The Iran-Iraq War: Why did Saddam Hussein start the war?

The beginning of the conflict: The Ba’ath Party and the Shiites

To understand the roots of the war, Baram argues, one must go back to 1968, with the rise of the Ba’ath Party to power in Iraq. Its rise immediately created tension with the Shiite population, which constituted a majority in the country, for several reasons. First, the Ba’ath was an extremely secular party, with atheistic foundations. Its spiritual founder, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian. This secularism was hard for the traditional Shiite public to digest.

Second, Saddam Hussein, who was the strongman of the regime, was paranoid and ruled with an iron fist. He infiltrated intelligence agents into the madrasas (religious schools) in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and tightened control over them, which caused great anger.

The third reason was the Ba’ath’s pan-Arab ideology. The Shiites in Iraq, although Arabic speakers, constitute a majority of about 55 percent of the country. However, in a unified pan-Arab state, they would have become a negligible minority of just a few percent within a Sunni Arab world. Therefore, most of them opposed the idea.

The Algiers Agreement and the Shiite opposition

The tension with the Shiites worsened following the intervention of the Iranian Shah. In 1969, the Shah unilaterally canceled the 1936 border agreement concerning the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which was vital for Iraq, and began to undermine the Ba’ath regime through agents who instigated Shiite rebellions. The regime brutally suppressed the rebellions and deported tens of thousands of Shiites to Iran.

In 1975, a surprising turn of events occurred. Saddam Hussein and the Shah signed the “Algiers Agreement,” which resolved the border dispute. In return, the Shah ceased his support for the Kurdish rebels in Iraq and stopped his subversion among the Shiites. However, according to Baram, the Shiite movement against the Ba’ath had already gained its own momentum. The internal opposition was led by a charismatic cleric, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and his party, “Hizb al-Da’wa al-Islamiyya.” In 1977, massive demonstrations broke out again and were suppressed. In response, the Ba’ath regime officially declared that the Sharia (Islamic law) was null and void, a step perceived as a grave provocation.

The rise of Khomeini and his personal score with Saddam

The Islamic Revolution in Iran in February 1979 changed everything. Its leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, had a personal score to settle with Saddam Hussein. Khomeini had been living in exile in the Iraqi city of Najaf since the 1960s. As long as Saddam was the Shah’s enemy, Khomeini indirectly supported him. However, the Algiers Agreement made Saddam a friend of the Shah, Khomeini’s bitter enemy.

Worse still, in 1978, at the Shah’s request, Saddam expelled Khomeini from Iraq. Baram explains that this was a stinging insult in Arab tradition, but ironically, the expulsion served Khomeini’s interests. He went to Paris, where he gained global media exposure that allowed him to manage the revolution from afar, free from the surveillance of Iraqi intelligence.

After rising to power, Khomeini became an existential threat to Saddam’s regime. He was a personal enemy, a fundamentalist religious leader versus a secular ruler, and a Shiite leader who called for liberating the Shiite holy sites from Sunni rule. Khomeini also canceled the Algiers Agreement, thereby threatening to choke Iraq’s only sea outlet.

The decision to go to war

Baram describes a secret recording of a meeting of the Iraqi leadership from September 15, 1980, in which Saddam presented his reasons for going to war. He had four main reasons. The first was the internal problem, meaning the Shiite threat, which was only mentioned implicitly. The second was the strategic threat to the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The third was the desire to humiliate Khomeini, “to rub his face in the mud,” and to prove to the Shiites that their leader was weak.

The fourth reason, and perhaps the decisive one, was the assessment that Iran’s army was dismantled. Khomeini had purged the regular army he inherited from the Shah, and Saddam believed his own strong and well-equipped army would easily win the war. Baram notes that Israeli intelligence also assessed at the time that Saddam was planning an attack, but mistakenly thought the target was Israel.

Another catalyst for the decision was an assassination attempt by the “Dawa” party against the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, in April 1980. In response, Saddam executed the leader of “Dawa,” Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. Khomeini reacted with a public call to the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam’s regime. From Saddam’s perspective, there was no choice but to launch a preemptive strike.

The eve of the invasion: Miscalculations

According to Baram, both sides miscalculated. Saddam and his leadership, with few exceptions, were confident of a quick victory. Even his minister of defense, who was a professional, was forced to answer in the affirmative when asked if the army could win.

On the Iranian side, army commanders asked Khomeini for permission to retreat to the Zagros Mountains to reorganize the army, but he flatly refused. He promised to send the young “Revolutionary Guards,” who he claimed would fight “like lions.” Baram concludes that the Iraqi attack, which was intended to exploit the division in Iran, achieved the opposite result: it united the divided Iranian people behind Khomeini, and the opposition to him almost completely disappeared.