A Quest for Vengeance

By William E. Smith.

Khomeini's legions invade Iraq and threaten the whole Arab world

"Your Iranian brothers, in order to defend their country and push back the attacks on the enemy of Islam, have been forced to cross over into Iraq to save the oppressed Iraqi people. Rise up and install the Islamic government that you want!" So declared Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini last week as he launched his army along the Shatt al Arab waterway in a huge invasion of Iraq. For the first time in the 22 months since Iraq initially attacked Iran, heavy fighting was taking place on Iraqi territory. Khomeini's objective was not just the overthrow of his bitter enemy, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but the creation of an Iraqi Islamic Republic modeled on Iran's own. To moderate rulers throughout the Arab world, the threat was even more awesome: a rising wave of Islamic fundamentalism, reinforced by an Iranian victory in Iraq, that could topple Arab governments from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.

After 48 hours of rising artillery exchanges, the Iranian high command last Tuesday night broadcast a coded message: "Ya Saheb ez-Zaman! Ya Saheb ez-Zaman!" (Translation: Thou absent Imam!) That was the order for as many as 100,000 soldiers and militiamen to begin the march toward Basra, Iraq's second largest city and the nerve center of its oil-producing region, and to engage an Iraqi army of about the same size. "Operation Ramadan" had begun. The first Iranian goal appeared to be the capture of Basra and much of southern Iraq, from which the invaders could either press on to Baghdad, the Iraqi capital 280 miles to the northwest, or pin down Iraqi divisions while a second invasion force was launched directly at Baghdad, which is only about 75 miles from the border.

Within 24 hours the two armies were locked in what was believed to be one of the biggest land battles since World War II. In the intense fighting that followed, thousands were killed and scores of tanks were destroyed as the Iraqis fought off the first wave of invaders. Said an Iranian officer of the packed battle scene: "Even if you shoot with your eyes closed, you are bound to hit someone." It was also a time of fervor and of exaggerated claims. In Tehran, masses of Khomeini supporters ignored the wail of air-raid sirens and marched through the capital in support of their leader. The Iranians announced they had destroyed two Iraqi divisions, but by the end of the week their offensive appeared to have stalled, leading the Iraqis to proclaim a "great victory." Meanwhile there were numerous indications that Khomeini's forces were preparing another major attack, which would probably take place some time this week.

With the outbreak of righting on Iraqi territory, one of the most feared of Middle

East scenarios was unfolding. The Arab world was already in disarray over Israel's invasion of Lebanon seven weeks ago in an attempt to dislodge the Palestine Liberation Organization. With no end to the siege of West Beirut in sight (see following story), another non-Arab country, Iran, had invaded Arab territory and seemed, moreover, to have a better-than-even chance of unseating the ruling government. At immediate risk were the moderate, hereditary regimes of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the gulf. But the Ayatullah Khomeini's vow was even more explosive: to press on to Jerusalem, to liberate the Holy City and overwhelm all enemies of Islam.

More serious still, the pressures induced by the wars in the Middle East have drawn the U.S. and the Soviet Union into dangerously confrontational positions, for the struggles involve not only the warring armies of Islam but future control over the Persian Gulf and the largest known petroleum reserves on earth.

The worst worries of the U.S. and of the moderate Arab leaders presuppose an Iraqi defeat by the Iranian invaders. But the outcome of the war is not clear by any means. The Iraqis appeared by week's end to have blunted the initial Iranian attack on Basra and driven the Iranians back almost to the border. The Iraqis were fighting harder in defense of their country than they had fought during their long, misguided adventure in Iran. U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that Iraqi MiG-21s had staged an air attack on the Iranian petroleum facilities at Kharg Island. Damage was said to be light, but the incident was bound to have a discouraging effect on tankers bound for the island.

"Iraq wanted peace," declared Iraq's Saddam, triumphant for the moment and ignoring the fact that he had sent his army into Iran in the first place. On Friday, two days after the initial Iranian attack had subsided. TIME Photographer Peter Jordan visited the battlefield and found it bare except for hundreds of bloating bodies, burned-out tanks and artillery pieces, and a handful of Iraqi soldiers. Reported Jordan, the only Western newsman on the scene: "The stench from the bodies was so intolerable that the Iraqis stuffed tissues or cotton into their nostrils. Among the Iranian prisoners were children, boys of twelve and 13, who wore the colors of the Revolutionary Guards. When the Iranians, who had fought their way to within eight miles of Basra, realized that they were surrounded on three sides by Iraqi forces, they reportedly broke ranks in panic. Some surrendered, later acknowledging to interrogators that they had been assured by their superiors that their victories inside Iran last spring would lead to further triumphs once they had entered Iraq." That may yet prove to be true, but it did not work out that way last week.

Meanwhile, Iranian officials angrily denied that they had become the aggressors in the war. Declared Iran's United Nations Ambassador Said Rajaie-Khorasani to TIME Correspondent Raji Samghabadi: "The Saddam Hussein regime has inflicted stupendous losses of life and property on us. It has done everything within its power to humiliate the Islamic Republic. Now we are expected to give the war criminals a chance to rebuild their forces and spring at our throat again. Sorry, no deal."

For weeks the revolutionary government in Iran had debated how far the country should go in "punishing" Saddam Hussein. Iranian moderates, led by Majlis Speaker Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, suggested that the $150 billion in reparations demanded of Iraq by President Ali Khamene'i, a hardliner, was negotiable. But the fanatics wanted nothing less than the destruction of Iraq's Baath Party and the establishment of an Islamic republic in Baghdad.

Until June 21, Khomeini deliberately remained neutral in the debate, allowing subordinates ample time to state their positions. Then, characteristically, he made a speech fully supporting, and indeed surpassing, the positions of the extremists. Khomeini even criticized some of his own aides for paying more attention to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon than to the Iran-Iraq war. "We shall get to Lebanon, and to Jerusalem, through Iraq," said Khomeini, but "first we have to defeat this sinister [Baath] party."

Khomeini's "Iraq first" policy quickly gained the support of Iran's two Arab allies, Syria and Libya, and soon Iran's Revolutionary Guards command was issuing a call for volunteers. Syria's position is based on its longstanding hatred of Saddam and the enmity between the Iraqi and Syrian branches of the Baath Party. Syria had sided with Iran while Iraqi forces were on Iranian soil, but its continued support of Iran, now that Khomeini's forces have invaded Arab Iraq, is a somewhat more awkward position for Syria to be taking. Syria has also been embarrassed by recent events in Lebanon. It has refused to offer temporary sanctuary to the leadership and guerrillas of the P.L.O., possibly because it is holding out for a better deal from the Saudis and the other oil-rich Arabs who would finance such a solution to the problem of the trapped P.L.O. forces. Furthermore, in battles with the Israelis last month, Syria lost at least 86 MiG aircraft. One apparent reason: Syria lacks skilled fighter pilots, partly because it prefers that its new pilots be members of the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam to which President Hafez Assad belongs.

Like Assad, Saddam Hussein is a member of a minority group within his own nation. He is a Sunni Muslim in a country whose population of 14 million is 55% Shi'ite. Iran has assumed that this fact alone makes Saddam vulnerable to being overthrown, but that reasoning may not be correct. Saddam has created a cult of personality around himself. Today his face can be seen everywhere in his capital city, in a wide variety of sizes and demeanors. A huge painting on Rashid Street, for example, shows him in uniform, leading a tank assault, while in the background swirls a visionary horse charge by the Iraqi cavalrymen who routed a Persian invasion in the 9th century. Though outnumbered ten to one, the horsemen were victorious in an epic three-day battle, and saved Iraq.

Not unlike the Shah of Iran, Saddam has been devoting enormous effort and expense toward turning his backward country into a modern state. In addition, he has tried to make the Shi'ite community feel that it is being well taken care of. Italian and Korean workmen are laying marble in the inner courtyards of the principal shrines in the sacred Shi'ite cities of Najaf and Karbala; gold leaf is being splashed over mosques throughout the country. The poorer Shi'ite communities that once spawned opposition to the Baathist regime now have new schools, hospitals, roads, sewers, electricity and water lines. Even during the months of war, while many public works activities were postponed (and while the gulf states were contributing at least $20 billion to the Iraqi war chest), the projects in the Shi'ite areas continued. Whether Saddam has succeeded in gaining the loyalty of Iraq's Shi'ite community is a question that will probably be answered all too obviously within the next few weeks.

For the U.S., the crisis had been looming since the fall of the Shah in 1979. U.S. strategists, their Iran policy paralyzed, were reduced to speculating that the Ayatullah, who is now 82 and ailing, would soon die or become incapacitated, and that his fanatical regime might then collapse. The U.S. considered seeking closer ties with Saddam, a longtime ally of the Soviet Union who suddenly was sending signals that he was trying to extricate his country from the Soviet orbit. But once the U.S. hostages were released by Iranian authorities on Jan. 20, 1981, the new Reagan Administration decided to do nothing and hope for the best in Iran. The war between Iran and Iraq, which Saddam had launched in September 1980 in an effort to make Iraq the prominent power in the gulf, sputtered along inconclusively, a problem for the Iranians but a matter of little concern to the U.S.

But late last year the gulf war suddenly heated up again, culminating in the battle of Khorramshahr two months ago. There, after a few hours of combat, the Iranians drove the discouraged Iraqis back across the western shore of the Shatt. In June, Saddam declared a unilateral ceasefire, withdrew the last of his forces from Iran and asked for peace. Absolutely not! cried the old Ayatullah. Khomeini responded with a set of demands that Saddam could not accept. Besides calling for the resignation of Saddam and the overthrow of the ruling Baath Party, Khomeini declared that the Iranian armed forces would seek to enable the people of Iraq to form "a government of their own choice--that is, an Islamic government." When Iraq's friends in the gulf suggested that he settle for $50 billion in reparations, which they promised to raise, Khomeini turned down the offer as insufficient. "Why should he accept $50 billion?" an Egyptian official commented last week after the fighting shifted to Iraqi territory. "He thinks he can have it all."

For the past year the Khomeini government has been gaining increasing support from the Soviet Union and its allies, including North Korea, Cuba and East Germany. Most helpful, perhaps, has been Syria, an Arab neighbor with a long history of hostility toward Iraq. Through Syria, Iran received large shipments of Soviet weaponry, including 130-mm artillery pieces, antiaircraft guns and tank engines. In the meantime, Washington remained silent while Israel sold Iran an estimated $120 million worth of military hardware, including spare parts and ammunition for Iran's American-made equipment, which had been acquired during the rule of the Shah. Nor did the U.S. openly complain that the Israelis were sending experts to Tehran to help the Iranians use their American-made weapons.

With apparent shortsightedness, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was supporting Iran in order to cause trouble for Saddam, whom it has long regarded as its primary enemy in the Arab world. Thus the ancient adage "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," which guides the convoluted politics of so many nations in the Middle East, had reached its ultimate absurdity in revolutionary Iran: both the Soviet Union and a U.S. ally were contributing to the Ayatullah's war machine.

From the beginning, the Soviets have moved with extreme caution in Iran. They ordered the local Tudeh (Communist) Party to infiltrate organizations of clerical power but to avoid any actions that could arouse official suspicion. Meanwhile, Moscow provided Iran with increasing amounts of military and economic aid, though always by proxy. Indeed, to hedge their bets, the Soviets continued giving token support to Iraq, with which they have had a friendship treaty since 1960 and whose army they have largely supplied.

As an indication of how secure the Iranians have become about their relations with the Soviets, Iran decided several weeks ago to move eight divisions away from its border with the Soviet Union in order to relocate those forces along Iran's border with Iraq. It was the first time since the end of World War II, when the Soviets occupied Iran's northern province of Azerbaijan, that the Iranians had left their 1,090-mile border with the Soviet Union virtually unguarded. When King Hussein of Jordan visited Moscow late last month, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko told him that when the Iranian invasion of Iraq began, Moscow would be supporting Iran. It was the Soviet official's unsubtle way of hinting to Hussein that even though Jordan was Iraq's most faithful ally, the King would do well to remain on the sidelines of the forthcoming battle.

Within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, there is disagreement about the degree of Soviet involvement in Iran. Soviet Expert Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes the Soviets cooled on Saddam because he wanted unconditional support from Moscow for whatever he proposed to do against Israel or Iran, and was angry when he failed to obtain it. Moreover, Sonnenfeldt says, the Soviets were tilting increasingly toward Iran after the fall of the Shah, because they regarded Iran as a greater strategic prize. William Quandt, a former National Security Council official now at Brookings, doubts that the Soviets played a significant role in Iran's decision to invade Iraq. Says he:

"Khomeini is a genuine revolutionary, and he would like to export his revolution. He is also a man who personalizes his quarrels--he 'brought down the Shah,' he 'brought down Jimmy Carter,' and he wants to bring down Saddam Hussein. If he could bring into power an Islamic regime in Iraq, so much the better."

In early June, the Soviet Union urged Iran to make peace with Iraq under some of the terms Iran had demanded but with "modifications." The Soviets even proposed that the two countries join them in establishing an "anti-imperialist front." Had the Soviets brought about a peace agreement, it would have enabled them to retain close relations with both Iran and Iraq, and would have greatly bolstered their position in the region. Khomeini said no. On June 21, he made a speech in which he not only rebuffed Moscow's peacemaking efforts but denounced the whole Soviet role in the Middle East. Said Khomeini: "The Americans fear the Soviet Union might do this or that in the region if we defeat Iraq. The Soviet Union can do nothing. It has proved to be capable of nothing." Having put the Soviets in their place, Khomeini continued to accept support from them, just as he has accepted clandestine help from the Israelis.

Iran's plan to attack Iraq, with Soviet acquiescence, was in the formative stages when the Israelis launched their invasion of Lebanon. The Israelis gambled that with a quick strike at their northern neighbor's heartland, they could impose a solution of sorts on their 34-year-old conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. They bought Defense Minister Ariel Sharon's argument that such an assault could free northern Israel from occasional P.L.O. attacks, break the organization's leadership and perhaps even create pressure on the Palestinians to make Jordan their homeland. If Syria attacked Israel's invasion force, so much the better, because Sharon was prepared to carry his anti-Palestinian offensive all the way to the Syrian capital, Damascus.

Their campaign in Lebanon has generally produced the results the Israelis were seeking, but it has spilled enough blood to worry the Reagan Administration and its allies. The spectacle has been observed by 100 million or more citizens of the Arab world on their TV sets: the siege of Beirut, the brutality of the ceasefire violations, the Beirut negotiations leading toward the Israeli goal of expelling the P.L.O. fighting force from Lebanon. Even Arabs with the highest stakes in the gulf war, the emirs of Kuwait and princes of Saudi Arabia, have been traumatized and distracted from their more immediate problems by the war in Lebanon. They have watched the first siege of an Arab capital by an Israeli army, and they have become alarmed at the emotions aroused in their own countries.

For the Soviets, according to most Western analysts, the long-term goal is control of Middle East oil. In Afghanistan, they have built a new airfield in the corner of the country closest to the mouth of the Persian Gulf. In the Horn of Africa last week, Soviet-backed Ethiopia attacked its traditional enemy next door, Somalia, probably with the help of Cuban and East German advisers. If the Ethiopians should defeat Somalia, they and their

Soviet allies would gain a position of influence over a country that is strategically located at the southern end of the Red Sea. Moscow could then, if it wished, call South Yemeni troops back into combat with Oman, which, like Somalia, is scheduled to provide facilities for the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has sold Iraq $500 million worth of arms and ammunition since the Iran-Iraq war began. Nonetheless, Mubarak fears that Saddam may not be able to stand up to the Ayatullah's army and Revolutionary Guards for long. Iran is four times the size of Iraq and has a population that is three times as large. The Egyptian government believes that the fighting may be over by September at the latest. And after that? Would Khomeini rule Iraq as the reigning ayatullah, as he does Iran, or through a Shi'ite-dominated political mechanism more closely attuned to the Arab traditions of Iraq?

That question matters less to Arab leaders than the fact that Khomeini's forces are already plotting the overthrow of every government in the gulf. TIME has learned that a new corps of revolutionaries is being trained under the name of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Gulf. The group is led by a noted ayatullah operating out of Tehran. Recruits are being trained in camps in South Yemen and Libya and in a new facility recently opened for a class of 600 in northwestern Iran. The initial graduates began to filter into the gulf states two years ago. Some of them bungled their first coup attempt last December, when Bahrain police arrested 80 terrorists trained and armed by Iran for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Sheik Isa Al-Khalifa. Other subversive activity in the gulf sponsored by Iran is known to be under way.

One plan being discussed among Iraq's Arab allies for countering subversive activity calls for the establishment of an Arab rapid deployment force. The proposal would involve an Egyptian contingent of several divisions and would perhaps be deployed along the borders of Iraq in Kuwait and in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. As a down payment, Egypt would insist on the restoration of diplomatic relations that were broken off by most of the gulf states following the conclusion of Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. The Egyptians would also require ample supplies of U.S. equipment and strong American support, including air force and naval assistance if necessary.

But Mubarak must be cautious about committing his troops to foreign service. After the late Anwar Sadat made his historic trip to Jerusalem in 1977, with the full support of his military commanders, they told him that in the future they would fight only for Egypt. They did not want to fight for Palestinians or for the anti-royalists in the civil war in Yemen. Egypt's commanders were prepared to accept peace with Israel, provided that they would never again have to send Egyptian troops to fight outside their own country.

Mubarak knows it could be a mistake for him to send troops to assist Saddam in Iraq. Such a move not only might antagonize Egypt's generals, but would also anger the Islamic fundamentalists in the country. It was the fundamentalists who assassinated President Sadat last October, and they remain a threat in spite of Mubarak's crackdowns. Nonetheless Mubarak is prepared to offer Egyptian troops to defend Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other gulf states, under the terms of the 30-year-old Joint Arab Defense Pact, if the arrangement is approved by the states involved and supported militarily by the U.S. Considering Mubarak's reluctance to send forces anywhere outside Egypt, the current discussion of such a mission is an indication of how worried he is about the spread of Islamic revolution.

Even some of Khomeini's friends are upset about the Iranian invasion of Iraq. The P.L.O., which has generally supported

Khomeini out of deference to Syria, is furious with the Iranians for launching an invasion that can only divert attention from the Palestinians' plight in Lebanon. Arab and Western diplomats feared that the Iranian attack would enable Israel to move briskly into West Beirut to settle the problem of the stubborn P.L.O. Not that such an argument would carry much weight with the ruler of Iran, which has once more become the primary power in the gulf. If the Palestinians want Jerusalem as the capital of a state of their own, Khomeini wants it as the goal of a holy crusade.

Officially, Iranians quarrel with the notion that they are committed to the overthrow of Arab governments. They also deny that they have fallen under the influence of the Soviet Union. As Iran's Ambassador to the U.N., Rajaie Khorasani, said last week, "We have proved that a nation armed with the ideology of Islam need not choose between the superpowers but can stand on its own feet." It is true that a wave of Islamic revolutionary fervor moving across the Middle East would not necessarily serve the interests of the Soviet Union any more than it would help the West. But since it would damage existing ties of all kinds, cultural as well as political and economic, it would have a greater impact on the Arab world's links with the West than on those with the Soviet Union and its allies.

Still to be determined is the effect of the gulf war on world oil prices and markets. Taken together, Iran and Iraq have about half the oil reserves and export capacity of Saudi Arabia, the world leader. In recent months, Iran's refusal to abide by production ceilings set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has helped keep world prices down as global output continued to exceed demand. There was no evidence last week that either prices or supplies had yet been affected by the fighting in Iraq.

But the petroleum industries of both countries, and particularly Iraq, are quite vulnerable. After its attack on Iran's Kharg Island faculties last week, Iraq reportedly warned Japan that its tankers should stop using the island. If Iran decides to retaliate in kind, it would probably aim first at the Iraq-Turkey pipeline, the only export route now available for Iraqi oil, and at the scattered fields to the west of Basra. A determined Iran could take Iraq out of the oil business for as long as two years. But even if warfare should paralyze the oil industries of Iran, Iraq and neighboring Kuwait, thereby removing about 4 million bbl. per day from world oil markets, the loss could be overcome by Saudi Arabia, which could increase production from its current 6.5 million to 10.5 million bbl. per day.

What seems indisputable, as the two Middle East wars continue, is that they are costing the U.S. dearly in prestige Arab rulers who privately would welcome American assistance at the moment fear that they would only inflict damage on their regimes by appearing to be in league with the U.S. The Reagan Administration last week offered to hold joint milltary exercises with Saudi Arabia and any other gulf states that might feel threatened by the Iran-Iraq conflict, but so far there have been no takers. The most critical problem afflicting U.S.-Arab relation at the moment stems from the link that many Arabs believe exists between the U.S. and Israel's operation in Lebanon.

But the Arabs also deeply resent the fact that the Israelis chose to give military support to Khomeini's Iran. The Israelis respond that the aid effort was based on their traditional enmity toward Iraq. They claim their aid was halted several months ago, long before the Iranian invasion of Iraq began. Other sources say that some Israeli aid, including the training of Iranian military personnel in the use of American arms, is continuing.

What the Reagan Administration still needs most, after 18 months in office, is a strong policy for the Middle East.

Another central problem has been its un willingness to say in public what it has been telling the Israelis in private. According to most observers, the U.S. op posed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, though this did not have any effect on the Israeli government. But by failing to state its position forcefully, the Administration appeared to the Arab states to be a silent partner in the attack or at the very least an overly indulgent ally. Until the U.S. can distinguish openly between American policy and Israeli policy, and rein in some of the more expansionist tendencies of the Begin government, it cannot make real headway in improving its relations with the Arab world.

Theoretically, the Administration was correct to hew a neutral line between Iran and Iraq, but changing circumstances call for a defter touch than the U.S. has displayed thus far. Says Richard Helms, a former U.S. Ambassador to Iran (and onetime head of the Central Intelligence Agency): "Now is the time to come to the aid of our moderate Arab friends.

We shouldn't tilt toward Iraq so much that we throw Iran into the arms of the Soviets, but we can tilt a little bit, enough to encourage the Saudis and some of the others to conclude that we are still their friends and would come to their rescue if worst comes to worst."

The first step for the U.S. is to deal forthrightly with the Palestinian question.

This, in fact, is exactly what Secretary of State George Shultz promised at his confirmation hearing last week. The Lebanese crisis had made it "painfully and to tally clear," Shultz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that the "legitimate needs and problems" of the Palestinian people must be resolved. He might well have added that the West's failure to solve the Palestinian problem has had a lot to do with giving Islamic fundamentalism its anti-Western basis of action. The more ambitious Khomeini's forces become, and the more expansionist his goals in the name of Islam, the more vital it is that the U.S. have a Middle East policy that is perceived to be consistent and fair by all moderate parties in the Arab world.

--By William E. Smith. Reported by Murray J. Gart/Middle East and Dean Brelis/Baghdad

With reporting by Murray J. Gart, Dean Brelis

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