LESSONS FROM AN EARLIER GULF WAR: When US citizens talk about a “precedent” for fighting in the Persian Gulf region, they’re almost always talking about “Operation Desert Storm”. In that 10-week war in early 1991, the US-led– but also UN-authorized– international coalition succeeded in realizing the war’s central aim of reversing Iraq’s occupation of all of Kuwait and re-installing the Kuwaiti Emir to his throne.
What US citizens don’t talk about as much– and many members of them don’t even seem to know much about this history– are two earlier campaigns at and around the northern end of the Gulf that provide very sobering lessons about the present situation.
The first of those was the British campaign into Mesopotamia, 1914 – 1918. I wrote about that on JWN, Friday night.
The second was what I call the Very First Gulf War of the Modern Era , namely the war Saddam Hussein launched (with some help from the reagan administration) against neighboring Iran in 1980. That war lasted till 1988.
Well, I wrote about that war , too, Friday. Some slightly rambly musings. (As I’ve noted on JWN previously, I sort of “use” this blog like five-finger exercizes to get the old gray cells working.)
But in the course of writing that post/essay, I went back into the Christian Science Monitor electronic archive– which blessedly stretches back to January 1980– and picked out all the pieces I wrote back in September and October 1980 when I was covering the beginning of that war from the Iraqi side.
(My then-husband was, at the same time, covering it from the Iranian side.And our two infant kids were back at home with the nanny in Beirut, where a local militia decided to place a sniper on the roof of our apartment house… It was a totally stressful time.)
But back to Saddam’s war plans at the time. His idea was to launch an invasion of Iran with the express aim of bringing about regime change there. Since the regime in question was the Iranian revolutionaries, he thought he could count on at least a blind eye from the world’s big powers, all of whom hated Ayatollah Khomeini at the time.
And how was the Iraqi campaign– which the lackey media in Baghdad all compared to a famous battle in Islamic history called the Battle of Qadissiyeh– supposed to achieve regime change? Why, it would sow distrust of the Ayatollahs’ regime among the Iranian masses. And concurrently with the launch of the Iraqi military campaign, eager Iranian exile politician Shahpour Bakhtiar had assured the Iraqis– from his home in so-distant Paris– that he just “knew” that Iranians of all tribes, classes, and subdivions would almost immediately rise up against Khomeini and overthrow him…
I think the war started on the night of September 22-23, 1980. My first file to the CSM from Baghdad was in the September 25 edition of the paper. (It was not particularly insightful or distinguished. More the journalistic equivalent of a postcard home: “Look! I got here!”)
In the paper of September 29, my reporting was becoming a bit more substantive:
The air raid sirens started their ululating screech at 9:20 in the morning this Sunday. The heavy traffic that was building up along the city’s wide thoroughfares and its six bridges across the twisting Tigris River was halted almost in its tracks.
Civil defense units steered cars into side streets and hurried their passengers into doorways and underground shelters. Barely half an hour later the single note of the “all clear” galvanized the busy city back into life.
Despite frequent such air raid warnings — and false alarms — spirits remain high, and enthusiasm for the war effort against Iran remains undimmed. The enthusiasm is fanned by a daily diet of motivational material supplied by the state-controlled media. Television has a round-the-clock program of military documentaries… supplemented increasingly in recent days by the national TV’s own films of Iraqi infantry and tank units continually advancing into Iranian territory, mainly over reddish-brown sand dunes…
By October 1, the atmosphere seemed already to have changed:
Leaders of the ruling Baath Party here have changed their tactics in their confrontation with neighboring Iran. But their goal appears to be the same: the speedy downfall of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian regime.
The militant statements and military aggressiveness evident here in the past week have been replaced by a new, more moderate image and a slackening of the military effort… The Iraqi armored and infantry [forces] who last week thrust 35 miles into Iranian territory northeast of here are this week standing by, with some apparently being deployed back from the combat areas.
In that piece, I reported on a press conference given by Foreign Minister Saadoun Hammadi, which I described as clearly showing, “a sensitivity to the many other interests being damaged by the continued fighting — most spectacularly, his [previous] promise that Iraq would try to restore, and perhaps even to increase, former levels of oil output after the fighting ends.”
I added that similar signs of “senisitivity” had also been shown by President Saddam Hussein in a televised midnight address to the nation: ‘We have no dispute with the peoples of Iran,’ President Saddam Hussein promised to a slightly bemused Iraqi audience fed hitherto on a daily TV diet of military fervor. We wish all the peoples of Iran well,” the President continued…
Most significantly, I reported that within hours after that, Saddam announced he was ready for a ceasfire-in-place, and would welcome a diplomatic intervention by the UN to negotiate an end to the conflict.
At the time, I reported that my pro-regime contacts in Baghdad were giving the spin that this was a fiendishly clever move by Saddam to try to hoist Khomeini on the petard of his own well-known inflexibility:
They seem to be banking on the Ayatollah’s own amply demonstrated inflexibility to aid them in the next stage of the game. With Saddam Hussein appearing almost angelically moderate in comparison, he is hoping to line up extra diplomatic and international pressure to bear against the ayatollahs of Iran.
From today’s viewpoint it is hard to tell whether Saddam’s request for a ceasfire was actually a ploy, or whether it was the logical consequence of a realization that may well have started to sink in for his people by then: namely, that there was not going to be any massive anti-regime uprising inside Iran.
Be that as it may, what seems important to note as of today is that Khomeini did indeed prove to be inflexible. He did not accede to Saddam’s request for a ceasefire-in-place. (Under international law, he was in no way obliged to do so. The Iraqi forces were, after all, still occupying great chunks of his country?) Instead, the Iranian leadership sent human waves of ill-trained young men into the front-line and hurled them against the Iraqi occupiers…
It took a further eight years of devastating warfare, and the lives of around a million people both sides of the line, before that war was brought to an end.
In my post yesterday, I was focusing mainly on the role the Reagan administration played, giving strategically-timed amounts of help to each of those national leaderships in an evidently successful attempt to keep the fires of conflict stoked and to keep both nations trapped in chronic warfare. And on Bombs-Away Don’s particular role in all that.
Today, I want to focus more on that terrible strategic miscalculation Saddam made, in september 1980, when he launched the war in the confident expectation that it would be accompanied by a mass, anti-regime uprising inside Iran.
I don’t think I need to belabor this particular point for you, my alert readers from all over the world…
So I think I’ll just end up with some other excerpts from my reporting from that war. The first was reported from Qasr e-Shirin, an Iraqi-occupied Iranian-Kurdish town northeast of Baghdad. (It also appeared in the October 1, 1980, edition of the paper. But my surmise is that I’d filed it a day earlier than the piece I cite above.)
There are occasional glimpses of the remaining residents of the town, though many have fled back farther into Iranian territory. Half a dozen women wearing printed jackets over basically dark-colored robes are in deep discussion with one tank crew. The women have large (and empty) food pans in their hands.
“You should have come here yesterday,” says one of the Iraqi officers. “We organized a general distribution of foodstuffs here in the main square, and the townspeople formed a queue that long.” He waved expansively.
“You see, before the Iraqi Army came here three days ago, the town was cut off from supplies. And the Khomeini agents who were here didn’t organize any help for the citizens.
“Only the Iraqi Army has helped them,” he summed up. “Though, of course, we are not here to stay. It was just to bring Khomeini to his senses that we came here.”
And then here, from a piece in the October 6 edition of the paper titled, “Across the river, world’s largest oil refinery lies in smoldering ruins.” This piece was cutely datelined from Siba, a place slightly southest of Basra that has the twin distinction of (1) being the reputed site of the Garden of Eden, and (2) having the un-Edenic distinction of lying right across the narrow Shatt al-Arab waterway from the huge Iranian refinery complex at Abadan.
At his headquarters back about a mile from the riverside front line, the volubly friendly infantry captain considered things were “going well.”
We ate lunch with him there, served by khaki-clad, pistol-toting girl volunteers. “We have right on our side, so we’re bound to win,” the captain said, as he skillfully dodged questions about actual military dispositions.
The situation, as I could ascertain it, was that the Iraqis had virtually surrounded Abadan and nearby Khorramshahr, cutting off at least one of the roads linking them with Ahvaz to the north.
But the Iraqis had not yet actually penetrated into the two key riverside cities. They were prevented by the reportedly fanatical resistance of Iranian troops and irregulars defending them, as well as by a reluctance to cause excessive harm to the cities’ considerable ethnic Arab populations.
Well, I’m sure no-one needs to work very hard to discover the numerous parallels between the Iraqis’ situation then, in their campaign against Iran, and the US leadership’s situation today, in its campaign against Iraq.
It is all so, so tragic, and so unnecessary.
I, by the way, am going to go to a store this afternoon to buy some yellow ribbon to put on the anti-war signs in our front yard. In the US, displaying yellow ribbons signifies a concern for troops serving in dangerous places overseas. I hope that mine, as attached to my anti-war yard signs, will send a loud message to the effect of: “Support our troops! Bring them home NOW!”