From Conflict (David Petraeus & Andrew Roberts, 2023) pp176-8
Since the heyday of British early nineteenth-century Whiggery, the West has operated under the general assumption that mankind progresses as it evolves, learning from the past and perfecting techniques – advancement and improvement entwined as one. The Iran-Iraq War serves as a stark counter-argument to this theory, as it was reminiscent less of the Second World War than of the First. Poison gases, trenches, barbed wire and frontal assaults across a barren no man’s land all led to horrific levels of casualties and soldiers suffering agonizing, often slow deaths, with the images of their religious leaders tucked into their shirt pockets as their bodies lay in a harsh land.
It is impossible to understand the psychology of today’s Iranian mullahs without remembering that in many cases their youth was dominated by an eight-year-long existential state-on-state struggle that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of their brothers, fathers and countrymen. “There were no lessons for Cold War armies in the tactical conduct of the Iran-Iraq War,” writes Freedman, “except that certain regimes, when they go to war, were prepared to squander manpower.”
It was Iraq that first undertook the use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops in 1983, and also first began to attack Iranian oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz the following year. In 1985, Iraq unleashed bomber and missile attacks on Iranian towns and cities over a hundred miles inside Iran. For two months in early 1988, around 200 Al-Hussein missiles (an upgrade of the Soviet Scud with a slightly longer range) hit over three dozen Iranian cities, prompting what the Western media called a “Scud duel.”
The year 1988 was a difficult one for Iran: Iraq’s recapture of the Al-Faw Peninsula during Ramadan (aided by the use of sarin gas) was coupled with Operation Praying Mantis, in which the United States attacked Iranian surveillance platforms and ships after Iranian naval mining incidents had damaged the USS Samuel B. Roberts. This, alongside the threat of military sanctions being raised in the UN – where Iran had neither friends nor allies – ensured a ceasefire was agreed, though no peace treaty was signed.
The war illustrated the recurrent truth that totalitarian dictatorships can (and usually do) wage war that is far more costly in both blood and treasure than wars waged by their counterparts in democracies, where leaders can be evicted when the public turns against the war. With no fear of political blowback or criticism from domestic media or elected assemblies, dictators are emboldened in launching expensive assaults almost regardless of the cost in human life. China’s human-wave assaults in Korea, the brutal Khmer Rouge tactics in Cambodia in the late 1970s and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine all demonstrate that an insulated leadership, violent and intimidating to its populace, can cause massive bouts of destruction with little domestic trouble (though there may yet be repercussions in Russia in the years ahead).
Reluctant Western support of Iraq was best articulated by Henry Kissinger when he said of Iran and Iraq that “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.” Yet in a sense both sides did indeed lose: they were both severely weakened by the conflict, which degraded their economies and populations alike. Eight years after their country had been invaded, Iranians’ per capita income had collapsed by 45 percent. At the time of the ceasefire agreed in August 1988, a total of 262,000 Iranian and 105,00 Iraqis had died (although several estimates put the numbers far higher),as well as over 100,000 civilians.
A United States-backed, reluctantly pro-Iraq coalition had dealt severe blows to an Iran now practically on life support, while allowing Iraq to take the brunt of the counter-attack had weakened a partner few wanted to remain strong. By the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein had been left with such serious war debts that he decided to try to recoup his losses in a wild, desperate manner that we shall examine later in this chapter.
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