The Iraq War (11 page)

Despite Saddam’s success in attracting foreign support after 1984, he was not at first able to shift the balance of the war decisively his way. He began by using the advanced weaponry with which he had been supplied to intensify his attacks on Iranian cities. The Iranian air force responded in kind but its stock of warplanes had been so reduced by losses in combat that the contest proved unequal. Iraqi missile strikes actually provoked demonstrations against the war in the affected cities. Saddam had better success by using his French-supplied strike aircraft, Super Étendards equipped with Exocet sea-skimming missiles, to intensify attacks on Iranian tanker traffic and the terminals at which the tankers loaded; there were seventy missile strikes in 1984–85. Iran responded by shifting its attacks to Kuwaiti tankers, in retaliation for Kuwait’s financial support of the Iraqi war effort, a move which, as mentioned above, led to an extensive reflagging of the tankers as American ships. This strengthening of the American position against the ayatollah régime was set back in a bizarre fashion when evidence came to light that Washington
was simultaneously supplying Iran with weapons – the Iran–Contra affair – in an effort to secure the release of American hostages held by Islamic terrorists in Lebanon; the repercussions severely shook the Reagan administration. It did not assist Saddam’s position, in any case, when a damaging attack on the USS
Stark
in the Gulf, on 17 May 1987, was revealed to be the result of an Iraqi Exocet strike.

Nevertheless Saddam’s efforts to involve Western and other navies in the protection of Gulf tanker traffic against Iranian attack had become so comprehensive that even the
Stark
affair did not dent the defence they offered. His finances, despite the punishing costs of the war, also continued to hold up. Although by 1987 Iraq’s foreign debts amounted to $50.5 billion, or thrice its gross domestic product, with another $45–55 billion owed in loans from client Gulf states, sympathetic treatment by American, Saudi and even Soviet institutions allowed it to make interest payments and find purchasing power abroad. Iraq was effectively bankrupt but was able to continue fighting because no interested state, outside a small coterie of Islamic and anti-Israeli countries, wished to see it defeated.

Then in February 1988 the shift in advantage, for which Saddam had always worked, at last swung Iraq’s way. The terrible suffering brought by the war to Iran, which had sustained nearly a million military casualties, out of a population of 9 million males of military age, combined with the unremitting air attacks on its cities, which had caused a widespread flight of the civilian population, had so weakened the ayatollah régime’s power that it could no longer mount an effective defence. Saddam opened his decisive counter-offensive with renewed air and missile attacks on Iranian centres. In April, assisted by intelligence support, he unleashed a ground offensive on the Fao peninsula, lost to Iran in 1986; it was captured and by early July so was all Iraqi territory lost to the Iranians since 1980. The Iraqis also expelled the remaining Iranian forces from Kurdistan and even succeeded in seizing a foothold across the enemy border.

As Iran was also undergoing damaging attacks by Iraqi aircraft
on its tanker traffic and coastal oil outlets, which it was unable to counter, reality forced the ayatollah régime to accept that the war could not be won and could only be prosecuted farther at increasing and pointless loss. Since 1982 Ayatollah Khomeini had insisted that only Saddam’s relinquishment of power – ‘régime change’ as it would later be known – would induce him to enter into a settlement. He was now brought to recognize that he could not achieve that outcome. On 18 July 1988, therefore, Iran announced to the United Nations that it would accept Security Council Resolution 598, calling for a cease-fire, and it came into effect a month later. Ayatollah Khomeini died the following year, at the age of eighty-seven.

Saddam, still only in his early fifties and in vigorous health, had therefore won a sort of victory; but at terrible cost. Besides the war dead, totalling perhaps over 100,000, the conflict had also severely weakened the Iraqi economy. War debts, largely owed to the Gulf States and to Saudi Arabia, amounted to $80 billion; reconstruction costs were calculated at $230 billion. Ordinary state expenditure exceeded income from oil, about $13 billion a year; there was no other significant export except dates. The country could not service its debts, was surviving after 1988 only by begging for time to pay from its creditors and was effectively bankrupt. At the outset of Saddam’s taking power, Iraq was a prosperous country with an excellent credit rating. By 1988 it was mired in borrowing which it could not manage. Moreover, Saddam’s institution of an austerity programme at home, designed to reduce government spending, brought him unpopularity. Large numbers of soldiers were demobilized into unemployment, the number of state employees was abruptly reduced, state spending projects were curtailed, with a farther loss of jobs, and the sale of state enterprises was seen to benefit only a small group of Iraqi capitalists.

Saddam had other difficulties. Despite the departure of Iranian troops from Kurdistan, Kurdish resistance continued, provoking him, unwisely, to resort to the use of chemical weapons against the rebels. In March 1988 he had deluged the township of
Halabjah, the last place to be occupied by the Iranians, with hydrogen cyanide, killing 5,000 of the inhabitants and injuring 10,000 more. During the summer of 1988 he subjected another sixty-five Kurdish villages to chemical attack, causing heavy casualties and the flight of a quarter of a million Kurds to Iran or Turkey. He was meanwhile persisting with his efforts to develop an Iraqi nuclear weapons programme, despite the success of the Israelis in destroying the Osirak reactor centre in 1981. The West, generally so exigent in its efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, as indeed was the Soviet Union, at first displayed a careless indifference to Saddam’s lust to acquire unconventional weapons, including the missile systems necessary to deliver them. The West’s unconcern, originally conditioned by its estimation that Saddam, for all his known faults, was preferable as an agent of power in the Gulf region to the incomprehensible ayatollahs, persisted into the post-Gulf War period. Then, the balance of opinion, unpredictably fickle as it so often is, swung against him. He made what proved to be the grave mistake of arresting and executing a Western journalist, after a travesty of a trial, for reporting on his unconventional weapons programme. Suddenly international opinion took against him. The United States was already suspicious of his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, a clear threat to its client state of Israel; the judicial murder of the
Observer
journalist, Farzal Bazoft, attracted the condemnation of Margaret Thatcher, who, as British Prime Minister, was the principal non-American influence on the outlook of President Ronald Reagan.

Saddam had by that stage of his career killed so many critics of his régime that he no doubt failed to comprehend why one more elimination of a troublesome individual should have serious international repercussions. Had he allowed the dust to settle it might not have done so. Almost immediately after the Bazoft affair, however, he embarked on a new foreign policy initiative which farther provoked Western disapproval. The matter was, politically if not morally, of far greater weight. Saddam made it clear that he was bent on recovering the crippling costs of the Iran war.

Though he had attacked Iran without any thought that he might be biting off more than he could chew, the first two years of the war had shown him otherwise. As difficulties developed, he turned to the other Gulf States for help, in the expectation that repayment would be neither difficult nor inconveniently demanded. As the war drew out he had found that loans and subsidies were made with increasing reluctance, and eventually arranged only out of fear of an Iranian victory. By the time the ayatollahs conceded, the cost to the Gulf States, Kuwait foremost, of sheltering behind Iraq equated, in financial if not human terms, to what might have been incurred had they fought themselves.

Saddam’s ‘victory’ thus left a bitter aftertaste. He expected, if not gratitude, at least financial understanding from his neighbours. They, however, wanted their money back. Both parties pitched their terms too high. Saddam began to demand not only the cancellation of his debt, $40 billion by 1988, but a large farther subsidy, $30 billion, to pay for reconstruction. His creditors, increasingly doubtful of his willingness or ability to repay, began to recompense themselves by increasing oil production, in breach of OPEC agreements to stabilize quotas. As oil prices on the international market were falling at the time, the Gulf States’ policy doubly disadvantaged Iraq, which found its income shrinking in consequence. The Emir of Kuwait, despite the evidence of Saddam’s growing displeasure, nevertheless emphasized that he would not reduce oil output, would not grant new loans and would continue to demand repayment of Iraq’s debts.

That was foolhardy on a number of counts. Whatever else was wrong with Saddam’s international position, lack of military force was not one of his postwar weaknesses. He controlled the largest and most experienced army in the Gulf region and the sixth largest air force in the world. Moreover his difference with the Emir of Kuwait was not born of any recent and material dispute but went back to the early days of Iraqi independence. Under the Ottomans, who had ruled Mesopotamia since the sixteenth century, Kuwait had been administered as part of the province
(vilayet)
of Basra. Under the tutelage of the British, who had run
an undeclared empire over the Gulf States through the government of India and the Royal Navy throughout Victoria’s reign, Kuwait had acquired a sort of independence from the Turks. This was not accepted by the Iraqi political class which, as soon as the mandate was ended in 1932, began to articulate a claim to Kuwait as part of the national territory. The claim was in part nationalist but was perhaps more strongly driven by Kuwait’s oil wealth, contained in fields which straddled the common border, and by Kuwait’s better access to the waters of the Gulf across its longer coastline. Whatever the merits of the Iraqi case, and they were not widely supported in the international community, it was a popular cause at home.

Saddam, moreover, was determined to persist in pressing his demands. During July 1990 Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, put his country’s case forcefully to the secretary of the Arab League, arguing that both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were depriving Iraq of a considerable portion of its legitimate oil income through depressing the price by overproduction; ‘a drop of $1 in the price of a barrel of oil leads to a drop of $1 billion in Iraqi revenues annually’. He went on to argue that Iraq had, during the war with Iran, fought to protect the whole Arab homeland. It had spent in hard currency $102 billion on weapons and had lost $106 billion in income because of disruption of production. Yet Kuwait and the UAE were still demanding repayment of loans. ‘How can these amounts be regarded as Iraqi debts to its Arab brothers when Iraq made sacrifices that are many times more than these debts in terms of Iraqi resources during the grinding war and offered rivers of blood of its youth in defence of the [Arab] nation’s soil, dignity, honour and wealth?’

The threat, particularly to Kuwait, was made more explicit in a television broadcast by Saddam Hussein on 17 July. ‘Raising our voices against the evil of overproduction is not the final resort if the evil continues. There should be some effective act to restore things to their correct positions.’ What that act might be he indicated to the American ambassador, April Glaspie, in Baghdad on 25 July. In a letter he gave her to be sent to President Bush, he
warned, ‘We don’t want war … but do not push us to consider war as the only solution to live proudly and to provide our people with a good living.’

The dialogue that followed has been minutely dissected. Supporters of April Glaspie hold that she made clear to Saddam Washington’s disapproval of an attempt to settle the dispute with Kuwait by force. Critics believe that her exposition of American policy was ambiguous. The strongest point she made was that his deployment of troops (30,000 had just been concentrated on the Iraq–Kuwait border) made it ‘reasonable … to be concerned’. Weakly, she conceded that ‘we have no opinion on the Arab–Arab conflicts, like your border dispute with Kuwait … we hope that you can solve this problem via [the Arab League] or President Mubarak [of Egypt]’. Saddam responded by saying that he wanted a meeting with the Kuwaitis and that that might settle the matter. ‘But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.’ On that note Saddam and Glaspie parted, she apparently believing that she had merely been present at another instalment of Arab rhetoric. She would later tell
The New York Times
, ‘Obviously I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.’

Glaspie seemed to be attempting to excuse her misinterpretation of Saddam’s despatch of a large army to the Kuwait border by suggesting that the troops might have occupied only the disputed Rumeila oil field and the oil-bearing islands of Warba and Bubiyan. It was an odd evasion of responsibility by a professional diplomat; even partial annexations of foreign territory are infractions of international law. Whatever her thinking, and however muddled or not, her exchange with Saddam can only be described as disastrous and rightly led to the extinction of her career.