GEOPOLITICS OF THE GULF 101:

GEOPOLITICS OF THE GULF 101: Why are so many Iranians inside and outside the regime taking evident satisfaction at the imbroglio to their west? Had it occurred to anyone in the present US administration that maybe, just maybe, there’s a history there?
Here’s some of what AP is reporting out of Teheran today:
“Hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrated, denouncing both ‘Bush’s barbarism’ and ‘Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship’… Demonstrators pelted the British Embassy in Tehran with stones, breaking windows and shouting for the embassy to be closed… The cleric who delivered the Friday sermon that was broadcast on Iranian television, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, said: ‘Will bombs and the use of force bring democracy and freedom? It definitely will not.’ The worshippers responded with shouts of ‘Death to America!’ and ‘Death to Britain!”
So okay, imagine you’re an Iranian. Back in 1978 you had probably, like most Iranians, supported the revolution against the dictatorship of the Shah, though maybe you’d have shared some of the many common reservations about the Islamic theocracy that filled its place. Still, after the excesses and idiocies of the Shah’s era, you were probably willing to give the revolutionaries a chance.
Then in September 1980, there was a vicious military assault against your country. Saddam Hussein, your militantly secular, Arab-nationalist neighbor to the west sent a nasty expeditionary force into your country– with the aim of sparking local anti-regime uprisings and bringing down your government.

I was there, in Baghdad, at the start of the Very First Gulf War of the Modern Era, in September 1980.
Okay, I admit my prose style was a little florid, but here it is: the lead from my piece in the September 25, 1980 edition of the Christian Science Monitor:

Baghdad, Iraq – “This ancient Mesopotamian city of waving palms and brash new construction projects is suddenly feeling the impact of modern war. But, despite suffering modest casualties from Iranian air raids, ordinary Iraqis express pride and confidence in the achievements of their own armed forces…

The Iraqis were basing their hopes of overthrowing the Khomeini regime, in good part, on promises from Iranian exile politicians like Shahpur Bakhtiari that “their people” inside Iran would coordinate anti-Khomeini “uprisings” to support the attackers. Whoa, was that a miscalculation! The promised “uprisings” never materialized. (Gosh, will the Bushites never learn?) Instead, the presence of the large Iraqi force inside Iran spurred Iranians to feats of — literally– suicidal heroism. Human waves of pro-Teheran youths organized themselves into baseej and pasdaran battalions and hurled themselves against the Iraqi attackers.
Iran is actually a much bigger, weightier country than Iraq. Over time, and at the cost of truly massive human losses, the Iranians managed to push the Iraqi occupiers back toward the international border.
Panic stations in Washington!
When Saddam first went into Iran, he had certainly gotten a nod and a wink– perhaps more?– from the folks in the Carter administration, frustrated as they were with Iran’s continuing holding of the US Embassy hostages. Jordan, which has nearly always been very close to Washington, allowed Iraq to truck in massive amounts of military supplies through its Red Sea port, Aqaba. (I remember seeing some of those convoys as I drove into Baghdad from the Jordanian capital, Amman.)
But when the Iranians got back near the international border, they were in a position to directly threaten Baghdad, which is undeniably close to it.
By then, Ronald Reagan was in the White House. It was then, in 1983, that Bombs-Away Don (Rumsfeld) made the infamous trip to Baghdad during which he upped the level of intel-sharing and other forms of help considerably… You can actually see a video clip of this meeting, if you go to the superb collection of FOIA-freed US government docs on this topic assembled by the National Security Archive in DC.
So we saw the Reaganauts’ studied blind eye in the mid- to late 1980s when Saddam’s people started using– against some Iraqi Kurds, but also in significant numbers against Iranian soldiers and civilians as well– the chemical weapons that quite possibly Iraq had gotten from Washington in the first place?
Oh, and along the way there, in a cynical effort to keep the Iran-Iraq war going by supplying both sides with much-needed military materiel, we also had the whole Iran-contra affair.
Altogether a shameful episode in American history.
That war dragged on for a total of eight years, and caused around a million casualties, between both sides.
By the early 1990s, the level of the Iranians’ revolutionary zeal had eased considerably. They were totally drained of energy by the eight years of war. No longer dominated by people intent, Trotsky-like, on exporting their revolution, the majority of in-country Iranians probably just wanted to normalize their relations with the rest of the world. The Europeans, Japanese, and most other big powers were pretty happy at that prospect.
But then, along came the Clintonites with their brand-new American “doctrine” in the Gulf called dual containment. Not only was Iraq to be contained– which seemed like a fairly evident imperative after its brutal aggression against Kuwait in 1990– but so, too, was Iran. Martin Indyk was the principal author of this policy.
So throughout the 1990s, as Iranian society struggled to deal with the social devastation left by the eight-year war, and to slowly rebuild its links with other countries, the Clintonites were out there trying to prevent those links from being built. Not only did they impose a tough prohibition on any American business from doing business with Iran. In addition, they tried to go after European firms and governments that wanted to trade with Iran, too, in a lengthy attempt to keep the Teheran regime isolated from any outside contacts.
It didn’t work, of course. But it built up a lot of Iranian resentment. (Duh!) That, in addition to the remnants of Iranians’ historic grievances– for overthrowing their elected prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, in the 1950s; for supporting the Shah and his brutal Savak for the next 25 years; etc, etc…
So now, here are the American forces, who launched an invasion of Iraq in the hope that it would be accompanied by the anti-regime “uprisings” promised by exile politicians… And getting, dare we say it, somewhat bogged down in the effort. And the Americans and Iraqis are slugging it out there against each other, both of them being weakened with every week their fighting lasts.
If you were a policymaker in Iran, what kind of a stance toward the US-Iraq conflict might tempt you? Might you not have just the teeniest temptation to try to keep it going as long as possible?
You would, of course, have many means through which you could do this. All a person has to do is look at a map, and see the length of the two countries’ mutual border, and see how close most of Iraq’s strategic cities lie to it. Not just Baghdad and Basra, but many other cities too.
Easy enough, I would imagine, for the Iranians to emulate the policy the Americans pursued throughout the 1980s: to discreetly give each side in the nearby conflict just enough of the aid it needs to make sure that the conflict keeps going.
We know that the Iranians have been in touch with the Americans about some “technical” tactical matters like giving help to rescue downed airmen. We can also imagine that through the vast networks of Shi-ite co-believers in the south, and Kurdish ethnics in the north, who have family members on both sides of the international border, with significant comings and goings between them, some fairly substantial help could be provided to the Iraqis as necessary.
What’s more, Americans should recognize that for the Iranians or anyone else, providing help to the Iraqis is not illegal under international law. That is certainly one of the “weaknesses” the Bushites must face, that they have suffered by virtue of NOT having gotten any express UN authorization for their military action.
So, if the Iranians were to do as I suggest they might, and to seek to keep the fires of conflict between their two sworn adversaries well stoked for as long as possible, would such a policy be cynical and immoral? Yes. Can we understand, though, how many Iranians may feel tempted to undertake something like this, in an attempt to see the US and the Saddamites slugging it out between the two of them? Yes.
And then, of course, there are the terrible situation and the almost unknowable preferences of the Iraqi Shi-ites. In any contest between Iran and Iraq– as between the US and Iraq– the Shi-ites, who form more than 60 percent of Iraq’s national population, are caught in a vise-like grip. They will almost certainly be the ones who take the greatest proportions of human losses as this war drags on.
So far, the position of most of the Iraqi Shi-ites seems to have been one of sullen neutrality. Most certainly, they haven’t yet launched any of the anti-Saddam “uprisings” that the Bushites evidently expected.
In an article in Thursday’s Washington Post, Dan Williams reported that Mohammed Bakir Hakim, the leader of a key, Iran-backed Iraqi Shi-ite group called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Mohammed Bakir Hakim, had “told Iraqi Shiites on Tuesday to remain neutral in the war.” Hakim was reported as having told Teheran-based reporters, “We are not in favor of this war because it places the future of Iraq in foreign hands.”
Of course, there’s another possibility. Maybe the Iranians would not be as manipulative and cynical as the Reaganauts were in the 1980s? Maybe instead of using the deeply-held disdain they have for both the present antagonists as a reason to fan the flames of discord, the Iranians might turn out to be the kind of deeply involved neighboring power, nonetheless neutral as between the fighting parties, who would therefore be in a good position to help to broker a ceasefire?
Wouldn’t that be great? What we clearly need, after all, is a ceasefire NOW and a negotiated resolution of this truly devastating conflict.