The Iran-Iraq War

Pierre Razoux, Nicholas Elliott

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674915718
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

From 1980 to 1988, Iran and Iraq fought the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. The tragedies included the slaughter of child soldiers, the use of chemical weapons, the striking of civilian shipping in the Gulf, and the destruction of cities. The Iran-Iraq War offers an unflinching look at a conflict seared into the region's collective memory but little understood in the West. Pierre Razoux shows why this war remains central to understanding Middle Eastern geopolitics, from the deep-rooted distrust between Sunni and Shia Muslims, to Iran's obsession with nuclear power, to the continuing struggles in Iraq. He provides invaluable keys to decipher Iran's behavior and internal struggle today.Razoux's account is based on unpublished military archives, oral histories, and interviews, as well as audio recordings seized by the U.S. Army detailing Saddam Hussein's debates with his generals. Tracing the war's shifting strategies and political dynamics—military operations, the jockeying of opposition forces within each regime, the impact on oil production so essential to both countries—Razoux also looks at the international picture. From the United States and Soviet Union to Israel, Europe, China, and the Arab powers, many nations meddled in this conflict, supporting one side or the other and sometimes switching allegiances. The Iran-Iraq War answers questions that have puzzled historians. Why did Saddam embark on this expensive, ultimately fruitless conflict? Why did the war last eight years when it could have ended in months? Who, if anyone, was the true winner when so much was lost?

[Chapter 1]

Escalation

After many years of apparent calm, relations between Iran and Iraq suddenly took a turn for the worse during the winter of 1979–1980. Violent demonstrations in front of the Iraqi embassy in Tehran called for the removal of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. Iraqi flags and effigies of the Iraqi president were burned before representatives of the international press. In the border province of Khuzestan (literally, “the land of towers”), long claimed by Baghdad and primarily populated by Arabic speakers, the Iraqi consulate in Khorramshahr was pillaged and its consul expelled. Numerous schools teaching Arabic were vandalized and their teachers assaulted. Alleging that mujahidin hostile to the Islamic Revolution were present in Iraq, the Iranian regime sent its air force into Iraqi air space and simulated attacks on Iraqi barracks. Baghdad retaliated by bombing several border villages, ordering the closing of the Iranian consulates in Basra and Karbala, and reaffirming its rights over the Shatt al-Arab River, which flows 155 miles (250 kilometers) from the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates to its mouth in the Persian Gulf. Its last sixty-two miles (one hundred kilometers) form the border between Iraq and Iran. With a width varying from 1,300 to 4,920 feet (400 to 1,500 meters), the river feeds a vast marsh-covered delta on the banks of which Iraq and Iran built two of the largest oil refineries in the world: Basra and Abadan.

The Media War

On February 8, 1980, Saddam Hussein appeared on television wearing his traditional olive green uniform to call on the solidarity of all Arab nations to help him oppose Iranian provocations by any means required. Everyone in the Arab world understood that the Iraqi president now only had one goal in mind: to block Iran’s maneuvers, if necessary by force.

In Iran, the repression initiated by the revolutionaries who had overthrown the Shah in February 1979 continued savagely and relentlessly. Fierce battles raged between guardians of the Revolution and the Shah’s former supporters. The situation remained chaotic. Shapour Bakhtiar, the imperial regime’s last prime minister, now exiled in France, added fuel to the fire by emphatically declaring that, “Khomeini will soon be done with, it will last seven or eight months at most! Less than a year in any case. That is certain.”¹ In Baghdad, these statements were taken as proof that the Iranian army was weakening. Members of the Iranian opposition who had sought shelter in Baghdad reinforced this impression by describing the apocalyptic situation in their homeland. They were echoed by Iraqi intelligence reports.² The émigrés attempted to convince the Ba’athist regime to help them overthrow the provisional government, emphasizing the prevailing anarchy, the administration’s collapse, and the purges and desertions that had rendered the army inoperative. The Iraqi authorities prudently gave the opposition lip service, doubting their actual ability to topple the revolutionary regime. The Iraqis preferred to act surreptitiously by arming the independence movements trying to emancipate themselves from central Iranian power in Kurdistan, Baluchistan, or oil-rich Khuzestan Province.

Meanwhile, verbal jousting between Tehran and Baghdad escalated. On March 15, 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini called on Iraqi public opinion: “O Iraqi people, beware your leaders and make revolution until victory.” Six days later, his son Ahmad made an even more threatening declaration: “We must deploy all the necessary efforts in order to export the revolution to other countries and reject the idea of containing it within our borders.”³ For its part, the Iraqi government demanded the repeal of the Algiers Accord of March 6, 1975, which had allowed Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran to announce to the world press that they had made an agreement to put an end to their divergences. By its terms, the two parties had accepted to definitively demarcate their terrestrial and fluvial borders, which had been contested for centuries.⁴ The river border would now run through the middle of the Shatt al-Arab rather than along the Persian bank that had served as its past demarcation.

On April 1, 1980, Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein’s closest collaborators and a figurehead of the Iraqi Christian community, was attacked while giving a speech at Baghdad University. A grenade exploded several feet (a few meters) from Aziz, lightly injuring him. A dozen students were killed. A Shiite activist was immediately arrested. The Iraqi secret service accused the activist of being an undercover agent for the Iranian SAVAMA, the new secret service agency that had replaced the fearsome SAVAK. The next day, the Iraqi president made a sensational announcement declaring that the blood spilled would not be forgotten. Three days later, another bombing rocked the capital during the funeral for the first assault’s victims: a homemade bomb was thrown from an Iranian school along the funeral cortege’s path, killing and wounding dozens of people. The Iraqi regime protested vehemently, blaming Tehran. Iranian president Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr promptly responded, accusing Baghdad of gross provocation and denouncing Ba’athist ideology as “no more than an amalgamation of Nazi, Fascist, and Marxist doctrines.”⁵

The situation was becoming increasingly heated. In Tehran, Ayatollah Beheshti told the international press that, “Saddam, the butcher of Baghdad, the accomplice of Menachem Begin, is just a puppet in the hands of the United States.”⁶ This provocation hit the bull’s-eye: the Iraqi dictator was driven by a pathological hatred of Jews and saw himself as a leader in the fight against Israel. He could not tolerate for his credentials in this area to be called into question. Since the ayatollahs seemed determined to unearth the hatchet, they would get as good as they gave. Saddam Hussein addressed an extremely firm warning to Ayatollah Khomeini and called upon the United Nations Security Council, demanding a vote for a resolution condemning Iran’s illegal occupation of the small Emirati islands Tomb and Abu Musa (located near the Strait of Hormuz). To make his resolve clear to Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam ordered the immediate execution of Ayatollah Mohammad al-Sadr, who had been the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution’s companion in exile.⁷ He also ordered the expulsion to Iran of 40,000 Iraqis of Iranian origin. Khomeini reacted by openly calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and viciously criticizing the “monstrous and perverted regime of Iraq’s Ba’ath Party, a veritable Little Satan which has put itself at the service of the Great Satan [the United States].” No longer hiding his intentions, he went so far as to declare: “We want to found an Islamic State gathering the Arab, the Persian, the Turk, and the other nationalities under the banner of Islam.”⁸ Upon hearing this, the Gulf monarchies braced for war, knowing that they would have to unite one way or another, but also that they would be forced to support Saddam’s regime to contain Iranian Shiite expansionism.

Occasional clashes continued on the field. In mid-April, an Iranian patrol machine-gunned a border post in retaliation for an Iraqi helicopter attack on an Iranian position. Psychological warfare intensified. On April 27, 1980, Radio Tehran announced the assassination of Saddam Hussein, spreading disinformation to destabilize the Iraqi regime. Three days later, the Iranian embassy in London was attacked by a commando claiming to belong to the previously unknown Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan. The British Special Air Service was called to the rescue and intervened five days later to free the Iranian diplomats held hostage.

To make the situation even more complicated, Iran granted asylum to the Barzani brothers, two leaders of the historic Kurdish rebellion that had raged in northern Iraq from 1974 to 1975. The brothers Idris and Masoud Barzani took the opportunity to resurrect their networks of peshmergas (literally, “freedom fighters”). The Iraqi government, seeking to avoid the resumption of war on the Kurdish front, multiplied concessions to the Barzanis’ major rival, Jalal Talabani, while launching a series of deadly raids against the peshmergas rallied behind the Barzani brothers. Jalal Talabani seized the chance to establish his control over the cities of Iraqi Kurdistan, notably in the oil region of Kirkuk, leaving his rivals to control the mountainous border area. He negotiated an agreement with Saddam Hussein by which his partisans would stop militarily harassing the regime in exchange for greater regional autonomy. This suited the Iraqi president in that it divided the Kurdish guerillas and prevented a united front from forming against him.

Meanwhile, the situation in Iran remained as chaotic as ever. President Bani-Sadr intensified operations against the new regime’s opponents and kept the armed forces under close surveillance, fearing a coup d’état. His precautions were not in vain: on July 4, 1980, General Oveisi asserted that he could take control of Tehran by the end of the summer. On the night of July 9 to 10, a vast military plot was foiled a few hours before it was to be set in motion. The coup d’état had been orchestrated from Paris by General Oveisi and Shapour Bakhtiar and was to be triggered on the Nojeh air base near Hamadan by General Said Mehdiyoun and General Ayat Mohagheghi. The mutineers had chosen this base, home to several powerful Phantom fighter squadrons, due to its proximity to the Iranian capital. The plan was for some thirty heavily armed planes to set out at dawn and bomb Ayatollah Khomeini’s residence, the presidential palace, the seat of government, and several Revolutionary Guards barracks. Detachments of soldiers faithful to the Shah would then have been transported into the capital by helicopter to take control of the symbols of power, with reinforcement from several ground force battalions.

The revolutionary regime reacted fiercely. More than 600 commissioned and noncommissioned officers were arrested, including some fifty pilots. Most were executed following a summary trial supervised by the Revolutionary Guards, who had now surrounded the principal air bases. The air force, which already suffered from personnel purges,⁹ insufficient crew training, and a lack of spare parts, was now in complete disarray. Most fighter planes and helicopters were grounded for several weeks. As for General Oveisi and Shapour Bakhtiar, their active participation in the conspiracy signed their death warrant. The Iranian regime would mercilessly hunt them down over the course of the next several years.¹⁰

Did Saddam Hussein back the attempted coup d’état? There is no evidence to support such a theory. Admittedly, several Iraqi fighter planes crossed the Iranian border to attack a radar station located near the Nojeh air base at the exact moment when the coup was to be launched. Those who believe that the conspirators and the Iraqi regime were in collusion claim that this air attack would have served as a pretext for the Iranian Phantoms to take off and lull the suspicions of military personnel faithful to the revolutionary government. But in that case, why wasn’t the Iraqi army on alert? And why weren’t the Iranian mujahidin in exile in Iraq standing ready to cross the border and go reinforce the mutineers? It seems unlikely that Saddam Hussein played a major role in this plot, particularly since he hated Iranians and did not give their opponents much credit. There is every indication that he was playing a waiting game, though he was certainly aware that a significant attempt at overthrowing the Islamic regime was imminent, probably thanks to King Hussein of Jordan and King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, who had both been warned by the CIA, which was in turn discreetly supporting the military networks faithful to the Shah.

Saddam Chooses War

The conspiracy’s failure solidified Saddam’s convictions. First, the Iraqi president realized it was illusory to hope for a military coup d’état to wipe out the Islamic Revolution. He understood that despite the CIA’s active support, the Iranian opposition no longer stood a chance. The Kurds, the Azeri, and the Baloch were fighting for their autonomy, potentially their independence, but not to overthrow the regime in Tehran. Saddam also grasped that it would be a mistake to hope for military intervention from the United States or the Soviet Union, which had been mired in Afghanistan for the last ten months. And relying on the oil monarchies would be a joke. He therefore came to the conclusion that, short of being able to overthrow the Iranian regime, he needed to act quickly to durably weaken it. The two regimes were now on a collision course. Invective and provocation had gone too far to be forgiven. The Iraqi dictator was firmly convinced that Ayatollah Khomeini would no longer compromise and that he would stop at nothing to bring Saddam down. Saddam Hussein came to the logical conclusion that in order to preserve his power, he needed to preemptively attack Iran. He hoped this would weaken Khomeini and possibly precipitate his downfall. Most importantly, he would be able to reestablish Iraqi sovereignty over the entire Shatt al-Arab and erase the affront of the Algiers Accord, which had been a personal humiliation. All the better if he could take control of some bordering oil-rich Iranian territory while he was at it.

The timing seemed perfect, given that the Iranian army, in disarray following the Revolution and the Western embargo, was no more than a shadow of its former self.¹¹ What remained of the army was scattered across several fronts to battle Kurd, Azeri, Arab, and Baloch separatists with the assistance of the Revolutionary Guards. The Iraqi secret services’ reports also specified that the Iranian air force, once the Imperial Army’s spearhead, had been grounded since the failure of the Nojeh plot. The Iraqi dictator believed a quick war with Iran would allow him to occupy his soldiers and increase his prestige. He seemed all the more confident given that his nuclear program was moving in the right direction, while Iran’s had been called to an abrupt halt by the revolutionaries. According to his experts, the “Osirak” nuclear power station, built with France’s help at al-Tawita (on the banks of the Tigris, some twenty miles [thirty kilometers] southeast of Baghdad), would be operational within about fifteen months, allowing Iraq to upgrade its category and play with the big boys.

Saddam Hussein was also persuaded that by attacking Iran he would establish himself as the leader of the Arab world, thus marginalizing his greatest rival, the Syrian Hafez al-Assad. He was convinced that once faced with the fait accompli, the Gulf monarchies, notably Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, would have no choice but to support him and back him financially. According to him, the United States would hold back and simply wait and see what happened. Saddam believed the Europeans would follow him because they were worried about the risks of the Islamic Revolution spreading throughout the region. They also relied on selling him weapons. In fact, his only concern was with the Kremlin, whose reaction he had trouble predicting. His intuition told him that the Soviets, having lost all influence in Egypt, would respect the friendship and assistance agreement tying them to Iraq and would not risk losing a weighty ally in the Middle East.

In mid-July Saddam Hussein summoned his chiefs of staff to ask them to prepare to go to war with Iran, yet did not mention a date or a specific military objective. However, he gave his generals a single month to prepare the army and provide him with a coherent battle plan, ignoring the fact that such an enterprise generally requires considerably more time. Most of the generals took the news with worry and skepticism, but none had the courage to openly question the decision, not even Adnan Khairallah, who enjoyed significant prestige in the military institution as first cousin to the president and holder of the coveted position of minister of defense. All those involved knew that Saddam was impervious to advice that did not adhere to his ideas and that he ruthlessly eliminated anyone who stood in the way of his projects. Ra’ad Majid Rashid al-Hamdani, one of his officers, would later confess: “[Saddam] looked you straight in the eye, as if to control you. Not knowing what was on his mind was scary.… Saddam had a number of personality traits.… One moment he would be extremely affectionate, the next moment he would be extremely hostile and cruel.… One minute he could be overly generous, the next he could be extremely stingy.… He could take ideas from every one and create a new idea. At a political level, he was an excellent tactical player; however at the strategic level, 99 percent of his concepts were wrong. His problem was that he imposed tribal standards on the administration of a country.”¹² No one dared to expose himself to the dictator’s wrath by warning him that he was running the risk of straying into an uncontrollable venture.

Having muzzled his generals, Saddam could no longer count on them to tell him the truth and prevent him from making a mistake. For the army was not truly ready for war. Though its equipment was being modernized, it generally remained inferior to that of the Iranian army. Training left a lot to be desired. Logistics were not coordinated. Motivation remained weak. The Iraqi military would have been prepared to do battle to protect their country, to fight the Kurds, or to invade Kuwait, which they considered a part of Iraq, but attacking Iran was an entirely different proposition. The Iraqi military high command began to prepare for a large-scale military operation in utter secrecy, without the slightest enthusiasm. The generals all knew that their leader would not tolerate the slightest leak and that a dreadful fate awaited anyone responsible for the slightest indiscretion. A self-confident Saddam spoke to the press, praising “the Iranian peoples’ struggle against the ayato...