Recent Iraqi Success Could Add New Risks to Gulf War

Buoyed by its biggest battlefield victories since the beginning of its 7 1/2-year-old war with Iran, Iraq is adopting a new and more aggressive strategy to force Iran into accepting a U.N.-sponsored peace settlement.

But, despite indications that Iran’s war effort is encountering mounting difficulties, there is little likelihood of the conflict ending, or even winding down, in the near future, diplomats in Baghdad say.

On the contrary, a new set of risks may be about to emerge, they say, because of reports that some Iraqi military strategists are pressing for the chance to cross the border to seize Iranian territory for the first time since the early days of the war.

Until recently, all of this seemed quite impossible.

Among Western military analysts in Baghdad, the most prevalent view of the war was that, although it was basically unwinnable by either side, time favored the Iranians, whose willingness to expend their greater manpower in costly human-wave offensives allowed them to nibble their way into Iraqi territory.

The basic assessment among observers that neither side is strong enough to secure an outright victory has not changed. But over the last two months a series of startling Iranian setbacks, mirroring in part the deepening political chaos in Iran, is beginning to raise serious questions about Iran’s ability to continue waging an offensive war.

The first suggestion that Iran’s revolutionary ardor might be cooling came when it failed to launch an expected winter offensive in the south this year. That was followed by the failure of a more limited offensive in the north which, after making initial gains, was blunted by Iraq’s ruthless use of poison gas.

The confirmation that Iran was in serious difficulty came when, much to the surprise of foreign observers, Iraq swept into the Faw Peninsula in April, easily reclaiming that southernmost finger of Iraqi territory from the Iranian forces that had occupied it for the last two years.

Then, late last month, the Iraqis launched another successful offensive to retake most of the territory north of the peninsula and east of the port city of Basra that the Iranians captured in January, 1987.

What is still deeply puzzling Western military observers here in the Iraqi capital is that in neither case did the Iranians seem to offer much resistance to the Iraqi attacks. Whatever else they may be, Iranians have proven time and again that they are not cowards.

‘Easily Gave Up’

“We find it baffling that the Iranians so easily gave up what it cost them tens of thousand of lives to take only a year and a half ago,” one diplomat said.

Though some military experts cite a breakdown in Iran’s command structure as a result of political turmoil in Tehran, the major factor behind the Iranian rout appears to be a sudden and severe shortage of manpower.

There are strong indications that the Iranians had pulled out the bulk of their forces, both from the Faw Peninsula area and from the Shalamcheh area east of Basra, before the Iraqi offensives were launched.

“The big question,” one military observer said, “is, where is the Iranian army? Suddenly, it seems to have lost its numerical advantage.”

Iraqi strategists believe their escalation earlier this year of the brutal “War of the Cities,” in which Tehran and other population centers were pounded with more than 170 long-range missiles, has sapped Iranian morale and sharply reduced the numbers of young men volunteering to go to the front.

Recruitment Problems

Conventional wisdom once held that the missile attacks only served to harden Iranian resolve, but more recent signs indicate that the Iraqis may have calculated correctly. Iran’s latest recruitment drives have fallen far short of their targets, and one Baghdad-based diplomat, citing figures from a report compiled by his embassy in Tehran, said the number of new recruits was lowest in those areas that had been the most heavily hit by Iraqi missile strikes.

Whatever the underlying reasons for the decay of Iranian resolve, Iraq has been quick to show that it is capable of taking advantage of the new situation.

Shackled by a political leadership that regarded its own generals as a greater potential threat than Iran, the Iraqi army has long labored under the burden of a bureaucratic control system requiring Baghdad’s seal of approval for virtually every important field decision.

This time, however, the generals appear to have convinced President Saddam Hussein that the time was right to strike, and he in turn seems to have given them relatively free rein in planning the attacks at the Faw Peninsula and Shalamcheh, diplomats said. The result was two swift and, for the Iraqis, unusually aggressive assaults that effectively combined their superiority in armor and aircraft with the element of surprise.

Tenuous Footholds

Iraqi morale, which hit a low point last year, was dramatically bolstered by the two victories, which left the Iranians with only tenuous footholds in the mountains of northern Kurdistan and in the marshland between the border and Fish Lake, a man-made water barrier east of Basra.

“Suddenly, they discovered that Iran is not invincible after all,” one diplomat said. “Now they’re taking the offensive and no longer simply waiting behind the trenches for the Iranians to attack.”

This new-found confidence was articulated by Hussein himself who, in a speech to military commanders last month, said Iraq would stay on the offensive to sap the Iranians of “the motive and morale by which they used to fight.”

Besides recovering lost territory, Iraqi officials say their aim is to finally force Iran into accepting Resolution 598, the U.N. Security Council’s nearly year-old proposal for a settlement of the war.

However, diplomats caution that Iran’s recent reversals do not mean it is ready to make peace on the same terms it has rejected in the past.

Signal for War?

On the contrary, the appointment Thursday of Parliament Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani as the new acting commander of Iran’s armed forces is seen more as a signal that the Iranians plan to continue the war.

“It suggests they plan to change strategy, not give up, in response to their setbacks,” one Western military expert said, adding he thought that Iran may now give a larger role in the war to its regular armed forces, as opposed to the Revolutionary Guards who have been in charge until now.

For Iraq’s part, there are signs that it is considering taking the ground war into Iran for the first time in two years.

Iraqi Defense Minister Adnan Khairallah said after the Shalamcheh victory that the army should not stop at the frontier but should seize Iranian border towns being used as springboards for attacks into Iraq. He mentioned six towns, including Mehran, which Iraqi troops occupied earlier in the war.

Diplomats here say that Western countries, including the United States, have urged Iraq not to cross the frontier for fear that such an offensive would grossly complicate efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the war.

However, “this regime is like a pendulum, swinging from one extreme to the other,” one senior diplomat noted.

The danger now, he said, is that “if Saddam Hussein takes the decision to swing the other way, none of the advisers around him will dare to disagree by counseling caution.”