In the coming decade, the Middle East would supplant Southeast Asia as the most war-torn region of the world. The Middle Eastern battlefields of the late Cold War stretched across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the jagged mountains of the Hindu Kush, across the arid Mesopotamian plains, and west to the Mediterranean cities of Beirut and Sidon. While the first two waves of mass violence in the East had focused on Communist revolutions, ethnic and religious warfare dominated the third and final wave of conflict. In Afghanistan, the Soviet Army found itself mired in a bloody war. Like earlier invaders, the Soviets found Afghanistan easy to conquer but nearly impossible to control. Meanwhile, across the Persian Plateau, the revolution in Tehran continued to send shock waves across the region. As the ayatollahs consolidated control in Iran, its historic rival, Iraq, prepared to launch an assault on the Shia regime. To the west, along the shores of the Mediterranean, Israeli leaders prepared to launch their own invasion of their northern neighbor, Lebanon, in a bid to remake the Levant. The climactic final decade of the Cold War ravaged societies across the Middle East and transformed the face of war in the late twentieth century.
Following the collapse of Third World communism in the 1970s, the combatants on the battlefields of the Middle East mostly abandoned the East-West framework of ideological conflict. “In the last five years,” a 1981 CIA report noted, “the link between religion and nationalism has been growing stronger in the Islamic world.” This resurgence was not monolithic or directed by any single authority. Rather, the pressures of rapid modernization and ongoing political turmoil had helped transform Islam into a “potent political force.” According to the CIA report, throughout much of the region, “Islam is increasingly being linked to nationalism, and the resultant political currents are taking a decidedly anti-US direction.” Washington’s close association with modernization drove much of this anti-U.S. sentiment, which was reinforced by “US global strategies.” U.S. military deployments in the region, a thirst for oil, and “US support for Israel—a constant reminder of Muslim military defeat and Western imperialism,” helped fuel this animosity. As a result, pro-Western leaders in the region would need to be careful about identifying too openly with Washington. “One challenge for the US,” the report argued, “will be to distinguish between the rhetoric designed for internal consumption and a leader’s personal willingness to enter into a relationship with the US for certain purposes.” Analysts also warned that the Kremlin was likely to seek greater influence in Muslim politics. Nevertheless, the Islamic resurgence “presents problems for Moscow” owing to the difficulty of finding a synthesis between Marxism and Islam.1
Ultimately, this sectarian resurgence raised dangers for both superpowers. But both Washington and Moscow were too deeply invested in the Cold War struggle to remain disengaged from the conflicts raging along the southern periphery of the Soviet Union. Containment’s momentum pulled the superpowers deeper into the war zones of the Middle East. As the fighting intensified, both superpowers shifted their attention to the region. Moscow and Washington escalated their intervention in Afghanistan and kept a nervous eye on Lebanon and Mesopotamia.
“WAR OF THE MINES”
Having deployed the Fortieth Army during the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, Soviet commanders now faced the difficult task of combating a growing, internationally backed insurgency in a country known for its defiance to outside control. Reports from the city of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, described guerrilla influence as “pervasive.” Three separate curfews kept Afghans off the streets in the evening. While Soviet forces had imposed a 10:00 p.m. curfew, guerrillas had vowed to fire on anyone moving after 9:00. To be safe, most residents elected to stay indoors after 7:00. Meanwhile, the rebels had forced several schools to close, shot three teachers, and intimidated local butchers who had been hoarding meat. Residents had been forced to scrounge for food and supplies. Petroleum was available only on the black market, and the price of both wood and bread had increased dramatically.2
During the second phase of the war, which lasted from March 1980 to April 1985, the Soviet General Staff focused on major combat operations aimed at destroying regional rebel strongholds. The Mujahideen had quickly abandoned the massed guerrilla assaults seen in the first weeks of the conflicts, reverting instead to more traditional hit-and-run operations launched from mountain hideouts. Afghanistan’s more rugged regions restricted Soviet movement and prevented the use of heavy military vehicles. The Mujahideen would stand and fight, Soviet commanders found, only when defending a vital base or when they were encircled. With this in mind, Soviet forces concentrated on large operations designed, in the words of the Soviet General Staff, to “liquidate the Mujahideen’s regional bases.” Tanks and heavy armor were unable to operate effectively off-road and therefore were of limited use beyond their vital roles in guarding convoys. Likewise, fighter jets were unsuited for providing close air support. Helicopter gunships were more useful in mountain warfare and, when employed in close coordination with ground troops, could prove devastating. The real challenge, argued Russian officers, was “not military, but political.” Karmal’s government, Russian generals later wrote, “did not live up to expectations.” Kabul could not project effective control over the fiercely independent tribal regions of the country; Afghan government forces remained ineffective; and poorly conceived government reforms failed to win the support of the population in the villages. Despite Moscow’s best efforts, the Mujahideen held “all the main agricultural areas of the country” while Soviet control was limited to cities and the major roads that connected them.3
The key to the war, a CIA officer later explained, lay in controlling supply routes. The Soviets needed to establish control over the Panjshir Valley and the Paktia and Khost Provinces, along the Pakistani border. The Panjshir, controlled by Massoud, represented a critical supply conduit for the Soviets. Paktia and Khost, controlled by Haqqani, held the key to closing off the CIA-ISI pipeline to the Mujahideen.4 The guerrillas, conversely, had to keep their supply lines open while disrupting shipments of Soviet armaments to the Fortieth Army. Each side, then, fought to cut the other’s supply lines. Both the Soviets and the Mujahideen laid thousands of mines throughout the country. While the Mujahideen mined roads in an effort to stop convoys, Soviet troops laid mines around garrisons, to prevent rebel attacks. In time, the Soviets would dub the conflict the “war of the mines.” Much of the fighting took place in the form of ambushes along major Soviet supply routes. A favorite Mujahideen tactic involved disabling the lead and rear vehicles in a convoy and attacking, from the surrounding heights, the forces trapped between. In response, Soviet troops sent pickets into the hills along key roads in an effort to flush out potential ambushes. Meanwhile, Moscow committed the majority of the Fortieth Army to escorting convoys and garrison duties. Of the 133 battalions stationed in Afghanistan, only 51 were consistently engaged in offensive operations against the rebels. Special Forces commandos, airborne troops, and reconnaissance battalions, constituting about 20 percent of the total forces in Afghanistan, bore the brunt of the fighting on the Soviet side.5
With the main contingents of the Fortieth Army in place, Soviet commanders launched a series of large-scale offensives against suspected rebel bases in the first half of 1980. The first major sweep came in late February and focused on the sixty-mile-long Kunar Valley, along the border with Pakistan. The operation began with an aerial and artillery bombardment of the valley. Helicopters then swooped in to drop troops onto the surrounding ridges while tanks and armored vehicles thundered in. All told, some five thousand Soviet troops, along with tanks, helicopters, and warplanes, participated in the operation. Rebel fighters put up a determined defense, but there was little they could do in the face of such firepower. Soviet troops devastated the villages in which they encountered resistance, leveling buildings and slaughtering both Mujahideen and civilians. After clearing the valley and relieving a government garrison, the Soviets pulled back. Not long after, the rebels returned.6 Refugees reported that as many as nine thousand families had fled the valley, with some survivors claiming that Soviet forces had used napalm and other chemical weapons.7 It would be the first of four offensives in the valley that year.
The Soviets launched similar operations in other provinces in a bid to crush rebel sanctuaries, cut lines of supply, and eradicate the Mujahideen. In particular, the Soviets focused on the mountainous regions in the east. Home to some of the fiercest Mujahideen, the area formed a vital supply link to Pakistan. The Panjshir Valley, which lay within striking distance of vital Soviet supply lines running along the Salang Highway, soon emerged as a second trouble area. In frontal engagements, Soviet firepower made short work of the rebels. Heavy armor was impervious to Mujahideen rifles, and Soviet aircraft could strike at will against any target they found. Severely outgunned, rebel fighters quickly abandoned their preferred tactic of massed assaults on Soviet positions.8 But not every operation went as planned. In March 1980, Mujahideen slaughtered an entire Soviet mechanized battalion. The rebels ambushed the Soviets while they were traveling along a road in Paktia. Their path blocked, Soviet troops remained sheltered inside their vehicles, firing at the rebels taking cover behind boulders on the surrounding hillsides. After the Soviets’ ammunition ran out, the Mujahideen moved in, killing everyone they found. Soviet commanders had not yet adjusted their tactics (designed for a conventional war in Europe) to the circumstances they faced in Afghanistan. By relying on heavy armor and motorized rifle battalions, the Soviets remained bound to major roads snaking through gorges, ravines, and narrow passes that provided endless opportunities for Mujahideen ambushes.9
By the spring of 1981, Soviet commanders had concluded that their short-term intervention in Afghanistan had become a major war. And Afghanistan’s political problems rendered the Fortieth Army’s combat operations ineffective. “In our view at this time it is necessary,” they wrote, “to evaluate the real state of affairs in the D[emocratic] R[epublic of] A[fghanistan], to mark out a political and military strategy, and the main thing—to demand the DRA leadership switch from assurances to decisive actions.” The Karmal regime had shown itself to be largely ineffective. No small part of the problem lay in the rampant factionalism within the PDPA—namely, the efforts of the Parcham wing to dominate all positions of authority. Making matters worse, Soviet officers complained, government bureaucrats showed little real concern for the situation in the countryside. Most officials did not live in the regions they represented, did not visit their provincial districts, and had little knowledge of the economic and political challenges that their constituents faced. As a result, the general population outside the capital had little allegiance to the regime in Kabul. Kabul’s land reform programs were ill-conceived and poorly implemented. Desertion was rampant in the Afghan Army, with some units losing nearly a third of their strength. At best, Kabul controlled less than two-thirds of the country’s districts, and even there, rebel influence survived. These failures had hamstrung the Fortieth Army’s military mission. As a result, Soviet commanders had begun to call for Karmal’s removal and the reorganization of the Afghan government. A delay in this task would only preserve “the totalitarian power of one person” and undermine the ultimate goal of the intervention in preserving the gains of the 1978 revolution.10
Likewise, Karmal had never been able to establish amicable relations with the tribal authorities along the Iranian and Pakistani borders. These historically independent populations had taken on significant strategic importance as the Soviets worked to cut off the pipeline of foreign aid streaming into the country from Pakistan and Iran. As Soviet commanders warned, “Imperialism is waging an undeclared war in Afghanistan. Following an active policy of political and economic isolation of the DRA, the US, Pakistan, Egypt, and China are giving significant economic aid to the so-called Afghan refugees and are creating and training large contingents of rebel bands on Pakistani and Iranian territory who are then sent into Afghanistan to fight the legal government of the DRA.”11
According to the CIA, Khomeini’s regime in Tehran had become “the most vocal Third World supporter of the Afghan insurgency.” Afghan insurgents had accompanied the one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand Afghan refugees who had moved across the border into Iran and were now receiving training from Iranian volunteers. Iranian officials coordinated Mujahideen propaganda, set up insurgent offices in Tehran, and brought guerrilla leaders as guests on diplomatic trips.12
China represented another key base of support for the Afghan rebels. Chinese leaders, the CIA explained, saw Moscow’s intervention as a move that added “another link in the Soviet encirclement of China” and threatened Pakistan. In response, Beijing strengthened its relations with Islamabad and launched a program to provide aid to the Mujahideen. Zbigniew Brzezinski had reached out to Beijing and encouraged China to expand its support for the rebels. In the coming years, witnesses would report the “widespread use of Chinese-manufactured arms—supplied via Pakistan—in Afghanistan.” The similarity between Chinese and Soviet arms, moreover, contributed to the goal of keeping the arms supply covert. China had also begun training Afghan fighters at camps inside China. By the end of the war in 1989, China had sent a reported four hundred million dollars in aid to the Mujahideen.13
A “COMPLETE BLITZ”
Faced with the task of fighting a protracted guerrilla war in rough terrain surrounded by a largely hostile population, Soviet troops took many of their frustrations out on local villagers. One British observer traveling on the road from Iran to Herat described a deserted village that had once been home to some five thousand people. “I didn’t see more than ten inhabitants there,” he wrote. Soviet aircraft had launched a “complete blitz,” destroying nearly every building in the area and leaving the ground pockmarked with craters. The entire region was now deserted. The local vineyards had been “reduced to gray dust.” “The town that I stayed in,” he wrote, “looks like Hiroshima.” Human rights observers working with Helsinki Watch and Asia Watch concluded that the Soviets, after failing to win the support of the rural population, had “turned their firepower on civilians.” The Soviets had resorted to a policy of indiscriminate reprisals against noncombatants in the countryside. If a convoy came under attack, the Soviets “attack the nearest village.” If a region was known to harbor Mujahideen, Soviet planes launched bombing raids. Aerial bombing devastated rural communities. Afghan villagers learned to guess the intentions of aircraft flying overhead by their altitude: high and fast meant the population was safe; low and slow signaled an attack. Fighter-bombers arrived first, bombing mosques, shops, and houses. Next came helicopter gunships, which targeted the villagers and livestock that survived the initial bombardment.14 In a “war of logistics,” Moscow aimed to destroy support for the rebels by devastating the rural population that supported them. Soviet forces systematically attacked granaries, destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, and rounded up young men for conscription in a bid to depopulate troublesome regions. These operations drove millions of Afghans to become refugees and, in the process, deprived the Mujahideen of shelter and supplies, forcing the rebels deeper into the mountains.15
Most of the refugees fled across the border into Pakistan. By 1982, dozens of camps lined the border. Two and a half years into the war, nearly one in five Afghans had fled, making them the largest refugee population on the planet. The tent cities had begun to look less like temporary camps and more like permanent settlements—mud-and-stone huts were replacing white canvas tents; mosques, bazaars, schools, and clinics had sprouted up; green Islamic Mujahideen flags flapped in the wind that blew down the mountainsides. The camps buzzed with refugees, nomads, rebel fighters, and Pakistani tribesmen. The United Nations, World Food Programme, and outside countries spent around a million dollars per day on food and medical supplies for the nearly three million displaced Afghans. Meanwhile, the millions of sheep, goats, and camels that the refugees had brought with them picked local pastures clean.16 Beyond humanitarian concerns, U.S. officials recognized the political value of support for the refugees. As the embassy staff in Islamabad wrote, “assistance to the refugees serves important U.S. interests in the region—including stability in Pakistan, assurance of continuity for [Pakistan’s] role in giving haven to the refugees, and the viability of the resistance in Afghanistan.”17 The world’s largest population of refugees—more than 2.5 million by some counts—was an appendage to the war across the border, providing safe haven, logistical support, and propaganda for the Mujahideen’s struggle against the Soviet occupation.
The Soviets also struggled to maintain their supply lines. Moscow moved three-quarters of its equipment and supplies into Afghanistan along the Salang Highway, a short trek from Massoud’s Mujahideen stronghold in the Panjshir Valley. The entrance to the hundred-mile-long valley is guarded by a steep gorge, which then opens up to fields of maize and wheat, vineyards, and apricot orchards. Forces in the valley were also close enough to threaten Bagram Air Base, the largest Soviet airfield in Afghanistan, and the Afghan capital, Kabul. Soviet commanders could not long tolerate the presence of so fierce a rebel warlord as Massoud at the doorstep of their most vital installations. In April 1980, the Soviets launched the first of an eventual nine offensives to pacify the Panjshir. Three Soviet battalions, along with around a thousand Afghan soldiers, swept into the valley, clearing minefields, repairing bridges, and taking rebel positions. Massoud’s guerrillas retreated before the onslaught, laying ambushes and sabotaging roads. Soviet forces advanced to the end of the valley to declare victory. As the Soviets withdrew, however, bands of Mujahideen filtered back into the valley, launching sporadic attacks on the retreating Russians. This first sweep established a pattern the Soviets would follow throughout the war: after taking an area using massive force, they would declare victory and withdraw, leaving the rebels, most of whom had retreated in advance of the onslaught, to retake the area.18
In such a war, decisive victory was all but impossible. Still, this did not stop the Soviets from trying. In May 1982, Soviet commanders launched their largest operation yet: a fifth major assault on Massoud’s forces in the Panjshir Valley. The sweep came in part in retaliation for a guerrilla attack on Bagram Air Base in April that destroyed twenty-three aircraft and helicopters. Some twelve thousand troops participated in the offensive alongside tanks, mobile artillery, and combat vehicles. The ground forces were supported by massive waves of helicopter gunships and warplanes. The assault began with aerial bombardments followed by helicopters that dropped troops on key positions. Before the attackers closed in, Massoud was able to evacuate his three thousand guerrillas to the surrounding heights. There, the Mujahideen set up firing positions on the Soviet forces below. A Western reporter claimed that Massoud’s forces destroyed fifty vehicles and thirty-five aircraft in the first ten days of the offensives. Rebel attacks on the Salang Highway nearby destroyed another sixty vehicles and blocked the vital route. “The Russians can stay as long as they want,” one rebel commander boasted. “There is nothing much they can do except drive their tanks up and down the valley. Their bombing does not bother us.” But the sweep was more devastating for civilians. Soviet bombardments destroyed houses, fields, and irrigation systems; slaughtered livestock; and killed scores of civilians.19 While Massoud and the Panjshir had become a symbol of the resistance, the Soviets’ failure to destroy the guerrilla forces in the pivotal early years of the war boded ill for their broader efforts in Afghanistan.
Unable to dislodge Massoud’s forces from the Panjshir, Soviet commanders brokered a truce with the guerrilla leader in 1983. Three years into the war, the Kremlin had come to see Massoud as not simply a rebel fighter but also a shrewd political leader. “I’m not an adversary of the Soviet Union or the Soviet people,” he told Russian negotiators. Under the cease-fire, both sides agreed to refrain from major operations, giving the Soviets greater security for their convoys passing through the Salang Tunnel and Massoud’s forces an opportunity to regroup and focus on disputes with rival Mujahideen groups. Massoud also put energy into building up a civil administration in the Panjshir Valley. The Kremlin’s willingness to negotiate with a Mujahideen commander was novel, but it did not last. After two failed Soviet assassination attempts, Massoud allowed the truce to expire in March 1984 and resumed operations against the Salang Highway the following month. Soon after, the Soviets launched their seventh and largest assault on the Panjshir Valley. Anticipating the offensive, Massoud evacuated his troops and much of the civilian population. The Soviets launched a combined air and ground attack consisting of three squadrons of Tu-16 bombers, the 108th Motorized Rifle Division, and five thousand Afghan troops. On April 16, Massoud blew up three bridges and began launching attacks on supply convoys in a bid to disrupt Soviet preparations. Five days later, Mujahideen fighters staged an assault on Bagram. Soviet commanders responded by pummeling the Panjshir with heavy bombing raids and sending combat vehicles roaring up the valley behind heavy artillery barrages. Meanwhile, Mi-24 helicopters dropped elite units into positions to trap retreating guerrillas, forcing Massoud’s fighters higher up into the mountains. After several weeks, Moscow declared victory. Massoud had survived, but the Soviets had established a permanent ground presence in the valley.20
After three years of fighting in Afghanistan, there was still no end in sight. Soviet forces won most of their engagements with the rebels, but the insurgency survived. The Mujahideen continued to fight with religious zeal, maintained a complex set of tribal allegiances, and fiercely resisted attempts at outside control. Making matters worse, Washington showed renewed determination to continue its support for the insurgency. Ronald Reagan, the hard-line conservative Republican presidential nominee, had won a resounding victory over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. The Reagan administration was determined to increase the pressure on the Soviets around the world, prompting some commentators to speak of the rise of a second Cold War under Reagan’s leadership. Operations in Afghanistan would form the centerpiece of Reagan’s Third World offensive against Moscow. The Reagan administration, working alongside the Pakistani ISI, had determined to dramatically increase the cost of Moscow’s intervention in both blood and treasure. As the Reagan White House geared up to launch a multipronged offensive against Soviet power around the world, Afghanistan emerged as the most promising theater of operation. As one historian argues, “Among the numerous battles Reagan waged around the world, Afghanistan should be understood as the central front.”21
“LIKE LIGHTNING ON THEIR HEADS”
Even as the Soviets struggled to put down the insurgency in Afghanistan, another conflict erupted in neighboring Iran.
The Iranian Revolution, which had helped spark the conflict in Afghanistan, continued to destabilize the wider region. On September 22, 1980, under the cover of darkness, squadrons of Iraqi jets screamed over the border in a surprise attack on ten Iranian airfields. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein hoped to destroy Iran’s air force fleet as it sat on the tarmac in an operation modeled on Israel’s 1967 strike against Egypt. The Iraqis achieved the element of surprise, but their bombs were less effective. Poor training and second-rate Soviet avionics ensured that most of their strikes fell wide of their targets. As clouds of smoke drifted over Iranian air bases and pilots scrambled to their jets, Iraqi infantry and armored divisions stormed across the border at eight different points. In the north, Iraqi troops pushed into Iranian Kurdistan to block any possible Iranian counterattack against the Kirkuk oil fields. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces in the central region seized the high ground along the Baghdad–Tehran road to block a counterattack against the Iraqi capital. The real objective of the offensive, however, lay to the south, along the contested Shatt al-Arab waterway (forming the border between the two countries in the south) and the Iranian coastal cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr. Here, the Iraqis planned to expand the Iraqi coastline with a conquest of the southern borderlands, which contained large numbers of Arabs, minorities in overwhelmingly Persian Iran. The assault transformed the ancient frontier between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires once more into a war zone and touched off a conflict that would drag on for nearly eight years.22
Saddam’s motives for the invasion grew out of both ambitions and anxieties. Five years earlier, Iraq had signed an agreement with Iran that recognized shared control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway and renounced Baghdad’s claims to the Arab province of Khuzestan. The agreement, which favored Tehran, embittered Saddam and much of the controlling Ba’ath Party leadership. As part of the agreement, Tehran agreed to cease its support to Kurdish rebels in Iraq, allowing Baghdad to reassert control over Kurdish territories in the north. But the 1979 revolution, the fall of the Shah, and the near disintegration of the Iranian military presented Saddam’s regime with a new opportunity to deliver on its revanchist dreams. Iran’s refusal to revisit the agreements meant that Baghdad would need to regain its former control of the waterway “with blood and weapons,” he told his generals in the weeks before the invasion. “This is a historical chance. It means we’re getting back the Shatt al-Arab and the lands along our border but it means something greater, it means that Iraq has moved from one stage to another.” The Ba’athist leader planned to seize key areas along the frontier and present Tehran a fait accompli. If the Iranians chose to escalate, Saddam boasted, “We will retaliate immediately. It is just a single phone call for our decision [to launch a military assault] to reach them just like lightening [sic] on their heads.”23
CIA analysts warned that a victory in the war against Iran would dramatically increase Baghdad’s influence in the Arab world, at least in the short term. “Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the smaller Persian Gulf states, and perhaps even Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization will pay greater deference to Iraq,” a report argued, “but they also will try to circumscribe Iraqi power and exploit Iraqi ambitions for their own purposes.” Meanwhile, an Iraqi victory would threaten Israeli and Egyptian leaders, raise the odds of “leftists” seizing power in Tehran, and open the door to increased Soviet influence in the region.24 The best-case scenario for Washington and its allies, then, would be a limited Iraqi victory that undermined the power of Tehran’s ayatollahs but left Iran intact as a counterbalance to Iraqi power in the Gulf.
Beyond presenting an opportunity for the assault, the revolution in Tehran raised dangers for Saddam’s Sunni regime in Baghdad. Iraq’s Shia majority had greeted the news of Khomeini’s rise with enthusiasm. “Iran has been sinking in its own blood for an entire year,” Saddam had told his advisors in February 1979. “We are not worried about the current state of Iran, but rather the unpredictable outcome of the different phases [of the revolution] in Iran.”25 In March 1979, prominent Iraqi Shia cleric Baqir al-Sadr sent a cable to Khomeini, congratulating the Ayatollah on his victory and expressing hope for more Islamic victories to come. When Iraqi authorities banned Sadr from traveling to Tehran two months later, a surge of demonstrations swept through the Iraqi Shia community. In response, the regime staged mass arrests of suspected organizers and threw Sadr in prison. The riots that followed gave Saddam and the regime an excuse to crush Iraq’s leading Shia movement, Al-Da’wa, and execute hundreds of prisoners. The following April, authorities tortured and executed Sadr after a failed assassination attempt against Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. Saddam deported to Iran some thirty-five Shia Iraqis suspected of harboring hostility toward the Sunni-controlled state.26
As sectarian tensions rose throughout Iraq, the Ba’athist regime grew ever more suspicious of Iranian machinations. Khomeini and his followers made no secret of their desire to spread their revolution to the wider Islamic world. Neighboring Iraq and its Shia majority (some two-thirds of the population) sat at the top of Tehran’s list. While Khomeini formed the vanguard of the Islamic revolution, Saddam was a contender for the leadership of the secular Arab nationalist revolution—a position vacated by Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat in the wake of the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. In the summer of 1980, Saddam and his regime looked eastward, to an increasingly radical Shia regime in Iran that had issued open calls for Islamic revolution and had given support to Shia dissidents inside Iraq. That same regime had alienated the majority of the world community by holding the American embassy staff hostage for the better part of a year even as its military teetered on the brink of disintegration. For Ba’athist officials in Baghdad, the time appeared ripe to launch a preemptive attack on Iran that would topple Khomeini’s hostile regime, remove the source of revolutionary unrest among Iraq’s domestic Shia, and reclaim the privileges Iraq lost in the 1975 Algiers Agreement signed with Iran. Furthermore, Saddam perceived a narrow window of time in which to move before Khomeini could consolidate full control in Tehran, reconstitute his military forces, and restore Iran’s diplomatic standing in the wider world community. By mid-1980, Iraqi military intelligence concluded that the political turmoil of the revolution and the break with the United States had gutted Iran’s military capabilities: “[I]t is clear that, at present, Iran has no power to launch wide offensive operations against Iraq, or to defend itself on a large scale.” By striking in September 1980, Saddam and his generals seized what they saw as a historic opportunity to transform the region. They could hardly have been more wrong.27
“THEY WILL FIGHT UNTIL THEY DIE”
For the Iranians, the invasion came as both a blessing and a curse. The small contingent of military forces along the border could do little to slow the Iraqi advance. As Iranian troops scrambled to redeploy to the front, it appeared as if Saddam’s gambit had paid off. Nevertheless, Khomeini took a defiant stance to the outside world: “A thief has come, thrown a pebble and then fled back to his home.” The mood in the capital was one of panic, however. The regime was well aware of the poor state of military preparations, and some leaders began planning for a war of guerrilla resistance against the victorious Iraqis. In the days following the initial assault, however, a different picture emerged. Saddam’s air strikes had inflicted less damage than either side had expected. With considerable effort, Iranian ground crews managed to launch a total of 140 F-4 Phantoms, F-5 Tigers, F-14 Tomcats, and support aircraft in a punishing round of reprisals that did considerable damage to Iraqi airfields. The first days of the Iran-Iraq War showcased the contest between American and Soviet warplanes as Iraqi MiGs clashed with the American-made jets flown by the Iranians. In general, the Iranian aircrews proved superior, but Tehran’s inability to secure replacement parts for its aircraft suggested that this would not long be the case.28
Saddam had also miscalculated the political impact of the invasion in Tehran. The Iraqi leader had gambled that the situation inside Iran in the wake of the revolution was chaotic and that Khomeini’s leadership was weak. Moreover, Saddam expected the Arab population in Khuzestan to welcome the invasion and join forces with the invaders. The attack achieved the opposite, however. Faced with an external threat, Iranians throughout the country and from all walks of life put aside domestic divisions and rallied to support the regime. The national emergency created by the assault also allowed Khomeini and his supporters in the regime to further consolidate their authority. The clerics launched a campaign of censorship in the press, coupled with moves to crack down on dissent. At the same time, the Iraqi attack gave a new sense of urgency to the ranks of the regime’s supporters. Thousands of volunteers flocked to Tehran’s defense. Far from dividing Iran, Iraq’s invasion united it and gave the Khomeinists even greater power.29
At the front, Saddam’s offensive had stalled. As the southern thrust of the Iraqi advance moved toward Khorramshahr and the massive oil facility at Abadan, it began to encounter stiff resistance from Iranian defenders. Khomeini called upon Iranians to turn each town in the invaders’ path into a “Stalingrad.” While Iraqi guns pounded the two locations, Iranian police, marines, naval cadets, and militias organized a ragtag defense. As black smoke poured from burning oil tanks at Abadan—set aflame by air strikes—Iraqi armored divisions pushed into the city of Khorramshahr. Iranian snipers harried the advancing Iraqis as they fought their way past ruined warehouses on the outskirts of both cities. Both armies rained artillery shells down upon deserted neighborhoods as soldiers and armor battled among the smoking ruins. “You know these Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Iranian soldiers are crazy,” an Iraqi told one reporter. “They will fight until they die.” By October 7, the Iraqis had seized Khorramshahr’s port. Aside from occasional sniper fire from Iranians hiding in the wreckage, the docks lay silent. Iraqi soldiers picked their way through piles of damaged cargo on the piers—rolls of toilet paper flapping in the breeze, vegetable shortening melting in the sun. The retreating Iranians had left obscene graffiti mocking the Iraqis and their leader, Saddam Hussein. By the time the Iraqis gained control of the city, street fighting had leveled much of the city and left some seven thousand casualties. Both sides began referring to the city as Khunistan, or “City of Blood.”30
As soldiers mopped up the Iranian resistance in Khorramshahr, Iraqi forces pushed east toward Abadan (bordered by rivers in the north and east and the Persian Gulf in the south and west), throwing up pontoon bridges across the Karun River. Ten miles of palm groves separated the Iraqis south of Basra from Iran’s massive oil complex at Abadan. Iranian helicopter gunships strafed the advancing troops as Iranian artillery, dug in around Abadan, shelled the invaders. Iraqi guns returned fire, sending columns of smoke up around the refinery that turned the sky brown. Inside the city, residents dug trenches in the streets in anticipation of the coming assault. While Iraqi guns maintained a nearly continuous stream of fire on the defenders, Iranian warplanes staged retaliatory strikes on enemy artillery positions. Although the Iraqis were able to encircle the island almost completely and advance to within a mile of the city, Iranian reinforcements landed at the southern tip of Abadan and bolstered its defenses. The Iranians managed to repel repeated Iraqi attempts to take the island until the third week of November, when heavy rains turned the approaches to Abadan into an impassable quagmire.31
With the Iraqi offensive halted, all parties had a chance to take stock. The invasion, which was supposed to have accomplished its goals within two weeks, had not gone according to plan. Even so, the capture of Khorramshahr was a significant victory. “No major city in the Middle East,” one historian wrote, “had fallen since the 1967 war.” The price in manpower and equipment had been high, however, and the Iraqis could no longer sustain their offensive. As Saddam’s troops turned to preparing defensive positions, Iran’s leaders prepared for a counterattack. With the invasion stalled, the Islamic regime seized the opportunity to further consolidate power and launch a nationwide mobilization. Individual mosques throughout the country were charged with fielding units composed of twenty-two men who would receive training as part of the home guard, which was reorganized as the Basij paramilitary militia, which would receive its marching orders from the newly created Revolutionary Guard, charged with defending Iran’s Islamic institutions. The Iranians recognized that they would not be able to match the Iraqis tank for tank. As long as the regime remained isolated in the world community and cut off from American supplies of weapons, Tehran would face a disadvantage in mechanized war. Iranian commanders therefore turned to their country’s massive demographic advantages—Iran had triple the population of Iraq—to counter their foe’s war machines. Iran would wage a people’s war against the invasion, symbolized most dramatically by the use of “human wave” assaults. The twenty-two-man Basij squads would rush forward in battle, each unit tasked with seizing a specific objective, and overwhelm the Iraqis with their masses. To negate Iraqi command of the air, the Iranians began launching night assaults. With their legions of Basij soldiers marching under the banner of the Ayatollah, and backed by units of the Revolutionary Guard, Tehran hoped to expel the Iraqi invaders.32
With the coming of spring 1981, the war resumed in its full ferocity. Iraqi commanders hurled their forces against Abadan in an effort to break the defenders. By midyear, some sixty thousand troops were besieging the island. But the defenders were bolstered by a more stable political situation in Tehran, where the clerics had consolidated control over the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. The revolutionary regime now set about integrating its political, religious, and military organs by launching an Islamic education campaign in its military ranks. Clerics called upon the Basij and Revolutionary Guard to view the war as a battle of Islamic forces against nonbelievers. Khomeini denounced the “infidel” Saddam as “a perpetrator of corruption.” In a public address, he proclaimed to Iranians, “You are fighting to protect Islam and he is fighting to destroy Islam. . . . There is no question of peace or compromise.” Conversely, Saddam had strengthened his position in Baghdad. Iraqis now celebrated the dictator’s birthday as a national holiday and praised him as “the greatest Arab hero since the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1257” and “the savior of the nation from darkness, backwardness and disunity.” The Iraqi leader proclaimed the war dead martyrs because they had perished in defense of Islam against “the Persian infidels.” Fearing that Iraq’s Shia majority might choose to support its coreligionists in Iran, Saddam focused on the ethnic divisions between Iraqi Arabs and Iranian Persians. As both sides amplified their rhetoric, the bloodbath continued. By the first anniversary of the war’s outbreak, some 38,000 Iranians and 22,000 Iraqis had been killed.33
Iran launched a massive counteroffensive in the autumn of 1981. Iranian troops struck Iraqi positions around Abadan at midnight on September 26, in a move that pushed the invaders back to the Karun River. Having relieved the immediate pressure on its oil facilities in the south, Tehran turned its attention to northern Khuzestan. Iranian commanders had devised a set of tactics that would prove devastatingly effective against the Iraqis’ superior firepower. The Iraqis, reconnaissance revealed, rarely prepared adequate defenses around their bivouacs and fought poorly at night. Iranian assaults would be led by hordes of Basij and Revolutionary Guard units aimed at overwhelming the comparatively weak Popular Army units that the Iraqis used to fill out their lines of more experienced combat troops. As gaps appeared in the Iraqi lines, the Iranians would rush in, before fanning out to encircle the remaining Iraqi troops at the front. In this way, Iranian forces scored victories at Susangerd and Bostan in late November that created a vulnerable Iraqi salient around Dezful. After building up its forces over the course of the winter, Tehran launched the three-pronged Fath ol-Mobin operation against Dezful at midnight on March 22, 1982. Iranian columns cut through the Iraqi forces before closing around several Iraqi brigades on March 30.34
Tehran’s victories in the north and at Abadan left the city of Khorramshahr as the last major chunk of Iranian territory still under Iraqi occupation. Both sides began preparations for the coming battle. Saddam placed considerable political value on holding the city and committed his forces to a defensive strategy. Iraqi engineers prepared a network of earthworks, bunkers connected by underground passages, and minefields, and began razing buildings and clearing vegetation to create fire zones. Baghdad sought to transform Khorramshahr into a fortress defended by 150,000 Iraqi troops. On April 30, the Iranians launched another offensive, spearheaded by 35,000 Revolutionary Guards attacking Iraqi positions along the Baghdad–Basra road. The second phase of the operation began on May 1, when Iranian forces crossed the Karun River. Five days later, another Iranian force struck near Hoveyzeh and Hamid. Human-wave attacks slowly overwhelmed the Iraqi troops, who clung in vain to their prepared defensive positions. On May 9, Iranian troops seized control of the road running through Hamid, cutting supply lines and forcing the Iraqis to abandon their defenses and pull back to a ring around Khorramshahr. The city had become a trap for Saddam’s troops. Short of supplies and ammunition, and outnumbered by a factor of two to one, the Iraqis could do little to stop the flood of Iranian troops. After ten days of savage fighting, Iranian troops cut Baghdad’s supply line into the city. By May 23, the remaining Iraqi defenders had fallen back to their last redoubt inside Khorramshahr. As Saddam’s forces began to collapse, 30 to 40 percent managed to escape across the Shatt al-Arab. Another twelve thousand were caught inside the city and taken prisoner. The fighting transformed the port city, in the words of one reporter, into “a wasteland of rubble, minefields and abandoned trenches. Virtually no building has escaped destruction. There is no life in the ruins.”35
“A GRAND HISTORIC BATTLE”
With the liberation of Khorramshahr at the end of May 1982, Tehran expelled the Iraqis from all but a narrow strip of its territory. The Iraqis had suffered significant casualties, and another forty thousand of its troops had been taken prisoner. The war had also become a heavy burden on the Iraqi economy; by 1983, Baghdad carried twenty-five billion dollars in foreign debt. Blame for the defeats fell squarely on the shoulders of Saddam. The Iraqi leader had launched the war, served as its strategic engineer, and now carried the blame for recent setbacks. In June 1982, the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), the military brass, and top Ba’ath officials held a meeting without the dictator to hammer out a cease-fire proposal. Baghdad proposed a truce in exchange for acceptance of the prewar status quo—a tacit admission that the war had been a mistake. Had Khomeini accepted the proposal, Saddam would likely have been pushed out of power. Tehran’s rejection, however, gave the Iraqi leader an opening to reassert his control. Saddam stressed his personal role as the only leader who could deliver Iraq from its current predicament. At the same time, he cracked down on any hint of opposition, announcing that he had personally shot the minister of health for suggesting that he, Saddam, step down. He reorganized the RCC and the Ba’ath leadership, and also worked to reorganize the military, promoting officers loyal to the president and dumping enormous resources into rebuilding the organization’s fighting capacity. The shift from offensive to defensive operations demanded a new strategy: Baghdad also increased spending on its chemical and biological weapons programs and its surface-to-surface missile force, in the hope of using both as deterrents against Khomeini’s legions.36
While the summer of 1982 witnessed the reconsolidation of the regime in Baghdad, it also saw a hardening of attitudes in Tehran. The fighting had dispelled any U.S. hopes for the collapse of the Ayatollah’s regime. Khomeini and his supporters had faced periodic internal challenges as the revolution solidified into a new regime. The most dangerous of these came from the left-wing People’s Mujahideen, which had been fighting an urban guerrilla war against the clerical regime since 1981. Khomeini survived these internal challenges, however, at the same time that Iranian military forces turned back the Iraqi invasion. A 1982 CIA report concluded that the ruling clerics had institutionalized their power in Iran, “repressed internal opposition forces,” and “Islamified” the military. The regime had maintained its support among Iran’s “lower class” majority and launched a campaign to centralize economic planning and development.37 Moreover, the CIA warned, Tehran was taking “full advantage of the impasse over [the Lebanese Civil War] to extend its influence in the Arab world and promote its hegemony in the Gulf.” Iran had stepped into the role of “defender of Syria and the PLO” and had begun calling on the Gulf states to “return to the fold of Islam” and distance themselves from Washington.38
On the heels of its victory in Khorramshahr, Khomeini’s regime faced a decision: whether to declare victory and seek an end to the war or to press its advantage and invade Iraq. The proponents of the former option could argue that Tehran had successfully defended its territory and, in the eyes of much of the international community, been the victim of Iraqi aggression—to continue the war would cast the regime as the aggressor and risk further alienating it from the wider world. Those calling for invasion could argue, conversely, that Iran had paid a heavy price in the war and now had an opportunity to destroy the hated Ba’athist regime and restore access to the Shia holy sites at Najaf and Karbala, to the south of Baghdad. While Khomeini understood the dangers of invading Iraq, he was loath to sue for peace—tens of thousands of Iranians had died in the fighting, and their sacrifice must be avenged. Sometime around June 20, 1982, the regime made the fateful decision to invade Iraq in a bid to destroy Saddam’s regime.39
At 11:30 p.m. on the night of July 13, Iranian armed forces launched Operation Ramadan al-Mubarak. The previous day, Iranian state television had announced, “A grand historic battle is about to take place. The sons of Khomeini have gone to the Front, with the intention of marching to occupy Karbala.” The offensive aimed at breaching Iraqi lines in the south and laying siege to Iraq’s main port city of Basra. Tehran hoped that the Shia population there would rise up against the regime and welcome the invaders. Basra’s defenses were formidable, however. Seven divisions occupied the city, which was ringed by a maze of extensive earthworks bristling with barbed wire and guarded by minefields and canals designed to slow the progress of attackers. Iraqi commanders had also positioned heavy armor along with helicopter gunships to guard the approaches to the city. Over the next month, the Iranians sent five human-wave assaults across the malarial marshes that lay between their front lines and the city. Led by Basij troops who had been sent ahead to clear mines, companies of Revolutionary Guard assaulted the city. Iraqi counterattacks focused on striking the Iranian flanks with mobile armor and gunships. After four weeks of fighting—during the height of which some observers estimated a thousand people were killed each day—Tehran halted its offensive. Iranian gains were meager: a strip of land twelve miles long and three miles wide. For this the Iranians had suffered a casualty ratio of three to one against the defenders.40
Iran’s invasion helped resolve a dilemma for the superpowers. American officials had little affinity for either side. Baghdad was home to one of the more radical regimes in the Arab world, which also happened to be aligned with the Soviet Union. The regime in Tehran, for its part, was viciously anti-American—the hostage crisis was still fresh in the minds of most Americans—and had denounced the United States as the “great Satan.” “In a perfect world,” CIA analyst Bruce Riedel later wrote, “the United States would have liked to see the war either end quickly or go on indefinitely.” However, Iran’s offensive in the summer of 1982 raised the worst possible scenario: a victory for the ayatollahs. “Yes, the Iraqi regime was despicable,” Riedel explained, “but still the feeling was that if Iran won the war, that would be the worst of everything—the Middle East as we knew it would soon be overrun by anti-Western fanatics. . . . It was a siege mentality. And yes, we were in that same bunker with Saddam Hussein. Keeping Saddam going became an overriding policy objective of the United States in the region.” Iran’s invasion cast Ba’athist Iraq as a potential bulwark against the spread of Khomeini’s revolution into the wider region.41
In the days leading up to Iran’s attack, Reagan’s national security advisor, William Clark, had warned the president that the invasion “will create shock waves throughout the Gulf and pose further dangers for U.S. interests in the Middle East, which are already threatened because of Lebanon.” If successful, he claimed, the Iranian offensive could topple Saddam’s regime and destabilize pro-American governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf. In this same vein, a declassified Reagan administration paper from mid-1982 advocated a “tilt toward Iraq” as the best option for dealing with the conflict in the region. The paper argued that the outcome of the war would impact U.S. access to Gulf oil and help decide Iran’s strategic orientation in the larger Cold War struggle. Washington’s policies, the paper continued, should seek to shield the Arab world from both Soviet influence and “radical forces (such as Iran).” At the same time, the United States should expand its military capabilities in the Middle East in the hope of deterring “overt Soviet aggression and, failing deterrence, to fight a conventional war limited to the region while denying the Soviets control of the Gulf.” In light of these concerns, the paper concluded, U.S. officials should consider providing strategic intelligence to the regime in Baghdad in an effort to bolster its defenses against the Iranian invasion.42
While officials in Washington deliberated over a tilt toward Iraq, Moscow also began to reconsider its policies toward the belligerents. Like the United States, the USSR had initially sought to remain out of the war. Although Soviet leaders seized the opportunity to blame Washington for fomenting the crisis, they urged both sides to cease hostilities and move toward de-escalation. Indeed, news that its client in Baghdad had launched an invasion without first consulting the Kremlin did not come as a welcome surprise. Saddam’s move aggravated an already strained relationship between Baghdad and Moscow brought on by Ba’athist repression of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) dating back to 1978. Rather than turn a blind eye to Baghdad’s efforts to crush its domestic Communists, the Kremlin had authorized KGB operatives to open a clandestine aid channel to ICP agents operating a radio station in the northern Kurdish region. Relations between the two countries deteriorated further at the end of 1979, when Saddam denounced the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In early 1980, Moscow authorized the shipment of a thousand antitank rockets and thousands of submachine guns to the ICP. When Iraqi troops stormed across the Shatt al-Arab to attack Iran in September 1980, Soviet leaders were in no mood to lend their support. In retaliation for the attack, the Kremlin canceled all arms shipments to Iraq.43
By the summer of 1981, tensions between Moscow and Baghdad had begun to ease. With his offensive halted on the battlefields around Abadan, Dezful, and Khorramshahr, Saddam had a change of heart and endorsed the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Kremlin reciprocated with a renewal of arms shipments to Baghdad. Iran’s invasion of Iraq the following year created a new sense of urgency in the Kremlin. Frustrated as it might be with Saddam, the Politburo understood that the prospect of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard parading through Baghdad would be disastrous. A victory in Iraq would place Khomeini in a position to stir up Islamic revolutionaries throughout the Arab world, in Afghanistan, and inside the Soviet Union itself. In the summer of 1982, Moscow therefore increased its military support for Saddam’s regime. Nevertheless, Soviet leaders were careful to limit the flow of arms so as not to give the Iraqis an overwhelming advantage against the Iranians. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union wished to see a decisive victory in the war. As historian Christopher Andrew observed, both superpowers bought into Henry Kissinger’s observation “What a pity they can’t both lose!”44
This superpower ambivalence rankled Iraqi leaders. Saddam railed against Washington’s duplicity. “America has two faces,” he told his inner circle; “one face which is the one that it displays in front of us, but there is another face which aims at taming the Iranians though they do not want the Iranians to be defeated.” Baghdad was convinced that Washington would abandon Iraq at the first indication of rapprochement with Tehran. While he was disappointed at the lack of full support from Moscow, Saddam recognized that the Kremlin was merely protecting its own interests by seeking an end to the Gulf conflict. In the eyes of the Iraqi regime, however, the USSR remained a “friendly country.” Ultimately, transcripts of Saddam’s secret conversations reveal that cooperation between parties in the Gulf conflict was born not of any genuine affinity, but rather of ruthless Realpolitik—a fact that would become clear in the coming decade.45
THE APPROACHING STORM
While the Soviet-Afghan and Iran-Iraq Wars escalated, the conflict in Lebanon dragged on. After five years of war and more than forty thousand deaths, the republic’s citizens were accustomed to violence. Couples clad in gold lamé jumpsuits danced in multimillion-dollar nightclubs in East Beirut while snipers and militiamen armed with rocket-propelled grenades guarded the war-torn no-man’s-land that bisected the capital. Shopkeepers who had been chased out of the downtown war zone threw up wooden stalls along the beach from which they continued to sell their wares. Sectarian militias roamed through lawless streets, toting firearms and rocket launchers, and engaging in sporadic clashes with their rivals. “Everyone,” a Western reporter wrote in the spring of 1980, “from the hawkers in the street to the ministers of Government agree [sic] that a new and more vicious phase of the civil war is brewing.”46
Amid this dystopian landscape, the Palestinian liberation movement—which had played a central role in sparking the war—found itself at a crossroads. The rapprochement between Egypt and Israel and the 1976 war with Syria had dealt serious blows to the PLO’s efforts to gain a seat in the peace process and a state in the West Bank and Gaza. However, the organization had gained unprecedented levels of international recognition by the end of the decade and emerged as a key player in Lebanon. The guerrillas had survived Operation Litani and now controlled large stretches of Lebanese territory. Shielded by UN peacekeepers in the south and the semifortified frontier between Christian and Muslim forces that began with the Green Line in Beirut, the PLO found itself in a position of relative security. With Lebanon split into sectarian enclaves, Palestinian leaders enjoyed control over a virtual mini-state stretching from West Beirut down into South Lebanon. Within this territory, Arafat and his comrades built the so-called Fakhani Republic, a virtual state-in-exile, with the structures of a formal government, in the Fakhani neighborhood of West Beirut, complete with a bureaucracy and financial infrastructure. At the same time, the organization began transforming its military units into a conventional force. Where the PLO had previously fielded primarily guerrilla units, the organization now began to acquire tanks, artillery, and combat brigades. On the international front, the Palestinians also increased the numbers of foreign military missions, sending advisors and trainers to revolutionary groups throughout the Third World. Among others, PLO officers worked with Nicaraguan Sandinistas, African National Congress guerrillas in South Africa, Iranian revolutionaries, and liberation fighters from Zimbabwe.47
This buildup did not escape the attention of Israeli policymakers, however, who still hoped to crush the Palestinian nationalists and their mini-state in Lebanon. On June 30, 1981, Prime Minister Begin and his Likud Party won another round of national elections in Israel. Begin’s new cabinet included a larger number of hawks and made the notable addition of Ariel Sharon as defense minister. The white-haired, barrel-chested Sharon enjoyed a fearsome reputation as one of Israel’s greatest generals. A decorated veteran of the 1948 and 1956 wars, Sharon had commanded Israel’s first commando group, Unit 101, charged with launching reprisals against Palestinian villages in the wake of guerrilla attacks—including the infamous 1953 Qibya Massacre. He achieved greater notoriety during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when he commanded an armored division in the Sinai. In the mid-1970s, Sharon entered politics and became a strong proponent of building Israeli settlements in internationally recognized Palestinian territory.
Following Likud’s victory in the 1981 parliamentary elections, Begin and Sharon moved to strike at the PLO. On July 10, 1981, Israeli jets attacked Palestinian targets in South Lebanon. Palestinian fighters responded with a barrage of rockets aimed at the town of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee region of northern Israel. The escalation continued with Israeli air strikes against PLO positions in Damour, outside Beirut, and another, deadlier round of PLO rocket attacks that killed three Israelis. By July 16, Israeli warplanes were bombing bridges in the south and Palestinian bases in other parts of the country. The following day, Israeli planes struck several PLO buildings in Beirut in an apparent bid to kill Arafat. Although the chairman survived, the raid killed some three hundred people, mainly civilians. PLO spokesmen accused Begin of waging “a war of genocide against the Palestinians.” As rockets continued to rain down on Galilee and the PLO remained defiant, Israeli leaders concluded that their current policies were ineffective.48
The Israelis were not the only players troubled by the war in Lebanon. Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, had intervened in Lebanon in 1976 to impose his will on his smaller neighbor, expand Damascus’s influence, and prevent the Lebanese chaos from creeping across the border into Syria. After years of fighting, however, none of these goals had been achieved. Syria’s intervention created a substantial drain on the nation’s finances. Moreover, as the violence and instability continued, a stream of refugees filtered into Syria, creating an added burden to the nation’s slowing economy. Assad had also decided to reverse course in Lebanon, severing his embarrassing alliance with the conservative Maronites and patching over his relations with the Muslims and the PLO. Arafat remained a stubbornly independent force, however, and refused to submit to Damascus’s will. The strains of the intervention had also helped to fan domestic troubles in Syria. Opposition to Assad’s regime from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood fed on economic and political resentments created by the Lebanese intervention. The Brotherhood’s supporters railed against Assad’s betrayal of the Palestinians at the same time that they suffered under rising inflation and economic upheaval. Predictably, domestic violence escalated in Syria from 1976 onward. A string of bombings and assassinations by the Brotherhood targeted prominent Alawites (members of the Shia sect to which Assad’s family belonged) throughout the country, sending a message to Assad’s regime. The bloodiest incident took place on June 16, 1979, when gunmen massacred dozens of Alawite cadets at the Aleppo Artillery School. In addition to the conflict in Lebanon, Assad now faced a war at home—one he intended to win, regardless of the cost. Over the next years, the spate of assassinations continued, punctuated by periodic urban uprisings and bloody retributions from the regime. Assad sent in his best troops to crush the Brotherhood. Commanded by his brother Rifaat, the Defense Companies was an elite, heavily armed praetorian guard charged with defending the regime. In June 1980, in retaliation for an attempt on Assad’s life, Rifaat sent his soldiers into the Tadmor Prison, in Palmyra, where they systematically butchered some five hundred Muslim Brothers inside their cells. The following month, the regime massacred scores of young men in Aleppo.49
The final reckoning came in the old city of Hama, famous for its giant wooden waterwheels along the Orontes River. A stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hama had been in the regime’s crosshairs for years. In the early morning hours of February 2, 1982, snipers ambushed a group of soldiers sent to arrest a Brotherhood leader. When government forces sent reinforcements, loudspeakers in mosques throughout the city raised the alarm, proclaiming a jihad against the attackers. Soon, Islamic guerrillas had overrun police and government buildings throughout the city and slaughtered dozens of Ba’athist officials. Assad now found his opportunity. In retaliation for the uprising, Rifaat’s Defense Companies launched a murderous siege against Hama. Twelve thousand government troops surrounded the city in a bid to crush the Brotherhood once and for all. For the next three weeks, paratroopers engaged in bloody street fighting while tanks and artillery shelled guerrilla positions. In heavy fighting that left scores of civilians dead, the Brothers were slowly pushed back to the old quarters of the city. There, hidden in the labyrinth of narrow streets and ancient houses, they staged a desperate defense. Hundreds of Assad’s troops died in the assault, along with uncounted numbers of civilians caught in the crossfire. At the end of the battle, government forces brought in bulldozers to raze the buildings that served as hiding places for the remaining defenders and their wounded. Thousands were crushed beneath the rubble. When the fighting was over, the regime simply built a new city—roads, shopping malls, hospitals, apartment buildings, schools—on top of the dead.50 Rifaat later boasted that his forces had slaughtered thirty-eight thousand in Hama. Far from downplaying the numbers, the regime touted them. By transforming Hama into a massive cemetery, the regime chose to send a message to other would-be rebels. Assad would show no mercy toward challengers: it was a warning that would echo well into the next century. Assad had decimated the forces of Islamic resistance in Syria and secured his regime for decades to come.51
Hama would not be the only Levantine city to suffer a bloody siege that year. Since 1977, Menachem Begin had waged an indecisive war against the PLO in Lebanon. Air strikes, Christian proxies, and limited invasions had all failed to curb guerrilla operations from the north. By the start of his fifth year in office, Begin was determined to move away from tit-for-tat retaliation and take the offensive against the PLO. At the same time, he believed that Israel had a duty to defend non-Muslim minorities in the region, specifically, the Christians in Lebanon. Begin envisioned the formation of a coalition of non-Muslim groups, led by Israel, that could serve as a geopolitical counterweight to the Muslim majority in the Middle East. The prime minister’s diplomatic vision was backed up by Sharon’s military design. This “big plan” entailed a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to achieve three key objectives: crush the PLO, place the Maronites firmly in control, and drive the Syrians out of Lebanon. It was a bold move designed to tilt the balance of power in the Middle East in Israel’s favor. Much of the Israeli cabinet opposed Begin and Sharon’s strategy, however. An invasion of Lebanon, they feared, would tarnish Israel’s already suffering international image. To circumvent these objections, Sharon implemented a strategy of creeping escalation. Individual reprisals would gradually escalate into a cross-border offensive. Once IDF forces were inside Lebanon, objections from the Israeli cabinet would be insufficient to prevent a drive to Beirut. In preparation for the invasion, Sharon made a clandestine voyage in January 1982 to Beirut to meet with the young Phalangist commander Bashir Gemayel. The following month, Bashir paid a secret visit to Begin in Jerusalem.52
Bashir Gemayel was the brash, impulsive son of Maronite patriarch Pierre Gemayel. The youngest of six children, he was remembered by many as unremarkable aside from his tireless work ethic. Plagued by acne into his twenties, Bashir nonetheless maintained “a kind of puppy-dog openness” that, while charming, suggested “a certain bewilderment about the world,” journalist Jonathan Randal wrote. In contrast to aging leaders such as his father, Jumblatt, and Camille Chamoun, Bashir appeared young and energetic—the hope of a new Lebanon. The thirty-four-year-old’s boyish enthusiasm was only part of the story, however. Bashir had directed his Phalangist militia on vicious raids against Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims. However, his most notorious attacks targeted his Christian rivals. In 1978, Bashir sent one hundred of his men to attack the villa of Tony Franjieh, heir to the rival Maronite Franjieh clan. The Phalangists stormed into the home in the early hours of the morning, killing Franjieh, his wife and three-year-old daughter, and the family dog. Two years later, Bashir’s men again attacked their Christian rivals. This time, the victims were Dany Chamoun’s Tigers, a five-hundred-man militia commanded by the son of former president Camille Chamoun. During the so-called Day of the Long Knives (or the Safra Massacre), Bashir’s forces battled with the Tigers in East Beirut near the hotel complex and seaside resorts. Scores of civilians were caught in the crossfire as the Phalangists massacred Chamoun’s men. Some victims were thrown screaming out of high-rise hotel windows. Estimates of the dead ranged from ninety-four to five hundred men, women, and children.53
Begin and Sharon, along with their Mossad agents, were less interested in Bashir’s bloody rise to power than in his potential to serve as the vassal prince of a new pro-Israeli, Christian state. To overcome objections within the cabinet, Begin and Sharon in late 1981 proposed two operations, Little Pines and Big Pines. The former entailed an invasion of South Lebanon halting at the Litani River; the latter was a plan to drive all the way to Beirut and open a corridor to the Maronite enclaves in the north. In reality, Sharon envisioned Little Pines as the first stage of the larger operation. Throughout the first half of 1982, he and Begin seized on every PLO provocation to build political support for their invasion and began sending signals to Washington of their intention to move into Lebanon. U.S. secretary of state Alexander Haig officially warned the Israelis against launching the invasion but privately gave a green light for a limited incursion into South Lebanon in the event that Israel was provoked. Sharon received his long-awaited pretext on the evening of June 3, 1982, when members of a renegade Palestinian guerrilla faction, the Abu Nidal Organization, shot the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, in the head. It was a thin justification for an invasion of Lebanon. Abu Nidal, the group’s leader, had been expelled from the PLO in 1974 and given a death sentence by Arafat himself. But the Israeli government would not let such technicalities interfere with their pretext for invading a neighboring state. “They’re all PLO,” Begin quipped; “Abu Nidal. Abu Schmidal. We have to strike at the PLO.”54
PEACE FOR GALILEE
On the morning of June 6, 1982, ninety thousand Israeli troops stormed across the Lebanese border along with eight hundred tanks and fifteen hundred armored personnel carriers. The Israeli juggernaut lurched into motion, backed by what one U.S. Foreign Service officer described as an American “hunting license” for Sharon. Still shrouding their larger vision for Lebanon, Begin and Sharon chose to name the invasion Operation Peace for Galilee, a moniker that would later draw ridicule from observers inside Israel and the wider international community. Henry Kissinger, now a private citizen, praised the invasion’s “strategic rationale” in an editorial and explained that the prospect of the PLO moderating its behavior had always been a “mirage.” Lebanese Maronites greeted the Israeli soldiers with rose water and rice as IDF tanks sped by, kicking up great plumes of dust. Even as Sharon and Begin repeated their promise not to move more than forty kilometers beyond the border, Israeli troops staged amphibious landings to the north at Sidon, some twenty-seven miles south of Beirut. Within twenty-four hours, the IDF had accomplished most of its goals as set out in Little Pines, but Begin and Sharon had no intention of stopping. They had entered Lebanon not to reinforce the so-called security belt in the south but to eviscerate the PLO and remake the Lebanese state. Their deception apparent, IDF units now charged northward toward Beirut as Israeli jets struck Syrian missile batteries in the Beqaa Valley. A jubilant Begin ordered Israeli commandos to find and assassinate Arafat. By June 13, an Israeli armored column was charging toward the presidential palace en route to link up with the Maronites in the north.55
The IDF sat at the gates of Beirut, peering down into a city devastated by seven years of civil war. Sharon seized control of the gendarmes’ headquarters and established vehicle parks for his tanks. Maronite gawkers, curious about the new arrivals and hopeful that the Palestinians were on the verge of expulsion, filtered up from the city to greet the conquerors. As Sharon paused to complete the encirclement of the capital, Israeli forces battled with Palestinian defenders in refugee camps in the south. Hoping to minimize their own casualties, Israeli troops shelled Sidon with cluster bombs and phosphorous in an almost indiscriminate fashion. Residents dug a mass grave in the town’s central square to accommodate all the bodies. Even then, a Western journalist wrote, the urban wreckage concealed uncounted corpses as the “sickly-sweet stench of death” wafted through the streets. At the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp, outside Sidon, the IDF encountered some of the fiercest resistance of the war. Palestinian fighters, some only in their early teens, moved amid the densely packed buildings and shanties, armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), in a desperate attempt to hold off the attackers. Unprepared for this type of urban combat, Israeli forces bombarded the camp for most of a week, using shells with aerial bursts to inflict the maximum amount of damage on the ramshackle dwellings. The camp’s defenders died to the last man, holed up in a mosque that the IDF finally destroyed. No one knew how many civilians perished in the battle: “I regard all Palestinians, except the women, as potential terrorists,” an Israeli officer told a reporter. IDF commanders refused to allow journalists into the area until a month later. “All that was left standing were a few cypresses and some radio antennae,” one journalist recalled.56
In the days that followed, fighting raged through Beirut’s southern suburbs as the IDF completed its encirclement of the capital. While PLO fighters staged a tenacious defense in some quarters, they were hopelessly outgunned by Israeli forces. As he surveyed the approaches to the city, Sharon prepared to do something no Israeli general had ever done before: capture a foreign capital. Previous governments had scrupulously avoided such actions for fear of becoming bogged down in a drawn-out conflict and alienating world opinion. Pictures of conquering Israeli forces subjugating civilians inside a neighboring metropolis would confirm the worst propaganda from the Arab world. Indeed, the cabinet in Jerusalem balked at the prospect of such an operation. But Sharon had little use for such reservations. He had come to kill and conquer. “The IDF’s arrival in Beirut marked the transformation of Operation Peace for Galilee from a limited military action to protect Israeli citizens into a runaway war to conquer an Arab capital, and eventually a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that would turn on its creators with terrible consequences still to be measured,” two Israeli commentators later wrote.57
For the next seven weeks, Beirut was a city besieged. Israeli warplanes dived over PLO-controlled neighborhoods in an effort to intimidate the guerrillas and provoke them to expose their gun positions. Meanwhile, the IDF and Phalangists sent car bombs into the city to terrorize the defenders. The Israelis launched a concerted offensive on July 4—it was probably not a coincidence that they chose to do so while most leaders in Washington would be on vacation. The Palestinians and the Joint Forces responded to IDF incursions into the suburbs with artillery and rocket bombardments, which had the effect of blunting the offensive. The Israeli juggernaut rolled forward, however, as IDF units pushed to the edge of Beirut’s Khalde Airport. After encountering heavier-than-expected resistance on the ground, Sharon launched a series of air raids against West Beirut that massacred hundreds of civilians. Strikes intended to kill PLO leaders in apartment buildings achieved little effect beyond killing noncombatants cowering inside. On August 1, the IDF launched a new assault on the airport, which resulted in a fifteen-hour battle before Israeli forces were able to establish control. Three days later, Sharon renewed his joint offensive, pushing toward the Shatila refugee camp, Beirut’s port, the National Museum, Summerland Beach, and Tayyouneh. Around one hundred Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting. The noose had tightened around West Beirut, but the Israelis had run-up against a ring of strong concrete buildings crisscrossed by narrow streets and alleyways in which their heavy armor would be of little use. Any further ground advances would be made not over open ground but in vicious urban fighting against the dug-in Palestinian guerrillas. With their troops halted, the Israelis pounded West Beirut with artillery and air strikes, killing hundreds in the final days of the war. In a final blow, the Israeli Air Force flew two hundred sorties, killing an estimated five hundred people.58
Israel’s bloody siege generated a firestorm of criticism in the international community. “What is Israel doing to itself?” the New York Times asked. The paper blasted Sharon as a “disastrous diplomat” whose style was “studied intransigence” toward Israel’s own civilian government. “Israelis have dismissed as absurd any suggestion that a country meant to be the Athens of its region could become a Prussia.” But the slaughter in Beirut told a different story. Grisly footage of wounded civilians aired on televisions across the world. “The military tactics employed by the Israeli army, in bombing and shelling Beirut, have no military or moral foundations,” wrote the editors of the London Times. “It may be coincidence that Mr Begin and [Israeli foreign minister Yitzhak] Shamir are ex-terrorists; but the tactics they have instructed their armed forces to carry out in Beirut albeit against terrorists, have been tactics of terror too.” A letter from a British parliamentarian printed the same day denounced Israeli tactics as “obscene barbarity.” After viewing one broadcast, a furious Ronald Reagan phoned Begin to demand that the Israelis stop their artillery attacks against the civilian population. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered,” he later wrote. “I used the word ‘Holocaust’ deliberately and said the symbol of his country was becoming ‘a picture of a seven month old baby with its arms blown off.’” The president continued to place pressure on Begin to cease the assault and work with American envoy Philip Habib in good faith. “Israeli air strikes, shelling and other military moves have stopped progress in negotiations,” he wrote to the prime minister. “I find this incomprehensible.” Reagan’s harangue apparently worked. Following a final round of attacks, Begin called off Sharon and agreed to Habib’s cease-fire plan.59
On August 21, American and French peacekeepers began the evacuation of 14,938 Palestinian and Syrian personnel from West Beirut by sea and overland to Syria. Arafat left for Tunisia on August 30 to tearful farewells from the PLO’s supporters who remained. The Palestinians surrendered their heavy weapons to their Lebanese allies but kept their AK-47s. In the end, Arafat judged that transforming the capital into an Arab Stalingrad would be too costly. As it was, the war had been costly enough. The toll in the invasion ran as high as 19,085 Lebanese and Palestinians killed and another 30,000 wounded. Three hundred Israelis had been killed with another 1,500 wounded. The Syrians saw 400 killed and 1,400 wounded or captured. A Lebanese police report placed the casualties in Beirut alone at 5,675 dead and 29,506 wounded. Authorities estimated that 83.8 percent of these casualties were civilian. But the bloodshed was far from over.60
BY MID-1982, IT WAS CLEAR THAT THE AFTERSHOCKS OF the Iranian Revolution would continue to reverberate through the 1980s as a series of interconnected conflicts raged across the Cold War borderlands of the Middle East. As the fighting intensified, Iranian clerics, Iraqi officials, Afghan rebels, Lebanese militias, and Pakistani intelligence officers all sought to mobilize sectarian identities in pursuit of specific political agendas—fueling wars that increasingly pitted rival ethnic and religious groups against one another. Worried that the violence might upset the regional balance of power, leaders in both Washington and Moscow searched for ways to control these new forces. In the process, Southwest Asia emerged as a staging ground for new strategies of revolution and superpower intervention. While the White House consolidated the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force into Central Command, the Kremlin expanded its military forces in the Soviet Southern Theater. As Soviet commanders continued their brutal efforts to crush the insurgency in Afghanistan, U.S. military and intelligence agencies laid plans that would lead them into even deeper involvement in the great sectarian revolt of the 1980s.