The eight-year war that bled Iran and Iraq during the 1980s has always been the subject of heated debates among Iranians.
Was the war triggered by Ayatollah Khomeini’s provocative acts, including the assassination of Baathist officials, in Iraq? Or was it Saddam Hussein who, believing that Iran had been fatally weakened by the Islamic revolution, tried to avenge the humiliation inflicted upon him by the Shah five years earlier? Or, perhaps, it was President Jimmy Carter who goaded Saddam into invading Iran to force the mullahs to release the American hostages and thus ensure Carter’s re-election in 1980.
These are some of the questions that have been debated for almost a quarter of a century. The “war debate” usually reaches its peak in summer, marking some key events related to it.
It was in August 1980 that Khomeini’s calls for an Islamic revolution in Iraq reached its crescendo. It was in July 1987 that the Islamic republic rejected United Nations Security Council resolution 598 calling for an immediate cease-fire. It was in August 1988 that the ayatollah, announcing that he was drinking “the poisoned chalice,” accepted the cease-fire that he had rejected the previous year.
Last year’s “war debate” was dominated by revelations by Hashemi Rafsanjani, a who was Khomeini’s principal aide in the 1980s. Rafsanjani claims that Khomeini agreed to end the war until Iran developed nuclear arms to counter Saddam’s arsenal of chemical weapons.
This year, the “war debate” is dominated by revelations from another close Khomeini aide. This one is Ibrahim Yazdi, a pharmacist from Houston, Texas, who returned to his native Iran after the mullahs seized power and rose to become Khomeini’s foreign minister. (Yazdi relinquished his US citizenship but was subsequently ousted by more radical Khomeinists who suspected him of having secret links with the Americans.)
In a videotaped narrative published on the Internet, Yazdi claims that the reason for Khomeini’s decision to reject the UN-proposed cease-fire and thus prolong the war for another year, and 100,000 more dead Iranians, was the ayatollah’s insistence that he should first seize control of Iraq’s Shiite “holy cities.”
At the start of the war Khomeini had declared an even wider objective: To conquer Iraq, march on Jordan and Syria, and attack and destroy Israel. The key slogan of the war on the Khomeinist side was: “From Karbala (one of the Shiite holy cities in Iraq) to Jerusalem!”
However, by 1987 it had become clear that the poorly armed and even more poorly led Iranian forces were unable to turn tactical victories inside Iraq into a strategic one by capturing Baghdad, let alone moving onto Jerusalem.
Khomeini had to lower his ambitions.
Thus he settled for the more limited goal of seizing Karbala and its sister “holy city” Najaf.
Yazdi’s account shows that none of the Iranian military commanders and political decision-makers working on the war shared Khomeini’s optimism. They believed that the Islamic republic had been lucky not to lose the war in the first place.
Khomeini had destroyed the Iranian armed forces by disbanding most of its units, executing and/or imprisoning some 6,000 officers and cashiering a further 22,000 officers and NCOs. The Iranian Air Force was soon unable to fly for lack of pilots and spare parts for its US-made equipment. The newly created Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was in its infancy and, though capable of holding its own against Saddam’s raw recruits, was unable to deliver the empire that Khomeini wanted.
To placate the ayatollah, the Iranian commanders and their political allies in his entourage proposed a scaled-down plan of conquest.
Under it Iran would retain control of Iraq’s outlet to the sea, won almost a year earlier, and deploy all its forces to capture Basra, Iraq’s second most populous city.
Yazdi’s account shows that Khomeini never believed in the concept of “revolution in one country.”
The ayatollah believed that his mission was to unite Shiites in the region under one flag, his own, and use their combined power to create an Islamic “superpower” capable of taking on the two superpowers of the time, the United States an the Soviet Union.
In that spirit Khomeini had encouraged the creation of a special force of “volunteer-martyrs” to “liberate” Bahrain, appointing one of his relatives, Ayatollah Sadeq Rouhani, as its leader. (Later, Rouhani broke with Khomeini and accused him of having betrayed the Bahrain plan.)
The latest revelations underline what analysts of Iranian politics since the 1980s have known: The Islamic republic is an opportunistic power in search of an empire based on ideology but sought through violence and war.
It was thus no surprise last June to see the newspaper Kayhan, Iran’s largest-selling daily, calling for Bahrain to be “reattached” to the Islamic republic.
Nor should one be surprised to learn that Tehran is working on a contingency plan under which southern Iraq would be turned into an annex of the Islamic republic, when and if the US-led coalition runs away before the new Iraqi regime can defend itself.
One sign that the Islamic republic may be moving onto the offensive came last week from Iran’s Minister for Intelligence and Security Ayatollah Mohseni Ejehi.
At a press conference, he claimed that the Islamic republic was facing a “three-pronged conspiracy” aimed at toppling it. He warned that “revolutionary elements” linked to the Khomeinist movement were prepared to open several new fronts in the region, including in “unexpected places.”
Ejehi’s analysis shows that Tehran’s new leadership, determined to crush the internal opposition, plans to order spectacular operations by its allies and clients beyond Lebanon and Gaza.
The current “war debate” illustrates one crucial point: In 1987, the central question of regional policy was how to reconstitute the balance of power shattered by the Khomeinist revolution in Iran. Two decades ago Khomeini decided to stop because he was stopped. Two decades later, the region still faces that question.
The new leadership in Tehran, under President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad does not believe in “revolution in one country”.
One of Ahmadinejad’s key claims against Rafsanjani is the that the latter, and other “rich mullahs”, forced Khomeini to end the war without achieving “ultimate victory.” In that context, Yazdi’s revelations must be read as a warning from an aging revolutionary who, having lost most of his illusions, has gained a whole set of new fears.
