Iran-Iraq War

More obscure wars, but this one is a bit more recent – within the lifetime of anyone likely to read my blogs.  Yet again I take inspiration from Osprey, this time its Essential Histories volume entitled The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 by Efraim Karsh.

 Background.  Up until the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Iran and Iraq had an uneasy peace; they were rivals but neither attempted to invade the other, and they had understandings (e.g. the 1975 Algiers Agreement) about what would otherwise be contested territory to the south.   In particular, Iraq’s Shatt-al-Arab waterway was its sole access to the Persian Gulf.  Iraq was also nervous about Iranian support for a growing Kurdish insurgency, especially since much of Iraq’s oil producing areas were in the Kurdish part of the country. 

 February 1979.  Islamic hotheads took power in Iran – and took hostages from the US Embassy, which pissed us off and embarrassed Carter, doing much to ensure Reagan’s election in November 1980.  In July 1979, Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq.  Things started getting ugly, and both sides decided they really didn’t like each other.

 September 23, 1980.  Iraq invaded Iran and captured (from north to south along the border) Qasr-e-Shirin, Mehran, Musian, Susangerd, Khorramshahr, Aabadan, and Fao – and took full control of the Shatt-al-Arab.  All this territory was right across the border and less than 100 miles into Iran.  In December, Saddam Hussein announced that he would not advance further but simply keep the modest territory gained.  

 Late 1981, early 1982.  Iranian offensives drove Iraqi forces off Iranian soil, liberating Bostan, Susangerd, and Korramshahr, and invaded Iraq.  Iran now had the upper hand. 

 From 1983-86 Iran pursued several more offensives which captured modest amounts of Iraqi territory in the north (east of Kirkuk), center (west of Mehran), and south (near Basra).  In 1985 Operation Badr succeeded at capturing part of the Baghdad-Basra highway.  As with Saddam’s earlier achievements, Iran’s incursion into Iraqi territory was modest.

 1988. Iraqi forces, now better supplied, drove Iranians from Iraqi territory.  August – ceasefire.

 Supplies.  Iran inherited the Shah’s military, which had been US-supplied.  Ironically, the Israelis (!!!) helped keep them stocked in spare parts (e.g. F-16 tires), part of which was the Iran-Contra deal.  The Israelis considered Saddam Hussein to be the bigger threat than Iran and were happy to help the Iranians kill off Iraqis.  They even went so far as to bomb an Iraqi nuclear reactor in June 1981.  Libya, Syria, North Korea, China, Taiwan (they agreed on one thing!), Argentina, South Africa, Pakistan, and even Switzerland supplied Iran.

            For its part, Iraq was mainly supplied with Warsaw Pact equipment.  While the USSR had initially imposed an arms embargo on Iraq, after the Iranians started winning they changed their minds and opened the spigot:  200 T-55 and T-72 tanks, and SA-6 surface-to-air missiles, followed by T-72 tanks, Scud missiles (remember those?) and MiG-21, -23, and -29 fighters.  The French also supplied Saddam heavily with its own arsenal of weapons – on credit, up to $5 billion by 1986; little wonder the French had a vested interest in seeing Saddam remain in power in 2003.  Egypt, Spain, Italy, Britain, and Brazil also supplied Iraq with weapons. 

            Of course, few forget the US’ support for Saddam at this time, though this took the form of agricultural credits.  For the US, the memories of the Iran hostage situation were firm in our memory, and while no one really liked Saddam, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, so our hatred for the Iranians fueled our support for Saddam.

 Pasdaran.  This was Iran’s paramilitary militia, mostly infantry with very little heavy weapons support and little or no armor.  Iran subscribed to the “human wave of crazy fanatics” school of warfare which Iraq countered with the “Russian tanks and chemical weapons” school of warfare.  Of the two, the latter proved to be much more effective in the long run.  Iran’s military successes seemed to depend on the extent to which it relied on the Pasdaran or conventional armies to get its point across, generally more successful with the latter than the former.

 Chemical Weapons.  The Iraqis earned the dubious distinction of being the most prominent and infamous (though not exclusive) power to use poison gas since…World War I.  Mustard gas and nerve gases were used against Iranians and Kurds, both groups which were ill-prepared to resist chemical attacks.

 War of the Cities.  Each side had air forces and a civilian population highly vulnerable to air attack.  Baghdad and Tehran both suffered heavily in the war.  Each side was also heavily dependent on oil revenue (“it’s the oil, stupid”) and targeted each other’s facilities as a means of inflicting economic damage on each other.

 Persepolis.  This is the only movie I’ve seen which addresses this war.  It’s an animated film about a young Iranian girl, Marjane Satrap, who grew up in Iran during the war.  She likes Iron Maiden and prefers Western culture, spent time in Europe during part of the war, but was back in Iran during some of the air raids on Tehran.  She was not a big fan of the theocracy; the movie also describes some of the fanaticism which occurred in Iran.

Red Horizons

Red Horizons, by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa.  Former head of DIE, the Romanian foreign intelligence agency (their CIA/KGB).  He defected from Romania to the US in 1978 and eventually wrote a book about all the nasty stuff his boss, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, was up to during his reign from 1965-1989.  Here are some of the most interesting points:

1.         Yasser Arafat.  Major league homo.  Along with J. Edgar Hoover, another grotescquely ugly homosexual.  Who says they are all handsome perfect saints?  Arafat told Ceausescu that the Palestinians were not ready for their own state and any such state, if created, would be an immediate and complete failure.  Realizing this, however, he was still pushing for Israel’s eradication and refused to agree to any recognition of Israel.  Ceausescu was angling to mediate between Begin and Sadat, i.e. to take the role that Carter would eventually have; instead of a Camp David accord, it would have been a Bucharest accord, and hopefully result in a Nobel Peace Prize for him.  However, we all know who ultimately won that competition.  (In Nelson’s voice: “HA HA!”)

2.         Ceausescu and Arafat were good friends: Pacepa said they were very much alike.

3.         Ceausescu stuttered when he was nervous or under pressure.  His wife, Elena, was a total cunt with delusions of being a scientist; she weaseled various channels to get phony “honorary degrees” and had scientific textbooks ghostwritten in her own name; yet knowing how bogus this all was, still considered herself to be a shining scientific mind in her own right.

4.         The Romanians were the vanguard of the Warsaw Pact’s attempt to steal Western technology for their own military and industrial uses: the top of the industrial espionage tier.  To try to get these secrets, Ceausescu tried to pretend to the West that Romania was independent of the USSR and striving to be even more so, as if Romania would use any such assistance received from the West to promote its independence.  The reality was that it was a game: the Soviets depended on the satellites to get them what they themselves could not get from the West; far from using this technology against the Soviets, the Romanians had every intention of sharing it with them to get favors in return, in a mutual bargaining relationship which continued behind the scenes.   Ceausescu’s predecessor, Georghe-Dej, managed to use a particularly fantastic piece of espionage-theft from the West to get Krushchev to remove Soviet troops from Romania.

5.         Another element was influence.  The usual deal with foreign intelligence is the goal of stealing enemy military technology.  But Ceausescu believed influence was just as important.  INFLUENCE to get US to give Romania favorable trade terms and lower its restrictions on technology transfers. 

6.         Qadafi hated Araftat.  Ceausescu had a great relationship with Mr Libya.

7.         They had three kids.  Valentin and Zoia were actually fairly well adjusted (and embarrassed by their parents).  Valentin was educated overseas and had no use for Marxism.  Zoia managed to discover what life was like for the ordinary Romanians and wasn’t too keen on abusing the system; she tended to have anti-communist boyfriends her parents hated (somewhat like the older daughter in “Beautician and the Beast”).  Younger son Niku was the enfant terrible: boozing, whoring, etc. abusing his position to get whatever he wanted.  Total asshole. Remarkably, despite (maybe because of) his behavior, they considered him perfect to replace his father as ruler of Romania.  They were notorious nepotists.

8.         Ceausescu was heavily anti-Hungarian and anti-Semitic.  He loved “Kojak” and other American crime TV shows.

9.         His wife was very contemptuous of the US, and of Carter and his wife in particular, who she referred to as Mr. & Madame Peanut; there were thought of as peasants, and the weakness of the US system was that even a peasant could end up running the country.  Sounds a bit elitist, doesn’t it?  Aren’t the communists the proud champions of workers and peasants?  Clueless woman.  Overall they looked down on the US.  Hmmm...how many wars has Romania won?  Less than one?  What does Romania have to be proud of, compared to the US?  See, this is arrogance where there is nothing to justify it.  Of course, part of their antipathy to Carter may have been this rivalry to mediate in the Middle East (as noted above).

10.        Also, Ceausescu – probably copying a cue from the Chinese – was cozying up to Nixon, and was super pissed when Congress forced him out of office, undoing all the hard work he had done establishing the personal rapport with Nixon. He did have a problem with US presidential term limits: the maximum amount of time any US President would have in office is 8 years, so every 4 or 8 years Ceausescu would have to start all over.  When it came to Congress, he only focused on influencing Senators (6 year terms) and not Representatives (2 year terms).  He tried to characterize Romania as a “maverick” within the Soviet Bloc and curry favor among Western countries.  Some of it worked, but it dried up when Pacepa defected.

11.        The bright sides are the following:

            A.         The author was the head of DIE, equivalent to the Director of Central Intelligence (CIA Director) – and the highest level East Bloc official to ever defect.  He has all the juiciest details on all the shit Ceausescu was up to, so when he defected, he fucked up Ceausescu big time.  The day he arrived in the US he told the FBI about all the secret ops Ceausescu had all over the US and Western Europe.  He notes that defections and anti-Ceausescu demonstrations drove Ceausescu nuts, physically ill and vomiting.  I can only imagine what happened when Pacepa himself defected.  His defection essentially destroyed the DIE and it never recovered.

            B.         We know now what happened to Ceausescu and his wife, so we know the story has a happy ending.

12.        Ceausescu and his wife visited the US in 1978.  On the trip to New York, his hotel (the Waldorf-Astoria) was surrounded by anti-Ceausescu protesters – Romanians and Hungarians, putting aside their usual mutual ethnic antipathy to attack a mutual enemy – and his limo was pelted with eggs and tomatoes, which really pissed him off.  He complained to the US State Dept., which referred him to Ed Koch, who was then the Mayor (somehow they couldn’t grasp that this was the Mayor’s responsibility, not Carter’s).  Koch was totally cool when he spoke to them in person.  “Hey, they protest me, they protest Carter, no one thinks twice about it.  What’s the big deal?  It was just eggs and tomatoes.”  Ceausescu wanted the protestors shot; his advisors, and the US, said, “uhh, you can’t do that here.” 

13.        When they visited Dallas, Texas, Ceausescu was terrified; this was the city where Kennedy was assassinated (“Texas is the reason the President’s dead!!”).  Apparently he felt Dallas was some dangerous wild place where the local population routinely killed Presidents who visited, and that security was non-existent.  For the record, only three US Presidents were assassinated, and the score is Washington, DC 1 (Lincoln, 1865); Buffalo, New York 1 (McKinley, 1901); and Dallas, Texas 1 (Kennedy, 1963).  I suppose DC gets a half point for Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Reagan, but this hadn’t happened by the time Ceausescu was there.  As it was, we know that Ceausescu and his wife were shot in the capital, Bucharest...not in Dallas.

14.        I was watching TV in Paris with my friend Phil at his family’s house back around 1982-83.  The news came on with footage of French TV from 1974.  It was in black & white!  Shit, 1974, and French TV was still in black & white!  Well, the Romanians have the French beat.  As late as 1978, Romania was one of two countries in Europe (Albania the other) to still broadcast TV in black & white.  The Ceausescus refused to budget money to change over, believing that color TV was a luxury the Romanian people didn’t need.

 With the recent execution of Saddam Hussein, Ceasescu’s fate comes into context: of all the other dictators and tyrants in modern history, aside from Saddam, the only two to face execution were Mussolini and Ceausescu.  Mussolini was killed, and his corpse hanged in public in Milan for the Italian population to spit upon.  Ceausescu was shot in private surroundings and his body (along with Elena’s) put in a mismarked grave.  His corpse was photographed and the photo widely circulated so that the Romanian people could see for themselves that he was DEAD and not hiding away somewhere or in exile.  He escaped Mussolini’s fate. Milosovic and Pinochet “ran out the clock”; Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot all died natural deaths; and Hitler, Goering and Himmler committed suicide, cheating the hangman (literally, in Goering’s case).  The odds of a dictator facing any sort of justice, “victor’s” or otherwise, are extremely slim.  Saddam was executed in private, by hanging (a fairly mundane and unspectacular means of execution) and his body discreetly returned to Tikrit.  He was not publicly executed; he was not summarily shot as he was captured in his spider hole; and he was granted at least the pretense of a trial.  He got off easy, as it is.  He deserves no sympathy or apologies, nor should any apology be made for the trial or the execution.