The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
the destruction of the communist Tudeh party in Iran, were sending massive new tank shipments to Iraq. The Israelis had provided large quantities of small arms and ammunition to the Iranians. So had the Syrians. The French were still supplying Exocet missiles to the Iraqis while the North Koreans sold Soviet rifles to Iran. The Americans had been quietly re-establishing their relations with Baghdad – at this point, they were still increasing their ‘interests section’ in the Belgian embassy in Baghdad – at the very moment when Saddam most needed the moral as well as the military support of a Western power. While George Bush was denouncing Iran’s ‘Oppressive regime’ in Pakistan, Saddam was reported to be hanging deserters by the roadside outside Baghdad.
On 29 May 1984 the first load of 400 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and launchers arrived by air in Saudi Arabia from the United States. President Khamenei of Iran sarcastically warned Washington that Iran would ‘resist and fight’ any US forces sent to the battle zone. ‘If the Americans are prepared to sink in the depths of the Persian Gulf waters for nothing, then let them come with their faith, motivation and divine power,’ he said. As for the Gulf Arabs, he warned: ‘You will be neutral in the war only if you do not provide Saddam with any assistance. But a neighbour who wants to deliver a blow at us is more dangerous than a stranger, and we should face that danger.’ Well aware that the Arabs were still giving huge financial support to Iraq, the oil-tanker crews took Khamenei’s threats seriously. Several vessels on the Kuwait run through the sea lanes north-west of Bahrain were now travelling by night for fear of Iranian air attack.
Covering this protracted war for a newspaper was an exhausting, often unrewarding business. The repetition of events, the Iraqi attacks on Kharg Island, the massing of hundreds of thousands of Iranian troops outside Basra, the constant appeals by both sides to the UN Security Council, the sinking of more oil tankers, had a numbing quality about it. Sometimes this titanic bloodbath was called the ‘forgotten war’ – even though at times it approached the carnage of the 1914–18 disaster. I dislike parallels with the two greatest conflicts of the twentieth century. Can we really say, for example, that Saddam’s decision to invade Iran in 1980 was a blunder on the scale of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, which led to the deaths of 20 million Russians – when perhaps only a million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s aggression? Certainly, by the time it ended, the Iran – Iraq bloodletting had lasted as long as the Vietnam war. And Saddam’s war was the longest conventional conflict of the last century, a struggle of such severity that the barrels of the Iranian army’s guns had to be replaced twelve times before it ended in 1988.
My visits to the battle fronts, and to Tehran and Baghdad, seemed to have a ‘story-so-far’ quality about them. Statistics lost their power to shock. In 1985 alone, Colonel Heikki Holma of the UN’s inspection team in Iran estimated that 4,500 Iranians had been killed or wounded by chemical weapons. In two years, there had been at least sixty major chemical attacks by Iraq. The casualty figures were obviously on a Somme-like scale – again, I found myself unwillingly using the parallels of my father’s war – but neither side would admit the extent of its own losses. By 1986 alone, a million had perished in the war, so it was said by the Western diplomats who rarely if ever visited the war front, 700,000 of them Iranian. The Iranians said that 500,000 Iraqis had been killed. There were – and here the figures could be partly confirmed by the International Red Cross – 100,000 Iraqi POWs in Iran and around 50,000 Iranian POWs in Iraq. Both sides were together spending around $1.5 billion a month on the war.
In Iran, the conflict had changed the mood of the theologians trying to conduct the battle with Iraq. Only a year earlier, there were daily reports of torture and mass rape coming out of the grey-walled confines of Evin prison. But in April 1985, Hojatolislam Ali Ladjevardi, the Tehran prosecutor, was dismissed from his post together with many of his murderous henchmen; executions were now carried out almost exclusively on common criminals rather than enemies of the state. ‘The executions have been toned down,’ an Iranian businessman put it with mild sarcasm. ‘Now they only kill murderers and narcotics men. The worst they do to a girl who offends Islamic law is to cut her hair off.’ There was a growing acquiescence – rather than acceptance – of the Khomeini regime that produced an irritable freedom of speech; shopkeepers, businessmen, Iranian journalists, even conservative religious families could complain about the government without fear that they would be betrayed to the Revolutionary Guards.
It was part of an illusion. The Islamic Republic had not suddenly become democratic; it had cut so deeply into its political enemies that there was no focus of opposition left. In 1984 at least 661 executions were believed to have been carried out in Tehran, a further 237 up to Ladjevardi’s dismissal. The figures were Amnesty International’s, but the Iranians themselves admitted to 197 judicial killings between March 1984 and April 1985, claiming that they were all for drug offences. The introduction of a machine specially designed by Iranian engineers to amputate fingers was proudly announced by Tehran newspapers, proving that the revolution was as anxious as ever to exact punishment on those who contravened its laws.
Such public freedom of expression as still existed could be found in the Majlis, the institution that so many critics had once predicted would provide only a rubber-stamp parliament for Khomeini’s decrees. There was a confrontation in parliament over a series of laws on land reform, trade and the budget. Conservative members led by Rafsanjani, the speaker, wanted to preserve the power of the clergy and the bazaaris, arguing for a liberal economy and no changes in land ownership. More radical members who claimed to follow ‘the line of the Imam’ were demanding full government control of trade, land distribution and a number of social reforms that sounded like socialism. The result was government paralysis. Landowners refused to till their fields lest their property became profitable and was taken away by the state.
Khomeini had a final veto over all legislation, but his chief function now was to be a presence; he was the patriarch, produced for the relatives of martyrs or, more rarely, for foreign diplomats, a figure of solidity but no movement, of image rather than content, a mirror to past victory and what had gone before rather than to the future. His last meeting with diplomats was typical. More than sixty ambassadors, chargés and first secretaries were crammed into a minuscule room at the Ayatollah’s residence and obliged to sit cross-legged on a slightly grubby carpet, a French embassy attaché suffering severe cramp as he perched on top of a Scandinavian chargé. In due course, Khomeini entered the room and delivered himself of a fifteen-minute speech in Farsi, without translation. ‘It didn’t matter what he said,’ one of the ambassadors remarked acidly. ‘The old man sat there on a sheet on a raised dais and he was making only one point: that the Shah had received his guests in regal magnificence in his palace but that he, Khomeini, would receive us in humble circumstances.’
But each night now, Khomeini was taken off to the bunkers beneath the Shah’s old palace at Niavaran, the only air-raid shelter in all Tehran, to protect him from the war that was now his enduring legacy. As the Iraqi fighter-bombers soared unmolested over the capital, tens of thousands of his people would flee into the mountains by road. While Khomeini still demanded the overthrow of Saddam, his mullahs appeared on national television, begging the people of Isfahan, Shiraz, Ahwaz, Dezful and Tehran itself to contribute food and clothing for their soldiers at the front. Individual home towns were asked to resupply front-line units that came from their areas. In the marshes of southern Iraq, the Iranian Basiji clung on amid the hot mud and Iraqi counter-attacks.
The Iranians were now freighting their 600-kilo ground-to-ground missiles up to a new base at Sarbullzaharb in Kurdistan where North Korean engineers calibrated them for the flight to Baghdad. When they knew the rocket was approaching its target just over fifteen minutes later, the Iranians would announce the impending strike over national radio. For reporters, this could have a weird journalistic effect. ‘I’d be sitting in the bureau in Baghdad when Nabila Megalli would come through on my telex from Bahrain where she’d been listening to the radio,’ Samir Ghattas, Mohamed Salam’s AP successor in Iraq, would recall. ‘She would say that the Iranians had just announced they’d fired a missile at Baghdad. I stayed on the telex line – we had no fax then – and the moment I heard the explosion in Baghdad, I’d write ‘Yes’. The Iraqis would pull the plug five minutes later. It took twenty minutes for