ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

Israel wrested the strategic Golan Heights from Syria; completely occu-
pied the Egyptian Sinai, including the crowded Palestinian refugee camps
in the Gaza Strip; and seized all former Palestinian territory on the West
Bank of the Jordan River. The Israeli Air Force’s devastatingly effective
preemptive attack on the Egyptian and Syrian Air Forces in the first
hours of the war had several consequences. It assured the Israelis air
supremacy throughout the war. This they used to advantage to give their
own ground forces relatively generous amounts of close air support, which
added to the crushing defeat inflicted on the Arab ground forces. Israeli
air attacks alone disrupted and demoralized portions of the Egyptian
Army. From its first strikes, the Israeli Air Force established ascendancy
over its opponents, not only in the physical sense of greater numbers and
brute force, but also in the equally important senses of élan, confidence,
and belief in the superiority of men, machines, and methods. For a
generation after 1967, Israeli pilots would enter battle secure in victory
while the enemy would find his responses slowed by doubt. This ascen-
dancy was not without a negative impact on the Israelis. In neglecting to
examine carefully the actual effectiveness of their performance, they
became overconfident and failed to adapt to new air defense technologies,
to acquire newer close air-support munitions and techniques, and to train
realistically for missions other than air-to-air-combat. The humiliation
suffered by the Arab air forces caused Arab leaders to work to prevent a
repetition of the disaster. Not only did Arab air forces pursue ground
dispersal procedures more thoroughly, they also embarked on expensive
programs to construct hardened aircraft shelters. Iraq, fearing both
Israeli and Iranian aircraft, built more than 500 such shelters by 1989.
In October 1973 Syria and Egypt attacked Israel and achieved a
large measure of surprise. The Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal, elimi-
nated Israeli defenses, and waited for a counterattack. The Syrians
stormed the Golan Heights and nearly broke through to Israeli plains
below. At the last moment, the Israelis halted them, pushed them back,
and gained additional territory. On the Egyptian front, the Israelis
penetrated across the Suez Canal and isolated a large segment of the
Egyptian Army on the east bank of the canal. At that point, after twenty

19



PERSIAN GULF POWERS

ment and the execution, imprisonment, or dismissal of many officer
pilots—most, American trained—thoroughly devastated the service.
Khomeini also reduced the term of conscription to twelve months, too
short a period to train personnel for useful service, and he cut the
defense budget by one-third. The new regime’s alienation of the armed
forces’ Western arms suppliers, its cancellations of spare parts and
maintenance contracts, and its attempt to sell spare parts stocks on hand
ensured very low maintainability for its arms inventory, provided it could
locate reliable maintenance technicians. For example, the Iranian Air
Force had begun to set up a U.S.-designed computerized logistics system.
It had computer coded and logged the stocks and had installed the
computers, but it never received the software or deliveries of mission-
essential spare parts.”

The Islamic Revolution’s leadership also closely watched the
military’s day-to-day operations and made personal recommendations
regarding promotions, discipline, and courses of action. This practice
mirrored the Shah’s own methods, but it assumed that anyone approved
by the Shah threatened the revolution. The Revolutionary leadership
appointed religious commissars down to at least the battalion level,
empowering them to intervene in daily affairs. The leadership’s attention
to the ordinary workings of the armed forces made the services more
politically responsive to the regime, at a ruinous cost to professionalism.
The Islamic Revolution’s leaders confronted the classic dilemma facing all
leaders of regimes that differ radically from their predecessors’: How can
the new regime ensure the loyalty of its predecessor's armed services
while keeping these forces militarily effective? A loyal general might be
responsive to the state but incompetent to defend it; an effective general
might overthrow the state rather than its enemies.

In mid-1979, when the Islamic Revolution’s enervated armed forces
appeared unable to quell Kurdish and Arab separatist movements, the
government authorized the formation of a popular militia. The Revolu-
tionary Guards appeared with a strength of 30,000. A coup attempt in

31. Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-Iraq War, p. 64.

41



PERSIAN GULF POWERS

leader, the Shah, or Emperor, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, embarked on a
spending spree that bought the most sophisticated Western weapons that
money could buy. The Shah had two major advantages over the other
Gulf powers: the largest population in the region and favored status with
Western arms manufacturers. In 1979, Iran’s population of 37.4 million
dwarfed Iraq’s 12.9 million and Saudi Arabia’s 9.3 million. All three
countries, because of their Moslem faith and government policies, were
among the countries with the highest birth rates on earth. If Iran could
properly organize, educate, and train its people, it could dominate the
Gulf region through sheer strength of numbers. The Shah had the easiest
access to American arms, at once the most technologically superior and
most difficult-to-maintain weapons available. If the Iranian armed forces
could obtain enough Western and American arms, and if they could
operate them effectively, they could become the preeminent country in
the region. Beginning in 1972, the administration of President Richard
M. Nixon courted the Shah and encouraged him in his ambition to
become the policeman of the Persian Gulf. But the Shah purchased
weapons systems neither wisely nor well, and he pushed his armed forces
and his people beyond their willingness and ability to absorb Western
products and concepts.

By forcing a too rapid purchase of complex weapons systems, the
Iranian leader decreased the readiness of his armed forces. Seventy-
seven F—14As and their accompanying Phoenix air-to-air missile weapons
systems gave the Shah the most advanced aircraft in the Gulf. From
1970 to 1977, the Iranian Imperial Air Force increased the number of its
personnel from 17,000 to 100,000 and of its combat aircraft from 175 to
341. The Shah’s goal was in 1982 to have an air force among the finest
in the world.* But for years the Iranian Air Force required that Ameri-
can technicians from Grumman Aviation, the F-14 manufacturer, be
present to properly service the fighter’s advanced avionics. The Iranian
Air Force lacked a modern logistics system, necessary for its F-14s and
its 190 American-built F-4D/Es and 166 F-5E/Fs. The F-4 Phantom, in

26. Maj Ronald E. Bergquist, The Role of Airpower in the Iran-Iraq War (Maxwell
AFB, Ala: Air University Press, Dec 1988), p. 25.

37



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

President of Iraq, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr. As he consolidated his political
power in the 1970s, he remained content to have Bakr serve as a figure-
head. Saddam gradually supplanted the president and gained complete
control of the Baath party. He placed his creatures—one could not call
them confederates because that would imply some will of their own—in
important party and government posts. Predictably, many of these
minions belonged to Saddam’s family or were Sunni Arabs from Tikrit,
his native village and province. These cronies owed him everything, and
their misdeeds on his behalf made their survival after his fall unlikely.
They had made a typically Faustian bargain of absolute loyalty in return
for position.

The Baath party imposed a relatively efficient totalitarian state on
Traq, complete with public executions, show trials, confession rituals,
private torture, secret police, pervasive propaganda, and political indoctri-
nation in all organizations and in the schools. The intended effect was to
cow much of the population, shred any personal bonds of trust within the
populace, and make one and all subject to informers. Once an individual
informed, the state owned him. Some organizations still attempted to
overthrow the party. In 1978, a failed military coup backed by the Iraqi
Communist Party led to another purge of the high command, and, as a
result, Baath control of the IZAF increased.*

In July 1979, Saddam eliminated all internal opposition in the
Baath and forced President Bakr to resign. As President of the Republic
and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Saddam
applied Baath principles to the upper eschelons of his government.
Shortly after he replaced Bakr, he eliminated his predecessor’s supporters
within the party. In fact, Saddam so intimidated the party that hence-
forth in Iraq, he was the party, which existed only as another tool of his
control. In August 1979, he addressed the party congress. Already, he
had taken hostage the families of many of its members, and some of
those members stepped forward to “confess” their errors. Saddam, in a
shaking voice with tears flowing down his face, proceeded to read off

86. Bergquist, Role of Airpower in the Iran-Iraq War, p. 22.

46


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

infant son (a threat because of his ancestry) near Karbala, a town
between Kufa and Baghdad. A far larger enemy force had surprised him,
riddled his camp with arrows, and put Husayn and many of his support-
ers to the sword. Despite these setbacks, a group of Muslims continued to
see Ali and his direct heirs, who had the blood of the Prophet, as the
legitimate heads of the community of believers, or Imams.

Ten Imams followed Ali and Husayn before the line ended with
the disappearance of the last Imam, Muhammad, in A.D. 874. The ad-
herents of Ali (in Arabic, the shi’at Ali or Shi’is; in English, Shias or
devotees of Shia, also called “twelver” Shias to distinguish them from the
lesser branches of Shia) endowed Ali and his line with almost divine, at
least more than human, qualities, and thought that by transmission from
the Prophet they had received a unique nobility of the soul and a special
insight into the Qur'an. The Shias lived in the expectation of the day of
the coming of the Mahdi, “him who is guided,” when the twelfth Imam
would arise and begin the rule of justice in the world.® As noted, this
messianic movement found its greatest support in the Persian portions of
the Arab Empire. When that area regained its independence in the
fourteenth century A.D., the Persian King of Kings made the Shia form of
Islam the state religion. Persia as well as present-day Iran has remained
a state with a majority Shia population. The sites of the tombs of Ali (Al
Najaf), his son Husayn (Karbala), and six of their successor Imams in
Iraq had become objects of veneration for all Shias by the tenth century
A.D. Iraq now counts approximately 60 to 65 percent Shias among its
population.

More orthodox Muslims, by no means a single sect that agreed on
all points of doctrine and practice, continued to hold a more traditional
and less mystical faith. They believed in the primacy of the words and
deeds of the Prophet, as demonstrated in the Qur’an and in the daily
practices of his life (together, known as sunna). They accepted the
legitimacy of the first four caliphs as the rightful successors to Muham-
mad and became known as Sunnites, and their branch of Islam became

9. Ibid., p. 31.

12



IRAN-IRAQ WAR

of the state, rather than imposing strict political controls on their actions,
Saddam gained a far more effective military. The increased professional-
ism of his officers may not have produced genius, but it did produce an
organization capable of fielding a million men and of formulating a
scheme of specialized training, which emphasized combined-arms opera-
tions. This enabled significant portions of the army to easily overcome
the tactical problems presented by the enemy and to produce a command
organization able to plan and conduct large-scale offensive actions. Much
like General Bernard L. Montgomery, who commanded the British Army
in the Egyptian Desert in 1942, the Iraqis mastered the complicated art
of a set-piece battle. In contrast, the Iranian mullah’s distrust of their
regulars handicapped the Iranian war effort from start to finish.

On a lower level, the war demonstrates the disadvantages of an
unbalanced force structure. Despite the Iraqis’ constant superiority in
armor and artillery, they often stumbled when they faced Iranian opposi-
tion in wet weather or in mountainous terrain. The Iraqis lacked suffi-
cient infantry to protect their armor from man-portable, antitank wea-
pons and to root out their enemy from his positions. Only when the
Iraqis fielded masses of effective infantry, which actually reduced their
casualties, did they find it possible to halt the Iranian attackers in their
tracks and to mount a counterattack. For their part, the Iranians also
worked with many severe shortcomings, not the least of which were their
dependence on light infantry forces and their inability to obtain modern
replacement aircraft or spare parts for the aircraft they possessed. The
failure of the Iranians to perform maintenance because they lacked either
trained personnel or spare parts cost them far more aircraft than acci-
dents or combat did. However, the Iranians earned high marks for some
of their actions. On occasion, they showed the ability to plan offensives
carefully, and their basic infantry tactics of a thorough reconnaissance of
the ground, infiltrating enemy positions, and initiating action at night or
in the rain, as well as choosing favorable terrain such as wet lands and
mountains, maximized the potential of their forces and imposed formida-
ble restraints on their foe. For whatever reason, the Iranians held the
initiative for five years, and with relative equality of numbers they did

7



TRAN-IRAQ WAR

kilometer front into Iran. They. had an initial advantage in manpower of
5 to 1. Despite minimal and disorganized resistance, their advance
averaged only 10 kilometers a day. While Iraqi forces in the north and
center struck glancing blows, the largest attack, by five divisions in the
south, pushed into the Iranian province of Khuzestan. This province
contained some of Iran’s most lucrative oil fields and had a substantial
Arab minority population which the Iraqis had convinced themselves
would support their invasion. The southern force had two missions: to
seize the cities of Khoramshahr and Abadan, which would place the
Shatt-al-Arab completely in Iraqi hands, and to occupy the cities of
Dezful and Ahvaz. The capture of-Dezful, located on the western side of
a key pass through the Zagros Mountains, would block the most direct
surface route and railroad from Teheran to the plain between the moun-
tains and the Tigris River. Ahvaz was a key road junction, halfway
between Abadan and Dezful. Apparently the Iraqis lacked the strength,
imagination, or logistics to order their forces to close up to and seal all
the passes over the mountains and to occupy the major Iranian oil fields
between Abadan and the mountains. Their initial plans proved to exceed
their hesitant and fumbling reach. The forces outside Khoramshar ran
into slight resistance from popular revolutionary forces and sat down to
wait for orders. Saddam dithered and seemed unwilling to accept the
casualties involved in urban fighting. He may not have felt completely
confident about his hold on Iraq at this point of his career. Possibly, he
wished to avoid putting his control to the test by incurring casualties. As
his personal hold on the state solidified, his fear of casualties decreased,
but at the moment, his indecision guaranteed heavy Iraqi casualties
when his forces finally attacked a much reinforced foe. Only when
Khomeini refused to accept a United Nations cease-fire did Saddam order
his troops into the city. When they moved in, the Iraqis had little trouble
taking the port area, but they encountered fierce resistance in the city’s
center. They did not clear the area until October 24 and may have
incurred as many as 9,000 casualties in doing so. By mid-November, they
halted on all fronts. The failure of the Iranians to collapse immediately
and the heavy casualties suffered by Saddam’s troops led him to switch

57



4 .

The Iran-Iraq War -

Given the character of the Iraqi government, only its leader,
Saddam Hussein, could have made the decision to invade Iran. If nothing
else, Saddam timed his decision well. Iran had alienated its.major arms
suppliers, substantially weakened its armed forces, and frightened its
neighbors with its religious rhetoric. Iranian refugees and high-ranking
defectors residing in Iraq even encouraged Saddam by exaggerating Iran’s
weaknesses for purposes of their own. The Soviet Union feared the effect
of Islamic fundamentalism on its Moslem republics and also distrusted
the Iranian Regime for its harsh suppression of the Tudeh (the Iranian
Communist Party). Furthermore, Iran had sent military aid to the
Moslem guerrillas in Afghanistan who were fighting the Soviet-imposed
government in Kabul. A Soviet-Iranian rapproachment seemed unlikely.
The remaining Gulf states, also targets of Khomeini’s threats, seemed
disposed to tacitly support and encourage Iraq. Although Saddam had
selected an advantageous time for the invasion, his military botched the
execution.

The Iraqi Invasion of Iran (1980)

On the night of September 22, 1980, two waves of Iraqi aircraft,
comprising virtually every combat-ready fighter and fighter-bomber Iraq
possessed, launched a surprise attack on two Iranian early-warning radar
stations, six Iranian air bases, and four Iranian army bases. The attacks
failed miserably. Iraqi bombing runs scattered ordnance so widely that
the Iranians later found it difficult to even determine the original tar-

55



TRAN-IRAQ WAR

carried two 2,000-pound bombs. each. The provision for 100 percent
backup says much about the professionalism and seriousness of the
Israeli planners. Before entering Iraq, the aircraft purportedly violated
both Jordanian and Saudi Arabian airspace undetected. The Israelis took
the Iraqis by surprise and successfully completed their mission. In fact,
had the Israelis not publicly accepted responsibility for the raid, the
Tragis might well have blamed it on the Iranians.“ Although the United
Nations, the United States, and many other countries condemned the
Israeli action despite Israel’s preexisting state of war with Iraq, it
appears that the Israelis effectively delayed the Iraqis’ development of
atomic weapons for a number of years to come. A nuclear-capable Iraq in
1990, a strong likelihood without the Osirak raid, would have complicated
US. operations in the Gulf immensely.

In the fall of 1981, the Iranians cleared the Iraqis from most of
Tran, save for the region around the Shatt-al-Arab. In November 1981,
Saddam offered a one-month cease-fire. The Iranians summarily rejected
his offer and replied that they would make no compromise and that the
war would continue as long as Saddam remained in power. At the end of
the rainy season, in March 1982, the Iranians resumed their offensive,
and within ninety days they had almost completely ejected the Iraqis
from their land. The Iraqis suffered heavy losses and seemed demoral-
ized. For their part, the Iranians continued to exploit the advantages of
their light-infantry tactics in the face of the road-bound Iraqi Army. The
Traqis failed to provide for defense in depth, left significant gaps between
their units, and reacted too slowly to the threats they faced. They had
also added new layers of command, all needing approval for seemingly
every action, and they continued to micromanage the war from Baghdad.
In these spring 1982 battles, the Iraqis suffered between 55,000 and
75,000 casualties, while the Iranians absorbed more than 100,000. In
June, Saddam ordered the Iraqi Army to withdraw from all but of few
key sectors of Iran, and he declared a unilateral cease-fire; the Iranians
countered with unacceptable demands—for war guilt, reparations, and a

49. Dupuy and Martell, Flawed Victory, pp. 69-72.

61



IRAN-IRAQ WAR
A War of Attrition (1984-1986)

Heavy casualties in the first offensives against Iraq forced the
Iranians to change their tactics. From April 1984 into 1986 they waged a
war of attrition on land. They hoped, by means of attrition, to find a
solution to the difficult tactical problem confronting them. How could they
defeat a more heavily armed, more numerous, deeply entrenched foe,
without ruinous losses? At this stage of the war, the Iranian armed
forces consisted of 305,000 regulars, 250,000 Revolutionary Guards, and
200,000 Basij (available for part-time duty only). They disposed 1,050
main battle tanks and 95 operational combat aircraft. Their enemy
numbered 675,000 regulars under arms, with 4,820 main battle tanks
and 580 operational combat aircraft." The Iraqis also had an advantage
in artillery tubes, perhaps as great as 5 or 6 to 1. During this period,
the Iranians attempted to conserve their matériel and human resources
with carefully planned night or surprise attacks up and down the 750-
mile front. They attacked important local features, confronting the Iraqis
with the choice of taking casualties to regain what had been seized or of
accepting a less favorable defensive terrain. During one of these attacks
in 1985, the Iraqis first employed the Republican Guard, an elite unit
charged with guarding the president, in a counterattack against an
Iranian breakthrough. The Iraqis replied to the war of attrition by
launching an air war against tankers carrying Iranian petroleum and
ports holding Iranian oil. Although the Iraqis struck several tankers with
French-built Exocet missiles, they accomplished little other than driving
up shipping insurance rates in the Persian Gulf.

The Final Iranian Offensives (1986-1987)

From 1986-1987, the conflict entered a new phase—that of Iran’s
final offensives. In the first, which began in the middle of a rainstorm on

58. Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-Iraq War, pp. 192-93, table 7.1, “The Trends in
Tranian and Iraqi Military Forces, 1979-1985.”

65



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

The state of the interceptor force illustrates one disadvantage of
purchasing Soviet arms. The USSR provided inadequate training in air
combat and little training in air operations. Nor did it employ aggressor
squadrons and advanced simulators. In addition, the Soviets failed to
supply detailed operational data, as opposed to straight technical data, on
their fighters and missiles. The Iraqis, in any case, lacked sufficient
experience to interpret such information. Soviet personnel made almost
no effort to go beyond their conventional ground-controlled intercept
training and doctrine to provide for more fluid situations. They also failed
to supply adequate training and capability in electronic warfare and
countermeasures and in low-altitude combat. They provided virtually no
training for air combat at altitudes below 5,000 feet.“

The Soviets did not short-change their Iraqi clients in all impor-
tant areas. Whereas the Iranians received only incomplete portions of a
complex, computer-driven, U.S. logistics system, which they could not
maintain or support, the Iraqis received from the Soviets a far more
practical and easy system. Instead of U.S. demand-pull logistics, a system
that responds to requests for items already consumed, the Soviets, in
accordance with their own doctrine, set up a demand-push logistics
system which supplied Iraqi forces at the front with a massive oversup-
ply of ammunition stocks and war reserves. In 1986, for example, Iraqi
guns expended in excess of 400 rounds per day against the attempted
Iranian breakout from the Al Faw Peninsula.” The Iraqis also strength-
ened their mobility by purchasing large numbers of tank transporters, a
move that saved maintenance on tanks, extended their service life, and
increased their mobility and responsiveness.

Saddam Hussein himself constituted the weakest link of the Iraqi
military. He placed his relatives and followers—most were Sunni Arabs
like himself whose only military qualification was personal loyalty to
their leader—in command of many of the major units. Saddam not only
continued purges of the party and the military, he suppressed the Shias,

41. Ibid., p. 479.

42. Ibid., p. 452.

52


ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). To continue its policy of con-
frontation, Syria sought military parity with Israel. In the nine years
after the October 1973 war, Syria force-fed $10 billion of Soviet arms into
its armed forces while increasing the strength of its active army from
120,000 to 179,000, its air force from 10,000 to 30,000, its tank force
from 1,170 to 2,990, and its combat aircraft from 326 to 450." This
modernization far outstripped the absorptive capacity of Assad’s forces.
The constant infusion of new equipment had negative impacts on readi-
ness and training, and Assad’s tight political control of his forces stunted
the growth of professionalism necessary to ensure flexible battlefield
leadership. .

The October 1973 war produced a thoroughgoing military reform
within the Israeli military. Heavy casualties; the initial surprises and
intelligence failures; the effective Arab military performance, especially
the air defenses; and the much larger than anticipated consumption of
matériel demonstrated to the Israelis the weaknesses of the foundation
on which they had based their victory. They set out to make their forces
not only better, but larger as well. In addition to developing a more
advanced command and control (C”) system, they expanded their standing
army by 130 percent; enlarged their reserves by 60 percent, while
providing them with more and more realistic training; doubled their tank
force; vastly increased their artillery; improved and augmented their
infantry, including boosting the number of their armored personnel
carriers from 1,000 to 4,000; doubled their munitions stocks; shifted their
logistics system from one based on supply-on-demand to one based on
oversupply at the front; and radically improved their medical services and
chemical protection gear. They also reversed their decisions on low
technology. They acquired high-technology U.S. systems, such as the
F-15, F-16, and E-2C Hawkeye Airborne Warning and Air Control
System, and large numbers of smart munitions.” Finally, peace with
Egypt on its southern border allowed Israel to reorient its strategic

18. Ibid., p. 109.

19. Ibid., pp. 111-12.



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

June 1980 by members of the armed forces led to more purges and an
increased reliance by the regime on the ideologically trustworthy Revolu-
tionary Guards. This force continued to expand and to receive favored
treatment at the regular armed forces’ expense. The Revolutionary
Guards had the advantages of relatively high motivation and cohesion,
fostered by their fanatical faith. Otherwise they suffered from the numer-
ous disadvantages endemic to hastily raised ideological or party forces.
They and, more importantly, their officers had no military training; the
troops were short-service volunteers. They had no heavy weapons or
organized communication facilities and equipment, they siphoned off high-
quality manpower from the regular military, and they set up a competing
procurement system. Their leaders also removed them from the regular
chains of command and from regular logistics channels. The Revolution-
ary Guards believed that they could overcome their many technical
deficiencies by transmuting their militant faith into battlefield effective-
ness. Unfortunately, in combat as in alchemy, no philosophers’ stone can
instantly transform dross to gold. The Revolutionary Guards would suffer
many unnecessary casualties and defeats in the upcoming war with Iraq
before they learned that willpower cannot overcome firepower.

The ability of Iran to defend itself seemed dangerously weak. Its
forces no longer had the Shah’s access to modern weapons, nor could it
field many of the weapons the Shah had acquired. It seemed ready to
squander its large potential manpower advantage over that of its rivals
by setting up an untrained force in competition with its regular troops.
Furthermore, the aggressive fundamentalist Shia rhetoric of Khomeini
and his fellow mullahs, or Moslem clerics, frightened the neighboring
Gulf states. The Iranians accused the Saudis of profaning the shrines of
Islam and of discriminating against Shia pilgrims. The small Gulf
countries worried at any threat from Iran, and Iran’s next-door neighbor,
Iraq, had a majority Shia population ruled by a dictatorial Sunni minori-
ty. Iran thus simultaneously threatened all its neighbors while it reduced
its ability to defend itself militarily, should its neighbors. choose to
respond with force. Iraq finally succumbed to both the provocations and
the temptations offered by its rival. On September 22, 1980, preceded by

42



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

[to accept defeat] was more deadly than taking poison.” Although he
refused to accept the cease-fire because of Iran’s “ambiguous” terms,
Saddam halted forward movement, announced that he had no designs on
Iranian territory, demanded that Iran accept face-to-face negotiations, and
warned that he would not tolerate renewed Iranian mobilization. In the
meantime, Saddam permitted his army to launch a series of raids farther
into Iran and permitted his air force to continue raids on strategic
targets in Iran. At last, the Iranians agreed to meet personally with the
Iraqis shortly after the implementation of the cease-fire, and Saddam
succumbed to the diplomatic pressure from his Gulf allies, the United
States, and the European powers to cease operations. On August 8, 1988,
the conflict ended.”

To the more than casual observer, the Iran-Iraq War holds several
valuable lessons. To dismiss the conflict as a clash between armed mobs
would be fallacious, as European observers of the American Civil War
learned many years ago. The Iran-Iraq War confirmed some age-old
precepts, the most obvious being that a nation’s strategy must be geared
to its capabilities. Although Saddam timed his initiation of hostilities
well, he gambled far too heavily on the perceived disorganization of his
enemy and overestimated the efficiency of his own forces. He did not
properly appreciate the basic strengths of the Islamic Republic, nor did
he did properly prepare his own armed forces for the task at hand.
Likewise, the Iranian decision to invade Iraq after freeing its own
territory committed it to a task well beyond its reach. A simple decision
to accept a negotiated peace at this time would have saved an untold
number of lives. On the other hand, Saddam’s decision at the end of the
war to forego a campaign to conquer additional Iranian territory and to
settle for a cease-fire showed a far more realistic appraisal of the difficul-
ties involved in launching an extended campaign inside enemy territory.
The war also serves as a case study in the value of the professionaliza-
tion of the military. In freeing his soldiers and airmen to employ inde-
pendent judgment and to devise their own means of achieving the goals

60. Ibid., pp. 369-99.

74


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

fell, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen began to
arrive in Saudi Arabia, not only to protect the Saudi monarchy from
Iraqi aggression but also to reverse the conquest of Kuwait. When U.S.
and world economic sanctions, political pressure, and diplomatic negotia-
tions all failed in the face of Saddam’s unbending determination to retain
his newly acquired nineteenth province, only two choices remained to the
United States, Saudi Arabia, and their many allies: war or surrender.
Surrender had unthinkable domestic political consequences for the
alliance’s leaders. It would guarantee international anarchy by allowing
Iraq and other revisionist powers to act on their desire to rearrange the
globe to their advantage, free from the threat of reprisal. Therefore, the
President of the United States, George H. W. Bush; the King of Saudi
Arabia, Fahd ibn Abd al Aziz Al Saud; and their allies chose war.

Early on the morning of January 17, 1991, the Persian Gulf War
began. It consisted of massive allied air strikes on Iraq and Iraqi targets
in Kuwait. The United States Air Force spearheaded the air offensive
and furnished the bulk of the attacking aircraft. During forty-two days of
fighting, the U.S. Air Force simultaneously conducted two closely coordin-
ated air campaigns: one in support of allied ground forces; the other,
attacking strategic targets. Planners of the strategic air campaign sought
to isolate and incapacitate Saddam Hussein’s government; gain and
maintain air supremacy to permit unhindered air operations; destroy
Traq’s nuclear, biological, and chemical capabilities; and eliminate Iraq’s
offensive military capability, which included its key military production
facilities, their infrastructure, and the instruments it used to project its
power—the Iraqi Air Force, the Republican Guard, and short-range
ballistic missiles.*

This study develops background information to place the Persian
Gulf War in its proper historical and cultural contexts, unfamiliar to and
not easily understood by Americans. The first essay quickly summarizes
the relationship between Arab culture and Islam, the history of Islam

3. Briefing Slide, “Air Campaign Plan & Targets,” Reflections on DESERT STORM:
The Air Campaign, Ut Gen Charles A. Horner, Commanding General, Ninth Air Force,
n. i 1991,

2


TRAN-IRAQ WAR

to plan, with the consequent neglect of both the immediate tactical
situation and targets of opportunity. The Iraqi air defense network, which
the Soviets had optimized for high- and medium-altitude defense, suffered
because not. only did its operators lack proficiency, it had inadequate data
integration and transfer rates as well. As late as 1988, low-flying Iranian
F-4s still easily penetrated Iraq.” Once the Iranians forced the Iraqis to
the defensive in 1982, the IZAF adopted a strict policy of conservation of
aircraft. The air force intended to preserve its inventory while allowing
time to acquire and familiarize itself with more modern aircraft. The
IZAF could not afford an indefinite continuation of the higher loss rates
it suffered during the first part of the war. Consequently, it employed
very safe tactics for its combat missions. For example, Iraqi MiG-25s
bombing Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil-loading facility, sacrificed
accuracy in favor of safety. The MiGs dropped iron bombs from altitudes
of 60,000 to 70,000 feet to avoid the performance envelopes of the
Tranian Hawk surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery located
there. The IZAF made a similar trade-off in ground attack missions;
during the Al Faw battle it conducted air strikes from 6,000 to 10,000
feet.

In spite of conservative tactics, the Iraqis pursued a two-pronged
strategic attack against the Iranian economy. From the commencement of
full-scale fighting, both sides engaged in the so-called oil war, which
continued until the end of hostilities. Both nations needed to export oil,
their only hard-currency commodity in the world market, to maintain
their civilian economies and sustain their military efforts, The Iraqis
sank several Iranian tankers in the Gulf, ineffectually attacked Kharg
Island, and bombed Iranian refineries. By October 1981, the Iranians
began to ration refined petroleum, as did the Iraqis who also had their
refineries shelled and bombed. The Iranians, in fact, wiped out the Iraqi
oil-exporting capability in the Gulf, forcing Iraqis to rely on pipelines.
Because the IZAF did not follow up its raids quickly and because it
scheduled too few strikes for each target, it never permanently knocked

61. Ibid., p. 458.

77



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

well against an enemy who had every advantage, save one—the Iraqis
had an extreme sensitivity to casualties. An inherent weakness of infan-
try is its tendency to scatter and lose direction after the initial assaults.
This problem the Iranians never solved, and for their failure they were
obliged to continue in the offensive far beyond the point of diminishing
returns. They faced the classic problems of World War I trench warfare
against an enemy armed with modern weaponry, including nerve gas,
while an arms embargo denied them any technological means to solve
their dilemma. One can hardly condemn them because they did no better
than most European armies and leaders from 1914 to 1918.

The two warring air forces presented sharply different perfor-
mances, but they also shared two traits: the desire to conserve aircraft at
all costs, and a consistent underestimation of the number of sorties and
aircraft needed to accomplish the desired objective. As previously discus-
sed, the Iranian Air Force, for reasons beyond its control, declined in
numbers and readiness throughout the conflict. It began the conflict with
472 combat aircraft, but with at best only 200 combat-ready. This num-
ber includes its F—14s, which already suffered from partially sabotaged
avionics. Until the Iranian Air Force depleted its supply of American-
trained pilots, it showed air-to-air combat and munitions-delivery skills
superior to those shown by its enemy. However, the Iranian Air Force’s
steadily declining effectiveness from attrition and maintenance problems
meant that it had little impact on the course of the war, other than to
provide a deterrent to hostile air operations. Although early in the war,
the Iranians demonstrated the capacity to launch damaging air base and
oil facility strikes, not one example of significant Iraqi battlefield casual-
ties, delays in movement, logistics problems, or defeats is attributable to
Iranian air action.

Overcentralization and rigid planning hampered IZAF command,
control, and communications (C*) during every phase of the war. Primary
mission planning took place in the IZAF Headquarters in Baghdad, with
some tactical mission planning and decision making reportedly occurring
in the central operations room of the Presidential Palace. Saddam person-
ally directed several operations. In general, Iraqi air raids took too long

76


TRAN-IRAQ WAR

tion and care, or of the intricacies of sophisticated machinery. Nor could
hardened aircraft shelters hide a Third-World work ethic, excessive
differences between officer and enlisted status that interfered with daily
work, a failure to allot funds for base maintenance, and the mind-set
that assets (either logistical or aircraft) must never be consumed or
risked because their loss would diminish the personal empire of the
commander “owning” them. When compared to air forces in its own
league, Iraq could field a large, modern, combat-experienced force, blessed
with a new and excellent base system. Furthermore, it performed effec-
tively and accomplished its mission in the conflict. When held to the
standards of the air forces of the countries that manufacture Iraq’s
aircraft, the IZAF becomes far less formidable. Inferior aircraft, inferior
pilots, poor service and maintenance, timidity in employment, and
ineffective use of munitions mark it as force unable to compete against
the world’s more sophisticated foes.

79



PERSIAN GULF POWERS

the borders, Abd al Aziz proclaimed himself King of Saudi Arabia. By
then, he had already displayed the gratitude of a king. The Brethren, a
fanatical lot who after the conquest had not accepted a peaceable exis-
tence, especially a relegation to pastoral life, continually left their en-
campments for raids into Iraq. There they not only killed Iraqis, they
destroyed any newfangled devices—such as motor cars, telegraphs,
telephones, and airplanes—that offended their conservative religious
beliefs. The Brethern objected to Abd al Aziz’s attempts to control them
and revolted. Al Aziz promptly raised an army of town Arabs and
crushed the Brethren at the Battle of Sibila in 1929. Subsequently, many
of the special encampments failed, and the King forcibly shifted a large
number of Brethren veterans into the Royal Saudi Army. However, Abd
al Aziz continued to honor his family pact with the House of Al ash
Shaykh. He appointed its members to all the most significant and
powerful religious posts in the Kingdom, a practice that continues in
modern Saudi Arabia.TM

In 1938, Standard Oil Corporation of California discovered oil in
the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Every year since then, geologists
have located more new Saudi oil than the country had produced in the
previous year. By the mid-1980s, Saudi Arabia possessed, at a very
conservative estimate, approximately 25 percent of the world’s total
known oil reserves (the United States had 4 percent, the USSR 9 per-
cent). Even earlier than this discovery of Saudi oil, discoveries of oil in
Persia, Iraq, Kuwait, and in the Persian Gulf attracted British attention.
(As an example of the military importance of oil, in 1911 the First Lord
of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, decided to convert the British Fleet
from coal to oil. He based his decision on the ready availability of
Persian oil from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.) By the mid-1980s, 57
percent of the world’s total oil reserves lay under the countries surround-
ing the Persian Gulf. Excluding Saudi Arabia’s portion, Iran held 7

24, Ibid., pp. 32-83.

35



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

days of intense fighting, the two superpowers—the United States and the
Soviet Union, major arms suppliers to the warring parties—insisted on a
cease-fire. The Israelis emerged victorious, but all parties suffered heavily
in men and matériel. :

To protect their armies from Israeli air power, both Syria and
Egypt covered their ground forces with an advanced array of numerous
surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), such as SA-2s, SA~3s, SA-6s, and SA~7s,
and with antiaircraft artillery (AAA), such as the four-barreled radar-
directed ZSU-23-4—all of Soviet manufacture.”* These air defenses, which
rivaled or surpassed those encountered by the U.S. Air Force over North
Vietnam, seriously degraded the Israeli Air Force’s ability to perform its
close-air support and interdiction missions. The Israelis lost 25 aircraft to
ground fire for each one lost in air-to-air combat. This is not to be taken
as an indication that the Israelis suffered a high loss rate per sortie; in
fact, their average loss rate appears to have been less than 1 percent.
But the necessity of avoiding Arab defenses during penetration and
withdrawal and during attack considerably reduced the Israelis’ accuracy
in battle. Like other air forces encountering intense low-level air defen-
ses, the Israeli Air Force, to avoid unacceptable attrition, had little choice
but to abandon its prewar emphasis on low-level attack tactics and to
switch to medium altitudes, lessening accuracy. Israel paid a high price
for its prewar decisions to neglect electronic warfare and to field a low-
technology air force. Their flawed reasoning compromised their ability to
perform effectively over the battlefield.

Necessity forced the Israeli Air Force to attack the SAM defenses
directly, in hopes of destroying or disrupting them or of forcing their
displacement. Israeli planes could not successfully fly other vital missions
in the presence of heavy air defenses. Against the Syrians, whose battle-
field air-defense system was only about 30 percent as large as the
Egyptian system, attacks on the SAMs achieved some gains. The Syrians
inadvertently helped the Israelis on October 9 when they launched

15. Most of these weapons, especially the larger SA~6s and SA~7s, were in fixed
emplacements, which dictated a limited Egyptian strategy for the war. The ground forces
stayed within the protective umbrella of the SAMs and were exposed to Israeli air strikes
outside the cover of the missiles.

20


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

conducted by drones), precision, attacks by highly trained pilots, sophisti-
cated C®, antiradar missiles, superior electronic countermeasures, and
laser-guided bombs in coordination with long-range artillery and surface-
to-surface missiles, Israeli F-4Es, A-4s, F-15s, and Kfirs destroyed 17
batteries within three hours. The Israeli Air Force also decimated the
Syrian Air Force in a series of furious but one-sided air-to-air battles,
shooting down twenty-nine Syrian aircraft on June 9 while losing none.
In these battles and others, the Syrians virtually threw away their most
modern combat aircraft; they lost eighty-seven in all.” Apparently, in this
instance, the Syrians thought the political statement made by confronting
Israel with all possible means of resistance would outweigh considerations
of sound deployment. Their reasoning may also have been dictated in
part by the dispersal and nonaggressive employment of the Iraqi Air
Force in 1980, shortly after the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War. The
apparently timid performance of the Iraqi Air Force in this instance
earned Saddam unfavorable comment throughout the Arab world. Assad
would rather lose aircraft than face. The Israeli ground forces, aided by
the synergy between their new artillery and and infantry doctrines and
aided by a large number of ground attack sorties flown by their air force,
defeated the Syrians. Assad reinforced his troops heavily and retained a
considerable presence in the country.

Next the Israelis fruitlessly besieged Beirut to drive out the PLO
and establish conditions leading to a friendly government. Given the
Israelis’ extreme sensitivity to casualties, they relied on firepower rather
than on infantry, and the siege dragged on until American and Soviet
intervention forced a solution far from favorable to Israel. The PLO went
into exile, free to fight another day. Israel believed it had no choice but
to maintain a security zone, expensive in both currency and blood, in
southern Lebanon. Israeli interference in Lebanon’s disastrous civil war
had little result except to ensure that no Lebanese government friendly
to Israel would ever come to power. Israel’s policy had failed because
even a favorable military balance cannot retrieve overly ambitious

20. Trevor N. Dupuy and Paul Martell, Flawed Victory: The Arab-Israeli Conflict and
the 1982 War in Lebanon (Fairfax, Va.: HERO Books, 1986), pp. 12-121, 142.

26


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

lished full diplomatic recognition between Israel and Egypt. For being the
first Arab power to sign a formal peace with Israel and to recognize
Israel’s right to exist, Egypt became a pariah in the Arab world.

The Camp David Accords completely transformed the strategic
balance in the Middle East. Without Egypt and her large armed services
forming a second front on one Israeli flank, no Arab military coalition
could hope to succeed against Israel. Now, with little or no Egyptian
threat, Israel could look beyond survival, possibly even to military
adventurism. The new strategic configuration possessed almost as many
dangers as the old.

In addition, in 1975 Sadat-ended his arms relationship with the
USSR. He expelled all Soviet advisors and switched his sources for arms
supplies to the West. After 1978, the United States became Egypt’s main
arms supplier. The abrupt change had long-term and severe effects on
the readiness and effectiveness of the Egyptian armed forces. Egyptians
did not have the resources to effect anything approaching a speedy
conversion of Soviet to Western equipment. Consequently, the bulk of
their armor, artillery, air defenses, and air forces lost significant capabili-
ty as the existing haphazard maintenance standards declined precipi-
tously with the continuing decline in the supply of vital Soviet spare
parts. In addition, Egyptian forces receiving new U.S. equipment could
not adequately absorb and maintain it. No armed force can absorb large
amounts of new equipment after a certain threshold is attained without
losing significant readiness. This is why, since 1973, the Egyptian armed
forces have experienced a steady decline in terms of relative combat
power. They now possess only limited offensive capabilities. The Egyptian
loss of military strength and political standing within the Arab world
produced a leadership vacuum which other Arab states and leaders, such
as Saddam of Iraq and Hafiz al-Assad, President of Syria and former
Lieutenant General Commanding the Syrian Air Force, vied to fill.

Sadat of Egypt opted for peace; Assad of Syria, chose continued
confrontation. Egypt’s break with the Soviets and its subsequent peace
with Israel had left the Syrians with no major front-line ally. Syria had
already alienated the other front-line Arab state, Jordan, by backing the



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

percent, Iraq 6.5 percent, Kuwait 13.5 percent, and Qatar 4.5 percent.”
World War II slowed development in these non-Saudi fields, but in the
fifty years since, their reserves have become increasingly important in the
world’s economy.

In 1973, the Arab countries of the Gulf showed the power of oil
when they used it as an economic weapon. In support of Syria’s and
Egypt’s efforts in the October 1973 war against Israel, the Gulf Arabs
embargoed their oil, refusing to sell it to any nation that they perceived
was encouraging or aiding Israel. This action resulted in skyrocketing oil
prices which severely damaged the domestic economies of the world’s
industrial nations and greatly strained the international banking system.
Furthermore, the increase in oil prices—which the Arabs and the other
members of a worldwide oil producers’ cartel known as the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries managed to maintain after the end of
the October war—resulted in a tremendous influx of dollars, the currency
specified in oil agreements. This sudden and continuing escalation of
purchasing power subjected all societies of the Gulf region, including the
Iranians who did not participate in the embargo but nonetheless profited
from the oil price run-up, to tremendous strain.

One result of the countries’ additional buying power was a region-
al arms race. The three largest powers of the Gulf—tIran, Iraq, and Saudi
Arabia—spent vast sums in purchasing foreign-built armaments for their
armed forces. These oil-producing countries used their new-found reve-
nues in attempts to improve their primitive health, welfare, educational,
and economic infrastructures, as well. They spent many billions of dollars
on services that only foreign firms and workers had the expertise to
provide. New money, new technology, and new ideas threatened to set
the people of the Gulf adrift.

The governments of the three major Gulf powers pursued differ-
ent recipes for purchasing arms and for developing social programs. Iran
started quickly but then fell apart under the stress of modernization. Its

25. Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), vol 2, The Iran-Iraq War, pp. 6-7, table 1.2,
“World Oil Reserves.”

36


2 .

The Arab-Israeli Wars

Israel became a state the day the British Mandate in Palestine
ended. Both the United States and the Soviet Union recognized the new
nation immediately, but within 24 hours the armies of the Arab League
(Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon) invaded it. Arab regular forces
maintained two major advantages over their opponent: numbers and fire
power. Although Israeli armed forces could never redress the problem of
numbers, they soon acquired surplus World War II weaponry to equal
anything in Arab hands. Although their weapons were inferior, the
Israelis nevertheless possessed the innate advantages of cohesion, match-
less motivation, and superb leadership. Furthermore, they fought on their
own soil, a factor that lessened their logistics problems while it increased
those of the enemy. In fifteen months and with 6,000 dead—this, from a
population of 600,000—the state of Israel emerged victorious from its
trial by fire and forced its enemies, save Iraq, to sign armistice agree-
ments."

As a result, Israel increased its area by 21 percent. Of the former
Arab population, 70 percent fled beyond Israel’s borders. Placed in camps
in the Gaza Strip (a small portion of land on the Mediterranean Sea
between Israel and Egypt), on the West Bank of the Jordan River, and in
Lebanon, these unhappy people began lives of poverty, humiliation, and
frustration. They became the poor relations of the Arab world—without
resources, without skills, and without a state. Their refusal to assimilate
into their new countries and their hosts’ refusal to accept them turned
the Palestinians into a bitter people, unwelcome in the land in which

14. Sacher, History of Israel, pp. 315-53.

17





ROOTS OF CONFLICT

out an Iranian oil-exporting facility or completely halted the flow of
Iranian crude to waiting ships. Still, considering the IZAF's relatively
small investment in sorties, it derived a substantial dividend from the
efforts it made. Its success in the oil war lowered Iranian morale,
reduced the Iranian export of oil by possibly hundreds of thousands of
barrels per day, caused the Iranians to waste energy on an expensive
operation to shuttle oil to the south, and forced them to divert air
defense assets and personnel from the front. Further, the oil war tempted
the Iranians into retaliation, first by wasting aircraft in the bombing of
Traq’s oil facilities, then by attacking third-party shipping in the Gulf,
diverting its resources in a costly-confrontation with the United States
and European powers.

In the second prong of its attack, the IZAF took on Iranian
bridges, power plants, and civilian population centers. This effort had
little measurable impact, but IZAF attacks on population centers affected
Iranian civilians’ morale. Bombings and missile exchanges during the war
of the cities did not in and of themselves break the Iranians’ will to
fight. In a more sophisticated sense, the war of the cities added a sense
of unease, of underlying irritation and fear, and of uncertainty to daily
life. This miasma had an unquantifiable, but nonetheless real, influence
on the Iranian psyche that should not be discounted.

A final assessment of the performance of the IZAF in the war
with Iran requires two differing standards of measurement: those of the
Third World and those of industrialized nations. Despite the sheer size of
its arms inventory, the sophistication of its modern weaponry, and its
ability to overhaul and modify much of its equipment, the IZAF was a
Third-World air force. Its pilots may have known what buttons to push,
and when, but they had little understanding of the theoretical application
of their actions. In addition to the scaled-down avionics in the export
versions of the aircraft they flew, Third-World pilots got scaled-down
flight training as well. IZAF maintenance crews might have had literacy
in Arabic, but translations from Soviet or Western manuals, haphazardly
translated lectures, or on-the-job experience supplied by foreign technic-
ijans could not overcome an abysmal ignorance of the aircraft’s construc-

78


TRAN-IRAQ WAR

greatly aided Iraqi military operations, but provided an accurate insight
into USS. collection capabilities and methods. Americans also routinely
ignored the sale of American arms to the Iraqis by Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
and Kuwait. Jordan sold or transferred small arms, mortars, and Huey
helicopters; Saudi Arabia sent small arms, mortars, and other weapons;
and Kuwait sold Iraq thousands of TOW (tube-launched, optically
tracked, wire-guided) antitank missiles. As one senior administration
official recalled, “we don’t want Iraq to lose the war.”

The Iranian invasion of Iraq, a move encouraged by the momen-
tum of Iranian successes and by the mullahs’ desire to gain control of
Iraq’s Shia shrines and population, changed the nature of the war and
the international response to it. Saddam and the Baath had no choice
but to fight to the end. They could not permit the city of Basra, Iraq’s
second-largest city and the obvious target of any Iranian offensive, to fall.
If Basra did change hands and its majority Shia population went over to
the Iranians, the rest of Iraq might soon follow. In any case, with the
preponderance of the Iraqi Army made up of Shias—perhaps as many as
85 percent—Saddam could not afford to wager too confidently on their
loyalty. Fortunately for Saddam, the Iraqi Shias stayed remarkably loyal
throughout the conflict, a fact that says much for the patriotism and
commitment of the average Iraqi to his government. Although the inter-
national community had relaxed the arms embargo against each warring
power enough to allow importation of hand-held weapons, mortars,
shoulder-fired missiles, and the like, it had effectively withheld heavy
weapons. The Iranian threat to radically change Iraq, and by extension
the entire Persian Gulf, caused several Western powers to lean toward
the Iraqis. In 1982, 82 percent of France’s foreign arms sales went to
Iraq. When the Ayatollah’s regime came down hard on the Iranian
Communist Party, the Soviets ceased their courtship of Khomeini and
began to ship arms that had been back ordered to Iraq and to accept
orders for new ones. From this time onward, the Iraqis had free access to
the world’s arms markets, while the Iranians had difficulty in obtaining

51. Hersh, The New York Times, Jan 26, 1992, p. 1; William Scott Malone, “Did the
USS. Teach Iraq to Hide Its Terror Arms?,” The Washington Post, Nov 3, 1991, p. Cl.

63



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

peninsula. Theories speculate that this readiness to migrate resulted from
overpopulation (a lack of pasturage, for example) and from prolonged
drought. In addition, the two great powers of the region, the Eastern
Roman or Byzantine Empire—which occupied present-day North Africa,
Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Anatolia, Greece, and the Balkans—and the
Sasanian Empire—comprised of the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys,
Persia, and a portion of the Central Asian Steppes—had exhausted
themselves in prolonged and ruinous warfare. Religious conflict in the
form of popularly supported heresies against the official state orthodoxies
further weakened the internal cohesion of the Christian Byzantine and
Zoroastrian Sasanian states.

Muhammad did not merely produce the spark to ignite the already
waiting tinder of circumstance, he did far more. He assembled the inert
stone and mortar at hand into an enduring edifice of his own design. The
Prophet’s gift for political consolidation was first demonstrated by his
speedy ascension to the dominant chiefdom of Medina. In his years on
the caravan routes, before his revelations, he had become intimately
familiar with the tribes and their peculiarities. He coupled his knowledge
of tribal politics with the traditional means of alliance building: wives,
gold, trade, and land. Above all he evinced an extraordinary judgment of
his fellowman, favoring leniency and restraint over coercion, and winning
over those who could be converted while ruthlessly crushing those who
could not. Muhammad’s attitude toward conversion and apostasy showed
his pragmatism. Whereas anyone, even the enemy on the battlefield,
could convert to Islam with a simple phrase acknowledging the primacy
of Allah, and be accepted immediately into the community of believers,
Muhammad decreed death for the apostate. Simple conversions increased
the flock and weakened the will of enemy forces by offering them quar-
ter. Once one became part of the community of believers, the advantages
of membership in the group were to be seen as reason sufficient to
seduce the individual into remaining. Death for apostasy discouraged
members from recanting while assuring that apostates would neither
receive nor ask for quarter in battle.

Muhammad, the Messenger of God, overshadowed Muhammad the


The Persian Gulf Powers

As the chain of circumstances leading to the Arab-Israeli Wars
unfolded, an equally significant series of occurrences affected the coun-
tries of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. In Turkey, the fall
of the Ottoman Empire after World War I allowed Great Britain to _
assume a mandate over Iraq and impose protectorates on Kuwait, Oman,
Aden, and Yemen. Britain retained a decisive voice in Persian affairs, as
well.

In the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, Abd al Aziz of the House
of Saud succeeded in duplicating the political triumph of the Prophet by
unifying the Bedouin tribesmen. With his able administration and
knowledge of his subjects, he earned their admiration; with his impo-
sition of religious reform, he gained their minds and souls. Abd al Aziz
revitalized his family’s 150-year old alliance with the Wahhabis, a sect of
fundamentalist, fanatically conservative Muslims. (The Wahhabi move-
ment took its name from its founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab,
from the House of Al ash Shaykh.) Al Aziz called for a particularly
literal and strict interpretation of the Qur'an and the Sunna. He con-
demned the adoption of all Islamic practices and innovations not sanc-
tioned by the Prophet or his followers earlier than the third century of
Islam (that is, before A.D. 1000). He forbade the celebration of the
Prophet’s birthday or the invocation of the Prophet’s or other saints’
names in prayers of intercession. In 1744, the houses of Al ash Shaykh
and Saud made a pact. The Sauds would adopt Wahhabism and propa-
gate it throughout their current and future territories, while the Al ash
Shaykhs would receive religious control of the Saud’s dominions. In
return, the House of Saud would wield political power. When the Sauds

33



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

strated to the Iranian armed forces, and probably to the Iranian political
leadership as well, that even a well-prepared assault could not succeed.
Since the Iranians did not have the same access to international arms
that the Iraqis did, they could never match Iraqi firepower, nor were
they willing to make their armed forces as professional as those of the
Iraqis. Only a miracle could produce an outright victory, and the Ayatol-
lahs and mullahs still believed in such events. The war would continue.”

Renewed Attrition (1987)

The Iranians fell back on a strategy of attrition, which, given the
relative strength of the two armies, further revealed their strategic
bankruptcy. Instead of bashing themselves to bits against the Iraqi
defenses, the Iranians preferred to bleed to death. From the start of the
war, the Iranians had lost 600,000 to 700,000 dead, and twice that
number wounded, a level of casualties comparable to those of France or
Germany in World War I. In addition, the recruiting drives in 1986 had
come up short. Since the regime would not completely put itself on a war
footing (Iranians throughout the war devoted, on average, 21 percent of
their gross national product to military spending, as opposed to twice
that much in Iraq) and force the necessary manpower into the armed
services with a thoroughgoing conscription, the Iranians struggled to
maintain sufficient numbers of troops on the line. Their home front
began to show signs of war weariness, and some Iranians even question-
ed why the mullahs had sent so many of their countrymen to their
deaths.” In the spring of 1987 several small Iranian attacks produced
lopsided casualties in favor of the Iraqis. In the meantime, the Iraqis has
escalated attacks on Gulf shipping and on Iranian oil facilities and ports.
Many of the raids produced useful, but temporary, results. Although the
IZAF did not have enough aircraft to hit its targets repeatedly and to

57. Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-Iraq War, pp. 247-54.
58. Ibid., p. 261.

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ROOTS OF CONFLICT

caused heavy casualties and spread panic among the ranks of the ill-
prepared Iranians. The IZAF had built new bases with hardened aircraft
shelters and complete support facilities and equipment. The air force had
also acquired late-model Soviet aircraft; such as Su-22s, Su-25s,
MiG-29s, and MiG-25Rs. It added large numbers of surface-to-air
missiles, cluster bombs, and chemical munitions to these aircraft.” The
inability of the Iranians to conduct large-scale assaults in the last half of
1987 provided the Iraqis with the opportunity to put the finishing
touches on their preparations and to put in motion their plans for a
counteroffensive.

For every Iraqi strength, the Iranians had a corresponding
weakness: a lack of professionalism, fewer heavy weapons, poor training
and equipment for gas warfare, declining recruitment, fewer troops at the
front, few defenses in depth, and divisions within their leadership on the
direction of the war. For example, the Iranians had at best only one-half
the number of artillery pieces that the Iraqis had, and the Iranians had
only 600,000 full-time soldiers at the front, two-thirds the number of
their foe. Iran’s confrontation with the Western powers in the Gulf added
a strategic distraction, while the Iranians compounded their problems
with poor strategy on land. They decided to make their major ground
effort in the north, which would aid the Kurds and threaten Iraqi oil
production centers. However, the mountainous terrain offered major
advantages to the defender, and the Iraqis had far better lines of com-
munications to the area. Worst of all, a northern offensive tied up large
numbers of troops and left the southern sector undermanned.

In the early months of 1988, the IZAF continued its attacks on
dams, bridges, and refineries, and the war of the cities intensified. In
March, provoked by an Iranian offensive in the north that destroyed the
best part of an Iraqi division, the Iraqis loosed poison gas on Kurdish
villages. The Iranians derived a substantial propaganda victory from this
action, and it led to their continued attack. The Iraqis brought up
reinforcements, whose enormous firepower and other advantages eventual-

59. Ibid., pp. 353-55.

72



IRAN-IRAQ WAR

ly turned the offensive into a bloody ruin. Iranian publicity about Iraq’s
use of gas warfare may have done more to harm the morale of Iranian
civilians, potential recruits, and front-line troops than it helped in the
war against the enemy. After a month of deception operations, on the
first day of the Moslem holy month of fasting, Ramadan, April 17, 1988,
Iraq commenced its counteroffensive: It struck the Al Faw Peninsula and
caught the Iranians in the midst of troop rotations and with badly
prepared defenses. After having held the initiative for five years, the
Tranians had tended to neglect their defenses. In thirty-five hours, with a
force advantage of 6 to 1, the offensive recaptured the entire peninsula
and drove the Iranian defenders across a single bridge, purposely left
undamaged, spanning the Shatt-al-Arab. The Iranians left behind their
supplies and their major items of equipment. They displayed none of the
fanatical determination to fight to the death that had previously charac-
terized their conduct.

Five weeks later, on May 25, the Iraqi Army attacked the Iranian
lines along a fifteen-mile front, just south of Basra. In addition to having
a 8 to 1 advantage in force, the Iraqis made heavy use of nerve gas and
employed an immense artillery barrage. This time, well-designed defenses
confronted their initial advance. The Iranians stuck to their guns and
even counterattacked, but the Iraqis fed in reinforcements, which eventu-
ally broke the defenders. Within a day, five Iranian divisions began a
swift and panicky retreat. Again, the Iraqis captured large stocks of
equipment, including 90 tanks. In one day, Iran gave up territory that it
had expended 50,000 dead to capture in 1987. In June, Iraqi attacks
recaptured Mehran, and far more significantly, Iraqi forces recaptured the
oil-rich Majnoon Island. Both attacks shattered the opposing Iranian
units and captured vast amounts of equipment. The first four counter-
attacks ejected Iran from all it had gained since 1982.

On July 12, a final Iraqi attack demonstrated the futility of
further resistance; on this date, the Iraqis immediately broke through
Iranian lines and advanced unopposed for forty kilometers. On July 17,
the Iranians accepted the United Nations cease-fire resolution. In an
address to the Iranian people, Khomeini remarked, “Making this decision

73



ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

efforts have also cost them heavily in the morale of their troops and in
training time for their reserve forces.”

The moral problem of how to deal with the uprising in Gaza and
the West Bank, along with the obviously failed intervention in Lebanon,
has helped to embitter Israel’s internal politics and has, to some extent,
cracked the national consensus on Israel’s goals and the nature of its
state. Peace with Egypt and its military decline, together with Israel’s
demonstrated superiority over Syria, has allowed Israel the luxury of
divisive internal politics. Israel’s parliamentary electoral system, which is
proportional rather than winner-take-all, exacerbates the political tension;
it permits fringe parties with extremist views to gain seats in the
parliament, or Knesset. Because neither the Labor Party (which ruled
Israel from 1947 to 1977) nor the conservative Likud Party (which has
ruled much of the time since 1977) can consistently obtain a majority of
the seats in the Knesset by an outright majority vote, the Israelis are
forced to deal with splinter parties, which are largely ultraconservative.
The advantage in negotiating with the splinter parties goes to the Likud,
but in striking bargains, the splinter groups extract concessions entirely
disproportionate to their electoral strength. The process drives the Likud
further to the right and increases its vulnerability to the reactions of its

In the meantime, the IDF must not only cope with Lebanon and
the intifada, they also must not lose their edge in advanced technology.
Israel attempted to maintain its advantage in the air by developing its
own jet fighter, the Lavi. But, before the project’s cancellation, it ab-
sorbed such a large proportion of Israel’s limited defense budget that
training, research and development, and procurement funds for all other
IDF programs suffered. Israel’s large defense expenditures coupled with
equally large demands for its social welfare system have weakened its
economy and ignited a high rate of inflation, adding to domestic hardship
and tension.

The liberalization of the Soviet Union provided a welcome, if

21. Cordesman and Wagner, Arab-Israeli Conflicts, pp. 263-65.

29



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

The plot included clerks; teachers; civil servants; Shias from the Eastern
Province, which contains the oil fields; and many military personnel
including the commandant of the Military Staff College and the com-
mander of Dhahran’s air base. The government executed more than 130
military personnel and imprisoned 305 for life, and 750 more for 15-year
terms.

Large increases in the price of petroleum and in the volume of its
production, especially after the October 1973 war, enabled Saudi Arabia
to simultaneously invest in its economy, its society, and its military
defense. The market price of oil shot up from $1.80 a barrel in 1970 to
$32 in 1980. Saudi oil revenue mushroomed from $4.3 billion in 1973 to
$22.6 billion in 1974, and to $102 billion in 1981.“ The ability of the
Saudi people to absorb the new wealth, not revenue, limited moderniza-
tion. Under successive five-year economic development plans initiated in
the early 1970s, the Saudis used some of their oil wealth to change the
face of their country. A frenzied construction boom began after 1973; it
continued after the assassination of King Faisal in 1975 and the succes-
sion of his half brother King Khalid. Not as well educated nor as widely
experienced as Faisal, Khalid nevertheless had the respect of his family.
His simpler Bedouin ways and his life style made him more acceptable to
the ulama. As king, Khalid followed Saudi custom and became his own
prime minister. He carried on Faisal’s policies—building seaports, power
plants, international airports, huge military bases, thousands of school
buildings and clinics, subsidized housing, grain silos, shopping centers,
telephone and communications systems, and thousands of kilometers of
roads and highways. Foreign and Saudi businessmen and “fixers” became
wealthy, and thousands of Westerners arrived to work under contracts
obtained from the Saudi government. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs,
Palestinians, Yemenis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Indians, South Koreans, and
Filipinos flocked to the kingdom as well to work as laborers and servants.

28 63. Gene Lindsey, Saudi Arabia (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1991), pp. 128-33,
1.

64. Nyrop, Saudi Arabia, 4th ed., p. 135.



Cultural and Historical Background

Muhammad, the Prophet of God, his revelations and teachings,
and the people who first followed him, the Arabs, dominate life in the
Middle East. The religion founded by Muhammad—Islam—and its
associated traditions, culture, and judicial system pervade all aspects of
daily life in the region that encompasses an area of northern Africa and
southwest Asia, from Libya in the west to Afghanistan in the east. In
countries like Turkey that have anticlerical traditions and in those like
Syria and Iraq that have secular socialist governments, only with great
difficulty can rulers force significant societal changes on their less radical,
less religiously imbued subjects. Although the twentieth century has
brought a thin veneer of western thought and western modernization to
the Middle East, it has not erased thirteen and a half centuries of Islam.
So it was that when tens of thousands of American military men and
women arrived in the region, they faced a civilization as different from
their own as any on earth—one stranger and even more difficult to
comprehend than the one their compatriots encountered when they
arrived in Vietnam.

Islam grew from roots planted firmly in Arab culture. The Arabs
had a complex and ancient lifestyle originating at the end of the most
recent ice age, which left the Arabian Peninsula a desert punctuated by a
few oases. For thousands of years, the people of the peninsula adjusted
to their harsh environment which permitted only a small margin for
error and helped generate a culture both inflexible and tradition bound.
(With the such emphasis on survival, little wonder the Arabic language
contains 6,000 words for items and thoughts relating to camels.) Two
closely related groups evolved from this society: nomads and oasis dwel-



INTRODUCTION

and the Arab conquests, and the creation of one of the flash points in
present-day Middle Eastern conflicts—the Arab-Jewish dispute over
Palestine. The second essay provides a military analysis of the Arab-
Israeli wars. from 1948 to 1982. It describes the performance of the
engaged armed forces, the performance of Western versus Soviet weapons
systems, the development of the respective forces’ military professionaliza-
tion, and the ability of the warring parties to learn from their experien-
ces. The final three essays describe the recent history of the three
regional powers of the Persian Gulf—Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. In
addition to providing a detailed character analysis of Saddam Hussein
and a military analysis of the Iran-Iraq War, these final sections examine
the tension that arose in the three nations when the desire for modern-
ization confronted the demands of Islamic conservatism.



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

they lived and unwelcome in their homeland as well. From this miasma
of despair would come an open wound of terrorism and blood for both
Palestinian and Jew.

The Arab armies revealed several shortcomings. They lacked
effective leadership at the both the commissioned and noncommissioned
officer levels. The officer corps reflected its French and English training
well enough, but Western-style training could not adequately offset the
inherent Arab culture, which required too great a distance between the
leaders and those led. Senior Arab officers showed little originality and
initiative in operations. Save for the British-officered and British-led
Jordanian Arab Legion—the smallest Arab force and one composed
exclusively of desert Bedouin tribesman—the regular Arab forces lacked
cohesion and sufficient training to properly employ the weapons they
possessed. King Abdullah of Transjordan squandered the Arab Legion by
engaging in city fighting in Jerusalem. As will be discussed briefly below,
in subsequent wars between the Arabs and Israelis, the Jews retained
their military superiority while the Arabs endeavored to remedy their
deficiencies. Considering the Arabs’ initial disadvantage when they
entered the fray, they made great military progress, but not enough to
overcome the Israelis’ lead.

Since 1949, the Israelis have fought four wars against the Arabs.
During October and November of 1956, in conjunction with the French
and British, they defeated Egypt and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, a
desert area between their country’s southern border and the Suez Canal.
The militarily overmatched Egyptians, however, managed to win the
diplomatic battles. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened
to embargo British and French oil imports and forced British and French
alike to withdraw and leave the regime of Gamal Abdal Nasser in place.
Although the Israelis had done well militarily and had demonstrated
their ability to conduct a lightning offensive campaign, they too had to
withdraw. The Arabs did not forget the lesson that support from a
superpower could wrest victory from defeat.

In a Six-Day War in June 1967, the Israelis preempted a joint
Syrian-Egyptian surprise attack and also invaded and defeated Jordan.

18


CULTURE & HISTORY

them vulnerable to raids and blackmail, euphemistically called taxation,
demanded by the nomads. A few sessile tribes, such as that of Muham-
mad’s birth, the Quraysh of Mecca, used a religious function to expand
their influence. The Quraysh had long provided the priests and caretak-
ers for the Kaaba, a shrine filled with idols dedicated to ancestor wor-
ship. Even before Muhammad cleansed the Kaaba, turning it into Islam’s
holiest site, large numbers of pilgrims had conducted an annual pilgrim-
age there. Like all tourists, they left a portion of their wealth behind,
enriching the Quraysh and helping to finance its commercial efforts. By
the end of the sixth century A.D., the Quraysh had graduated from being
a tribe of simple merchants to one of merchant bankers, with extensive
contacts in the Arabian Peninsula and in the entrepéts of the spice trade.
These contacts also served as a primitive, but useful, intelligence system.
Some Quraysh members also possessed extensive managerial and organi-
zational skills.°

The Prophet Muhammad was an Arab. He never left the Arabian
Peninsula; he never dealt with significant numbers of non-Arabs, save for
the Jews of Medina, whom he eventually destroyed or exiled because they
rejected his message. Like the most of his compatriots, he could neither
read nor write. His teachings addressed the universal issues of good and
evil, salvation and damnation, and the conduct of the believer in this
world—these he addressed from the context and perceptions of a man
who both ruled an Arab community and led Arabs in battle. By the time
of his death in A.D. 632, he had succeeded in organizing the Arabs, then
exclusively inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, into a unified polity.

Many factors aided Muhammad in his establishment of the first
monolithic state in north and central Arabia. Although his God-given
message and personal talents conferred on him unique advantages, so did
the timing of his birth. The merchants of Mecca had at last developed
the necessary administrative skills for empire. For reasons yet unclear,
the tribe of Mecca seemed more receptive to a centralizing impulse and
had almost reached a point of initiating a mass migration from the

5. Ibid., p. 52.



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

airmen of the House of Saud had given their master cause for unease.
The Saudis adopted solutions to ensure loyalty among their military
similar to those adopted by Iraq and Iran, but the Saudis did not have
to purge as heavily as the other two powers did because the Saudi armed
forces were, as a whole, more loyal, if for no other reason than that the
Saudi forces had never served another regime. The air force proved the
most unreliable among the Saudi armed forces, with its personnel
involved since 1945 in five assassination or coup attempts against the
king. However, the Saudi dynasty employed the time-honored principle of
divide and rule. As the Baath and the mullahs had established popular
militias as counterweights to their regular forces, the Saudis created the
conservative National Guard, meant not as a force of reservists to
reinforce the regular army, but as a force to parallel the army. From
25,000 to 30,000 strong, the National Guard had an entirely separate
chain of command, direct to the King. It conscripted men from the desert
Saudis, and half served as militia, subject to call-up only on mobilization.
The two mechanized and two infantry brigades of the National Guard
received American training, but they received fewer heavy weapons than
the army did. Until the 1980s, the Saudis used the Guard as an internal
security force. Since then, it has retained that task and also assumed a
greater role in defending the nation’s borders. As an organization, the
Saudi National Guard sprang from the palace guards of the kings, known
as the White Army for the white robes of its members. The palace
guards originated from, of all sources, the Moslem Brethren that Abd al
Aziz had suppressed. In spite of their heritage, these fanatical adherents
to Wabhabism still serve their king as well as their God.

The House of Saud’s internal family politics affected the position of
the Saudi National Guard in the government. For more than 20 years, a
senior and extremely conservative Saudi prince, Abd Allah ibn Abd al
Aziz, a son of King Abd al Aziz born in 1921, has commanded the
National Guard and served as its minister.” As the only son of King Abd

67. For a thorough description of the foibles of Saudi succession, see Alexander Bligh,
From Prince to King: Royal Succession in the House of Saud in the Twentieth Century
(New York: New York University Press, 1984).

86



MODERN SAUDI ARABIA

Such conduct limited the foreign policy options available to Saudi
leaders. Either they could purchase friends and buy off enemies, a quite
feasible proposition given their oil wealth, or they could acquiesce to a
certain amount of intimidation and blackmail, provided the threat seemed
less than permanent or not too costly. If bribery or accommodation failed,
they were then faced with two less palatable alternatives: conquest by an
external power, or protection from another outside power. These two
options carried grave risks for the regime; long-term destabilization, loss
of face and consequent loss of legitimacy, or destruction. The geography
of the Saudis’ oil fields contributes to the strategic vulnerability of their
country. The Eastern Province, which extends approximately 260 miles
along the Persian Gulf from the Kuwaiti border to the Qatar Peninsula,
contains Saudi Arabia’s working oil fields and a substantial Shia minori-
ty, which has good reason to resent its treatment at the hands of Wah-
habi-Sunnis, the dominant group in Saudi affairs. The Iraqis’ direct land
route to this province is through Kuwait; the Iranians are 120 miles, by
air, across the Gulf. The economic prize of over 25 percent of the world’s
known petroleum reserves dangles invitingly for the power able to seize
it from the weak grasp of its owner.

By the end of 1989, a classic strategic situation existed in the
Persian Gulf. The two strongest Gulf powers had fought, with the Gulfs
third-strongest power and its lesser states having aided the weaker of the
two powers. Iran’s near-total military defeat greatly reduced its strength
in the short run, but its potential to someday dominate the Gulf re-
mained. With no second front to fear and bedeviled by a weak economy,
Traq had few restraints on its actions and an urgent need to improve its
situation before Iran regained a measure of its former power. As the
major military power in the region controlling the international petroleum
market, Iraq had but to reach out and grab the lever to sluice immense
wealth into its own coffers. Saudi Arabia’s well-equipped but tiny armed
forces would not stand long against a serious expedition from Iraq. Only
a deus ex machina in the form of intervention from beyond the region
could prevent the fall of Saudi Arabia.

89



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

emphasis to the north to meet the Syrian challenge.

In addition to its confrontation with the front-line Arab states,
Israel has also had to deal with the problem of terrorism, conducted
usually by Palestinians, with the discreet, or not so discreet, as the case
may be, support of the Arab states. The Israelis had a long-established
practice of replying to all incidents of terrorism or of attempted terrorism
immediately and violently by attacking the sponsor or sponsors of the
act. For several decades, the Israelis have followed this policy almost
inflexibly. From their point of view, their method extracts vengeance,
discourages repetition, and satisfies internal domestic political require-
ments. It further causes the front-line Arab states—Egypt, Syria, and
Jordan—to closely control dissident elements, such as the PLO, in order
to avoid retaliation for actions that they, the host nation, have not
condoned. However, the danger remains that the Israelis may, at some
point, miscalculate the appropriateness of their response and provoke a
far larger confrontation. Unless controlled, this hair-trigger retaliatory
reflex could possibly be manipulated by Israel’s foes against its own best
interests. The PLO, for instance, consistently trades on the Israeli policy
of an eye (or two) for an eye to gain sympathy and support throughout
the Arab world and the Third World. In the Persian Gulf War, Saddam
Hussein, Dictator of Iraq, used this principle in hope of provoking
retaliation when he fired missiles at the Jewish state. In any case,
Israel’s policy of retribution, although seemingly useful in the short run,
represents a distinctly destabilizing factor in Middle Eastern politics.

In the mid-1970s, a civil war in Lebanon between Christians and
Muslims gravely weakened the central government and created a power
vacuum that drew in outside powers such as Syria and Israel. Lebanon’s
weakness allowed the PLO and other anti-Israeli groups to operate more
openly and with far less control. The increasing PLO control of Lebanon
presented Israel with a particularly complex problem in that the PLO
now had a base in a state too weak to prevent it from acting against
Israel. Israel’s standard retaliatory strikes on Palestinian refugee camps
in Lebanon and against PLO targets sited adjacent to civilian facilities
produced civilian deaths. The resulting world condemnation far exceeded


The United States
Air Force in the
Persian Gulf War

Conflict

A Military Perspective on the
Middle East hans Persian Gulf Crisis

by Richard G. Davis



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Al-Khalil, Samir. Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.

Bergquist, Maj. Ronald E. The Role of Airpower in the Iran-Iraq War.
Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, Dec 1988.

Blackwell, James. Thunder in the Desert: The Strategy and Tactics of the
Persian Gulf War. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Bligh, Alexander. From Prince to King: Royal Succession in the House of
Saud in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University
Press, 1984.

Cordesman, Anthony H., and Wagner, Abraham R. The Lessons of
Modern War. Vol. 1, The Arab-Israeli Conflicts, 1973-1989. Boul-
der, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990.

Cordesman, Anthony H., and Wagner, Abraham R. The Lessons of
Modern War. Vol. 2, The Iran-Iraq War. Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1990.

Chubin, Sharam, and Tripp, Charles. Iran and Iraq at War. Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press, 1988.

Dixon, Norman. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. New York:
Basic Books, 1976.

Donner, Fred McGraw. The Early Islamic Conquests. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1981.

Dupuy, Col. Trevor N. Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947-1974.
New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

Dupuy, Col. Trevor N., and Martell, Paul. Flawed Victory: The Arab-
Israeli Conflict and the 1982 War in Lebanon. Fairfax, Va.: HERO
Books, 1986. ,

Friedman, Norman. Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait. Annapolis, Md.:
Naval Institute Press, 1991.

91



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

trated the state’s revenues on improving and expanding the army. Lopez
used his German-trained, European-equipped soldiers to intervene in the
Uruguayan civil war and to attempt to solve a Brazilian border dispute.
A six-year war by Paraguay against Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina
(whose neutrality Lopez violated) ensued. It resulted in the death of not
only Lopez but also more than one-half of his countrymen, plus a long
occupation by the victors. Clearly, Lopez, heir to an extremely insular,
xenophobic tradition, grievously miscalculated the strength of his forces
relative to the strength of his foes.

Saddam’s faith in his role as a leader who was destined to en-
hance Iraq and all Arab states is the touchstone of his entire system of
self-belief. It justifies his using any means to achieve his goals, while it
supports him in vicissitude—the leader can never be permanently over-
come, nor can he be fallible. Saddam knows that he will win eventually,
whatever the cost to others.

Saddam has significant abilities and disabilities. He can rebound
with vigor from temporary setbacks; he has a merciless, cold-blooded
willingness to use any means, including genocide, to achieve his ends; he
has the ability to make necessary tactical retreats, as demonstrated by
his constant bargaining with his Kurdish minority. His view of the world
as suspicious and unreliable compelled him to assume all power to
himself and to personally make every key policy decision. He distrusts
subordinates and colleagues, refuses to solicit their advice, and discoura-
ges them from offering it, relying instead on his own intuition and
astuteness. When his minister of health suggested, at a cabinet meeting
in 1982, that he resign in order to facilitate a peace with Iran, Saddam
led the minister out of the room and personally executed him. Although
Saddam has a sophisticated understanding of the Arab world and Middle
Eastern politics, he knows little beyond that milieu. Aside from a trip to
France in 1979, he has had no direct exposure to the West; during the
the decade of the 1980s, he refused to talk to Western reporters. His
speeches indicate that he has absorbed and accepted the xenophobia of
his uncle’s household. He apparently believes that the West—the United
States and the United Kingdom, in particular—dislikes Arabs and is

48


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

from North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and codified his instruc-
tions in written form, the Qur’an. Not only did these conquests impose
Arab rule and Islam, they imposed Arab culture. Study of the Qur’an,
required of all believers, encouraged the use of Arabic as the religious
and literary language of the new empire. While the Arab conquerors
occupied the great cities of the East, they founded their own military
cities, such as present-day Cairo, Egypt, in an attempt to separate
themselves from the local population. Although the Arabs came from
outside the existing civilizations, which by definition made them barbari-
ans, they did not employ exceptionally vicious methods, such as the
Mongols did in Eastern Europe and Asia or the Spanish did in the New
World. In fact, the Muslims either developed or stumbled upon an
elegant and subtle means of perpetuating their rule. Instead of forced
mass conversion to Islam and the slaughtering of the upper and adminis-
trative classes (other than on the battlefield), the Muslims allowed the
local populace to exercise their existing religion freely (something the old
governments had not done) and to maintain but not to expand their
religious sites. The Muslims retained Arabic as the language of their
courts and merely required that their civil servants be believers in Islam
and that all non-Muslims pay an extra, and not exorbitant, annual head
tax. In short order, the Arabs also forbade non-Muslims from marrying
Muslim women, prohibited the wearing of clothes of certain colors by
non-Muslims, and refused to accept the testimony of non-Muslims in
Muslim courts of law.’ The old governing families of the conquered
Byzantine and Sasanian provinces converted within a generation, but the
process took far longer in some areas of the outlying countryside. The
Coptic Christians of present-day Egypt never converted, but, within a
relatively short time, the vast majority of the conquered citizenry, like
their overlords, would pray five times a day facing in the direction of the
city of Muhammad’s birth, Mecca.

The European world regarded the overthrow of the last of the
Roman Empire and the occupation of the Christian Holy. Lands as

8. Ibid., p. 47.

10



CULTURE & HISTORY

political leader. Like early Christianity, early Islam had a powerful
leveling tendency that lessened social and economic distinctions among
believers. Muhammad preached that all men were equal in the sight of
God. This widened Islam’s appeal and aided in the recruitment of new
members. Islam supplied the higher universal law that had been lacking
in Arabic culture. Instead of being caught up in the infinite variableness
of tribal power politics, a follower could now appeal to a fixed and
standard set of divine rules. It was beyond the Prophet’s power to
eliminate the practice of retaliation; however, he put restrictions on it.
Retaliation could occur only if an injured party retaliated for the break-
ing of Islamic code; retaliation was not to be used to settle a personal
grudge. Muhammad forbade feuding within the community of believers.
By eliminating the perpetual round of blood feuds, he increased the
cohesion among believers. The community of believers, or umma, gave its
members an institution above and beyond the tribe, one in which all
authority could be centralized. Muhammad also expounded at length on
the details of the day-to-day life of the members of the umma, including
matters of their inheritance, marriage, and slavery. Believers could live a
life free of the tribe, based on divine guidelines. By tamping down tribal
and personal conflict, while simultaneously placing all believers under the
control of a single man and one God, Islam supplied an element of
cohesiveness and continuity heretofore missing in earlier Arabian Penin-
sula tribal confederations.*

Muhammad’s last recorded speech in A.D. 632 at Mecca affirmed
many of the above points: “Know that every Muslim is a Muslim’s broth-
er, and that the Muslims are brethren; fighting between them should be
avoided, and the blood shed in pagan times should not be avenged;
Muslims should fight all men until they say, "There is no god but God'.”

Within thirty years of his death, Muhammad’s followers had
completely overthrown the Sasanian Empire, stripped the Byzantines

6. Ibid., pp. 58-61.

7. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, Belknap Press, 1991), p. 19.



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

new regime in Baghdad. Apparently, the Iraqi defeat produced some
dissatisfaction within the Iraqi government, for Saddam reduced the size
of the Revolutionary Command Council from seventeen to nine members,
cut the size of the Baath Party Council, dismissed part of the cabinet,
and had twelve generals shot for their performance in battle. As previ-
ously mentioned, when the minister of health suggested at this point that
Saddam resign in the service of peace, Saddam reportedly invited him to
leave the cabinet meeting room and personally executed him. Saddam
retained central authority over all major military decisions in the field.”

Iran Invades Iraq (1982-1984)

The turn of the war in Iran’s favor forced policy reappraisals in
the capitals of the superpowers. Neither the USSR nor the United States
wished to see Iraq defeated. In the spring of 1982, U.S. support tilted
from Iran toward Iraq, and by summer 1982, Moscow had lifted its arms-
sales ban on Iraq. As early as March 1982, U.S. intelligence sources had
detected signs of the impending Iraqi debacle. On March 15, the United
States removed Iraq from the State Department's list of nations aiding
terrorism, which eased trade prohibitions. The United States quickly
began to forward intelligence information based on satellite imagery,
communications intercepts, and Central Intelligence Agency assessments
to Baghdad. This intelligence relationship deepened as the war pro-
gressed. In November 1984 President Reagan purportedly signed a
National Security Decision Directive calling for a direct intelligence
liaison with Baghdad. By 1986, American intelligence began arriving
almost in real time. This upgrading of the quality of the information sent
may have included actual satellite imagery, precise down to vehicle
size—1.5 to 2 meters in resolution. Radio intercepts included exact
designations and, by inference, showed the effectiveness of radio silence
and communications via buried land lines. This information not only

50. Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-Iraq War, pp. 122-43.

62


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

where diverse minorities abounded.

A bloodless coup removed the initial Iraqi Baathist regime after
only nine months in power. Five years later, in July 1968, the Baath
Party and non-Baathist army officers launched a successful coup against
the government. The Baath quickly outmaneuvered its co-conspirators and
gained complete control of the country, which it has retained. In the
early 1970s, the Baathist Party underwent several typically bloody and
public purges. At the same time, it struggled to suppress a Kurdish
rebellion, which received aid from the Shah of Iran until March 1975,
when Iraq and Iran signed the Algiers Accord. In the accord, Iran agreed
to stop aiding the Kurds in return for Iraq’s honoring earlier protocols
that assigned the eastern bank of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway to Iran.
(The Shatt-al-Arab flows approximately eighty miles from the confluence
of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, passes the Port of Basra, and flows
into the Persian Gulf. It constitutes Iraq’s only access to the Gulf.) Iran
and Iraq had sparred over ownership of this waterway for decades, and
the Iraqis’ resentment of their forced concession of it to Iran was one
factor contributing to the Iran-Iraq War.

A strongman emerged to head the Baath and Iraq—Saddam
Hussein al-Tikriti. Born in the village of Tikrit, Iraq, in April 1937, his
father died soon after. At the age of eight, Saddam ran away to live with
his maternal uncle in Baghdad. The period between his father’s death
and his taking up residence with his uncle may have had profound
consequences in shaping his personality. Arab culture, even more than
others, provides for the lionization of young boys by their mothers and
female relatives until they are thrust into the world of adult males at
the age of six or seven, when they come under their fathers’ control.
Depending on the amount of male influence supplied by Saddam’s
extended family, he may have suffered from the beginning of his life
from a lack of male influence and from overadulation. In any case, his
stay in his uncle’s home exposed him to traditional and new ideas. His
uncle had a gift for both rhetoric and hate. A widely read treatise,
“Three Things God Should Not Have Made: Persians, Jews, and Flies,”
flowed from his pen. Young Saddam imbibed his uncle’s prejudices in full


MODERN SAUDI ARABIA

al Aziz and a desert tribeswoman whose forebears at one time competed
with the Sauds, he not only has close ties to the ulama and the desert
tribesmen, but he has the loyalty of the National Guard as well. Within
the Saud family, his birth status made him a virtual outcast and denied
him the internal family alliances that aided his half brothers. On the
other hand, his status made him the focus of discontent and a rallying
point for dissatisfied family members, including two of King Faisal’s sons,
Foreign Minster Sa’ud and General Intelligence Director Turki. Abd Allah
consistently opposes the rapid pace of modernization; dislikes the United
States, in part because its pro-Israeli policy radicalizes Arab politics; and
has championed Arabic and Islamic causes. He favors holding oil produc-
tion to a minimum.” With the death of King Kahlid on June 12, 1982,
and the accession of King Fahd, the sixty-year old Abd Allah became
Crown Prince and Deputy Prime Minister. Abd Allah and Fahd do not
see eye to eye, but the balance they maintain keeps peace within the
various factions of the House of Saud. Fahd, eldest among a powerful
group of royal full brothers, known as the Sudairi Seven after the tribe
of their mother, appointed his next eldest full brother, Prince Sultan,
born in 1925, to be the Second Deputy Prime Minister, placing him
second in line for the throne. During his reign, King Fahd has relied on
Prince Sultan, who since 1962 held the portfolio of Minister of Defense
and Aviation, rather than on Abd Allah, to help him administer his
Kingdom. Fahd’s reliance on Sultan deepened the intense rivalry between
Sultan and Abd Allah, both as heirs to the throne and as leaders of
military establishments that must compete for resources. Fahd threatened
Abd Allah’s other flank by appointing a second full brother, Prince Na‘if,
to the Ministry of the Interior, a position Fahd vacated when he became
king. As minister, Na’if oversees internal security functions including the
secret police and a secret, armed, reserve police force purportedly num-
bering upwards of 40,000.”

68. Lindsey, Saudi Arabia, p. 141.

o Douglas F. Graham, Saudi Arabia Unveiled (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1991),
p. 46.

87



ARAB-ISRAELI] WARS

internal order for Lebanon and safety for Israel than if Lebanon were
controlled by the PLO or another radical group. The state of Israel
confronted the largest challenge. If it did not find some satisfactory and
humane resolution to the problem of how to deal with the Palestinians, it
faced mounting domestic strife capable of poisoning its body politic and
eventually destroying any hope of permanent peace.

Reverberations from the Arab-Israeli conflict impacted areas
beyond the borders of the warring states. The Soviet Union and the
United States sold billions of dollars worth of weapons systems in the
region. By their purchases, the client states bought not just arms, but
advisors, sympathy, and some support for their political objectives. For
example, at the end of the October 1973 war, the superpowers found
themselves facing each other at the highest nuclear alert level: The
USSR was trying to avert total defeat and humiliation for the Egyptians
while the United States was trying to restrain the Israelis. Other Muslim
and Arab states have adopted anti-Israeli, anti-American policies and
rhetoric. The governments of Libya and Iraq, although not immune from
Israeli military action, were at a far enough remove to actively support
terrorism and to incorporate anti-Israeli sentiment into their educational,
political, and governmental systems. The conservative monarchies of
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, although rejecting terrorism, have, to
a lesser extent, followed suit. Within the Middle East, anti-Israeli hatred
feeds from the taproot of the region’s Arabic-Muslim culture and creates
a strong unifying factor that cuts across national boundaries and differing
political systems. However, like many universal principles, local condi-
tions affect the attraction that a principle holds for a populace and
determine how much a populace is committed to it.

31



PERSIAN GULF POWERS

biased against them. Saddam has little understanding of the internation-
al system and the workings of the Western political process. This limited
knowledge has probably caused him to accept many stereotypes about the
West as true—Western television and Western-made movies do not
emphasize the great strengths of their civilization. His sparse knowledge
of the West, his own feelings of invincibility, and the centralization of all
power in his hands could cause him to misjudge the implications or
consequences of his actions. ~
Using information-processing theory, in the mid-1970s Norman F.
Dixon prepared a provocative study of commanding generals of the
British Army. He illustrated the processing styles with an example.
Headquarters receives a message which states that the enemy is prepar-
ing for a counterattack. The message supplies detailed strength and
disposition data and specifies a probable date and sector of attack. The
facts of the message are indisputable, but the information it conveys to
the generals varies considerably. The message gave only redundant
information to General A, who had anticipated a counterattack and has
already made preparations. The message came as a complete surprise to
General B, who had not anticipated a counterattack. It reduced his
ignorance and uncertainty and gave him much to do. General C found
the message so unexpected that he chose to ignore it, with calamitous
results. It conflicted with his perceptions and clashed with his wishes. It
emanated, so he thought, from an “unreliable source.” Since his mind was
closed to the message’s contents, he refused to believe it, much like
General Grant did before the battle of Shiloh. In fact the message
supplied more information than General C, with his limited capacity,
could absorb. One should further note that, as a rule, older information,
which has been accumulated to support the currently held conviction,
tends to carry more weight than new information, which requires more
thought, returns the individual to a previous state of uncertainty and
doubt, and confronts the decision maker with the possibility of error.”

38. Norman Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (New York: Basic
Books, 1976), pp. 30-31. This work offers far more valuable insight into the psychology of
command than I can give in the short example cited here. This is a startling book that
will cause any reader to stop and ponder, even if he cannot agree with it.

49


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

complicating, final factor for the Israelis. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the
USSR reversed its policy on Jewish emigration and began to permit an
ever-expanding stream of Jewish citizens to leave the Soviet Union. From
1989 through 1991, 340,000 former Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel,”
where they comprise between 7 and 10 percent of the population. These
new citizens required housing, retraining, and support, all of which had
to come from the overstrained Israeli economy or from foreign aid or
donations. The assimilation of such large numbers of new families put
pressure on the entire Jewish population. The previous Soviet policy of
severely limiting Jewish emigration had favored the Arabs; the policy
now directly threatens them. More Jews mean more pressure to populate
Palestinian land within Israel. For the front-line Arab states, more well-
educated Jews, especially those leaving jobs in the Soviet defense indus-
try, make the military equation even more lopsided.

By 1990, the situation between Israel and front-line Arab states
seemed stable, but internally, the situation within Israel seemed more
volatile than ever. If left to their own devices, Egypt and Jordan had
little desire to make war with Israel. Egypt had not completed modern-
izing its force with Western weapons, and it depended almost completely
on American economic and military aid and credits. Jordan had its own
Palestinian problem and, because of limited funds, had kept its army
relatively small and starved of modern equipment. Syria had extremely
bad relations with both Jordan and Iraq. It had supported Iran in the
Iran-Iraq War and had closed its portion of Iraq’s oil-exporting pipeline
during the war. The decline of the Soviet Union and its reluctance to sell
Assad large quantities of the very latest arms meant that Syria’s military
faced a position of permanent technological inferiority when compared to
Israel’s. In 1982, Syria had learned the difficulty of taking on Israel,
unaccompanied by other Arab allies. Nonetheless, the Syrians consoli-
dated their hold on Lebanon. The Israelis acquiesced to Syrian control in
Lebanon, apparently because they recognized that they were unable to
impose a Lebanese solution and that Syrian control would provide more

22. Jackson Diehl, “Israel’s Immigration Slips, Jewish Newcomers Find Jobs, Housing
Scarce,” The Washington Post, Dec 29, 1991, p. Al.

30


TRAN-IRAQ WAR

not refrain from all interference in the internal affairs of his armed
forces: he continued his partiality toward his favorites and punished
those who failed.

The new call-up allowed the Iraqis to maintain an army equal in
size to the Iranians—820,000 regulars—and to quadruple the size of the
Republican Guard—to 28 brigades. The upgrading of U.S. intelligence
information, which occurred at this time, must also have greatly aided
the Iraqi effort; it revealed some of Iran’s most secret tactical moves. The
Iraqis had superior equipment, logistics, intelligence, mobility, fortifica-
tions, firepower, and airpower, but they allowed the initiative to remain
with the Iranians, who used their opportunity poorly. The Iranians
remained fixed on taking Basra, and their inability to resolve the differ-
ences between their regular forces and the Revolutionary Guard commit-
ted them to human-wave tactics conducted by half-trained troops. A
carefully prepared Iranian offensive against Basra, code-named KARBALA
V, became the crucial battle in this phase of the conflict. On January 9,
1987, the Iranians—70 percent of them Revolutionary Guards and totally
untrained Basij—attacked extremely strong Iraqi defenses consisting of
minefields, multiple rings of fortifications, and extensive water defenses.
The Iranians achieved tactical surprise and experienced some initial
success, especially when the Iraqis were again slow to commit their
reserves. Soon the offensive became a repeat of the Al Faw operation as
both sides committed large forces. The Iranians sent at least 140,000
men into the fray. Saddam appears to have distanced himself from this
fighting, either because of his agreements with the generals or because
he had no wish to accept responsibility for any possible disaster. How-
ever, poor performances by the Iraqi Army Chief of Staff and the Com-
mander of the Third Corps incurred Saddam’s disfavor and prompted the
dismissal of and possible execution of a number of officers in the Third
and Seventh Corps. Eventually, the Iraqis shot the offensive into the
ground. They suffered heavy casualties in doing so, but the Iranians
suffered far more heavily, losing perhaps 30,000 killed and tens of
thousands wounded.

KARBALA V marked a decisive turning-point in the war. It demon-

69



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

lers. The nomads’ lifestyle discouraged fixed residences and the accumula-
tion of weighty or bulky goods and wealth. It encouraged the accomplish-
ments of the mind: religion, language, genealogy, and relationships. Of
the three types of nomadic tribesmen, also known as Bedouins, camel
herdsmen had primacy over sheep herdsmen or goat herdsmen. The
camel, not the horse which could not thrive in the harsh desert, confer-
red unparalleled mobility because it could cross large sections of the
desert without needing water. For thousands of years, nomadic tribes
ranged their seasonal pasturage, raiding and stealing from the herds of
their neighbors, or seizing their pasturage. This engendered a warrior
ethos, with an accompanying code of honor, and a fierce loyalty toward
the tribe. More perniciously, it ingrained an enduring tradition of retalia-
tion and blood feuds. As a group, the Arabs developed no overriding or
universal law or authority to judge disputes. For the tribes, and even for
a larger sect within a tribe, life consisted of war of all against all; no
alliance or coalition survived the death or disenchantment of its makers.
This led to a permanent mind-set that Americans in particular find
difficult to comprehend: An Arab is less concerned with the right or
wrong of another individual’s case or the justice of his own complaint
than he is with the honor of his tribe, which is measured by the strength
and capability of his own tribe relative to the strength and capability of
his opponent’s tribe. As long as an Arab’s tribe can protect a tribe
member from retaliation, the individual may do as he wishes.‘ In the
modern Arab world, this phenomenon plays out time and again. In its
least attractive form, it is seen in the treatment of both Palestinian
Arabs and foreign workers and in the taking of hostages.

Although by the time of Muhammad, Arabian oasis dwellers may
have outnumbered nomads, their political position was lower. Oasis
dwellers—more often than not, closely related by blood and tribe to the
nomads—prospered from their mercantile and agricultural endeavors.
However, their dependence on a caravan-based commerce and on agricul-
ture (in particular, their dependence on extensive date tree groves) made

4. Fred McGraw Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1981), pp. 40-41.

6


ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

inaccurate and poorly aimed Soviet FROG (free rocket over ground)
surface-to-surface missiles against military targets in northern Israel. The
widely scattered fall of these rockets convinced the Israelis that the
Syrians had intended to attack Israel’s population centers, and they
responded by attacking Syrian economic targets (power plants, factories,
and fuel storage tanks) and rear-area military installations, including the
Syrian Ministry of Defense. Thereupon, the Syrians displaced some of
their forward air defenses to protect their rear areas. Not until Israeli
ground attacks disrupted the Syrian air defense system, however, could
the Israeli Air Force operate with a large measure of freedom. Against
the Egyptians, Israeli air suppression of Egyptian battlefield air defenses
made little progress. Only when the Israeli Army crossed the Suez Canal
and either shelled or attacked Egypt’s SAM batteries on the canal’s west
bank did the Egyptian air defenses lose their effectiveness.”

Israel’s hard-fought victory in the October 1973 war led each of
the three major participants to make significant decisions affecting their
military strength. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the general who had
become head of state upon Nasser’s death in 1971, revealed that rare
combination of decisiveness, moral courage, and statesmanship that made
him one of the premier peacemakers of the last half of the twentieth
century. Although the Egyptians may have lost the war from a military
perspective, they had obtained gained the grudging respect of their
enemy. Trading on this, and on the desire of Egyptians and Israelis for
peace, Sadat opened negotiations with his foes. In 1978, aided by Ameri-
can President James “Jimmy” E. Carter and with lavish American
guarantees of military and civilian aid for the two countries, representa-
tives from both Middle East countries signed a peace treaty. The Camp
David Accords—named for the negotiation site, the Camp David rural
retreat of American presidents—returned the Sinai to Egypt and estab-

16. Col Trevor N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947-1974 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 549-55.

17. Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), vol 1, The Arab-Israeli Conflicts, 1973-1989, pp.
100.

21



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

The administration of the Royal Guard Regiment, responsible for
protecting the King’s person at all times, further illustrates the Balkani-
zation of the Saudi military. The Royal Regiment does not belong to the
National Guard, the lineal descendant of the Saudi King’s personal
guards, nor does it belong to the Saudi Army; it belongs to the Ministry
of the Interior, which also manages the secret police.” This capturing of
different portions of the armed forces by different Royal factions may
promote loyalty to the dynasty, but it also bears the potential for future
conflict.

Other precautions taken by the House of Saud to prevent a
military coup include dispersing the military and maintaining a small
force structure. Saudi forces are stationed widely throughout the country
in new and comfortable bases. The government can respond rapidly, with
minimal military force, to almost any likely internal or external contin-
gency, but its ability to concentrate the bulk of its military speedily in
any one area is prevented. This inability to concentrate force may pre-
vent the armed forces from overthrowing the government, but it risks
leaving the government unable to use the mass of its armed forces
quickly, if they are loyal, to suppress a larger scale rebellion or to fend
off a powerful foreign foe. The Saudis have also kept the size of their
armed forces small. Jordan, a country with a population 25 percent as
large as Saudi Arabia’s, has armed forces 30 percent larger. Syria, with a
population only 80 percent the size of Saudi Arabia’s, has six or seven
times more armed forces. Iraq, whose population exceeds Saudi Arabia’s
by a little more than 20 percent, dwarfs the size of the Saudi armed
forces with twelve to fifteen times more regular armed forces. It seems
clear that the Saudis have had only one purpose for their armed for-
ces—internal security—with the ability to deter foreign aggression a
much lesser objective. Members of the House of Saud have reasoned,
given the hard experience of reigning monarchs in the Arab world, that
armed forces large enough to successfully oppose their nondomestic
enemies would be more dangerous to their monarch than to their foe.

70. Ibid., p. 40.



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

a cardinal shortcoming. In June 1981, Khomeini dismissed him, and
Bani-Sadr fled the country, helped by some elements of the Iranian Air
Force. The Khomeini regime promptly instituted an exhaustive purge. It
re-arrested many of the American-trained regular officers that Bani-Sadr
had allowed to return to duty and, in all, purged more than half its
pilots and air crews; operational strength in the air force dropped to well
below a hundred aircraft. In addition, the regime halted all training,
required that religious officials approve all missions, and limited fuel to
the minimum needed for a specific mission. The Iranian Air Force never
fully recovered from this blow. Bani-Sadr’s flight caused further mischief
for the regime in that it finally pushed radical groups, such:as the
People’s Mujahideen, into armed opposition. The Mujahideen launched an
urban guerrilla warfare campaign with car bombings and assassinations
that succeeded in killing two presidents of the Republic and one of its
prime ministers. The government responded with an even more murder-
ous campaign and executed perhaps 3,000 dissidents.” While these events
caused permanent damage to the Iranian Air Force and obviously dis-
tracted the regime, in the long run the strengthening of the religious
party meant more manpower and determination for the military effort at
the front, albeit for the popular forces, because the mullahs fanatically
believed that they would eventually be the victors.

In June 1981, the Iraqis received a blow from an unexpected
direction. On the seventh of the month, Israeli Air Force F—16s bombed
and destroyed the French-built Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. Israeli
intelligence credited the Iraqis with the capability to start the 70-mega-
watt reactor by September 1981 and further gave them the capacity by
1985 to exploit the enriched uranium they had on hand to produce six
20-kiloton, plutonium-based atomic bombs, each approximately the same
size as the Hiroshima bomb. The Israeli government found this prospect
intolerable and decided to launch a preemptive air raid. (Israel claims it
informed the United States of its decision beforehand.) The strike consist-
ed of six F—15s flying escort and eight F—16s, four flying backup, that

48. Ibid., pp. 117-18.

60


MODERN SAUDI ARABIA

The Saudi armed forces.and National Guard benefited immensely
from this spending. Although the House of Saud was intensely anti-
Zionist, it was also fiercely anti-Communist. The atheism of Marxist-
Leninist ideology as well as what many Saudis saw as the USSR’s
aggressive strategy to seize the oil fields of the Persian Gulf prevented
them on principle from buying Soviet arms. The Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in 1979 supported their fears, and they eyed with suspicion
the arms deals between Syria, Egypt, and Iraq and Eastern Bloc suppli-
ers. In spite of Saudi Arabia’s enmity toward Israel, the United States
became the major Saudi arms supplier. Other Western countries sold
them large quanties as well, and by the late 1980s the Saudis had
become so worldly that they purchased intermediate-range ballistic
missiles from the People’s Republic of China, the only country willing to
sell them such weapons. By the late 1980s, the Saudis had taken deliv-
ery of or had on order 63 F-15Cs, 24 Tornado F.8s, 36 Tornado GR.1s,
76 F-5E/Fs, 24 Hawk trainer/attack aircraft, 5 E-3s (AWACs), 79 C—130
transports, 12 air-to-air refueling tankers, 500 helicopters, 1,000 French
AMX-30 and U.S. M60A3 tanks, 500 M-113 and AMX-10 personnel
carriers, 1,500 field guns, 16 batteries of Hawk and Crotale surface-to-air
missiles, nine corvettes, four guided-missile frigates, 13 missile attack
boats, and hundreds of light patrol craft. The Saudis also purchased
AIM-7 Sidewinder missiles, TV-guided missiles, and laser-guided bombs.©
The Saudi Army had a strength of 35,000 to 40,000, the Air Force had
approximately 15,000 personnel, and the Navy had 2,500. All three
services recruited on a volunteer basis only.

Like the Iraqi and the Iranian armed forces, the Saudi armed
forces had difficulty in absorbing these complex weapons systems. For
instance, Pakistani and Moroccan troops manned the Saudi Army’s
American-equipped armored brigade (the 8th) throughout the 1980s, and
a British firm maintained its Tornados. As with the military services of
the Iraqi Baath and the Iranian mullahs, the soldiers, sailors, and

65. Friedman, Desert Victory, pp. 288, 306; Lindsey, Saudi Arabia, p. 216.
66. Friedman, Desert Victory, pp. 288, 307.

85



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

Graham, Douglas F. Saudi Arabia Unveiled. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/
Hunt, 1991.

Hiro, Dilip. The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict. New York:
Routledge, 1991. :

Hourani, Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1991.

Langer, William L., ed. An Encyclopedia of World History. 5th ed. Boston,
Mass.: Houghton & Mifflin, 1972.

Lindsey, Gene. Saudi Arabia. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1991.

Nyrop, Richard F., ed. Iran: A Country Study. 3d ed. DA Pam. 550-68.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, GPO, 1978.

Nyrop, Richard F. et al. Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia. 3d ed. DA
Pam. 550-51. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, GPO,
1977.

Nyrop, Richard F. et al. Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia. 4th ed. DA
Pam. 550-51. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, GPO,
1984.

Payne, Robert. The Holy Sword: The Story of Islam from Muhammad to
the Present. New York: Harper & Bros., 1959.

Pelletiere, Stephen C., and Johnson, Douglas V. Lessons Learned: The
Iran-Iraq War. Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute,
U.S. Army War College, 1991.

Sacher, Howard M. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our
Time. New York: Knopf, 1989.

92



TRAN-IRAQ WAR

Khomeini responded by issuing a Fataw, or religious proclamation,
stating that more offensives would follow and that the war must end by
the next Iranian New Year (March 21, 1987). He issued a call for
500,000 new volunteers, and the government toughened its enforcement
of conscription. It closed the universities and subjected 30,000 teachers to
the draft. New regulations allowed the Revolutionary Guards to stanch
the recurring loss of experienced manpower by enabling them to recall
men who had already served. For his part, and apparently for reasons of
prestige, Saddam ordered the recapture of the militarily insignificant
Iranian town of Mehran in the north. By May 12, Saddam’s forces had
overwhelmed the defenders, which gave him the opportunity to proclaim
that he would trade Al Faw for Mehran, or else he would be forced to
seize more Iranian cities. Instead, the Iranians retook Mehran on June
10, 1986, possibly persuading Saddam to reassess his management of the
war.

In July 1986 the Baath held a party conference. The session
naturally included not only the top civilian leadership but much of the
military leadership as well—one did not attain a leading position in
either the Iraqi government or its military without becoming a party
member relatively early in one’s rise. At this meeting, which may or may
not have reinforced similar decisions reputedly taken in 1982 at the
beginning of the Iranian invasion of Iraq, Saddam and his military®
worked out a modus vivendi. Discussion centered on the key topics of the
direction of the war and of future strategy. The generals apparently did
not make the fatal mistake of directly challenging Saddam’s authority,
but they did persuade him to modify his method of command and his
conduct of the war. Khomeini’s promise to end the war soon and Iran’s
efforts to finally mobilize its 3 to 1 manpower advantage required a
drastic Iraqi response. The Iranians would surely open their offensive in
the rainy season, as they had in Al Faw, negating much of Iraq’s advan-
tage in aircraft and mechanized equipment. To respond effectively to
these circumstances, the Iraqi Army had to field a sizable high-quality

55. See Sharam Chubin and Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1988), pp. 116-17, who place this meeting in 1982.

67



" PERSIAN GULF POWERS

ranks, apparently because of their access to explosives. The aircraft
ordnance-loading crews also experienced loyalty checks and security
vetting. The Shah’s methods squelched initiative and produced an atmo-
sphere of distrust and suspicion within ‘his military.”

Thousands of Iranians traveled abroad to learn the requisite
managerial and technical skills to operate the systems flooding their
country. Likewise, thousands of Westerners, particularly Americans,
arrived in the country to compete for the Shah’s largesse and to instruct
the Iranians in the operation and care of their purchases. The ideas and
attitudes of the West collided with the conservative values of the Moslem
clergy and most of the people. The Shah’s father, Reza Khan, had
attempted to completely secularize the state. He had adopted many of the
methods of the founder of the modern Turkish state, Kemal Ataturk, who
was another ruthless Westernizer. To discourage tribal particularism
(each tribe affected a unique style of dress) and to encourage the entry of
women into the labor force, Reza Khan had his rubber-stamp parliament,
the majlis, pass laws which made the wearing of Western clothes manda-
tory for all and forbade the veiling of woman. He struck directly at the
authority and position of the Moslem clergy when he introduced a
modified French Code Napoleon, which established civil marriage and
divorce, and ended the clergy’s domination of civil law. He also regulated
self-flagellation and the public behavior of religious fanatics, including
dervishes, and put religious education under the control of the state
schools.” Although accepted by Iranian society, these innovations had not
grown deep roots.

In any case, old resentments compounded those caused by the
Shah’s headlong modernization. The Shah’s swelling authoritarianism and
his growing separation from his people added to the turmoil. He found it
necessary to make increasingly arbitrary and unsound decisions. Finally,
in 1979, his opposition coalesced around an elderly, fundamentalist Shia

29. Bergquist, Role of Airpower in the Iran-Iraq War, pp. 25-26, 47.

30. Richard F. Nyrop, ed., Iran: A Country Study, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.:
Government Publishing Office, 1978), DA Pamphlet 550-68, pp. 53-54.

39



Modern Saudi Arabia

During the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War, the third most
powerful nation in the Gulf in terms of population and military strength
invested heavily in every aspect of its military and more heavily in its
civilian economy. Saudi Arabia attempted to avoid what it saw as the
errors of its neighbors. The secular Pahlavi dynasty in Iran came to grief
in large measure because its programs for modernizing the state had
provoked intense internal opposition among conservative Shias and
sparked an Islamic revival. The Shah’s importation of large amounts of
western technology, which required the presence of many western technic-
ians to train Iranians and operate the equipment, as well as his policy of
encouraging Iranians to study in the West aided in destabilizing his
regime. The technicians and returning students circulated Western ideas
of individual freedom and responsibility, representative government, and
the seeming superiority of Western science and management techniques,
concepts that undermined the corrupt and autocratic regime of the Shah
and gave strength to its liberal opponents. These new ideas also threat-
ened many of the religious tenets of the conservative opposition, making
religious leaders more determined to oppose the Shah. When Iran’s
internal opposition became too strong, and the United States, under
President Carter, refused to support a bloody crackdown, the Pahlavi
dynasty fell. Iran came under the influence of Islamic fundamentalists.
Meanwhile, Iraq became a thoroughly secular, police state. Its leader,
Saddam, executed important Shia clerics and fought an endemic civil war
against his Kurdish minority. Unveiled Iraqi women could stroll the
streets of Baghdad without fear. The Saudis could observe as well the
effect on both warring nations of having spent vast sums of money on

81



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

Moslem leader exiled in France, Ruhollah Khomeini. (The Shias called
the respected heads of their faith ayatollahs, which literally means
“miracle of God.”) The face of the Ayatollah Khomeini carried on posters
shortly appeared on every television screen and front page of every
newspaper on earth. A popular revolution spearheaded by Khomeini’s
supporters on the political right and the Iranian Communist Party and
others on the left swept the Shah from power and into exile. Khomeini
became the head of state. He proceeded to become embroiled in an long,
violent struggle with the Iranian Communists and other secular and
liberal elements of the Iranian political spectrum. Although Khomeini’s
followers triumphed in this struggle of car bombs, assassinations, and
firing squads, their efforts consumed much energy, left the country
weaker, and distracted Khomeini from other affairs. It did not weaken
his resolve to reverse the Shah’s reforms and to eliminate the Shah’s
men from positions of influence. As one would expect, Ayatollah
Khomeini had an especial contempt for things Western that attacked his
religion. The United States, which had the most visible presence in Iran
and had played host to and educated (or as Khomeini contended, “con-
taminated”) thousands of Iranians, became vilified as the “great Satan,”
bent on undermining traditional Moslem values. The seizure of the U.S.
Embassy staff in Teheran and the Americans’ prolonged captivity, as well
as the flight or expulsion of all American advisors, technicians, and
businessmen from Iran, completely severed the economic, diplomatic, and
military ties between the two countries.

The military, the pride of the Shah, had profited, perhaps inordi-
nately, from his spending and, in large part, had remained loyal to him
until his fall. Not surprisingly, the Iranian revolutionaries thoroughly
purged it at all levels, and starting in February 1979, the new regime
repeatedly thinned its ranks. Arbitrary arrests and executions increased
the terror and further lowered morale and, just before taking power,
Khomeini had called for mass desertions of the enlisted personnel, many
of whom responded. The army dropped to 150,000 members, losing half
its strength. The air force declined from approximately 95,000 to 62,000
members. The loss of trained ground personnel to desertion and retire-

40


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

gets; most of the bombs intended to hit the runways missed, the remain-
der caused only minor cratering. Many bombs failed to explode, possibly
because of fuzing or arming problems, and long rows of transport aircraft,
not sheltered like Iran’s fighter planes, escaped injury. Attacks on the
army bases damaged a few buildings but hit no important targets. Senior
IZAF officers later stated that the pilots flying the missions had little
practical experience other than bombing Kurdish villages. The officers
noted the primitive Soviet avionics on their attack aircraft and attributed
to them circular errors of probability in excess of 500 meters. They
further acknowledged an absence of technical personnel familiar with
weapons effects, a lack of operational research facilities, no ground crews
with experience in arming or fuzing air munitions for demanding mis-
sions, and a dearth of photo interpreters or personnel experienced in
bomb damage assessment. The IZAF grossly underestimated the number
of missions it needed to complete its task, failed to conduct proper
reconnaissance, and provided its units and pilots with hopelessly inade-
quate briefings and intelligence materials. So politicized was the IZAF
chain of command that it sometimes took days to obtain approval for
even important targets. In fact, IZAF raids left the Iranian Air Force
intact, which immediately gave lie to the reports of its demise. Within a
day, it mounted a 100-sortie counterattack. Throughout this period, the
Iranians used their superior American aircraft, munitions, and training to
win most of the air-to-air battles and to deliver low-level attacks on Iraqi
targets. Their level of effort soon dropped to 50 sorties a day as they
consumed irreplaceable aircraft and spare parts. The Iranian Air Force
never repeated its earlier performance for the remainder of the war. As
for the IZAF, it temporarily disappeared from the air. Despite a numeri-
cal superiority of 3 or 4 to 1, the IZAF dropped its sortie rate to a
minimum and withdrew some of its units to bases in western Iraq, while
dispersing others to Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen, and
Oman.“

On the ground, twelve Iraqi divisions advanced across a 700-

43. Ibid., pp. 83-84. See also Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military
Conflict (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 40-41.

56


ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

strategic goals based on unrealistic political assumptions.

In a postscript to the war in Lebanon, the United States also
learned a humbling lesson in the danger of failing to sufficiently relate
military means with diplomatic goals. On August 25, 1982, U.S. Marines
landed in Beirut as part of a multinational force guaranteeing safe
evacuation of the PLO. The Lebanese government asked the troops of the
multinational force to remain in Beirut. The force’s leaders complied, and
its troops promptly became the targets of all enemies of the Lebanese
government. The decision to remain in Lebanon changed the role of the
U.S. Marines from peacekeeper to participant. In a country as strife torn
and violent as Lebanon, the inevitable finally occurred; regrettably, it
found the American government and its military unprepared. On October
23, 1983, an Islamic fanatic, driving an explosives-filled truck on a
suicide mission, blew up the sleeping quarters of the U.S. Marine force in
Beirut, killing 241 Marines and wounding over 100 more—the most costly
instance of terrorism ever committed against American combat troops.
The death toll in this single incident nearly doubled that of the U.S.
effort in the war against Iraq in 1991. From November 10 through
December 3, 1982, Syrian antiaircraft gunners fired repeatedly and
unsuccessfully at U.S. naval aircraft. On December 4, twenty-eight U.S.
carrier-based aircraft attacked Syrian antiaircraft guns at Hammana, in
the mountains east of Beirut. The U.S. Navy lost two aircraft and
suffered the humiliation of having one of its aircrew members fall into
Syrian hands. President Assad held Lt. Robert O. Goodman captive until
January 3, when he released him to U.S. presidential candidate Reverend
Jesse Jackson. In the meantime, on December 14, 16-inch guns of the
battleship USS New Jersey shelled Syrian and Druze militia positions
near Beirut. The shelling apparently had little effect, but films of the
ship firing its main battery provided a powerful, but negative, image of
American willingness to shed Arab blood. Shortly after these incidents,
the United States withdrew its forces, leaving the Arab world with an
indelible impression that Uncle Sam had neither the will nor the compe-
tence to intervene in its affairs.

President Ronald Reagan partially reversed this impression of

27



TRAN-IRAQ WAR

people’s militia, the Basij.“ Henceforth, the Revolutionary Guard domina-
ted the direction of operations. The victory of the regime’s hard-line
religious faction also meant that relations with the United States, which
had just recovered its hostages, would not improve, to the detriment of
the Iranian military's spare-parts position. In spite of their initial set-
back, the Iranians continued the counteroffensive. From September to
December 1981 they regained considerable territory as Iraqi defenses
crumbled under the pressure of “human wave attacks” launched by
religiously inspired Revolutionary Guard units and effectively supported
by regular artillery units and more heavily armed regular infantry units.
Because the Iranians continued to employ variations of the human wave
throughout out the conflict, the observations of Anthony Cordesman,
coauthor of a balanced and informative work on the Iran-Iraq War,
deserve consideration. He noted that this tactic “makes sound military
sense as a means of countering fewer but better equipped forces,” provid-
ed the attack is not pushed too hard; the attack takes advantage of
night, or exploits some other form of tactical surprise; successful penetra-
tions are followed up; unsuccessful attacks are halted; and the fighting
has worthwhile and achievable objectives. Cordesman adds that the
Iranians tended to become overinvolved with their own ideological be-
liefs—they consistently failed to control and properly organize their
human wave tactics and assumed that religious fervor could overcome
tactical deficiency.” However, in this early stage of the war, their tactics
proved quite effective, especially when one realizes the all-too-human
tendency of defeated troops from any nation to report overwhelming
waves of enemy troops.

Internal political events distracted the Ayatollah’s regime and
directly affected his ability to wage war. Khomeini’s chief minister, Abdul
Hassan Bani-Sadr, wished to follow more moderate policies than those
promoted by the conservative-religious factions that supported Khomeini.
The mullahs regarded Bani-Sadr’s support of the regular armed forces as

46. Pelletiere and Johnson, Lessons Learned, pp. 9-10.

47. Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-Iraq War, pp. 431-33.

59



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

infantry foree—the unreliable rabble of the Popular Army could not hope
to perform the task. Therefore, Saddam’s senior officers asked that he
order a general call-up. They proposed to assign college students—hereto-
fore exempt—and the sons of the most influential people in the country
to newly formed infantry units of the Republican Guard. It probably did
not escape Saddam’s attention that the new infantry-heavy tactics implied
massive casualties, but the generals had an answer to that as well.
Unlike the Iranians, they would not throw untrained or partially trained
men directly into the maelstrom. Instead, and as secretly as possible, the
new units would receive thorough and prolonged training in aggressive
warfare techniques. Their commanders would carefully and professionally
plan their operations, even to the point of building full-scale mock-ups
and running the troops through them.

Finally, the generals argued for decentralization of the war’s
direction. They hoped to persuade Saddam that he could no longer
control the military’s every move from the palace. They wanted him to
realize that if he agreed to a large army and a complex training pro-
gram, he could not hope to oversee it all, and if he implemented this
new program, his soldiers could switch from the static defensive tactics
they had clung to for four years to a mobile defense. Such a scheme
would necessitate timely responses. In addition, the leaders undoubtedly
anticipated a long campaign sprawling across the entire front which could
last for weeks and pass through several phases. Saddam could not run
such a campaign either from his palace or with his limited staff.

Although Saddam certainly marked the names of some of his
officers for future ruin and disgrace, or worse, he agreed to their propo-
sals. When faced with possible defeat, Saddam demonstrated the flexibili-
ty to loosen control of the professional military to preserve his rule.
Despite the presence of a political officer in every major unit, Saddam’s
acceptance of the new strategy gave the generals the freedom to raise the
standards of professionalism within the Iraqi Army to levels that far
outclassed those within the Iranian services. Nonetheless, Saddam did

56. Pelletiere and Johnson, Lessons Learned, pp. 37-38.

68


INTRODUCTION

On August 2, 1990, the Republic of Iraq occupied the Emirate of
Kuwait, extinguished its government and armed forces, and annexed it.
This action followed an escalating dispute between the two countries. In
brief, the Kuwaitis had refused three Iraqi demands: to forgive loans
worth billions of dollars made to Iraq during its war with Iran in the
1980s; to adhere to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’
lowered petroleum sales quotas; and to cease the alleged over-exploitation
of the Rumelia oil field,’ which extends across a portion of the Kuwaiti-
Iraqi border. Although the Iraqis may have prepared for their move far
in advance,? the Kuwaitis’ rejection of their demands provided the
ostensible reason for the invasion. Iraq also had tenuous claims, unrecog-
nized by the international community, to overall suzerainty of Kuwait,
based on the administrative arrangements it claimed the British had
established during their rule of the 1920s through the 1940s, the Otto-
man Turks had established during their Empire of the 16th through 19th
centuries, and the Baghdad caliphate had established even earlier. By
substituting action for rhetoric, Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, trans-
formed a regional quarrel into a world crisis when he seized his neigh-
bor, Kuwait.

By this action, Saddam doubled his proven petroleum reserves to
approximately 200 billion barrels and gained control of about 20 percent
of the world’s total crude oil production. Within a week after Kuwait City

1. Caryle Murphy, “Persian Gulf Crisis Swells: Iraqi Is Given New Title,” The
Washington Post, Jul 20, 1990, p. A12. °

2. James Blackwell, Thunder in the Desert: The Strategy and Tactics of the Persian
Gulf War (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), p. 72. Blackwell refers to unnamed intelli-
gence sources who claim that the Iraqis had trained since 1989 on one-to-one mock-ups of
Kuwait in a base camp in southeastern Iraq.



PERSIAN GULF POWERS

other individual’s names. He terrified his audience by skipping around
the list, reading a name, pausing, and then pronouncing guilt or inno-
cence. Guards dragged those found guilty from the chambers. Saddam
required that the country’s top ministers and party leaders personally
participate in the firing squads. Given the Arab and Baath party’s
penchant for blood feud and the patent inability of Saddam’s confreres to
say that they had not joined in, this act permanently sealed them to
Saddam. Soon after taking sole power, Saddam cemented his hold over
Iraq and instituted a thoroughgoing personality cult that glorified his
every public thought and deed.”

Any non-Iraqi history of the Persian Gulf in the last three decades
of the twentieth century will assuredly present Saddam as an archvillain,
totally indifferent to the suffering of his people, whose miscalculations led
to years of bloody warfare and to catastrophic defeat, and who squander-
ed decades of oil revenues on armaments and useless prestige projects.
He shares with Hitler and Stalin their merciless treatment of domestic
enemies and their remorseless attitude toward their compatriots. Charac-
teristics of his authoritarian personality appear in other autocrats and
dictators as well. He somewhat resembles Peter the Great in a single-
minded determination to elevate his country and to modernize it. His
career parallels Mohammed Ali’s in Egypt as well. In the first decade of
the nineteenth century, Mohammed Ali used his French-trained armed
forces to overrun the Sudan, Palestine, Syria, Medina, and Mecca, but he
found himself unable to cope militarily with the European powers. During
his regime, he used the most remorseless means to reform Egypt along
Western lines, including establishing agricultural projects and introducing
power equipment to the cotton industry. His attempts produced little of
lasting value. Eventually, the Ottomans recognized his rule, and his
dynasty continued until 1952. Many view Mohammed Ali as one of the
precursors of Arab nationalism. Saddam also shares a few traits with
Francisco Solano Lopez, dictator of Paraguay from 1862 to 1870. After
attaining power, Lopez, who considered himself a military genius, concen-

37. Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear, pp. 70-71.

47



PERSIAN GULF POWERS

measure. He also studied more intellectual fare—the writings of the
founder of the Baath Party, Michel Aflaq, which may have influenced
him to join the party in 1957. Once in the party, Saddam was a ruthless
and cold-blooded killer, if killing would advance his goals. In October
1959 he participated in an abortive assassination attempt on Prime
Minister Kassem and fled to Egypt with a bullet wound in his leg. Two
years later, he returned to Iraq and spent two years in jail until the
Baath Coup of February 1963 released him. Many of the coup plotters,
military men from the Tikriti area, came from Saddam’s own home
grounds.

The army-led countercoup of November 1963, which overthrew a
Baath government paralyzed by party in-fighting between its radical and
moderate branches, left an indelible impression on the Baath party and
on Saddam. Neither would trust the army again. Nor did the Iraqi Air
Force (IZAF) endear itself to the Baath. At one point in the November
1963 coup, the IZAF bombed the Presidential Palace, an action which
Saddam Hussein, a man long on memory and short on trust, may never
have forgiven. The IZAF also participated in an abortive 1965 coup. The
possibility exists that Saddam may have kept the IZAF on a short tether
after this attempt to reduce its capacity for meddling in internal poli-
tics.“ In another example of party control of the IZAF, in 1971 the Baath
moved the Iraqi Air Academy from a suburb of Baghdad to Tikrit, where
the party could ensure the political correctness of the cadets. The Syrian
Army coup of 1966, in which military officers replaced Baath activists,
further hardened the Iraqi Baath against a professional military. In 1968,
after regaining power, the Iraqi Baathists even considered disbanding the
army but decided on a thorough purge instead.» A coup attempt in 1970
resulted in the deaths of an additional 300 Iraqi officers.

Saddam had served as deputy chairman of the Revolutionary
Command Council since the 1968 coup and had close ties with the

34. For some discussion of this point, see Norman Friedman, Desert Victory: The War
for Kuwait (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991), p. 371.

35. Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1989), p. 31.

45



TRAN-IRAQ WAR

put them out of action permanently, it was during these missions that
the IZAF revealed an air-to-air refueling capacity and a growing efficien-
cy in the use of French aircraft, such as the Mirage F—1 which it had
purchased to supplement its Soviet models. Iran, too, escalated its attacks
on shipping in the Gulf, a move that brought it into a direct confronta-
tion with warships of the U.S. Navy and several European powers. The
two warring nations also resumed their war of the cities, peppering each
other’s capitals and major cities with short-range ballistic missiles and
occasional hit-and-run air raids. As one would expect in any technological
match-up, the Iranians got the worst of the war of the cities. The Iraqis’
greater access to foreign missile suppliers and technicians enabled them
to give more than they received. Iranian morale stretched thinner, but
held.

The Final Iraqi Offensives and Western Intervention (1987-1989)

The Iran-Iraq War entered its final phase early in 1988 when the
fruits of rising Iraqi military professionalism, increased recruitment of
higher quality personnel, unlimited access to foreign arms markets, and
careful training of elite and selected regular units had ripened. Fully
equipped and confident Iraqi Army units rotated out of the line to receive
intensive training in all terrains and in all weather. The Iraqi Army also
attained peak size, estimated at between 900,000 and 1,000,000 men
distributed among 77 division equivalents. In addition, the Iraqis reori-
ented the use of their helicopters. No longer did the helicopters perform
strictly as gunships, they now performed in artillery spotting and recon-
naissance. This reorientation improved the effectiveness of the field
artillery, especially in its ability to fire beyond visual range and to
rapidly shift fire. With respect to chemical warfare, the Iraqis made a
significant improvement: they upgraded from the use of persistent agents,
such as mustard gas, to the use of nonpersistent and highly lethal nerve
gas. They could employ nerve gas, but not mustard gas, relatively near
their own troops and during an initial assault. This insidious weapon

7



CULTURE & HISTORY

known as Sunni. Most Muslims adhere to some form of Sunnism.

In A.D. 762, Caliph Al Mansur began to build for the Arab Empire
a new capital, Baghdad, possibly named after the Persian word for “the
gift of God.”° Not until a hundred years later did the Arab Empire reach
its zenith, but by then the caliphs and their government officials had lost
control of the tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, whose members had more
or less reverted to their former chaotic civilization and had ceased to
send large numbers of warriors to outside regions. In A.D. 1258, after a
life-span that exceeded by a hundred years the life-span of the Western
Roman Empire, the Arab Empire fell. In that year, the Mongols killed
the caliph, sacked Baghdad, and, with their usual
insensitivity to collateral damage, slaughtered perhaps 800,000 of its
residents.

Eventually most of the region passed into the control of another
Islamic empire, that of the Ottoman Turks, where it stayed for at least
another 600 years. In the last decades of the Ottoman Empire—those
preceding World War I—North Africa, Egypt, and several ports and
principalities in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf came under the colonial
rule or protection of either the French or the British. With the defeat
and breakup of the Turkish Empire in 1918-1919, the French acquired
the League of Nations mandate for Lebanon and Syria in 1922, while the
British received mandates both for Palestine (which included Palestine
and Jordan) and for Iraq in 1920. The mandate for Palestine obliged the
British to honor an undertaking that they had committed themselves to
during the war. On November 2, 1917, in the Balfour Declaration (named
for British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour), His Majesty's Government
sponsored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achieve-
ment of that object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be
done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-

10. Robert Payne, The Holy Sword: The Story of Islam from Muhammad to the
Present (New York: Harper & Bros, 1959), p. 157.

13



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

tactics. As the seasonal rains soaked the battlefield from November
through February, he announced that Iraq had achieved all its objectives.
He hunkered down to hold his newly captured territory and to wait
either for Khomeini to negotiate or for the revolutionary regime to
collapse. Yet another shock faced Saddam—his major arms supplier, the
Soviet Union, imposed an arms embargo on him at the beginning of the
conflict and did not lift it for two years in vain hopes of gaining influ-
ence in Teheran.“ This proved a further incentive for Saddam to broaden
his arms supply base: he turned to Western arms sellers, when available,
and he increased Iraq’s arms-manufacturing capability.

Iran Regains Its Territory (1981-1982)

In the spring of 1981 the Iranians commenced a series of counter-
attacks intended to drive the Iraqis from Iran. Iranian mobilization had
produced enough new troops, most going to the popular forces, to redress
the manpower imbalance, changing it to 2 to 1 in Iran’s favor. In addi-
tion, in January 1981 the U.S. government, under newly elected Presi-
dent Reagan, may have decided to aid Iranian resistance by ignoring
restrictions on third-party sales of U.S. arms. The Israelis, always
implacable foes of Saddam, and possibly others were said to have sold
the Iranians billions of dollars worth of American spare parts and arms.”
The Israelis, of course, refilled their stockpiles with newer American
arms. In an early January 1981 attack at Susangerd, the Iranians
provoked one of the largest tank battles in the war, and lost heavily.
This discredited the regular army and led to an increased emphasis on
the Revolutionary Guard and on the even more poorly armed and trained

44, Stephen C. Pelletiere and Douglas V. Johnson, Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq
War (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1991),
pp. 8-9; Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-Iraq War, pp. 84-88, 92-98.

45. Seymour M. Hersh, ‘U.S. Secretly Gave Aid to Iraq Early in Its War Against
Iran,” The New York Times, Jan 26, 1992, p. 1.

58



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

heavy weapons. Only the United States, of all the world’s major arms
exporters, officially refused to ship heavy weapons to either side. Conse-
quently, the Iranians had little choice but to rely on manpower-heavy
solutions to tactical problems, thus playing into the hands of the reli-
giously inspired popular forces at the expense of weapons and personnel
training. The renewed access to heavy weapons led the casualty-adverse
Traqis to continue to rely on firepower, backed by their impressive combat
engineering. Iraqi engineers built up a mammoth array of deeply forti-
fied, interconnected positions strengthened by selective flooding and
supported by extensive logistics facilities, and a large system of roads to
facilitate the movement of reserves.”

The initial Iranian offensive toward Basra, which the Iranians
never captured, conformed to the pattern of almost all subsequent
Iranian pushes. Using human-wave tactics, the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards penetrated Iraqi positions and forced the Iraqis back for a few
kilometers, before they themselves became disorganized and outran their
supporting logistics and artillery. The Iraqis counterattacked the exposed
Tranians and repulsed them to almost the starting point. Both sides lost
heavily in equipment, a price the Iranians could not afford. The Iranians
also lost heavily in manpower; their casualty rate nearly doubled that of
Traq’s. They could replace their losses in terms of numbers but not in
terms of quality, training, or experience. Furthermore, the Iranians
experienced a far higher mortality rate among their casualties because
they lacked medical resources and held such creature comforts as hospi-
tals in great contempt. As this process continued over several years, it
gradually reduced the Iranians to a lightly armed mob, extremely vulner-
able to armor and mechanized counterattack. Throughout 1983, the
Iranians continued to hurl themselves at the Iraqi defensive positions
guarding Basra.

52. Pelletiere and Johnson, Lessons Learned, p. 11; Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-
Iraq War, pp. 145-57.

64



CULTURE & HISTORY

Jewish and Arab states. Arab rejection and British foot-dragging delayed
implementation of the resolution until the next year. In early 1948,
Jewish underground armies intensified their terrorist attacks against both
British and Arab, hoping to consolidate their position before partitioning
occurred. Despite the open and somewhat understandable favoritism
shown by the British toward the Arabs in this situation, tens of thou-
sands of terrified Palestinian Arabs, encouraged by neighboring Arab
states, fled their homes for the safety of surrounding Arab countries. On
May 14, 1948, the British Mandate in Palestine ended, setting the stage
for a series of wars between the new Jewish state and the surrounding
Arab countries. Because of the great intensity of these wars and
because several of them pitted arms designed and manufactured in
Western Europe and America against arms designed and produced by the
Soviet Union, a brief study of these events reveals some similarities and
lessons applicable to the war in the Persian Gulf.

13. For a recent and balanced, but pro-Jewish, account of these events, see Howard
M. Sacher, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (New York: Knopf,
1989), pp. 116-314. For a straightforward narrative of mildly Arabic leanings on the
circumstances surrounding the partition, see Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, pp.
359-60.

15



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ....... 00.0 ees 1
Chapters

1. Cultural and Historical Background ............- 5
2. The Arab-Israeli Wars .......-.-. 000000005 7
3. The Persian Gulf Powers .......-.0.-0-0+0+05 33
4, The Iran-Iraq War ... 1... 2... eee ee eee eee 55
5. Modern Saudi Arabia ...........-- 00+ eee 81

Bibliography ........... 0c cece eee ee 91



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

particular, had the reputation of requiring an inordinate number of
ground maintenance hours for each flight hour. Such an aircraft loses
operability rapidly under less than optimum conditions. The advantages
of these American-built aircraft were superior range, payload, and per-
formance, as compared to these attributes of the Soviet-built aircraft that
Iraq was flying. The Shah also purchased tanker aircraft, which brought
air-to-air refueling capability to some of his F—-4s.

The other services also benefited: for his ground forces, the Shah
purchased 400 American M—47s/M—48s, 460 American M60A1s, and 875
British Chieftain main battle tanks. In addition to being undercooled and
underpowered for the climate and terrain, the Chieftains suffered from
the recurrent service and reliability problems endemic to British-designed
tanks.” From 1973 through 1978, Iran spent an average of approximately
15 percent of its gross national product on its military, and, in constant
dollars, its total military expenditures tripled Iraq’s over the same
period.”

Although the Shah lavished equipment and training on his armed
forces, he held them to tight rein. His distrust of all potential competing
centers of power and the necessity that he remain the center of the state
and that all power and authority emanate from him led him to follow a
policy of divide and rule. The heads of the services reported directly to
him as the supreme commander of Iran’s military forces; the chain of
command excluded the minister of war and the supreme commander's
staff. The Iranian armed services did not engage in joint planning. The
Shah exercised direct operational control over the Iranian armed forces
and served as his own operations officer. Loyalty to him constituted the
primary basis of advancement, and several competing security organiza-
tions cross-checked and weighed the loyalty of all key military figures.
Purportedly, the Shah personally reviewed an individual’s service record
for every promotion beyond the rank of major. Within the Iranian Air
Force, the policy of loyalty to the Pahlavi dynasty even touched the lower

27. Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-Iraq War, pp. 63-64.

28. Ibid., pp. 46-47, table 3.1, “Iranian and Iraqi Military Efforts: 1973-1988.”

38


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

weapons rather than internal development.

‘The Saudis wished to steer a course between the examples set by
these two neighbors. They succeeded. When King Abd al Aziz died in
1953, he left a kingdom still administered as an enlarged version of a
Bedouin tribe. In spite of the presence of any number of impressive-
sounding ministries and bureaus, all tax and oil concession revenue went
into his private purse, for dispersement as he saw fit. He distributed his
money arbitrarily and unwisely, creating an atmosphere of corruption and
greed. A contractor referred, one suspects with fondness, to the last days
of his reign as “the good old days, when the old king didn’t know the
difference between a thousand and a million.”* Abd al Aziz’s immediate
successor and eldest son, the feckless and incompetent Saud, did little to
improve upon his father’s record. However, Prince Faisal, Saud’s desig-
nated heir and another senior son of Abd al Aziz, eventually took power,
and then the crown, from his half brother. Although by no means a
progressive, Faisal had extensive travel in and knowledge of foreign and
Western lands (he had served as a foreign minister); had practical
knowledge of governmental administration and fiscal policy (gained as a
working governor of a major province); was extremely pious and expertly
trained in the Qur'an and Islamic oral traditions, making him acceptable
to the ulama (the community of clerics who dominated Saudi religion);
and, by the standards of time and place, had an admirable reputation for
incorruptibility. Faisal’s desire to modernize his kingdom was far greater
than his predecessor’s, and he seemed more interested in civil progress
than in military expansion.

In April 1962, army officers overthrew the Imam of North Yemen,
a kingdom on the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and touched
off a civil war. Egyptian President Gamal Abdal Nasser supported the
rebels, and the Saudis supported the royalists. Because the Saudi monar-
chy might be in danger for supporting the neighboring royalty, Faisal,
newly appointed the de facto regent for the House of Saud, obtained U.S.
support from President John F. Kennedy in the event of an Egyptian

62. Richard F. Nyrop et al., Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia, 4th ed. (Washington,
DC: GPO, March 1984), p. 32.

82



ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

the utility of these acts to Israel’s cause, nor did they prevent future
attacks. Although the PLO in Lebanon offered a political and terrorist
threat, the military problem they posed was insignificant, due to their
limited and embryonic armed forces. Likewise, the strife-torn and preoc-
cupied Lebanese armed forces presented no obstacle. Only the Syrians, in
the north of Lebanon, who had sent troops into the country to support
their interests, could offer significant military opposition to the Israelis.
Hence, the PLO, a serious irritant but one without major defenses in
Lebanon, offered a tempting target for military action. In 1981, the
Israelis began to plan for an invasion of southern Lebanon to knock out
the largest PLO threats.

In June 1982, Israel and Syria came to blows over expanding
Syrian and Palestinian influence in Lebanon. On June 5, 1982, two days
after Syrian gunmen killed Israel’s Ambassador to London, Schlomo
Argov, with a shot to the head, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded
southern Lebanon. They intended to establish a 40-kilometer-wide zone,
free of armed members of the PLO, to secure northern Israel from
terrorist attacks. This limited operation rapidly expanded, in part with
the connivance not only of the Israeli Minister of Defense, former IDF
general and ultra-conservative politician, Ariel Sharon, but also of the
IDF Chief of Staff, who had visions of imposing a friendly Christian-
dominated government on the country. This objective, which seriously
misread the realities of Lebanese internal politics, condemned the opera-
tion to ultimate failure by setting a goal that.exceeded the Israelis’reach.

Within three days, the IDF had advanced to the Lebanese capital,
Beirut. When Israeli forces threatened to cut the Beirut to Damascus
road, a serious clash with Syrian forces that pitted tens of thousands of
troops from each side developed. While on the defensive, the Syrians
fought tenaciously, but the Israeli Air Force, demonstrating the conclu-
sions drawn from the October 1973 war, virtually obliterated the Syrian
SAM defenses and destroyed many AAA pieces, as well. On June 9, 1982,
the Israelis attacked ninteen Syrian SAM batteries, consisting of SA-2s,
SA-8s, and SA-6s, in the Bekaa Valley, east of Beirut. Using a carefully
integrated combination of advance planning, aerial surveillance (some

25


THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
IN THE PERSIAN GULF WAR

Roots of Conflict

A Military Perspective on the
Middle East
and the
Persian Gulf Crisis

by

Richard G. Davis

a Center for Air Force History
1993



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

Saddam falls into the third category of decision maker, one whose
communication arteries are so clogged with prejudices and faulty informa-
tion and whose receptor apparatus is so filtered by authoritarianism that
fresh information cannot pass through to reach him. It seems that a
lifetime in a position of absolute rule or authority almost invariably
results in a Type C information-processing individual. Dictatorships,
despotisms, and absolute monarchies seem to produce rulers of unbound-
ed megalomania. The more control the leader has, the less feedback he or
she seems to require or recognize. “Garbage in equals garbage out” may
have unfortunate consequences for a computer operator; for a national
leader, it is ruinous.

False assumptions about the viability of the opposition influenced
Saddam’s decision to go war with Iran on September 22, 1980, just as
false assumptions affected his decision ten years later to invade Kuwait.
Saddam acted on what he wished to be so, not on what actually was so.
However, some of his miscalculations seem worse in retrospect than they
did at the time. On paper, his armed forces appeared more than a match
for the Iranians. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the many Iraqi
regimes pursued a foreign policy consistently hostile to the existence of
the State of Israel and to the conservative Arab monarchies it bordered.
Such a policy made it impossible for the Iraqis to obtain American arms
and difficult to purchase Western ones. The Iraqis turned to the Soviets,
whose first delivery of military aircraft arrived in Iraq in November 1957.
After the Israeli’s 1967 victory in the Six-Day War and in response to
increased pressure from Iran, the Iraqis moved closer to the Soviet
Union. In April 1972 they signed a 15-year treaty of friendship. For the
following three years, Soviet weapons of all types flowed into Iraq’s
military stores, while an answering stream of Western currencies, which
the Iraqis had obtained for their oil, left the state treasury in Baghdad
for the one in Moscow. However, the relationship between the two
nations was not always smooth. Baath ideology rejected communism.
After its first coup in February 1963, the Baath pulled all Iraqi students
from Soviet training schools and sent them to Britain. In 1977, the Iraqis
diversified their arms sources by purchasing from France 60 Mirage F-1s,

50


ROOTS OF CONFLICT

occupied Mecca and Medina in the first decade of the nineteenth century,
the Wahhabis ruthlessly removed all traces of the religious innovations
they despised. However, the Sauds soon lost control of the two cities, and
their foes drove them into the desert, where the Sauds remained power-
ful but isolated until the advent of Abd al Aziz in 1902.”

For Abd al Aziz, as for the Prophet, Islam provided the glue of his
earthly kingdom. Thanks to Wahhabism, he convinced his nomadic
tribesmen that proper religious devotion required a sedentary way of life
and that. as tribal warriors they must be constantly prepared to wage the
Jihad, or holy war, against unbelievers. (Wahhabis considered other
Muslims unbelievers.) Abd al Aziz-established 200 communities which
combined the functions of religious mission, agricultural village, and
military camp. The communities stressed religious indoctrination and
military training. To loosen the bonds of tribalism, Abd al Aziz assigned
portions of several tribes to each community. This served to emphasize
the importance of faith over sect. The camps permitted the rapid mobili-
zation of military forces, the maintenance of a ready reserve, and the
attainment of a relatively high status of readiness and cohesion. Adher-
ents of this system called themselves the Ikhwan al Musilmin, or Muslim
Brethren. By 1912, Abd al Aziz numbered 11,000 Brethren among his
followers. Four years later he ordered all tribesmen to participate in the
system and to pay a religious tax (zakat) to support the Wahhabis. Abd
al Aziz obligated the tribal chiefs to attend religious training in Riyadh
and encouraged them to join his court in hopes of breaking the bond of
loyalty between the chiefs and their tribes. He thereby hoped to transfer
this affection to himself.

With the Brethren at his command, the leader of the House of
Saud began to unify the peninsula. Although the Emir of Kuwait success-
fully maintained his independence in open battle, the Saudis gained
control of the interior of the peninsula by 1926, when they triumphed in
Mecca and Medina. In 1932, after negotiations with the British, who
recognized most of the Saudi leader’s conquests in return for his fixing

23. Richard F. Nyrop et al., Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia, 3d ed. (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), DA Pam 550-51, pp. 121-23.

34


PERSIAN GULF POWERS

a preemptive air strike against the Iranian Air Force, Iraq invaded Iran.
The forces that led the Republic of Iraq into war with Iran
differed greatly from the pressures that affected Iran. Beginning with the

British withdrawal from Iraq in 1946, Iraq’s domestic politics followed a
violent course. In July 1958, General Abdul al-Karim Kassem led a group

of nationalist military officers to overthrow and execute its pro-Western
king. General Kassem purged the remaining Iraqi general officers and in
the next four and one-half years executed, imprisoned, or removed 2,000
of Iraqi’s other 8,000 military officers.” When Kuwait attained indepen-
dence in June 1961, Kassem attempted to annex it. Prompt arrival of
British troops forced his retreat. In February 1963, Iraqi Air Force
officers spearheaded a Baathist coup by bombing the Defense Ministry in
Baghdad until Kassem surrendered. The coup displaced Kassem, now the
prime minister, and its leaders executed him.

The Baath (Resurrection) party, had begun in Syria. It appealed to
the newly educated and predominantly self-made members of the emerg-
ing professional and middle classes, who came from the less dominant
social classes and from communities outside the Sunni Moslem majority.
Baathists believed that all Arabs formed a single Arab nation and had
the right to live in a single Arab state. The Prophet Muhammad created
the Arab nation by infusing Arab society with the religion of Islam.
Therefore, all Arabs, not just Muslim Arabs, could belong to this nation
and regard it as the basis of their claim to a special mission in the world
and a right to independence and unity. Arabs could fulfill their mission
and assure their rights first by transforming their intellects and their
souls with the acceptance of the idea of the Arab nation, and then by
transforming the political and social system to reflect the new nation and
state. In the mid-1950s, the Baath Party amalgamated with a party that
held more explicitly socialist ideals. In that form Baathism spread
throughout the Arab world.” Its provision for non-Sunni Muslim members
gave it a particularly strong attraction in countries like Syria and Iraq,

82. Bergquist, Role of Airpower in the Iran-Iraq War, p. 22.
33. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, pp. 404-05.

43



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

weakness three years later when he authorized a single U.S. air strike
on Libya, in retaliation for Libyan-sponsored terrorism against Americans
in the Federal Republic of Germany. This strike, consisting of F-111Fs
using smart. munitions, showed the United States’ capacity to inflict
significant political, if not material, damage on a lesser Arab power. It
further demonstrated a new willingness on the part of the U.S. govern-
ment, supported by the U.S. Air Force’s precision guided munitions
capability, to target the leadership of a hostile country. The U.S. ord-
nance may have landed close indeed to the leader of Libya, Muhammar
Quadaffi, but regardless of where the weapons fell, the loss of face
inflicted on Quadaffi by the raid caused him far more injury than the
actual injury incurred by the bomb.

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon may have destroyed much of the rag-
tag Palestinian army and expelled the PLO, but it did not solve the
Israelis’ problem with their Palestinian neighbors. In fact, the sense of
isolation and betrayal among Palestinians in territory occupied by Isra-
el—the Gaza Strip on the Egyptian border and the Jordanian West
Bank—became even more desperate when Jordan renounced its sovereign-
ty over the West Bank of the Jordan River. Nor did the PLO and other
anti-Israeli organizations, such as the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, take
long in either returning to or strengthening their positions in Lebanon.
Within five years, the threat there had become at least as great as it
had been in 1982. In late 1987, a series of anti-Israeli riots sparked a
Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in the occupied territories. In one form
or another, the uprising has continued since that time, and it continues
still. Palestinians ruthlessly kill their own people when they suspect
them of collaborating with the enemy, just as they attempt to stone or
otherwise injure members of Israel’s security forces. Israel has responded
by sending in its elite Border Police, increasing the riot control training
of its army, deporting troublemakers, destroying the dwellings of intifada
participants, and attempting to control the riots with tear gas and
various forms of rubber, plastic, and steel bullets. Because the Israelis
cannot put out the fires of Palestinian resentment, their efforts have
merely succeeded in keeping the lid on a rapidly boiling cauldron. Their

28


CULTURE & HISTORY

unparalleled disasters. They resisted the Muslim conquest. Arabic raids
throughout the Mediterranean Sea and the further conquest of much of
the Iberian Peninsula reinforced the threat and the Europeans’ fears.
However, in time the Christians of Iberia would reconquer their land and
number themselves among Islam’s most implacable foes. Other peoples
submitted: The Semitic Syrians and Palestinians had much in common
with their equally Semitic Arab cousins, and the vast mass of the
Egyptian population had a centuries-old tradition of phlegmatic service to
whoever ruled them. Likewise, the Berbers of North Africa had a nomad-
ic tribal society that, after some early resistance, found Islam well
adapted to its needs.

Lands to the east also succumbed as the Islamic and Arabic tide
rolled across Sasanian Persia, Afghanistan, the Indus River valley, and
parts of central Asia. The eastern conquests proved more difficult to
assimilate. The Persians, of course, formed the bulk of the peasantry in
Persia proper, an area roughly analogous to present-day Iran, and they
also comprised the ruling class of the Sasanian Empire. They continued
many of their duties under the caliphs, in spite of the fact that they
traditionally considered themselves both distinct from and superior to the
Arabs. They absorbed Islam and the Qur'an, but they proceeded to add a
twist in keeping with the far more mystical beliefs of their former
religion. This shift, introduced in the East, created the largest and most
enduring of the Muslim schisms, a heresy comparable in significance to
the Reformation.

The heresy began with a dispute over the succession from Muham-
mad, and it developed into something more profound. Unlike the first
three caliphs, the fourth—Ali ibn Abi Talib—shared the bloodline of the
Prophet Muhammad. Ali was the Prophet’s first cousin and had married
his daughter, Fatima. Ali ruled indecisively from A.D. 656 to 661. He died
at the hand of an assassin at Kufa, an Arab garrison city on the Euphra-
tes River, south of present-day Baghdad. A new dynasty, the Umayyads,
moved the Caliphate to Damascus, and Ali’s second son by Fatima,
Husayn, a direct descendent of the Prophet, revolted in A.D. 680. He
raised a tiny band of followers, moved hesitantly, and died with his

li



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

February 10, 1986, the Iranians delivered a hammerblow to the Al Faw
Peninsula that found the complacent Iraqis unprepared. Much earlier in
the war, the civilian population of the city of Al Faw had deserted,
leaving only a few unreliable Popular Army units garrisoned in the
peninsula, which juts into the northern Gulf between the Shatt-al-Arab
and Bubiyan Island. Diversionary attacks in the north distracted Iraqi
reserves, enabling the Iranians to secure the peninsula. Once ensconced,
the Iranians not only gained the symbolic victory of cutting Iraq off from
the sea, but they positioned themselves to attack Basra from the south
and to attack Iraq’s lines of communication with Kuwait. The Iranians
threatened to surround Iraq’s only naval base, Umm Qasr, on the
Kuwaiti border, and they captured Iraq’s main air control and warning
center used to cover the Gulf. The Iranians’ success reduced the
Kuwaitis, the Saudis, and the rest of the Gulf populations to a state of
near panic. Unable to determine their enemy's actual intentions, the
Iraqis, and presumably Saddam, vacillated as to where they should send
their reserves. The Iranians used the time they gained to send 20,000
reinforcements to the swampy, low-lying peninsula. On February 13,
Saddam committed units of the elite Republican Guard. They found their
tanks and mechanized equipment of little use in the marshy terrain.
They literally bogged down and received a bad mauling at the hands of
Iranian artillery. Apparently to calm the other Gulf powers, Saddam next
sent in a massive counterattack, to which he assigned his best command-
ers. Hampered by strict orders to avoid casualties, by road-bound tactics,
and a terrain that limited vehicular movement to paved surfaces on the
peninsula, these units made slow progress, and still suffered unacceptable
losses. The Iraqis consumed large quantities of munitions, firing up to
600 artillery rounds per day per gun. Both sides also committed their air
forces; the Iraqis claimed to have mounted more than 18,500 sorties in
the six weeks that followed the attack. The Iraqis even used poison gas
on a large scale. The effort produced little but wastage of men and
machines. By March 20, the fighting in Al Faw had died down.TM

54. Ibid., pp. 219-25.

66


MODERN SAUDI ARABIA

attack. He also obtained the U.S. president’s encouragement for a series
of internal reforms. On November 6, 1962, Faisal issued a ten-point
reform program that promised a constitution, never issued; creation of a
Ministry of Justice, delayed for a decade; and reform of the religious
police, not vigorously pursued. As king, Faisal implemented some of the
other promised reforms, such as public education and welfare programs;
road, agricultural, and irrigation programs; regulation of commercial
activities; development of the country’s resources; and the abolition of
slavery. Until his death in 1975, Faisal adroitly balanced his commitment
to modernizing Saudi Arabia with his commitment to maintaining Wah-
habi traditions both of his upbringing and of the ulama. The Wahhabi,
whose principal article of faith was the condemnation of ten centuries of
change in Islam, carried its world view to the secular state as well. At
best, the Wahhabi regarded modernization with extreme skepticism. For
example, when Faisal, after consulting with the ulama, decreed that
television broadcasts could begin in Saudi Arabia, one of the princes led
an armed mob against the station, and in the ensuing gun battle several
people died. In 1968, when the first public school for girls opened (Saudi
boys and girls attend separate facilities), some Saudis rioted, and a mob
of 500 parents went to Riyadh to complain to Faisal. Police escorted the
girls to school, and troops dispersed angry mobs, much like contempora-
neous events in Alabama’s Selma and Birmingham in the United States.
However, Faisal held a unique advantage in his dealings with the ulama:
among Abd al Aziz’s thirty-six sons, he alone had a mother from the
founding family of the Wahhabi movement—the Al Shaykhs. Just as
Richard M. Nixon, a Republican president known for his strong anticom-
munism position, could go to the People’s Republic of China when a
Democratic president could not, Faisal, raised as a Wahhabi, could
advocate modernization, while others could not. In 1970, Saudi Arabia
had a literacy rate of only 15 percent; in 1987, it had two million chil-
dren enrolled in school and claimed a literacy rate of 52 percent.

At the other extreme, a minority of Saudis wanted more rapid
reform. In June of 1969 the royal government uncovered and obliterated
a massive revolutionary conspiracy consisting of several radical groups.

83



PERSIAN GULF POWERS

the first of which arrived in early 1981. Also in the 1970s the Iraqis
contracted with India to provide some of their previously Soviet-supplied
flight instruction programs. The Communist-backed 1978 military coup
attempt in Iraq further dampened Soviet-Iraq relations. By 1980 it
appears that neither the Soviets nor the Iraqis had reason to be com-
pletely satisfied with their liaison. ,

In September 1980 the Iraqi Army had 190,000 personnel plus
250,000 active reservists; 2,700 main battle tanks, 90 percent of them
Soviet T-54s, T-55s, and T-62s; 2,500 infantry fighting vehicles; 800
artillery pieces; and 1,200 antiaircraft guns. Most of the reservists lacked
training with modern weapons for an offensive campaign, and only one-
third of its four armored and six mechanized divisions were reorganized
for modern combat. The IZAF was approximately 28,000 strong, not
counting a 10,000-member air defense organization. Established in 1931
as the air arm of the Iraqi Army, the IZAF remained subordinate to the
ground forces. Its commander reported to the army’s chief of staff. The
British Royal Air Force had established, trained, and equipped the IZAF
before 1946 and had, until 1958, retained close contact. The IZAF and
the Iraqi Army, also British-founded, retained much of their colonial
heritage, especially in planning methodology. (The Iraqis based their
invasion plan of 1980 on work originally drawn up under British tutelage
in 1941.)”

In 1980 the IZAF had two formal missions: to provide the army
with ground support, and to assist with air defense. It possessed 332
combat aircraft, almost all Soviet built, consisting of 15-20 obsolescent
Soviet bombers plus 80 MiG-23Bs, 60 Su—20/22s, 40 Su-7Bs and 10
Hunters in its ground attack elements, and 115 MiG—21s in its intercep-
tor squadrons. The interceptor units had poor air-to-air combat training
and the highly limited, export versions of Soviet radar. The air-to-air
missile inventory of the interceptor squadrons consisted of outdated
Soviet AA-2s (Atolls).

39. Bergquist, Role of Airpower in the Iran-Iraq War, p. 23.
40. Cordesman and Wagner, Iran-Iraq War, pp. 69-70.

51



PERSIAN GULF POWERS

who formed 65 percent of the total population of Iraq, and the Kurds, a
mostly Sunni Moslem ethnic group that constituted approximately 19
percent of the population. He created an atmosphere of terror, of uncer-
tainty, and of arbitrary punishment that deadened the initiative of his
bureaucrats and his soldiers. Rather than risk an error, his senior
officers, time and again, paused and awaited instructions. Within the
IZAF military, loyalty to Saddam and the Baath, rather than professional
ability, was the prerequisite for advancement. Saddam’s overcentralization
of command and politicization of his armed forces prevented the exercise
of effective professional judgment necessary for success.

53



ROOTS OF CONFLICT

Jewish communities in Palestine.” Also, during the war, the British had
encouraged the Arabs in their hope for political independence, as evi-
denced in the correspondence between the British Political Officer for
Egypt and the sharif of Mecca (the McMahon-Husayn correspondence of
1915-1916).”

These rather contradictory wartime undertakings quickly became
not one, but two apples of discord. The British refused to grant the
Arabs independence and alienated them, leading to a 1941 revolt in Iraq
and to anti-British activities within the British-dominated Egyptian Army
during the 1941-1942 Western Desert campaigns. British efforts at even-
handedness in implementing the Balfour Declaration barely kept the lid
on a pot they themselves had brought to a boil. The Jews pushed for
maximum immigration into Palestine. The rise of Hitler and of anti-
Semitism in Europe created pressure for an even greater influx of Jews.
British attempts to reduce the flow met with intense and emotional
opposition from the Jews. For the Arabs, the imposition of additional
Jews threatened their own stake in Palestine. The Western-oriented,
relatively wealthy (by Middle Eastern standards), energetic, Jewish
interlopers set up new communities and purchased old land. Thus any
land transferred from Arab to Jewish hands meant more Jews and fewer
Arabs in Palestine, a reality both sides accepted. By the end of the
1930s, both groups had resorted to terrorism and counterterrorism.
British efforts to control the violence merely put them in the middle of a
cross-fire. In fact, a Jewish-launched terrorist campaign ended the British
occupation of Palestine. The Jews, in part, felt that the British had
favored the Arabs in the dispute. They further reasoned that they would
emerge victorious in any future conflict in Palestine if the British could
not restrain them.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly
voted to partition Palestine, west of the River Jordan, into separate

11, William L. Langer, ed., An Encyclopedia of World History, 5th ed (Boston, Mass.:
Houghton & Mifflin, 1972), p. 1091.

12. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, p. 316.

14