The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (16 page)

H
eading east toward Iran from the compact squalor of Iraq’s second- largest city, Basra, the specter of an old battlefield fills the barren landscape. Clearly discernable on either side of the bumpy, dusty road choked with trucks, dilapidated taxis, and donkey carts are miles of trenches crisscrossing the desert, stretching off in all directions to the horizon. Endless rows of U-shaped earthen berms and large triangular fighting positions are slowly eroding, the tanks that once occupied them long since removed for other wars or stripped for scrap metal by the local villagers. Craters large and small pockmark the desert moonscape. Rain and wind frequently reveal the bleached bones of hastily buried soldiers, some still wearing boots and pieces of now indistinguishable uniforms, their sculls broken and cracked by bullets and hot metal. Twenty years after the fighting ended, unexploded ordnance littering the desert floor regularly takes the lives of civilians who stray off the roads and beaten paths.

These scenes testify to one of the bloodiest wars since World War II: the eight-year slaughter of the Iran-Iraq War. When it mercifully ended in August 1988, neither side had achieved very much: the border was unchanged, no territory had been gained, and both Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini remained in power, safely seated in their respective capitals. But well
over a million men had given the full measure of devotion, with perhaps four times that number permanently maimed. It was a war of incompetence, two lumbering giants repeatedly hammering each other with the clubs of modern firepower, killing thousands with each swing but achieving little. Institutional constraints hamstrung both countries, preventing any learning curve of more than a gentle glide slope. The Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, a military neophyte, frowned upon commanders who showed either initiative or too much battlefield prowess. Iran’s once mighty military had been gutted by the revolution. Instead of using tanks, infantry, and aircraft in a combined arms doctrine of a modern military, Khomeini and the revolutionary commanders believed élan and revolutionary zeal in the form of human wave assaults could overcome rows of Iraqi tanks and artillery laid hub to hub.

While the war achieved little militarily, it had a pronounced effect on the region. Iran spent its revolutionary fervor, leaving the country isolated, with a profound sense of grievance and insecurity. The war ushered in Iraq’s military supremacy and two decades of wars between Saddam Hussein and the West. It left the Gulf Arabs deeply suspicious of Iran. For the United States, heightened fear of an Iranian threat to Washington’s control over Middle East oil led to an unlikely alliance with Iraq that Washington would soon regret.

S
addam Hussein was both pragmatic and paranoid. The descendant of Sunni shepherds from the town of Tikrit north of Baghdad, the dark-haired, mustached Hussein had risen through the ranks of the socialist Baath Party initially as an enforcer, before he ascended to the presidency in 1979. While he advocated secularism and Western socialist ideals such as universal education and women’s suffrage, his true focus was political survival and personal aggrandizement. Saddam Hussein’s political savvy was combined with ruthless suspicion. Anyone who appeared too capable might find himself imprisoned or executed. “Saddam was always wary of intelligent people,” said Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as “Chemical Ali” for his role in gassing hundreds of Kurdish civilians in 1988 to crush a perceived hazard to Saddam’s rule.
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The Iraqi leader soon found himself in the crosshairs of the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini had not forgotten that Saddam Hussein had ordered his expulsion from Iraq at the behest of the shah. The supreme leader
held Saddam and his secular Baathist Party in contempt. Khomeini publicly criticized the Iraqi regime as “corruptors of the true faith” and openly called for Iraq’s majority Shia population to revolt. The ayatollah emphasized the unity of all Muslims, rejecting traditional Western concepts of nation-states and national identity. The
umma
, or community, was the sole basis for Islamic politics, and the Prophet’s concept of a united Islamic nation drove the Iranian revolutionary vision. “We will export our revolution throughout the world…until the calls ‘There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God’ are echoed all over the world,” said the supreme leader during one of many similar-themed Friday sermons.

Khomeini’s words were matched by actions. Iran began backing Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq. Iranian agent provocateurs infiltrated Iraq, providing weapons and training to Shia opposition groups. Iran increased support for the Iraqi Shia militant group Islamic Dawa Party, which included a number of future leaders of Iraq, including prime ministers Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki. Shortly after the shah’s overthrow, the Dawa Party moved its headquarters to Tehran and escalated its guerrilla operations against Baathist rule in Iraq. In April 1980 alone, Iranian-backed terrorists assassinated twenty Iraqi officials and narrowly missed killing Iraq’s deputy prime minister and close confidant of the Iraqi leader, Tariq Aziz.
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In response, spurred privately by Saudi Arabia, which was deeply concerned that the Iranian Revolution would stir up Shia passions in its own eastern provinces, Baghdad clamped down by arresting prominent religious leaders, expelling thousands of Shia, and threatening to support an insurgency in the Arab populace of southern Iran. Tension grew along the border, and military skirmishes became common. In response to one Iranian infiltration, on December 14, 1979, Iraqi troops moved five kilometers into Iran before withdrawing under the umbrella of a massive artillery barrage that rained shells down all along Iran’s southern border. By the summer of 1980 Iran and Iraq seemed poised for war.
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Saddam Hussein viewed the Iranian Revolution as both an existential threat and an opportunity. To Saddam Hussein, Iran looked weak. The Iranian Revolution had consumed much of the officer corps of the shah’s once vaunted army and unleashed long-standing tensions between the Persian majority and Iran’s ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds in the north and the Baluchis in the south. The Iraqi leader wanted to abrogate the 1975 Algiers Accords with Iran; imposed by the shah, it had established the border between the two nations at the center of the Shatt al-Arab, giving Tehran
control of half of Baghdad’s only outlet to the Persian Gulf. Also, Saddam Hussein cast his eye on the Iranian province of Khuzestan, directly across the border near Basra. Under its sands were most of the Iranian oil reserves, and with a majority Arab population, Saddam Hussein calculated they would welcome his “liberation” of them from Persian control. The Iraqi records captured after the American invasion in 2003 are replete with such megalomaniac ideas. Saddam Hussein believed that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel abrogated Egypt’s leadership of the Arab people, and that this mantle now fell on Iraq’s shoulders. He envisioned himself taking up the mantle as the new leader of the Arab people. Saddam Hussein saw himself as the new Saladin, believing it was his destiny to unite the Arab people in a great crusade to retake Jerusalem with the ultimate goal of becoming the new caliphate.

In October 1979, one month before Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy, CIA officer George Cave flew back to Tehran carrying with him some highly sensitive intelligence that he hoped would impress the new Iranian government as to American sincerity. He met with the minister of foreign affairs, Ebrahim Yazdi, a pragmatic moderate whom Cave had known for a number of years.

“The Iraqis are planning to invade Iran,” Cave said simply. U.S. intelligence had strong evidence, including communications intercepts, and before leaving Washington Cave had seen satellite imagery of the Iraqi army rehearsing crossing the Shatt al-Arab. While he did not mention this visual evidence to Yazdi, he relayed the CIA’s anticipation of an Iraqi attack the following year.

Cave told Yazdi about a CIA-operated signals intelligence collection station located at Ilam, near the Iraq border and parallel to Baghdad. Beginning in 1973 and using the code word Ibex, the agency built this base at the request of the shah; its sole purpose had been to eavesdrop on Iraq. Four specially configured Iranian C-130 airplanes collected Iraqi communications, downloading the intercepts to the ground station, where they would be translated and analyzed. “The general who ran it is still in Iran,” Cave urged. “You need to reactivate it to find out what Iraq is up to.”
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But with a wave of the hand, Yazdi dismissed Cave’s advice. He replied in Farsi, “They wouldn’t dare!” Iran’s dismissal of the CIA’s warning could have proven fatal for the fledgling Islamic Republic—had their antagonist not been Saddam Hussein.

D
uring a news conference at the end of the first American war with Iraq, in 1991, the brusque, imposing General H. Norman Schwarzkopf famously said of Saddam Hussein’s military acumen: “He is neither a strategist nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that he’s a great military man.” Nothing reveals the truth of this statement more than Iraq’s dysfunctional attack on Iran.

On September 22, 1980, Iraq tried to duplicate the successful Israeli attack during the 1967 war by leading its ground invasion in its opening gambit with a massive air attack on Iran’s airfields and destroying Iran’s air force. But Iraq’s effort proved a poor imitation, and only three planes were destroyed on the ground. The Iranian pilots responded with surprising vigor. In a series of dogfights in the opening week of the war, their American training and equipment proved superior in the blue skies over southern Mesopotamia. Had it not been for the shortage of spare parts and pilots that soon curtailed the number of Iranian sorties, the Iraqi invasion might have ended before it began. A delusional Saddam Hussein suspected that Israeli pilots had really been conducting these effective attacks.

Nine Iraqi divisions lumbered across the border into central and southern Iran. It was an anti-blitzkrieg. Despite only sporadic Iranian resistance, the Iraqi army moved glacially. Frequently orders came from the high command in Baghdad straight down to division commanders, bypassing the intermediary corps headquarters. Operating in the dark, with no planned military objectives, and not wishing to question Saddam Hussein’s methods, senior Iraqi commanders did nothing. Units advanced a few kilometers and stopped; they dug in and awaited further orders from Baghdad.

Saddam’s timid attack permitted Iran to send reinforcements unhindered to the front and forced Iraq to fight in a wide-open, coverless wasteland. While it required weeks for the disorganized Iranian military to muster enough forces to blunt the Iraqi armor divisions, the halting pace of Baghdad’s invasion gave Tehran the luxury of time. The Iraqis succeeded in capturing only one important city in Khuzestan: the port city of Khorramshahr—now called Arabistan by Saddam Hussein—which fell after four weeks of house-to-house fighting at the cost of six thousand Iraqi casualties.

Iran saw the hand of the United States behind Iraq’s aggression. Just as Iranians believed that the shah had been admitted into the United States to
plot a countercoup rather than for humanitarian reasons, the prevailing view on the streets of Tehran was that Iraq would not have attacked without the permission of the American superpower. The two nations had colluded to overturn the revolution. Iranian leaders believed their suspicions were confirmed when news leaked that the last prime minister under the shah, Shapour Bakhtiar, had joined the Iraqis and entered the occupied part of Iran. “It was believed that Bakhtiar would seek to establish a separate government in the region, which would be recognized by the United States and others, igniting a civil war inside Iran.”
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While the United States frequently receives the credit or the blame for much of what transpires in the Middle East, Washington’s hidden hand was not behind the Iraqi attack. “The U.S. government was taken by surprise when the attack occurred in the magnitude that it did,” said Gary Sick, who worked the Persian Gulf desk for Brzezinski at the White House.
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Carter steadfastly refused Brzezinski’s urgings to consider more serious military options to pressure Khomeini to release the hostages.
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The last thing the White House wanted was a massive regional war and another crisis in the Middle East instigated by the paranoid megalomaniac ruler in Baghdad.
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