By GEORGIE ANNE GEYER
This week marked the anniversary of a war most Americans scarcely remember, but which definitively influenced our times. Most of the rest of the world has forgotten about it, too, except of course the families of the million who died in it.
The 1980s war between Iraq and Iran was uniquely important because it planted the seeds for all that was to come and led to the foreign policy tumult we see today.
When Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visits the United Nations this week and stands in the same room as the American president, it will mark a historic confrontation. That 1980s war hasn’t ended; members of President Trump’s inner circle are is even talking about overthrowing the Iranian regime in Tehran.
The bad memories were further revivified this week when — on the Iranian equivalent of Memorial Day, marking the beginning of the 1980s war — an attack on a military parade in the southern Iranian city of Ahvaz killed at least two dozen people. And of course, the country’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, blamed the unusual attack on the United States as a “continuation of conspiracies by U.S.-backed regimes in the region.”
Come with me for a lost moment to the horrendous and awe-inspiring battlefield I visited in the spring of 1984. East of Basra in the south of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was well into fighting a brutal war with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s troops, tens of thousands of them children-soldiers with keys around their necks to “open the doors to heaven” when they died, as so many of them did.
That desert of south Iraq is merciless, with no romantic “Lawrence of Arabia” waves of sand. It is more like a vast, relentless road of cement. From the barely protected outpost of Iraqi soldiers, where a handful of us journalists waited, we could see the desert littered with thousands of Iranian bodies — all covered with sand, like ghoulish bumps in the desert itself.
The war ended in a stalemate in 1989, but it wasn’t studied, so nobody learned much from it, and it was really only a preview to the big wars that were coming.
Saddam Hussein, having overspent on the war, went on to invade Kuwait two years later to seize their oil wells to pay his bills. This brought on the allied American invasion led by President George H.W. Bush, a well-thought-out and limited war to drive Saddam and his military back to Iraq.
President Bush was our picture of wisdom in wartime. He refused to “go to Baghdad”; instead, he and his close circle fully intended for new principles to come out of this war: war through allied, limited and effective military force, decency in victory. (Maybe someday.)
However, through the remainder of the ’90s, Republican neoconservatives, rabid supporters of Israel and military hawks continued to lobby at every turn for another go at Iraq, this time not stopping before “regime change.” When 9/11 happened, their chance came.
Although Iraq was not involved in the attack, this group of new-style interventionists was able to goad America into attacking Iraq, resulting in the worst of the “permanent wars” or “forever wars” we are fighting yet today across the Middle East — with no resolution.
Think back on it for another moment. In the 1980s, there were still two major lodes of political and religious thinking in the Middle East: Saddam, for all his brutality, was the Middle East’s modernizer in Iraq, a secular state; Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, the fanatic Shiite cleric, fully intended to make over all the states of the region as Islamic states.
Today, that unpleasant but workable duality, based on a balance of terror, is gone. Because of our intervention, Iraq is in tatters and Iran has become the dominant power there and in a growing number of areas in the region.
America’s intervention actually empowered the Iran that President Trump is now threatening to destroy.
President George H.W. Bush’s sensible and sophisticated war policies set an example for military leadership that should guide us into the future. Maybe we should read more of our own history.
Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer(at)juno.com.
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