Drums Along the Border

By William Drozdiak

After nearly two years of war, Iran is poised into invade Iraq

As the Israeli siege of Beirut turned last week into an anguished negotiating drama over the withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ominous events were taking shape in another part of the Middle East. TIME has learned that American reconnaissance photographs of the 700-mile border between Iran and Iraq show that Iranian forces are massing for a full-scale invasion. Units from all over Iran, including eight divisions formerly posted on the Soviet border, are moving rapidly into place. U.S. experts believe that the Iranians may be ready to attack as early as this week. In addition, TIME has learned, the Reagan Administration has determined that the Soviet Union intends to provide support to Iran once the invasion begins.

Iranian armed forces are poised for an assault at three points along the Iraqi border: in the south, where the reconnaissance information indicates that Iranian troops are concentrated near the port of Basra, the site of Iraq's major oil production facilities; in the center, near Amara, where Iranian troops are solidly entrenched within 200 miles of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital; and in the north, where Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has persuaded Kurdish dissidents to foment new trouble for the regime of President Saddam Hussein. In Tehran last week, Iran's Defense Minister, Mohammed Salimi, sounded a clear-cut warning: "Despite the superpowers' opposition, a push into Iraqi territory has become inevitable."

The impending showdown constitutes a survival test for Saddam Hussein's leadership. On the eve of battle, he moves peripatetically among his soldiers and civilians, escorting Western visitors around Baghdad to convince them that he enjoys the full support of his people. He clearly does, despite the increasingly disastrous consequences of the war. Some 100,000 Iraqis have been killed or wounded in a fruitless bid to seize control of the Shatt al Arab waterway and Iran's oil-rich Khuzistan province. Yet most Iraqis despise Khomeini's brand of Islamic fanaticism and prefer the secular nature of Saddam Hussein's government. Saddam Hussein's downfall would also provoke grave apprehensions in the gulf sheikdoms (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates). Those states and Saudi Arabia have poured at least $20 billion into Iraqi coffers to help keep the advancing Iranian forces at bay. If Iraq succumbs to Khomeini's aggression, it would probably become a Shi'ite-ruled Arab nation inclined to spread the Islamic revolutionary gospel throughout the Arabian peninsula, where sizable Shi'ite populations have long resented the clannish Sunni monarchies that rule them. The tiny island state of Bahrain, where 55% of the population are Shi'ites (some of Iranian origin), nearly fell victim last December to a Khomeini-inspired coup attempt.

Saddam Hussein has becalmed Iraq's Shi'ite majority, which makes up 55% of the population, through a combination of repression and munificence. He has arrested and executed most leaders of a Shi'ite underground unit known as Da'wa (the Call) and has displayed similar ruthlessness in dispensing with secular political rivals, especially Iraqi Communists. "There is no opposition left in Iraq," explains Saddam Hussein's Deputy Prime Minister, Tareq Aziz. "There is none left, and none will rise because we cut off the head of anybody who dares to raise arms against us."

But Saddam Hussein has also devoted much of his government's mammoth $75 billion development program to refurbishing Shi'ite communities, especially the revered shrines at Najaf and Karbala. Unlike Iran's ill-fated Shah, Saddam Hussein has sought to curry favor with Shi'ite mullahs through handsome endowments that have been used to adorn mosques with gold leaf and Italian marble. Even at the height of the war with Iran, foreign workers labored night and day to construct houses, schools, hospitals and roads in the poorer Shi'ite towns so that Khomeini's exhortations to rebel against Saddam Hussein's government could not take root among the deprived and discontented.

Saddam Hussein may have placated his potential opponents at home, but his armed forces seem far more vulnerable to their foreign foes than at the start of the war. Syria. Iran's leading Arab ally by virtue of President Hafez Assad's hatred of Saddam Hussein, had previously cut the flow of Iraqi oil across its territory and agreed to send its fighter jets on decoy missions to distract the Iraqi air force, in effect opening a second front. Flush with a string of recent victories, the confident Iranian troops positioned near the Iraqi border have been readied for combat with the help of military advice and equipment provided by a curious assortment of Iraq's other antagonists, including North Korea, Israel and, lately, the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, Saddam Hussein believes that the necessity of defending Iraq's borders will galvanize his armed forces after the serious losses of the past year. He is convinced that the entire psychology of the war will change once Iran becomes the aggressor. Says he: "The Iranian troops will begin to ask, 'Why have you [Khomeini] put us here on the border when the Iraqis are no longer in our territory? Why do you leave us in the trenches?' " Ultimately, Saddam Hussein feels, the myriad factions in revolutionary Iran will start arguing over the wisdom of a foreign offensive, and the fragile consensus around Khomeini will collapse.

The Ayatullah's desire for revenge, however, is presumably sufficient to overcome any such dissent. Khomeini has never forgiven Saddam Hussein for expelling him in 1978, at the Shah's request, after 14 years of exile in the holy city of Najaf. Shortly after his triumphal return to Iran in 1979, Khomeini invited leaders of Iraq's militant Shi'ite Da'wa party to a meeting to give his blessings for a revolutionary uprising that would turn Iraq into a Shi'ite-led satellite of Iran. Declared Khomeini at the time: "What we have done in Iran we will do again in Iraq."

If the invasion occurs, it could end Saddam Hussein's plans to serve as host to the Conference of Non-Aligned Countries, scheduled to take place in Baghdad this September. Saddam Hussein envisioned the meeting as a way to emphasize Iraq's maturing role as the dominant neutralist power in the gulf. His decision to recall his troops from Iran last month was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to salvage the conference, though it is doubtful Iraq could have held any Iranian territory for much longer. Recently, Saddam Hussein dispatched Justice Minister Mundhir Ibrahim to Cairo to extend a personal invitation to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to attend the summit, if only out of gratitude for the $500 million in military equipment that Egypt has sold to Iraq during the war. Mubarak quickly accepted, a step that is expected to hasten Egypt's return to a pivotal place in the Arab world.

Saddam Hussein's desire to burnish his non-aligned credentials has also led him to disregard a 22-year "peace and friendship" treaty with Moscow and attempt a rapprochement with the West. He staged a bloody purge of the Iraqi Communist Party, then opened Iraq's doors for trade and investment deals with Western firms. West German, French and Japanese companies have signed contracts worth billions of dollars for major development projects throughout the country. Saddam Hussein has also courted the U.S. in the hope of renewing diplomatic relations (see following interview). Meanwhile, U.S. trade with Iraq has risen to $1 billion a year, more than three times the figure for Soviet trade.

Despite its position of strict neutrality in the gulf war, the U.S. has responded to Iraqi overtures in small ways. Iraq was removed from the State Department's list of countries that aid terrorism, thus enhancing trade prospects. U.S. diplomats are pleased that their private exchanges with Iraqi counterparts have been devoid of polemics about U.S. support for Israel. Says a State Department official: "We can put aside our differences over Israel and discuss things rationally."

A more tangible Iraqi concern is the realization that for the U.S., Iran's value as a strategic prize in the region may far outweigh the need for open and friendly relations with Iraq. Administration analysts believe that although the wounds left by U.S. support for the Shah and by the hostage ordeal have yet to heal, Washington must keep channels of influence open to prevent Iran from becoming even more dependent on the Soviets. Moreover, the U.S. would like to pursue every possibility of reconciliation with Tehran in the post-Khomeini era. Says a State Department official: "Even though relations with Iran may be years down the road, we do not want to queer a rapprochement by jumping to one side of the belligerents."

Such faint hopes seem far removed from the immediate risks of Saddam Hussein's possible demise. Several gulf rulers are exasperated by what they see as Washington's lack of concern about the consequences of an Iranian invasion of Iraq. Indeed, some Arab analysts believe that Saddam Hussein's forthcoming battle could prove to be the most crucial military encounter in the Middle East in recent times. They predict that a Khomeini sweep into Iraq, conducted with the backing of the Soviet Union, would establish a pro-Iranian regime in Iraq that would then make its peace with Syria.

This formidable axis would enjoy not only substantial military aid from the Soviet Union but also the enormous oil reserves of Iran and Iraq (before the war, combined output reached as high as 8 million bbl. per day) to pay for such arms. More important, Islamic revolutionary ardor could rapidly sweep through the gulf sheikdoms, as well as Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province, particularly if encouraged by Khomeini militants who are so imbued with the notion of a Shi'ite holy crusade. As Iran's military machine gathers its strength at the Iraqi frontier, the leaders of the Arab gulf states are beginning to fear that such a hypothetical possibility is drawing closer to reality every day. --By William Drozdiak. Reported by Murray J. Gart and Dean Brelis/Baghdad

With reporting by Murray J. Gart, Dean Brelis

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