Saddam Hussein against Iran, to 1990

Saddam Hussein was playing the anti-Communist West against the Soviet Union. He was buying weapons from the Soviet Union, while the West was hoping to lure him away from the Soviet Union and also selling him weapons.

With the fall of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran, Hussein saw opportunity. The Shah had been friendly with the U.S. and was considered a great power in the Middle East. But the new regime in Iran was weakened by revolution, and it was hostile to the United States. The Iranians, moreover, were largely of the Shiite branch of Islam, in conflict with Sunni Muslims elsewhere in the Middle East, including Iraq. Saddam, it is said, feared Iran's influence in Iraq. Perhaps he also feared that the spread of fundamentalism to Iraq. Saddam went to several Middle East nations that had Sunni Muslim heads-of-state to gain approval for an invasion of Iran. In Jordan he met with King Hussein, and there, it is believed, he met with three senior CIA agents -- Jordan having been a base of operations for the CIA in the Muslim world. Saddam Hussein was also seeking more weapons, and in this he had an advantage over Iran, which had only Libya and Syria for allies.

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein's government declared Iraq's 1975 agreement with Iran null and void, and, on September 22, Saddam launched a land and air invasion against Iran, claiming that Iran had been shelling Iraqi towns. He said he would be in Teheran, Iran's capital, in three days. His forces advanced along a broad front into Khuzestan province. They captured the city of Khorramshahr, but they failed to capture the oil-refining center at Abadan.

Publicly the United States was neutral regarding the Iran-Iraq war but in fact it was supporting Iraq. U.S. foreign policy strategists did not want a hostile power, Iran, to gain control over Iraq's oil fields. The United States had opposed any Security Council move to condemn Saddam's invasion of Iran. It removed Iraq's name from its list of nations supporting terrorism, and it began sending arms to Iraq, including strains of anthrax for chemical weaponry. France supplied Iraq with more high-tech weaponry, and the Soviet Union continued to supply the Iraqis with weapons.

In June 1981, Israel bombed a site in Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring a nuclear bomb capability. The U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, condemned Israel's act.

The Israelis were selling weapons to Iran, and the United States provided both Iran and Iraq with arms and with intelligence information, the U.S. trying to win favor from moderates in Iran and trying to keep Saddam Hussein friendly. In 1984 the Reagan administration again applied trade sanctions against Iran, and in late 1986 the Iranians leaked information about U.S. arms dealing, which upset the Sunni Muslims, produced the Iran-Contra scandal in the United States and sent the U.S. tilting more toward Iraq. The United States saw its relations with the Sunni Muslim states as more important than its relations with Iran, and it still feared Soviet gains with the Sunni Muslim states.

Iran and Iraq attacked each other's oil industry. That Hussein used chemical weapons against the Iranians -- a weapon abhorred in the West since World War I -- created little stir in the West. But Iran's attacks on oil tankers prompted the United States and other Western European nations to station warships in the Persian Gulf, and Iran's ability to obtain arms fell.

Stalemate prevailed, while millions were dying in the Iran-Iraq war, and, as always in war, wealth was being lost, with Iraq acquiring a huge debt. Saddam's war was costing him too much, and in 1988 he agreed to a cease-fire mediated by the United Nations.

Into 1990 a permanent peace treaty had not yet been created between Iran and Iraq. Accusations were made that Saddam was making nuclear bombs. On March 16, Iraq denied this but admitted to having chemical weapons and threatened to use them against Israel if it were attacked. Relations between the U.S. and Iraq were deteriorating. On April 10, 1990 the U.S. canceled an aerospace trade mission to Iraq. But still the U.S. sought to maintain good relations with Saddam, hoping that this was best for maintaining a favorable position and what civility still existed in the Middle East.