The Gulf War

Its Origins, History and Consequences

John Bulloch, Harvey Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138651234
• eBook ISBN: 9781317206286
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

After a million deaths and twice that number injured, after the destruction of much of the infrastructure of Iran and Iraq, disruption of trade throughout the Gulf and the involvement of the USA and USSR, was the Gulf War a pointless exercise, a futile conflict which achieved nothing and left the combatants at the end of it all back in exactly the same position from which they started in 1980? In this book, first published in 1989, the authors argue that the lack of territorial gain was irrelevant: the real advantages won by each side were far more important, intangible though they were. For Iran, the channelling of the energies of her people away from domestic concerns meant the continuation of the Islamic revolution and ensured the stability of the mullahs. In Iraq, the war propped up the increasingly shaky regime of Saddam Hussein. The outside world, especially the superpowers, was terrified of the spread of Muslim fundamentalism, so made no effort to prevent Iraq from trying to halt this spread. But Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the oil states also had vested interests in promoting the continuation of the war.

1
Khomeini's poisoned chalice

When the end came, the old man could not bring himself to give the news in person. He was in his private mosque at his house in Jamaran performing the asr prayers as an announcer at the Tehran studios of the Voice of the Islamic Republic called on the Iranian nation and the Muslims of the world to stand by for an important message from Ayatollah al-Ozma Sayyed Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, Imam of the Ummah, the architect of Islamic Iran, the mullah who had defeated the Shah, the implacable commander who had decreed that there could be no peace until the forces of anti-Islamic Iraq were defeated. It was 2 p.m. on 20 July 1988, and though the message was a confirmation of what the world had learnt twentyfour hours earlier, it still came as a shock to the Iranian people, for without Khomeini's imprimatur, they could hardly believe the wild propaganda of foreign radio stations - that after almost eight years the war against Iraq was over. Even now, it was an announcer who was reading the text of the Imam's message, yet the words rang true, the style was his. 'Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom,' the announcer intoned. 'Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light. Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice .... '

In Baghdad there was dancing in the streets; in Tehran, a mournful resignation among a population taught to expect war until victory. And fighting did go on for weeks more, so that when the ceasefire did eventually take effect on 20 August, the two opposing armies were back to almost precisely the positions they had occupied before the 22 September 1980 invasion of Iran by Iraq. Now, eight years later, what was to have been a swift Iraqi offensive followed by a peace dictated from Baghdad could be seen as the longest conventional war of the twentieth century, a war which combined the human-wave assaults and gas attacks of the first World War with the modern horrors of long-range missile strikes on civilian targets. The precise death toll may never be established but is probably between half a million and a million.

On the Iranian side of the border entire towns were destroyed, either bulldozed into oblivion by the advancing Iraqi armies or shelled to rubble by the Iranian forces trying to liberate them, while on the Iraqi side in the final months of the war, Iraqi jets rained poison gas on their own civilians at Halabja, wiping out 5,000 Kurds in the space of a few minutes in revenge for the loss of a small town of doubtful importance. On the battlefield, the Iranians deployed poorly armed schoolchildren against tanks and artillery and the Iraqis used nerve gas for the first time in the history of warfare. In eight years, the two sides spent a total of $350 billion on a conflict which brought neither anywhere near fulfilling even its most modest war aims.

The only victory, for both Iraq and Iran, was that they avoided defeat. For the world, the tragedy was the continued strength of both brutal warring regimes. For most of the eight long years of war the opposing forces were locked in a virtual stalemate, brought about by what one Western military analyst called 'a balance of incompetence'. At one time or another, both armies were in a position to deliver the knockout blow, yet they squandered their opportunities with bad strategy and lack of preparation. The Iraqi forces which stormed across the frontier into Iran for what they believed would be a speedy victory spent the next seven and a half years on the defensive, most of that time on their own territory, while their political leaders sued for peace. Iran, which had to scrape together a makeshift defence to halt the 1980 Iraqi blitzkrieg, was carrying on an unsuccessful offensive during that time while Khomeini and the clerical leadership refused all offers of a negotiated settlement. Iran declared itself to be the victim of an 'imposed war', yet after 1982, when the invaders were thrown out and the battles moved into Iraq, the continuation of the conflict was largely self-imposed. The Iranian decision to carry the war into Iraq rather than to negotiate for peace from a position of strength proved to be the greatest single blunder of the war.

Saddam Hussein escaped the consequences of his ill-conceived adventure to contain and subdue Iran thanks to a combination of determination and ruthlessness, coupled with the indirect support of outside powers, principally the United States, which by 1987 had resolved that the Islamic Republic should not be allowed to triumph. The ceasefire, when it came, was forced on Iran when it was at its weakest, when it had lost both its capacity and its will to continue the fight - which did not prevent Saddam Hussein declaring the outcome a victory for Iraq with all the hyperbole his regime had made its own over the years. It was a war in which, in the words of the Iraqi General Command, 'the Iraqi people and their valiant armed forces resisted the force of aggression and tyranny'. The ending of the conflict was 'a great victory that has been achieved by Iraq in the name of all Arabs and in the name of humanity'.

The Iranian religious hierarchy had a much more daunting task in persuading their people that the sacrifices and sufferings of the previous eight years had not been in vain. The essence of their message was that the struggle against Iraq had consolidated the achievements of the revolution and that the decision to end the war was in order to protect those achievements. For all that, Khomeini's acceptance of the 'poisoned chalice' of peace was tantamount to an acknowledgement of defeat. 'I know that it is hard for you,' he told the Iranian people. 'But then is it not hard for your old father? I know that for you martyrdom is sweeter than honey, but then is it not the same for this servant of yours?' Those were unmistakably his own words, but when it came to justifying what had been decided the excuses of advisers took over: Iran was the victim of a plot by the enemies of Islam in which Iraq's role was merely that of a mercenary catspaw, acting on behalf of outside powers. 'Everyone knows that we did not start the war. We only defended ourselves in order to ensure the continuation of Islam in the world. It is the innocent Iranian nation that has been the target of continuous attack by the world-devourers.' For 'world-devourers' read the United States, the Soviet Union and Israel, although each one at times helped to bolster the Iranian war effort for its own geopolitical motives.

The outside powers did not start this war but they did nothing to avert it and little to end it once it had begun. Despite declarations of neutrality from the world community and occasional expressions of outraged impotence at its inability to bring the conflict to an end, a steady supply of foreign weapons reached the two belligerents throughout the war, and even when Iraq began to use chemical weapons on the battlefield, there was no more than a muted response from the rest of the world. Only on those occasions when the conflict threatened to spill over the borders of Iran and Iraq and to threaten oil supplies did the rest of the world really become concerned, though in the end it was concerted action by the outside powers which dictated the outcome.

Back in the autumn of 1980 the intensity of mistrust between the two great powers was such that neither side could afford to intervene decisively without risking the possibility of a slide towards world war. Some days before the Iraqi invasion, members of President Carter's Special Co-ordination Committee, including secretary of state Edmund Muskie, defence secretary Harold Brown and the national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, gathered in Washington to discuss intelligence reports of a buildup of Soviet troops along the Iranian frontier, possibly poised for intervention. It was less than a year since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which had prompted Carter to set out his new doctrine threatening a US military response against any Soviet attempt to gain control of the Gulf, but in September 1980 the United States had no forces in the area to mount a conventional military response; the only possible option was nuclear. Brzezinski gives an account of the meeting in his memoirs:

Muskie offered the judgment that Congress would not feel that a nuclear war was worth 11 per cent of our oil, and Brown rather sharply responded by asking what would happen if the Soviets invaded Iran and we did nothing. Did Muskie really believe that our losses would be only a percentage of our oil supply? Muskie retorted that the American people might even accept the loss of Europe rather than risk nuclear war. I then joined in by asking Muskie if he accepted the proposition that the loss of the Persian Gulf might lead to the loss of Europe and Muskie reluctantly agreed that that might be the case.

It was against a background of chaos in the oil markets that the Carter advisers met to discuss the challenge of a possible Soviet move into Iran and towards the Gulf, and Muskie was correct in asserting that only a small proportion of US oil consumption depended on supplies from the Gulf, but for America's allies in Western Europe and Japan, Middle East oil was of primary importance. For the world in general, the importance of Gulf oil to the global economy remains paramount and will increase in coming decades as reserves in other parts of the world run down. Middle East oil is at present calculated to represent 58 per cent of all the world's known reserves, and a quarter of those Gulf reserves lie beneath the territories of Iraq and Iran - by the next century nearly all the remaining oil in the world will be in the Gulf.

The West has already suffered two oil shocks which plunged Western economies into recession: the first in 1973 when the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) took over price-setting from the international oil companies at a time of high demand for Middle East oil. The effects of this OPEC revolution were exacerbated by an Arab oil embargo imposed as a result of the Arab-Israeli war, so that within two years the price of a barrel of oil rose from $1.90 to $10.40. Queues at petrol stations, rationing and the US decision to reduce the speed-limit to an energy-saving 55 mph were all signs of a realisation in the West that oil supplies were not infinite and could not be taken for granted.

Ironically, it was the Shah who was one of the architects of the pricing revolution, and six years later it was his fall which occasioned the second oil shock. The disruption of Iranian production in the year leading up to the February 1979 revolution caused panic in the oil markets, although demand for oil was relatively depressed at the time. Yet despite this and the fact that Western countries had by now built up substantial strategic reserves, buyers rushed to beat the rising market; further panic set in at the time of the Iraqi invasion, with its threat of a total cut-off of Gulf supplies, so that by the autumn of 1980, the free-market price of a barrel of Gulf crude was approaching $40.

The geopolitical dilemma facing Washington in 1979 was that US inability or failure to protect the Gulf from Soviet threat would risk undermining the entire structure of the post -war Western alliance, for the underlying threat of any Soviet move into the Gulf was that the West might ultimately lose access to Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, almost twice as great as those of Iran and Iraq combined. The Americans believed the threat was real because the CIA had reported, erroneously as it turned out, that the Soviet Union would soon become a net importer of oil. In fact, the Russians wanted security and stability of supply from the Gulf in much the same way as the Americans did. Traditionally, the Soviet Union had sold its own oil and gas at favoured rates to its Eastern bloc allies, but as world prices began to rise it saw the opportunity to boost its foreign exchange earnings by selling its oil on the free market and diverting its allies towards suppliers in the Gulf.

The crisis prompted by the slide towards war in the Gulf could not have come at a worse time for the United States: its global standing was low and its relations with the Soviet Union were bad, and in the region affected Washington had lost its most powerful ally and had found no one to replace him. When the Gulf war began, fifty-two of America's diplomats had been held hostage in Iran for more than ten months after fundamentalist students seized the embassy on 4 November 1979, and President Carter's failure to extract them pointed to his almost certain defeat in the election battle with Ronald Reagan which was by now just two months away.

But the Soviet Union was also under pressure, with the process of detente with the West begun by Leonid Brezhnev in the early 1970s now on the point of collapse. The SALT I treaty which resulted from the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks was the high point of the process, but the SALT II treaty, negotiated with the Carter administration, was doomed to founder on the rock of Congressional opposition. The Soviet desire for detente had been spurred on, in part, by the deterioration of relations between Moscow and Peking in the Maoist era, a process later exacerbated by Sino-Soviet rivalry in Indochina after the Vietnam war. Now it seemed that Washington was strengthening its ties with Peking, possibly even contemplating selling weapons to the Chinese, at a time when its relations with Moscow were drifting towards a new Cold War. The birth of the Solidarity trade union and the growth of liberalism in Poland during 1980, a process in which Moscow inevitably detected the hidden hand of Washington, was threatening Soviet dominance of the Eastern bloc. In Turkey, the Soviet Union's NATO neighbour on the southern flank, a right-wing military regime had just seized power. The American decision to lead a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow seemed symbolic of the new freeze between the superpowers.

Not for the first time in its history, the Soviet Union felt itself surrounded on all sides, and the theory that the opportunistic entry into Afghanistan was designed to strengthen the southern defences is as valid as Washington's worst-case scenario in which the Afghan invasion represented the first step on a Soviet march towards the warm waters of the Gulf. Moscow had its own, equally disturbing scenario: that the United States would use the excuse of the Tehran hostage crisis to mount an assault on Iran aimed at reversing the revolution and bringing Iran back even more securely into the Western camp. Alternatively, it feared that once the hostages were freed Washington might move to restore a strategic relationship with Iran, for after the Afghan invasion US officials began to hint at the possibility of future military and economic cooperation with the Iranians once the hostage crisis was resolved. A state department official was quoted in January 1980 as comparing the relationship with Iran with that between the United States and post-war Germany, and remarking: 'We ended up rearming Germany.' It was a prospect only slightly less alarming to Moscow than that of direct US intervention.

In international politics, a balance of suspicion can often serve the same purpose as a balance of trust, and in this case both Washington and Moscow understood that any attempt by either side to move into the countries of the Gulf in force would almost inevitably provoke a war between the superpowers, for neither side had a reliable surrogate in the region. Revolutionary Iran owed allegiance to no one, and US attempts to support a counter-revolutionary movement capable of unseating Khomeini had come to nothing. Iraq, so long an ally of the Soviet Union, was now marching to its own tune, so when war broke out the superpowers stood aside, and the state of relations between Moscow and Washington even made decisive action at the United Nations a virtual impossibility. Although it was clear from the spring of 1980 and certainly after August that a war was brewing between Iraq and Iran, the Security Council took no action to restrain either side. Some of the blame for this lay with Iran itself which, by its continued detention of the American hostages, had made itself a pariah state.

The Soviet Union, given the state of its relations with the United States, had opted at the start of the hostage crisis to give moral support to Iran's 'revolutionary act' (the taking of the embassy), rather than standing unequivocally by Washington on the issue of the inviolability of international law. A Pravda commentary published one month after the seizure of the US embassy merely noted that the action was in violation of international law, but it added that Washington was guilty of a gross violation of international norms by conducting naval manoeuvres in the Arabian Sea. Although Moscow supported a unanimous Security Council call for the release of the hostages, it abstained on a further resolution threatening Iran with economic sanctions. Britain's ambassador to the United Nations at the outbreak of the war, Sir Anthony Parsons, has described the failure of the permanent members of the Security Council to take swift action when it was most needed.

Iraq was, as I saw it, under the impression that they needed three or four days in which to deal Iran a knockout blow. Now, with that in mind, Iraq made the most strenuous efforts to prevent the Security Council actually from meeting at all. And they brought enormous pressure on the seven nonaligned members of the Council actually to refuse to go into the Chamber. And this tactic succeeded for some days. At that time, if Iran had not been in international disgrace because of the hostage holding, I simply don't believe that the other members of the Security Council, the permanent members and others, wouldn't have actually overridden this Iraqi pressure against a meeting.

When the Security Council eventually adopted Resolution 479 on the Gulf war in September 1980, this called only for a ceasefire and did not call for a withdrawal of forces to the international frontier nor condemn Iraq for its act of aggression, so that Iran was left with the impression that the world community had abandoned it to its fate. It was something that was to colour Iranian perceptions for the rest of the war for it sowed the seeds of the belief that the Islamic Republic was facing the combined enmity of the outside world. It was a belief which was enhanced by the fact that the Security Council's collective inability at the start of the war to rescue Iran from the consequences of Iraqi aggression contrasted so greatly with the subsequent determination of individual states to secure their interests in the Gulf.

For most of the war, four of the five permanent members of the Council - the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France- all had warships stationed in or near the Gulf to safeguard oil supplies and ultimately, in the case of the Americans, to bring pressure on Iran to end the war, for this American intervention in the Gulf, ostensibly to safeguard the security of international shipping, was unashamedly one-sided. The White House refused to be diverted from its chosen course even when in May 1987 an Iraqi jet mistakenly attacked the USS Stark, killing thirty-seven American servicemen on board. Rather, the incident was the signal for an expanded US presence which was ultimately pitted against Iran. It was a high-risk operation, which disturbed some of America's closest allies and was condemned by domestic critics, for the US presence, particularly after Kuwaiti tankers were placed under the protection of the Stars and Stripes in July 1987, actually made the Gulf less safe. It prompted the Iranians to mine international waterways and tempted the Iraqis to attack Iranian tankers in the hope of provoking Iran into entering into an unequal combat with the US fleet. Under broader rules of engagement introduced in the final year, the United States assumed the role of an undeclared belligerent in the war against Iran, while Iraq continued to carry out air strikes on Iranian shipping with impunity.

The American intervention was motivated by the desire to contain Iran at a time when it looked as if the Iranians might make a decisive breakthrough in the land war by capturing the Iraqi city of Basra. It was also prompted by the need to purge the memory of Irangate, both at home and among the United States's Arab allies. The revelation in the autumn of 1986 that Washington had secretly been supplying arms to Iran, at a time when such sales were banned, had a traumatic effect on the American public and on countries such as Saudi Arabia which had put their trust in the United States. It was an affair which threatened to destroy the Reagan presidency and undermine the US role in the Middle East, and the secret dealings revealed the views of those in the Reagan administration who saw Iran as the cornerstone of America's geopolitical strategy in the Gulf. It was a doctrine inherited from Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration and had provided the basis of the strategic relationship between Washington and the Shah.

After the Irangate revelations, those who saw Saudi Arabia as the key US asset in the region, notably the secretary of state, George Shultz, came to the fore, and there was a sharp switch away from seeking a rapprochement with Iran towards a policy of containing it. But whatever the motivation, the results were the same: the US presence in the Gulf as an undeclared ally of Iraq was a central element of the pressure which built up on Iran to end the war. Had the Americans acted so aggressively or decisively at the beginning, they might only have succeeded in worsening the already dismal relations with Moscow and perhaps provoked a Soviet military reaction, but by the summer of 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev had taken over in the Kremlin and a new and more co-operative chapter in the superpower relationship had begun.

For the first six years of the Gulf war, both superpowers were content with the stalemate: the panic over oil supplies proved to be unfounded, for Iran's war effort depended totally on its ability to export its oil and the periodic threats of the mullahs to close...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Authors' note
• Map: The Gulf and the Middle East
• Preface
• 1 Khomeini's poisoned chalice
• 2 Preparations for war
• 3 Iraq's failed blitzkrieg
• 4 Iran and Iraq: internal wars
• 5 Exporting the Islamic revolution
• 6 Khorramshahr: the City of Blood
• 7 America: the Great Satan
• 8 The turn of the tide
• 9 Reluctant allies: the threat to the Arab Gulf
• 10 Secret arms deals
• 11 The Soviet Union: the other Satan
• 12 The struggle for power in Tehran
• 13 The war at sea: America joins in
• 14 New battles to settle old scores
• 15 Islam divided: the conflict remains
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Select bibliography
• Index