1980 - The Iran-Iraq War’s long aftermath

LONDON: I joined the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in September 1980, two weeks before Iraq invaded Iran and started the bloodiest war in modern Middle Eastern history. Perhaps a million combatants and uncounted civilians died. Four-and-a-half decades later, we still live with the consequences. 

There had always been tensions between the two countries but 1979 had really set the scene. That was the year that changed everything: the shah was overthrown in Iran; Juhayman Al-Otaibi seized Makkah’s Grand Mosque; in Pakistan, Zia-ul-Haq executed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; an Islamist insurgency in Syria accelerated; and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. These events ushered in a new and alarming era of turbulence and instability. 

For the Middle East, the subsequent outbreak of hostilities between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and revolutionary Iran became the defining event of the period. It represented a clash between competing versions of modernity: the Baathist dream of mystical Arab nationalism, and Ruhollah Khomeini’s heterodox reimagining of Islamism, based on a mythical past and deriving legitimacy from a reactionary interpretation of clerical authority. Both systems were harshly repressive and each had their true believers. 

Iraq thought itself to be stronger, especially after the revolutionaries in Iran had purged the generals and Tehran’s traditional sources of military supplies in the West dried up. But Iran, surfing a wave of popular enthusiasm, proved more resilient than expected. The war became an attritional stalemate. Khomeini refused all appeals to bring the conflict to an end until he was finally forced to do so in 1988, after horrifying losses on both sides.

For much of this period I had a ringside seat as a young diplomat in Abu Dhabi. The impact of the events on the Arab states of the Gulf was huge. They feared the expansion of the Iranian revolution into their territories. Article 154 of the new Iranian Constitution had committed Iran to pursuing exactly this. It had been put into effect partly through the activities of an organization linked to Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, and partly through support channeled through what became Lebanese Hezbollah to dissident Shiite movements in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in particular — whose activities included bombings and plane hijackings.

This was the most serious challenge to stability and cohesion that these states, most of which had only achieved independence between 1961 and 1971, had ever faced. Their domestic institutions and military capacities were still weak. And Iran represented both a material and an ideological threat. It is hardly surprising that they chose to financially support Iraq, which was Arab, Sunni-ruled, populous, educated and a familiar (if sometimes overbearing) neighbor. 

The end of the war in 1988 left Iraq with massive debts to other Gulf states, particularly Kuwait, and widespread damage to essential infrastructure, particularly in the south, around Basra, where most of the country’s oil fields are concentrated. 

Saddam decided to recoup his losses by bullying Kuwait, which refused to buckle. That led him to invade the country on Aug. 2, 1990. 

He might have thought he could do a deal that would have left him in control of Kuwait’s northern oil fields. Instead, he suffered a catastrophic defeat that left his military aspirations in tatters, his weapons programs subject to international supervision and the economy crippled by sanctions, which tore apart the fabric of Iraqi society. 

The uprisings that followed in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north — neither of which were successful in a conventional sense — helped set the scene for the way in which Iraq reconstituted itself along sectarian and ethnic lines after Saddam’s eventual fall in 2003. 

In Iran, the myth of the war as one of exemplary national resistance at a time of isolation has endured powerfully, at least within the ranks of the regime and its supporters. It has fed a narrative of victimization that already had deep historic and cultural resonance among many Shiites. 

It also led Iran to double down on a strategy of so-called mosaic defense and proxy warfare, designed to compensate for conventional military weakness. It does not in any way seem to have reduced Tehran’s appetite for destroying Israel and ultimately bringing its neighbors under Islamist rule. 

The overthrow of Saddam in 2003 was widely seen as a belated sequel to 1991, when coalition forces had failed to follow the fleeing Iraqi army all the way to Baghdad and instead allowed Saddam and his loyalists to regain domestic control outside the Kurdish areas. 

The diplomatic maneuvering of the subsequent decade corrupted parts of the international system, with the oil-for-food scandal and persistent obstructionism by certain members of the UN Security Council. But 2003 was, in practice, a victory for Iran — as was the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. 

And this story is not over. The Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan and the shadow of Daesh, which emerged from the chaos of Iraq, continues to haunt the region. In the wake of the dramatic events of the past year, which has seen Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Gaza seriously weakened, and its investment in the Assad regime in Syria come to nothing, Tehran is perhaps more isolated than ever. 

And with the return to power in the US of President Donald Trump, who during his first term pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal and stepped up sanctions, life for the Iranian people is not likely to improve for the foreseeable future. 

If Ruhollah Khomeini had not been expelled from Najaf by Saddam Hussein in 1978; if the Shah had not had cancer; if Saddam had reacted more calmly to Iranian provocations in 1979; if Khomeini had agreed to a ceasefire after the recapture of Khorramshahr; if Saddam had not then gambled on an invasion of Kuwait; if Iran had become a more normal country, then we might be living in a different world. But we are not. More’s the pity. 

• Sir John Jenkins is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, where he has written extensively on Islamophobia and extremism. He was the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia until January 2015.