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The episode features Colonel (ret.) Pesach Malovany, a former Aman officer and a researcher of Arab armies, for a conversation about the Iran-Iraq War. Malovany, author of the books “The Wars of Modern Babylon,” “From the North Evil Shall Break Forth,” and others, served as an Aman officer dealing with Iraq at the beginning of the war. In the conversation, he analyzes the reasons for the outbreak of the war, which was the longest in the Middle East in the 20th century, its main developments, and its outcomes.
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The background to the war
According to Pesach Malovany, the war, which lasted eight years, expressed historical hostility between the two regimes and the two countries. The background to the war is composed of several factors. First, a long-standing border dispute, which focused on the Shatt al-Arab river, a vital sea outlet for both countries for oil exports. Second, traditional hostility between Arabs and Persians and between Sunnis and Shiites. Added to all this was the political rivalry between the secular Ba’ath regime in Iraq and the revolutionary Islamic regime that came to power in Iran in 1979. In the same year, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq, and he saw the revolution in Iran as an opportunity to exploit its weakness. The new Iranian regime, for its part, worked to destabilize Iraq, supported the Shiite opposition, and was even involved in an assassination attempt against the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz.
National loyalty versus sectarian identity
Boris asks if national identity overcame ethnic and religious identity in the war. Malovany answers in the affirmative. He explains that the Iraqi leadership assumed that the Arab population in Iran’s Khuzestan province would rise up and join the invading forces, but in reality, the Arab residents of the province fought against the Iraqi army. Similarly, the majority of the Iraqi army was composed of Shiite soldiers, and they fought fiercely against the Iranian Shiites. According to him, loyalty to the state and the flag trumped all other considerations.
The balance of power and the course of the war
Malovany describes the balance of power at the start of the war. Iran had the advantages of a much larger population (39 million versus 14 million) and strategic depth. On the other hand, its army, which was equipped with Western weapons, was greatly weakened following the revolution and the American embargo. The Iraqi army, in contrast, had grown much stronger since 1973 and was the largest army in the Middle East, with 12 divisions and about 3,000 tanks.
The war, according to Malovany, was divided into several stages. It began with a surprise Iraqi attack on September 22, 1980, which included a broad air strike in an attempt to imitate Israel’s “Operation Moked.” The strike failed to neutralize the Iranian air force, and the ground forces struggled to advance and suffered heavy losses, for example in the battle for the city of Khorramshahr.
After the Iraqis were stopped, the initiative passed to the Iranian side. In the spring of 1982, in a successful counter-offensive, the Iranians managed to expel all Iraqi forces from their territory. Saddam Hussein ordered a full withdrawal to the international border and offered to end the war, but the Iranians refused. From then on, the war became a series of Iranian attempts to invade Iraq and topple Saddam’s regime, mainly in the Basra sector. For years, a bloody war of attrition was waged, which included the Iranian use of “human wave attacks” and the recruitment of children to the front.
The decision and the end
An important turning point came in March 1986, when the Iranians managed to surprise the Iraqis and capture the al-Faw Peninsula in southern Iraq. Malovany describes this as Iraq’s biggest intelligence and operational failure of the war. Following this success, Iran declared a “year of decision” and planned huge offensives, but these failed and exacted a terrible price in human lives, which broke the spirit of volunteerism among the Iranian public.
In April 1988, after lengthy preparations, the Iraqi army launched a series of blitzkrieg attacks. Within two days they liberated the al-Faw Peninsula, and in further attacks along the front, they completely collapsed the Iranian military array. Thousands of Iranian soldiers were taken prisoner, and the Iranian army lost its ability to fight. The difficult military situation, along with Iraqi missile attacks on Tehran and other cities, forced Khomeini, in his own words, to “drink the cup of poison” and agree to a ceasefire in August 1988.
Malovany concludes that one of the war’s important legacies was the legitimization of using ballistic missiles against population centers, a phenomenon that influenced future conflicts in the region.
The original episode, in Hebrew: מלחמת שמונה השנים