Conflicted S3 E17: Saddam vs. Ayatollah

Speakers: Aimen Dean & Thomas Small

Aimen:    Thomas, it’s always you who start, but nonetheless, today, I'm going to tell you an anecdote about this episode, the Iran-Iraq War.

Thomas:    Oh, an Aimen anecdote. It's not a dad joke, is it, Aimen?

Aimen:    Well, I wish it was a dad joke, although it happened during my dad's time. Anyway, but nonetheless.

Thomas:    There was a dad joke right there. Didn't take you long.

Aimen:    So, you know that the Iran-Iraq War caused the protocol departments of most of the international organizations at that time, the UN and many other organizations such as the IMF and any other organization where Iran-Iraq attending these meetings, the protocol departments always seated nations according to alphabetical order.

Then they realized that since 1980, since the start of the Iran-Iraq War, that Iran and Iraq will be sitting next to each other because it is I-R-A-Q and I-R-A-N. And so, no. So, it caused such a headache that they abandoned the alphabetical seating of nations. It's the Iran-Iraq War-

Thomas:    Are you serious?

Aimen:    Yes, that caused many international organizations, including the UN to abandon alphabetical seatings.

Thomas:    Well, there you go, war has consequences beyond our wildest dreams.

Aimen:    Indeed. It caused headaches to bureaucrats.

Thomas:    So, Aimen, as you say, Iran-Iraq War today, but before we get started on that topic, I want to talk about the flying blender that vaporized your old buddy Ayman al-Zawahiri the other day.

On the 31st of July to be specific, Ayman al-Zawahiri was vaporized in a drone strike as he stepped out onto the balcony of his house. I mean, his family weren’t harmed, just he. He was vaporized by a blender, a hellfire missile that's been sort of reconfigured to, without a warhead just with blades. Is this true?

Aimen:    Yeah, I mean, they call it the ninja weapon because it has these kind of like six blades coming out and they rotate because many, many people think that when missiles are fired, that the missile is like coming static like this that you like … no, actually it keep rolling in the air. It keeps spinning.

Thomas:    It’s rotating or whatever. It's just spinning.

Aimen:    Yeah, it rotates.

Thomas:    I mean, it's hard to feel sorry for Ayman al-Zawahiri and we'll talk more about him in our next episode, which is about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Aimen:    Indeed.

Thomas:    So, Ayman al-Zawahiri will be there, but it's hard to feel sorry for a guy like that, but I mean, what a way to go. It's not the noblest end.

Aimen:    But it's very swift. The Americans are very good at everything; fast food, fast burger, fast minced meat. Like I mean, at the end of the day, it was absolutely swift.

Thomas:    There we go. Of course, the most important point I think, is where was this house out of which he stepped onto a balcony? Of course, where was it? Kabul.

Aimen:    Not only Kabul, but actually just a short walk from the British and American embassies. I mean, you can't make it up.

Thomas:    As ever, we have amazing timing here on Conflicted. We're about to talk about Afghanistan. Next time, here Conflicted is coming full circle. Ayman al-Zawahiri is one of the masterminds of 9/11 vaporized by a blade.

Aimen:    Absolutely. But this is why I always say don't listen to doctors all the time telling you, oh, going out and having fresh air is good for you. No, apparently, what happened to Ayman is not good idea.

Thomas:    Okay man, alright. Alright, Iran-Iraq War, let's get into it. Let's get into it.

[Music Playing 00:03:19]

Right, Aimen, the Iran-Iraq War lasted from 1980 to 1988. And of course, there you were, a kid growing up in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia and this war, one of the worst of the 20th century by almost any reckoning, was happening in your backyard. You must have very vivid memories of the war from your childhood.

Aimen:    No question. I mean, as soon as I started realizing what was happening around me as a child, and just watching the news, the Iran-Iraq War was ever so present there on our TV screens. And the reason why, because actually it was happening just 300 kilometers away.

North of Khobar, where I used to live, just across the Gulf, you can see that the war is taking place there, and the ramifications of it. Because of course there were the implications for that war on our schools.

As young boys growing up in the Eastern province where it is mixed between Shia and Sunnis, and the schools, which are mixed, generally, you will notice immediately that the Shia kids are siding with who, of course, Iran because of the Ayatollah Khomeini, leadership of the Islamic revolution in Iran.

And we, as Sunnis, we are of course, siding with who, Saddam who's a Sunni, an Arab also, and fighting against the Persian hoards. And he is the lion of the Arabs guarding the Eastern gate, building so many myths and making it into a legendary conflict between Arabs and Persians.

Thomas:    How did your Shia schoolmates know about the Iranian perspective, let's say? I mean, you talk about TV, obviously, you mean Arab TV or were you able to get Persian language, Iranian TV as well?

Aimen:    First of all, because we are across the water in the Gulf. And so, in the Eastern province, you can easily, even with the old analog antennas, you can still easily pick up the Iranian TV. And the Iranian regime at that time, the Khomeini regime was very clever.

Actually, they had entire Arabic language TV segments directed at the Shia of a Iraq, the Shia of Kuwait, the Shia of Bahrain, and most importantly, the Shia of the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia. 

So, if we were able to pick up this in our house, of course, like I mean, in our Shia compatriots, in the Eastern province in Bahrain, were able to pick it up.

Thomas:    So, the Khomeini regime is bombarding the Shia of the Gulf, the Shia Arabs of the Gulf with propaganda in order to radicalize them, to organize them, hoping perhaps to foment an Iranian style revolution in their own countries, grab a hold of the oil resources of those countries, and eventually, make it all the way to Mecca, Medina and welcome the Mahdi back. Is that really what was going on at that time?

Aimen:    Absolutely. All the Mahdi kind of propaganda was always flooding over the airwaves, whether through TV or radio. In fact, as you know, the Ayatollah Khomeini, after he took over power and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, ironically on April 1st of, April fools of 1979.

He established with it also the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran. And the aim of all of this is to export the revolution. That the revolution is not just only in Iran. This is why he made sure that when they name Iran, they don't call it the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is called the Islamic Republic in Iran.

Thomas:    Ah, that's interesting. I'd never actually noticed that. Fascinating.

Aimen:    Indeed, because why, for them, the Islamic Republic should never be constrained by a border. That's what he believed. That's what the IRGC believed, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

And so, the exporting of the revolution started in earnest. I mean, they started broadcasting to the Shia populations of the GCC, and some of them obliged. There were riots in the Eastern province, there were riots in Bahrain.

Thomas:    And what about in your school, Aimen, were there rights in your school? Did riots break out between the Sunni and the Shia? You must have had at least, battles of words.

Aimen:    Battles of words, scuffles, this kind of thing. So, whenever Saddam was doing well in the war, we used to taunt them. Whenever Khomeini was doing well in the war, they were taunting us.

And so, and we were kids, we were 7, 8, 9, 10-year-olds, nonetheless. Like I mean, the sectarianism of that conflict was really reflected badly, reflected so badly on us as fellow citizens in the GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia.

Thomas:    Well, I'm ashamed to say that growing up in California, I was completely unaware of the Iran-Iraq War. I think none of us knew that something like that was going on, that there was this bloody almost World War I style war going on between Iran and Iraq.

The only thing I can remember, really this is where I would've first learned about the existence of any sort of war there, was when the infamous Iran-Contra scandal emerged in America, which we'll talk about in this episode. I'll try my best to summarize what's an incredibly complicated story.

But that didn't emerge until 1987, almost at the very end of the war. So, for most of the war, Americans like me at least, weren't really aware that it was going on.

Aimen:    Absolutely. Even though it is actually the longest active war in the 20th century between sovereign nations.

Thomas:    Yes, it's incredible, really incredible. In the last episode, it was the Ayatollah versus the Shah. This episode, it's the Ayatollah versus Saddam.

The Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein battling each other across what is ultimately a very flat and quite porous border there in Southeastern Iraq-Iran where the Shatt al-Arab River meets the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf, excuse me, Aimen.

Aimen:    Excuse me, Arabian Gulf, excuse me. 

Thomas:    Well, alright. Okay. Alright. Well, it's like we're back in that schoolyard in Khobar. You're picking a fight with a Shia. Stop picking fights with Shias, Aimen. My goodness….So, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Khomeini, what did these figures sort of symbolize, Aimen? I mean, Ayatollah Khomeini, we know what he symbolizes. He symbolizes the modern Islamist attempt to erect a new form of government to apocalyptically inspired, but also, one that is just modern enough to make a go of it in the 21st century now, and well, one that is still drawing on in a deep fervent religious faith and tradition.

But what about Saddam Hussein? He is a more difficult figure to characterize because in one sense, he was just a kind of strong man, military fascistic dictator.

Aimen:    Well, first of all, I mean, I would say that there is one similarity between Saddam and Khomeini that in their early childhood and then that's it. That similarity ends there; that both of them were orphans. Khomeini lost his father when he was only a few months old, and Saddam lost his father before he was even born.

Thomas:    Yeah, Saddam Hussein's entry into this world was not a happy one. His father died while he was in the womb and his mother, depressed by the loss of her husband, actually tried to abort him and failed, and tried to take her own life in the process. I mean, not the best way to start your life.

Aimen:    Absolutely. I mean, and not only that, I mean, she married Ibrahim al-Hassan and this stepfather of his was the most cruel stepfather you could ever have. And he actually like beat Saddam Hussein, prevented him from going to school, made him become a young boy shepherd, seller of watermelons to the trains that were passing. So, this is why Saddam Hussein said it to his biographer in this word. He said, “I was never a child.”

Thomas:    Well, he started out being abused and traumatized by his stepfather and by the general conditions of poverty and abuse that he suffered, but he ended up becoming well, frankly, a massive asshole.

Aimen:    Yeah.

Thomas:    So, but what does the figure of Saddam Hussein symbolize? I mean, he was a progressive in the sense that he desperately wanted and largely succeeded in modernizing Iraq very quickly, although that sadly went unstuck because he decided to launch various wars. But nonetheless, he was absolutely determined to modernize Iraq.

He was a socialist to some extent in his leanings, he was a pan-Arabist to some extent in his leanings, he was an Iraqi nationalist to some extent. So, how do we characterize him? Not the personality, but the political program?

Aimen:    Well, Saddam represented so many things. Many of them were really contradictions. So, the first thing is that he was an ardent Arab nationalist and a secular for that. 

So, he would believe in Iraq that encompasses all sectarian and religious backgrounds. However, his Arab nationalism also was a problem because Iraq did not only encompass Arabs, there were the Kurds, and the Syrians and many other ethnicities. So, that is one problem.

The other thing that Saddam represented is modernity, but also, modernity that is tethered to tribal traditionalism and the historic glory of Iraq. So, for him, yes, we have to move forward and modernize Iraq. But also, we are people who are tribal and we have to preserve the legacy of our Arab tribal traditions.

Thomas:    Not hugely different from Gaddafi in that respect.

Aimen:    Exactly. There are a lot of similarities between Gaddafi and Saddam with the exception that while Gaddafi was an indecisive caricature character, in many ways, Saddam was very different.

Saddam was someone who just his tears will fill you with terror. I mean, and one of the things that enabled Saddam to move forward in life is that his charisma, but some people call it the terror charisma.

It is a charisma that instilled terror in you. You are enthralled by him and you are afraid of him, and yet you are in awe of him. He was that kind of guy. This is what enabled him to really rule Iraq with an iron fist for three decades.

Thomas:    If with the Ayatollah Khomeini we have this symbol of transnationalism of an ideology that sort of ignores the nation state, ignores nationalism as a political principle, and seeks to create something more Imperial in its structure, Saddam represents that attempt. Yet again, like Gaddafi, like Nasser, like others, he represents possibly in most superlative form, the contradictions of nationalism in a region like the Middle East, which is so heterogeneous.

In a way, the story of Saddam, the story of modern Iraq is yet again, the story of attempting to build a nation state on nationalistic principles while wrestling with sectarian, ethnic, religious, and linguistic divides.

So, that's sort of an introduction, but we've kind of raced ahead of ourselves because we're talking about Iraq to some extent in this episode, and we haven't talked about Iraq in any detail since our episode on the Hashemites. What was that, six, seven episodes ago? I'm losing track, Aimen. We cover so much in this show.

Aimen:    It was episode nine, yeah.

Thomas:    Oh, you remember, episode nine. Okay, the Hashemites episode, we ended that episode in 1963, when the revolutionary regime of Abd al-Karim Qasim was overthrown in a Ba’ath Party coup.

You remember dear listener Abd al-Karim Qasim is the one who, with his fellow officers, overthrew King Faisal, massacred him and his family, very, very brutally and erected a Nasserite style, secular revolutionary regime in Iraq.

That revolution was carried out in cooperation with the Ba’ath Party. So, we should talk a little bit about the Ba’ath Party to refresh your memories. The Ba’ath Party was founded in Syria and it was headquartered there, but it did have national offices throughout the Arab world. And the Iraqi branch of the party was particularly active.

The Iraqi Ba’athist supported Abd al-Karim Qasim when he overthrew King Faisal in 1958, because they expected Qasim to join the United Arab Republic. Remember, Egypt and Syria at that point were united into one big state, the United Arab Republic, and the Ba’ath Party at that time supported the United Arab Republic because they were totally determined to create a pan-Arab state.

But Abd al-Karim Qasim disappointed them. He changed his mind about this as soon as he got power and began to pursue an Iraq-first policy. To sideline the Ba’athists, he actually allied with the Iraqi communist party and the Ba’athists hated communists. And this is the context really for the introduction onto the scene of a young Iraqi who joined the Ba’ath Party only a year before Qasim came to power.

In 1957, a young man, Saddam Hussein became a Ba’ath Party member. So, Aimen, how did that happen? Saddam Hussein born in 1935 in Tikrit, as you said, grew up in poverty, abused by a stepfather who forced him to sell watermelons.

He came by his education only with great difficulty, but he ends up joining the Ba’ath Party in 1957, and eventually, becomes President of Iraq. What has happened to him in the meantime?

Aimen:    If there is one person that Saddam owes everything really to is his maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah. Khairallah Talfah rescued Saddam from that abusive household where he was living with his stepfather and mother, and actually took him under his wing and sent him first to Tikrit proper in order to start his education. Although it was later, much later in life than it's supposed to be, and then straight to Baghdad.

And in Baghdad, when he finished the middle school, he wanted to join the military academy, but he was rejected. Why? His grades were not great, of course, affected by years of neglect and inability to join a school, a proper. And also, the same time, the problem was that he was not fit enough according to the military academy, which hurt him so much.

But nonetheless, in 1956, it was a pivotal year for Saddam because it was the year of the civil crisis and the year in which Nasser and Nasserism were on the rise. And he was enthralled by Nasser and he started to believe in pan-Arabism. And so the Ba’ath Party was part of that pan-Arabism scene. And so, he joined the Ba’ath Party in the late 1956, early 1957, and became part of the Ba’ath youth.

Thomas:    From what I understand, already at that time, there was indication that Saddam Hussein possibly because of his traumatizing upbringing, event some instinctive sort of sadistic or psychopathic tendencies.

And you once told me that that maternal uncle that was his sort of patron growing up, he was a huge admirer of Adolf Hitler and gave Saddam Hussein a copy of Mein Kampf to read.

So, clearly, this is a young man who's already been rather sort of wooed by what are you going to call them? Far right totalitarian ideas?

Aimen:    Far right nationalistic, totalitarian ideas. No question about it, and how to rise to power in a Hitleristic way. 

So, the young man then caught the eye of the Ba’ath Party security officials. They realized that this man is tough, have leadership qualities, sadistic of course, and also, someone who is fearless. So, they realized that this man is good for a mission they had a mind in 1959.

Thomas:    That's right. So, the year after Abd al-Karim Qasim came to power, the Ba’ath Party having been rejected by him, betrayed by him in their eyes, decided that he needed to be assassinated. They created a hit team to attack him while he was driving with his guards and Saddam Hussein was a member of that hit team.

Aimen:    Indeed. And of course, the attempt, while it was almost successful, it failed in killing Abd al-Karim Qasim. They opened fire, they peppered his convoy with bullets, but nonetheless-

Thomas:    They did strike him. He did get hit by bullets, but he didn't die.

Aimen:    Indeed. So, it failed to assassinate him, nonetheless. And Saddam Hussein escaped, even though he was hit by a bullet in his leg, he actually used a razor on his own to actually extract the bullet.

Thomas:    Aimen, this is where we get into the thorny issue of what can we believe about Saddam Hussein's biography. Certainly, Saddam Hussein and his regime loved to tell the story of him extracting the bullet with a razor blade and the whole way that he spun his role in that assassination attempt is probably a little bit hysterical.

I mean, other members of the team said, this was before Saddam Hussein became president, other members of the team said that the reason that the assassination attempt failed was because he was too trigger happy and fired his weapon too soon.

Aimen:    Actually, this is exactly like, I mean, the thing. But actually, the fact that he extracted with a razor is rather like, I mean impossible because actually from my experience in the Jihadi theaters, you just like put the razor over a candle, heat it for sterilization and it is the easiest way to actually do it. So, yeah.

Thomas:    Oh, my goodness.

Aimen:    And also, the extract shrapnel. So, it makes sense.

Thomas:    It's believable, let's say. Yeah.

Aimen:    It's believable, yeah. So, he fled to Damascus, spent three months there only, and then headed straight to Egypt. So, now, we are in February, 1960, we are in Cairo and Saddam Hussein lands there.

Thomas:    What a perfect time for a budding Arab nationalistic dictator to show up in Cairo. I mean, there you have Nasser in his glory, Cairo is absolutely chock-a-block full of new movies, new novels. There's a lot of energy there. Presumably, those three years that Saddam Hussein spent in Cairo were very formative for him.

Aimen:    Absolutely, because while he was away, he received the news that he was tried in absentia by a court in Baghdad and was given the death sentence. So, this actually, this sentence elevated his status among the Ba’ath Party people and he became actually the head of the Ba’ath Party student association in Egypt.

And in reality, he was also the security man, the man who kept everyone in check, and making sure the Ba’ath Party is not infiltrated abroad. So, during this time, his ideals started to take more shape.

Thomas:    He didn't come from a rich family. Who's funding his years in Cairo? Who's funding his education at this stage? What's going on? How does he pay for his life?

Aimen:    Well, he wasn't exactly having lots of money, but there was a credible account of him receiving stipends from two directions. One is a stipend from the Ba’ath Party to keep him afloat in Cairo, but wasn't enough. 

So, there was another patron of his, and it'll be a very big shock and surprise to the listeners. But in fact, another patron of his who used to pay him a humble, but decent monthly stipend every month was in fact, none other than the American Embassy and the CIA in Cairo.

Thomas:    The CIA? Saddam Hussein was a CIA asset?

Aimen:    Let’s put it this way, the CIA classified him as a potential asset. So, they were trying to woo him. They were trying to, okay, this is someone maybe like he could be useful because they were not exactly very fond of Abd al-Karim Qasim and how he scupper the Baghdad Alliance and how he foiled their plans in the Middle East.

And so, they thought, okay, this guy tried to kill him. You know what, maybe he's not a bad guy at all. Maybe we should talk to him.

Thomas:    So, Saddam Hussein's relationship with the United States goes back far further than I thought. That's fascinating. So, as we said, Saddam Hussein spent those three pivotal years in Cairo, and then in February, 1963, in the Ramadan Revolution, Abd al-Karim Qasim was finally overthrown.

So, this is where we left the Hashemite episode. The Ba’ath Party was instrumental to that coup that overthrew Qasim, and they were in power for eight months until there was another revolution that same year, in November, where Nasserite officers purged the government of Ba’athists and the Ba’ath Party were forced to go underground.

Aimen:    So, Saddam Hussein gets back to Iraq, but it didn't take long for the authorities to actually arrest him and put him in prison. So, between 1964 and 1966, Saddam Hussein spends two years in prison, and they were absolutely grueling, horrifying two years. I mean, he was absolutely tortured.

Thomas:    Oh, more trauma for poor Saddam.

Aimen:    Yeah, I mean, but again, the legend is born here because it was said by his comrades that he never broke. He never actually revealed anything about any of the comrades of the Ba’ath Party apparatus, of their safe houses — any information that could lead to the Ba’ath Party security apparatus crumbling, never.

Thomas:    That must have kept him in good stead when he was released in 1966.

Aimen:    As soon as he was released in 1966, he was given the task of forming what we can say the Ba’ath Party version of the Brownshirts; a sort of underground secret militia that could, if they are numerous enough, overthrow the government, which exactly what would happen two years later.

Thomas:    That's right. In the 17th of July, 1968, what's called the 17 July revolution, and just to make sure that you're not confused — this is not the 14 July Revolution of 10 years earlier, which overthrew the king. This is the 17 July Revolution of 1968 when the Ba’ath Party at that time, led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam Hussein's much older cousin, overthrows the government.

Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr becomes president and eventually, very soon thereafter, Saddam Hussein becomes Vice President of Iraq.

Aimen:    Oh, yeah and his years as Vice President of Iraq were the best years of his life in terms of what good he did for Iraq internally and externally, I must say.

Thomas:    I mean, he was really the power behind the throne, wasn't he? He was in charge.

Aimen:    Yeah, but you see, I mean, the moderation effect of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was important because Saddam Hussein was restrained in his brutality and he focused a lot on the programs that benefited Iraq actually.

First, he started nationalizing the oil industry of Iraq in 1972, which was actually opportune time because in 1973, you have the oil crisis and the oil prices went sky high, and Iraq benefited a lot from the extra revenues. And what did he do? Because of the traumatized childhood and the lack of education he had in his childhood, he instated a very aggressive education program in Iraq.

Every Iraq child from the age of six must go to school. And if the Iraq child is not in school, the parents will go to prison. So, I think it just shows that what good he did at the beginning of his time.

Thomas:    As you say, from 1973, when the oil revenues began to pour in, in a big way, Saddam Hussein built the most generous social welfare system anywhere in the Middle East. Education was a big policy platform, as you said, schools everywhere, universities everywhere, all for free, but also healthcare.

Healthcare was made free for all Iraqi citizens. New hospitals were built everywhere. This was, from the perspective of the Iraqi citizen, a massive transformation in their standard of living.

Aimen:    And remember, Thomas, he did all of this, not only like in order to solidify his position as a progressive, as a reformist, and as a modernizer, but remember that he became Vice President in 1968 at the age of what? 32.

So, by 1974, when he enacted all of these reforms, he was only 38. This young man let the successes of his policies get into his head. He wanted to now present himself to the masses as the great leader.

Thomas:    Aha, you're suggesting that that was almost accidental. I think Aimen, that was the plan all along because in front of the cameras, he's increasing schools, he's increasing the number of hospitals. He's doing all this “good stuff,’ sure. But behind the scenes, his real genius was political.

He had learned that the Ba’ath Party tended to split into various factions and he also knew that he could not trust the Iraqi military. And finally, he knew that Iraq was essentially lacking in cohesion.

Do you remember dear listener in the episode on Iraq, when we talked about all the fascias that existed in Iraqi society, between Arabs and Kurds and Turkmen and Shia and Sunni and Christians and historians and class distinctions, landowners, new money people, peasants — it was such a fragmented state. Saddam Hussein knew this.

So, he successfully built up a personal security apparatus that was able to maintain Ba’ath Party unity in Iraq and to neutralize the Iraqi military. So, behind the scenes, Saddam Hussein is creating a fascistic strong man organization that is loyal to him alone with which he was able to kind of neutralize the factionalism of Iraq.

Aimen:    And the currency of that loyalty Thomas, was clan blood relatives. He absolutely appointed hundreds and hundreds of his clan members (the Al-Bu Nasir clan) in all the positions of power. Whether it is security, military, intelligence, he really made sure that his clan populated many aspects of the deep state.

Thomas:    So much for modernization then. In the end, it was just old school tribalism.

Aimen:    Absolutely. And his tribe, Al-Bu Nasir, became the most powerful tribe, the most powerful clan in all of Iraq. And it helped the fact that he’s president, the president that he was a vice president to, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was in fact, from the same tribe also. So, it helped.

So, in the end, no matter how much you try to make a secular nationalist, modernist, communist, whatever you want — no matter how much you try to make out of an Arab, in the end, the Arab is a tribal creature and will always remain a tribal creature.

Thomas:    Oh, that's very depressing. So, that's the internal scene in the early years of Saddam's rule in Iraq. Let's zoom out a bit into the regional scene because this episode is going to get to the Iran-Iraq War, but tensions between Iran and Iraq were nothing new.

Tensions actually existed between the two states for decades, and if you want to zoom out even further, really for centuries. Iraq had for centuries, been very much a zone of political and geopolitical contention between Persian backed powers to the east and the Ottoman backed powers to the west, and various local war lord powers always vying for control of Mesopotamia.

So, Iraq had always been a zone of geopolitical tension and contention, but in the 1930s, this took on a new form that would have a lot of reverberations down the line when tensions broke out between the two countries over their border.

Really, the border along the Shatt al-Arab River. This is that river I mentioned before that is formed when the Tigris and Euphrates meet and then run a further 200 kilometers into the Arabian Gulf. There was a bitter dispute between Iran and Iraq over who controlled the river.

Aimen:    Once again, water features heavily in the conflicts of the Middle East country, see.

Thomas:    In 1937, Iran and Iraq signed a treaty to solve this problem. It's called the Saadabad Pact. Basically, Shah Reza Pahlavi, this is the father of the Shah that was overthrown in ‘79, right, the first Shah, the Iron Shah.

Shah Reza Pahlavi gave the Shatt al-Arab to Iraq and said, okay fine, the Iranian border isn't down the middle of the river, as you would expect, but it's on the Eastern bank of the river. So, the Shah gave Iraq the river in order to buy Iraq's agreement to join a pan-Middle Eastern non-aggression treaty involving Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, in 1937, in order to convince Iraq to play along with the Shah's regional sort of geopolitical aims, Iran granted the Shatt al-Arab River to Iraq. This sort of kept the tensions low for the next 30 years until April 1969. When that Shah’s son, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, well, he abrogated that treaty and really misbehaved. Wouldn't you say so, Aimen?

Aimen:    Oh yeah, there is no question about his misbehavior.

Thomas:    So, until 1969, Iran had to pay Iraq anytime an Iranian ship used the river. But in April of ‘69, the Shah decided nope, we're not going to pay anymore and he just stopped.

Iraq was not happy about this and they didn’t even threaten to go to war over it, but Iran's army was much larger at the time. And so, Iraq actually did nothing. Now, at the same time, there were conflicts between Iraq and Iran over the Kurds.

Aimen:    As we have alluded to before, Thomas, we talked about the Kurds in the north and how they found it difficult I mean, basically to coexist with an Arab nationalist government, when in fact, they are not Arabs and they don't speak Arabic. And so, the Kurds always wanted to have their own separate state, not just only in Iraq, but also in Iran and in Turkey and in Syria.

But in Iraq in particular because of the mountainous nature of their geography, they were able to some extent launch separate revolutions here and there and separate uprisings here and there in order to achieve their aim, a homeland of their own.

However, in the late 1960s, in the early ‘70s, the Shah decided that this is a cause I can support in order to pressure the Baghdad government into compliance with the Shah’s aims and goals. And so, he started, along with the CIA, to support the Kurdish separatist in the north.

Thomas:    The Shah support was really decisive and it resulted in some serious conflicts along the border with Iraq, between Kurds and the central government in Baghdad. The Shah support for the Kurds achieved his aim in the long run when in 1975 in Algiers, Iran and Iraq agreed a renegotiated settlement over the Shatt al-Arab.

In exchange for the Shah withdrawing his support for the Kurds, Iraq granted Iran a half share in the river. Basically, the border was drawn right down the middle. A pretty good solution, I would say, wouldn't you say, Aimen?

Aimen:    Yes. Practical, that's the whole idea.

Thomas:    And after the Algiers agreement, the tensions really did ease between the two countries so much so that in 1978, Saddam Hussein agreed to a certain demand by the Shah.

Aimen:    Oh yeah, the Shah was trying for years to get the Iraqis to expel Khomeini from Najaf where he was taking refuge for 14 years. In the end, Saddam in 1978, did what the Shah wanted, and he asked Khomeini to take a trip. And he did take a trip to a lovely place called Paris.

Thomas:    That was a really big sign of the new sort of friendship between Baghdad and Tehran at the time. That's the situation of Iraq with its eastern neighbor. As for its western neighbor, in the following year, that pivotal year, 1979, negotiations resumed between Syria and Iraq over the question of uniting politically and forming one big state.

To give a bit of background to this and apologies dear listener, we're talking about the Ba’ath Party here, it is always incredibly complicated. So, if you remember, in 1963, it's a very pivotal year in the Middle East. Everything comes back to ‘63. In 1963, in addition to a coup bringing the Ba’ath Party to power in Baghdad, a coup in Damascus brought the Ba’ath Party to power there.

And in 1966, another coup in Damascus toppled that Ba’ath Party leadership and replaced it with a more radical, more Marxist Ba’ath leadership. These were called the Neo Ba’athist. And this is the Syrian regime, which erected a proper centralized military dictatorship.

At this stage in 1966, a split happened between the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath parties, which would never be healed. The Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath parties were each other's biggest enemy for decades. In 1970, in Syria, in another coup, Hafez Al-Assad comes to power.

He tries to return the Syrian Ba’ath Party to a less radical, more pan-Arabist sort of Ba’athism of before. And in 1979, the Iraqi president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, so this is Saddam Hussein's cousin, Saddam Hussein is still vice president now, right? So, in 1979, Iraqi president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr opens up negotiations with Hafez Al-Assad to unite Iraq and Syria.

Aimen:    So, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Hafez Al-Assad started to put together a framework and started to materialize how this framework will look like. How we will have a United Arab Republic between Iraq and Syria, where the Iraqi president, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, will be the president and the Syrian president, Hafez Al-Assad will be the vice president of this new political entity.

For some faction, the anti-Saddam faction within the Ba’ath Party of Iraq, this is very good news because it means what? That Saddam is no longer the vice president, the all-powerful vice president who can shape the party according to his wishes and needs. This means that Saddam is out of power practically because his power stems from being the vice president of Iraq.

And of course, he is not happy with the Ba’ath Party faction that wanted him out of power by maneuvering Hafez Al-Assad into becoming the vice president of this new political entity. So, he put a plan into action.

Thomas:    He certainly did, but before we get to that Aimen, we need to make it clear that he was opposed to any union with Syria, not only for his own personal power reasons, but also, because of the Iranian Revolution, which had happened only a few months before.

Aimen:    Indeed. Hafez Al-Assad had a friendship with Ayatollah Khomeini and actually, he supported the revolution against the Shah. And so, Saddam suspected that Hafez Al-Assad who is an Alawite, a French faction of Shia Islam, is secretly being a sectarian in his politics towards Iran, and felt that no, this could actually put Bahrain, Baghdad, and Damascus in a big kind of Shia crescent.

No, no, no, I don't want Iraq to be like this. We are after all, a secular Ba’athist nation and we don't want to be subservient either to Tehran or Damascus.

Thomas:    It's a very murky, dark, and fascinating dramatic story, the Syrian role in the Iranian revolution because Hafez Al-Assad had actually allowed anti-Shah militant elements to train in Syria.

And at the same time, there's a Lebanese Civil War dimension to this. Remember, dear listener, the Lebanese Civil War is raging. Syria is intervening and this had a direct impact on the Iranian Revolution.

Aimen:    From Saddam's point of view, he suspected that Hafez Al-Assad is not exactly truly secular Ba’athist, and that he is really harboring sectarian loyalties towards Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini, because Hafez Al-Assad belonged to the Alawite minority. They are a French Shia sect and therefore, he felt that his sympathies were not exactly Arab, but more sectarian.

And it was not just only mere suspicion, there were some signs, some tell-tales there because Hafez Al-Assad allowed Iranian elements to be trained, not only in Syria, but inside Lebanon, because remember, the Lebanese Civil War is raging and there is the Amal Movement led by Musa Al-Sadr, who came from Iran to Lebanon in the 1960s to actually form the political and military aspirations of the Shia there.

So, these elements were being trained and they will become the embryonic stage of who? Of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard when they return back to Iran in 1979. But also, Gaddafi who we talked about before, must be present.

Thomas:    It's all connected, dear listener. It's all connected. You think this season of Conflicted has been confusing? It's confusing for a reason.

Aimen:    Well, that's not what my daughter said. My daughter, when she comes in every time she says, “Are you recording your Confusing Podcast?” “No, no, it's Conflicted.” “No, it's Confusing.”

So, anyway, so Gaddafi comes in and he threw the cat among the pigeon, and actually, he disappeared Musa Al-Sadr when he visited Libya in 1978. This allowed actually, the Khomeinist elements within the Amal Movement to take over and actually, this would lead to the birth of Hezbollah in Lebanon, very loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini, and his ideals.

Thomas:    All of this is by way of saying that Saddam Hussein had reasons for opposing the union between Iraq and Syria, and the making of Hafez Al-Assad vice president of the new country. He did not trust Hafez Al-Assad to have the Arab nationalist goal in mind.

Aimen:    So, Saddam Hussein enacted his plan to purge the Ba’ath Party of the pro-Syrian, pro-Hafez Al-Assad elements, and to cease power completely by removing Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and at the same time, making sure that all of those who supported the union with Syria are dealt with.

And this was again, in July. I don't know what is wrong with July. Why always July? Why, why always July? Even in Cuba, it is the July 26 Movement. Everywhere, in Egypt, it was the July 23rd revolution with Nasser. I mean, is July, can we get rid of this month for God's sake, please? And it's too hot anyways.

Thomas:    On the 16th of July, 1979 to be exact, five months after Khomeini landed in Tehran and the Iranian Revolution reached its climax, five months later in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein purges the Iraqi Ba’ath Party.

He overthrows Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, his cousin, he becomes president, and six days later, something really very remarkable happens, something that is like unbelievably blood curdling in its dramatic quality.

Aimen:    Absolutely, and it was all caught on what? On tape. It was all taped and you can see it on YouTube. It is one of the greatest political moments of the 20th century that is actually on tape.

Thomas:    Oh, tell us, Aimen, tell us. Describe the situation. Describe Saddam Hussein's purge of the Ba’ath Party.

Aimen:    Well, it all happened when Saddam Hussein gathered all the Ba’ath Party members, all the senior Ba’ath Party members in Qasr al-Khuld. Qasr al-Khuld means the eternity hall. And this will be a little bit ironic later.

So, Saddam Hussein gathered them all. He is sitting in the podium and just looking at them with his impressive suit and Cuban cigar, looking at everyone. And then he started talking about the fact that there is a conspiracy against Arab nationalism. There is a conspiracy against Iraq. There is a conspiracy against the Ba’ath Party.

And then he went on to say, what kind of conspiracy and he implicated Hafez Al-Assad and the Syrian Ba’ath Party, the fake Ba’ath Party in Damascus. And he went on to say that they wanted us to be subservient to the servants of the imperialism and whatever, and all of that. And he started talking the usual Ba’ath Party terminology.

And then after that, he said, and there are traitors among us here in this hall. There are traitors, and they will be exposed. And then he orders members of the Ba’ath Party to start to read the names of the traitors. And every time they read a name, he ordered that name, that person, stand up, and he will grill him and he'll question him and then he will say, “You are a traitor, go out, blah, blah. Come on, take him out.”

So, they will take him out and then the Iraqi Ba’ath Party members who were sitting there thinking maybe they are led to prison. But then seconds later, they hear a gun gunshot outside.

And then they realized this is not any ordinary purge. This is not, you are sent to prison. This is the eternity hall after all. You are sent to eternity. So, this is exactly what happened. One after one, they were taken out and shot. And the Ba’ath Party realized that they are dealing with Stalin 2.0 here.

Thomas:    Stalin 2.0. Certainly Saddam Hussein, now president, was riding high. What's ironic Aimen, is from that position of Supreme power, finally achieved in July of 1979, just one year later in September of 1980, in a sense, he throws it all away when he launches a preemptive strike on Iran and inaugurates the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Aimen, Saddam Hussein, why did he launch the war and was he right to do so?

Aimen:    This is going to be contentious here, but nonetheless, I will do my best to dive into his mindset, and to explore his motives as to why he launched that war against Iran.

From his point of view, he was surrounded by enemies. So, he never trusted the Turks because the Turks were always squeezing Iraq on the water issues coming from the Euphrates and the Tigris.

He never trusted the Syrians and we already know why, all the power play and the power struggle between him and Hafez Al-Assad. And because he believed that the Syrians were supportive of Khomeini and he however, feared Khomeini more than anything else. Why? Because Saddam Hussein, at the end of the day, as we have said, he is from Al-Bu Nasir, a Sunni tribe from Tikrit.

And what is the majority of the Arab population of Iraq? They’re Shia. So about 60% of the Arab population of Iraq are Shia, and 40% of the Arabs of Iraq are Sunni. And so therefore, as we said, the most thing that Saddam feared was the principle of exporting the revolution that Khomeini and his newly inaugurated Iranian Revolutionary Guard believed in passionately.

He feared that they will stir the Iraqi Shia population into another Khomeinist revolution in Iraq.

Thomas:    And I think he wasn't entirely wrong to fear the spread of the revolution. As we've already said, Iraq was factional in its very nature. As you've just pointed out, the largest single ethnic group if you like, the largest single group within Iraq were Shia Arabs. And Saddam Hussein as the head of the Ba’ath Party was trying to create an ideology that would work to unite the country but that was difficult.

The Ba’ath Party is both pan-Arab and secular, but much of Iraqi society was not Arab. They were either Kurds or Turkmen, and they were not secular. The egregious group of them were Shia, very, very increasingly religiously sort of motivated Shia because of Khomeini.

There were two groups within the Shia who were particularly threatening to Saddam Hussein, the Da’wa Party, and a group of mullahs who would in time found the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. Both of these Shia groups were calling for an Iranian style revolution in Iraq. So, Saddam, wasn't wrong to fear that.

Aimen:    While Saddam wasn't wrong in his assessment and he should have definitely feared the possibility of an Islamic Shia uprising in Iraq, however, he was wrong on the strategic aspect of how to counter that. Why?

One of the greatest Iraqi politicians that I have a great respect for and I find him to be an encyclopedia, historic encyclopedia is Faiq Al Sheikh Ali, and he's an Iraq MP right now.

But he was a Najaf born, Baghdad-educated Iraqi Shia lawyer. And I find him to be a man of integrity and I find him to be more objective than any other Iraqi politician or historian.

Thomas:    So, this is Faiq Al Sheikh Ali, so currently an MP in the Iraqi parliament.

Aimen:    Yes. And he's from an old established Najaf family, a Shia Iraqi lawyer, and at the same time, a historian. And he believed that while Saddam was right to fear Iran, Saddam was not right to attack Iran. Why?

Because he believed that the best thing Saddam could have done is to wait for Iran to make the first move because the Khomeinist regime in Tehran wasn't yet fully stable, and there were a lot of problems faced in the chaos after the revolution.

And so, what Saddam did in his opinion, in fact, Sheikh Ali's opinion, was that he thought mistakenly that the Iranian military is in disarray. The Iranian state is in chaos, that this is the right time. And he overstated the capability of the Iraqi Air Force, overstated the capability of his forces, and underestimated the capability of two things.

First, the Iranian military and also, most importantly, he underestimated the nationalist Persian solidarity that will follow once there is actually an attack by an Arab power like Iraq.

Thomas:    Let's unpick this a bit Aimen. I mean, it's quite complicated what you've just said. I mean, in 1978, Iran had the world's fifth most powerful army, but after the Iranian Revolution, the Iranian military was really weakened. 12,000 army officers were purged by the revolution, and the desertion rate of the Iranian army was 60%.

Pilots were exiled or executed, highly-skilled soldiers exiled or executed, and there were crippling sanctions against Iran launched by the United States and its allies. So, that means that Iran couldn't get any more heavy weapons, such as tanks and aircraft. 

So, Saddam Hussein's calculations weren't entirely wrong. I mean, he knew the Iranian military was in a very weakened state. This was the time to attack.

Aimen:    But as I said, his attack on 22 September of 1980 was what unfortunately united the Iranians around Khomeini to the point where many of those senior officers, military officers, senior pilots and technicians, tank commanders, who were in prison, were banging on the prison doors saying, “Take us to our aircrafts. Take us to our tanks. We want to fight.”

So, they wanted to defend their nation regardless of who is ruling it, and they were willing to swear oath of loyalty to Khomeini if it means they will be able to defend their nation against an enemy aggression.

Thomas:    Nonetheless, on the 22nd of September, 1980, Saddam Hussein did not know that and he launched a preemptive strike against Iran. He went all in, first with air strikes on Iranian air bases, and then a huge ground invasion from Iraq into the oil producing border region of Khuzestan.

Khuzestan, this is the southwestern province of Iran that borders Iraq and where Iranian oil is. I think it's really important that we kind of talk about Khuzestan and that border. The border there between Iran and Iraq is something like the border between France and Germany along the Rhine.

The ethnic and cultural contentions on either side of that border is very similar. So, the first World War was largely fought over the question of who controls the land on either side of the Rhine and whose land is it really let's say essentially. Is the west bank of the Rhine French or is it German? It's kind of an open question in terms of culture and ethnicity.

Well, the same is true of Khuzestan. The largest ethnic group in Khuzestan is in fact, Arab. So, Saddam Hussein to some extent could say, “Well, we're just liberating our fellow Arabs and they can join our larger Arab state here.” 

So, there's a sort of nationalist, almost Hitlerian irredentism informing Saddam's decision to invade Khuzestan. Kind of like the Anschluss, the union of Germany with Austrian and the invasion of the Sudetenland in the 1930s. The sense that, well, there are Arabs there, Arabs should be a part of Iraq.

Aimen:    Well, that's right Thomas. Actually, while the Iraqi Air Force failed in the first day to take out the Iranian Air Force and that will have a great ramifications for the rest of the war — while the land forces of Iraq were far more successful, actually they captured the Iranian border city of Khorramshahr straight away and then they moved on to the cities of Abadan, Al-Muhammara to lay siege on them and they captured almost 28,000 square kilometers of land in the first few weeks of the war.

Thomas:    This encouraged Saddam Hussein to think we've got them on the run, we are unstoppable. Of course, that was not true, and as soon as the following month, Iran launched counter attacks that would be devastating.

Now, Aimen, we don't have time to narrate in detail the ever twisting turning Iran-Iraq War. It lasted for eight years. So, just like in our Lebanese Civil War episode, I'm going to ask you now to do your best as fast as you can to summarize the Iran-Iraq War. Go!

Aimen:    Okay. There were really four phases for this war. Each-

Thomas:    Four phases, you love four-phase wars, Aimen.

Aimen:    Exactly. First phase, hubris. Second phase, oh my God, I made a mistake. Third phase, run away.

Thomas:    Fourth phase, invade Kuwait.

Aimen:    Invade Kuwait, yeah. So, no, but in this case they were really four phases. I mean, the first phase is the first 21 months of the war. I mean, from September 1980, all the way until June of 1982.

First Saddam goes in into Ahvaz, which is also known as Khuzestan in Iran. And he made significant advances first, only for the Iranians to regroup. And as I said, like I mean, the sense of Iranian national solidarity takes over and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iranian young men volunteer to fight.

So, the numerical superiority of the Iranians start to show, and they are pushing the Iraqis back and back and back. And by June of 1982, Iran retakes the entirety of whatever Saddam gained since September of 1980. So, in June of 1982, Saddam Hussein decides, you know what, let's cut our losses, everyone is back to where they started.

So, he calls for a ceasefire and he engages great powers such as France in order to mediate and to convince the Iranians that that's it, you got back what you lost. Let us end this war. But Khomeini intervenes and we start now to enter into the other three phases of the war.

And Faiq Al Sheikh Ali, this wonderful MP from Iraq, a historian who I respect, said in his opinion that the first two years of the war were Saddam's fault entirely. He launched the war, he bear the consequences of what happened. But this is the first two years.

But he said that from June, 1982, all the way until the end of the war in 1988, this was Khomeini’s mistake. This was Khomeini’s fault because he insisted that Saddam leave power as a price of ending the war. And this means that Khomeini takes over Iraq because he is demanding the Islamic revolution there, and he wanted a huge indemnity.

Now, the indemnity maybe is fair, but to ask for the leader of that country to leave, this was too much. And so, therefore, this guaranteed that the war between Iran and Iraq will continue unfortunately for six years and ironically, these six years were the bloodiest.

So, phase two, 1982 to 1984, this is when Iran invades now. And so, they take over Shatt al-Arab, they take over Al-Faw peninsula, and they take over Al-Majnoon oil field, one of the important oil fields in Samawah in Iraq. And they start to push further and further into Iraqi territory trying to lay siege to Basrah, which is the third largest city in Iraq after Baghdad and Mosul.

And in response, Saddam started to do two things. First, he appealed to his GCC neighbors that if you don't support me right now with all the money that you have in order for me to buy weapons from the Soviet Union and France, we will lose the war.

And that will have a domino effect where the Shia of Kuwait, the Shia of Saudi Arabia, and the Eastern province, the Shia of Bahrain, they will all rise up and the entire Gulf will become a giant Iranian lake.

So, the Saudis, the Kuwaits, the Emiratis, all of them poured billions and billions and Saddam started to purchase greater amount of weapons. And that enabled him to start shelling and bombing Iranian cities, such as Tehran itself, which led to Tehran shelling and bombing and sending missiles on Baghdad and other Iraq cities.

Thomas:    This phase of the war is called the War of the Cities.

Aimen:    Absolutely. Then you have the third phase, which is called the attrition phase. This is when really trench warfare became so common in the south of Iraq between the Iraqi army and the Iranian army. And of course, the involvement of the IRDC, all of this was where the movement of the lines was so static and the amount of casualties was so high.

The use of chemical weapons on both sides now becomes so common and that the casualties are rising so horrifically, hundreds of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of wounded. It was really, really awful.

Thomas:    Just to do justice to the history, we need to point out that the first person to deploy chemical weapons in the war was Saddam Hussein.

Aimen:    Oh yeah.

Thomas:    Iran had encircled Basrah, he felt very threatened. He used chemical weapons against them, and then they in turn, used chemical weapons against the Iraqis.

Aimen:    Indeed, except the Iraqi chemical weapon program was far more advanced than the Iranian one. And so, the use by the Iraqis on the Iranians was far more devastating on the Iranian side than on the Iraqi side.

Thomas:    And as an American, it shames me to say the reason the Iraqi chemical weapons program was as advanced as it was, was because they were receiving support in that by America.

Aimen:    And by France and Germany.

Thomas:    Oh, my goodness. The West, we hold ourselves so morally superior, don't we?

Aimen:    Indeed. So, that is the third phase, the attrition. But then during the attrition, I said that billions upon billions of dollars were pouring into Saddam's military from the GCC and also, the Iranians started using tactics that angered the great powers.

We enter into the later part of the third phase and of course, the final phase, the phase four, which is from 1985, all the way until 1988, the War of the Tankers where Saddam Hussein was bombing the oil rigs and the oil tankers of Iran in retaliation for Iran bombing Iraqi oil rigs.

So, what Iran does is started attacking oil rigs for other nations, carrying oil from Kuwait, from Saudi Arabia and from the UAE, going to the West. The West got involved and started protecting now the oil shipments to the world.

And they started telling both nations now we know what … by 1987, they started to tell both nations, you need to start coming down now. This war need to wrap up because it is starting to threaten the world supplies of energy.

And this is I think where the pressure was so much on Saddam quickly, get back your lands, get back to the borders of 1980 in order for this war to end. So, Saddam Hussein in 1988, with the backing of billions upon billions of dollars into his military from the GCC countries, launches the most audacious campaign of the war, the final campaign, as he called it like, I mean the second Qadisiyyah, naming it after a famous battle between the Persians and the Arabs in early antiquities.

And he finally captures Shatt al-Arab, Ahwar region, Al-Faw peninsula, and this series of victories shocked the Iranians in the speed, the mobility, the intelligence that the Iraq were getting thanks to American help with satellite imagery and intelligence provided to Iraq.

So, Iraq finally got back all the territories they lost, and they went back to the borders of 1980 plus two and a half thousand square kilometers from the Iranian side, which is not that big, really.

So, in reality, the war ended eight years later after the atmosphere for ceasefire became possible because everyone got back their territory. They are back at the border.

So, in 1988, after the Iraqi victories against the Iranian army and expulsion of the Iranian army from Iraqi territory, Khomeini released a communicate in which he said that while he is ashamed of what he is about to do, because of all the sacrifices that the Iranian nation gave in the eight years struggle, he will, however, get to drink that poison chalice and accept the United Nations Security Council resolution 598 to end the war with Iraq. So, who won the war? No one. However, millions upon millions of people lost.

Thomas:    Yes. I mean, there are only estimates to go by, but they estimate that about two million people died, combatants died in the course of the war, making the Iran-Iraq War the bloodiest and the longest conventional war between nation states of the 20th century, which is saying something given how much war the 20th century witnessed.

Aimen:    And this is I think a war of two egos here between Saddam on one hand, underestimating the solidarity and the strength of national pride that the Iranians had if he attacks, and then Khomeini underestimating Saddam and his ability to maintain the unity of his country, because he thought if he continued the war, one month at a time, that there will be an uprising in Iraq by the Shia and he will be able to liberate the shrines of Feyli in Najaf, of Hussein in Karbala and then there is that great unity of a Shia super state. You see both of them completely miscalculated.

Thomas:    Well, Aimen, I must say you've done a great job of summarizing a complicated war. Four phases; Iraq invades, phase one; Iran invades, phase two. War of attrition between both sides, phase three; and finally, bolstered from the Gulf, bolstered by the West, Saddam Hussein launches a huge counter attack and in phase four, kicks the Iranians out and peace resumes with the status quo, basically back as it was, no one's really won.

So, you've done a great job of summarizing that war. Let's open it up a bit to the international sort of dimension because the Iran-Iraq War was tremendously impactful on the whole world.

Iran, having really isolated itself as a result of the revolution was without many allies. I think only Syria and of course, Libya, our friend Gaddafi, supported Iran in the war.

Aimen:    Yeah, but also, there were some nations that were happy to sell arms to Iran, chief among them were North Korea. And who is the other one, Thomas? Please tell me, who is the other one?

Thomas:    Well, here's the thing, Aimen, this is where the Iran-Iraq War story becomes extremely difficult to understand because the foremost provider of arms to the Khomeini regime during the Iran-Iraq War was in fact, the United States of America.

It's very difficult to sort of explain this because the United States of America was also supplying Saddam Hussein with a lot of diplomatic, monetary and indeed, military support. So, why was this happening? It actually culminated in what's known as the Iran Contra scandal.

Aimen:    Oh yes, Oliver North.

Thomas:    Well, Oliver North, he was the sort of fall guy. He became the figurehead of the Iran Contra scandal. But the scandal itself is very, very complicated. Let me do my best now to summarize this complicated scandal.

The story starts like everything seems to start in 1979, just on the verge of the Iranian Revolution, the U.S. was the largest supplier of weapons to Iran by far. Iran was one of the biggest markets for American weaponry.

In November of that year, Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran. This is infamous, and took 52 Americans hostage. This inaugurated what's known as the Iranian hostage crisis.

And President Jimmy Carter of the United States imposed an arms embargo on Iran in reply. So, the Iranians take over the embassy in Tehran and Jimmy Carter says, no one can sell weapons to Iran. Now, flash forward a year or so, and Ronald Reagan is about to start his tenure as president of the United States.

He starts by supporting the arms embargo against Iran. However, he's told by his advisors that the arms embargo isn't really working because Iran is able to buy American weaponry on the black market anyway, and the arms embargo is depriving American arms manufacturers of revenues unnecessarily. And in fact, all that was going to happen was Iran was going to have to move into the orbit of the Soviet Union as a result of the arms embargo.

So, Reagan's advisors told him look, this arms embargo isn't really working. We should just sell arms to Iran anyway. They did. In 1981, they began doing this. Via Israel, American weapons were being sold clandestinely to the Iranian regime.

This was a win-win situation as far as Ronald Reagan was concerned. American arms manufacturers were getting their revenues, but because America was still imposing an arms embargo, no one else could sell arms to Iran legally. This was great for America.

Now, in the meantime, we have to move to Central America. Okay, so also in 1979, a coup was carried out in Honduras. A left-wing radical militant group known as the Sandinista National Liberation Front came to power there, and they began to be immediately opposed by a far-right wing militia group, known as the Contras.

Now, it was absolutely in Ronald Reagan's interests to support the Contras against the Sandinistas, because America did not want a far left wing government in Central America, allied to the Soviet Union in power.

However, in 1982, the Democrats took control of Congress and they passed a law forbidding the United States from supporting the Contras in their fight against the left-wing Sandinistas. Ronald Reagan's administration took one look at this law and decided to ignore it. They were determined to continue supporting the Contras behind the scenes.

Now, in a further complexity, starting in 1982 in Lebanon, Hezbollah began kidnapping Americans and others and holding them hostage. This was very embarrassing to the Reagan administration, and it also made them very angry. Reagan wanted to free the hostages in Lebanon.

So, it created this interesting tripartite kind of arrangement, where in order to raise money to support the Contras in Honduras, the Reagan administration agreed to sell even more weapons to the Iranians. This was all illegal. The money that they received from the sale to the Iranians was not registered on any federal government ledger. So, they could funnel that money to the Contras.

And at the same time, knowing that the Iranian regime was desperate for weapons, they could put pressure on the Iranian regime to tell its proxy Hezbollah to release the American hostages. It's the most confusing arrangement in the history of international geopolitics.

Aimen:    Come on, Thomas. You know basically I used to work for the intelligence services. For me, this is perfect arrangement. First of all, you want to support someone. You don't want basically the money to be traceable. So, what do you do? Okay, no problem at all. You know what, I have a material support that someone need.

And at the same time, I have another cause where I need to lend my support. So, let's call myself, I am party A, the people who need my support, party B, and who need something from me. And the party C, they also need something from me, but I can't be appearing to support both sides.

So, what happened is I have to give party B what they want from me, and I tell them, by the way, the money that you are giving me is going to go to party C and that's it. And actually, there is nothing, nothing that's actually coming from my side, except the thing that party B need from me. And then the proceeds will go to party C. That's it. And is it recorded anywhere? No.

Thomas:    From the point of view of a spy like yourself, Aimen, the Iran Contra affair might have been the perfect arrangement, but it didn't prove to be so for the Reagan administration. Beginning in 1987, Lebanese journalists uncovered this plan and started to publish their investigative journalism, which caused a tremendous stir.

The whole thing was blown into wide open. Oliver North, the kind of middle man facilitating the whole thing was hauled before Congress. He perjured himself. He was in prison. Ronald Reagan had to claim that he couldn't remember anything about it.

That was perhaps possible given that he, we now know was suffering from Alzheimer's disease at the time, but it was a very ignominious end to the Ronald Reagan administration and a particularly murky episode in the Iran-Iraq War.

Aimen:    In my opinion, I think because of the involvement of an unstable character, such as Oliver North, that is why everything went south.

Thomas:    Oh God, I knew we weren't going to get away from this episode without a bloody dad joke. So, Aimen, the Iran-Iraq War, I feel we haven't done it justice.

My God, it was such a huge epoch-making war in the history of the Middle East with reverberations down to the present day. I mean, right now, there are political squabbles going on in Baghdad between Shia political parties and their opponents, which are rooted directly in the Iran-Iraq War.

Aimen:    Absolutely. And I mean, some of the most powerful figures right now in Iraq, ruling Iraq right now, where were they during the Iraq-Iran War? Were they fighting for their country? No, they were fighting for Iran on the other side.

Thomas:    You mean that Iraqi citizens were fighting on behalf of the Iranian regime during the Iran-Iraq War? I mean, these are traitors.

Aimen:    Oh yes. I mean, there's no question by any standard of nationalism. I mean, they are traitors, but they were tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia citizens who were actually fighting for Iran.

They established first the Badr Brigade, which is now active inside Iraq as a political party but also, they established something called the Repentance Army, those who are supposed to fight for the Khomeini, for the Mahdi, for the Imam.

And so, many of them who fought for the eight years in the Iran-Iraq War, they fought for Khomeini against Saddam, against their fellow Arabs, against their fellow Iraqis. And some of them are big names. We're not talking only about Hassan Nasrallah, who is the leader of Hezbollah right now.

Also, we’re talking about Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, the founder of the Houthi Movement in Yemen, but we are also talking about Nouri al-Maliki, one of the prime ministers of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, one of the prime ministers of Iraq, post-Iraq invasion, Hadi al-Amiri, Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

There were so many people, big names in Iraq right now who are ruling Iraq right now were actually fighting for Iran throughout the entire Iran-Iraq War. And there are many Shia Arabs, including the Sadras and others and the Arab tribes of the south were Shia detest them.

Because they say that “Look, was Saddam, wrong to launch war against Iran? Yes. But that doesn't excuse that you abandon your own country and you go and you fight for the enemy. And this is why Iraq will never be stable because of the push and pull between the pro and anti-Iranian elements right there.

Thomas:    Which is linked to that age-old problem in Iraq of factionalism, it's not a unified country. Some Shia are allied with their co-religionists in Iran, but other Shia in Iraq identify more with their Arab identity and therefore, support Iraq’s Arab nationalist perspective. Although, while you have Kurds in the north, still very much jealous of their independence.

Maybe, it required a strong man like Saddam to keep them together. And if he hadn't invaded Iran in 1980, Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq might be regarded today as one of the great leaders of the 20th century.

Aimen:    Indeed. If he just did not do the two most stupid strategic mistakes he ever committed; 1980, invading Iran and 1990, invading Kuwait.

Thomas:    Yes. His invasion of Kuwait in 1990, not disconnected from the Iran-Iraq War. Following the war, Saddam Hussein had racked up enormous deaths to the Gulf states and he very much expected some kind of leniency, some kind of forgiveness of his indebtedness by the Gulf states, which they weren't so forthcoming with.

He thought, okay, well, I have no choice in his mind, but to invade Kuwait, take its oil resources, which then obviously, led to everything. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia inviting the American backed coalition into Saudi Arabia to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which pissed off Osama bin Laden. 

So, he decided to found Al-Qaeda, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it all ends up with Ayman al-Zawahiri on a balcony in Kabul being shredded by a flying blender.

Aimen:    Going out for fresh air is bad for you.

Thomas:    And we've come full circle. And I just would like to leave this episode Aimen, talking about Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein, I mean, he was, as I said before, a total asshole. There's no question about it. A bad guy, but as we discussed, deeply wounded from a traumatizing childhood, to some extent, he was the mastermind behind the modernization of Iraq and the establishment there of a proper social welfare system.

How are we meant really to think of him now? It's been 16 years since his death by hanging in Baghdad in 2006. Certainly in my lifetime as an American, Saddam Hussein was the great villain, the Hitler of our age. And on balance, that's probably something like true, but nonetheless, Saddam Hussein in the 70s and 80s during the Iranian Iraq war, especially, he was the lion of the Arabs.

He was in the minds of most Arabs, a great heroic political champion. How do you Aimen, think of him today, and how are we really supposed to think of him with justice? What does Saddam Hussein justice?

Aimen:    In my opinion, I think that he was a great administrator, a mediocre military strategist and I think he was a failure at understanding the flow of history. You see, one of the things he never read or understood was history. And he never understood that the actions he was about to take are going to have a devastating effect on his country.

He allowed power to go deep into his mind and to corrupt it. He performed very well when he was a subordinate, but he performed so badly when he became the leader. So, having Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr moderating his excesses when he was a vice president was I think the best years.

He led Iraq into a great nation in the Middle East, but unfortunately, power corrupted him and corrupted his mind, and filled him with that delusion of grandeur that he could take out Iran. He can take away their oil resources, and they will never fight back. That he can take Kuwait and that there will be no repercussions from the rest of the globe.

And he misread the entire global political scene. So, he was a mediocre leader in terms of strategy and tactics, but he was a formidable leader in terms of the ability to command the situation that now he was good with the now, but he was not so good with thinking long term.

Thomas:    So, there we have it, the Ayatollah versus Saddam Hussein. The Ayatollah, Aimen, didn't live to see the piece that he had won from Saddam Hussein, because he died the following year in 1989. The end of an era, the end of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Aimen:    Which shows that sometimes the Bedouin tribal nature of Saddam Hussein in which carries with it some nobility, there is an aspect of nobility about Saddam Hussein there.

And when Khomeini died, Saddam Hussein was appearing, talking to his cabinet. And he said, “The news came today that Ayatollah Khomeini died. And I have now instructed all the Arab media outlets not to show any gloating and to just say, “Khomeini, may God have mercy on his soul.”

“Because when he was alive, he was our enemy and we can do whatever we want. We can insult him, we can write all attack pieces on him, but when he is dead, it's our manners and our culture and our traditions that if someone is dead, that's it. You don't talk ill of the dead. So, he now went to a higher authority and he will have to answer for everything he did, but for us, we don't gloat.”

So, the way that Saddam reacted to Khomeini death without any gloating and to actually order people to respect his religious status, it reminds me of what Stalin once said. He said, “The death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is just a statistic.”

Thomas:    Oh my God. What a depressing way to end this episode on a very depressing topic, the Iran-Iraq War. What a futile waste of human life that was.

Speaking of which, in the next episode of Conflicted, we will be talking about another futile waste of human life, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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That's it for this week. Join us again in two weeks’ time for another episode of Conflicted.

Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Bea Duncan. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Production support and fact checking by Talia Augustidis. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.

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