Experts Say Iran May Win War by Nibbling at Iraq

As Iran continues to nibble away at Iraqi territory on the battlefields of the Persian Gulf War, concern is growing among diplomats and military experts that Iraq may be starting to lose the war after 6 1/2 years of stalemate.

The last year has witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of the war as Iranian forces repeatedly probed Iraqi defenses in search of a weak spot through which to launch the “final offensive” that Tehran has threatened to mount before the Persian New Year, which begins Saturday.

Although rumors of a final, go-for-broke Iranian onslaught have been rife for months, watching out for it has been a bit like waiting for rain in the desert. Indeed, many analysts in Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East now think the final offensive will never materialize because the Iranians have neither the armor nor the logistics to deliver a knockout blow.

May Not Need Big Victory

However, given Iran’s recent battlefield successes, the consensus among the analysts is that it may not be necessary for Iran to win the war with a decisive victory in order for Iraq to lose it.

Concern that this could happen was first voiced last year, after Iranian forces captured the Faw Peninsula in southern Iraq and then recaptured Mehran, an Iranian border town of little importance briefly occupied by Iraq in retaliation for the loss of the peninsula and its port city, Al Faw.

Given the enormous logistical difficulties of resupplying the peninsula from the Iranian side, Western military analysts in Baghdad were surprised that the Iranians took it. Indeed, these analysts say, the development was probably a fluke. “I don’t think the Iranians planned to capture it,” one Western diplomat said. “Faw was meant to be a diversionary attack that surprised the Iranians as much as the Iraqis by succeeding.”

Those who follow the gulf war cite two factors that appear to have figured in the Iranians’ success on the Faw Peninsula, as well as in their more recent gains.

One is Iran’s willingness, proven now time after time in its grim “human wave” offensives, to suffer enormous casualties for limited battlefield gain.

The other is the highly conservative, better-safe-than-sorry strategy adopted by Iraqi commanders in order to minimize losses, especially of expensive aircraft.

Throughout the war, Iraq has enjoyed virtually uncontested mastery of the air with a more than 5-to-1 advantage in planes. But until recently, its pilots took little risks, flying well above the range of Iranian anti-aircraft fire and dropping their bombs from altitudes too high to ensure accurate hits.

It is not so much Iranian flak that the pilots fear as the wrath of their own government. In at least several cases over the last few years, Iraqi pilots who lost their planes have been executed, according to diplomats and other well-informed sources who follow the war.

Self-Defeating Strategy

There were signs that Iraqi leaders, after their defeat at Mehran in July, began to suspect that this sort of discipline was self-defeating. Pilots were ordered to fly in lower and slower over their targets, increasing the chances of scoring direct hits. The new tactics started to pay off: In the latter months of 1986, Iraqi air strikes against Iranian oil facilities succeeded in slicing Iran’s oil exports in half, to fewer than 800,000 barrels per day.

Iraq’s prowess proved to be short-lived, however. After defeating an Iranian attack across the Shatt al Arab waterway in southern Iraq over Christmas, the Iraqis were taken by surprise a few days later when tens of thousands of Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guards and young recruits launched an amphibious assault across a large man-made water barrier a few miles north of the Shatt al Arab.

What appears to have been a diversionary attack on the central front came next, followed by another major Iranian push in the south and, early this month, a thrust across a snow-covered mountain pass in the north to the Gerdmand Heights, 12 miles inside Iraq.

Within Artillery Range

According to reports from the northern front, the Iranians are now within artillery range of the road that leads to Kirkuk, site of Iraq’s largest oil refinery. In the south, they are only about six miles east of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, which has been rendered nearly uninhabitable by repeated Iranian artillery shelling.

Most of the 650,000 troops Iran has massed along the 733-mile-long frontier have still not been committed to the fighting, and the Iraqis have said they expect another major Iranian assault to coincide with the Persian New Year.

What most disturbs Western military analysts is that Iraqi resolve seems to have faltered in the face of the latest attacks. The Iraqis have succeeded in halting them, but “they are still unwilling to commit their infantry to the kind of counterattacks necessary to recapture territory, with the result that each time the Iranians take more,” one diplomat in Baghdad said.

Journalists who have visited the front on the Iranian side have reported that Iraqi front-line troops appear to have dropped their weapons and fled without much of a fight--something that also happened during the Faw Peninsula fighting.

Push-Button War

“The Iraqis still seem to think that their overwhelming advantage in artillery, armor and aircraft means they can sit back and press buttons rather than roll up their sleeves and really fight,” an analyst said. “They are not using their firepower to their best advantage. They are using it as a crutch.”

In the strategic south, the almost exclusive reliance on artillery is also ineffective because of the watery terrain. The shells plop into the mud and marsh, which absorbs much of the explosions.

“The only way the Iraqis will dig the Iranians out of there is by committing their infantry, which they have not been willing to do,” said a Western military attache in Baghdad.

The experts also say they are perplexed by the fact that the Iraqis have not used their aircraft to disrupt Iran’s long and vulnerable supply lines to its bridgeheads at Faw and Fish Lake. The latter is the water barrier that Iranian troops crossed in January.

‘Extremely Hesitant’

“The only explanation we can think of is that the Iraqis, once again, are proving themselves to be extremely hesitant to engage in mortal combat,” said Hans-Heinz Kopietz, an expert on the Iran-Iraq War at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

The Iraqis, a Baghdad-based diplomat adds, “have no strategy for fighting this war. They are in a purely defensive mind-set. They just sit behind their fortifications and wait.”

Besides crediting the Iranians with a more imaginative military strategy than their foes, diplomats also point to the weapons covertly supplied to Iran by the United States and Israel over the past two years.

Among those arms were TOW anti-tank missiles that appear to have been used with great effectiveness by the Iranians in their recent thrust towards Basra, where some estimates suggest the Iraqis may have lost nearly 1,000 tanks over the past few months.

‘Helluva Lot of Tanks’

“The TOWs have been very effective,” Kopietz said. “The Iraqis have lost a helluva lot of tanks.”

Opinion is divided over what will happen in the gulf war over the course of the next few months, as the rainy season ends and the ground dries up, creating conditions that should facilitate the movement of Iraq’s superior armor.

Some analysts think the Iranians will have to launch a major offensive before then, if only because--considering their many threats to do so--not attacking could be construed as an admission of failure. “If they don’t attack by the end of this winter, it will be a severe psychological setback for them,” one Western ambassador in Baghdad said.

Others, however, think the Iranians will continue the pattern of a series of limited offensives on different fronts, withdrawing if the resistance is too fierce but, as soon as they find a weak spot, pouring in reinforcements and taking as much territory as they can.

Can’t Go on Indefinitely

Regardless of whether the war ends with a bang or a prolonged whimper, most analysts now agree that the stalemate that has characterized the longest-running conventional conflict of this century cannot continue indefinitely.

“The longer it goes on, the greater the risks,” a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said. “The danger of one side collapsing is too high.”

While no one is ready yet to count the Iraqis out, there is some agreement that unless they can reverse Iran’s recent string of nibbling victories, the Iraqis may be the first to crack.

“I’m not sure if Iran can win this war,” said one diplomat, reflecting what appears to be a consensus among those who follow the war. “But I am convinced that Iraq can still lose it.”