Origins of Iran Iraq War

American Geographical Society

Geopolitical Origins of the Iran-Iraq WarAuthor(s): Will D. SwearingenReviewed work(s):Source: Geographical Review, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 405-416Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215091 .

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GEOPOLITICAL ORIGINS OF THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR*

WILL D. SWEARINGEN

ABSTRACT. The origins of the Iran-Iraq war are geopolitical in two essential ways. Territorial issues, including the Shatt al-Arab boundary and five other zones, were a direct cause of contention. Nonterritorial conflicts also had key roles, but territory has been the measure in assessing their outcomes. Control of disputed land is the primary means of demonstrating prevailing power.

T HE Iran-Iraq war, which began in September 1980, has become the bloodiest and most destructive military conflict since World War II. The estimated toll includes more than one million dead, one million refu-

gees, and thousands of prisoners of war. The war costs each combatant country as much as $1 billion monthly, and the total cost to date may exceed $300 billion.' The once prosperous economies of Iran and Iraq are seriously crippled, and full recovery from war damage will probably take more than a decade. The possible effects of the war on both regional stability and international security are understood, but the origins of the conflict are not.

In the eight years since the outbreak of hostilities, attacks on oil shipments in the Persian Gulf, the intervention of the United States and other nonre- gional governments, and the sensational aspects of the conflict have tended to obscure the origins of the war. One group of analysts argues that the primary cause was the dispute about the 105-kilometer-long Shatt al-Arab boundary. Another group contends that this dispute was a pretext for the escalation of hostilities of other sorts, all of which were nonterritorial. Both explanations of the war's origins are inadequate, because they fail to address the full range of causal factors. A geopolitical analysis encompasses virtually all the relevant factors: ones intrinsically territorial like the boundary dispute and those of a different nature. This article first outlines the chronology of the conflict and then examines its underlying causes from a geopolitical perspective.

THE WAR

According to the government of Iraq, the conflict started on 4 September 1980, when Iranian forces shelled Iraqi towns and villages along the middle border region of the two countries. According to Iran and most observers, Iraq was the aggressor: the war started on 22 September, when Iraqi forces

* I thank Amy Budge, Technology Application Center, University of New Mexico, for drafting the maps. 1 Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iran-Iraq War and Western Security 1984-87: Strategic Implications and Policy Options (London: Jane's Publishing Co., 1987), 9-10.

* DR. SWEARINGEN is a research assistant professor of geography at the Technology Ap- plication Center, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.



406 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

launched a full-scale invasion of Iran. From the present perspective, those events in September 1980 merely represent the breaking point in an escalation of tension that had been under way for many months. Iran contended that between March 1979 and September 1980 it had experienced 434 attacks by Iraqi artillery, infantry, and armored forces as well as 363 violations of its airspace.2 Iraq asserted that it had suffered 544 violations of its borders and airspace during essentially the same period.3 Since the fall of the Iranian monarchy and the onset of the Islamic revolution in January 1979, relations between the two countries had steadily deteriorated. Besides territorial violations, both sides engaged in hostile propaganda, sabotage, terrorism, and incitements to revolt. In that context of overt hostility, the issue of which country did what to the other on a specific day or at any location is largely irrelevant.4

At the outbreak of warfare in September 1980, the two combatants were more or less evenly matched. Each country had regular armed forces num- bering approximately 250,000. Iraq had more tanks (nearly 2,900 versus 2,000) but fewer combat aircraft (approximately 330 versus 450).5 The Iraqi invasion of Iran in late September established three fronts.6 The main one was in the south, where Iraqi forces penetrated deep into Khuzistan and captured a strip seventy to one hundred miles wide along the western border of this province (Fig. 1). Khuzistan is significant because its ethnic composition is primarily Arab and because it contains the principal oil reserves and refining operations in Iran. The other two fronts were in the central and northern border regions, and the very narrow penetration of Iran there posed no crucial threat.

From the outset, each side displayed a high level of military incompe- tence.7 A Pentagon official remarked that the war was "a case of the incom- petent fighting the inept."8 Sophisticated weaponry has been misused with regularity-for example, tanks as stationary bunkers. Iraq seems either to have had no clearly formulated strategic goals for its invasion or to have fallen so short of achieving them that they remain a mystery. Six days into the war and without a stranglehold on Iran, the Iraqi government called for a cease-fire and issued a set of demands that was promptly rejected. Until mid-July 1988, the Iranian government was unwilling to negotiate a resolution.

2 Nasser Moeini, The Iranian Position, in The Iraq-Iran War: Issues of Conflict and Prospects for Settlement (edited by Ali E. Hillal Dessouki; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, Center of In- ternational Studies, 1981), 9. 3 J. M. Abdulghani, Iraq and Iran: The Years of Crisis (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 200. 4Tareq Y. Ismael, Iraq and Iran: Roots of Conflict (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 22. 5William 0. Staudenmaier, A Strategic Analysis, in The Iran-Iraq War: New Weapons, Old Conflicts (edited by Shirin Tahir-Kheli and Shaheen Ayubi; New York: Praeger, 1983), 30. 6 Stephen R. Grummon, The Iran-Iraq War: Islam Embattled (New York: Praeger, 1982), 21-22; Dilip Hiro, Chronicle of the Gulf War, MERIP Reports 125-126 (1984): 9. 7Arthur Campbell Turner, Nationalism and Religion: Iran and Iraq at War, in The Regionalization of Warfare: The Falkland/Malvinas Islands, Lebanon, and the Iran-Iraq Conflict (edited by James Brown and William P. Snyder; New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1985), 157-158. 8 Wall Street Journal, 7 November 1980.



IRAN-IRAQ WAR 407

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The war has proceeded in five distinct phases. The first was the Iraqi offensive that began on 22 September 1980 and ended by March 1981. The second phase consisted of a year-long stalemate during which Iraq held approximately 14,000 square kilometers of Iranian territory but was unable to advance. The third phase, beginning in March 1982, was marked by an Iranian counteroffensive that drove Iraqi troops from the occupied territory and even penetrated a short distance into Iraq. That counteroffensive was




spent by late fall 1983.9 The fourth phase, characterized by stalemate, con- tinued to April 1988. The fifth phase, still under way, began with the un- expected Iraqi recapture of occupied territory southeast of Basra. This phase has essentially shifted the battleline back to the prewar boundary.

During the past five years, the conflict has degenerated into a brutal war of attrition with resemblances to World War I: trench warfare, long, bloody battles with minor territorial gains, occasional use of poison gas, and strategic strikes against cities and vital oil installations. Outmanned, Iraq has been able to fend off Iran by superior access to new armaments. Neither side seems able to muster the force to inflict a decisive blow. Yet few analysts have predicted the turns of events in the war. The only prediction that can confidently be made is that resolution of the conflict must address its origins.

ORIGINS OF THE WAR

Some analysts contend that the war started primarily over a boundary dispute, and at least five pieces of evidence support the interpretation. (1) Iran and Iraq, or their predecessors, have been fighting for centuries over their border, particularly the Shatt al-Arab waterway. (2) The most recent boundary treaty, signed in 1975, was a source of deep humiliation to Iraq. Its government was forced to accede to the treaty by Iranian promotion of a Kurdish revolt that threatened to dismember Iraq and to deprive it of its primary oil-producing region. In exchange for Iran's pledge to stop sup- porting the revolt, Iraq gave up a large portion of the vital Shatt al-Arab waterway. When Saddam Hussein, the chief Iraqi negotiator, became pres- ident of the country in 1978, he vowed to redress the boundary situation. Hussein saw his opportunity after the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy brought about a debilitating purge of the military and a paralysis of the economy. According to this interpretation, the war was an Iraqi attempt to recover territory ceded in 1975 and to restore national pride. (3) The abro- gation of the 1975 treaty by Iraq five days before its invasion of Iran had the umistakable character of a declaration of war. Hussein vowed, "This Shatt shall again be, as it has been throughout history, Iraqi and Arab in name and reality."10 (4) After the Iraqi capture of the western part of the oil-rich province of Khuzistan, a key condition for its return was restoration of Shatt al-Arab to the pre-1975 status. (5) Iraqi justification of occupation of Khuzistan emphasized that control of this strategic region would compel Iran to recognize Iraq's territorial rights and to renegotiate the 1975 treaty. "The war was an extension of the politics of border negotiations by means of a military siege."11

Together the evidence that the Shatt al-Arab boundary issue was the cause of the conflict is compelling. A survey of the historical evolution of

9 Hiro, footnote 6 above, 5-12. 10 Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Middle East and Africa, Washington, D.C., 18 September 1980, E5. 1' Claudia Wright, Implications of the Iraq-Iran War, Foreign Affairs 59 (1980-81): 287.



IRAN-IRAQ WAR 409

the boundary reveals why Iraq might have gone to war over this issue. The frontier between Iran and Iraq has been subject to dispute for nearly five centuries. The first treaty addressing this frontier was concluded in 1535 between the Persian and Ottoman empires. Seventeen additional treaties have been signed since then.12 The key treaties from the current perspective were those of 1639, 1847, 1913, 1937, and 1975 (Fig. 2).

In 1639 the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia signed the first treaty to define a border in the region. That treaty recognized Ottoman control over what would become the modern state of Iraq and attempted to establish a boundary between the opposing empires. As was then customary, the boundary was defined according to the loyalties of villages and nomadic tribes rather than to geographical reference points. Thus a border zone, rather than a precise boundary, was created between the Zagros Mountains on the east and the Tigris and Shatt al-Arab waterways on the west.13 Though not specifically mentioning the Shatt al-Arab, this treaty has provided the foun- dation for all subsequent boundary discussions.

The Treaty of Erzerum in 1847 directly addressed the issue of the Shatt al-Arab. The United Kingdom and Russia were parties to this treaty. The great powers wanted a more precise definition of the Ottoman-Persian boundary to ease the expansion of their imperial interests in the region. The United Kingdom planned to develop steamship navigation on the Tigris River and the Shatt al-Arab, and Russia hoped to build a road linking its southern territories with Baghdad. 4 This treaty ostensibly allocated the Shatt al-Arab to the Ottoman Empire; however, Iran received Abadan Island, other small islands in the waterway, and former Ottoman territory on the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab. Additionally Iran was granted right of free passage on this waterway. The result was a significant territorial loss for the Ottoman Empire and later for Iraq.

Subsequent treaties confirmed the provisions of the Treaty of Erzerum, but an important modification appeared in 1913. That year a treaty granted Iran a five-mile stretch of territorial waters in the Shatt al-Arab opposite Khorramshahr. From a point approximately four miles above the mouth of the Karun River to a point almost one mile below it, the boundary was shifted to the middle of the Shatt al-Arab. The United Kingdom, aiming to facilitate its oil industry, played a crucial role in effecting this change. Oil had been discovered in southwestern Iran in 1908 by an agent of the pre- decessor of British Petroleum. Development of the deposits required a good port to receive drilling and other heavy equipment. British ships had to anchor in Turkish territorial waters off Khorramshahr to discharge the equip-

12 Vahe J. Sevian, The Evolution of the Boundary between Iraq and Iran, in Essays in Political Geography (edited by Charles A. Fisher; London: Methuen, 1968), 211-223; Daniel Pipes, A Border Adrift: Origins of the Conflict, in The Iran-Iraq War, footnote 5 above, 13-20. 13 Alexander Melamid, The Shatt al-'Arab Boundary Dispute, Middle East Journal 22 (1968): 351; Ismael, footnote 4 above, 2. 14 Melamid, footnote 13 above, 351-353; Pipes, footnote 12 above, 13-14.




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ment, a circumstance that involved Turkish customs officials. The United Kingdom enlisted Russia in an effort to pressure Iran and the Ottoman Empire to redefine their boundary. The present-day port of Khorramshahr was developed in waters transferred to Iranian jurisdiction by the 1913 treaty.

A similar boundary shift occurred in 1937. By that time the political alignments had fundamentally changed. A strong ruler, Reza Khan, had come to power in Iran in 1921, and Iraq had become a British mandate in 1920 and then an independent country in 1932. However, British economic interests and behind-the-scenes control remained influential. The United Kingdom prevailed on Iran and Iraq to rearrange their boundary off Abadan so that an improved port could handle additional oil exports from Iran.



IRAN-IRAQ WAR 411

Along a four-mile stretch of the Shatt al-Arab opposite Abadan, the boundary was shifted to the thalweg, or the deepest part of the river. Again Iraq lost territory.

The last important boundary change occurred in 1975. For reasons stated previously, the entire Iran-Iraq boundary along the Shatt al-Arab was shifted to the thalweg, and the rearrangement again came at the expense of Iraq. Measured in square kilometers, the territorial loss was trifling. However, the psychological effect was enormous. Iraq is almost entirely a landlocked country, and it regards the Shatt al-Arab as its primary connection to the outside world as well as the raison d'etre of its claim to the status of a Persian Gulf power.

In sum, in four different treaties Iraq suffered a significant loss of some of the most important of its national territory. On each occasion, the loss resulted from political coercion by external powers. Given this legacy and the especially humiliating character of the 1975 treaty, it is easy to understand why Iraq might have gone to war in 1980 when it felt that power and opportunity were in its favor. The evidence strongly supports this interpretation.

Yet many observers assert that the boundary issue was only a pretext and that the actual causes of the war were of a different nature.15 One analyst has argued, "Anyone who believes that . . . the Shatt al-Arab is the heart of the conflict ... will also be convinced that Israeli-Palestinian discord centers on sharing the waters of the Jordan River.... The idea that past border conflicts adequately explain the origin of the Iran-Iraq War is both an illusion and a legalistic sham."16 In this interpretation four nonterritorial factors are the keys to understanding the conflict.

Firstly, the personal animosity between Saddam Hussein and the Aya- tollah Khomeini has become manifested in state policy. In 1978 Hussein, at the behest of the shah, expelled Khomeini from the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq, where he had been living in exile for thirteen years. When Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979, he repeatedly called for the overthrow of Hussein. Since the outbreak of the war, the one condition for ending it about which Iran had been inflexible was the banishment of Hussein from power.

Secondly, the nearly five centuries of conflict over borders have com- monly been viewed as a reflection of ethnic animosity between Arabs and Persians, or the rivalry between Sunni and Shi'i Muslims. However, it is most convincingly interpreted as a struggle for status as the dominant regional power. Before 1979, Iran, with strong support from the United States, had emerged as the dominant military power in the Gulf region. In Iraq a

15 Richard W. Bulliet, Time, Perceptions and Conflict Resolution, in The Iran-Iraq War, footnote 5 above, 65-81; Jack S. Levy and Mike Froelich, Causes of the Iran-Iraq War, in Regionalization of Warfare, footnote 7 above, 127-143. 16 Bulliet, footnote 15 above, 73-74.




goal of the Ba'th Party after 1968 was to make the country the great power of the Gulf region, and Iraq sought to fill the power vacuum that was created by the fall of the shah. Iraq also had aspiration to be the predominant Arab power in the Middle East, and demonstration of its strength by invading an enfeebled Iran and recapturing Arab territory advanced that goal. The taking of western Khuzistan and other early Iraqi victories were proclaimed as the greatest military triumphs of the Arabs over the Persians since the Battle of Qadisiya in 636. One condition for withdrawal from Khuzistan was that Iran relinquish three Arab islands in the lower Gulf that the shah's navy had forcibly occupied in 1971.17 This condition was evidence that Iraq was pos- turing to become the leader of the Arab countries and the regional super- power. The latter interpretation was confirmed by a deputy prime minister of Iraq who remarked that one of his country's objectives was "to prove in battle that it is stronger than Iran and fully capable of defeating it."''8

Thirdly, the prevailing ideology of Iraq is Arab nationalism; in post-shah Iran Islamic fundamentalism prevails. As practiced by the two countries, these ideologies are in direct conflict. Arab nationalism is secular. With almost 60 percent of the Iraqi population consisting of Shi'i Muslims, the ruling Sunni Muslims cannot emphasize religion. Instead they stress Arab unity and socialism. Islamic fundamentalism in Iran plays on anti-Western, anti- modernist sentiments and stresses a return to the true Islamic values of the past. The war therefore represents a clash between two mutually exclusive types of legitimacy, two different and opposing sets of values.

Fourthly, the rulers of Iraq fear a Shi'i rebellion. The Sunni Muslims are clearly the minority in the country. In addition to the 60 percent of the population that is Shi'i, 20 percent is Kurds who are Sunni but who zealously retain their ethnic identity and have long been a secessionist group. The ruling Sunni Arabs thus constitute only 20 percent of the population, and the Islamic revolution in Iran, chiefly Shi'i in character, presented a threat to this minority. Shi'i Muslims in both Iraq and Iran regard Khomeini as their foremost political and religious leader. Since his advent to power in 1979, he has advocated not only the overthrow of the Hussein regime but also the establishment of a true Islamic state in Iraq. The purpose of the attack on Iran was to discredit Khomeini and his revolution. But if the invasion was to bring about his downfall, the result has been the exact opposite: it enabled the new clerical regime to consolidate its political control and to rally the Iranian population against a common enemy.

The majority of analysts considers these nonterritorial factors to constitute the true explanation of the Iran-Iraq war. This explanation is perhaps more convincing than the Shatt al-Arab boundary dispute by itself. However in two ways at least, it fails to address adequately the origins of the war. Firstly,

17 Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Middle East and Africa, Washington, D.C., 29 September 1980, E3. 18 Cited in Abdulghani, footnote 3 above, 205.



IRAN-IRAQ WAR 413

it treats the Shatt al-Arab dispute as a pretext for the war, when in fact the struggle represented significantly more. Secondly, like the Shatt al-Arab explanation, it does not account for other crucial disputes between the two countries. Both explanations are too limited and restrictive; even in combi- nation they fall short. In contrast, a geopolitical explanation adequately encompasses virtually all relevant factors.

GEOPOLITICAL ANALYSIS

The origins of the Iran-Iraq war were geopolitical in two key ways. Firstly, territorial issues were a direct cause of the war. Besides the Shatt al-Arab boundary dispute, there were at least five other major territorial issues. Secondly, Iraq went to war to capture or recapture territory for its symbolic importance. In the first instance, acquiring or controlling territory or resources was an explicit political goal. In the second, territorial gain was a means to achieve other political ends.

Analysts who have emphasized territorial issues as the cause of the war have focused almost exclusively on the Shatt al-Arab. Other crucial territorial problems either have been ignored or have been given insufficient attention. The combined political weight of these problems far exceeded that of the dispute over the Shatt al-Arab.

In the middle border region there was an intense dispute over the strategic heights of Zain al-Qaws and Saif Saad south of Qasr-e Shirin, a total of approximately 550 square kilometers of territory that Iran had forcibly an- nexed from Iraq. One of the conditions in the 1975 treaty was that Iran would return this territory.'9 However, five years later it had not done so. To add injury to insult, much of the prewar 1980 shelling of Iraqi towns and villages, including the principal episode on 4 September, came from these heights. In the Iraqi interpretation, this event started the war. One of the main objectives of the September invasion of Iran was to recapture these heights. Oil was also a part of this conflict. The border straddles a large oil-bearing structure, already exploited by both countries, that underlies this disputed area.20

A second territorial dispute concerned water rights to rivers shared by the two countries. Almost thirty rivers and streams rise in Iranian mountains, flow into Iraq, and then drain chiefly into the Tigris River. Increased Iranian diversion of water from these streams, which included the diversion of an entire stream in 1959, created much hardship for Iraqi riverine settlements. The issue had greatly strained diplomatic relations in recent decades. None of the boundary treaties had addressed this problem, with the exception of one concerning a small frontier stream, the Gangir, that had been equally

19 Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Middle East and Africa, Washington, D.C., 18 September 1980, E4; Nita M. Renfrew, Who Started the War?, Foreign Policy 66 (1987): 99-103; Salah Al-Mukhtar, The Iraqi Position, in The Iraq-Iran War, footnote 2 above, 16-17. 20 Robert Litwak, Security in the Persian Gulf 2: Sources of Inter-State Conflict (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower, for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981), 11-12.




divided in 1914 but without a specific mechanism for distributing its waters.21 The importance of this factor was established in the Iraqi proposal to end the war in its early days: a key demand was increased Iraqi rights to the waters of these streams.22

The third territorial issue involved the Kurds, whose role has been ignored or misinterpreted by most analysts. From the Iraqi perspective, the concern is for the territory and its resources. The Kurds are concentrated in northern Iraq, the primary oil-producing region of the country. Kurdish nationalism has long embodied a secessionist threat. In 1975 Iraq was forced to sign a humiliating treaty to stop Iranian support of Kurdish rebels that threatened Iraq's loss of northern territory.23 The disdain of the Iraqi government for the Kurds themselves has been expressed, in part, by strong military reprisals, including gassing entire towns and villages.24 By 1980 the Iranian government was again instigating Kurdish rebellion to jeopardize Iraqi sovereignty over the northern oil-producing region. This issue, by itself, might have led to war.

At the core of the government's fear of a Shi'i rebellion was a similar territorial issue. Because Iraq has a significant Shi'i majority, the danger of rebellion among the group is a vital concern to the ruling Sunni Arab minority. However, the Shi'i are heavily concentrated in southern Iraq, a counterbalance to the Kurdish concentration in the north. More likely than Shi'i overthrow of the central government is loss of the Shi'i south either to Iran or to a new state that would be closely allied with Iran.

Historically Iran long laid claim to southern Iraq. At Karbala and Najaf are two of the holiest shrines in Shi'i Islam, and the region has the largest concentration of Shi'i, including many Farsi speakers, outside Iran. To Iraq's government, the export of the Islamic revolution by Iran into southern Iraq was a thinly disguised attempt to exert old territorial claims. Khomeini was a "turbanned shah," pursuing age-old Persian expansionist policies under the guise of Islam.25 Iraq countered with a preemptive invasion of Khuzistan, which was perceived to be strategically significant because of its largely Arab population. Iraqi capture of this province was an effective counterthreat to dismember Iran.

Khuzistan indirectly was a final important territorial issue underlying the Iraqi invasion of Iran. The status of Khuzistan has been a point of contention between the two countries for more than sixty years. Under the Ottoman Empire, western Khuzistan had been part of what would become Iraq; however, after World War I, the United Kingdom ceded all of the

21 Pipes, footnote 12 above, 22. 22 Richard N. Schofield, Evolution of the Shatt al-'Arab Boundary Dispute (Wisbech, U.K.: Middle East and North African Studies Press, 1986), 64; Turner, footnote 7 above, 154. 23 Renfrew, footnote 19 above, 100. 24 New York Times, 2 April 1988. 25 Ghassan Salameh, Checkmate in the Gulf War, MERIP Reports 125-126 (1984): 16; Al-Mukhtar, footnote 19 above, 24.



IRAN-IRAQ WAR 415

province to Iran. In 1960 Iraq helped establish a popular front as part of an irredentist campaign to detach the Arabic-speaking portion of the province from Iran, and by the late 1960s Hussein was a driving force behind that campaign. After 1975 Iraq ostensibly dropped its claim to the region and its support of the Khuzistan rebel movement. Nonetheless, the Iraqi invasion of Khuzistan in 1980 raised speculation that repossession of the province was an ultimate goal of the Iraqi government.26 This interpretation seemed to be confirmed by the change of place-names to their historical Arabic forms immediately after the Iraqi invasion.27

Iraqi military strategy was ambiguous during the invasion. For example, there was no attempt to cut the transportation lines to Tehran or Isfahan. With the exception of Khorramshahr, which Iraqi forces captured after intense house-to-house combat with Iranian Revolutionary Guards, there was no full-fledged drive to take other key urban centers. This pattern raised speculation that the invasion of Khuzistan was more a strategic, symbolic action than a concerted effort to repossess territory. Nonetheless, given the oil wealth and the additional coastline along the Persian Gulf that come with sovereignty over the province, the potential benefits of acquiring Khuzistan must have been considered by the Iraqi government before the September 1980 invasion of Iran.28

Territory and resources were direct geographical factors in the Iran-Iraq war, and its origins were geopolitical in another key way: territory as symbol. During the twentieth century, the growth of nationalism bestowed a highly charged significance to the disputed lands along the Iran-Iraq border. None has acquired greater symbolic value than the Shatt al-Arab. The progressive diminishment of Iraqi control there by treaty had little actual economic effect, but its psychological importance was large. In addition to Iraqi concern about the essentially landlocked status of the country, loss of the territory represented a tangible symbol of subjugation and humiliation by imperial powers and an ancient rival. The territorial loss in 1975 was also an embarrassing display of Iraq's failure to become the preeminant regional power and the leader of the Arab world.

The actions of Iraq in 1980 were an attempt to redeem itself and to recover its national pride by recapturing the Shatt al-Arab. To force renegotiation of the boundary, Iraq invaded and captured western Khuzistan, an area with both strategic importance as a bargaining lever and symbolism because of the Arabic-speaking population. Wresting this region from Iranian control, even temporarily, would help elevate Iraq to leadership in the Arab world. One of the surprises of the war was the reluctance of the Arabic-speaking people of Khuzistan to embrace the Iraqis as liberators, a behavior that the Shi'i population of southern Iraq duplicated in response to the invading

26 Murray Gordon, Conflict in the Persian Gulf (New York: Facts on File, 1981), 157-159. 27 Moeini, footnote 2 above, 14. 28 Pipes, footnote 12 above, 23.




forces from Iran. Both governments greatly miscalculated the strength of ethnic and sectarian ties.

The factors that most analysts cite to explain the origins of the war- personality differences between leaders, historical rivalries, and conflicting ideologies-all have an important geopolitical dimension. Territory is the currency with which the outcome of conflicts on these other levels is assessed. Acquiring territory with symbolic value is a primary means of achieving other political goals. The real significance of the Shatt al-Arab derives from its role as a key symbol in the complex set of rivalries that exist between the two countries.

In sum, the origins of the Iran-Iraq war were essentially geopolitical in two important ways: the immediate objects of dispute were territories, and control of them was to demonstrate prevailing power. Examination of the origins of this war eight years after its outbreak is not simply an academic exercise. Resolution of the conflict will almost certainly have to address origins, and formulation of foreign policy toward the two countries requires an understanding of the conflict and its sources.



Origins of Iran Iraq War

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