The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (67 page)

The renewed sense of urgency to resolve the conflict led to the development of a resolution that finally moved away from the bias in favour of Iraq that had so marked previous texts. The principal disagreement was on the question of enforcement. Although clothed in the language of collective security and the need to give Security Council resolutions ‘teeth’, the US insistence that sanctions should be imposed on the party that did not sign up to the ceasefire resolution seemed too obviously directed against Iran (Iraq had been willing to accept a ceasefire since 1982). China and the USSR objected to this aspect of the resolution, as did the UK. In these circumstances, the US had to abandon its plan for sanctions in the event of non-compliance and the draft was put to the remaining ten members of the Security Council – some of whom felt understandably aggrieved that they had been excluded from the process of discussion.

Nevertheless, the resolution was passed unanimously on 20 July 1987. Resolution 598 not only called for a ceasefire and a withdrawal of forces to the internationally recognized boundaries, but also requested the Secretary-General to ‘explore, in consultation with Iran and Iraq, the question of entrusting an impartial body with inquiring into responsibility for the conflict’, and promised international assistance for reconstruction efforts. The Iraqi government rapidly accepted the resolution. For their part, the Iranian authorities were dismissive of this latest move, but they did not reject it outright since it embodied some of Iran’s long-standing demands. They also hinted that if the investigation into responsibility for the war proceeded as Iran hoped, then the demand for the overthrow of the Ba‘thist regime and the payment of war reparations might be ‘postponed’. However, there were many in Iran’s political and military leadership who were deeply suspicious of the UN Security Council – and of the speed with which Iraq accepted the resolution – and who still believed that Iran could achieve all its goals by force of arms.
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It was this faction which was weakened by the events of 1988. The Secretary-General had kept the resolution before both Iran and Iraq, focusing on the practicalities and maintaining some kind of process – and waiting for the moment when Iran, as well as Iraq, would come to accept it as the basis of a ceasefire. This only came about as a result of the military reverses suffered by Iran in the first half of 1988, both on the land front and in the waters of the Gulf. It was this, combined with the fear of escalation in the ‘war of the cities’ and of full-scale US military involvement which strengthened the hand of those in Tehran who believed that Resolution 598 offered the best chance of ending the war before the tide turned irreversibly against Iran.

Iraq tried to get the UN to agree to direct negotiations between Iran and Iraq prior to a ceasefire, but the Security Council supported the Iranian minister of foreign affairs, Ali Akbar Velayati, in his rejection of this attempt to tamper with the resolution. Iraq dropped its demand. Iran then agreed to direct negotiations once the ceasefire was in place, indicating its acceptance of the resolution. The Security Council approved the plan for its implementation and the Secretary-General declared that the ceasefire would come into effect on 20 August 1988, once a UN observer force was in placed.
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The war was finally over. Awkward and protracted negotiations ensued, lasting for a couple of years until they were displaced by the Security Council’s preoccupation with Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. However, the ceasefire held and up to that point UNIIMOG (UN Iran–Iraq Military Observer Group) successfully carried out its mission.

The record of the UN Security Council during the Iran–Iraq war is not a very commendable one, but it was characteristic of the era and possibly of the system. It was also to a great extent a function of the particular dislike and suspicion with which the revolutionary regime in Iran was regarded by the major world powers. They, the ‘inner Council’ of the Permanent Five members, determined the action, or inaction of the Council, not the Council as a whole. Their preoccupations with their own national interests shaped their attitudes to the belligerents, negating ideas of collective security or even support for the principles on which the UN was founded. Because of Iran’s threatened revisionism at the time, and because of vested interests in Iraq and in Iraq’s Arab allies, the Council was consistently biased against Iran. This was compounded by the peculiarly intimate and antagonistic relationship between the US and Iranian governments.

The consequences were visible from the very outbreak of war, through the eight years of its course, during which Iraq consistently violated the laws of war, but was rarely identified as the transgressor, let alone punished. This had more to do with the great powers’ hostility to Iran, than to any Cold War logic. It was only when Iran began to fight back that the UN Security Council bestirred itself. However, it was then that the lingering inertia and mutual suspicions of the Cold War precluded collective action other than the passing of a series of resolutions which may have given heart to Iraq, but otherwise had no impact on the belligerents.

Instead, the Permanent Five on the Security Council had joined the rush to supply war materiel to the belligerents, seeing it as a strategic, or simply as an economic opportunity, as did the fifty or so members of the UN which were involved in selling such materiel to Iran and Iraq during the war. Precisely because of this and because of the inaction of the Security Council, Iran and Iraq geared their strategies to winning a military victory, either through outright defeat of the enemy on the battlefield or through attrition. To achieve this end, all means were possible. Their use only depended on the effect they had on the other side and their capacity to sustain the effort. It was thus a war, the course and outcome of which was determined, as wars have been throughout history, by the crude and violent measure of the capacity of one side to inflict unsustainable death and destruction on the other.

Throughout the eight years of the war, there was ample evidence in the press and on television of the scale and the brutality of a war fought out largely by the infantry of both sides, in a manner reminiscent of the Western Front in Europe during the First World War. One sobering measure of the scale of the conflict, which is also an indication of the reticence of both the Iranian and Iraqi governments to admit to the true human cost of the war, is that there is still no agreed figure for the numbers of those killed and maimed during those years. On the Iranian side, estimates of the dead range from 300,000 to 500,000, with a further 700,000 maimed and wounded. On the Iraqi side, the parallel figures are 100,000 to 200,000 dead and some 300,000 wounded.

It will probably never be possible to establish with any great degree of accuracy the terrible human toll of this war in which both countries were profligate with the lives of their soldiers, sacrificed to placate the political ambitions of their leaders.
The ‘human wave’ attacks launched by the Iranian high command could cost 15,000 lives in a single day, as lightly armed or even unarmed
basij
(‘volunteers’) many of them barely into their teens, were sent across minefields to face the guns and the poison gas of the Iraqis. For his part, the Iraqi leader had no compunction about sacrificing whole regiments, as in the attempt to recapture the al-Faw peninsula in 1986, if it could restore his prestige. Away from the main battlefront, the human misery of the war continued, with some two-and-a-half million refugees fleeing from the shattered cities of southern Iran and of Basra, shipping destroyed and sailors killed in the waters of the Gulf, and civilian casualties mounting in the bombardments that erupted periodically throughout the war. Meanwhile, some 80,000 Iraqis were led away into captivity, matched by, although far outnumbering the 10,000 Iranian POWs in Iraq. This war was the most costly in human terms, the most destructive, and the most financially ruinous in the history of the modern Middle East.

Yet far from acting to bring it to a speedy end through mediation and diplomacy, the Security Council and its Permanent Five members played their part in reinforcing the deadly logic of war, whereby the Iranian leadership was finally obliged to recognize that Iran could no longer sustain the kind of damage being inflicted on its forces and its people. There is little doubt that the massive military re-supply of Iraq, the failure to prevent Iraq from using chemical weapons, from bombarding Iranian cities, or from crippling its oil trade, as well as the active participation of the US in assisting the Iraqi war effort, did indeed push Iran into accepting a ceasefire in 1988. But it was at a terrible cost in terms of human lives, and in the licence it seemed to grant to Saddam Hussein to use military force as an instrument of Iraqi policy, for which the region was to pay the price during the following fifteen years. Of equal importance for the future, the Security Council’s behaviour during the war coloured Iranian perceptions of its reliability and worth. Their understandable mistrust of it as a body concerned with collective security inevitably encouraged those in Iran who had long insisted that the country should rely on its own resources for deterrence and for defence, free of international supervision or restraint.

JAMES COCKAYNE
DAVID M. MALONE

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wars have had more lasting impact on the Security Council’s standing than those involving Iraq since 1980.
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To think of the 1991 and 2003 wars in Iraq as distinct may be misleading: these campaigns – and all that transpired in the period between – are better considered as one long war, waged not only militarily, but also with regulatory tools such as economic sanctions and weapons inspections.

For many years, the legal-regulatory approach centred on ‘sanctions plus inspections’ seemed to provide a viable alternative to military action against Iraq. But by 1995/1996, Security Council strategy on Iraq was adrift. Coincident with a creeping resort to unilateral military action, support for sanctions slowly frayed. After the events of 9/11, influential voices in Washington sought to deal with Iraq in a manner that would deter others from challenging American power. Broad coalition-building became less of a priority, marginalizing the utility of the UN for Washington and precipitating US and UK military action without explicit Council authorization in March 2003.

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in many ways flowed from Iraq’s bloody but inconclusive war with Iran. Saddam Hussein needed to deliver rewards to his long-suffering population. The small emirate of Kuwait was an obvious prize, offering both oil and improved access to the Persian Gulf. Long-simmering border disputes provided the pretext, while Kuwait’s overproduction of oil, depressing prices, raised the stakes further.

Perhaps encouraged by signals from the US that it had ‘no opinion’ on the Kuwait-Iraq border dispute, and misled by the Security Council’s timid response to his war with Iran, Hussein determined forcibly to annex Kuwait.
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He did not foresee the unified response this provoked from the Council, itself a product of perestroika in the Soviet Union and an increasingly cooperative relationship amongst the five Permanent Members (P5). Nor did he anticipate the assembly of a somewhat improbable diplomatic coalition in opposition to the invasion, bringing together Western countries, Arabs, Israel, both superpowers, and a wide array of members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). But Council acquiescence in the Iraqi invasion would have implied a profound threat to the sovereignty of many a small country. Mobilized by the US and UK, the Council acted within hours of the invasion, adopting Resolution 660 on 2 August 1990, demanding Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal.
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American-Soviet cooperation during the crisis was unprecedented, signalling for US Secretary of State James Baker that ‘a half-century after it began… the Cold War breathed its last.’
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On 6 August the Council adopted Resolution 661, only the third embargo ever imposed by the Security Council (after Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977). On 7 August, President Bush ordered 200,000 troops to the Persian Gulf for Operation Desert Shield, designed to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi aggression. The presence of Western troops in Saudi Arabia split Arab opinion, although twelve of twenty-one members of the Arab League voted on 9 August to support the UN sanctions and to provide troops for an all-Arab force in Saudi Arabia.
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Indeed, despite initial concerns within the region about US-led military action providing a basis for a continued US military presence, ultimately thirty-four countries formally joined the diplomatic coalition. Together, these countries provided
roughly 25 per cent of the troops and footed approximately 75 per cent of the total bill for the campaign of roughly US $70 billion, with the US supplying the rest. Particularly significant were the financial and troop contributions of Arab states: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf states contributed roughly US $36 billion; and Arab states were seven of the top ten troop-contributing states.
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The backing of many of these states apparently derived from concern at the prospect of Iraqi regional military hegemony, particularly if Hussein was left unchecked and managed to add the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia to those he had annexed in Kuwait. But Washington’s promises of significant economic assistance, including extensive debt forgiveness, clearly also helped.

This coalition strategy of President George H.W. Bush – who had previously served as US Ambassador to the UN – was rooted in the idea that collective action through the UN would allow burden-sharing and risk mitigation: