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INTRODUCTION
The Iran-Iraq War can be viewed at many different levels: as a human tragedy, as a threat to the security of Southwest Asia, as a threat to the world’s main supply of imported oil, and as the source of new lessons regarding the nature of modern war. All of these insights are important to understanding the strategic implications of the war and the meaning of the recent fighting. Without this understanding, the West can neither understand the risks inherent in the conflict, or what can be done to end it.
The Enduring Strategic Importance of the Conflict
One fact is all too clear. The Iran-Iraq War is of critical importance to Western security. More than half of all the world's proven oil reserves are located in Iran, Iraq, and the smaller Southern Gulf states. All of these states are affected by the war, and an Iranian victory could threaten the stability of the West's access to oil for decades to come.
Even a peace settlement that did not involve a major defeat for either side could threaten the West. It could leave Iran or Iraq so dependent on the USSR for arms or political support that it could weaken the delicate balance in the Gulf between the U.S. and USSR. Even if the war does nothing to strengthen the Soviet position, it could leave the region so unsettled that every nation would be forced to continue the present regional arms race indefinitely.
The war may also polarize much of Islam between Sunni and Shi’ite, and help divide the Arab world between secular states and those that adopt some form of Islamic revolution. While Khomeini is scarcely a popular example of Islamic government in most of the Arab world, he has still demonstrated that Islamic revolutions and governments arc possible. He also is a powerful sectarian example to the Shi’ites in Bahrain, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the Yemens.
In fact, it is hard to decide which would be worse, placing the USSR in a dominant position in cither Iraq or Iran, or an Iranian victory over Iraq that unleashed religious and cultural divisions that could divide the entire Middle East. Either outcome could rapidly move the West from a brief few years of “oil glut” to decades of oil crisis. Either outcome could require a level of military intervention that would strain the West’s limited power projection capabilities to the breaking point.
While little hard data has emerged on the war over the last two years from either Iran or Iraq, neither the West nor its friends in the Middle East can feel safe until the war ends. In spite of three years of near stalemate, the war can radically change the balance of power in Southwest Asia and the Northern Gulf at any time. While Iraq has many strengths, no amount of arms or money can give it the ability to sustain the war indefinitely. At the same time, the war is imposing strains on Iran which may ultimately undermine its present regime and make it vulnerable to Marxist influence or Soviet penetration.
A War of Lies
Unfortunately, the forces that are shaping the course of the Iran-Iraq war are exceptionally difficult to understand. All wars create their own fog of myths and misstatements. In this case, however, two closed societies deny the world press the kind of access needed for accurate reporting. There are no reliable unclassified sources of information on the course of the fighting.
For both Iran and Iraq, the war is a “war of lies”. Each side seeks to distort the perceptions of its own populace and the outside world for propaganda reasons. Each leadership lives at least partly in a world of self-inflicted illusions. As a result, neither side knows or tells the truth and the press must often guess. It is all too common to see directly contradictory press reports about the same battle appear on the same day.
While some Western intelligence information lies been made public, it often has proved to be no more accurate than press sources. The most advanced intelligence technologies cannot accurately interpret a war where so much of the fighting takes place at night or in poor weather, where both sides are constantly mobilized for new fighting, where so much of the fighting is done by dispersed infantry forces, and where it centers around fixed defenses that do not change from day to day. No one can accurately interpret the communications of forces which routinely communicate in a mixture of deliberate lies and self-delusion. No one can analyze orders of battle where the readiness and effectiveness ofindividual units is unknown, and there is no clear standardization of unit type.
The political and economic situation arc equally uncertain. A great deal of speculative writing has appeared about the internal views and power struggles of Iran’s religious leaders and new revolutionary elite. The same is true of reports on Sadam Hussein and Iraq’s Ba’ath Party. Few of these reports, however, have stood the test of time, and several coup attempts and executions have been reported that simply did not occur.
A great many statistics are being generated on the economies of both Iran and Iraq, but intelligence experts in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France all privately agree that the data involved are generally very uncertain, and that man)’ reports arc almost useless. The same is true of area experts in the UN, World Bank, IMF, and Departments of State and Commerce. In most cases, the most that can be done with such statistics is to compare a wide range of sources and try to pick the number that does the most convincing job of explaining the most recent facts. This, however, defeats the whole purpose of statistics and economic analysis.
The Unpredictability of War and Revolution
There is also a natural tendency to ignore the sheer scale of the uncertainty surrounding the war and the Iranian revolution. Both news reporting and academic analysis struggles for precision and predictability. In many cases this creates the illusion of understanding when the most that is available is guesswork. The uncertainty is also greatest when it comes to the two most critical issues affecting the war.
First, it simply is not possible to predict the course of the Iranian revolution. Even if one could understand the details of the forces now affecting the Iranian revolution and no source of data exists to make this possible - the history of true popular revolutions raises serious doubts about the relevance of studies based on the revolutions, initial leadership. Most revolutions take twenty to thirty years to run their course, and the history of the French, Soviet, and Chinese revolutions is littered with the bones of brilliant studies that failed to understand and predict the true course of what would happen.
Second, the outcome of the Iran-Iraq War cannot be predicted, only guessed at. The war is in its seventh year precisely because the military forces and strategic capabilities of both sides have remained in so close a balance. In fact the strategic situation in the Iran-Iraq war has been oddly similar to that in World War I. Both sides have different mixes of forces, but neither has a decisive edge.
There is relatively static trench warfare on the ground. This has led to long bloody battles of attrition against strong points and even gas warfare. At the same time, it has led to constant efforts to find some other flank theater in which one side can break out of the stalemate that has been created in the key central front. Even the war against tankers and oil facilities roughly parallels World War I's naval battles against each side’s economy, sources of arms, and lines of communication.
The end result has been a war whose outcome may be determined far more by whether Iran or Iraq can maintain political and economic cohesion under the strain of prolonged combat than by military tactics and strategy. It is a war that is far easier to lose by making a critical series of mistakes, than to win by effective planning and strategy.
Sources, Data, and Uncertainties
Given this background, it should be clear that this book involves a great deal of guesswork. It not only must be written at a time when the facts are remarkably difficult to establish, it concentrates on the fighting during 1984-1987. This is a period in which neither Iraq or Iran has generally permitted press access to the fighting, and it is a period in which the relative stalemate along the border has made it difficult to verify either side's claims by observing the outcome of the fighting. There are no real "experts" on the war, only “students”, and even the most informed students often disagree.
Both Iraq and Iran have operated in a climate of growing economic, political, and social strain. Little of their central statistical reporting, or that of outside sources, has come to grips with the true costs of the war, or has separated the fiction of paper plans from the grim reality of societies operating in a climate of “total war”. International statistics are unconvincing at the best of times, but they have often become hopeless in trying to understand what is really happening to Iran and Iraq.
As a result, this book draws heavily on the day to day reporting in the press, and relies largely on wide-ranging comparisons of different media sources. The U.S. press is the source which is most often referenced, but this is largely to permit other researchers to trace the chronological basis for the analysis. Extensive use has also been made of sources like the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Iranian and Iraqi news releases, television and radio transcripts, academic studies and articles, material gained at various conferences on the war, and interviews and discussions in the region, Europe, and the United States.
References to specific newspapers do not generally indicate the true source of a report. U.S. newspapers have very few foreign correspondents. Much of the actual input to U.S. newspaper reporting consists of French and British wire service data, background briefings by Western governments, and stringers in the Middle East. Many of these sources have consistent biases which are disguised by the failure to cite them in U.S. newspapers, and the tendency to mix different sources.
Nevertheless, it is the news media which provide most of the pieces that can be used to put together the puzzle of the Iran-Iraq War. Reporters have to deal in real time and work with many conflicting sources. If they make errors, many are corrected by their colleagues or in subsequent reporting. Further, the better reporters have far better informal access to intelligence sources than academics and arc able to get estimates which arc current at the time an event occurs. Most official or academic reporting occurs long after an event or long before it.
The reader should be fully aware of these problems because it is not possible to issue endless qualifications throughout this book, or to provide comparative reporting in many cases where there is really little agreement on the data.
The reader should also be aware that names and transliterations are generally provided in the form taken from the original source. Only a limited effort has been made to standardize such terms. Having travelled extensively in Iran and Iraq, the author would caution that both Iran and Iraq often use place names carelessly or issue communiques which simply do not scent to match the terrain. Similarly, Iran and Iraq report unit designations carelessly, as well as force numbers and casualties. These are highly political societies, and this is one case where truth was not the first casualty of war. It was dead long before the war began.
There is also considerable uncertainty in the Western estimates of military forces and casualties used throughout this book, and to estimates of military damage and short term oil production, oil exports, and oil revenues. Most intelligence officers place little confidence in their estimates of the operational strength of Iranian and Iraqi forces or casualty reports. Many reports on war damage overestimate the damage done, and many reports have been issued telling of virtual cutoffs of Iranian oil exports which have proved to be untrue over the weeks which have followed.
Even the spelling of the sites of many battles is not standardized. For example. U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force maps often use different spellings for smaller towns, and no agreed name exists for many of the mountains and hamlets along the border area. No agreement exists on how the names of many individuals shown be transliterated into English, and it is not uncommon to get letters from Iran and Iraq in which individuals change the English spelling of theft- own last names.
The Problem of Policy
Military history is always uncertain, even when it is limited to well-documented battles and written long after the fact. Trying to write a strategic analysis in the midst of a war, imposes far greater uncertainties. It has many of the characteristics of a detective story where the author is only slightly more aware of many of the facts than the reader. Fortunately, many of the broad issues and strategic themes shaping the war are not dependent on accurate knowledge of the details.
The reader should treat the analysis accordingly. If historians are ever given access to Iran and Iraq, and their records of the war, they may rewrite much of the West’s current knowledge of the war. At the same time, there can be no real question regarding the risks the war creates for the West and the region, or regarding the major strategic objectives of the U.S. and its allies. It is also clear from a policy viewpoint that the main issue is not how to cope with detailed uncertainties, but rather how to structure broad policy objectives.
The final chapter of this book discusses these policy objectives. At the risk of spoiling any suspense, it reaches the following major conclusions:
The war is far too dangerous to Western interests to be treated as a means of paralyzing Iranian and Iraqi regional ambitions. The West must make every effort to end the war as soon as possible.
The best outcome of the war is to preserve the present national structure of Iran and Iraq, without one side dominating the other. Both nations can act as major buffers between the Gulf and the USSR, but only if they remain strong independent states.
Iraq is now threatened by the risk of a successful Iranian invasion. Western policy must be shaped to limit the risk of any Iranian victory and a successful invasion. At the same time, the U.S. will not benefit from directly supporting Iraq with weapons shipments or other major assistance. U.S. support must be indirect, and linked to efforts to open lines of communication to Iran and to strengthen the southern Gulf states. In practice, this means using every political means to limit arms shipments to Iran, providing indirect economic aid to ensure that Iraq can continue to finance the war, providing quiet intelligence support, and providing political support for every serious peace initiative.
In contrast, the role that European nations like France are playing in providing arms to Iraq is vital. These arms sales are providing Iraq with the technology it needs to both defend and force Iran to a peace settlement. They also are helping to ensure that Iraq will not become dependent on the USSR. Any break in the flow of French arms to Iraq could be very dangerous to Western security.
Iran is only beginning its current revolution. The West cannot hope to create a stable and friendly relationship with Iran for many years to come. The Reagan Administration’s disastrous flirtation with covert arms shipments to Iran has demonstrated that Western of Torts to maintain and expand communications with Iran must be limited to political and economic contacts, and that these should be structured to act as incentives towards peace, not as bribes to Iran’s government.
At the same time, the West cannot afford to ignore the various opposition movements in Iran. It is possible that Iran’s current ruling elite may remain in power for the next decade, but it is not likely. This means the West must try to maintain low level ties with every major faction, and to build a relationship based on economic self-interest, not common political and social goals.
No Western effort to buy the support of either Iraq or Iran will secure the safety of Americans in the Middle East, protect Israel, or ease the problems of terrorism and hostage taking. It is stable, well-balanced policy initiatives based on strength and consistency of purpose that will do most to win the enduring support of an Iranian and Iraqi regime.
The West cannot hope to make Iran or Iraq military allies. Neither state is likely to act as any kind of proxy for Western security interests in the Gulf. The most the West can hope for is that Iranian and Iraqi economic tics to the West can be rebuilt and strengthened to the point where these ties dominate political attitudes and actions. The West also will not benefit from major arms sales to either state. This is an area where our European allies can accomplish far more by ensuring that neither state has to depend on the USSR for arms after the war, and that a superpower rivalry does not develop as part of an Iranian-Iraqi arms race.
No outcome of the war offers a secure hope of long-term stability in the Gulf unless the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states can be built up into a significant and unified political and military deterrent. The U.S. in particular, needs to revitalize its efforts to strengthen the GCC states, and its military ties to Saudi Arabia - the only southern Gulf state large and strong enough to underpin a regional military effort.
The West, however, cannot rely on regional forces to protect its oil exports. This presents a special problem at a time that European nations- are steadily reducing their already limited out of area capabilities. The U.S. must continue to strengthen USCENTCOM (U.S. Central Command! and its power projection capabilities in the region. It must have the military option of ensuring the (low of oil through the Gulf, and be able to provide “over-the-horizon” reinforcements to any Southern Gulf state threatened by one of its larger northern neighbours.
In shaping its forces, the U.S. must not only consider the risks inherent in an Iranian victory, but the threat of Iranian and Iraqi efforts to limit southern Gulf oil production after the war, the threat from Soviet backed radical states in the Red Sea, and the long term threat of a Soviet victory over Afghanistan’s freedom fighters. The U.S. is the only Western nation that can play this role.
In the longer term, the West must return to a far more realistic policy towards its dependence on imported energy. The present “oil glut” will not last beyond the early 1990s, and could end sooner. At that point, one central strategic reality will remain: well over 50% of all the world’s proven oil reserves will be in the Gulf. The West must act to secure this flow of oil but it must also revitalize its efforts to create safe sources of nuclear power and energy from coal, to develop advanced means of oil recovery, to create a commercial synfuels industry, and to exploit alternative sources of energy like solar and geothermal power.
In fact, the “oil glut” has done more than reduce the flow of Western money to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It has virtually killed every major Western effort at reducing the West’s long term dependence on oil imports. No Western security policy can be successful which does not recognize this fact. Unless the West acts to put its own house in order, no regional policy can ever provide it with the degree of security it needs.
Chapter One
The Strategic Implications of the Iran-Iraq War
From a Western viewpoint, the most critical strategic implications of the war are: (a) its impact on the future government and policy of Iran and Iraq, (b) its impact on their role as buffers between the Soviet Union and the West, and (e) its impact on the future availability of oil exports. All of these strategic implications involve serious threats to Western interests.
The War’s Impact on the Future of Iran and Iraq
While the West naturally thinks of the war in terms of oil and the security of the Gulf, the conflict is a human tragedy with its own strategic implications. The Iran-Iraq War has become one of the most bloody and enduring conflicts of the modern era. While any estimates of the losses on either side are highly speculative, the total number of dead may now be 1,000,000, and the total wounded exceed 1,700,000. Iran seems to have lost at least 300,000 killed and 600,000-750,000 wounded, and Iraq 120,000 dead and 300,000 wounded.1 These estimates are highly conservative, however, and U.S. experts have estimated that the total killed on both sides is over 1,000,000. In addition, at least 8,000 Iranians and 15,000 Iraqis are prisoners of war.2
The war now costs each nation as much as $1 billion a month in direct expenses and indirect costs to its economy. It has cost Iraq at least $120 billion since the war began. Iran's total costs are far harder to estimate, but probably total well over $70 billion in direct costs and over $140 billion in indirect economic costs and wartime damage.
These costs place an obvious strain on both societies. The pressure of trying to match Iran's military manpower has meant that a generation ...
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