United States and its Gulf allies felt threatened by the Islamic Republic, its dogmatic clerical leaders, and its surrogates, who were willing to use violence to achieve Iran’s goals. However, Iraq under Saddam was also an unknown quantity, a mukhabarrat (police) state and a republic of fear. The United States still knew little about either country and had little experience in or contacts with them. Writing in his memoir after the Kuwait war, Brent Scowcroft described an ‘abrupt turn’ in Saddam’s behavior towards the United States in 1990. Whereas before he had been a ‘relative moderate’ currying favor with the United States, Saddam had become less predictable. He still told U.S. diplomats he sought improved relations with the West, especially the United States, but he began to claim there was a conspiracy against him led by the United States, Israel, and Britain. The Bush Administration offered Baghdad economic incentives, including Commodity Credit Corporation credit guarantees to American exporters to encourage Iraq’s importation of American grain. In late 1989, Iraq was allocated $1 billion in guarantees, with $500 million to be immediately available and the remainder subject to further review before release. Scowcroft concluded that Saddam had decided to drop his policy of getting along with the United States and, instead, ‘put himself at the forefront of those states opposed to peace with, or even the very existence of, Israel’.50 Scowcroft was wrong. Saddam had learned by the early 1980s not to fear America. He believed the United States would continue to ignore his bad behavior and offer him support. He was also convinced that the American military and population still suffered from what he called its Vietnam complex – the U.S. was averse to combat and body bags and would run at the first sign of combat. A bipartisan Senate group traveled to Baghdad in 1990, led by Republican minority leader Bob Dole and including Democrat Howard Metzenbaum. Dole reported that Saddam was convinced

192   J. Yaphe there was a conspiracy against Iraq, but ‘seemed pleased’ when Dole assured him that President Bush was not plotting against him. Basically optimistic, Dole and the others advised the administration to ‘stay the course and keep the relationship open – sanctions would only lend credence to Saddam’s conspiracy theory’.51

Notes   1 Judith S. Yaphe is Distinguished Research Fellow for the Middle East in the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington DC. This paper was prepared for the conference on ‘Reappraising the Iran–Iraq War Thirty Years Later’ sponsored by the London School of Economics. Analysis and observations in this paper are hers and do not represent the views of the INSS, NDU, the Department of Defense, or any government agency.   2 For detailed discussion of the stages of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, see D. Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945, Charlotte, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002, p. 145. His estimate covered the period from 1972 to 1977.   3 Carter also promised the Shah F-­16s and AWACs, but the Shah wanted more, including F-­18s. See Little, p. 148.   4 Sullivan was the last U.S. ambassador to Tehran. He predicted that the army would collapse when confronted by demonstrators and met with Mehdi Bazargan and Ayatollah Mousavi, who were appointed by Ayatollah Khomeini to head the new government. W. H. Sullivan, Mission to Iran: The Last U.S. Ambassador, New York: Norton, 1981, pp. 273–4.   5 T. Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, p. 89.   6 Parsi, pp. 89–90.   7 See Z. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983, pp. 470–1; and www.archive.org/details/DocumentsFromTheU.s.EspionageDen (accessed 16 August 2012). The latter source contains documents taken from the U.S. embassy in Tehran when it was seized in November 1979.   8 According to M. Gasiorowski, Bazargan, who was forced to resign after the student takeover of the U.S. Embassy, did not inform his successor of the contacts with the United States. For information on the secret meetings between Iranian and American intelligence officers in 1979, see M. Gasiorowski, ‘The US-­Iran Intelligence Liaison Relationship, May–October 1979’, unpublished paper presented at a conference on the Iraq–Iran War: The View from Baghdad held at the Wilson Center, 26 October 2011 and cited here with permission of the author. For comparative analysis of U.S. intelligence support to Iraq and Iran during the war, see National Security Archive analyst M. Byrne, ‘Mixed Messages: U.S. Intelligence Support to Both Sides During the Iran–Iraq War’, also presented at the Wilson Center Conference, 26 October 2011, and M. Byrne, ‘The United States and the Iran–Iraq War: The Limits of American Influence’, in The Globalization of the Cold War, M. Guderzo and B. Bagnato, eds., London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 119–36. Byrne gives credit to DIA efforts to assist the Iraqis and appears to accept the assessment of Col. Patrick Lang, then the senior Defense Intelligence Officer responsible for the Iraq liaison, of ‘the high quality and detailed information provided by DIA’, while describing his CIA counterparts as ‘intensely turf-­conscious’. Perhaps, this remark says more about Lang and interagency rivalries in a time of war than it does about interagency

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   193 cooperation. For a detailed discussion of Lang’s Iraq operation, see B.  R. Gibson, Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence, and the Iran–Iraq War, 1980–88, Oxford: Praeger Securities International, 2010, pp. 207–9.   9 Z. Brzezinski, p. 451. 10 Ibid., p. 452. 11 W. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, New York: Scribner, 2001, p. 108. 12 Ibid., pp. 110–11. 13 Ibid., p. 111. 14 Ibid., p. 115. 15 Christopher, p.  112, notes, ‘The bellicose statements emanating from the Reagan transition team helped to make my point that the Iranians might as well deal with the devil they knew – me.’ 16 G. Sick, October Surprise: America’s hostages in Iran and the election of Ronald Reagan, New York: Three Rivers Press, 1991, p. 11. 17 Z. Brzezinski, p. 453. 18 Ibid., pp. 395, 522. 19 See K. M. Pollock, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994; S. Ward, Immortal: A Military History of Iran and its Armed Forces, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009; and J. Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq and Halabja, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 20 See Jerrold M. Post, ‘Saddam Hussein of Iraq: A Political Psychology Profile’, Political Psychology, vol. 12, no. 2, 1991. Post first presented his profile in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, December 1990. 21 B. Scowcroft and G. H. W. Bush, A World Transformed, New York: Vintage, 1999, p. 305. 22 Ibid. 23 The claim of Carter’s ‘green light’ for the invasion was made by senior Arab leaders, including King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, to President Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, when Haig traveled to the Middle East in April 1981, according to ‘top secret’ talking points that Haig prepared for a post-­trip briefing of Reagan. J. McGuish and A. Terry, ‘How U.S. Sky Spies Help Iraq’s War’, Sunday Times (London), 7 March 1985, sec. 1, p. 21. 24 Documents published by the Conflict Records Research Center at National Defense University confirm Saddam Hussein’s suspicions about U.S. intentions, motives, and trustworthiness in offering to re-­establish relations with Iraq and provide intelligence support in the long years of the war. His suspicions were certainly confirmed by the U.S. offer of similar assistance to Iran in the mid-­ 1980s. See The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime, 1978–2001, K. M. Woods, D. D. Palkki, and M. Stout, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; and Saddam’s Generals: Perspectives of the Iran–Iraq War, K.  M. Woods et al., eds., Washington DC: Institute for Defense Analysis, 2011. 25 Z. Brzezinski, pp. 48–9. 26 D. Ignatius, ‘Iraq is Turning to U.S., Britain For Armaments’, The Wall Street Journal, 5 March 1982, p.  22, col. 1; Bureau of National Affairs, U.S. Export Weekly, 6 June 1982, 312. The aircraft sale was licensed to Iraqi Airways. The L-­100 is the civilian version of the Lockheed C-­130 Hercules military transport and troop carrier. The Middle East, ‘A Tilt Towards Baghdad?’, June 1982, p. 7; New York Times, 18 July 1983, p.  3, col. 1. Four months later, the Commerce Department licensed the sale of six small jets to Iraq, four of which admittedly possessed military applications. Washington Post, ‘U.S. Licenses Sale to Iraq of Small Jet’, 14 September 1982, p. 12, col. 1. 27 For Iraq’s use of CW during the war, see Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair. See also The National Security Archive, National Security Archive, Electronic

194   J. Yaphe Briefing Book No. 82, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980–1984, J. Battle, ed., www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/ (accessed 16 August 2012); and M. Byrne, ‘Mixed Messages’, unpublished paper. 28 Declaration by Howard Teicher filed with the United States District Court (Florida: Southern District), Affidavit ‘United States of America, Plaintiff, v. Carlos Cardoen [et al.]’, 31 January 1995, available in The National Security Archive, ‘Iraq: Declassified Documents of U.S. Support for Hussein’, J. Battle, ed., www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/index2.htm (accessed 2 September 2012). The affidavit was filed in connection with a criminal trial in Miami in 1995 and was the first sworn public account by a Reagan insider of the covert U.S.–Iraq relationship. 29 Mubarak would play a similar role in 1990 when he advised then President George H. W. Bush that Saddam had no intention of harming Kuwait. 30 D. Oberdorfer, ‘U.S. Moves to Avert Iraqi Loss’, Washington Post, 1 January 1984, p. 1, col. 1; D. Ignatius, ‘U.S. Tilts Towards Iraq to Thwart Iran’, The Wall Street Journal, 6 January 1984, p. 20, col. 1. 31 A. Perlmutter, ‘Squandering Opportunity in the Gulf ’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 October 1983, p. 32, col. 3. 32 R. Gutman, ‘U.S. Willing to Use Air Power to Keep Iran From Beating Iraq’, Long Island Newsday, 20 May 1984, 3; Ignatius, ‘U.S. Tilts Toward Iraq’. 33 The question of who controlled Hizballah and to what extent has long been a subject of debate in the scholarly and intelligence community. Hizballah was created in the early 1980s by activist Iranian Islamist leaders, such as Ali Akhbar Mohteshami-­pur, who was Iran’s ambassador to Syria, and the newly formed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), many of whose leaders have since become senior officials in the IRGC and its special Qods Brigade. The airplane hijackings and acts of terrorism in Kuwait were efforts by Mughniyah to force Kuwait to release his brother-­in-law and sixteen other Lebanese Hizballah and Iraqi Dawa operatives held in Kuwaiti prisons. The Kuwaitis refused to concede and the terrorists escaped after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Mughniyah was murdered in Damascus in 2008. 34 Several American hostages wrote memoirs after their release, which included profiles of their captors and details of their captivity, but little is known about the negotiations for their release. Those writing included Terry Anderson, the longest held hostage, released in 1991 after nearly seven years of captivity, Den Of Lions: A Startling Memoir of Survival and Triumph, New York: Ballantine Books, 1995; Thomas Sutherland, the second longest held hostage taken in 1985 and released in late 1991, At Your Own Risk: An American Chronicle of Crisis and Captivity in the Middle East, New York: Fulcrum Publishing, 1996; Father Lawrence Jenco, a Catholic priest taken in January 1985 and released eighteen months later, Bound to Forgive: The Pilgrimage to Reconciliation of a Beirut Hostage, Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1995; and the Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian minister taken in 1984 and released in November 1985. 35 Reagan was in Bethesda Naval Hospital in July 1985 recovering from cancer surgery. See R. Reagan, An American Life, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990, p. 504. 36 Reagan, p. 510. McFarlane met in England with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a disreputable Iranian arms merchant whom Reagan describes as ‘a devious character’. Ghorbanifar claimed to be in touch with Iranian ‘moderates’ who would negotiate with Washington, but the CIA warned that Ghorbanifar was a fabricator whose veracity could not be established. Once again, Reagan’s advisers, including McFarlane, warned him against participating in any deals that might link arms shipments with efforts to free the hostages.

American perspectives on the Iran–Iraq War   195 37 Reagan, p. 506. 38 Ibid., p. 513. 39 As described by M. Byrne, the United States on at least two occasions in 1986 delivered satellite-­based military intelligence to Baghdad and Tehran. Information to Baghdad was delivered by Defense Intelligence Officer Patrick Lang, while Lieutentant Colonel Oliver North provided similar information to Iran. See unpublished paper by M. Byrne, ‘Mixed Messages’. 40 See Parsi, pp. 121–3. 41 Reagan, pp. 520–1. 42 Ibid., pp. 515–16. 43 Ibid., p. 517. 44 See Parsi, p. 124. 45 Reagan, p. 523. 46 Ibid., pp. 528–9; and Parsi, p. 124. 47 Reagan, pp. 542–3. 48 The last hostage to be released was Terry Anderson, an American journalist who had been abducted in 1985 and freed in December 1991. 49 Scowcroft and Bush, p. 134. 50 Ibid., pp. 306–7. 51 Mubarak and King Hussein tried to defuse the Iraq–Kuwait crisis in July 1990. They urged Saddam to resolve the disputes through negotiation. Saddam, they told Bush, was ‘receptive and responsive’ and Mubarak was ‘confident that accommodation can be worked out without delay’. He and Saudi Ambassador in Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan told President Bush that the Arabs ‘approved of the way the United States was handling the situation’ and asked that the United States avoid ‘any provocative action that is liable to add fuel to the fire’. Saddam, however, continued to increase his troops on the Kuwaiti border and by 31 July had nearly 100,000 massed there, nearly five times those of Kuwait. Saddam’s army occupied Kuwait on 2 August. Ibid., pp. 307–8, 310.

11 Critical Oral History A new approach to examining the United States’ role in the war Malcolm Byrne

In a recent journal article, MIT scholar John Tirman pointed out the difficulty of getting Iranians and Americans to relate to one other productively on an official level. In the course of a history ‘wracked by regime change, support for repression, aiding enemies, attacking with proxies, and searing rhetorical denunciations’, the two governments ‘seem unable to find . . . common ground’. The core problem, Tirman writes, is the vast disparity between the ‘national narratives’ of both sides. Those narratives over the years have become so laden with passions that traditional diplomacy alone is ‘ill-­equipped’ to deal with the problem. What is needed ‘is a new process to cope specifically with the emotional content of a bad relationship, not just the rational calculation of interests’. The new approach he proposes is a ‘mutual rewriting of the two-­country narrative’.1 In 2007, a project was launched which aimed at providing an opportunity for both sides to air their competing narratives with the dual purpose of uncovering new historical information about American–Iranian relations and discovering whether it would be possible for the two governments to bridge the gulf between them by re-­examining their perceptions (and misperceptions) of each other. The methodology to be used has come to be known as Critical Oral History (COH).2 The main focus of this project, of which Tirman is a principal organizer along with James G. Blight, janet M. Lang and the author of this chapter,3 is not actually the Iran–Iraq war. It is the attempt at rapprochement undertaken by presidents Bill Clinton and Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2001, which unfolded at a time when most observers thought there was a genuine chance of success. However, it will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked on American–Iranian interactions that the project’s organizers soon discovered the shortest distance to their objective was not a straight line. As this chapter will describe, it became apparent that a crucial piece of the puzzle regarding Iranian viewpoints toward the United States during the Clinton– Khatami period (and to this day) could be found on the battlefields of Iran and Iraq.

Critical Oral History: a new approach   197 A central purpose of the chapter is to describe the COH methodology and explain how it has been applied in this instance to the case of Iran. Although it is largely about process, the chapter will also relate some of the project’s substantive findings about the Iran–Iraq war. Necessarily abbreviated, these descriptions and findings will be fully elaborated in an upcoming book on the subject.

COH: how it works and why The idea for COH emerged in the 1980s in the course of research into the problem of nuclear danger, a subset of which was the Cuban missile crisis. Two scholars, James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, recognized that there were important lessons to be learned, not only about the crisis of 1962 but about the nature and process of crisis decision-­making, by focusing on the decision-­makers themselves. As Blight and Lang describe it: The method evolved as a way to address the dilemma described long ago by Kierkegaard: we live life forward, groping in the dark, unaware of its ultimate outcome, yet we are forced to understand events in reverse, working our way retrospectively backward to their supposed causes. This creates a profound disconnect between lived experience and our understanding of that experience. Caught in the moment – in the crisis – decision-­makers often feel confused, unsure, and sometimes even afraid. But scholarly (after-­the-fact) study of decision-­making usually removes the confusion and fear, focusing simply on explanations of outcomes.4 In other words, former officials not only are in a position to relate facts few others are privy to, they bring to the table important insights about the environment in which they functioned – explaining what it was like, for example, to make decisions surrounding by ambiguity and without the luxury of knowing (as scholars, looking back, do) how things will turn out. Typically, the focus is on a historical event or time period that turned out unfavorably for all involved – a war or a dramatic deterioration in relations. If one takes to heart Henri Bergson’s warning about the fallacy of retrospective determinism – that historical events should not be seen as inevitable just because they occurred – then the ill-­fated outcome naturally raises questions in the minds of observers: How did this crisis come about? How might things have turned out differently? Were there fundamental misunderstandings on either side about the other, or about the events in question? If so, were they perhaps responsible for creating missed opportunities to resolve the crisis? Some of the more notable conferences following this method have covered the 1962 Cuban missile crisis (including ground-­breaking meetings in Havana and Moscow with Fidel Castro, Andrei Gromyko and Robert McNamara); the American war in Vietnam (with sessions in Hanoi

198   M. Byrne involving McNamara and former North Vietnamese officials); and the decline of the American–Soviet détente in the late 1970s (bringing together U.S. presidential advisers Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski as well as long-­time Soviet officials Georgi Kornienko and Anatoly Dobrynin, among others). The basic approach involves organizing structured conferences around a triad of elements: (1) decision-­makers; (2) scholars and other experts; and (3) declassified documents. Each constituent part deserves some further treatment. The decision-­makers, who are usually retired and therefore less constrained in expressing personal views, are the most important element in the process because they have something to offer that has no substitute: their personal involvement in the events under study. They are therefore able to provide first-­hand recollections and perspectives from the earlier period, including fly-­on-the-­wall accounts of the policy process, which rarely make it into textbooks and often not even into memoirs. It is important to distinguish here between COH and traditional oral history. The main difference is that the former eliminates the unequal relationship that ordinarily adheres between the interviewer and the (usually) more eminent subject. Not only does this make it much easier to generate a lively discussion (or argument), it becomes far more difficult for individuals to shrug off sharp questions because they are delivered by someone of the same stature who is equally adamant about his/her own perspectives or recollections. The value of decision-­makers as sources is self-­evident, but appearing to rely on them to a significant degree does raise legitimate questions. How can individuals so closely bound up with the events and policies under scrutiny be trusted to be objective? What if their memories are faulty – a likelihood that grows with the passage of time? It is unrealistic to expect sources of any description to be flawlessly accurate or completely candid. To cope with this reality, scholars have a key role in COH. As experts in the published literature and the documentary record, they have the responsibility of calling the decision-­makers to account for misstatements, failures of memory or occasional self-­serving revisionism. A similar function is played by the third component – declassified documents – which are compiled and distributed in advance in order to refresh memories and, as necessary, hold the participants more closely to the facts during discussions. One of the functions of the documents is to provide a range of different institutional, individual and even governmental perspectives – another way to expand the number of ‘voices’ being heard at the table. The results rarely produce perfect certainty about a given set of events, but that is not a realistic goal in any research project. A more attainable objective is simply to get closer to the truth and render a fuller, more accurate account than was available before. By most standards, the COH

Critical Oral History: a new approach   199 process has a remarkable record, yielding new facts, bringing to light fresh perspectives and clarifying many of the circumstances that shaped the events being scrutinized – in effect generating a more multi-­dimensional representation of history. These new findings can then be added to the larger pool of knowledge where scholars can weigh and assess them using more traditional tools of historical inquiry. A crucial element in any successful COH conference is the establishment of a degree of empathy among the main participants. To attain that requires a genuine interest in and respect for the points of view of one’s counterparts, including one-­time adversaries. Blight and Lang are careful to point out that empathy does not mean sympathy. It means essentially putting oneself in another person’s shoes. This in turn requires being prepared to re-­examine one’s own past actions and to acknowledge, where appropriate, mistakes and shortcomings. Once the former officials begin to empathize, as they invariably do in these settings, extraordinary revelations and insights can emerge. The most interesting moments occur precisely when participants start to recognize that their own actions may have led to the problematic historical outcomes they have gathered to re-­examine.

COH in the case of Iran The idea to apply the Critical Oral History methodology to the case of American–Iranian relations was not new when this project began in 2007. But at that time a number of factors came together, including the avail­ ability of key organizers, which made pursuing the concept a more realistic undertaking. Initial discussions centered on finding a suitable subject to examine. Following the model of previous COH conferences, the idea was to look for possible ‘missed opportunities’ for improving American–Iranian relations over the years. Some of the prospects included the major flashpoints in the relationship: the 1953 coup d’état against Mohammad Mosaddeq, the 1978–79 revolution, and the 1979–81 hostage crisis. Less appreciated possibilities also came up, such as the window that opened when George H. W. Bush took over the White House during the presidency of the relatively pragmatic Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Most of these episodes satisfied one of the main logistical balancing tests that crop up in planning a COH event – finding an episode that took place long enough ago for there to be a sufficient body of publicly available declassified documentation, but recently enough that the players in those historical events are still alive and well. It did not take long to decide that the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) offered a potentially fruitful and exciting topic. Just a decade had passed since his call for a dialogue among civilizations, which seemed to present a dramatic opening for a meeting of minds with Western governments, particularly the United States. President Bill

200   M. Byrne Clinton’s obvious interest in reciprocating raised world expectations even further that after years of enmity the two antagonists might be on the verge of a historic rapprochement. The subsequent fizzling out of that hope came as a surprise to many and at a high cost for both sides and for global stability. For historians it raised the obvious question: What happened? How could two dynamic and popular leaders so clearly committed to a breakthrough in relations fail so utterly in their attempts? With that intriguing problem in mind, the organizers took the next step, which was to bring together a ‘team’ consisting of a small group of specialists from the United States, Europe and Iran to discuss the idea. Follow-­up conversations ensued with some of the policy players who were viewed as top candidates for the eventual COH gathering. These included former Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, retired UN Under Secretary General Giandomenico Picco, and a small handful of Iranian diplomats. While most of these ‘veterans’ expressed immediate interest in the project and its goals, each by virtue of their own personal experience and access to senior levels of their respective government (or, in Picco’s case, the United Nations) came quite independently to the view that to achieve our ultimate aim we would have to consider a less contemporary approach. The consensus soon emerged that the Iran–Iraq war of 1980 to 1988 would be an excellent focus. This insight proved to be on target, as the organizers confirmed during a visit to Tehran in January and February 2008. The trip itself, it is worth noting, underscored a truism of the COH process – how important it is to have knowledgeable colleagues on the ground to help navigate the politics and personalities of another country, especially one like Iran with so many obstacles to outside access. A number of such contacts helped to steer us through twelve days of eye-­opening meetings with officials from a broad cross-­section of political and institutional backgrounds. The significance of the Tehran experience was that it allowed the organizers a rare opportunity to introduce themselves, the project and the methodology of COHy to a range of constituencies whose tacit acquiescence, at a minimum, would be needed for subsequent phases of the project. Despite the already cooler atmosphere of the new presidential administration, our reception was warm and interest ran high, particularly in connection with the possibility of holding high-­level (and eventually multilateral) discussions of the war. Why was the Iran–Iraq conflict the consensus choice? Aside from Iran’s revolution, the war against Saddam Hussein was, and still is, the most momentous event in the history of the Islamic Republic, comparable in its impact to the American Civil War for the United States or the Second World War for Europe. Regular references by religious authorities to a holy war helped to tie the conflict’s outcome to the fate of the Islamic state itself. With a conservative estimate of a million casualties and thousands dead, virtually every Iranian family was personally affected.

Critical Oral History: a new approach   201 From Tehran’s perspective, Iran was the unquestioned victim of Iraqi aggression. Yet, world reaction to the invasion was atrociously passive in their view. Almost every Western government waited a full week before calling for a ceasefire in hopes Iraq would steal a quick victory over the feared Khomeini regime. Other real and perceived outrages followed: Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, the United States’ poorly-­veiled ‘tilt’ toward Baghdad, the U.S. Navy’s engagement and destruction of much of Iran’s tiny fleet, and finally the accidental downing of an Iran Air flight, which killed 290 civilians. Each of these bitter experiences added to the national narrative John Tirman wrote about. The continuing feeling of being victimized and the appeal of communicating their story to the outside world constitutes a powerful incentive for many Iranians to tell their story, and in a suitable political climate it would be more than enough inducement for key individuals to participate in a scholarly venture, even with unfamiliar partners. Another motivation for some Iranians is the desire to turn the microscope on their own society and examine the way the war was run at home. But that raises some sensitive issues in the Iranian context. Mainly, it presents an implicit challenge to the actions of the top leadership responsible for the direction of the war, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself. More specifically, it brings up a number of difficult questions: Why was the country so unprepared for the invasion when numerous signs pointed to Saddam’s intentions to attack (including CIA warnings in October 1979)? Why did Iran choose to go on the offensive starting in spring 1982 and mount a counter-­invasion of Iraq, thus losing the moral high ground in world opinion? Why were such devastatingly costly tactics as human-­wave attacks repeatedly used? Were they always necessary? Why did it take so long to come to the negotiating table and bring the killing to an end? The Iranian public is just beginning to engage with these subjects in more detail as media accounts and recent memoirs by former President Rafsanjani, ex-­Revolutionary Guards Commander Mohsen Rezaie and others reveal descriptions and assessments of some of the decisions that were made. This high-­level, authoritative interaction will invariably help drive the public debate. Another powerful player with a stake in the war’s history is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). As a fledgling military organization at the time, created to defend the revolution, the war was their crucible. Their units also had something to prove alongside the regular armed forces – that they were worthy of Imam Khomeini’s confidence. So important is the memory of the war to them that in recent years the IRGC has established its own publishing operation on the subject, producing to date more than fifty volumes of memoirs and analyses of campaigns in hopes of raising public appreciation of their role. One of the breakthroughs of this project during the Tehran visit was to develop contacts with individuals involved in the IRGC’s historical program.

202   M. Byrne

Investigating the Iran–Iraq War As time went on, the deteriorating political scene in Iran made certain that a face-­to-face meeting between American and Iranian former officials was not going to happen in the immediate future. Even before the notorious June 2009 elections, the prospects for Track 2 non-­governmental activities had shriveled virtually to nothing. We therefore decided to split the activity in two and host our own Americans-­only event while encouraging our Iranian counterparts to organize their own meeting. Down the line the idea would be to share the findings as part of a long-­distance ‘conversation’ between the two sides. In the meantime, the organizers were fortunate to be able to put together an impressive gathering of mostly ex-­CIA and former State Department officials in December 2008 to explore American policies during the Iran–Iraq conflict. The event took place at Musgrove, a conference center run by the Arca Foundation on St. Simons Island, Georgia (U.S.A.).The main participants were as follows (including their relevant experience during the war period): • • •

• • •

•

Charles Cogan: A thirty-­seven-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency; Chief of Near East-­South Asia division in the Directorate of Operations from mid-­1979 to mid-­1984. Richard Murphy: U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 1981–83; Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, 1983–89. David Newton: Deputy Chief of Mission, Damascus, 1978–81; Political Counselor, Saudi Arabia, 1981–84; Chief of U.S. Interests Section, Baghdad, 1984–85; U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, 1985–88; Director, Office for Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Palestinian Affairs, 1988–90. Giandomenico Picco: A senior United Nations official, 1973–92; as Assistant Secretary General of the UN for Political Affairs, he led the UN team that negotiated the end of the Iran–Iraq War. Thomas Pickering: U.S. Ambassador to Jordan, 1974–78; Assistant Secretary of State, 1978–81; U.S. Ambassador to Israel, 1985–88; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 1989–92. Bruce Riedel: Middle East Analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, 1977–90; Deputy Chief, Persian Gulf Task Force, Central Intelligence Agency, 1990–91; Director for Persian Gulf and South Asian Affairs, National Intelligence Council, 1991–93. Thomas Twetten: Head of the CIA Near East Division, 1983–88; veteran of thirty-­four years at the CIA in clandestine operations.5

During the lead-­up to the meeting, a considerable amount of time was spent collecting documentary sources on the war. Building on several years of Freedom of Information Act work by National Security Archive staff, and visits to National Archives and Records Administration, the

Critical Oral History: a new approach   203 Jimmy Carter Library and the Ronald Reagan Library, the project compiled a ‘briefing book’ consisting of roughly 800 pages of declassified records. Complementing the American side were memoir excerpts, published interviews and news articles from Iranian publications translated specifically for the conference. The sessions covered the following topics: the growth of U.S.–Iranian enmity prior to the war; the U.S. ‘tilt’ toward Iraq; the Iran–Contra Affair; the ‘Tanker War’ of 1987 to 1988; the endgame; and ‘missed opportunities’ and the legacy of the war. Discussions at each session were lively and from our vantage point extremely candid. Although this group was very collegial, the atmosphere at COH sessions does not have to be exceptionally warm. In fact, care needs to be taken not to make it overly chummy (a little bit of tension can sometimes produce positive results). The main requirement is to create an environment that is serious (though not austere by any means) and non-­ polemical. Once the participants feel comfortable they tend to open up. But comfort levels are not the only factor. Knowing that anyone in the room, especially one-­time adversaries, is free to pounce on any question­ able assertion is just as likely to promote useful commentary.

Conference findings The first session of the conference was devoted to understanding some of the underpinnings of the hostility that existed between Iran and the United States at the time the war broke out in September 1980. For several months after the Shah departed in January 1979, the United States retained an ‘overriding desire to rebuild U.S.–Iranian ties’, according to Bruce Riedel, one of the CIA’s principal Iran analysts at the time. The political situation in the country was of course turbulent and it was not at all clear who would emerge as the next unchallenged leader. One of the main trigger events, before the critical meeting between President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan in Algeria at the beginning of November, was the Amer­ ican decision to admit the Shah for medical treatment in New York. Handwritten notes on a declassified memo from Brzezinski to Carter indicate that the president had made this decision on 19 October.6 Concerns about embassy security had run high in some quarters, as reflected in a cable from July sent by chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen in which he predicted that accepting the Shah into the United States would be ‘seriously prejudicial to our interests and to the security of Americans in Iran’.7 One of the last to come around, apparently, was President Carter, who dryly remarked to his senior advisers that he hoped they had a plan in case the embassy was taken over. As Riedel noted, this turned out to be typical of the way Carter approached many difficult decisions regarding Iran – by agonizing extensively before finally acceding to the positions being pushed by aides.

204   M. Byrne While admitting the Shah and Brzezinski’s meeting with Bazargan were agreed to be key to shaping the perceptions of more radically inclined Iranians about where American sympathies lay, the participants denied that the United States had provided any meaningful support to the many exile groups who actively sought to overthrow the emerging Khomeini regime, either in the months following the Shah’s departure or in subsequent years. For their part, it took just one dramatic event to persuade the Amer­ icans that Iran’s new leaders were going to be a bitter antagonist. That event was the seizue on 4 November 1979 of the American embassy in Tehran. Almost thirty years later, conference participants still spoke emotionally about the impact of that act (which consigned many of their friends and colleagues to 444 days of captivity) and its potency in cementing the view in Washington that the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini were, in the thinking at the time, essentially medieval fanatics. During the project organizers’ visit to Tehran, one of the questions that came up most frequently was whether the United States authorized Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in September 1980. It is a question that continues to be debated in the West as well.8 It even arises in the declassified documentation, as in a set of talking points prepared for Secretary of State Alexander Haig to brief President Ronald Reagan after Haig’s trip to the Middle East in April 1981. ‘It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd,’ the document reads.9 Asked generally about the possibility of Carter’s authorization, and specifically about documentary evidence such as this, the American veterans were unanimous that no ‘green light’ was ever given, and that the Haig document, while intriguing on its face, leaves far too much room for interpretation to be definitive. In any event the Saudi comments did not address the various policy arguments that militated against an invasion – chiefly, the potential danger posed to the American hostages in Tehran – which the participants said held sway with most American officials. (Whether Brzezinski personally had his own views was another question.) An even trickier issue is whether the United States at least knew about Saddam Hussein’s plans in advance, even if there was no explicit authorization. Here the evidence is more compelling – and yet still does not necessarily constitute the final word. Various intelligence reports from 1979 and 1980 pointed to disquieting Iraqi military activities and suggested that some kind of major operation might be imminent.10 In October 1979, the CIA’s Iran expert, George Cave, made a special trip to Tehran to brief Iranian interim government officials about intelligence the United States had picked up about a possible Iraqi invasion.11 Most persuasive of all, a recently declassified CIA Alert Memorandum prepared less than a week before the invasion informed the president and his top national security aides that Baghdad appeared to be planning a major operation.12 Despite

Critical Oral History: a new approach   205 all of these signs, American officials from the president on down insist they had no idea what Saddam Hussein had in mind. A particular complicating issue the veterans pointed to is the absence of any concrete indication of timing; without knowing with some precision when an event will take place, intelligence officials often argue, it is extremely difficult to prepare any counter plans. More importantly, some of those at the conference argued that the question ignored an overriding reality, that the United States never enjoyed anything close to the kind of influence that would have made the Iraqis heed Washington’s point of view. This was particularly the case given Congress’s exposure a few years earlier, in 1976, of Washington’s covert support for the Kurds in their war against the Ba’athist regime in the early 1970s.13 The conference devoted considerable attention to the conduct of the war, especially the so-­called ‘tilt’ toward Baghdad by the United States. The predominant view to this day in Tehran is that Saddam Hussein essentially kowtowed to American interests and that he was rewarded during the course of the war with a variety of blandishments from Washington. The ex-­officials at Musgrove fully acknowledged that the United States offered Baghdad extensive aid in the form of commercial credits, international diplomatic support (coupled with a commitment to block Iran’s access to the global arms market), and even highly sensitive satellite-­derived intelligence to help counter Iranian military moves.14 Interestingly, at no point during the proceedings or interviews with other officials in the course of the project did anyone believe that the United States ever provided weapons directly to Baghdad. They did acknowledge the winks and nods to military support offered from the Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis and others – not to mention the French – but they argued persuasively that with so many other sources to rely on, including Moscow, weapons were never the issue. Far more important was the low quality of Iraq’s leadership, planning and intelligence about Iran’s tactics. The American veterans also insisted that the relationship with Saddam Hussein was nothing like the Iranian perception. The Iraqi leader was a ‘detestable’ ally, they insisted, and proceeded to spell out the historical and political context for the decision to pursue a relationship with his regime. These factors included the ongoing Cold War rivalry with Moscow and the notion that improving ties with Baghdad would not only help to counter Tehran’s fervor for spreading Islamic fundamentalism in the region but would undercut the long-­standing connection between Iraq and the USSR. They also pointed repeatedly to Iran’s role in establishing its own international isolation. Iraq was the lesser evil, a dubious status derived largely from their persistent pleas for a ceasefire (regardless of one’s views of their reasons), whereas the Iranians were seen as much less flexible on the question of talks. The discussion at Musgrove brought into sharper relief the existence of conflicting views over Iraq within the American policy establishment.

206   M. Byrne These conflicts were most pronounced when it came to the issue of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during the war. Substantial documentation exists to confirm that the United States was well aware that Baghdad was resorting to these weapons at regular stages throughout the conflict. Nonetheless, senior State Department officials bent over backwards to minimize the moral dimension of the issue, and to soften the impact for the Iraqis of the occasional public denunciations of chemical weapons use. The charm offensive aimed at senior Foreign Ministry official Ismet Kittani in March 1984 by Secretary of State George Shultz and Under Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger is an example.15 As Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State at the time, put it: ‘[T]here was never a lot of push behind that policy.’ All of the conference participants expressed regret about the relationship, which CIA operations official Charles Cogan called ‘a disgrace’, and especially lamented the chemical weapons dimension of the war. At the same time, they insisted that Iran had to understand the way its determination to pursue the fighting and to spread unrest throughout the Persian Gulf (and beyond) contributed to the antagonism felt in Washington. As for Iran’s role, the conference goers stressed the importance of Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision in spring 1982 to take the war into Iraq as a factor in isolating the Islamic Republic internationally. The move generated ‘panic’ in Washington, said Riedel. David Newton, who was posted to Baghdad during much of the 1980s, agreed that it was ‘the nightmare scenario’. Some of the most dramatic testimony dealt with this subject. One of the CIA operations veterans at the table, Tom Twetten, personally delivered the first samples of American intelligence to Baghdad in July 1982, where his reception was less than friendly. He and others (including former Defense Intelligence Agency official Colonel Patrick Lang in a taped interview with the organizers) described in some detail the nature of the intelligence provided and its impact on Iraq’s ability to repel Iranian battlefield advances and even to fine-­tune Iraqi attacks on Iranian targets. The bizarre Iran–Contra episode also figured in the discussions. There was general agreement that the affair, as far as the United States was concerned, primarily had to do with Ronald Reagan’s near obsession with getting American hostages out of Lebanon. Based on their attendance at meetings with key players in the affair, some of the Musgrove participants contended that the strategic dimension – opening up a new relationship with Tehran – was secondary and appealed only to some of the players on the American side, such as former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. To this extent, the Reagan Administration’s provision of arms to Tehran was less of a contradiction vis-­à-vis the tilt toward Iraq than it might have appeared. President Reagan simply wanted to do whatever he could to free the hostages; there is little evidence that he gave any consideration to the potential impact of those weapons on the war.

Critical Oral History: a new approach   207 A related topic was the role of Israel. As one participant put it, the strike against the Osirak reactor in 1981 was a fair indication of which combatant Israel considered the more threatening. Some of the veterans provided more background on the incomplete story of Israel’s weapons sales to Tehran prior to 1985–86. But while Israel certainly encouraged the Americans to engage with Iranian ‘moderates’, Tom Twetten, who had the dubious distinction of being dragooned into the covert dealings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, made it clear that American officials – most prominently William Casey, Reagan’s CIA director – were also drivers of the policy. Iran–Contra of course produced a major political scandal in the United States. But one under-­reported aspect of it has been its regional impact – on the course of the war, on American policy toward the Gulf once the affair was revealed, and (of greatest interest to the organizers) on the prospects for U.S.–Iran relations. In the course of the project, a number of indicators have pointed to the likelihood that, contrary to denials by the Reagan Administration, the TOW and HAWK missiles sold to Iran may well have had a meaningful impact on Iran’s fighting capabilities. New evidence has become available reflecting Saddam Hussein’s highly negative reaction to the revelation of the arms-­for-hostages scandal in late 1986. Besides the testimony of American officials during the course of this project, direct information has come out on Iraq’s reaction based on audiotapes and documentation of Saddam Hussein’s meetings with top advisers that were seized in Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The new American materials and comments by the Musgrove participants show that the scandal prompted policy-­makers to tilt even further toward Baghdad and the Gulf Arab states as a way to compensate for the embarrassment caused by the episode. The conference participants differed among themselves over whether U.S.–Iran ties could have been significantly improved if the affair had not taken place, but they did agree that the ham-­handed methods of Oliver North and his colleagues in dealing with Iranian officials created definite problems. A string of incidents beyond the arms-­for-hostages deals made their mark on the conflict. Among these were the so-­called ‘Tanker War’ and the war on the cities, as well as specific episodes such as the Iraqi strike on the USS Stark and the downing of the Iran Airlines passenger jet. The consensus of the conference was that none of these involved any kind of conspiracy or even a conscious strategy. There was no sense among the participants that the Stark incident was anything other than a monumental mistake, as was the Airbus tragedy. There does not appear to be any evidence, including among the captured Iraqi materials, that Baghdad was hitting back after Iran–Contra, although the remarkably gentle American reaction to the missile strike may well have reflected Washington’s eagerness to move on. As for the Iran Airlines disaster, published sources from Tehran bolster the information acquired from interviews with Iranian

208   M. Byrne officials and scholars that the USS Vincennes action in July 1988 had an extraordinary if inadvertent impact on Iranian leaders. So deep was Iran’s suspicion of the United States that it was an article of faith that the disaster was a deliberate attack on innocent civilians. The irony is that the conclusion they drew from this judgment was that Washington was intent on carrying out a stepped-­up military campaign against Iran, following up on earlier clashes between U.S. Navy vessels and Iranian forces in the waters of the Gulf. Faced with this (misperceived) looming threat and drained by eight years of fighting, Khomeini and a majority of his war council decided that prevailing against a combination of Iraqi and American forces would be impossible. The story of how a ceasefire agreement was finally achieved is a remarkable one. Giandomenico Picco, the UN official most directly involved, tells much of it dramatically in his memoir, Man Without a Gun.16 At Musgrove, he elaborated on his account as part of a wide-­ranging assessment of the behavior of the Western powers from the perspective of an international observer. Some of his criticisms were rather sharp, but he was most aggravated by the attitude of Secretary of State Shultz, who appeared to prefer to keep the fighting going – and Iranian and Iraqi casualties mounting – in the latter half of 1988 rather than jump on the opportunity to end the hostilities sooner. The final session at Musgrove featured a discussion of the aftermath of the war and whether, from an official perspective looking back in time, there had been any missed opportunities during the period of the conflict. One of the themes of that closing conversation was the degree to which both the United States and Iran misunderstood each other and other key players involved. This brief précis of the discussions lists several instances. With full appreciation of the ironies involved, considering Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait just two years later, several of the participants recalled the general view in Washington in 1988 that it would take Iraq as long as one or two decades to recover from the devastation. Just as misguided was the conviction in some quarters that a chastened Saddam Hussein would finally moderate his radicalism, leading to a new and stable dynamic in the Gulf. As for missed opportunities, several possibilities are worth noting. After so many years of American support for the Shah and following the embassy seizure of 1979, it was probably impossible either for the followers of Khomeini or for the United States in the near term to set aside their profound suspicions of each other and pursue an improvement in relations. At virtually every turn since the revolution, hard-­line factions in both countries have exploited dark – and sometimes flawed – memories of the other side’s sins to undercut attempts to move forward and promote mutual interests. But over time, as Iran’s revolutionary zeal and its capacity for spreading Khomeinism diminished, the window of opportunity may have eased open bit by bit. In the context of the war of 1980 to 1988, then, what were the prospects for reassessing one’s presumptions about the adversary? For example, given the depth of Iran’s resentment over the West’s non-­reaction

Critical Oral History: a new approach   209 to the invasion, what if the UN Security Council had not behaved quite so callously? Could that have ameliorated the feeling in the Islamic Republic that the outside world could not be trusted to be ‘fair’? Would the Western world have reacted more impartially if Khomeini had followed the counsel of some of his aides and declared victory in spring 1982 rather than follow a path that would turn Iran from victim into aggressor in the eyes of the international community? From the American side, could a more realistic appreciation of Saddam Hussein’s unquenchable regional ambitions and the futility of trying to draw him back into the community of nations have persuaded the White House to recalculate the costs of cozying up to the Iraqi dictator? In that event, could a more balanced American policy that, among other things, unreservedly condemned Baghdad for its chemical weapons use and held it formally responsible for starting the war have made a sufficient impression on Iran’s collective leadership to allow future presidents Rafsanjani or Khatami more leeway in pursuing a rapprochement? Finally, if the United States had approached the Iran arms deals of 1985 and 1986 as a genuine opportunity (as some Americans and Iranians believed it was) to reach out to senior Iranian officials, could it have created a firmer foundation for building future ties?

Conclusion By posing questions such as these, with the aim of prompting decision-­ makers to re-­examine and explain their actions, the COH method has proven its potential for producing breakthroughs in historical research. It is not a guarantee for determining definitive truth. But it is a remarkable tool that goes beyond documentation and memoirs to provide revealing, sometimes intimate, accounts of the policy process and the personalities behind it. The full findings of the Musgrove conference, published in 2012 under the title, Becoming Enemies: U.S.–Iran Relations and the Iran–Iraq War, 1979–88, serve three purposes. One is to expand the knowledge base on America’s conduct during the war, including our understanding of how the underlying thinking of American officials was shaped. Another is to prompt an equivalent Iranian contribution about Tehran’s policy-­ making, which is still largely opaque to outside observers. The third is to help lay the ground for further cooperative investigations, with Iranian counterparts, of key moments in the bilateral relationship. Plans are already in place for another ‘Musgrove’ in early 2011 to explore the two nations’ narratives as they evolved through the Clinton–Khatami years.

Notes   1 J. Tirman, ‘Diplomacy, Terrorism, and National Narratives in the United States­Iran Relationship’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 2, no. 3, December 2009, pp. 527–39.

210   M. Byrne   2 This chapter draws on material that has been turned into a book by the project’s organizers. The book, Becoming Enemies: U.S.–Iran Relations and the Iran–Iraq War, 1979–1988 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), contains substantially more information about both the COH process and the project’s findings to date.   3 After many years at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Brown University’s Watson Institute of International Affairs, Blight and Lang in 2009 joined the faculty of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario. Byrne is Deputy Director of the National Security Archive at The George Washington University.   4 J. G. Blight and j. M. Lang, The Fog of War, Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005, p. 6.   5 In addition, a small group of Middle East specialists helped to keep the discussion anchored to the facts: H. Banai, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, Brown University; J. Battle, an analyst on Iraq and Persian Gulf Affairs, The National Security Archive, George Washington University; F. Farhi, adjunct professor of Political Science and International Relations, University of Hawaii, Manoa; M. Gasiorowski, professor of political science and director of the International Relations Program, Louisiana State University; and J. Hiltermann, deputy program director, Middle East and North Africa, International Crisis Group.   6 Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, ‘The Shah’, Secret, 20 October 1979.   7 Amembassy Tehran cable to SecState, ‘Shah’s Desire to Reside in the U.S.’ Secret, 28 July 1979.   8 Among those doubting American innocence on the point are the following: A. H. Bani-­Sadr, My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the U.S., Washington DC: Brassey’s, 1991, p. 70; Bani-­Sadr, interview with the author and C. Ostermann, Paris, 28 March 2004; and author’s telephone interview with former Soviet UN Ambassador Alexander Belonogov, 13 March 2006. See also Christopher Hitchens, Toronto Star, 12 January 1991. However, in Chapter 9 of this volume Chris Emery analyzes this question in detail.   9 ‘Talking Points’, Top Secret/Sensitive, undated. 10 See G. Sick, All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran, New York: Random House, 1985, pp. 245–6. See also Defense Intelligence Agency cable, ‘Title: Iraq Goads Iran’, 9 April 1980, 05:33Z. 11 Author’s interview with George Cave, Washington, 10 May 2003. 12 Director of Central Intelligence, Alert Memorandum, ‘Iran–Iraq Conflict,’ 17 September 1980, with cover note of the same date from Stansfield Turner to National Security Council, ‘Iran–Iraq’. 13 United States Congress, House Select Committee on Intelligence, CIA: The Pike Report, Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1977. 14 See B. R. Gibson, Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence, and the Iran–Iraq War, 1980–88, Oxford: Praeger Securities International, 2010. 15 State Department Cable to various posts, ‘Kittani Call on Under Secretary Eagleburger’, Secret, 18 March 1984. 16 G. Picco, Man without a Gun: One Diplomat’s Struggle to Free the Hostages, Fight Terrorism, and End a War, New York: Times Books, 1999.

Part V

International perspectives on the war

12 France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War Pierre Razoux 1

During the Iran–Iraq war, France supported Iraq in pursuit of its own commercial and industrial interests, but gradually came to realise that this support would force it to make more and more concessions to Tehran in order to put an end to the terrorist attacks and hostage-­taking that she was suffering from Iran.2 To understand France’s attitude during the conflict, we need to step back a few years in time. After the Arab–Israeli conflict in June 1967, French popularity in the Middle East was at its zenith, thanks to General de Gaulle’s neutrality during the Six-­Day War. France capitalised on this to regain some of the influence she had lost in the Middle East after the Second World War. At the same time she sought to win over the captive markets of several Arab states that had become rich as a result of the oil bonanza. On 7 February 1968 General de Gaulle received his Iraqi opposite number, General Abdel Rahman Arif, in Paris. The task was not an easy one: Iraq had close ties with the Soviet Union and was ostracised by some members of the Western community. Contact between the two countries was nonetheless productive. A few months later, the Ba’ath party took over power in Baghdad. General El Bakr and Saddam Hussein, the two strongmen of the new regime, were convinced that it was in Iraq’s interest to strengthen links with Europe in order to break free of East–West antagonism and escape both Soviet control and American hostility. Since Germany was regarded as too friendly with Israel and the United States, and the United Kingdom had been out of favour since the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, the new Iraqi government quite naturally turned to France as the only country that seemed able to give the regime what it needed most: close cooperation in the oil sector and modern weapons to deter Iran. Hassan El Bakr and Saddam Hussein contacted the Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP), a French oil company that had been in Iraq for several decades, and the Total Group, which owned 23.75 per cent of shares in the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Negotiations made good progress thanks to the mediating skills of CFP director Jean Duroc-­Danner, who had built up excellent interpersonal relations in Baghdad.

214   P. Razoux

Iraq: a new Eldorado for French industrialists On 1 June 1972, Baghdad nationalised the IPC along with all the other oil companies in Iraq. The Iraqi government immediately informed Paris that all the necessary steps would be taken to safeguard French oil interests. Ten days later, Saddam Hussein went to Paris to define the terms of French–Iraqi oil cooperation. He took the opportunity to present the French authorities with a list of the equipment that Iraq wanted to procure as soon as possible: Mirage fighter bombers, helicopters, radars and various ground-­based weapon systems. The French oil industry, anxious to protect its interests in Iraq, put pressure on the government to grant Saddam Hussein’s request. The issue sparked controversy. President Georges Pompidou, who wanted to expand the policy of outreach to the Arab world initiated by General de Gaulle, decided in favour of arms sales to Iraq, but prohibited delivery of fighter aircraft and tanks (see Table 12.1). On 18 June 1972, the French and Iraqi governments signed an agreement safeguarding French oil interests in Iraq for ten years. France had particularly good reason to be favourably inclined towards Iraq: at the time of the oil shock triggered by the Arab–Israeli war in October 1973, Iraq had defended French interests in the OPEC forum and had refused to join the embargo imposed on France by the other Arab states. Cooperation between the two countries took another step forward after the election of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his prime minister, Jacques Chirac. Chirac made an official visit to Baghdad from 30 November to 2 December 1974, bearing glad tidings: France agreed in principle to deliver Mirage fighters to Iraq. An initial contract was signed for shipment, starting in January 1981, of forty Mirage F-­1 fighters (thirty-­six single-­seat and

Table 12.1  French military deliveries to Iraq 1970–801 350 light armoured vehicles (all Panhard): 131 AML-60, 101 AML-90, 118 M3 687 trucks (Berliet and Saviem) 580 mortars (Brandt) and 420,000 shells 102 helicopters (SNIAS): 47 SA316 Alouette III, 40 SA342 Gazelle, 12 SA321 Super Frelon, 3 SA330 Puma 255 Milan and Hot antitank missile launchers 10,800 missiles (SNIAS and Matra): 4,450 Milan (AT), 4,000 Hot (AT), 2,000 AS11/12 (AT), 300 Magic (AA), 50 Exocet (Antiship) 6 high tech detection radars (Thomson/CSF) to improve the Iraqi air defence network Total: US$5 billion (1980) Note 1 French Ministry of Defence, Historical and Archive Department; Interviews with representatives of various French industrials; Roger Faligot and Jean Guisnel, Histoire secrète de la Ve République, Paris: La Découverte, 2006; Claude Angeli and Stéphanie Mesnier, Notre ami Saddam, Paris: Olivier Orban, 1992.

France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War   215 four twin-­seat). The French prime minister returned to France with interesting news: the Iraqi government wanted to establish civil nuclear cooperation with France. This time, both French oil industrialists and weapons manufacturers stepped up lobbying efforts to convince the government to approve Iraq’s request, arguing that they needed to protect their commercial interests in Iraq. In 1975, French and Iraqi delegations held a series of talks to negotiate the terms of their bilateral nuclear cooperation. France offered to build an 800-kilowatt research reactor (Isis) in Iraq, and a seventy-­megawatt enriched uranium nuclear power station (Osiraq) in Iraq. Saddam Hussein paid a four-­day visit to France, from 5 to 8 September, to conclude negotiations. Jacques Chirac welcomed him with these words: ‘You are my personal friend. You can be assured of my respect, my consideration and my affection.’3 The Franco-­Iraqi cooperation agreement was signed in Baghdad on 18 November 1975. The United States, which still saw Iraq as a Soviet henchman, and Israel, which regarded Iraq as a formidable adversary, openly criticised the French stance and threatened to do everything in their power to wreck cooperation.4 In France, the agreement swept away the last remaining obstacles to the sale of the most sensitive equipment to Iraq. From 1976 to 1979, arms manufacturers sold Iraq all the equipment that its army needed but could not procure from the Soviets. Military cooperation gathered momentum with the signing of several bilateral agreements (in 1977) for the training of cadet pilots and technicians responsible for the introduction into service of the Mirage fighters and helicopters sold to Iraq. The training policy also extended to opportunities for internships at the French War School and in military schools. Every year, a hundred or so Iraqis, including twelve pilots and fifty technicians, received training in France. In 1979, the Dassault company signed a contract for the sale of a new batch of twenty-­six Mirage F-­1 fighters (twenty-­four single-­seat and two twin-­seat), to be delivered starting in 1984. Iraq even made an offer to purchase Mirage 2000, then at the prototype stage, but a series of delays prevented implementation of the project. The Navy Construction Directorate advised Iraqi defence staff that they should have a real ocean-­going navy and tried to lure them with the prospect of sales not only of escort vessels and frigates equipped with Exocet missiles, but also submarines, despite the fact that Iraq has only a very narrow access to the Persian Gulf. The project was dismissed as absurd by Prime Minister Raymond Barre’s office and came to nothing.5 Thanks to the joint support of the French oil, nuclear and arms lobbies, who backed press campaigns extolling the merits and modernity of the Iraqi regime, Baghdad became firmly established as the French arms industry’s foremost foreign customer. In the late 1970s, more than sixty-­ five French businesses were operating in Iraq and ten thousand French technicians were residing there, implementing the many industrial cooperation agreements between the two countries. Iraq became France’s chief

216   P. Razoux trade partner in the Middle East and its second oil supplier. It is not entirely implausible that it may have become an important source of funding for the ruling Gaullist party,6 who were constantly singing the praises of the Iraqi regime, joining the chorus of intellectuals who unhesitatingly defined its leadership style as genuine ‘Arab Gaullism’.7 Paris and Baghdad became so close, indeed, that each became hostage to the other. The French government reassured itself and justified its behaviour by explaining that its close complicity with Baghdad enabled it to remove Iraq from the Soviet sphere of influence and thus satisfy Western interests.

Nuclear energy: a core issue in Franco-­Iranian relations At the outset, Franco-­Iranian relations were much simpler and healthier. Commercial links were stable and there were genuine cultural ties. The situation was all the more clear-­cut because the French knew that selling arms to Iran was out of the question, as this was the exclusive preserve of the United States and Great Britain. Consequently, the French government placed the emphasis on nuclear cooperation because Shah Reza Pahlavi wanted his country to have civil nuclear power stations. On 18 November 1974, the French government signed an agreement to sell Iran two Westinghouse nuclear power stations built under licence by Framatome. The terms envisaged that any natural uranium deposits discovered in Iran would be exploited by a Franco-­Iranian company for the benefit of both countries. In December 1974, the Shah granted a one-­billion-dollar loan to France in exchange for allowing Iran to buy a 10 per cent share in the European Gaseous Diffusion Uranium Enrichment Consortium (EURODIF ).8 It was agreed that the share would enable Iran to buy 10 per cent of the enriched uranium produced by the EURODIF plant in Tricastin (France) when it became operational in 1981. France and Iran founded the Sofidif Company to manage nuclear cooperation between the two countries.9 In 1978 France began construction in Bushehr of Iran’s first nuclear power station. On 5 October 1978, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing agreed to grant political asylum to Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been expelled from Iraq. The French President had discreetly received the green light from the Shah of Iran, who regarded the cleric as one of his most dangerous opponents.10 From his residence in Neauphle-­le-Château, Khomeini pursued his policy of destabilising the Iranian imperial regime until the fall of the Shah on 16 January 1979. The French government was focusing its efforts on recognition of the Palestinian people’s legitimate claims and so did nothing about the Ayatollah, little realising how rapidly the situation in Iran would deteriorate. On 1 February 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini made a triumphant return to Iran on an Air France flight and seized power in Tehran.

France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War   217 On 9 April 1979, the new Islamic government condemned the contract agreed with France for supply of the two nuclear power stations, stopped payments and demanded reimbursement of the billion-­dollar loan to EURODIF authorised by the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini felt that the new Islamic Revolution could not afford the high cost of nuclear energy. His government nonetheless confirmed Iran’s share in EURODIF. France categorically refused to pay off the loan and opposed Iran’s claim to EURODIF shareholder rights. This was the start of a long dispute that was to embitter Franco-­Iranian relations for ten years and had grave repercussions for the security of France and its citizens. On 18 July 1980, bilateral relations were complicated by the capture of an Iranian commando group led by Anis Naccache,11 following the failed assassination attempt on the Shah’s former prime minister, Shahpur Bakhtiar, who had fled to France. Before being arrested, the five Iranians murdered a policemen. They were sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. From then on Tehran was unrelenting in its demands for their release.

Strong French backing for Iraq The outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war on 22 September 1980 took the French government by surprise and presented it with an embarrassing dilemma. How could it avoid breaking relations with Iran while safeguarding arms sales and industrial cooperation with Iraq? Paris had no intention of walking out on Baghdad. Its economic and industrial interests in Iraq were too important. For Giscard d’Estaing, who was worried about the spread of the Soviet Union’s influence throughout the world, providing support to Iraq was also in line with the geostrategic rationale of curbing the communist advance towards the Middle East. If Iraq collapsed militarily, Russia might be tempted to support Iran and thus gain access to the Persian Gulf. The French authorities feared nevertheless that very obviously strong backing for Iraq could provoke a violent backlash in Iran. In a cautiously worded statement, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said: ‘France is nobody’s enemy; its commercial ties with Iraq do not signify hostility towards the Islamic revolution.’12 In early November, during an official visit to Paris, several important Iranian figures warned the French authorities that continued deliveries of arms to Iraq could lead to a serious deterioration in relations between Paris and Tehran. The election of a Socialist government in May 1981 did not alter the situation. The new president, François Mitterrand, sent a message on 25 May to Saddam Hussein assuring him of French support. He stated publicly that he did not want to see Iraq defeated and that it was indispensable ‘to maintain a balance between Persians and Arabs’.13 Confronted with these realities, the new Socialist leadership could not ignore the powerful French industrial lobby that supported the alliance with Baghdad, even

218   P. Razoux though French nuclear cooperation with Iraq ceased after the destruction of the Osirak power station by the Israeli air force on 7 June 1981. This alliance, moreover, was acceptable to a large section of the Socialist Party, which regarded Iraq as a model of modernism, progressivism and secularism in comparison with the conservative oil monarchies and the obscurantist ideology of the Islamic Revolution. The French government reiterated its support for Iraq, stating that it needed to protect France’s energy supply sources in the Gulf and was morally obliged to support the only secular, progressive state in the region that could curb the dangerous proselytism of the Islamic Revolution. Inevitably, Iran was incensed by these arguments. The situation became much worse when the Iranian government, using as an excuse the inauguration of the EURODIF plant, asserted its right to 10 per cent of the enriched uranium produced by the plant and once again demanded repayment of the EURODIF loan. Paris flatly refused. Relations deteriorated even further when on 29 July 1981 France offered political asylum to Massoud Rajavi, leader of the People’s Mujahideen, a fierce opponent of Ayatollah Khomeini, but above all to Bani-­Sadr, first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who had been forced to flee from Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini lashed out, calling France ‘the little Satan’ – the ‘Great Satans’ being the United States and Israel. This meant the end of any lingering sympathy that the Ayatollah might still feel for France as a result of his stay at Neauphle-­le-Château.

Lebanon: theatre of confrontation between France and Iran On 4 September 1981, the French ambassador to Lebanon, Louis Delamare, was assassinated in Beirut. Responsibility was claimed by the Shi’ite militia, Amal, but the French authorities were in no doubt that the militia had been acting under Tehran’s instructions.14 The links between Lebanese Shi’ite factions and the Iranian clergy were notorious and the Ayatollah’s regime continued to issue threats against France. In response, France immediately took a tougher line towards Tehran and increased its arms deliveries to Iraq (see Tables 12.2 and 12.3), supplying new aircraft, helicopters and armoured vehicles. The first Mirage F-­1 aircraft were now being used by the Iraqi Air Force. France completed stocks of Iraqi missiles and signed the ‘Vulcain’ contract with Baghdad for the supply of eighty-­one GCT-­AUF1 155 mm ultramodern self-­propelled guns, able to unleash a deluge of firepower and suppress waves of Iranian attacks.15 French military advisers employed by service-­sector companies provided local back-­up to the Iraqi Army. To demonstrate its gratitude, Baghdad renewed its privileged oil cooperation agreement with France. In August 1982, France sent troops to Lebanon, as part of the Multinational Security Force Beirut (FMSB), to help evacuate the PLO, enforce the ceasefire between Israelis and Palestinians and protect the local French

France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War   219 community. The French military presence in Lebanon soon became a new bone of contention between Paris on one side and Tehran and Damascus on the other. Iranians and Syrians were displeased to see French soldiers in what they regarded as their back yard. The French presence became a double-­edged weapon for France, as the French military contingent represented a prime target for the militias manipulated by Iran. At the start of 1983, the Iraqi government offered to buy twenty Super Étendard fighter aircraft. The fighter, which had distinguished itself Table 12.2  French military deliveries to Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War1 97 Mirage F-1EQ fighter bombers (Dassault) 24 Mirage F-1EQ5 fighter bombers equipped with Exocet antiship missiles (Dassault) 5 Super Étendard fighter bombers equipped with Exocet missiles (on lease to the Iraqi Air Force between October 1983 and the Summer of 1985) 2 Falcon 50 liaison jets (one modified to launch Exocet missiles) (Dassault) 6 SA321 Super Frelon helicopters equipped with Exocet missiles (SNIAS) 40 SA342 Gazelle helicopters equipped with Hot antitank missiles (SNIAS) 10 SA330 Puma helicopters (SNIAS) 10 AMX-30 main battle tanks (GIAT) 100 AMX-10P light armoured combat vehicles (GIAT) 81 GCT-AUF1 (155 mm) heavy mobile guns (GIAT) 100 UTM-800 ‘Hot’ light antitank armoured combat vehicles (Panhard) 60 Rolland air defence systems 20 Crotale air defence systems Thousands of missiles: Milan (AT), Hot (AT), Magic (AA), Super 530 (AA), Rolland (SAM), Crotale (SAM), Exocet (ASM) and AS30L (ASM) Millions of ammunitions Electronic warfare devices Total: US$17 billion (1988) Note 1 French Ministry of Defence, Historical and Archive Department; Interviews with representatives of various French industrials; Roger Faligot and Jean Guisnel, Histoire secrète de la Ve République, Paris: La Découverte, 2006; Claude Angeli and Stéphanie Mesnier, Notre ami Saddam, Paris: Olivier Orban, 1992; Pierre Péan, La Menace, Paris: Fayard, 1987.

Table 12.3  French military deliveries to Iraq 1970–881 126 combat aircraft 158 helicopters 560 armoured vehicles 81 heavy mobile guns More than 15,000 missiles Millions of ammunitions Radars and electronic warfare devices Total: US$22 billion (1988) Note 1 Synthesis of figures from Tables 12.1 and 12.2.

220   P. Razoux months earlier during the Falklands war, was at the time the only combat aircraft able to fire the famous Exocet anti-­ship missile. The Iraqi leadership regarded the aircraft as the ideal weapons system to launch an effective attack on the Iranian terminal in Kharg and oil traffic to Iran. The Dassault company could not deliver the Super Étendard aircraft because production had stopped, but it offered to sell the Iraqis twenty-­four of the Mirage F-­1 fighters (version EQ5) that had been upgraded to carry and fire two Exocet missiles each. These aircraft also had a longer range. Dassault calculated that it would take two years to complete the upgrading. In the meantime, the French government agreed to ‘lease’ Iraq five Super Étendard fighters from its own naval inventory. Iran then signalled to the French government that delivery of the Super Étendards to Baghdad would destroy the fragile military equilibrium and would be taken as a casus belli. According to the French Secret Service (DGSE),16 Ali Khamenei, president of the Islamic Republic, Mir Hossein Mussavi, prime minister, and Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani, head of the Iranian parliament, met on 9 July in Tehran to plan attacks against French interests.17 On 21 September 1983, the French embassy in Beirut was the target of a bomb attack killing five people. On 7 October 1983, the French government launched Operation Sugar.18 Five French fighter pilots with false passports, officially employed by the Dassault company, flew from Landivisiau in the five Super Étendard aircraft leased to Iraq. The following day, after a stopover in Corsica, they landed on the Clémenceau aircraft carrier cruising south of Cyprus. They refuelled and set off once again for Iskenderun in Turkey in accordance with a flight plan dropped off by a Dassault Falcon 50, which arrived a few minutes before them. They reached the Turkish coast at nightfall, flying at very low altitude to escape Syrian radar detection. They flew along the Turkish–Syrian border into Iraqi air space, and finally landed at the Qayarah West base north of Iraq. The Iraqi crews who had been trained in France arrived the following week. On 23 October 1983, two weeks after the arrival of the Super Étendard aircraft in Iraq, a truck bomb drove at high speed into the building housing a portion of the French military contingent deployed in Beirut. Rescue teams found the remains of fifty-­eight French paratroopers. A simultaneous attack on the Marine headquarters in Beirut killed 242 American personnel. The two bomb attacks were attributed to the ‘Islamic Jihad’ movement and the Shi’ite Hizballah militia. For the French authorities, there was absolutely no doubt that the attacks had been ordered by Iran. President François Mitterrand issued a declaration: ‘We are not the enemies of Iran. France has not taken sides: as it happens, she has a friendly relationship (with Iraq) and does not wish to make enemies.’19 In Paris, defence minister Charles Hernu convinced Mitterrand to retaliate and preparations were soon being made for Operation Brochet, designed to strike one or more Hizballah targets. The Palmyra Hotel

France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War   221 (Beirut), where the main leaders of the Shi’ite militia were staying, was initially envisaged, but given the large number of foreseeable collateral victims the French leadership opted for the Sheikh Abdallah barracks, near Baalbek, which was used as a Hizballah training camp. On 17 November 1983, eight of the Naval Aviation’s Super Étendard fighters bombed the barracks. Iran’s reaction was swift. On 12 December there was a bomb attack on the French embassy in Kuwait. The French contingent deployed in Lebanon became the daily target of murderous attacks by the pro-­ Iranian militias. On 21 December, Islamic Jihad gave France ten days to pull out of Lebanon. Two days later, the French government expelled six Iranian diplomats suspected of preparing a terrorist campaign in France. On the night of 31 December 1983, two bombs exploded in France, killing five people. France now had the full measure of how much mischief the Iranian regime could cause.

Policy shift France increasingly came to see Iraq as an inconvenient ally, especially as the regime was unable to pay its debts and was now being accused by the international community of using poison gas against Iranian soldiers and the Kurdish peshmerga.20 The Socialist Party advocated a re-­adjustment of French policy towards the warring parties. For the first time, the Elysée openly refused to receive Tariq Aziz, who visited Paris on 28 February 1984. At the same time, arms deliveries to Iraq slowed down. The contracts signed were honoured and weapons manufacturers continued to deliver ammunition and spare parts, but no more major contracts were signed with Baghdad. In any case, Iraq was now largely insolvent. In March 1984, François Mitterrand, realising that France was caught in a trap in Lebanon, ordered the withdrawal of French troops from Beirut. He informed the Syrian authorities that he wanted to adopt a more positive approach towards Syria and Iran. In August 1984, dialogue between Paris and Tehran was restored. The Iranian government reproached France for not repaying the EURODIF loan, granting political asylum to Bani-­Sadr and Massoud Rajavi, selling arms to Iraq, and keeping Anis Naccache in jail.21 The Iranian authorities even offered to buy large quantities of French arms if France was willing to deliver them. The French government told Tehran that it would not ship arms to Iran until relations had been normalised. The new French foreign minister, Roland Dumas, took over the Iran dossier and stepped up contact with Tehran, but the Iranians complained of the lack of progress on the EURODIF issue. On 22 March 1985, three French diplomats were kidnapped in Beirut by Islamic Jihad. The French chargé d’affaires in Tehran immediately met with Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani, who stated that ‘the Iranian government has nothing to do with the hostage-­taking, but it knows and understands the kidnappers and can

222   P. Razoux influence them’.22 And to make it quite clear that he meant business, he announced that one of the hostages would be released. A week later a hostage was freed. The message was crystal clear: the release of hostages had to be negotiated through the Iranian government. On 22 May 1985, two more French nationals were taken hostage in Beirut. Soon after their abduction, the Iranian government reminded France of the conditions for normalising relations: repayment of the EURODIF loan, expulsion of Bani-­Sadr and Massoud Rajavi, cessation of arms deliveries to Iraq and release of Anis Naccache. In the meantime, the first Mirage F-­1EQ5 fighters equipped with Exocet missiles were delivered to Iraq and Saddam’s pilots made the very best use of them. At the same time, the four Super Étendard aircraft leased to Iraq were brought quietly back to France in June 1985.23 On 7 December 1985, two bomb attacks in Paris left forty-­one people injured as if to impress once again upon the government the urgent need to speed up negotiations. The following month, Paris made the following offer to Tehran in return for the freeing of the hostages: the start of a procedure to settle the EURODIF dispute; repayment of the first tranche of the loan; and the release of Anis Naccache. The Iranians told the French chargé d’affaires in Tehran that the proposal was not enough. On 3, 4 and 5 February 1986, Paris was hit by three more bomb attacks. Responsibility was claimed by the Committee of Solidarity with Arab and Middle East Political Prisoners (CSAMEPP), a hitherto unknown movement that demanded the release of Anis Naccache and his men.

The Luchaire affair: France’s ‘Irangate’ On 28 February 1986, La Presse de la Manche reported a scandal that was to cause great damage to the French government’s reputation: the revelation that for some years the Luchaire company had been smuggling munitions to Iran. On 16 March 1986, the Right returned to power and Jacques Chirac was appointed prime minister. André Giraud, the new defence minister, ordered the immediate cessation of all shipments of munitions to Iran.24 Several advisers to the former defence minister were implicated in the arms trafficking, which was suspected of being a source of funding for the French Socialist Party.25 The judge in charge of the case, however, never managed to lift the veil of defence secrecy over the affair. In the end, in the absence of hard evidence, he was forced to rule that there was no case to answer.26 The government’s attitude to the matter was one of extreme circumspection and discretion. Possibly this was because the retro-­commissions allegedly paid by the Luchaire company may have financed other political parties. Undoubtedly it was also because of the need to show consideration to Iran, which was universally regarded as the key to the release of the French hostages in Lebanon. Above all, it was because successive French governments from 1984 to 1989 knew that other French companies were involved in the

France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War   223 trafficking of military equipment to Iran (see Table 12.4). From 1983 to 1985, the Société nationale des poudres et explosifs (SNPE) delivered 250 tonnes of powder to Iran for the manufacture of ammunition. It delivered far more through a European powder and explosives cartel, whose secretary-­ general was Guy Chevallier, an SNPE senior executive.27 Throughout the war, the Manhurin company sent large shipments to Tehran of small-­calibre ammunition and reportedly planned to build an ammunition works in Iran. Matra sold radar systems to Iran, as well as 2,000 braking systems for dropping bombs from aircraft. Lastly, Thomson-­CSF, while deeply involved in arms sales to Iraq, allegedly delivered 200 thermal imaging night vision cameras to the Iranian air force.

The hostages affair The abrupt stoppage of munitions sales to Iran did not please Tehran. It did not help secure the release of the French hostages held in Lebanon, and neither did the recent extradition to Baghdad by the French authorities of two pro-­Iranian Iraqi dissidents, Hamza Fawzi and Hassan Kheireddine. In the space of one month, from March to April 1986, six more French citizens were taken hostage in Lebanon. The series of abductions was accompanied by two new bomb attacks in France, leaving eleven dead and thirty-­eight injured. Jacques Chirac’s new government sent a goodwill signal to the Iranians by expelling Massoud Radjavi and officially receiving the Iranian prime minister, Mir Hossein Mussavi.28 It offered to send the first tranche of the EURODIF repayment, to discuss procedure for paying off the remainder of the loan, to release Anis Naccache, to make no further arms deals with Iraq and to make adjustments to its relations with the two belligerents. As a result, two French hostages were released in Beirut. Negotiations continued over the summer, but new frictions arose between France and Iran. The two sides could not agree on the exact amount of the EURODIF debt.29 The Iranian government again claimed right of access, as a EURODIF shareholder, to enriched uranium. To make matters worse, President Mitterrand refused to grant the presidential Table 12.4  French military deliveries to Iran 1982–861 500,000 artillery shells of 155 and 203 mm (Luchaire) 250 tons of powder (SNPE) Hundred of thousands of small calibre bullets (Manhurin) 2,000 guidance kits for bombs (Matra) 200 night vision cameras (Thomson-CSF) Total: around US$1.5 billion (1988) Note 1 Walter de Bock and Jean-Charles Deniau, Des armes pour l’Iran, Paris: Gallimard, 1988; Pierre Péan, La Menace, Paris : Fayard, 1987.

224   P. Razoux pardon required for the release of Anis Naccache, thus calling into question the agreement negotiated two months earlier by his prime minister. The French hostages fell victim to the power-­sharing between a Socialist president and a Gaullist prime minister. By the beginning of September, negotiations had stalled. From 8 to 17 September 1986 a new terrorist campaign caused further bloodshed in Paris, killing thirteen and injuring three hundred. The French authorities pondered over the purpose behind it. Responsibility for all the attacks had been claimed by the CSAMEPP, the same movement that had claimed responsibility for the bombings in February 1986. Was the campaign designed to put pressure on the government and force it to be more flexible in negotiations with Iran? Or was it the work of a radical faction intent on sabotaging the talks and weakening the position of those members of the Tehran government who were in favour of outreach to the West? In any event, the negotiations continued. On 27 October 1986 France and Iran agreed on the sum of the EURODIF debt. On 11 November 1986 two more French hostages were released in Lebanon. A week later, France sent Iran an initial tranche of $330 million as repayment of a portion of the EURODIF loan.30 This was followed by the release of another French hostage in Beirut. There were now four French hostages still being held in Lebanon. On 13 January 1987 another French national was kidnapped in Beirut. This led to a significant shift in French policy towards Iran. The government, under pressure from public opinion, now decided that it was unacceptable to negotiate with hostage-­takers. It became clear that the affair would drag on for ever, since every step towards normalisation was followed by a new terrorist attack or another kidnapping. The sense of frustration had reached its limit. Again, opinions varied: some criticised the cynicism of the Iranian authorities, while others saw its behaviour as evidence of the ferocious struggle between the different factions of the Iranian regime. Whatever the truth was, France adopted a very hard line towards Iran. The Iranian dossier was gradually handed over to the police and ceased to be a diplomatic responsibility.

The Gorji affair On 17 February 1987, a repentant Tunisian jihadist contacted the French police and handed the French government a complete list of the members of the terrorist network that had carried out the murderous attacks in February and September 1986. The leader of the network, Fouad Ali Saleh, was a Tunisian who claimed to be close to Ayatollah Montazeri and had been recruited by the Islamist networks controlled by Tehran.31 The revelations highlighted the central role played by the Iranian embassy in Paris in the organisation of the attacks. Wahid Gorji, officially an interpreter at the Iranian embassy but in actual fact an agent of the Iranian special services in Paris, was identified as the coordinator of the attacks.

France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War   225 On 3 June 1987, after three months of investigations, the French police dismantled the terrorist network but were unable to arrest Wahid Gorji, who took refuge in the nick of time in his embassy. The French authorities immediately placed the Iranian embassy under surveillance to prevent Wahid Gorji’s escape. In late June, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac delivered an ultimatum to Iran: Wahid Gorji had to appear before a French court; otherwise all the Iranian diplomats in France would be expelled. He added, however, that the French government was willing to hand over Wahid Gorji in exchange for all the French hostages held in Lebanon. Iran immediately threatened to take hostage the twelve French diplomats who were still in Tehran. On 13 July the French container ship Ville d’Anvers was attacked near the Strait of Hormuz by Pasdaran boats. It was the first attack in over a year on French commercial shipping in the Gulf.32 The message was unequivocal: Tehran would not give way and was poised to attack French interests. On the following morning, 14 July, the French national holiday, the Pasdaran encircled the French embassy in Tehran, blocking all exit routes for the French diplomats who had taken refuge there. It was the start of the ‘war of the embassies’ that was to last four months. On 17 July 1987 France broke off diplomatic relations with Iran. Soon after, the French president launched Operation Prométhée and deployed a French naval task force to the Gulf, off the Iranian coast. It had a dual mission: to put pressure on Iran to release the diplomats and end the war of the embassies; and to protect French shipping in the Gulf, thus contributing to international efforts to end the ‘Tanker War’ that had been waged between Iran and Iraq for over three years.33 Until then, the French naval presence in the Indian Ocean had consisted simply of four corvettes, a support ship based at Djibouti and a tanker serving as a command ship for the admiral commanding the French forces in the Indian Ocean (known by the French acronym ALINDIEN: amiral commandant les forces françaises en océan Indien).

French military intervention in the Gulf On 30 July 1987, the Clémenceau aircraft carrier, armed with forty combat aircraft, the Suffren and Duquesnes destroyers and the Meuse tanker set off from Toulon for the Indian Ocean, in the wake of the Georges Leygues anti-­ submarine destroyer, which had departed urgently a week earlier to patrol the Persian Gulf. They were followed a few days later by the Garigliano, Cantho and Vinh-­Long minesweepers and the Garonne support ship. All these ships reached the Iranian coast during the last two weeks of August, where they joined the Marne tanker and the Protet, Bory, De Lagree and Schoelcher corvettes. The fourteen vessels formed Task Force 623, commanded by Admiral Jacques Lanxade from the Marne tanker, supported by Admiral Hervé Le Pichon, aboard the Clémenceau (see Table 12.5). This task force was subdivided into three Task Groups: TG 623–1, consisting of the Georges

226   P. Razoux Leygues destroyer and the four corvettes patrolling the Gulf and escorting French merchant ships; TG 623–2, consisting of the Clémenceau aircraft carrier, the Suffren and Duquesnes destroyers and the two tankers, Meuse and Marne, which was deployed in the Gulf of Oman and tasked to maintain a deterrent presence against Iran; and lastly, TG 623–3, consisting of the three minesweepers and the Garonne support ship, whose mission was to neutralise the Iranian mines laid near the Strait of Hormuz. The task force was supported by an Atlantic maritime patrol aircraft based in Djibouti. The French warships immediately began their surveillance, escort and deterrence mission. The crews had flexible rules of engagement authorising them to open fire if hostile intent was perceived. The Iranians were aware of this. Meanwhile, French Naval Aviation pilots stood ready to attack Iranian bases and oil installations if ordered to do so. The French military presence exercised sufficient deterrence to prevent any further bombings in France or attacks on French ships sailing in the dangerous Gulf waters. The only serious incidents were the interception by French Crusaders of Iran’s P-­3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft which came too close for comfort to the French task force.34 In parallel, the French government was negotiating an honourable exit from the crisis with Iranian emissaries. The Iranians were willing to exchange Wahid Gorji for some of the French hostages, but demanded a Table 12.5 Composition of the French Task Force 623 in Operation Prométhée (August 1987 to September 1988)1 Commandant: Admiral Jacques Lanxade (ALINDIEN) 1 aircraft carrier: Clémenceau (Admiral Hervé Le Pichon) 3 destroyers: Georges Leygues, Suffren and Duquesne 4 corvettes: Protet, Bory, De Lagree and Schoelcher 3 minesweepers: Garigliano, Cantho and Vinh-Long 2 tankers: Marne and Meuse 1 support ship: Garonne Total: 14 warships and 38 combat aircraft (20 Super Etendard, 10 F-8 Crusader, 8 Alizé) Task Group 623–1: Patrol and escort inside the Persian Gulf Destroyer Georges Leygues Corvettes Protet, Bory, De Lagree and Schoelcher Task Group 623–2: Gulf of Oman – Deterrence and potential retaliation towards Iran Aircraft carrier Clémenceau Destroyers Suffren and Duquesne Tankers Marne and Meuse Task Group 623–3: Minesweeping in the strait of Ormuz area Minesweepers Garigliano, Cantho and Vinh-Long Support ship Garonne Note 1 Private archives; File no. 1997 Z 720/9, Historical and Archive Department of the French MOD, Vincennes, France.

France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War   227 second tranche of the EURODIF loan repayment. On 27 November 1987 two French hostages were released in Beirut. The following day, French police lifted the Iranian embassy siege in Paris. Wahid Gorji gave himself up immediately to the French authorities, and after a hearing of a few hours with an investigating judge, he was put on a plane and extradited to Iran. Iran then released the twelve diplomats held captive in the French embassy in Tehran. It was the end of the embassy war. A few days later, Paris paid Tehran a second tranche of $330 million in partial settlement of the EURODIF dispute.35 At the start of 1988, negotiations continued. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac agreed to restore Iran’s status as a EURODIF shareholder. On 4 May 1988, the last three French hostages held in Lebanon were released. A few days later, François Mitterrand was re-­elected President of the Republic. He assigned Roland Dumas, his new foreign minister, the task of finding a definitive solution to the EURODIF issue, whatever the financial cost.36 In June 1988, diplomatic relations between Paris and Tehran were restored. Three months later, when the Iran–Iraq war ended, the French government ended Operation Prométhée and brought the task force back to Toulon after almost a year in the northern Indian Ocean. Only two destroyers, one corvette and a support ship remained in the Gulf. During this time, the Foch aircraft carrier was on alert status in Toulon, ready to take over in the Gulf. France was to learn two fundamental lessons from Operation Prométhée: deterrence worked with Iran; and the aircraft carrier was still an indispensable tool. The end of the Iran–Iraq war was met with relief in France. The French attitude during the war was to have major repercussions on domestic policy and very serious consequences for the security of French nationals: thirteen French citizens taken hostage, 100 or so killed (including the diplomats murdered in Beirut and the troops killed in Lebanon) and nearly 500 others injured or maimed. The lessons of this affair and its consequences unquestionably deserve to be given serious consideration by those who have to manage the current and on going crisis with Iran.

Notes   1 Dr Pierre Razoux is a Senior Research Adviser at the NATO Defense College (NDC) in Rome. He is an expert on the Middle East wars and has published extensively on this topic. His book dealing with the Iran–Iraq War (La guerre Iran-­Irak: La dernière guerre totale du XXe siècle) will be published by Perrin, Paris, at the beginning of 2013. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and must not be attributed to NATO.   2 The historiography on the French policy toward the Iran–Iraq war is in its infancy. A few books, mostly written by journalists, dealt with the topic at the end of the 1980s: Paul Balta, Iran–Irak: Une Guerre de 5000 Ans, Paris: Anthropos­Economica, 1988; Roger Faligot and Jean Guisnel, Histoire secrète de la Ve République, Paris, La Découverte, 2006; Claude Angeli and Stéphanie Mesnier, Notre ami Saddam, Paris: Olivier Orban, 1992; Pierre Péan, La Menace, Paris: Fayard,

228   P. Razoux 1987; and Walter de Bock and Jean-­Charles Deniau, Des Armes Pour l’Iran, Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Two special issues of academic reviews analysing the impact of this war for France deserve to be mentioned: Politique Etrangère no. 2, summer 1987, Paris, IFRI; and Notes et etudes documentaires no. 4889, Paris, la Documentation française, 1989.   3 AFP, 5 September 1975.   4 In the early hours of 7 April 1979, an Israeli commando gained access to the naval dockyard at La Seyne-­sur-Mer in France and sabotaged the installations under construction that were to house the core of the two Iraqi nuclear reactors, slowing the entire programme down by eighteen months. On 14 June 1980, Yahya El-­Mashad, an Egyptian physicist involved in the Iranian nuclear programme, was assassinated by Mossad in Paris. On 7 June 1981, Israeli air force planes destroyed the Osirak power station.   5 Interview with Admiral Pierre Lacoste, former Military Assistant to French Prime Minister Raymond Barre (Paris, 17 June 2010).   6 P. Péan, La Menace, Paris: Fayard, 1987, p. 97.   7 C. Saint-­Prot, Saddam Hussein: un gaullisme arabe? Paris: Albin Michel, 1987.   8 At the time France (27.8 per cent), Belgium, Italy and Spain had shares in EURODIF.   9 A Franco-­Iranian company plant producing enriched uranium by gaseous diffusion. 10 P. Balta, Iran–Irak: une guerre de 5000 ans, Paris: Anthropos-­Economica, 1988, p. 39. 11 The other members of the commando group were Nejad Tabrizi, Fawzi el Satari, Salah-­Eddine el Kaara and Mohamed Jenab. 12 AFP, 24 September 1980. 13 J. Garçon, ‘La France et le conflit Iran–Irak’ in Politique Etrangère no. 2, summer 1987, Paris: IFRI, p. 359. 14 M. Vaïsse, La puissance ou l’influence? La France dans le monde depuis 1958, Paris: Fayard, 2009, p.  389. Interview with Admiral Pierre Lacoste, former Head of the French Secret Service (DGSE), Paris, 17 June 2010. 15 R. Faligot and J. Guisnel, Histoire secrète de la Ve République, Paris: La Découverte, 2006, p. 249. 16 Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (French Secret Service). 17 Péan, op. cit., p. 115. 18 F. Marsaly, ‘Les Super Étendard de Saddam’, Aviation Française Magazine no. 13, January 2007, pp. 42–6. 19 AFP, 26 October 1983. 20 Iraq subsequently made an arrangement with France to reschedule payment of the debt, which was then five billion dollars. 21 R. Dumas, Affaires étrangères (1981–1988), Paris: Fayard, 2007, pp. 349–57. 22 Péan, op. cit., p. 135. 23 The fifth Super Étendard (numbered 67 in the French Naval Aviation) was shot down by Iranian fighters in July 1984. 24 From an inquiry carried out by the Contrôle Général des Armées (Barba report), it emerged that from 1982 to 1986 the Luchaire company had delivered almost 500,000 155 mm and 203M mm mortar shells to Iran, using end user’s certificates (EUCs). The Barba report was published by L’Express on 16 January 1987. 25 Faligot and Guisnel, op. cit., p. 251. 26 G. Gaetner, ‘L’Affaire Luchaire’, L’Express, 30 March 1995. 27 All the information in this paragraph is taken from the book by Walter de Bock and Jean-­Charles Deniau, Des armes pour Iran, Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

France’s involvement in the Iran–Iraq War   229 28 Massoud Radjavi found refuge in Iraq, from where he would continue to direct his People’s Mujahideen movement hostile to Ayatollah Khomeini. 29 The French estimated the ‘net debt’ as $750 million (after subtracting a portion of the sums owed by Tehran for cancelling the civil nuclear project), whereas the Iranians were demanding $2 billion. 30 Le Matin, 24 November 1986; D. Lorentz, Secret atomique, ou la véritable histoire des otages français au Lebanon, Paris: Les Arènes, 2002, p. 141. 31 Péan, op. cit., pp. 237–44. 32 In the past, three other French tankers had been attacked by Iranian Pasdaran: the D’Artagnan on 28 January 1986, the Chaumont on 4 March 1986 and the Brissac on 13 September 1986. Each of these attacks occurred at a time when the standoff between France and Iran was at a peak. 33 As confirmed in a handwritten note by Admiral Jacques Lanxade, chief of the military office of the Ministry of Defence and former Commander Indian Ocean at the time of the crisis, on a General Inspectorate of the Navy analytical document concerning Operation Prométhée, dated 5 July 1988 (serial number 1997 Z 720/9, SHD, Château de Vincennes). 34 Admiral Jacques Lanxade, ‘La coopération de la Marine nationale et de la Marine marchande dans le Golfe arabo-­persique’, Académie de Marine, Paris, 27 October 1988. 35 Lorentz, op. cit; Iran-­Resist, ‘Le Contentieux EURODIF ’, available at www.iran-­ resist.org/article167 (accessed 17 August 2012). 36 In September 1989, France and Iran agreed on procedures for settling the EURODIF issue. In July 1990, Anis Naccache was released by the French authorities. On 29 December 1991, a definitive agreement was signed by France and Iran. In total, France paid more than $1 billion to clear the EURODIF debt.

13 The Soviet Union and the Iran– Iraq War Artemy Kalinovsky

On the face of it, the story of the Soviet Union’s role in the Iran–Iraq war is not a very interesting one. Over the war’s eight-­year course Moscow, at various times, called for a ceasefire, refrained from selling arms to either belligerent, and sold arms to both, though not in major quantities. If we look a bit deeper and take a broader view, though, the story becomes more dramatic, for Moscow’s behavior reflected directly its foreign policy struggles of the late 1970s and the 1980s: redefining its relationship with the Third World, in particular the Middle East, after Egypt’s move towards the United States, the Camp David accords, and trying to salvage its relationship with the Muslim world after the intervention in Afghanistan. Thus Moscow’s various attempts in this period to cozy up to what was, on the surface at least, a highly hostile regime in revolutionary Iran, and its arms-­length relationship with an old ally, Saddam Hussein al-­Tikriti, in the same period. There are other stories to be told as well, of course: of the KGB’s work in Iran in this period, for example, or of the debates that must have taken place in Soviet foreign policy circles about the relative wisdom of selling arms to Iran to help it fight Saddam’s Iraq. But the archives are still not yielding their fruits for this period.1 What we do have are the memoirs of several key personalities on the Soviet side, as well as a scattering of documents from various sources (including the papers of the United Nations Secretary General) that help us at least better understand how and why Soviet policy followed the path that it did. The war broke out at a point when Moscow had already begun to grow wary of Saddam Hussein but was still encouraged by the anti-­Americanism of revolutionary Iran. As a result, Soviet policy seemed to favor the latter, although it could not afford to have the former suffer serious defeat. (After all, Iraq was a major client state and was equipped with the most advanced Soviet weaponry; an Iraqi defeat would be a major embarrassment for Moscow.) As the Iranian regime became more, not less, anti-­ Soviet, Moscow once again turned to helping Iraq. Once Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he quickly began to reach out to the Iranians; although Soviet aid to Iraq continued, Gorbachev viewed Iran as a valuable potential ally and courted it ever more energetically.

The Soviet Union and the Iran–Iraq War   231

Moscow, the Iranian revolution, and the ‘Hussein phenomenon’ By the end of the 1970s, Soviet officials and scholars were rethinking their approach to the Third World. Although the 1970s had seen the American defeat in Vietnam and socialist revolutions in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Angola, as well as the triumph of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, substantial cracks were beginning to form in Moscow’s Third World strategy. In 1972, the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet advisers and began the process of moving his country closer to the United States, culminating in the signature of the Camp David accords with Israel in 1978. At the same time, Soviet technological achievements, previously a major asset in attracting leaders from the developing world, were beginning to look less attractive. Countries such as Algeria, which had previously looked to the Soviet Union to help modernize and develop its economy, were now turning to America. Ethiopia and Somalia had gone to war, as a result of which nominally Socialist Mogadishu had become an American ally. By the end of the decade, Soviet officials and scholars were seriously rethinking their approach to the Third World, and were particularly looking for reliable sources of anti-­imperialist mobilization. It was in this context that they viewed the Iranian revolution. While Islam played a limited role in Soviet foreign policy in the 1950s and most of the 1960s, after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war it increasingly became a tool of the Soviet campaign to win over allegiance. Official Muslim clerics began to travel abroad as part of overtly political campaigns and to international conferences of Islamic scholars and clerics, and conferences with Muslim themes were organized in Tashkent.2 But it was in the late 1970s, and in particular after the Iranian revolution, that Soviet officials were really confronted with the need to formulate a policy. Soviet orientalist scholars and some officials became increasingly interested in the revolutionary potential of radical Islam. For the officials, in particular, the anti-­Americanism associated with Islamic movements was attractive, particularly as it seemed to become a more reliable tool of mobilization. An article in Literaturnaia Gazeta in January 1980, just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a year into the Iranian revolution, argued for support to anti-­imperial struggles undertaken in religious terms: It hardly needs to be emphasized that anti-­imperialism as one form of the active struggle of the peoples of the foreign East against present-­day neo-­colonialism is progressive in its very essence. Another point is equally obvious: in cases in which the struggle begins and continued under slogans that – by virtue of a given country’s specific feature – take on a religious coloring, the anti-­imperialist essence of this struggle does not change. The struggle against neo-­colonialism is in the vital interests of all liberated states, and it deserved the utmost support.3

232   A. Kalinovsky As was often the case, what Soviet officials wrote and said privately matched what they published and said publicly. Soviet Foreign Ministry officials studied the problem and invited scholars to give seminars on Islam after the Iranian revolution. Although there was skepticism about whether it was truly compatible with the Soviet’s conception of anti-­ imperialism (and what effects it might have within the USSR), they ultimately decided that ‘fundamentalism could be seen as one detachment of the national-­liberation movement’.4 An internal assessment prepared in 1983 (three years into the Afghan war) noted that increasingly Islam was becoming the rallying point for the battle against imperialist and neo-­ colonialism, and nationalists and Islamists were more and more likely to work together.5 This growing interest in the power of Islam as an anti-­ imperial force was probably a response to Soviet setbacks in the Muslim world throughout the 1980s: Sadat’s turn towards the United States, Algeria’s search for U.S. aid, and the coup against left-­leaning Zulfiqhar Ali Bhutto of the Pakistan’s People’s Party by the Islamist Ziu al Haq were all evidence that the Soviet model alone was no longer enough to win friends. The Soviet understanding of Islam’s progressive power was flexible – Islamists who were hopelessly anti-­Soviet could be labeled as such, as was the case with Pakistani President Zia ul Haq, who not only spoke of the natural alliance of capitalism and communism but was in effect emerging as the coordinator of the jihad in Afghanistan and international opposition to the intervention.6 The Iranian revolution, from Moscow’s point of view, was much more promising. Although Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rhetoric clearly labeled both the United States and the Soviet Union as ‘devils,’ it was America that was considered the greater one. Given this, Soviet leaders felt that they could benefit from the anti-­American nature of the revolution. Evgeny Primakov, the Soviet Union and Russia’s premier scholar-­cum-diplomat, noted in an interview given in July 1979: The Iranian revolution greatly complicates the American game in the Middle East. Actually, Iran is not only fully out of this game after taking, under the Shah, a very active part in it, but has also become a force openly hostile to the anti-­Arab machinations of the USA and Israel. Iran has given unreserved support for the PLO and the right of the Arab people of Palestine to establish their own state. It spoke out strongly against the capitulatory deal of As-­Sadat, the American-­Israeli model of a Middle Eastern settlement.7 As Leonid Shebarshin, the KGB resident there at the time, put it: ‘Khomeini was not attractive to us, but he had a very strong point in his favor: he was rabidly anti-­American. That is why we tried to find some way to establish an understanding with Khomeini and his entourage. That is why we were supporting him in our propaganda.’8

The Soviet Union and the Iran–Iraq War   233 Moscow’s relationship with Saddam Hussein began warmly. In the early 1970s, the emerging Iraqi leader appeared to be exactly the kind of progressive Arab nationalist Moscow had been trying to woo since the 1950s. Primakov remembers being very favorably impressed with the Iraqi strongman in 1973, and particularly his characterization of Sadat: After Nasser’s death, he [Sadat] could have become a leader, if he had continued the internal social-­economic developments, but he gambled on democratization, taking advantage of the fact that not only the bourgeoisie but the masses of the people were unhappy with the shadowy, police-­like tendencies of Nasser. After the arrests of the students and the blocking of their initiatives Sadat lost that ace. He started exploiting Islamist slogans and as a result brought to life such secret forces which he will later have difficulty controlling.9 For Soviet officialdom still smarting from Sadat’s defection to the United States, these words were truly soothing. But of course the relationship went deeper than shared assessments of world affairs: Saddam (the de facto leader of the country long before officially forcing Bakr out of power in 1979) in this period brought Iraq much closer to the Soviet Union in terms of economic cooperation and asked for it to share its economic and scientific expertise in developing Iraq’s economy. The two countries soon signed an agreement of Friendship and Cooperation in April 1972; Baghdad’s [partial] nationalization of its oil industry only further endeared the Ba’athist leadership to Moscow in June, and in July Iraq signed an agreement of cooperation with the Council on Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON).10 According to the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky, relations between the KGB and Iraqi intelligence were so close that Iraq became ‘the only country in the non-­Communist world where Soviet espionage was discontinued’.11 Not all was well in this relationship. Throughout the 1970s the Ba’ath had extended its influence throughout the government and the military and had taken an increasingly harsh line against the Iraqi communists. It was also repressing Kurds and Shi’ites, a policy which Soviet officials criticized, however mutedly. Hussein justified his internal politics in meetings with Soviet leaders, explaining that the effort to create national-­democratic government was being hampered by these internal enemies. For the time being, Soviet leaders bit their tongues, as they often did with other allies who attacked domestic communist parties.12 By the end of the 1970s, Iraq was also diversifying its sources of military hardware: if at the beginning of the decade almost 95 percent of its military import needs were met by the USSR, by 1979 this number was closer to 63 percent, the other sources being France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States.13 At the same time, despite the Shah’s closeness to the Americans, Soviet–Iranian relations were decent. The Soviet Union sent military experts and

234   A. Kalinovsky trained a number of Iranian officers (a relative small number: about 500 in the 1960s and 1970s) in the USSR. The Soviet Union sold armored vehicles and helped develop and maintain a production complex for military hardware outside Tehran.14 As was mentioned previously, the Iran–Iraq war, for Moscow, took place in the shadow of its intervention in Afghanistan.15 The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan brought cries of protest from western capitals as well as the Muslim world. In the wake of the Soviet Intervention, the Politburo directed the KGB to carry out appropriate measures in developing countries, especially Iran, to turn attention away from the Soviet intervention and towards encroaching American hegemony.16 It is not clear what exactly this meant, and there are no KGB documents that would provide any detail. It is almost certain, however, that the KGB’s task involved more clandestine ways of achieving the same goals the diplomatic initiative was supposed to help deliver. According to Leonid Shebarshin, the KGB resident in Tehran from 1979 to 1983 and later Chief of the First Directorate, the KGB’s instructions were, aside from gathering information, trying to ‘increase anti-­American feeling and soften anti-­Soviet feeling’. The latter was nearly impossible, the invasion of Afghanistan having helped make the USSR almost as big of an enemy of revolutionary Iran as the United States.17 Nevertheless, Soviet leaders remained hopeful that the anti-­ Americanism of the new Iranian regime would help neutralize the Carter Administration’s efforts in the Persian Gulf.

Early years of the war According to Primakov, Moscow had predicted that war would break out between Iran and Iraq soon after the Iranian revolution. A ‘situational analysis’ undertaken by a team of policy-­makers and academics had noted that Iran’s plan to ‘export the Islamic Revolution’ to neighboring countries referred directly to Iraq and stemmed from Khomeini’s personal animosity toward Saddam. As for Iraq, they thought that Saddam would likely be tempted to take advantage of the Iranian army’s weakness after the revolution and take oil-­rich Khuzestan as well as three islands in the Strait of Hormuz (Abu Musa, and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs) annexed by Iran from the fledgling United Arab Emirates in 1971.18 Whether the situational analysis was quite as prophetic as Primakov claims in his memoir is hard to ascertain (there’s more than a hint of self-­congratulation in his account), but certainly Moscow’s relations with Saddam had already begun to fray even before he launched his attack on Iran in September 1980, largely due to his destruction of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which put the Soviets on edge. In any event, the outbreak of the war apparently caught the Soviet Union by surprise. Only days before, Saddam had promised the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Barkovskii, that Iraq had ‘no plans for major

The Soviet Union and the Iran–Iraq War   235 military operations against Iran in the near future’. When Tariq Aziz came to Moscow soon after the outbreak of hostilities, he told Primakov that it was the Iranians who had started the war. Soviet leaders were more than a little peeved at this deliberate deception, so much so that they not only stopped selling arms to Iraq but decided to offer them to Iran.19 Again, the situation in Afghanistan may have had something to do with their surprise: Oleg Grinevsky, then the head of the Near East department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, writes that both military intelligence (the GRU) and the KGB were noting the likelihood of war in the weeks prior to the outbreak of hostilities, but that Soviet leaders ‘were up to their necks dealing with Afghanistan and hoped that it [the looming crisis] would pass’.20 Why did the attack on Iran cause such consternation for Soviet officials? Some Russian sources claim that the issue was Saddam’s behavior: his disregard for the 1972 treaty, for example, which had called for consultations with Moscow prior to taking such steps. There is probably some truth to this: in the constant vigil for ‘another Sadat’ (and fears, perhaps, of another Amin – an unstable, unpredictable ally) such sudden, independent moves may have been quite worrying. There were geopolitical concerns as well, as the war could draw the United States even further into the Persian Gulf (which was what happened in the end). One scenario considered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the KGB, for example, was that Iraq’s success could lead to a military coup in Iran, thus bringing that country back into the U.S. orbit. Most importantly, it undermined everything Moscow was trying to achieve in Iran: the softening of anti-­Soviet feeling in the country and solidifying the regime’s anti-­Americanness.21 Primakov offers yet another reason: fear that Iraq would drag the Soviet Union into the war: Although it never said so publicly, Moscow strongly disapproved of the Iraqi invasion of Iran, but not because the attack was unexpected, as the Soviets had indeed considered an invasion to be an imminent possibility. Rather, Iraq’s unwillingness to consult the Kremlin was seen as an attempt by Saddam to drag the Soviet Union into his military adventure, on the assumption that Moscow would automatically support whatever he did. The Soviet Union had no intention of doing that.22 It seems unlikely that ‘dragging in the Soviet Union’ was ever Saddam Hussein’s intent, but considering that the war broke out not long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (the prelude to which had been repeated requests by the Afghan leadership for the Soviet Union to help fight the growing insurgency against their rule) it is not impossible that at least some Soviet officials really did think that way. In Moscow, a special commission of the Politburo was charged with preparing decisions on Iran. The commission, not coincidentally, consisted of

236   A. Kalinovsky the same people who had formed the ‘Afghanistan commission’: Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief; Boris Ponomarev, the head of the International Department; and Dmitriy Ustinov, the Minister of Defense. (If Leonid Shebarshin’s account is to be believed, Andrei Gromyko was excluded). The chairman was Leonid Brezhnev.23 According to Russian sources (which for the moment are impossible to confirm), the debate within the Soviet leadership went something like this: The International Department took the most pro-­Iranian position. At the Politburo meeting convened to discuss the developing situation, Ponomarev argued that the Iranian revolution was in Soviet interests and that it was necessary to restrain Saddam, perhaps by sending him a strong warning.24 The Ministry of Defense wanted to continue supporting Iraq, arguing that to cease support now would push Iraq towards the West. Both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the KGB thought that a victory by either side would be detrimental to Soviet interests. An Iraqi victory could push Iran toward the West, while an Iraqi defeat would mean the defeat of a Soviet ally armed with Soviet arms and commanded by officers trained in the Soviet Union. In other words, it would be another confidence-­shattering moment like the 1967 war. Nor was an overly confident Iran in Soviet interests.25 The official Soviet policy toward the Iran–Iraq war was neutrality, calling on the two sides to stop fighting. At the end of October, a letter, drafted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and KGB, and bearing Brezhnev’s signature, was sent to Saddam. The letter explained that the war was just playing into the hands of the ‘western powers’ and the USA. The West, the letter said, ‘is aiming to force Iran to abandon its sharp anti-­imperialist positions, to make it more pliable, using the blood and hands of the Iraqis. But pliable not in the sense of satisfying the demands of Iraq – this interests them least of all’. The United States, it went on, hopes that Iran will be forced to turn to it for arms and for spare parts. Should not Iraq, therefore, act as quickly as possible to undermine the plans of the USA?26 The sources differ slightly on what happened next. At the time, the Iranian press claimed that the Soviet Union made an offer of ‘long-­term’ assistance to Iran, a claim which was then denied by Moscow.27 Some Russian sources have it that the Russians themselves approached Iran offering to sell arms not long after the outbreak of the war, but were rejected.28 According to former KGB officer and defector Vladimir Kuzichkin, however, it was Iranian officials who repeatedly asked for permission to buy arms, but the Soviet Union turned them down as part of its policy of supporting neither side. It was only in May 1982 that Iranian officials were allowed to travel to the USSR to look at arms, but they were then told that their needs could not be met until the end of 1983.29 In fact, by the end of 1982 the Soviet Union had begun pulling away from Iran. Western observers noted that Soviet assessments of the revolution and its leaders had undergone some important changes. Early in 1982, R.  A. Ulyanovsky, deputy head of the International Department,

The Soviet Union and the Iran–Iraq War   237 published an article in Kommunist that echoed the earlier positive assessments of the revolution, but in July he published another article that was overwhelmingly critical. Although Soviet writers still stuck with the principle that Islam could play a positive role in mobilizing the masses for ‘anti-­ imperialist revolutions’, they once again began to highlight its negative effects. Primakov, for example, now noted that Islam could distort the class struggle and lead it along lines that were ‘distinctive, unfamiliar, and in isolated cases deformed . . .’.30 At the same time, Iran was not reciprocating the Soviet Union’s overtures of the past several years. Khomeini continued to lump the Soviet Union and United States together as superpowers that only dealt with Iran to support their own interests, and in addition criticized the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan, for its relationship with Iraq, and for the treatment of Muslims within the Soviet Union. According to the KGB defector Kuzichkin, the slogan ‘death to the Soviet Union’ could be heard as often as ‘death to Israel’ or ‘death to America’. The Iranian authorities also encouraged protests by Afghan refugees outside the Soviet embassy in Tehran.31 Soviet commentators such as Ulyanovsky retorted, in late 1982 and 1983, that ignoring what the Soviet Union had done to support the cause of anti-­imperialism was beneficial to the imperialists themselves. Finally, the crackdown on the Tudeh party in 1982 (and the expulsion of eighteen diplomats for espionage that May) probably signaled that Tehran was preparing to assume a stricter line against the Soviet Union. Although Soviet criticism of the crackdown was relatively muted, in light of the general deterioration of relations by the end of 1982 it could only have confirmed to Soviet leaders that the attempt to engage Iran had largely failed.32 It is also crucial to remember that although Moscow stopped selling arms to Iraq after the war broke out, Soviet–Iraqi military cooperation did not collapse. There were 1,200 Soviet military advisors and military specialists in the country. Although the Politburo had all but decided to pull them out, it ultimately relented. According to advisor General Anatolii Mokrous, he was able to convince Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov that the specialists should stay, because otherwise ‘we would stop receiving orders from the Iraqis even for spare parts. And in that period Iraq gave us 65 percent of profit in convertible currency for the export of VVT (arms and military technology).’ Although they were forbidden from taking part in any fighting, the work of the specialists and trainers generally continued as before, though their families were evacuated.33 This was not of minor significance. If the Soviets had really pulled out their specialists, the Iraqi Army would have gradually lost some of the advantage it had as a professional, heavily mechanized army. It is unlikely that the economic argument cited by Mokrous was the primary reason that the Soviet Politburo decided to leave the advisers in place – rather, it was the bigger worry about what defeat for Iraq would do to Soviet military prestige and its overall interests in the region.

238   A. Kalinovsky What is not obviously clear is how Soviet leaders viewed Saddam’s emerging relationship with the United States and whether it had any direct effect on their decision to start supplying arms again. At the end of a long meeting in March 1981, Aziz told Primakov, after criticizing Moscow’s attitude towards Saddam: ‘We have settled the question of sourcing arms for Iraq. But the time has come when we need an answer to another question: will the limited [arms] supplies from the Soviet Union supplement those from our other source or the other way around?’34 If Iraq’s dealing with the United States (which Primakov insists the Iraqis never kept the Soviets informed of ) was unwelcome, then certainly Iraq becoming primarily supplied by the USA would have been completely unacceptable to the Soviets. Soviet specialists stayed behind in Iran as well, but they were small in number to begin with, and in any case the Iranian army’s main supplier before the revolution had been the United States.35 Moscow soon enough decided to move even more decisively to support Baghdad. At the end of 1982, the Soviet Union reached an agreement to sell arms to Iraq. Still, even though Moscow was not remaining strictly neutral, it clearly continued to believe that an overwhelming victory by either side was not in its interest. After all, the Soviet Union and Iran shared a long border, and Moscow also had to worry about Iran causing additional trouble in Afghanistan. At the same time, Moscow had reached an understanding that it was not going to push Iran to be more anti-­American than it already was, and it was unlikely to become more pro-­Soviet in the near future.36 In addition, as a CIA intelligence estimate noted, there was the question of Syria, a Soviet ally that was growing closer to Iran but had an antagonistic relationship with Saddam Hussein.37

The Iran–Iraq War in the Gorbachev years If the context for looking at Soviet policy towards the Iran–Iraq war in its first years is Soviet interest in the mobilizational and anti-­imperialist power of Islam, ambivalence towards Saddam Hussein, and the war in Afghanistan, then that of the Gorbachev years is his attempt to re-­define Moscow’s relationship with the Third World. As Svetlana Savranskaya has shown, this took place in two phases. The first, lasting from 1985 to 1987, was a gradual attempt at reform and deideologization, intended to strengthen Moscow’s positions in the Third World, and especially to help resurrect relationships with important regional powers, such as Iran and Egypt. The second saw an attempt at a more substantial departure from Moscow’s previous policy, and increasingly saw Moscow’s Third World interests subordinated to the goal of improving relations with the West.38 Again, Moscow’s actual policy largely continued according to the momentum that was already in place before Gorbachev became General Secretary. Soviet advisors continued to work in Iraq, for example, but were pulled out of Iran. The Soviet press seemed to tilt in Iraq’s favor, and

The Soviet Union and the Iran–Iraq War   239 Soviet calls for a ceasefire often implicitly criticized Iran. In December 1985, Saddam Hussein visited Moscow, his first visit since 1975.39 But Moscow also started to look for ways to reach out to Iran, and from 1986 was arguably shifting away from Baghdad and towards Tehran. Gorbachev’s advisors identified Iran as being one of the important countries that Moscow should prioritize, others including India, Argentina, and even Saudi Arabia. Iran, of course, had a particular significance, and this related to the war in Afghanistan. Iran hosted millions of refugees and provided support to some of the Shi’ite mujahideen groups fighting the Afghan government and the Soviet forces. Although several Soviet trade vessels had fallen victim to the Iranian navy’s efforts in the ‘Tanker War’ in this period, and thus had to be escorted by the Soviet Navy, Soviet contacts with Iran continued to grow.40 Moscow also became an active participant in United Nations efforts to end the war. This too reflected Gorbachev’s new direction in foreign policy. From 1987 onwards Gorbachev was increasingly interested in the idea of ‘national reconciliation’ and ‘conflict resolution’ for the various Third World conflicts in which the Soviet Union was in one way or another involved. As Gorbachev developed his ideas about conflict resolution, he also turned increasingly to the UN as a key enabler of his policy. This was particularly true in the case of Afghanistan, but also with regard to the Iran–Iraq war, where the Soviet Union not only supported the Secretary General’s initiatives, but also pushed for a UN naval force to protect shipping in the Gulf, an idea that met with some reservations, not least from UN officials.41 But it is evident also when reviewing Security Council discussions on the Iran–Iraq war of that period. At a meeting in September 1987 on Resolution 598, the Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnaze echoed the U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz’s views, saying that he ‘agreed with Mr. Shultz that it was very important to preserve the unity of the Council, the good atmosphere of working together and the cohesion which was present during the process of preparation of Resolution 598. If they could not do that now, the prestige of the Organization would be at stake. They face a test, and a difficult one.’42 It should be noted that the UN Security Council session took place not long after a ‘breakthrough’ meeting between Shultz and Shevardnadze, where the former for the first time believed that the Soviets were serious about withdrawing from Afghanistan. ‘Hearing Mr. Shultz and Mr. Shevardnadze speak with more or less the same voice concerning an area where they so recently had been hostile rivals’, wrote UN Secretary General Pérez de Cuéllar, ‘made me realize how profound was the change taking place in the relationship between the American and Soviet governments.’43 Shevardnadze and Shultz would continue to discuss the war together, then presenting proposals worked out jointly to the Secretary General.44 Gorbachev was also increasingly interested in the linkages between various problems confronting the Soviet Union. Preparing for his meeting

240   A. Kalinovsky with Reagan in May 1988, he planned to offer him a trade: Soviet aid on the Iran–Iraq conflict in return for U.S. help on Afghanistan: You’ve asked us to cooperate on Iran, we are asking you to cooperate on Afghanistan. . . . [If] we speak of a ‘package’, then maybe we can do this: we prepare for a second Security Council resolution and at the same time a resolution to replace the U.S. fleet with a UN one in the Gulf, and plug in the military staff committee of the Security Council. But here we add Afghanistan. We tie the two problems together: here yours and our interests intersect. This way we will quiet the whole region.45 Gorbachev’s proposed ‘trade’ did not get very far. Soviet troops were already on their way out of Afghanistan, and American officials were convinced that they were not going to turn around. But the fact that Gorbachev was offering such a trade in the first place reflects how far Soviet–Iranian contacts had come between 1986 and 1988. With the war over, however, Moscow began to see some of the fruits of its earlier efforts to reach out to Tehran. Starting from 1988 a number of increasingly high-­level visits took place, culminating in Shevardnadze’s meeting with Khomeini in Tehran in February 1989 and Gorbachev’s meetings with Ali Akbar Velayati and Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani in June of that year. Rasfanjani told Gorbachev that Iran was looking to the Soviets for help in building nuclear reactors, citing the fact that Western companies had cancelled their contracts. Gorbachev replied: ‘khorosho’ (‘good’).46 The relationship with Iraq, however, did not recover. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, at least, had staked their policy on improvement of relations with the United States and with Iran. When Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait in 1990, Primakov tried to mediate and forestall an American-­led response, a mission for which he received only a reluctant approval from Gorbachev, over the opposition of Shevardnadze.47

Conclusion The above is a sketch of Soviet policy, intended to lay the foundation for some further research. Nevertheless, it is useful to once again point to some of the continuities in Soviet policy from the late Brezhnev period to the Gorbachev era. The realization that Soviet relations with the Third World needed to be ‘reformed’ was already there by the late 1970s, possibly well before the invasion of Afghanistan (at least for the mid-­level cadre in the ministries and the central committee). The Soviet Union could no longer simply offer support to countries that declared themselves socialist, while ignoring (or losing) the countries that really mattered. In his maneuvering between Iran and Iraq, Gorbachev initially followed the policy of his recent predecessors, though more energetically. As

The Soviet Union and the Iran–Iraq War   241 attractive as a more pro-­Soviet Iran might be, there were broader geostrategic considerations. Iraq was also an important country, after all, and it was fighting primarily with Soviet-­made weapons and many Soviet-­trained officers. Iraq’s defeat could be as disastrous as the Arab defeat in 1967 for Soviet military prestige. It was only the later Gorbachev – the one after 1988 – who truly parted with previous ways of thinking by supporting the United States against Saddam. But in doing so, he (and his foreign minister) had also parted with most of their colleagues in the Soviet foreign policy apparatus.

Notes   1 Most of the material declassified in the 1990s from the Russian State Archive for Contemporary History, for example, concerns Soviet relations with the Tudeh party and is not very revealing, while the materials in the Gorbachev Foundation relate mostly to the Soviet–Iranian relationship at the end of the war and the Persian Gulf crisis.   2 K. Dawisha and H. C. d’Encause, ‘Islam in the Soviet Union: A Double Edged Sword?’ in A. Dawisha (ed.), Islam in Foreign Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 165–8.   3 Quoted in M. B. Olcott, ‘Soviet Islam and World Revolution’, World Politics, Vol. 34, No. 4, July 1982, p. 490.   4 O. Grinevsky, Tainy Sovetskoi Diplomatii, Moscow: Vagrius, 2000, p. 209.   5 Analytical report prepared by the Institute of Oriental Studies for Council of Religious Affars Chairman Kuroedov, GARF F. 6991, op. 6, p. 2761.   6 M. B. Olcott, pp. 491–2.   7 Quoted in A. Z. Rubinstein, ‘The Soviet Union and Iran Under Khomeini’, International Affairs, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Autumn, 1981), p. 600.   8 L. Shebarshin, remarks in O. A. Westad and D. A. Welch (eds.), The Intervention in Afghanistan and the Fall of Détente, Lysebu Oral History Conference, 1995, p. 40.   9 E. Primakov, Konfidentsial’no: Blizhnii Vostok na stsene i za kulisami, Moscow: Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 2006, pp. 307–8. 10 See Tareq Y. Ismael and Andrej Kreutz, ‘Russian–Iraqi Relations: A Historical and Political Analysis’, Arab Studies Quarterly, Fall 2001. 11 O. Gordievsky and C. Andrew, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, New York: HarperCollins, 1990, p. 458. 12 E. Primakov, Blizhnii Vostok, pp. 310–11. 13 A. Okorokov, Sekretnie voiny Sovetskogo Soiuza, Moscow: EKSMO, 2008, p. 330; O. Grinevsky, pp. 191–2. 14 A. Okorokov, pp. 307–8. 15 While the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan took place in the shadow of the Iranian revolution, concerns that the United States would try to compensate for its loss of Iran by taking advantage of the chaos in Afghanistan had played a key role in its original decision to intervene. See A. Kalinovsky, ‘Soviet Decision­making during the War in Afghanistan, from Intervention to Withdrawal’ Journal of Cold War Studies, November 2009. 16 Politburo Protocol 191 April 5, 1980 RGANI, Fund 89, Perechen 34, Doc 7. 17 Author’s interview with Leonid Shebarshin, Moscow, 17 September 2007. 18 E. Primakov, Blizhnii Vostok, pp. 312–13. 19 Ibid., p. 311.

242   A. Kalinovsky 20 O. Grinevsky, p. 194. 21 A. Okorokov, p. 355. 22 E. Primakov, Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present, New York: Basic Books, 2009, pp. 309–10. 23 L. Shebarshin, Ruka Moskvy, Moscow: TSentr-­100, 1992, p. 124. 24 O. Grinevsky, p. 195. 25 A. Okorokov, p. 355. 26 O. Grinevsky, p. 197. 27 O. Smolansky and B. M. Smolansky, The USSR and Iraq: The Soviet Quest for Influence, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, p.  232; F. Lecours, ‘L’URSS face a la guerre du gole, une strategi singuliere’, Etudes Internationales, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1986, pp. 788–9. 28 A. Okorokov, p. 355; E. Primakov, Russia and the Arabs, p. 309. 29 V. Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB: My Life in Soviet Espionage, New York: Ballantine Books, 1992, pp. 343–6. 30 M. Atkin, ‘Moscow’s Disenchantment with Iran’, Survey, Vol. 27, Autumn/ Winter, 1983, pp. 248–50. 31 V. Kuzichkin, pp. 350–2. 32 M. Atkin, pp. 250–2. 33 Krasnaia Zvezda, ‘Fighting Babylon’, 24 May 2003. 34 E. Primakov, Russia and the Arabs, pp. 312–13. 35 Krasnaia Zvezda, ‘Fighting Babylon’. 36 Author’s interview with Leonid Shebarshin. 37 Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Prospects for Iraq; Special National Intelligence Estimate’, SNIE 36.2-83, 19 July 1983, available at www.foia.cia.gov/docs/ DOC_0001220920/DOC_0001220920.pdf (accessed 17 August 2012). 38 S. Savranskaya, ‘Gorbachev and the Third World’, in A. Kalinovsky and S. Radchenko (eds.), The End of the Cold War and the Third World, London: Routledge, 2010. 39 Smolansky and Smolanksy, pp. 246–7; and T. Nizameddin, Russia and the Middle East: Towards a New Foreign Policy, New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 58–60. 40 On the Soviet Navy in the Gulf, see Krasnaia Zvezda, ‘Fighting Babylon’. 41 See ‘Note for the Secretary-­General – Iran/Iraq’, 29 September 1987, Pérez de Cuéllar Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, Box 6, Folder 70. On Soviet participation in the UN effort in this period, see A. Belonogov, Na Diplomaticheskoi avantsene: zapiski postoiannogo predstavitelia SSSR pri OON, Moscow: MGIMO, 2009. 42 ‘Notes of the Secretary-­General’s working lunch . . .’ 25 September, 1987, Pérez de Cuéllar papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, Box 6, Folder 70. 43 J. Pérez de Cuéllar, Pilgrimage for Peace: A Secretary General’s Memoir, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, p. 175. 44 See ‘Note on Secretary General’s Meeting with US Chargé d’affaires’, 4 March 1988, Pérez de Cuéllar Papers, Box 6, Folder 73. 45 Plan of talks between M.S Gorbachev and the President of the USA, May 1988 (Dictated by Gorbachev to an assistant), Gorbachev Foundation Archives Document 872. 46 See S. Savranskaya; and E. Shevardnadze, Kogda Rukhnul Zheleznii Zanaves, Moscow: Evropa, 2009, pp. 102–9. 47 Ibid., pp. 109–11; E. Primakov, Blizhnii Vostok, pp. 318–21.

Index

Afghanistan 150, 152, 161, 170–1, 174, 180, 183, 230–2, 234–40 al-Bakr, Ahmed Hassan 151, 184, 213, 233 Arif, Abdul Rahman 213 Assad, Hafez 64, 180 Aziz, Tariq 36, 100, 155, 185–6, 221, 235, 238 Ba’ath Party of Iraq 9, 15–21, 23, 26, 28, 33–6, 39, 45, 94–5, 99, 103–4, 120, 135, 139, 162, 205, 213, 233 Bahrain 63, 109, 111–13, 115, 118, 120, 160, 166, 179, 191 Bani-Sadr, Abolhassan 6, 127, 150–1, 217, 221–2 Barzani, Mulla Mustafa 157–8 Basra 21, 23, 41, 43–4, 46–9, 68–9, 132, 159 Bazargan, Mehdi 152–5, 160–1, 171, 181, 203–4 Begin, Menachem 166, 180 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 6, 151–3, 160–1, 165–9, 172, 180–1, 183, 185, 198, 203–4 Carter, Jimmy 6, 149–50, 119, 121, 152, 154, 162, 165–6, 168–9, 171–3, 178, 180–3, 185, 191, 204, 234 Casey, William 186 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 57, 86, 137, 151, 154–5, 157–60, 162–4, 166, 169, 180–1, 184, 186, 189, 201, 202–4, 206, 238 China 68, 72, 96, 97, 112 Cold War 1, 57–8, 150, 179, 205 de Cuéllar, Pérez 67, 239 Egypt 37, 113, 161, 169, 178, 180, 184, 186, 205, 228, 230–1, 238

d’Estaing, Valéry Giscard 214, 216, 217 Evren, Kenan 127, 129, 131, 139 Fao Peninsula 6, 29, 33, 44–5, 49, 65, 71–2, 98, 140 France 1, 9, 63, 97, 99, 114, 117, 171, 187, 213, 214, 215, 216–17, 217–18, 219–23, 224–5, 227, 233; hostage crisis 213, 221, 223–4, 225, 226–7 Germany (West) 97, 99, 102, 182, 187, 213 Ghorbanifar, Manucher 194, 207 Gorbachev, Mikhail 230, 238–9, 240–1 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC or Gulf States) 1, 5, 8–9, 48, 58, 67, 97–9, 102, 109–21, 166, 172, 179, 181 Gulf War (1990–1) 15, 17, 24, 27–8, 97, 109, 118, 120 Hizballah 178, 187, 188, 194, 220–1 human-wave (offensive) 33, 40–1, 43, 37, 201 Hussein bin Talal, King of Jordan 161, 167, 195 Hussein, Saddam 2, 4–8, 11, 15–32, 33–50, 56–7, 59, 62, 64–9, 81, 85, 94, 96, 112, 127, 134, 136, 139, 150–2, 155, 158, 159, 160–1, 163–4, 166–7, 169, 171, 178, 180–2, 184–6, 189, 191–5, 200–1, 204, 204–5, 207–9, 213–15, 217, 219, 230, 233–6, 238, 240–1 Iran 1–10, 15, 16, 18–27, 29–30, 33–50, 56–73, 77–90, 92, 95, 97–101, 104, 109–11, 114–21, 125–41, 149–72, 178–92, 196–7, 199–209, 213, 215–26, 230–41; Al-Quds Force 30; Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) 63, 68, 69, 70, 201; Pasdaran 38, 41, 44, 47, 48, 225, 229

244   Index Iraq 1–10, 15–31, 33–50, 56–73, 77–90, 92–104, 109–11, 113–21, 125–41, 149–72, 178–81, 183–7, 189–92, 196–7, 200–9, 213–23, 225, 227, 230, 233–41; High Command 35, 43–4, 46, 69; Republican Guard 24, 27, 29, 30, 43, 47, 48, 49, 93; Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) 21, 24 Islamic Jihad (terrorist group) 220–1 Israel 1, 5, 6, 35–6, 37, 57, 64, 72, 113, 128, 150, 156, 161, 165, 166, 169, 170, 178, 180, 184–6, 188–91, 207, 213, 215, 218, 228, 231, 232 Italy 97, 102, 117, 143, 228, 233 Jordan 151, 161, 167, 169, 172, 205 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 2, 3, 5, 27, 35–9, 43, 47–9, 58–64, 66, 71, 113, 136, 138, 139, 153, 155, 157–8, 160–1, 163, 167, 171, 180–2, 188–90, 201, 204, 206, 208–9, 216–18, 232, 234, 237, 240 Korea (North) 48, 72, 167, 170 Kurds 1, 6, 8, 9, 19, 20, 39, 48, 49, 56, 58–9, 65, 66, 71, 125–6, 132–5, 137, 138, 140–1, 155–60, 162, 178, 205, 221, 233; Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) 20, 133–5, 138, 158; Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) 125–6, 133–5, 138, 139, 140, 141 Kuwait 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 17, 19, 20–5, 27, 50, 55, 64–8, 70, 72, 92–3, 97–103, 109, 111, 113–20, 159, 162–3, 166, 178, 184, 186, 187, 190, 191, 208, 221, 240 Lebanon 158, 178, 187, 188, 190, 206, 218–19, 221–5, 227 Libya 48, 57, 62, 64, 67, 72, 137, 167, 170, 184 Mitterrand, François 217, 220–1, 223, 227 Naccache, Anis 217, 221–4 Newsom, David 154, 161 Oman 63, 109, 112, 116–17, 166, 176, 191 Özal, Turgut 129, 130, 131, 139, 140 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza (the Shah) 35–6, 58–62, 79, 111, 133, 154, 156,

157, 158, 159, 161, 164, 179–81, 183–4, 189, 191, 203–4, 208, 210, 216–17, 232, 233 Pakistan 72, 136, 232 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) 158, 218, 232 Primakov, Evgeny 232–5, 237–8, 240–1 Qasim, Abdel Karim 111 Qatar 63, 97, 109, 113–16, 120, 121, 181 Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi 43, 62, 67, 69–70, 127, 130, 135, 138–9, 188–90, 199, 201, 209 Rajavi, Masood 218, 221, 222 Reagan, Ronald 3, 71, 149, 150, 152, 178, 179, 171, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186–7, 188, 189, 190, 191, 203, 204, 206–7, 240 Rumsfeld, Donald 99, 185–6 Sadat, Anwar 180, 184, 231–3, 235 Saudi Arabia 3, 25, 48, 65, 67, 68, 96–100, 102, 109–15, 118–19, 121, 127, 161, 165, 168–9, 171–2, 179, 181, 183, 185, 186, 191, 202, 204, 205, 239 Shevardnadze, Eduard 239–40 Shultz, George 188, 206, 208, 239 Soviet Union 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 21, 34–5, 42, 57–9, 64, 67–8, 71–2, 90, 97, 99, 117, 128, 143, 150, 152–3, 155–6, 159–61, 165, 167–72, 179–81, 183, 198, 205, 213, 215–17, 230–41 Stalin, Joseph 34–5 Strait of Hormuz 43, 63–4, 68–9, 72, 85, 118, 225–6, 234 Syria 18, 31, 48, 57, 62, 64, 67, 68, 72, 95, 116, 126, 133–4, 141, 156, 167, 170, 172, 180, 184, 194, 219–21, 238 Talabani, Jalal 157 Turkey 1, 5, 9, 125–41, 156, 158, 220 · Türkmen, Ilter 130, 133 Ulusu, Bülent 126, 128, 130 United Arab Emirates 109, 112–17, 120–1, 159, 166, 175, 234 United Kingdom 22, 36, 46, 69, 73, 78, 99, 101, 110–12, 117–18, 121, 179, 187, 191, 213, 216 United Nations 5, 57, 63–6, 70, 77, 88, 112, 116, 140, 167, 185, 200, 202, 208, 209, 230, 239–40

Index   245 United States 1, 3–4, 6–7, 17, 24–7, 29, 45, 49, 57–8, 60–1, 68, 70–2, 77, 85, 97, 99, 101–3, 114, 117–21, 137, 149–72, 178–92, 196, 198, 201–9, 213, 215–16, 218, 230–2, 235–41, 240; hostage crisis (1979–80) 61, 149–52, 155, 159, 160–9, 171–2, 178, 181–3,

185, 199, 204; hostage crisis (1983–9) 181, 187–90, 206–7 Vance, Cyrus 158, 161, 198 Velayati, Ali Akbar 129, 130, 133, 135, 240 Yemen 57, 67, 112, 120