Iraq Invades Iran—And We’re Still Paying the Price

Iraqi prisoners are put on show in Iran, April 1982.

(© JEAN GUICHARD/SYGMA/CORBIS)

Twenty-five years ago today, on September 22, 1980, Iraqi jets roared over the airfields of Iran and unleashed their full destructive power against the grounded air force of Iraq’s neighbor to the east. As his planes rained fire over the military installations of his adversary, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein ordered his army to cross the Iranian border in force, stunning the world with a full-scale invasion and sparking a long and costly war in a region of great strategic importance internationally. The invasion caught Iran by surprise. Few suspected that Hussein would move beyond his characteristic grandstanding to start an actual war. With the Tehran hostage crisis still in progress and the failed American rescue mission a recent memory, Iran quickly speculated that the United States had a hand in the outbreak of war. No evidence has ever surfaced to substantiate this claim, but the United States did play a prominent, regrettable role in the unfolding of the nine-year conflict. And the nation feels the consequences profoundly to this day.

By the time war was declared between them, Iran and Iraq were already high-profile antagonists on the global stage. Though a 1975 treaty had nominally resolved the border disputes between them, bitterness persisted over what some regarded as an inequitable arrangement. Iraq declared war ostensibly to secure its meager strip of coastline and to contest Iran’s claim to certain areas of the country. Perhaps even more important, however, was the Iranian revolution of 1979, which overthrew the U.S.-supported, autocratic regime of the shah and replaced it with a radically fundamentalist Islamic government. Dictators throughout the Middle East feared the spread of Islamic revolution, and Saddam Hussein quickly positioned himself and the nation of Iraq as counterweights to Iranian influence. When Hussein finally went to war, he did so with the financial and political support of many Persian Gulf states, even some, like Kuwait, that feared the future power of an ascendant Iraq.

The United States was reluctant to lend its resources to either side in the war. American leaders certainly didn’t want to support the regime of Iran’s ayatollah, which still held the hostages taken in November 1979. Neither, though, were they eager to bring their considerable support to the Iraqi cause, considering Saddam Hussein’s expansionism and not-so-subtle ties to the Soviet Union. Instead, throughout the nearly decade-long war the United States employed a masterful and cynical strategy designed to ensure that the conflict would be fought to a stalemate, with heavy losses on both sides and without either nation achieving dominance over the Persian Gulf’s oil reserves. To evoke the words of Woodrow Wilson, it was carnage without victory.

Initially the principal recipient of quiet U.S. support was Iran, with the United States and Israel arranging the sale of billions of dollars in military supplies to the Islamic republic as it attempted to fend off Iraq’s unanticipated onslaught. But when Iran turned the tide of the war and began to press its advantage toward total triumph, American aid shifted dramatically in the direction of Iraq. Even as Saddam Hussein pursued a nuclear-bomb project and used poison gas against Iranian targets—civilian and military—and his own citizens, the Reagan administration ensured that he would not be defeated. Between 1981 and 1988, Iran and Iraq purchased a total of $65 billion dollars worth of weapons from other countries, accounting for 22 percent of all arms purchases in the developing world. A not insignificant portion of this weaponry came from Western suppliers including the United States, France, and Germany.

President Reagan accomplished his strategic goal of a stalemate between Iran and Iraq when, in 1988, the war-weary countries signed a cease-fire agreement, their territorial quarrels still unresolved. This achievement, however, came at a terrific cost. At least 1.5 million people had lost their lives in the war, including astonishing numbers of innocent civilians. And the costs of the war went beyond the high price in lives. Significant evidence suggests that Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent U.S.-led, international intervention were direct results of the Iran-Iraq conflict. At the time of the 1988 ceasefire, Iraq had become by far the more heavily armed of the two belligerent nations, and it entered the 1990s with a daunting arsenal and an army not to be lightly reckoned with. Hussein’s arms purchases, though, left his country deeply in debt and owing $10 billion to the Kuwaiti government in loans Iraq thought would be forgiven. Furthermore, the end of the Iran-Iraq war led to close relations between the U.S. and Iraqi governments for a time, probably leading Hussein to believe he could act with relative impunity throughout the Gulf region.

To this day the United States copes with the aftershocks of the war. One of the many obstacles that have frustrated President George W. Bush since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003—in addition to military recruiting shortfalls, internal Iraqi divisions, and a tenacious insurgency—is the enduring influence of Iran. In 2002, even before the second Gulf War began, Bush used his State of the Union address to declare both Iran and Iraq members of an “axis of evil” that supported terrorism and menaced the United States. In the summer of 2004, American troops engaged in an extended standoff with the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical cleric and warlord with strong ties to right-wing religious leaders in Iran. Also that summer, it was reported that Ahmad Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile who encouraged the U.S. to wage war against Saddam Hussein, had been passing American secrets to the Iranian government.

The shadow of the Iran-Iraq war has proven long in modern history. The United States is still struggling to escape it.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com