Military power and foreign policy goals: the Iran-Iraq war revisited

Abstract

For every state there exists an interrelationship between the availability of military power and the setting of foreign policy goals. The nature and scope of the quest for military power is a direct consequence of the world view held by a state's leadership, which is in turn translated into national goals. At the same time a state's military capabilities at any given moment can determine the limits of a forceful foreign policy. Any successful pursuit of foreign policy goals depends to a considerable extent on the state's assessment of its military power in relation to its external environment. Since the assessment of military power and the perception of external threats are as much subjective as objective, any state can commit one of two errors in evaluation. It can set itself goals which are beyond its military power to achieve; or it can underestimate its power and pursue policies and goals that are narrower or more limited than its 'objective' power base might make possible. Though most would agree that setting sights too low can be just as harmful to a state's interests as setting them too high, it is the latter kind of error that generally attracts the attention of analysts. Setting sights too low is usually read as a sign of inactivity, passivity, lack of initiative and missed opportunities. But once a state undertakes concrete action in pursuit of its foreign policy course and fails, the failure is usually attributed to an overestimation of its relative power. This is the line of thought that has been applied to the decision by Iraq in 1980 to invade Iran, a decision which is commonly explained by what may be called the grand design theory. According to this theory, the Iraqi invasion in September 1980 reflected President Saddam Hussein's ambitions-which ranged from the occupation of Iranian territories (the Shatt al-Arab and Khuzestan), through the overthrow of the Khomeini regime, to the desire to assert Iraq as the pre-eminent Arab and Gulf state. It has even been suggested that, by defeating Iran, Saddam Hussein hoped to become the most influential leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.1 On this line of argument, Iraq's inability to bring the war to a swift conclusion is attributed to the wide gap between these very ambitious goals and the limitations of Iraqi military power. Iraq, so it is said, has committed the common mistake of trying to bite off more than it can chew, having overestimated its own power and underestimated that of its opponent.