Iran-Iraq War

Fought between September 1980 and August 1988, with prisoners returned as late as 2003, the Iran-Iraq War was one of the longer, and certainly bloodier, of modern wars. Much of the conflict was a static stalemate reminiscent of the trench warfare of the First World War. Iraq, which had invaded Iran over a territorial dispute, suddenly asked for peace in 1988, in what may well have been a plan by Saddam Hussein to shift his attention to became the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, starting the Gulf War. Several other disputes, including Islamic sectarian conflict and freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, led to parallel fighting.

A substantial number of countries supplied and advised Iran, Iraq, or, in a number of cases, both, although there were no significant units from other countries directly involved in the fighting between Iran and Iraq. Starting in 1984, there was fighting between Iran and the U.S. and some of its allies, but that was more of a parallel conflict, often called the Tanker War.

Many countries in the West had regarded Iran, and to a lesser extent Iraq, as a buffer against Soviet expansion. The rich oil reserves of both countries also was important to the major powers. These priorities had created some important background for regional tensions, such as Operation Ajax, a U.S. and British covert operation that deposed the popular, if left-leaning, government of Mohammed Mossadegh, and restored the Pahlavi Dynasty. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was aggressively Westernizing Iran, offending a good deal of conservative Shi'ite Muslim opinion, and governing with the assistance of an aggressive secret police apparatus.

Contributing to the attitudes of other countries was the Iranian Islamic Revolution that deposed the Shah. In reaction to the U.S. giving sanctuary and hospitalization to the Shah, members of the loosely organized revolutionary forces. This led to the 1979 Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy, with diplomats held hostage until Ronald Reagan took office. The seizure caused intense friction between the U.S. and Iran.

Iraq invades Iran

Saddam Hussein, ostensibly a Sunni Muslim, claimed to have started the war to block the export of Shi'ite radical Islam by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and also to gain control of the Shatt al-Arab, a relatively narrow body of water that provides sea access to Iraq's main port of Basra. While Iraq, at first, pushed back Iranian troops after the September 22, 1980 invasion. By March 1981, however, the Iraqi momentum had stalled.

After the situation was stalemated, there were various attempts to broker a settlement. Saudi Arabia offered to pay reparations to Iran and guarantee the removal of Iraqi troops, but Khomeini rejected that proposal.

The military balance

Indeed, the Iranians, in the view of military analysts, were doing surprisingly well against one of the Arab world's strongest military forces (250,000). Since 1973, using oil revenues that now amount to $30 billion annually, the Iraqis had spent $8 billion to $9 billion on military hardware, most of it purchased from the Soviet Union. The shopping list included more than 330 MiG, Sukhoi and Tupolev fighters and bombers, along with tanks ranging from the standard T-62 model to the T-12, which is considered one of the world's best.

To face this panoply of forces, Iran threw in units and equipment diminished by revolutionary confusion and the decimation of the military's top echelons, but still formidable in regional terms. Its air force included 445 combat planes, among them not only 188 Phantom F-4s and 166 F-5s but also 77 advanced F-14 interceptors.

The principal problems with the planes as well as with the Iranian navy and ground forces: lack of maintenance and spare parts. According to Western analysts, only eight of the F-14s were airworthy and one-third of the army's 875 British-built Chieftain tanks were no longer serviceable. Army manpower was down from about 240,000 under the Shah to an estimated 180,000 as a result of desertions and purges;

250 generals had been replaced by inexperienced officers or by military-minded mullahs. Said a Pentagon expert: "In order to move full steam into a war like the one where they now find themselves, the Iranians should have been spit polishing, shining and checking that machinery day by day. Apparently a lot of it has just been sitting there since the revolution."

Motivation

The current governments of Iran and Iraq detested one another, over a wide range of issues.

Ethnic and theological

Iranians are fairly monolithic, of Persian culture, Shi'ite Islamic religion, and speaking Farsi. While it was conquered many times, Iran was relatively homogeneous, and had a tradition of absorbing its conquerors.

Remember that modern Iraq was a British invention, joining three Ottoman provinces. Iraqis are primarily of Arab ethnicity, speaking Arabic, with, in the North, a substantial Kurdish minority speaking a significantly changed dialect of Farsi. Arabs of Sunni Islamic religion dominated Iraq, especially from Saddam's home area of Tikrit. The classic Mesopotamian civilization was most related to these Sunni in central Iraq, near what has been called the cradle of civilization, the joining of the Tigris and Euphrates River in the southeast Baghdad area.

In the south of Iraq, the majority of the population are Shi'ite Muslims, but ethnically Arab rather than their coreligionists in Iran. It was not a given that Southern Iraq was automatically allied with Iran.

Ideological issues

There are few who would suggest that Saddam was an altruist, purely interested in the greatest good for the greatest number. Nevertheless, he had come to prominence through the Ba'ath Party, a relatively secular organization with strong nationalism and anticolonialism. An Islamist movement that wanted to make no distinction between civil government and religion would be threatening to a Ba'ath position.

Before the takeover by Shi'ite fundamentalists, Iraq had a working relationship with the unpopular Shah, Reza Shah Pahlavi

Once Khomeini was in control, "The threat of war had hung in the air since spring, when border clashes began to intensify and spread along the 760-mile frontier between the two countries. Traditional enemies, divided by ethnic and ideological differences, Iraq and Iran had come to a temporary accommodation in 1975 when Saddam, then Vice President, and the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi announced a frontier agreement during an OPEC summit in Algiers. The centerpiece of the accord was a change in the status of the Shatt al Arab, long a source of friction between the two nations. Under the Algiers agreement, the border was moved from the Iranian side of the disputed waterway to the middle of the estuary; in return, the Shah agreed to stop his support for Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq who had been battling the Baghdad government with increasing success. According to the Iraqis, the Shah also promised to return a parcel of disputed territory around Musian.

The agreement held as long as the Shah lived. Though Baghdad never forgot its Shatt al Arab concession, though it resented the Shah's self-appointed role as the policeman of the gulf and worried about Iran's steadily growing military strength, it reaped instant benefit from the accord. Without the Shah's support, the Kurdish rebellion fizzled, allowing Iraq to concentrate its oil resources on fast-paced economic development and to emerge as a military power. But the squabble was renewed with the Shah's demise, the Iranian revolution and the advent of the Khomeini era. Khomeini had spent 14 years in exile in Iraq during the Shah's reign, but never concealed his dislike for the Iraqi reqime. Now, stressing old cultural and religious divisions, Tehran accused the Iraqis of fomenting unrest among the predominantly Arab population of Iran's oil-rich Khuzistan province, and called on Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, the majority in the country, to overthrow the Saddam government, which is dominated by Sunnis. Iraq in turn demanded amendment of the Algiers agreement. It also insisted on the return to "Arab" sovereignty of three small strategic islands—Abu Musa, Greater and Lesser Tunb—at the Strait of Hormuz that had been occupied by the Shah's forces in 1971. Iran did not respond.

Personalities

Saddam saw himself in a heroic mold, based not only on his public presentations, but on some of his personal effects discovered after the 2003 capture of his household. Portraits of him in heroic roles were all over Iraq, but there were such things as his having commissioned portraits of himself by fantasy artists.

While there is no question that there was an intense focus on Khomeini the man in the Islamic Resolution of Iran, he had gained that stature by defiance of the Pahlavi government, his portraying the West as responsible for many of Iran's troubles, and for a drive to a fundamentalist version of Shi'a Islam, with strong resistance to what was seen as western cultural imperialism.

The Iranians were inspired by Khomeini, who railed against Iraq's "godless" rulers, dismissing them as pawns of "the great Satan." Saddam was an "infidel guilty of blasphemy." What particularly galled the Iranians was that in the wake of the revolution, Iraq had given sanctuary to a force of some 3,000 Iranian soldiers now known as the Iran Liberation Army and gathered by General Ghoylam Ali Ovisi, 59, the former military commander of Tehran. The I.L.A. was not involved in last week's fighting but was reportedly ready to move into Iran behind the Iraqis

Beliefs about a short war

Given the limited military capabilities of the combatants, the war did not appear likely to be a prolonged one, although Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini pledged to fight until "the government of heathens in Iraq topples." Mediation efforts by the U.N. were rebuffed, but the Conference of Islamic Nations dispatched a "goodwill mission" consisting of Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq and Tunisia's Habib Chatti, the organization's secretary-general, to the combatant capitals. No matter how long the struggle continued or how soon it ended, the shock waves had already reached out from the gulf.

Shatt al-Arab issues

As is common in the Middle East, there was an immediate issue of water rights. Beyond that, however, the Shatt al-Arab is a relatively narrow body of water that provided Iraq's main port, Basra, with access to the Persian Gulf. Especially with anti-shipping missiles, armed speedboats, and other hard-to-detect, hard-to-stop fast weapons, Iran was in a position to block shipping, not only petroleum exports but all Iraqi trade dependent on sea transportation.

Oil

pproximately 40% of the non-Communist world's oil and is a cockpit of superpower rivalry. "Whether it has been declared or not," said Iraqi Defense Minister Adnan Khairallah early on, "it is in fact war." The struggle escalated quickly and as it did, spread to key oil facilities on both sides—Basra, Kirkuk and Mosul in Iraq, Abadan and Kharg island in Iran. With thick black smoke pluming from bombed tank farms and refineries, petroleum-consuming nations around the globe anxiously calculated and then recalculated the implications. Said one U.S. official in tallying up the damage: "Once oil installations became fair game, the stakes became much higher for everyone."

Within days of the outbreak of heavy fighting, oil shipments from Iraq and Iran were suspended, including crude deliveries through Iraq's pipelines to the Mediterranean. Between them, the two nations export just over 3 million bbl. per day, around 20% of gulf crude shipments, an amount that would not necessarily be critical at a time of a global oil glut. But there was the dire possibility that the Strait of Hormuz, 30 miles wide at its narrowest point, at the southern end of the gulf, might be closed because of the hostilities. Halting the flow of the supertankers that steam through the passage would have a devastating ripple effect (see following story) by preventing the shipment of oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the smaller gulf states. That kind of drop in world supplies would be intolerable.

Iraq attacks

The subsequent Gulf War, in part, may have been attractive to Saddam because control of the port of Kuwait gave a more defensible access to the sea.

On Sept. 17, apparently convinced that Iran's revolutionary convulsions had left the country divided and its military forces weak, Saddam made his move. Before Iraq's National Assembly he declared the Algiers agreement "null and void." Five days later full-scale fighting broke out.

For the Iranians and Iraqis living along the Iran-Iraq frontier, the war hardly came as a surprise. For months they had lived with increasingly sharp border battles, including artillery bombardments and occasional air raids as Iraq stepped up its drive to regain control of the Shatt and of the Musian region. The difference last week was the range and intensity of the fighting and the commitment of forces on both sides.

Typically for modern wars, and this was the first modern war around the Gulf

The deepest Iraqi raid was against Mehrabad Airport, a civilian and military base four miles west of Teheran. While Iraq apparently wanted to destroy the Iranian air force on the ground, it failed

Scarcely two hours after the attack, U.S.-made Iranian Phantoms were streaking toward two Iraqi bases in the Basra area. Then, beginning at dawn on Tuesday, the Iranian air force launched strikes against at least 16 different targets in Iraq. A principal one was Baghdad, the capital, as well as the military garrisons in the sprawling city of 2.8 million people along the banks of the Tigris River. Iranian planes also attacked the northern oil cities of Mosul, Kirkuk and Erbil. Iraqi gunners sent up barrages of antiaircraft fire and ground-to-air missiles that lit up the skies and brought down a reported 67 Iranian planes.

Baghdad residents took the attacks calmly. The Baghdad media featured propaganda of Iranian attacks on civilians.

On day two, the war took a more ominous turn: it singled out oil, the mainstay of both countries' economies. Iranian naval vessels shelled oil terminals at Fao island, and the Phantoms returned to bomb and rocket Basra's vast new petrochemical complex. Twenty-nine people were killed in that raid, some of them Britons, Americans and other foreign workers among a labor force of thousands. The foreigners and their families fled in cars and buses to the Kuwait border 15 miles away. "It all happened so fast," said Briton Roger Elliott. "I was just sitting there getting my truck started when I looked up and saw these jets screaming towards me. The bombs exploded 50 yards away and I could feel the skin on my face being peeled off by the concussion."

At about the same time the Iraqis sent their bombers against Iranian oil facilities across the Shatt al Arab at Abadan and farther south against Kharg island, where 14 tankers at a time can load crude. At Abadan, one of the biggest refineries in the world (587,000 bbl.-per-day capacity) and the principal source of fuel for Iran's domestic needs, flames and smoke shot skyward. "There are going to be a lot of cold Iranians this winter as a result," said a U.S. diplomat monitoring the fighting. In Tehran, the government decreed that no gasoline would be sold to private motorists for at least a week.

Meantime, Iraqi troops and armor crossed the frontier in force. The invaders mounted a multipronged drive aimed at Abadan, the nearby port of Khorramshahr, Ahwaz and Dezful, a vital pumping station on the Abadan-Tehran pipeline, and to the north around Kermanshah. The heaviest fighting, reported TIME Correspondent William Drozdiak, was around Khorramshahr, which was being pounded from three sides by Iraqi tank and artillery fire. Making his way through dust clouds raised by the armor, Drozdiak bumped into an Iraqi general, who gave him an impromptu briefing: "There is terrible fighting around Khorramshahr. Unfortunately we are not yet in control of the city."

Iran admitted the loss of five border posts in the early fighting. But as the week went on, the Iranian defenses hardened and the Iraqis found themselves pressed to maintain their salients.

While the Iraqi forces seemed better organized, Iran had a larger reserve of personnel, and religious fervor to fight Iraq was much stronger than in the Baa'th attack on Iran. ROpposition parties like the left-wing Socialist People's Mujahidin and the Marxist People's Fedayan were captured by the patriotic fever and backed the war effort of President Abolhassan Banisadr's government. Even Reza Pahlavi, 19, the Shah's oldest son, who is studying at the American University in Cairo, volunteered his services from abroad as a fighter pilot. .

As the war revved up, Tehran declared an embargo on Iraqi harbors and oil facilities like Basra and proclaimed Iranian territorial waters a "war zone." Ships passing through Hormuz were advised by Iranian navy craft to avoid Iraqi ports. While for the most part the traffic—and the oil—kept flowing, some supertanker captains hove to. Off Kuwait, a fleet of the giant ships dropped anchor, waiting for the war to end.

Particularly at the outset, the war was largely shut off from the outside world, which could only guess at the ferocity of battle by communiques issued by both sides. By the fifth day, for instance, the Iraqis claimed to have shot down no fewer than 158 Iranian planes, about as many, experts figured, as the Iranians would have been able to get into the air. Propaganda was rife on either side. Iraqi television carried bulletins on the fighting, with commentaries on what "our heroic forces" had done to "the racist Persian enemy." The Iranian media talked of Saddam Hussein's "collusion with Israel." Apparently counting on a quick and glorious kill, Saddam's government initially treated the war as a kind of media event, issuing visas for 300 foreign newsmen and busing many of them to Baghdad from Jordan, across 500 miles of desert.

By week's end Baghdad was claiming the recapture of the land the Iraqis consider theirs. The rail line from Iran's southwest oil towns to Tehran was said to have been cut by Iraqi forces, and the border towns of Khorramshahr and Abadan, where the refinery was still burning days after the first bombardment, remained besieged. Western observers assumed that the Iraqi objectives were limited and doubted that they would try to advance much farther. The Iraqi army does not have the logistics to support a campaign deep in enemy territory. And if it tried to push toward Tehran, it would encounter the forbidding 12,000-ft. Zagros Mountains. Moreover, the Iranians were fighting so grittily that even skeptics in Tehran were impressed. Said a retired senior officer: "The soldiers were humiliated by the revolution and then by the revolutionaries. What the hell are they righting so ferociously for?"

Air

"Iraqi pilots flying Soviet-built MiGs headed eastward for bombing raids on military targets and oil facilities across the Iranian border, including the Tigris-Euphrates estuary known as Shatt al Arab. Caught by surprise at first, the Iranians responded with attacks of their own, sending American-made Phantom F-4 fighter-bombers against Iraqi cities and installations."

IIAF had less actual combat experience having only fired in anger during periodic border problems with Iraq . More recently, however, they had used tactical airpower along with ground forces to assist the sultan of Oman in counterinsurgency operations in Dhofar, the western portion of Oman. In contrast, the IQAF had experienced combat operations during wars with Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973 . It had also operated extensively during the long running Kurdish insurgency that ended in 1975 . And, of course, ithad also engaged in periodic attacks along the Iranian border. The Arabs, most notably the frontline states-Egypt, Syria,andJordan-have had 30 years of lessons about airpower drilled into them by theirexperience against Israel . As this study will later show, some of these lessons also filtered into Iraqi and Iranian thinking

Naval

. In the Shatt and in the northern gulf, naval craft skirmished and bombarded shore installations.

Ground

Iraqi armor and infantry punched across 500 miles of desert front at many points, surrounding two key Iranian cities but running into stubborn resistance and counterattacks.

Iraq also is reported to have 1,000 huge tank transporters, acquired as a result of bitter experience. Rushing to support Syria and Egypt in the 1973 war against Israel, Baghdad dispatched its tank force on the long trek through Jordan and Syria to the Golan Heights, only to discover that most of the tanks had shattered treads and burned-out engines by the time they arrived. This time the tanks were ready to ride to battle on transporters.

External effects

Superpowers

The gulf war pitted not just Iraq against Iran but, on the sidelines, the U.S. against the U.S.S.R. Both superpowers have strategic interests in the area; neither will easily stand by if the other should make political gains there. U

Going back to the early days of the Republic, freedom of navigation has been a core issue of U.S. policy. President Jimmy Carter, in 1979, committed to keeeping open the Strait of Hormuz. Since the U.S. has little influence on Iraq or Iran, keeping the waterway open might require force, unless an effective coalition could be built. The Soviets saw this as a potential proxy fight.

Though neither Iraq nor Iran made any attempt last week to interfere with shipping through the strait, the Soviets talked about U.S. "preparations for armed interference in the Persian Gulf," obviously concerned that, in case of a blockade, the U.S. might resort to military action. In Washington, officials expressed fears that if the conflict dragged on, the Soviets, who are Iraq's main armorers and who share a 1,250-mile border with Iran, would have a built-in advantage in case of internal complications in either country.

Iranian counteroffensive

On 13 July, Iran opened a major counteroffensive.

Offensives and counteroffensives

Between January 1985 and February 1986, both sides launched offensives, all of which ground to a halt.

Tanker War

Iran and Iraq both saw oil revenue as affecting the other side's ability to fund its war, and began acting to deny such revenues. This involved attacks on third-country shipping and on ports containing third-country ships.

Essentially independently of the main fighting, Iran was increasingly involved with the U.S. and allies such as Kuwait. The period was rife with bad judgment, such as the U.S. shooting down a misidentified Iranian civilian airliner, Iran Air flight 655 and the Iraqis attacking a patrolling U.S. frigate, U.S.S. Stark

War of the Cities

Each side then tried to break the morale of the others by attacks on cities, primarily by wildly inaccurate SCUD ballistic missiles and derivatives, but also with small raids by aircraft. As in WWII, this caused misery but was indecisive.