How Iran and Iraq Made Peace—and America Lost

An Iranian soldier wears a gas mask to protect against Iraqi chemical warfare.

(www.sajed.ir)

Nineteen years ago today, on August 20, 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran made peace with Iraq. War between the two countries had dragged on for most of a decade. Around a million people had died, military and civilian, and both countries had lost billions of dollars. When he had first announced his decision to start the work of peacemaking, Khomeini had expressed the full bitterness of a disappointed military leader. “Taking this decision was more deadly than taking poison,” he said on July 20. “I submitted myself to God’s will and drank this drink for his satisfaction.” And the peace that emerged was an unsteady one. Its long-term implications for the United States have been profound.

The intensity of the division between Iran and Iraq during that summer of 1988 is hard to exaggerate. The two nations could not even agree on when the war had started. Iran, in a position that has been largely confirmed by history, said the war began with an invasion by Iraq on September 22, 1980. Iraq’s leaders countered that the hostilities had broken out a few weeks earlier, with alleged Iranian raids into their country. Whether or not Iran had actually launched actions against Iraq, it was clear that Iraq’s Baathist government feared attack by Iran’s fundamentalist regime. That fear helped provoke the devastating cross-border assault of September 22, which caught the Iranian army unawares and featured devastating raids against Iran’s unprepared air force.

The next eight years saw endless bloodshed. The progress of the war turned back and forth, with neither country gaining a lasting advantage. The international community, including the United States, did little to push the belligerent nations toward any kind of peace. Indeed, in the history of idealistic American diplomacy, this episode will never rank high. Unsure which of two untrustworthy nations to back, the Reagan administration never supported either combatant heavily enough to make a decisive difference. As other Western countries, including France, sold munitions to Iraq, the White House engaged in furtive, illegal operations to sell the Iranians missiles in exchange for the release of hostages held by the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah. Proceeds from the sales went to anti-communist Contra fighters in Nicaragua. When these actions were revealed in 1986, the result was a thorough investigation of the President and his associates by a special prosecutor, in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Other actions, such as the sale of helicopters to Iraq, while not against the law, raised questions about why the United States was making it easier for both nations to keep fighting.

By the summer of 1987, the United Nations and its member states had taken a serious interest in the war. That July the Security Council passed Resolution 598, calling for a ceasefire in the Persian Gulf “as a first step towards a negotiated settlement.” That call would be ignored until a costly accident the following year. On July 3, 1988, the American cruiser Vincennes shot down a civilian Airbus, Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 passengers and crew on board. Under different circumstances, the tragic mistake might have produced hostilities between the United States and Iran. At the moment, though, the Islamic Republic was bleeding from recent Iraqi victories. In late June, Iraqi attacks had overwhelmed Iran’s defense forces at several points, including the Majnoon Islands, where Iranian soldiers had been slaughtered with chemical shells, including nerve gas. After these humiliating losses, the downing of Flight 655 may have been a breaking point for the Iranian government, which understood how battered and war-weary its own people were. Hence the Ayatollah’s strained statement on July 20.

But if Iran was prepared to start negotiating for peace, it was not prepared to bow its head before its Iraqi rivals—and with good reason. As U.N. investigators began to examine the damage from the war, the world learned the extent of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz had acknowledged that his country had engaged in chemical warfare, but the knowledge that it had done so repeatedly and as recently as June produced fresh indignation around the world. Furthermore, although Iraq’s people celebrated the ceasefire as a victory, Iraq had racked up at least $60 billion in war debt, along with innumerable civilian casualties. When the Iraqi and Iranian foreign ministers first started to talk, on July 26, with U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar as an intermediary, it became instantly evident that neither party would be able to walk away with a fully satisfactory agreement. Their differences covered too broad a range of issues.

There was no certain winner in the Gulf war of the 1980s. If there has been a loser, in the long run, it has probably been the United States. By playing both sides in the war, the American government at least succeeded in keeping either nation from attaining regional supremacy. But Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, ended the war feeling confident, having managed to halt the spread of Iran’s revolution. The war also had given him the chance to thrash his enemies in northern Iraq, the Kurds, who had resisted Baghdad’s Baathist government. When the hostilities ended, Iraqis across the country saw enormous new banners carrying the image of their emboldened despot. As a military dictator, the Iraqi president had come into his own. Iran, meanwhile, simmered with resentment against the United States for aiding its enemy and refused to consider the possibility of reestablishing formal diplomatic ties with Washington.

The consequences have been grave. Saddam Hussein defied international law for another 15 years, invading Kuwait in 1990 and constantly taunting U.N. weapons inspectors. Since his removal from power, the United States has been faced with threats from an Iranian government headed by that country’s most confrontational leader since Khomeini. During the 1980s, United States policy prevented the rise of a single power in the Middle East, but it may have produced an even more dangerous dual menace that plagues us 19 years later.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com and is editor-in-chief of The Harvard Political Review.