An Appalling Cost--for What?

Just days before its emissary arrived in New York to take part in U.N.-sponsored cease-fire talks, Iraq again sent its army smashing into Iran, killing or capturing thousands before pulling back across the international border. Tehran responded to the attack by urging volunteers to rush to the front--a call that seems to have gone largely unheeded. Iraq’s foray had two goals. The first, as it acknowledged, was to seize more Iranian captives so that when the fighting finally stops it won’t be caught embarrassingly short in the exchange of war prisoners. Its second goal appears to have been to show that it is still capable of taking offensive action along a broad front, just in case Iran tries to win at the negotiating table what all its sacrifices failed to achieve on the battlefield.

Saying that it will even approach that table has already required a monumental political retreat on Iran’s part. First, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself has been forced to concede the failure of the holy crusade that he so long insisted on pursuing against Iraq. Second, Iran has been forced to drop two of the three major conditions that it years ago swore must be met before it would accept a cease-fire. It no longer demands that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein must be overthrown, and it no longer insists that it must be paid tens of billions in reparations before it will turn toward peace. Had these unrealistic conditions been abandoned earlier, hundreds of thousands of lives could undoubtedly have been spared.

One remaining Iranian condition is embodied in U.N. Security Council Resolution 598, which sets the stage for a cease-fire. That is for an international commission to fix responsibility for the war. Iran is confident that blame for starting the nearly eight-year-long conflict can be pinned on Iraq. Iraq is either confident that it can show its invasion of Iran to have been clearly provoked or--perhaps more likely--it simply doesn’t care what any international body might conclude about its war guilt, knowing that whatever may be said it has little to fear in the way of effective sanctions.

From the beginning it has been clear that the most desirable outcome of the Persian Gulf war would be a peace without victors, an equivocal end that would leave neither radical Iran nor radical Iraq dominant in the region. That prospect now seems imminent. Yet to get to this point, a point that essentially does little more than restore the status quo of 1980, has cost an estimated 1 million lives and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in national wealth. The gulf war has seen many crimes committed. Surely the greatest of these is that those responsible for the carnage are unlikely ever to be called to account.