But Leaders Eventually Faced Reality : Iran’s Tenacity Kept Experts Surprised

Although Iran’s sudden acceptance this week of a U.N. cease-fire resolution in its war with Iraq surprised many U.S. experts, its previous determination to keep fighting had surprised them even more.

A steady string of crucial setbacks on the battlefield in the last year and a critical shortage of military supplies had wiped out any reasonable chance that Iran could win a military victory.

At the same time, a severely deteriorating economy, signs of weakening public support and increasing isolation from Arab nations had made a negotiated settlement appear for months to be the only way for Iran to salvage anything from the conflict.

In the end, with much of Iran’s industrial base decimated and its population exhausted by eight years of war, the country’s leaders faced a stark choice, according to RAND Corp. analyst Nikola Schahgaldian: Whether to continue waging war on Iraq or to preserve the Islamic revolution set in motion by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.

“Whereas before the fear was that the revolution would not survive the war, now the feeling seems to be that the war must end to safeguard what remains of the revolution,” one diplomat in the region said.

Iran’s most decisive military defeats have been in the south. Iran had held Iraq’s Faw Peninsula, a piece of territory at the head of the Persian Gulf, since 1984. But it failed to use the peninsula to capture nearby Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, and last April Iraq recaptured Faw.

That setback exposed two of Iran’s most significant problems, analysts said--a breakdown in command of the Iranian military and Tehran’s growing inability to raise fresh recruits for the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards. At roughly 350,000 men, the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s shock troops, have stagnated, analysts said, and their morale has plummeted with the recent losses.

Reliance on costly “human wave” assaults enabled the Iranians to gnaw their way into northern and southern Iraq--but at tremendous cost. Most damaging was the loss of noncommissioned and junior officers, whose shortage had “a grievous impact on Iran’s command and control structure,” one military analyst said.

The failure of the attack on Basra dramatized Iran’s inability to maintain a pipeline of weapons for its troops, said RAND analyst Frank Fukuyama. When Iran launched its ill-fated offensive in late 1986, it did so with the last of the weapons it had acquired through the arms-for-hostages deal with the United States.

After that, Iran had to rely on Eastern Europe, China and North Korea for boats, tanks and missiles. But U.S. pressure succeeded in cutting that flow of armaments.

Iran’s worsening economic situation also has made new weapons purchases more difficult. Eight years of war put roughly 80% of Iran’s oil refineries out of order, according to Schahgaldian.

Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the northern provinces had “a profound effect,” according to Shaul Bakhash, a historian at George Mason University.

In Tehran, the mounting pressure to end the war reached a new high in February, when Iraq began lobbing missiles into Tehran and other Iranian cities, inflicting thousands of casualties.

“It was the first time some of Tehran’s war planners started thinking about the war on a personal level,” said Schahgaldian. “It not only had a tremendous psychological impact on the population in Iran, but it got a lot of people thinking about what rationales could be used to end the war.”

By the time the U.S. cruiser Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner on July 3, U.S. officials said, there was evidence that Iran was trying to find a way to accept the year-old U.N. resolution that could end the war. That, said one senior Reagan Administration official, could explain why Iran’s overall response to that tragedy was relatively restrained.

Times staff writer Michael Ross contributed to this story from Cairo.