The Gulf War: The contest continues

Abstract

The Gulf War between Iran and Iraq has been a very odd war. In its basic characteristics it is similar to other recent conflicts-it has caused great death and destruction, it has been prolonged, and it was unnecessary and it has become pointless-but in several of its aspects it is unusual to the point of oddity. Its very name, 'the Gulf War', is a misnomer because only in the forty-fourth month of the war was there any significant action on, or above, the waters of the Gulf. Belying its name this has been almost entirely a land war with many of the battles taking place hundreds of miles away from the Gulf. It could hardly be otherwise since Iraq's frontage on the Gulf is just forty miles wide, only enough to accommodate the mouth of the Shatt-al-Arab. In few wars have the causes of the conflict been so obscured and misunderstood. Thus, it has become an assumption, an accepted fact, that Iraq began the war by attacking the international frontier in September 1980, and also that it was Iraq that began the blockade war, the real Gulf war, when it attacked ships using Iran's Kharg Island oil terminal in April 1984. Neither of these 'facts' is correct. No sooner had the 'revolutionary', 'Islamic' regime under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in February 1979 than it began its campaign to export its 'revolution', but in a form neither genuinely revolutionary nor truly Islamic. What it amounted to was an explicit and fiery appeal to the Shia populations in Iraq and the Gulf states to rise up and overthrow their Sunni rulers. Iraq was the country most acutely threatened by this subversive propaganda because more than half its population, perhaps 60 per cent, is Shia and concentrated in the southern areas, immediately adjoining the Iranian province of Khuzistan. And the Iraqi Shias had genuine grievances against the government in Baghdad, dominated by Sunnis, which, whether under the Hashemite monarchy or the Nasserist or Ba'athist republics, had given the Shias a very small share in power. This dangerous situation was made all the more explosive by the existence of a militant Iraqi Shia organization, led by Imam Muhammad