May 17, 2007
The Stark Incident Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:45 PM EST Jack Kelly’s lead piece on this website, “Iraq Attacks America (Accidentally?), 1987,” commemorates an Iraqi attack on an American frigate, the USS Stark, in which 37 American sailors were killed. The Stark was part of an operation aimed at protecting commerce in the Persian Gulf, more specifically one that would eventually protect neutral merchantmen from Iranian attacks, in a war started in 1980 by Iraq with a full-scale invasion of Iran, and subsequently escalated by Iraq into a naval war marked by attacks on oil tankers, which provoked Iranian reprisals. Why was the United States siding with Iraq? In part because the Islamic Republic of Iran had kidnapped American diplomats during the hostage crisis of 1979–1981, thus violating one of the more sacred principles of international law, and thereby had made itself into an outlaw state in a pretty literal way: Having so foully broken the laws of nations, Iran was refused the protection of the law. That phrase is more than a little bombastic; more pertinently and usefully, Iran was deprived of significant U.S. military assistance, which might otherwise have been afforded her in the face of naked aggression. There were other reasons for American support of Iraq—for example, protecting the weaker oil-rich Sunni Arab Gulf states from a radical Shiite Iranian regime, which made the Iraqi Baathists look like a lesser evil, and stopping any single power from controlling the oil reserves of both Iraq and Iran. But had the Iranians not seized our diplomats, it seems almost inconceivable that the United States would have repeatedly and fairly openly intervened on the side of the very obvious and in many ways despicable aggressor. American policy was at times confused, at other times inept, and sometimes contradictory, but we won our end, which was to ensure the (temporary) survival of Iraq as an independent state, no matter what that state’s crimes. The Iraqis lost their initial territorial gains pretty quickly; after a year or so, Saddam Hussein was fighting only for survival, which he managed (for a while) to secure. Over the course of the war Iraq inflicted something like a million casualties on Iran, which means that the earlier pleasures of humiliating and enraging the Americans, which were very sweet at the time, and the political intricacies of which may have created the Islamic Republic, turned out to be very expensive. To the extent that the price of those pleasures was belatedly understood, they may have turned from sweet to bitter, but it is not clear that many if any Iranian Islamists thought (or think) a million casualties were too high a price for seizing and maintaining power. That means it is not clear that any lesson was learned about not paying too much for your whistle, to recall a phrase from Poor Richard’s Almanack, one my maternal grandfather tended to quote with some frequency. Are there any other lessons from the policy that claimed 37 dead aboard the Stark? Fewer, I think, than once seemed to be the case. At the time, it seemed clear that we had no idea what we were doing during the Iran-Iraq War, semi-covertly aiding first one side, then the other, unless we were absolutely pure and at every moment brilliantly effective Machiavels, which seems unlikely, given all other available evidence about the people who devise and administer American foreign policy. In retrospect, though, the worst outcomes—the annexation of Iran’s oil provinces by Iraq, or of all of Iraq by Iran—were avoided. Having learned that the price of naked aggression is not always war with the United States, and that it is often a bad idea to pick on anyone remotely your own size, let alone bigger, Saddam invaded Kuwait, from which he was not-too-expensively expelled, at least in terms of American lives and treasure. So the Reagan and Bush Administrations muddled through, and as far as the Iraq-Iran War goes, it is not clear what a better and clearly attainable outcome would have looked like. The United States winked at one great evil to punish and ward off another; we were ham-handed, dishonest, and at times cowardly; many of the people who devised and executed our policy were fools or worse. But pointing this out is more damning if an obviously superior alternate policy can be sketched out. And a quarter century on, I am less sure than I used to be that it can be.
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