The Iraq War (10 page)

Immediately after Khomeini’s return home, Saddam attempted to ingratiate himself with the Islamic régime in Iran by declaring a policy of ‘mutual respect and non-interference in internal affairs’. He began to pray in public, to show consideration for Shi’a religious practices and holy places and generally to demonstrate his respect for Islamic belief. Khomeini was quite unmollified, correctly
judging Saddam’s sudden demonstration of piety as merely expedient. He called on the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam and openly supported Shi’ite resistance to Ba’athist rule. Iranian involvement in an attempt to assassinate Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister and, anomalously, an Eastern Rite Christian, was barely disguised.

During 1980 Saddam was progressively driven to conclude that all attempts to placate the régime of the ayatollahs were pointless; Iranian Islamicism was not only hostile but also dangerous to Ba’athism, while, as long as Khomeini ruled, there could be no hope of settling the Shatt el-Arab dispute. Force alone, Saddam decided, could rectify the situation. Objectively, moreover, the resort to force was a logical option. Khomeini’s revolution had devastated the Iranian armed forces, a leading element of the modernization programme, and a disproportionate number of the victims had been senior officers. Military morale had been heavily depressed as a result, as had operational efficiency. Saddam had good reason to conclude, therefore, that Iraq’s armed forces, though only half the size of those of Iran, were capable of achieving a quick and cheap victory.

Saddam began the Iran–Iraq war on 22 September 1980 by launching squadrons of his air force, equipped with French Mirage fighter-bombers, against ten Iranian air bases. His hope was to repeat the success of the Israelis on the first day of the 1967 war when, by co-ordinated surprise attacks, the air forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria had been destroyed in a few hours on their airfields. His hope was not achieved. As Saddam was later often to complain, geography was against Iraq. Iran is a large country and its military bases were distributed all over its territory, many distant from the frontiers; Israel’s targets in 1967, by contrast, had all been concentrated close behind enemy frontiers in easy reach of attack. In 1980 much of the Iranian air force survived the initial strikes and was able to mount retaliation on the same day, not only against Iraqi air bases but also against Iraqi naval units and some oil facilities, which were to prove critical targets throughout the ensuing eight-year war.

Nevertheless Saddam had been correct in his prewar judgement that the disorganization brought about by the ayatollahs’ purge of the secularist, but efficient and well-trained, Iranian military leadership would make it difficult for Iran to mount an effective defence. Within a month of the start of the war the Iraqis had advanced into Iran on a front of 600 kilometres (373 miles), to a depth varying from 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) in the north to 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) in the south. They had captured several towns and got within artillery range of Dezful, a key transportation centre in the northern oilfields. In the south, after a bitter battle in the streets, the city of Khorramshahr had been taken, but at a cost of 7,000 dead and wounded. The Iraqis had, however, failed to take nearby Abadan, the old Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s refinery centre through which most of the country’s oil was exported down the Gulf; without Abadan, moreover, they were ill-positioned to recapture the east bank of the Shatt el-Arab.

Having achieved his initial advance, Saddam, who was acting as supreme commander despite his complete lack of military experience, ordered the army to dig in on a defensive line. He apparently wished to avoid inflicting casualties, in the belief that the Iranians would give in if offered the chance to do so; he also calculated that the ground captured could be used in bargaining for a settlement. On both counts he was wrong. The Iranian people had been seized with patriotic fervour and, as events would demonstrate, were prepared to accept very heavy casualties to avoid defeat, while the Iranian government had no interest in negotiating a settlement on any terms favourable to Iraq.

Saddam’s pause had the farther effect of allowing the Iranians to regroup, reorganize, and induct hundreds of thousands of new recruits into the army. In May 1981 they were able to launch a counteroffensive which forced the Iraqis to pull back from Abadan to Khorramshahr and in October they were driven across the Karun River, one of the first objectives. In November the tide of battle turned markedly in the Iranians’ favour. They began to organize mass attacks, sending human waves of untrained juveniles to march into Iraqi minefields and barrages of automatic
fire. Step by step, during the rest of the 1981 campaign and into the spring of 1982, the Iraqis were forced to give ground, losing thousands of prisoners in the process. Saddam was unable to mount an effective defence, let alone a counter-offensive, and in June 1982 declared a cease-fire, claiming that Iraq had achieved its objects.

Iraq was in fact close to defeat, less because of military losses, grievous though they were, than financial difficulties. The fighting in the south, at the head of the Gulf, had severely diminished Iraq’s ability to export oil, but not so Iran’s which, with outlets onto the lower Gulf and the Indian Ocean, could continue to earn oil income. Iraq, as the war became protracted, was increasingly dependent on subsidies from neighbours, particularly Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to which Saddam successfully represented the war as a struggle against Islamic fundamentalism in which he fought to protect not only his régime but also theirs. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia both transported essential supplies to Iraq and provided oil credits to foreign suppliers, which paid, among other things, for war material. After two years of fighting, Iraq was effectively sustaining its war by borrowing and the loans, unsecured, unserviced and mounting, were putting the country into an increasingly unfavourable financial position. Its financial situation was to worsen throughout the following years and collapse to be staved off only by persuading neighbours to lengthen credit and, eventually, the United States to lend its support. During the 1980s Iran was regarded by the United States as the most dangerous of its Third World enemies, because of the violent anti-Americanism of the ayatollah régime and for its seizure of the staff of the American embassy in Tehran, in gross violation of international law. The extension of support to anti-Iranian Gulf States was a natural consequence; it eventually included the reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers as American ships, hastened after Iran began air attacks on tankers in 1984, and the strengthening of the American naval presence in the Gulf to protect them.

Yet despite foreign assistance, the war began to go badly against Iraq after 1982 and the turn of events was not to be disguised.
Internally the cost, running at a billion US dollars a month, began to reduce funds available for imports; after an initial boom, deliberately sustained by Saddam to buoy civilian support for the war, the economy began to show signs of recession. Between 1980 and 1983 Iraq’s foreign currency reserves fell from $35 billion to $3 billion, with a consequent drop in imports; the reserves were farther adversely affected by Syria’s action in closing the pipeline to the Mediterranean, in retaliation for Saddam’s rupture of relations with the Syrian Ba’athist party. The human as well as financial costs were high, with casualties running at 1,200 a month, a figure that rose sharply during offensives. Militarily, from 1982 onwards, Iran was able to mount offensives with increasing frequency. During the summer of 1982 Iran embarked on a major offensive designed to cross the Tigris and reach Basra, Iraq’s second city and capital of the Shi’a south. The methods were as before: mass attacks by waves of untrained, under-age volunteers. After the initial shock, however, the Iraqis proved equal to the strain. Their engineers constructed extensive and deep lines of fortifications, in places creating artificial lakes which funnelled the direction of the Iranian thrusts. Behind strong defences the Iraqis fought well, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers; if ground was lost, it was recaptured by ground–air counter-attacks. The Iranian air force had difficulty in operating, because of American refusal to supply spare parts for its aircraft, while the Iraqi air force, flying French and Russian aircraft, was not so penalized; it was also equipped with large numbers of helicopters which Iran lacked. Moreover the Iraqi ground forces, encouraged by their defensive successes, displayed markedly improved morale; even the Shi’a conscripts, deterred at the thought of the ayatollahs exporting their joyless regime in the wake of victory, found a sense of patriotism and battled with a will.

Between 1982 and 1984 the struggle degenerated into a war of attrition, with the Iranians maintaining the offensive but Iraq inflicting the heavier casualties. Although by 1984 the total of Iraqi war dead had reached 65,000, with up to 60,000 taken prisoner, the equivalent Iranian figure was 180,000 dead and half a
million wounded. Moreover, the Iranians were not gaining ground. The exception to their consistent failure to do so came in early 1984 when, by a cunningly organized night attack, Iranian amphibious forces succeeded in surprising the garrison of the Majnun Islands, near Basra. Despite repeated attempts to recapture the islands, the Iraqis failed. Saddam therefore decided to resort to unconventional methods. He was already manufacturing chemical weapons at two plants, at Salman Pak and Samarra, and now used two products, mustard gas and Tabun, in helicopter attacks on the Iranian positions. Mustard gas is a blistering agent, developed and widely used during the First World War, Tabun a nerve agent developed by the Nazis for use in extermination camps.

Chemical agents are notoriously unsatisfactory as weapons of war. They are difficult to deliver with precision and, once launched, are wholly subject for effect on the vagaries of the local weather; low humidity robs the agents of effect quickly, high humidity causes them to persist; favourable wind direction carries them into the enemy positions, unfavourable wind direction causes ‘blow back’ or results in dispersion away from the battlefield. The Iraqis in the Majnun Islands encountered all those conditions; the Iranians, by contrast, soon acquired protective clothing and antidotes which rendered the use of chemical agents pointless.

In the long run, Saddam’s resort to chemical weapons was to do him nothing but harm. Not only did his chemical warfare campaign fail to achieve its intended results; it also alerted the attention of the United Nations. The use of chemical weapons had been outlawed by the League of Nations during the 1920s and the ban had been sustained with remarkable consistency throughout the Second World War and afterwards. As one of the few demonstrable successes of international arms control, the United Nations was determined to support it and in March 1984 a team of UN inspectors was despatched to Iran to investigate its complaints. The team confirmed that Iraq had broken the ban, a report that prejudiced most countries previously favourable to Saddam against him. For a time Saddam was brought to desist;
in 1987–88, however, he resumed his use of chemical weapons, in that period against his own people in Kurdistan, in an attempt to terrorize them against co-operating with Iranian incursions into their area. Notoriously, at Halabjah in March 1988, his use of chemical agents killed at least 5,000 Kurdish civilians in an operation directed by his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, later to be known as ‘Chemical Ali’.

Between 1984 and 1988, however, Saddam’s distasteful reputation as a chemical warmaker was offset in foreign opinion by what appeared to be the much more threatening behaviour of his enemies, both in Iran and in the wider Middle Eastern world. The ayatollahs made no attempt to placate either the West or the Soviet Union. They persisted in persecuting the Tudeh, Iran’s Communist Party, and they made little effort to disguise their links with Islamic anti-Western terrorists. The Syrians, meanwhile, were continuing to provide refuge and training facilities to a number of violent Islamic terrorist groups and President Gaddafi so provoked the United States by his support for terrorists that it launched airstrikes against Libya in early 1986. In these circumstances it was comparatively easy for Saddam to represent himself as a force for stability in a troubled region. He was, from the middle of the Iran–Iraq War, certainly so treated. The small Gulf States, terrified that Iran might infect their populations with anti-monarchist and fundamentalist feeling, increased their donations to Iraq’s war chest, eventually to the tune of $25 billion. The Soviet Union began to supply high-technology equipment, including intermediate range missiles, capable of reaching Iran’s major cities from Iraqi bases. Egypt recycled some of its Soviet equipment to help Iraq with spare parts. France, if on a strictly financial basis, delivered dozens of high-performance strike aircraft, enhancing Iraqi capability to attack the Iranian tanker trade.

Most tellingly of all, the United States, which had throughout the years of Saddam’s rise kept Iraq on its list of countries suspected of supporting international terrorism, now decided that a shift of policy would be advantageous. Saddam’s enemies were also America’s, a perception heightened by anti-American terrorist
outrages in Lebanon in 1983, when, in what was to prove the first instalment of suicide bombing, a Marine barracks was truck-bombed with great loss of life, following a devastating attack on the US embassy in the city. Saddam’s Foreign Minister was invited to Washington; in December 1983 his visit was returned by Donald Rumsfeld, then acting as a special Middle Eastern adviser to President Reagan. David Mack, a former State Department official who accompanied Rumsfeld to Baghdad, explained later that ‘we wanted to build a Cairo–Amman–Baghdad axis’. The warmer relationship thus established did not lead to the US supplying arms to Saddam (though in 1982 it did send sixty military helicopters designated as crop-sprayers, which Saddam peremptorily had adapted to fire anti-tank missiles), but Washington used its good offices to facilitate the construction of new pipelines to port outlets in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, thus easing Iraq’s financial difficulties, and it also began covertly to supply intelligence to Baghdad, derived from satellite overflights and surveillance by American AWACS aircraft operating from Saudi Arabia.