The Sunnier side
Patrick Desmond
`Trouble in the Middle East' has for so 1 long meant war between Israel and her neighbours, or the threat of it, that Western eyes have rarely strayed to the hot war which has raged in the Gulf since the autumn of 1980. It seems now to have come to a halt, at least temporarily, with a decisive Iranian repulse of the Iraqi in- vaders. This may be the time, therefore, to look at what has been going on, and why.
`Gulf' gives us the clue. We were brought up to say Persian Gulf. But that form con- cedes, in the Arab view, Iranian claims to territories in and around the Gulf which are not merely untenable but an affront to the Arabs. And, an affronted Arab wielding clout these days, newspaper editors have taken the hint and dropped the adjective. The first of these claims is to three islands which lie athwart the Straits of Hormuz, the Gulf entrance, through which passes 40 per cent of the West's oil — and most of the Middle East's income. The second is to a piece of detached Kuwaiti territory at the head of the Gulf. The third is to the bed of the Shatt el-Arab, the conjoined Tigris and Euphrates fivers, at the confluence of which lies Iraq's main port of Basra.
Until 1975 the Iraq-Iran frontier was deemed to run along the centre of the Shatt, but in that year the Shah obliged Iraq to ac- cept its movement to the Iraqi bank. Iran was thereby given the right to Iraqi trade whenever it chose; and though it did not do so, the fear that it might festered. The fall of the Shah in January 1979, and the tur- moil which followed, provided an oppor- tunity for a rectification of frontiers which Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Ba'athist (Arab Socialist) ruler, decided he could not resist and in September 1980, after much border skirmishing by both sides, the Iraqi army crossed the common frontier along almost its whole length.
Saddam's motives were not wholly ter- ritorial. They were also self-preservative Iran is a Shia (Muslim heretic) state, indeed the Shia state, and the fall of its govern- ment to the prosletysing ayatollahs was bad news to all its Sunni neighbours. It was par- ticularly bad news to Saddam because he is one of the handful of Sunni rulers whose subjects include a Shia majority. An exter- nal victory over Khomeini's regime would therefore also count as an interhal rein- forcement of his power; and it would have the additional advantage of commending him to the other Sunni rulers, perhaps of elevating him to the Arab leadership, a role he strongly fancied.
And victory looked altogether attainable. Geography does not favour an Iraqi invader of Iran, since the southern end of the front Provides a number of waterlines for the Ira-
nians to defend, and the north a high escarpment. But both a cause and a side- effect of Khomeini's return from exile was a disintegration of the Iranian armed forces, which had run on personal loyalty to the Shah. Disintegration was enhanced by the sophistication of the equipment which the Shah's millions had bought the armed forCes, and which the survivors of the Ayatollah's purges, inevitably the least sophisticated themselves, were expected to operate and maintain. The Iraqi Russian equipment was simpler and older, the army larger and its loyalty to Saddam apparently total. In the first weeks of the campaign its superiority paid off in success all along the front, particularly at the southern end, where it laid siege to Khorramshahr and Abadan. Strangulation was thus pre- empted, for it was now Iran which could not export its oil, Abadan being both it main refinery centre and outlet.
Foreign military experts began to moderate their forecasts of an Iraqi walkover when the two southern cities pro- ved stubbornly resistant. But the Iraqis, pointing to lack of movement elsewhere, explained that commentators were confus- ing their strategy with Israel's. This was war not of 20th century blitzkrieg but. of 18th century frontier adjustment. They, having got more or less what they wanted with their first blow — including a large part of the Arab-inhabited province of Khuzestan — were content to sit tight and wait out the inevitable Iranian collapse.
The Iranians were not prepared to see the war go that way. Mixed though the popula- tion of the country is, with a dissident Kur- dish population in the north, Arabs in Khuzestan and three million nomads, Iraq's aggression had generated a formidable uni- ty. Untrained Revolutionary Guards fought fanatically for Khorramshahr and Abadan at the side of the soldiers; none of the minorities took advantage of the country's ordeal to revolt. And, somehow or other, the armed forces' advanced equipment was kept going. There was intermittent and fair- ly ineffective mutual air bombardment at the beginning of the war, but losses eroded both sides' ability to carry that on. Tanks, on the other, were kept running. Saddam, dependent on Russia for spare parts for his Soviet equipment, found Soviet unwill- ingness to offend the ayatollahs a limitation on re-supply. Iran, on the other hand, was able to buy on the open market and seemed able to find the cash when needed.
Khorramshahr and Abadan held out into 1981 and the Iraqis failed to progress beyond the Khuzestan cities of Dezful and Ahvaz, around which the fighting concen- trated in the summer. Then, in September, it started to flow the other way. The Ira- nians counter-attacked in Khuzestan and drove the Iraqis back to the Karun river, the main water obstacle before the Shatt el- Arab. In November the offensive was resumed, with more heavy losses suffered by the Iraqis. The Iranians suffered, too; indeed, their loss of life has probably been the heavier (40,000 to 20,000) but is more bearable because of the promises of entry to paradise made by the Ayatollah Khomeini to the Islamic volunteers. In December Sad- darn conceded the gravity of the situation by telling his soldiers that it was 'very im- portant that you do not lose any more posi- tions' and on 15 December he announced that Iraq was willing to end the war if Iran would recognise her frontiers.
No such luck. The Iranians have con- tinued to advance. In January they won back territory in Khuzestan with attacks at Susangerd and Bostan. On 19 March they opened an offensive on a 25 mile front west of Defzul, which has since driven the Iraqis back to their own frontiers. On 25 May a subordinate attack returned Khorramshahr to them. On 20 June, in desperation, Sad- dam announced a unilateral ceasefire and the withdrawal within ten days of all his men left in .Iran — chiefly garrisons at Mehran in the centre of the four-hundred- mile front and at Qasr-e-Shirin, on the Baghdad-Teheran road in the north. But that was insufficient for the Ayatollah, who said that the war would go on, unless $150 billion was paid in reparation, the Shia Ira- qis expelled into Iran allowed to return home, and Saddam put on trial. He shows every sign of meaning what he says.
So the state of the Gulf is now even more unstable than when Saddam, first struck nearly two years ago. Iraq, also unfriendly with the Shia government of its northern neighbour, Syria, is now no counterweight of any sort to Iran in the oil region. The Gulf states themselves, all Sunni and all monarchial, tremble at the danger a populist and Shia regime in a victorious Iran offers them. The Americans are nowhere yet near deploying their Rapid Deployment Force into its projected for- ward base off the Omani coast, and are therefore almost powerless to intervene to protect even their cherished Saudis. The Russians are almost as suspect to the ayatollahs as they are to the sheikhs. So Iran — historically the imperial power in the region — looks set to have its way up and down the Gulf as it chooses. The only impediment to its revival as a Gulf hegemonist is that its people are Iranians, and therefore almost as deeply disliked by Arabs as are the Israelis — who, at least, do not threaten to force their religion on those they defeat.
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