One story has dominated March’s news: the American-Israeli assault on Iran. Shashank Joshi, our defence editor, has been keeping War Room readers informed in his usual
dispatches on Mondays. And we have published
numerous articles on the conflict—and its
adverse economic consequences—online and in print.
In this bonus edition, however, I wanted to step back a bit and consider a previous conflict, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, to gain some insights into how the present war may turn out. To help me sift through the history I talked to Nicolas Pelham,
The Economist’s Middle East correspondent and a long-standing expert on Iran. He has visited the country many times; on one notorious occasion, he was forced to stay rather
longer than he expected. He argues that the Iran-Iraq war was “foundational for what the Islamic Republic became”. Perhaps Donald Trump might have studied it before
embarking on his present adventure.
The Iran-Iraq war remains one of the bloodiest conflicts since the second world war. According to David Crist, a historian, it cost approximately 1m lives, and about four times that number were wounded. Iraq’s leader,
Saddam Hussein, ordered the invasion of his neighbour in September 1980, ostensibly to pre-empt Iran’s hostile intentions towards his own country. He considered the newly installed clerical regime in Tehran to be a mortal enemy of his own secular Baath party. After initial breakthroughs Iraq’s offensive petered out. What territory it did seize was recovered by Iran. The war, most people agree, ended in a stalemate.
What were the consequences for Iran? First, Saddam was expecting his invasion to provoke a popular uprising against the untested and divided revolutionary regime that
had taken power in 1979. But, as Nick puts it, “instead of toppling the regime, the invasion entrenched it.” The horrific human losses merely sustained Iran’s cult of martyrdom, much as the murderous and recently deceased Ali Khamenei is now being
mythologised as a great leader.
Second, the egregious failures of the regular Iranian army provided an opportunity for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to expand its power. The IRGC became both the regime’s
praetorian guard and its own battlefield army. It also started arming proxies, such as
Hizbullah in Lebanon and later the
Houthis in Yemen and
Hamas in Gaza, to keep the battles away from Iranian territory (a forward-defence strategy) and to rally the Shia faithful. America has been fighting a clandestine war against these groups ever since, while Israel has done so more openly.
Third, the conflict shows that Iran was ready to fight long wars with any means at its disposal. Iraq offered Iran a very good deal to end the bloodshed in 1982, but the regime just fought on, oblivious, it seemed, to the human cost. It was, as Nick says, “happy to go for broke”, as it is now,
sapping its opponent’s will and munitions. Remarkably, Iran carried on fighting even as most of the world’s great powers—including the Soviet Union, America and France—supported Iraq and supplied it with weapons. Although it’s hard to believe now, Israel actually armed Iran during this conflict to sustain a regional counterweight against Iraq.
Last, Iran (and Iraq) discovered how to use attacks on shipping in
the Strait of Hormuz to persuade other countries, such as America, to put pressure on their opponent to surrender. Altogether, hundreds of commercial vessels were damaged in the so-called Tanker War. Iran perfected speedboat attacks on tankers and also used missiles. Iraq—as America did this month—bombed
Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal in the Gulf, to little effect.
The current conflict is unpredictable, but there are always valuable lessons in the past.