Russia's military alliance with Iran is all about keeping Assad in power and America on its back foot, and even a short-lived partnership can do long-term damage to U.S. interests. On Aug. 16, Russian bombers took off from Shahid Nojeh air base near the Iranian city of Hamadan reportedly to bomb Islamic State targets in Syria. The fact that the Russian air force had based planes inside Iran was not only a surprise to American diplomats -- it was news to many Iranian officials as well. While State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the Russian action may have violated a UN Security Council resolution, 20 Iranian legislators demanded a closed session of parliament to discuss why Iran had allowed foreign forces to base themselves in the country for the first time since World War II.
Against the backdrop of outrage in Tehran, Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan accused Moscow of "ungentlemanly" behavior in publicizing Russia's use of the base, denied reports citing Russian officials that Moscow and Tehran had signed an agreement for Russia to use the base, and announced that Iran would no longer allow Russian bombers to fly from the airstrip. In an apparent attempt to save face, Russian Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the Russian planes had "successfully" completed their mission and returned to Russia.
This may have seemed a brief hiccup in an otherwise solid alliance between Russia and Iran. But it's worth remembering that it's the romance, not the strife, that is the aberration. Never in the countries' hundreds of years of dealing with each other have they cooperated so closely. It's America's misfortune that Moscow and Tehran have just recently discovered that there is vast overlap in their interests in the Middle East -- not least, in opposing U.S. interests there.
CONVERGENCE OF INTERESTS
Russia and Iran have traditionally been suspicious of each other. Although there has been occasional cooperation, relations have usually vacillated between direct rivalry and veiled competition. At times, the two countries have descended into armed conflict: They fought two wars in the 19th century, and Russian forces occupied lands the Iranian shah considered his own in what is now Turkmenistan. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet forces sponsored separatist movements, first in the northern Iranian province of Gilan on the Caspian Sea and, in the wake of World War II, in both Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. The 1946 Azerbaijan crisis -- the first real crisis of the Cold War -- was sparked by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin's refusal to withdraw the Red Army from Iran in 1946, where it had been stationed during World War II in order to help secure a supply route.
The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran after the Iranian revolution might have symbolized revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's animosity toward the United States, but his distrust of the Soviet Union was just as deep. "Neither East nor West but Islamic republic" became a defining slogan of Iranian revolutionaries.
But with Khomeini's death in 1989, some Iranian officials sought to improve ties with Moscow. Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani even traveled to Moscow to explore rapprochement. By the end of the 1990s, Russia had emerged as Iran's main conventional arms supplier and began assisting in its nuclear program.
When Vladimir Putin rose to power in 2000, the relationship grew even warmer. The arms trade between the two countries expanded even further, and the Kremlin's diplomats vocally supported Iran's nuclear program as a peaceful endeavor and worked diligently to dilute sanctions on Tehran. High-level meetings of the countries' top officials are now almost routine: Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Iran in January 2015, and Putin visited in November -- the first visits by Putin and a Russian defense minister in a decade. Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, have met several times since then, as have their ministers and aides. This summer, Putin called for Iran's admission into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, something he had never done for any Arab state.
ANTI-WESTERN ALLIANCE
Some of the motivation for this warming of ties may have been economic, as Russian military and nuclear industries saw Iran as an increasingly lucrative market. But Moscow and Tehran have also been brought together by a growing number of shared political interests. Both countries are concerned about the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal. Both fear the rise of Sunni extremism, which for Russia is connected to the historic instability in the North Caucasus region that goes back to the war with Chechnya, when Moscow's abusive policies radicalized what began as a secular separatist struggle. Russia and Iran also see possibilities for growing cooperation in Eurasia; for example, three years ago, Russian and Iranian officials discussed the idea of Tehran joining the Moscow-led Customs Union, which aims to counterbalance the European Union.
The Syrian crisis has taken Russia-Iran cooperation to new heights. The war-torn country has become the perfect place for both regimes to check U.S. influence in the Middle East and expand their own power in the region. Putin especially wants to promote himself as a great world leader and cynically uses talk of anti-terrorism cooperation in Syria to advance this goal, even as he failed to target the Islamic State with any consistency and in some cases may even have strengthened it.
From Putin's paranoid perspective, support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is the same as supporting his own grip on power. The Russian president believes that the West orchestrated the "color revolutions" in Eastern Europe and other anti-regime protests in the Middle East and Russia. If he does not reduce Western influence, he believes, the West will oust him. Iran also needs Moscow's help to prop up its client and wants to obtain more Russian weapons.
Putin says he is friends with everyone in the Middle East, but, in reality, his policies favor the "Shiite axis" in the region. Russian experts and officials claim that Iran is a potentially "secular" force to counter Sunni Islamists. Indeed, Moscow has designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic State as terrorist organizations -- but not the Shiite Islamist Hezbollah. Meanwhile, the Russian media trumpet the country's alliance with Iran and the public acknowledgment of Russian forces based there.
Putin is a cynical pragmatist. Even as he courts Iran and the Syrian regime, for example, he has also worked to improve relations with Turkey and Israel. Yet the Middle East's Shiite powers tend to be more anti-Western than the Sunni bloc -- an alliance with them aligns with Putin's goal of countering the West and positioning himself as the leader of a great power.
DAMAGE TO U.S. INTERESTS
Iran's decision to cut off Russia's use of Shahid Nojeh air base was most likely due to a domestic political backlash. In any case, the anger was not about Moscow's use of the base, but about Russia's decision to publicize it.
Moscow and Tehran are therefore likely to continue cooperation. Theirs is an alliance of dictatorships, and dictators can put their differences aside when it suits their interests.
Still, this doesn't mean their alliance is built to last. Putin may think he can continue to successfully balance the Arab world's rival Sunni and Shiite powers on one hand and Iran and Israel on the other, but the Middle East is volatile and unpredictable. Iranian officials' cynicism that Putin will throw Tehran under the bus when it suits his short-term interests and anti-Russian sentiments among ordinary Iranians will continue to undercut long-term ties.
But a short-term alliance can do long-term damage to U.S. interests, and tactical victories can add up to a strategy. U.S. and European officials should not underestimate Putin's Middle Eastern ambitions or the challenges that his growing anti-Western alliance in the region presents.
Anna Borshchevskaya is the Ira Weiner Fellow at The Washington Institute.
Montazeri was more outspoken about the executions of political prisoners than previously thought — he said Khomeini would go down in history as a “bloodthirsty murderer”
Role of Ayatollah Khomeini’s son revealed, including the extent to which he kept vital information from the founder of the Islamic Republic
Further evidence that prisoners were unjustly tried — and even those who agreed to cooperate with officials were killed
The voices of those who sat on the so-called “death panel” can be heard in the clip, adding further eeriness and menace to an already horrifying series of events
On August 10, the office representing the late Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri released an audio file from 1988, raising new questions about the execution of thousands of political prisoners that year, including over 2,000 jailed members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq or the People’s Mojahedin Organization (MEK). MEK originally played a role in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but, following disputes and violent clashes with Ayatollah Khomeini supporters in the 1980s, the group turned into one of the Islamic Republic’s most controversial and long-standing opponents. It sided with Iraq during the eight-year war between the two countries, and, until recently, countries including the United States considered the MEK to be a terrorist organization.
The audio clip released documents Montazeri's August 15, 1988 visit with the members of Iran’s revolutionary death panel. Comprised of religious legal expert Hossein Ali Nayri, Morteza Ashrafi, then Tehran’s prosecuting attorney, deputy prosecutor Ebrahim Raisi and Mostafa Pourmohamadi, the Ministry of Intelligence's representative to Evin Prison, the body was tasked with carrying out the orders of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with regard to political prisoners.
In 1988, Khomeini had declared in writing that “All those who, in prisons all over the country, have persisted and continue to persist in their hypocrisy are at war against God and condemned to death.” According to Montazeri’s memoirs, 3,800 people lost their lives in the executions of summer 1988.
So, with the release of this audio clip, what new facts have emerged, and how do they contribute to our understanding of this dark chapter in Iranian history?
-Montazeri as a Reliable Source
The release of the video adds further credibility to Montazeri’s accounts of those days. Hearing is believing. But in addition to this, the audio files do something else: they allow the listener to witness one of the most bitter meetings regarding political, security, and judicial affairs in Iran’s history. Rage and laughter, emotion and indifference, despair and concern, sincerity and deception (both obvious and hidden) between interlocutors do not exactly jump out in dry written memos. But now they are here in this audio clip to be heard verbatim.
At moments in the recording, Ayatollah Montazeri registers his concern that anyone else will join the ranks of the dead. “I’m opposed to even a single one more,” he says at one point. One of those responsible for carrying out the slaughter replies that 200 prisoners are in solitary confinement, and that problems will result if those prisoners are released and return to the general population. Although the clip reveals emotion in some places, some of the most disturbing and strange moments include the dispassionate back-and-forth between officials with the power to seal the fates of 200 prisoners by giving them death sentences.
- Montazeri felt more strongly about what was going on in 1988 than had previously been disclosed — and said Khomeini would go down in history as a “bloodthirsty murderer”
Montazeri's stance in the clip will certainly come as a surprise to some, as the cleric has not been heard being so frank about the 1988 executions before. He called members of the death committee “historical criminals”, presumably to their faces, and claimed that the case is one of the greatest crimes to take place in the Islamic Republic. He also predicted that in future Khomeini will be thought of as a bloodthirsty murderer. The audio file presents a number of these types of statements — claims that did not appear in Montazeri’s written memoirs.
- Ahmad Khomeini played a more major role in events than previously known
The clip also reveals the extent to which Khomeini’s son Ahmad Khomeini’s was involved in the events of 1988. Two points in particular hold significance. First, in collaboration with the intelligence ministry, the younger Khomeini had already set out designs for cracking down on dissidents. For three or four years prior to 1988, he had stated in newspapers, journals, and communiques that all MEK members should be put to death. As part of the attack on the monafeqin (Ahmad Khomeini’s highly polemical term, meaning “hypocrites,” and regularly used by him during the 1980s), he welcomed the chance to raise the issue with the elder Khomeini himself, being sure to secure in writing as much support from his father as possible.
In fact, in the clip, Montazeri makes it clear that that dealing with the Mojahedin-e Khalq’s assault on Iran was but an excuse for following through on a long-standing plan. Owing to the fact that some of those executed were members of other leftist groups, it had been clear even before that the executions were a premeditated project. Montazeri’s audio now further confirms this fact.
Secondly, Ahmad Khomeini was also in such firm control of his family that he didn’t permit detailed information about the killings to reach his father, and the clip provides new evidence for this. Montazeri himself couldn’t even secure a 10-minute meeting with the Supreme Leader: “They’ve cordoned off Mr. Khomeini from everyone,” Montazeri says in the clip. And it was not merely Ahmad doing the cordoning off: in one instance, Mohammadali Ansari — Ahmad’s former agent to his father’s estate, who now handles the affairs of Ahmad’s children — blocked a dissenting judge’s objections from reaching Ayatollah Khomeini, telling him: “You have no right to speak to the Imam. You will kiss his hand and then relate the proceedings to Mr. Ahmad.”
Prisoners’ Trials: The Truth
Also brought to light is new information concerning the manner in which prisoners were tried. Examples of these unjust processes can be found in official documents: a letter to Ayatollah Khomeini from a religious judge of the Khuzestan Revolutionary Court dated August 14, 1988 states that some of those detained “were prepared to talk and give up information,” but were executed “in the interest of the Islamic Republic” because they had not been able to prove that they had defended Iran in its eight-year war with Iraq or because they were accused of siding with Iraq. The newly-released Montazeri file reveals that even those who insisted they had fought in the war on Iran’s side were put to death. For example, one prisoner was, in the course of interrogation, asked to denounce the MEK. He agreed. He was then asked if he was willing to go the front in the war against Iraq, and responded similarly. Finally, interrogators asked him if he was willing to walk on landmines. The prisoner responded: “Is the whole country willing to go walk on landmines? These things shouldn’t be expected of a new convert like me.” The attendant official then said it was clear the prisoner was unrepentant and still supported the MEK, and his execution was carried out.
Did Khamenei Support the Executions?
Up to now, the current supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini has been portrayed as one of those who opposed the slaughter in 1988. The audio file makes clear that after the widespread crackdown on prisoners, executive officials pursued a campaign of deception, intending to tell the nation that those executed had been in contact with foreign powers. One of those present in the meeting indicates that Ayatollah Mousavi Ardabili (then head of the Supreme Judicial Council) and Ayatollah Khamenei (then president) were in on the plot.“So many lies we would tell the people,” Montazeri said. “So many untruths, in this Islamic Republic.”
The actual voices of members of the death panel can be heard on the audio file
One extremely disturbing aspect of the audio file is that the voices of those responsible for issuing death penalties can be heard for the first time. In the clip, they offer a few points in their own defense. They say that they have learned how to suppress extremism — if they had not learned this, they say, the number of killings would have been three times greater. They also state that they would never argue with Ayatollah Khomeini’s edict. They complain that the Supreme Judicial Council has withdrawn itself and refused to get involved in the issue. They insist they have done due diligence in giving prisoners space to part ways with the MEK, but because they had received no response, they carried out the execution orders.
In one especially bitter moment on the audio clip, Montazeri asks one panel member: “Have you been telling prisoners that if they answer ‘no’ they will be executed?” The member responds, “No, I didn’t say that to anyone.” The panel has no other response to this simple question from Montazeri. “Mr. Nayri, if a person were to ask you why you have put to death a prisoner sentenced to 10 years’ jail time, what would you say? We’ll regret that rashness when it comes time to execute someone sentenced to hanging.” These dialogues illuminate much about the trial process that condemned thousands.
Death panel members were divided, and in-fighting was pervasive
The audio contains further striking revelations of incompetence and hypocrisy on the part of Ayatollah Mousavi Ardabili, head of the Supreme Judicial Council at the time. He not only abdicated his own responsibility in the case but also fanned emotional flames, abetted propaganda efforts, and worked with the others to cook up means for a cover-up. And it wasn’t just Erdibili. The clip neatly exposes the squabbles and divisions between death panel members: one panel member accuses the body of playing politics, while another says it shirked responsibility by teaching classes every day until noon and meeting only three times a week. Montazeri confirms this: “To hell with them all.”
Another new fact brought to light is the mendacity of some members of the panel. One member claims that some prisoners were spared execution because members of their family had been previously put to death — this claim while there were clear examples of families like the Behkishis, who lost five members to state executions in 1988. Intelligence Ministry’s representative to Evin Prison was definitely on the panel
Mostafa Pourmohamadi, the Intelligence Ministry’s representative to Evin Prison, has previously denied his presence in the body: “I wasn’t involved in the death panel,” he has said. His voice can be heard on the audio clip, leaving no room for further denial. Pourmohamadi definitely sat on the death panel of 1988.
Other revelations will likely come to light as a result of the audio clip’s public release, and further investigation into its content. Countless questions remain around the events of 1988. Before the release of the clip, the world knew that Montazeri objected to the executions of 1988. But the audio file has provided further documentary evidence of his protest against the very regime he helped to build, and the clash among Iran’s most powerful figures of the time. Now the world knows the full extent of Montazeri’s outrage. It was a bloodbath — a bloodbath that had the full approval of and was carried out by the highest powers in the Islamic Republic.
When Iran makes headlines, it is usually as a result of its conflicts with other countries. Far less attention is paid to Iran’s conflicts with itself, which are still raging nearly 40 years after the revolution that brought forth the Islamic Republic. Despite the images of a monolithic, repressed, hyper-devout society that sometimes serve as a shorthand for Iran in Western media, the country is in fact the site of a great deal of political and ideological contestation. As Laura Secor writes in her new book, Children of Paradise, “Iran does not have a culture of passive citizenship, despite the best efforts of its rulers, past and present, to produce one. What it does have in many quarters is a restless determination to challenge injustice and to seize control of its destiny.”
Secor, who has reported from and written about Iran for The New Yorker, TheNew York Times Magazine, and this publication, has produced a vibrant panorama of contemporary Iran that doubles as a thorough intellectual and political history of the country’s past four decades. She tells the stories of the men who have held power, and also those of the men—and, increasingly, women—who have opposed them: activists, journalists, lawyers, university students, and ordinary citizens who have risked their lives by challenging authority.
The Iran that emerges from her account is full of contradictions, complexities, and paradoxes. The book ranges widely, but it is held together by an underlying narrative of intellectual evolution: the descent of dissent, from the revolutionary thinkers who helped bring down the shah, to the reformists who later sought to liberalize Iranian theocracy, to the contemporary generation of activists who have directly challenged clerical rule and paid a heavy price. Throughout, the book calls attention to how each generation has dealt with the Enlightenment concepts of rights and equality and with the desire to maintain religious legitimacy. Today’s activists and reformers still struggle to reconcile the fundamental beliefs of Islam with the Enlightenment concept that all people, irrespective of belief or nonbelief, are equal and endowed by nature with inalienable rights. The conservatives who rule the country, on the other hand, suffer from no such dilemma: they hold that only true believers are entitled to participate in high-level politics—and they insist that only they themselves can determine who counts as a true believer.
AGAINST THE WEST
Secor begins with a highly accessible introduction to the Iranian radicals of the 1960s and 1970s who helped lay the groundwork for the revolution—thinkers whose legacies continue to shape Iranian politics but who remain virtually unknown in the West. She focuses on the sociologist Ali Shariati and the social critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who were prominent among a set of intellectuals who strove to articulate an anticolonial and anti-Western but profoundly modern vision of Iran as a revolutionary Shiite society. The shah had allied Iran with the United States and had opened up the country to Western influence and money, steps that resulted from and also accelerated what these dissidents derided as gharbzadegi: the “Westoxification” that led Iranian elites to slavishly embrace foreign ideas and technologies. Writers such as Shariati and Al-e Ahmad sought to reclaim an “authentic” Iranian identity and reinterpreted Shiite theology as a revolutionary political ideology, refiguring the martyred Imam Hussein—revered by Shiites as the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad—as a kind of seventh-century Che Guevara. They held that “Eastern” spirituality was superior to “Western” materialism and argued that Westerners could not possibly understand Iran because the country’s unique culture would always be fundamentally alien to Western minds. By the 1990s, some of the intellectuals who had eagerly participated in the revolution as young people had grown disillusioned.
Most of these nativist intellectuals were religious dissidents. (Under the shah, Shariati was arrested a number of times and ultimately died in exile.) Others were leftists with Marxist sympathies. And some were even conservative supporters of the shah. But most shared one common feature: a rejection of the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. For pro-regime intellectuals, the Enlightenment concept of individual rights placed unacceptable limitations on the state. For Marxists, the need for national unity against the shah’s tyranny and foreign influences took precedence over claims to individual rights. And for the religious dissidents, Enlightenment thinking supplanted God with humanity and thereby opened the way for materialism, atheism, and the toleration of religious “deviations” such as Bahaism. As Shariati put it, he chose to take shelter in the mosque to protect himself from the noise and dazzle of the Enlightenment, which he feared put mankind on a false path.
Supporters of the Iranian opposition movement wear green in the holy city of Qom, December 2009.
But Shariati, Al-e Ahmad, and their intellectual allies were a bit selective about their antipathy to the West: they were quick to accuse their opponents of gharbzadegi while in the same breath praising Western critics of Enlightenment thought, such as Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, and adapting their ideas to the Iranian context. Indeed, the philosopher Ahmad Fardid, who coined the term gharbzadegi and later became a champion of Iranian Islamism, started out as a monarchist and right-wing Heideggerian. Such tensions in Iranian revolutionary thought would become only more pronounced after the shah fled Iran and his chief antagonist, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, returned from exile and replaced the shah’s monarchy with a theocratic system headed by himself.
CLERICAL ERRORS
After Khomeini took power, he quickly sidelined the leftists and secularists who had joined forces with the Islamists to oppose the shah’s regime. It soon became clear that under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic would not usher in the rule of the intelligentsia, as Shariati and other dissidents had hoped and expected. Rather, Khomeini’s new constitution institutionalized the concept of velayat-e faqih, the divine right of the clergy to rule.
By the 1990s, some of the intellectuals who had eagerly participated in the revolution as young people had grown disillusioned, as the clerics and security forces maintained an ever-firmer grip on Iranian society and politics. This set of former revolutionaries began to turn away from the old discourse and search for a new language to articulate their demands and grievances, hoping that this might be the first step toward reforming the system. Theorists and activists who had once promoted ideas such as gharbzadegi, khesh (roots), shahed (martyrdom), and towhid (solidarity) now hailed demokrasi, azadi (liberty), barabari (equality), huquq-e beshar (human rights), jameh-e madani (civil society), and shahrvandi (a newly coined termed meaning “citizenship”). These intellectuals became known as “the new Islamic thinkers,” and they represented a repudiation of the earlier line of revolutionary thought: one of them, Akbar Ganji, even declared that Shariati’s work should be relegated to a museum.
The leading figure among the new Islamic thinkers was Abdolkarim Soroush. In the 1970s, Soroush was a young admirer of Shariati, doing his graduate studies in chemistry and philosophy in the United Kingdom. His writings on science and religion got the attention of many revolutionaries and dissidents, including Khomeini himself. Soroush returned to Iran in 1979, after the revolution, and soon thereafter, Khomeini appointed him to a committee charged with carrying out an Islamic “cultural revolution” in higher education (modeled in part on the campaign that Mao Zedong had earlier launched in China) that would rid Iran’s universities of Western influences. But once Soroush realized that the clergy had no intention of sharing power with others, especially with reformist intellectuals, he shifted gears, eschewing radical Islamism in favor of a vision more in tune with liberalism. By the mid-1990s, he had become a target for militant conservatives. At his lectures, hard-liners physically assaulted him and members of the audience. The authorities shut down the magazine he had founded, Kiyan. He was stripped of academic appointments, questioned by intelligence agencies, and even publicly criticized by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Soroush had little choice but to flee into exile, eventually taking a number of academic positions in the United States.
Secor introduces readers to thinkers whose legacies continue to shape Iranian politics but who remain virtually unknown in the West.
Soroush has been absent from Iran for many years, but Secor rightly places him at the center of the intellectual transformation that has taken place there during the past two decades. He has become for a new generation of activists and thinkers what Shariati was for the original revolutionary movement. Drawing inspiration from the work of the Austrian British philosopher Karl Popper, especially The Open Society and Its Enemies, Soroush has set out to slim down Islam, transforming it from the bloated ideology it became under Khomeini into a religion of personal piety and morality centered on the individual’s relationship with God. As Soroush told an interviewer in 1997, he seeks to purify religion, “making it lighter and more buoyant . . . [and] more slender by sifting, whittling away, erasing the superfluous layers off the face of religiosity.”
BEYOND BELIEF
Secor sympathizes with Soroush and other reformist intellectuals of his generation. That sympathy, however, leads her to underestimate two fundamental weaknesses of their movement. First, many reformists discovered the virtues of individual rights only after they had lost influence or had been pushed out of the ruling elite, more often as a result of personal disputes or power struggles than because of genuine philosophical disagreements with the regime. Take, for example, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, revered by reformers as a great champion of individual rights. Montazeri, who died in 2009, had been Khomeini’s designated heir until 1989, when, according to reformers, he broke with the regime over its prohibition of political parties and its efforts to “export” Iran’s revolution abroad, among other issues. A more skeptical view is that Khomeini’s inner circle had already started to ease out Montazeri after a relative of his was caught leaking information to media outlets about the secret U.S.-Iranian dealings that took place as part of the Iran-contra affair and that had embarrassed the regime. Only after it had become clear that Montazeri had fallen out of favor did he begin to publicly challenge the regime on substantive matters.
Second, although Iranian reformists have advocated enhanced individual rights, they have not embraced Enlightenment ideals more generally. They freely use the language of “modernity”—their pronouncements frequently feature that term—but neglect the fact that there are many varieties of modernity, including Stalinism, Maoism, fascism, and Nazism.
The main stumbling block preventing the reformists from a full embrace of Enlightenment values are the concepts of universal liberty and equality. The Enlightenment replaced divine authority with popular sovereignty, religious duties with individual rights, and, most threatening of all, obligations to God with inalienable rights derived from nature. In the Enlightenment tradition, such rights belong to all. But most reformist intellectuals have been willing to accept notions of liberty and equality only when applied to “true” Muslims. Mohammad Khatami, the reformist who served as president of Iran from 1997 to 2005 and who remains an influential figure, divides humanity into khody (“us,” meaning Muslims) and kheyr-e-khody (“them,” meaning unbelievers). Even Soroush, the reformist who comes closest to Enlightenment values, tends to endorse the idea of a political distinction between believers and everyone else. Many reformists discovered the virtues of individual rights only after they had lost influence or had been pushed out of the ruling elite.
Secor writes that for Soroush, “there was no reason Muslim societies should not draw on secular political theories in order to design the best possible state. . . . What mattered was that those who entered politics in a Muslim state have good Muslim values. From there, everything could be debated and contested on rational merits, in the open air.” But that position requires one to determine what constitutes “good Muslim values.” As Soroush learned the hard way, for those in power in Iran, demonstrating “good Muslim values” requires one to adhere not just to Islam but to the concept of velayat-e faqih, and also to demonstrate loyalty to Iran’s supreme leader—all of which flies in the face of Enlightenment values.
An Iranian woman holds a poster of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as they attend a pro-government rally in Tehran, February 2011.
This problem of unbelief has plagued reformers for decades. Consider the mass executions of imprisoned dissidents and antiregime militants that Khomeini ordered near the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. Secor movingly and vividly covers this grotesque bloodletting. The executions were carried out after Khomeini issued two secret fatwas (religious decrees), one calling for the death of prisoners who were moharebs (those warring against God) and the other condemning those who were mortads (apostates). The first was directed against members of the Mojahedin, a radical Islamist organization led by young intellectuals from devout Muslim backgrounds who had waged a dramatic guerrilla war against the shah but had also challenged Khomeini’s regime after the revolution. The second fatwa condemned antiregime leftists and nationalists who had grown up in Muslim families but no longer believed in Islam. The prisons set up inquisition courts that asked inmates whether they identified as Muslims, believed in basic Islamic precepts (especially the existence of an afterlife), performed their daily prayers, and fasted during Ramadan. Those who answered in the negative were promptly hanged.
In his memoirs, Montazeri claims that he wrote privately to Khomeini to protest the first set of death sentences on the grounds that the Mojahedin prisoners had already been convicted of lesser crimes and were no longer participating in violent resistance. Montazeri, however, avoided criticizing the second fatwa, which condemned the leftists and nationalists to death, probably because he did not want to get into a discussion of apostasy, which might have forced him to argue that unbelievers deserved the same rights as Muslims. That, apparently, would have been a bridge too far. If any influential reformers objected to the second fatwa, they kept it to themselves. Even now, three decades later, their silence remains deafening.
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
Today, the new Islamic thinkers have been supplanted to some extent by a new generation of activists who came of age or were born after 1979 and who can be described as the revolution’s grandchildren. They formed the backbone of the so-called Green Movement that coalesced to protest the results of the 2009 presidential election, which returned the hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office despite charges of vote rigging. Secor provides colorful portraits of these young dissidents: university students, journalists turned bloggers, and human rights campaigners working for women’s equality or against the death penalty.
The regime mercilessly crushed the Green Movement through mass arrests, beatings, and forced confessions. Opposition figures aligned with the movement, such as Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have remained under house arrest even during the presidency of the relative moderate, Hassan Rouhani, who succeeded Ahmadinejad in 2013. Although the promise of the Green Movement seems to have been extinguished, the reformist spirit is not altogether dead. As Secor’s book reveals, one hopeful aspect of today’s younger activists and intellectuals is that, unlike thinkers such as Soroush, who sought to criticize Iran’s theocracy without abandoning religious thought and language, they seem to be avoiding the discourse of Islam altogether and are instead exploring that of the Enlightenment.
Today’s younger Iranian activists and intellectuals seem to be avoiding the discourse of Islam altogether and are instead exploring that of the Enlightenment.
In this way, the new reformists are emulating a much earlier generation of Iranian liberals: the intelligentsia behind Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1905–7, which challenged the Qajar monarchy and led to the creation of Iran’s first parliament. The constitutional revolution’s leaders consciously avoided framing their appeals in religious terms precisely because they knew that doing so would play into the hands of the clergy, who could ultimately delegitimize the revolutionaries by calling into question their devotion to Islam. Soroush’s generation, in contrast, allowed itself to be sucked into the whirlpool of Islamic discourse in part because the popular mood after the revolution seemed to demand it and in part because Khomeini’s towering charisma allowed him to dominate Iranian politics so thoroughly that it became difficult to participate in debates without addressing religious thought.
But today’s activists and reformists do not have to contend with a figure such as Khomeini, and they are discovering that an increasing segment of the Iranian population is no longer enamored of the Khomeinist notion that “Islam is the solution.” So although the clerics remain firmly in control for the moment, it is unlikely that the regime will be able to avoid for much longer the difficult task of acknowledging and responding meaningfully to the central tenets of the Enlightenment, whose appeal refuses to wither away.
Predicting what will start a war, and when, is an unrewarding business. Long-term trends (‘causes’) are often clear enough, but not the proximate causes, or triggers. We can assess the comparative significance of competition for resources, hunger for power, the nature of political systems, the psychology of leaders. What precipitates a conflict, though, may be a sudden, unforeseen event: an accident, misreading or miscalculation, or a temperamental leader’s flash of hubris. Often, of course, it is a combination of such things. Yet there is nothing inevitable about the outbreak of conflict. (Bear in mind when I say this that I work for an NGO that operates on the premise that conflicts can be prevented.)
We face the same obstacles in analysing what will bring a war to an end, and how long it will take – or, to put it differently, what would persuade the warring parties to seek to reach peace. Take the war in Syria. Its participants blundered into it, responding to each provocation by their adversaries with an escalation of their own, so that gradually a local popular protest turned into a civil war wrapped up in a regional power struggle folded into a confrontation between superpowers that so far has cost more than a quarter of a million lives and displaced almost 11 million Syrians – about half the population – within and outside the country’s borders. How will it end? How can it be ended, when the participants themselves show no sign of being ready to end it?
The Iran-Iraq War offers as useful a case study as any in how conflicts begin and are brought to an end. The war started in September 1980, when Saddam Hussein, perceiving a significant threat in Iran’s recent Islamic Revolution, sent his troops across the border with the intention of dealing his neighbour a quick and humiliating blow. He was worried that the Islamic Republic’s radical ideology and revolutionary zeal might incite Iraq’s majority Shia population to revolt against his own secular rule. He also sensed a momentary weakness on Iran’s part, as the new regime was busy eliminating its internal enemies. Strategically, he hoped to rein in Iran’s hegemonic pretensions in Iraq and the Gulf, a region with a significant Shia population.
After eight years of war, and hundreds of thousands of dead and injured on both sides, Iran’s younger generation was dangerously depleted, its troops exhausted and its population demoralised. The new republic had also become isolated internationally as a result of the 1979-81 US hostage crisis. By contrast, Iraq, while vulnerable on a number of fronts, was gathering strength with the help of Arab and Western support. Yet the war was brought to an end, and what clinched it, Pierre Razoux argues in his new history of the conflict, was the Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This made possible a rapprochement between Tehran and Moscow, which the Soviets were eager to achieve, afraid that a defeat for Iran would permit the US to extend its influence in the Gulf. According to Razoux, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that if the Soviets put pressure on Iran to end the conflict, Washington would persuade Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to facilitate the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The broader point is that no headway can be made in negotiations for peaceful settlement of local conflicts until the international context allows for it. Arguably the war in Syria won’t end without an agreement, or at least an accommodation, between Iran and Saudi Arabia – which, in turn, would have to be facilitated by Russia and the US. It is heartening that, despite their significant differences, both Russia and the US are now sponsoring an inclusive process to end the war in Syria.
*
In Iran, the experience of the war still reverberates. A great deal continues to be written about military and strategic decision-making during the war. Yet the Iranian debate, while valuable, is limited. Controlled by the Revolutionary Guard war research centre, it overemphasises military strategy, highlights the heroism of Iranian soldiers, and reflects a very particular perspective, based as it is on a daily record (thirty thousand cassette tapes) of wartime discussions between commanders.
In Iraq, the study of history is hardly a priority now, with its middle class severely damaged by two wars (Iran then the first Gulf War), 13 years of crippling UN sanctions, then the second Gulf War and the mayhem ensuing that continues to this day. What remains of the educated elite is just trying to get by, or trying to leave. US military researchers debriefed Iraqi generals after 2003, but their views are useful only in relation to wartime decision-making and operational matters; some of their more outrageous claims about the regime, or about Iran or the Kurds, went unchallenged by their questioners, who appeared knowledgeable about individual battles but clearly had little or no understanding of the political and historical context in which they took place. The Kurds themselves, who chose Iran as their ally in an attempt to free themselves from the Iraqi yoke and suffered grievously in consequence, have undertaken very little historical inquiry, with the exception of a few autobiographical accounts.
So we have reason to be grateful to Razoux, who between chapters zooms out of the battlefield to focus on the international power struggles and diplomacy that helped shape various confrontations in the war. What emerges is that the mindsets driving state policy in Iran and Iraq today, or the actions of sub-state actors, including Islamic State, are largely rooted in the instincts that propelled the war in the 1980s. The war wasn’t simply a conflict between two states but a clash between two cultural traditions, political philosophies and nations – all intertwined – that transcended state borders: Arab v. Persian, Sunni v. Shia, secular v. theocratic.
Each side drew on its religious traditions in its propaganda, using a coded language that would be clearly understood by the other, and was meant to injure. Saddam had a particular knack for it, referring to the war in its entirety as his ‘Qadisiyyah’ (to invoke the decisive defeat of Persians by Arab Muslim forces in 636 ce), and naming the ballistic missile with which the Iraqi military struck cities as far away as Tehran the al-Hussein, not after himself but after Hussein ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, the third imam of Shia Islam, who was killed and beheaded by his (Arab Sunni Muslim) rivals in the battle of Karbala in 680.
Battles deriving from the seventh-century schism between Sunni and Shia continue to be waged in the popular imagination. The divide, which concerns lineage more than religious practice (although it has evolved ritual differences as well), is deep, but doesn’t necessarily generate violent intercommunal conflict. There have been long historical periods of peaceful commingling and extensive intermarriage. Politicised by the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, however, it now drives the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen. To put the genie back in the bottle will require Iran and Saudi Arabia to find a new balance of power in the Gulf, but even this may no longer be enough to suppress the region’s conflicts.
What emerges in illuminating detail from Razoux’s study is the impact of the power struggle between Ayatollah Khomeini’s two protégés, the men he promoted and protected till the end of his life in June 1989, and left in charge of a house divided by their rivalry: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Hosseini Khamenei. Rafsanjani was the gregarious son of wealthy pistachio farmers, Khamenei the ascetic product of a Shia theological seminary. The war was Rafsanjani’s handiwork, especially after mid-1982, once Iran had succeeded in expelling Iraqi forces from its territory. He continued to press the case for continuing the fight even in the face of the growing realisation that Iran couldn’t sustain it. As the war drew to a conclusion, he made sure that his mentor, Khomeini, took the responsibility for ending it, thereby securing his own political survival.
By contrast, Khamenei alternately supported and opposed continuing the war, making sure never to contradict the Supreme Leader. Razoux may be correct when he says that Rafsanjani made the only mistake of his long political career by allowing Khamenei to succeed Khomeini, giving him the last word on all major decisions. As a result, over time, Rafsanjani has largely been sidelined, though this has done little to temper his ambition or cramp his ability to promote his disciples, including the current president, Hassan Rouhani. They belong to the political wing that, while wanting to preserve the revolution and the regime it produced, sees the value of opening Iran up to the outside world – an approach Khamenei fears will be the beginning of the end.
Razoux gives a good account of Rafsanjani’s push to establish the Revolutionary Guards and Basij volunteers as rivals to the army, which the ruling clerics associated with the shah and the revolution’s secular wing. The use of militias to counteract established state institutions as a way of protecting the Islamic Revolution is a model that Iran is replicating today in Lebanon (Hizbullah), Iraq (the Popular Mobilisation Forces) and Syria (the National Defence Forces). But healthy state institutions would potentially be far more effective in projecting Iran’s power beyond its borders.
*
The crisis over Iran’s nuclear aspirations has its origins in the war too. The shah had established the programme under US tutelage; Iran’s revolutionary leaders cancelled it, saying the use of nuclear weapons contradicted the principles of Islam. Once the Iraqi nuclear threat had been removed by the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in June 1981, Iran no longer felt the need to pursue a nuclear path. But Iraq’s extensive use of poison gas during the conflict forced Iran’s leaders into a recognition that they had left the country dangerously exposed. (To be clear, both sides repeatedly committed atrocities during the war, targeting civilians at will and, in Iran’s case, dispatching children to the front for suicidal tasks such as minesweeping.)
Iran’s frequent, emphatic remonstrations with the UN, based on its careful reading of international law, were largely ignored. It had, in its view, made rightful, reasonable and responsible appeals to the world’s highest political body and been rebuffed. It was only then that Iran’s revolutionary leaders considered restarting the nuclear programme; they also decided to build up their own arsenal of chemical weapons so as to be able to counter Iraq. (The war ended without Iran having deployed these weapons. Iraq, in addition, had started to develop biological weapons, but at war’s end had only reached the testing stage.)
The deal between Iran and the existing nuclear powers, concluded last year, shouldn’t be seen merely as a political fix to a technical problem. The decision to pursue nuclear weapons is primarily rooted in fear and can only be adequately addressed by a building of trust. In this respect, the US and Iran still have a long way to go. One of the potential obstacles will be the US’s perceptions of Iran’s role in the region, and its support of proxies in Lebanon and Syria in particular. But Iran argues that Western states have no business throwing their weight around in the Middle East, that Western military interventions, rather than solving problems, have created a whole host of new ones, and that the root cause of instability – the failure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict – remains unaddressed. Moreover, Iran claims it has legitimate security interests in the region, and that Syria is a long-time partner which came to Iran’s aid when its existence was threatened in the 1980s; it is only reasonable, from Tehran’s perspective, that Iran should support the Assad regime now that it finds itself besieged. (What Iran leaves unsaid is that one of its primary motivations is its need for a corridor through Syria to its principal ally, Hizbullah in Lebanon.) As for Iraq, Iran has an abiding interest in seeing a nominally friendly Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, presiding over a weak state in no position to threaten its neighbour.
Finally, Razoux highlights the critical role of oil, which, even if it wasn’t the casus belli, informed the actions of all the key players, Iran and Iraq included, as in their repeated targeting of oil infrastructure and shipping. One way of describing the war in the most basic terms is that it pitted Iran’s vastly greater reservoir of young men against Iraq’s easy access to loans, credit and bank guarantees, which it used to finance its war machine. When Saudi Arabia, prodded by the US, began flooding the market with oil in July 1985, precipitating a dramatic drop in the price to below $10 per barrel, it caused severe financial difficulties in the Soviet Union and Iran, as well as Iraq. Saddam’s backers in Riyadh helped him out with new loans; after the war, the debt added to the pressure on an Iraqi economy struggling to revive itself, eventually resulting in the Kuwait fiasco. But Iran suffered the most, its income reduced by a half or even two thirds in a very short time. This, and the continuing high rate of casualties, resulted in a surge of domestic criticism of the war that could no longer be ignored or appeased. It would still take three years for Iran to sue for peace, and another three for the Soviet Union to collapse, but the US-Saudi manipulation of oil prices may have been a determining factor in both cases.
This part of the story has echoes today, even though the circumstances are quite different. In the face of a falling oil price, in part caused by the extraction of shale oil and gas in the US, Saudi Arabia has refused to reduce output (it argues, reasonably, that others will promptly seize its market share), and this is placing enormous pressure on Russia, Iran and Iraq, as well as Saudi Arabia itself. There is no overt manipulation, but everyone knows that Saudi Arabia – which has built up significant financial reserves and imposed austerity measures – is likely to be in a better position to weather the storm than states which are strapped for cash and may face a reduced capacity to project their power abroad. The longer Saudi Arabia can hold out, the thinking perhaps goes, the harder it will be for the others to maintain their level of engagement in Syria.
*
There is another important dimension to the war, to which Razoux doesn’t quite do justice. Some twenty years ago, not long after I began researching Iraq, I noted that Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s had lost not only their lives but also their history. The pervasively repressive Iraqi police state and the mayhem caused by the Iran-Iraq war had made it more difficult to gain access to Iraqi Kurdistan, and more dangerous to stay there. The Iraqi regime’s widespread use of poison gas and the systematic murder of tens of thousands of noncombatants went largely unnoticed, unchallenged and unpunished. At that time, in 1994, not a single serious study of the post-1975 history of the Iraqi Kurds had been published. Moreover, the Kurds’ decision to ally themselves with Iran in the war, which the West castigated because of the Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis, resulted in a bias in Western intelligence reporting on the conflict that is glaringly evident in declassified documents from the time.
The basic facts are straightforward. In 1975, when Saddam and the shah struck a deal over the contested Shatt al-Arab waterway (the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates as they reach the Gulf), Iraqi Kurds, who had fought an insurgency with the shah’s support, were hung out to dry and faced imminent total defeat. The rebels under Mustafa Barzani fled into exile in Iran; their families were deported to camps in southern Iraq. Subsequently, the Kurdish movement split along political, ideological and linguistic/geographical lines, and by the time Saddam started the war with Iran in 1980, the two main factions, under Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani and his rival Jalal Talabani, were pursuing shifting alliances with neighbouring states, just as the Kurds have often done and still do today, the better to compete with each other. In 1983, Barzani’s fighters served as Iran’s scouts in battles in corners of Iraqi Kurdistan, while Talabani entered into a one-year truce with Saddam; meanwhile, the two groups were fighting each other in the mountains, either directly or through tribal proxies.
Three years later, Iran had managed to convince the two leaders to work together under Tehran’s authority. By opening a front in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran hoped to relieve pressure on its forces in the south, and by early 1987 the strategy had been so effective that Saddam saw the need to mount a counterinsurgency. He appointed his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid as overseer of security operations in the north. In February 1988 the regime launched what it called the Heroic Anfal Operation, a six-month-long campaign in eight numbered stages designed to cover all of rural Kurdistan. Each stage was preceded by the extensive use of chemical weapons against Kurdish strongholds: this drove people out of the countryside and into the arms of the Iraqi military, which dispatched them in convoys to execution sites in the south. It’s estimated that between eighty and one hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, died this way.
In a separate operation, as part of the war, the Iraqi regime attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with poison gas in March 1988 after it was captured by a combination of Iranian and Kurdish forces. The attack killed thousands of civilians, while leaving the fighters, who had protective clothing, mostly unscathed. (This wasn’t the first Iraqi gas attack on a population centre: that took place in the Iranian Kurdish town of Serdasht in June 1987.) Significantly, the Iraqi army couldn’t have been as successful as it was in dislodging Kurdish villagers, who had grown inured to constant shelling and air attacks, had events at Halabja not sent a powerful message as to what might befall them if they stayed. After Halabja, as chemical clouds wafted down in selective locations during the Anfal campaign, the merest rumour or hint of a gas attack would be enough to send people running, just as the army intended.
*
Regrettably, the scarcity of research on the Kurds I observed in 1994 hasn’t markedly improved since. Razoux’s otherwise excellent study is no exception: in these matters his book strays even from the basic facts, including the events and timing of the Anfal campaign. This is quite unnecessary, as access to Iraqi Kurdistan hasn’t been a problem for more than twenty years, and the war generation is alive and there to be interviewed. Yet without a proper understanding of what happened in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1980s and how it has shaped the Kurds’ worldview it’s hard to grasp what drives them today, and what sacrifices they would be willing to make to avoid ever again falling under Baghdad’s rule, regardless of who is in charge (which today, arguably, is nobody). Iraq’s Kurds are engaged in a long struggle for greater autonomy – and ultimately independence – that includes a demand for absolute control of additional territory, including its oil. This struggle is far from settled, and Western states, by providing unquestioned military support to the Kurds in the fight against Islamic State, are aggravating local conflicts that will persist beyond IS’s defeat, should it come to that. What happens in and around Mosul is likely to be of particular importance.
Razoux has a somewhat limited understanding of the extent and significance of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons throughout the conflict, but especially during its final year. Poison gas may, to some, be merely one tool among many to be used on the battlefield, but its psychological impact – the terror it inflicts, especially on civilians, who are usually unprotected – can be enormous, a so-called force multiplier. For Iraq’s military, it was an asymmetrical advantage. Iran’s forces were reaching exhaustion point in early 1988. Knowing this, the Iraqis dropped huge quantities of gas onto Iranian lines on the first day of each of the five stages of the Tawakalna ‘ala Allah operation, a few months after the attack on Halabja. The gas attacks preceded a concerted effort with conventional weapons to drive demoralised troops out of the remaining pockets of Iraqi territory Iran was holding. The gambit was an overwhelming success; little actual fighting was required during these final ‘battles’ of the war.
At the same time, the Iraqi regime had found a diabolic way of eroding Iranians’ morale at home. The ‘war of the cities’ had involved direct missile attacks on Tehran in February 1988, prompting a massive evacuation of its population. Days after the Halabja attack the Iraqi media began broadcasting threats that Iraq would place chemical warheads on its modified Scud missiles, the al-Husseins. Now Iranians fled Tehran in even greater numbers, while its hospitals began preparing for the arrival of large numbers of casualties from chemical strikes. For many Iranians this was a psychological turning point.
In the event, Saddam failed to make good on his threat: he may have realised he didn’t need to. In hindsight it’s clear that the actual and threatened use of chemical weapons proved instrumental in undermining public support of the Iranian war effort, just as it had done wonders in draining the Iraqi Kurdish countryside of a population that had enabled the rebels to move about with ease. The impact of this smart, strategic, depraved use of poison gas is missed by Razoux, as it is by many others writing on the war. This is surprising, in that the significance of the gas attacks wasn’t lost on the international community, which gathered for the Paris Conference on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons immediately after the war; some years later, this led to the adoption of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Iraq’s escalating use of chemical weapons – greater quantities, ever more lethal and diverse agents, and an expanding set of targets reached over larger distances – may have been the precipitating factor in Iran’s decision not to pursue any longer a conflict it had come to acknowledge it couldn’t win. But this alone wasn’t enough to end the war. A combination of structural factors – dwindling oil revenues, international isolation, a decline in recruits to what was essentially a volunteer army, war exhaustion, popular demoralisation, the US engaging Iran in naval battles in the Gulf, and a changing international context with the thaw in the Cold War and the start of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in May 1988 – paved the way for Iran’s obstinate leader finally to bow to reality. To predict what may bring the Syrian civil war to an end, or the war in Yemen, or any other of the world’s current conflicts, will require a close analysis of the key factors influencing the course of events in each case, and of what might be needed to tip that course in the right direction.
The Iran-Iraq War offers as useful a case study as any in how conflicts begin and are brought to an end. The war started in September 1980, when Saddam Hussein, perceiving a significant threat in Iran’s recent Islamic Revolution, sent his troops across the border with the intention of dealing his neighbour a quick and humiliating blow. He was worried that the Islamic Republic’s radical ideology and revolutionary zeal might incite Iraq’s majority Shia population to revolt against his own secular rule. He also sensed a momentary weakness on Iran’s part, as the new regime was busy eliminating its internal enemies. Strategically, he hoped to rein in Iran’s hegemonic pretensions in Iraq and the Gulf, a region with a significant Shia population.
In Iraq, the study of history is hardly a priority now, with its middle class severely damaged by two wars (Iran then the first Gulf War), 13 years of crippling UN sanctions, then the second Gulf War and the mayhem ensuing that continues to this day. What remains of the educated elite is just trying to get by, or trying to leave. US military researchers debriefed Iraqi generals after 2003, but their views are useful only in relation to wartime decision-making and operational matters; some of their more outrageous claims about the regime, or about Iran or the Kurds, went unchallenged by their questioners, who appeared knowledgeable about individual battles but clearly had little or no understanding of the political and historical context in which they took place. The Kurds themselves, who chose Iran as their ally in an attempt to free themselves from the Iraqi yoke and suffered grievously in consequence, have undertaken very little historical inquiry, with the exception of a few autobiographical accounts.
Battles deriving from the seventh-century schism between Sunni and Shia continue to be waged in the popular imagination. The divide, which concerns lineage more than religious practice (although it has evolved ritual differences as well), is deep, but doesn’t necessarily generate violent intercommunal conflict. There have been long historical periods of peaceful commingling and extensive intermarriage. Politicised by the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, however, it now drives the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen. To put the genie back in the bottle will require Iran and Saudi Arabia to find a new balance of power in the Gulf, but even this may no longer be enough to suppress the region’s conflicts.
Razoux gives a good account of Rafsanjani’s push to establish the Revolutionary Guards and Basij volunteers as rivals to the army, which the ruling clerics associated with the shah and the revolution’s secular wing. The use of militias to counteract established state institutions as a way of protecting the Islamic Revolution is a model that Iran is replicating today in Lebanon (Hizbullah), Iraq (the Popular Mobilisation Forces) and Syria (the National Defence Forces). But healthy state institutions would potentially be far more effective in projecting Iran’s power beyond its borders.
Finally, Razoux highlights the critical role of oil, which, even if it wasn’t the casus belli, informed the actions of all the key players, Iran and Iraq included, as in their repeated targeting of oil infrastructure and shipping. One way of describing the war in the most basic terms is that it pitted Iran’s vastly greater reservoir of young men against Iraq’s easy access to loans, credit and bank guarantees, which it used to finance its war machine. When Saudi Arabia, prodded by the US, began flooding the market with oil in July 1985, precipitating a dramatic drop in the price to below $10 per barrel, it caused severe financial difficulties in the Soviet Union and Iran, as well as Iraq. Saddam’s backers in Riyadh helped him out with new loans; after the war, the debt added to the pressure on an Iraqi economy struggling to revive itself, eventually resulting in the Kuwait fiasco. But Iran suffered the most, its income reduced by a half or even two thirds in a very short time. This, and the continuing high rate of casualties, resulted in a surge of domestic criticism of the war that could no longer be ignored or appeased. It would still take three years for Iran to sue for peace, and another three for the Soviet Union to collapse, but the US-Saudi manipulation of oil prices may have been a determining factor in both cases.
The basic facts are straightforward. In 1975, when Saddam and the shah struck a deal over the contested Shatt al-Arab waterway (the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates as they reach the Gulf), Iraqi Kurds, who had fought an insurgency with the shah’s support, were hung out to dry and faced imminent total defeat. The rebels under Mustafa Barzani fled into exile in Iran; their families were deported to camps in southern Iraq. Subsequently, the Kurdish movement split along political, ideological and linguistic/geographical lines, and by the time Saddam started the war with Iran in 1980, the two main factions, under Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani and his rival Jalal Talabani, were pursuing shifting alliances with neighbouring states, just as the Kurds have often done and still do today, the better to compete with each other. In 1983, Barzani’s fighters served as Iran’s scouts in battles in corners of Iraqi Kurdistan, while Talabani entered into a one-year truce with Saddam; meanwhile, the two groups were fighting each other in the mountains, either directly or through tribal proxies.
Razoux has a somewhat limited understanding of the extent and significance of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons throughout the conflict, but especially during its final year. Poison gas may, to some, be merely one tool among many to be used on the battlefield, but its psychological impact – the terror it inflicts, especially on civilians, who are usually unprotected – can be enormous, a so-called force multiplier. For Iraq’s military, it was an asymmetrical advantage. Iran’s forces were reaching exhaustion point in early 1988. Knowing this, the Iraqis dropped huge quantities of gas onto Iranian lines on the first day of each of the five stages of the Tawakalna ‘ala Allah operation, a few months after the attack on Halabja. The gas attacks preceded a concerted effort with conventional weapons to drive demoralised troops out of the remaining pockets of Iraqi territory Iran was holding. The gambit was an overwhelming success; little actual fighting was required during these final ‘battles’ of the war.