War Sputters Out

After nearly eight years of fighting and at a cost of an estimated 1 million lives, the Persian Gulf war at last appears to be winding down to an equivocal end. With its army weakened by morale and supply problems and its economy a shambles, Iran has been forced to accept a year-old U.N. Security Council call for a cease-fire. Iraq had earlier said that it would abide by the resolution. A halt in the fighting is likely to find each country occupying pretty much the same land that it held when Iraq launched its invasion. Territorially, then, the hugely costly conflict will have changed nothing. But politically major changes have occurred and could well continue, perhaps for years to come.

Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein emerges from the war with his prestige bolstered, his power augmented and quite possibly with both his ability and his inclination to create trouble in the region enhanced. He has arrived at this point because of his own remarkable ability to maneuver and with more than a little help from his friends. Somehow Hussein was able to survive the consequences of his appalling misjudgment in blundering into what he thought would be a pushover war against Iran, was able to rally an army that clearly seemed beaten, was able finally to hold and then beat back Iran’s armed forces. He was aided in all this by the jittery generosity of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which unlocked their treasuries to finance a war effort whose demands quickly came to exceed Iraq’s own resources.

He was helped no less by an utter ruthlessness in waging war. On the battlefield Hussein freely used poison gas against both Iran’s army and his own Kurdish population. In the Persian Gulf he indiscriminately attacked neutral shipping, and in so doing succeeded in internationalizing the conflict by bringing in the U.S. and other Western navies as de facto allies against Iran. For the moment the Arab gulf states find themselves grateful to Iraq for blunting the threatening momentum of Iran’s Islamic revolution. At the same time Syria, which has a longstanding ideological conflict with Iraq and which supported Iran in the war, has cause to be nervous.

In its announcement accepting the U.N. cease-fire resolution Iran spoke pointedly of the need to concentrate on saving its Islamic revolution. What this suggests is a concentration now on domestic affairs that almost certainly will include a fight to succeed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who reportedly is near death. An Iran exhausted on the battlefield, preoccupied with its internal affairs and with the influence of its hard-liners possibly waning is welcome news internationally; among other things, it should allow a major scaling back of the U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf. It might also in time help ease the way for a change in the U.S.-Iran relationship that could be to the strategic advantage of both countries.