Angry Planet - How the Iran-Iraq War Shaped the Modern World

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

We live in a world shaped by the Iraq War. No, not that Iraq War. No, not that one either. We’re talking about the Iran-Iraq war. Just after Iran’s Islamic Revolution, it fought an eight year war with Iraq. The details of that war are incredible, and in the west, little known. Children cleared minefields, Iraq used chemical weapons, drones flew through the air, and helicopters engaged in dog fights with jets. And the consequences of that war shaped the region and the world. The effects are still with us today.Here to help us untangle all of this is Aram Shabanian, a graduate student of Non-Proliferation and Terrorism Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He also runs The Fulda Gap, a site dedicated to using OSINT to understand modern war.Recorded 2/18/21Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. March 16th, 1988. They launched a chemical attack on the city of Halabja, and it killed thousands of people. Innocent people were fixated in the streets. And this was part of a broader campaign. Again, this gets covered up in the historical record, much like what's happening in Syria gets covered up by the chemical weapons there. Everybody pays attention to the chemical weapons attack, and they don't pay attention to the fact that there were also conventional attacks happening against civilians. Not that one is more important than the other, but they both need to be kept in mind. And so in this case, it was the chemical attacks on Halabja, but also the bulldozing of entire communities along the border with Iran to create a sterile zone. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years time will be published. when genocide has been carried out in this country almost with infinity and when it is near to completion

when people talk about intervention you don't get freedom peacefully freedom has never faith-guided peacefully anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach Hello, welcome to Angry Planet I'm Matthew Galt

And I'm Jason Beal We live in a world shaped by the Iraq war No, not that Iraq war. No, not that one either. Talk about the Iran-Iraq war. Just after Iran's Islamic Revolution, it fought an eight-year war with Iraq. The details of that war are incredible and in the West, little known. Children cleared minefields, Iraq used chemical weapons, drones flew through the air,

in helicopters engaged in dogfights with jets and shot down migs. And the consequences of that war shaped the region and the world. we still live with the effects of it today and some surprising ways. Here to help us untangle all of this and tell the story of the war and its consequences is Arm Shabonian, the graduate student of Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He also runs the Foldagap, a site dedicated to using open source intelligence to understand modern war. Thank you so much for joining us again. Hey, no problem. Glad to be on.

All right. So let's get to the first. the basics out of the way. How did this war start? So it depends on who you ask and which side you ask, but effectively the Iraqi started the war with the invasion itself in September 1980. But the roots of the war go back substantially further. Saddam Hussein was personally frustrated. He was vice president of Iraq in 1975. He was personally frustrated by what was called the Treaty of Algiers, which was a treaty that delineated the border between Iran and Iraq down the shot al-Arab waterway, which is the waterway near Basra, and it's Iraq's only entry to the sea.

And so this 1975 agreement was signed under essentially duress because Iran had the most powerful military in the region at the time, which was backed by the U.S. And so in 1979, there's a revolution in Iran. The longtime strongman in the region, the Shahs, is forced out and his security apparatus is in disarray because there have been mass purges of supposedly disloyal dissidents within the Iranian military.

and some branches, 50 to 75% of the Iranian military was purged. So Saddam Hussein took advantage of that opportunity to exact his revenge and restore the border to what he thought it should be, among other reasons. The other reasons being that he wanted to try to unify the Arab world behind him. He wanted to be seen as like the savior of the Arab world against the historical Persian menace. And so for those reasons, Saddam Hussein took advantage of a series of border skirmishes with Iran to launch a full-fledged. invasion. And that's the caveat is that the Iranians were firing artillery across the border at Iraqi settlements and were engaging in occasional skirmishes with the Iraqis, but the Iraqis eventually and ultimately invaded Iran with full-scale military forces.

Can you talk a little bit about Saddam's dream? Because I think that's important to really understanding him and kind of understanding a lot of his actions. Is this idea of unifying the region? Can you get into that a little bit more? Yeah. So Saddam, he was a Baathist, but part of part of the Bothist ideology is this pan-Arabist idea, right? That the, that the Arab world had been broken apart by outside powers and kept apart by outside powers. And there's some degree of truth to that. There is various treaties that were signed by outside powers that essentially broke up the Arab world. But Saddam believed that if the Arab world could just unify, it would be able to take on its historical nemeses being both the Persians and the Israelis now

and stand up and be a great superpower. And they just needed some one to unify them. And so that was part of what he was trying to do with this war, was he was trying to show all of the Arabs in the Gulf states, especially, that he was the man that could stand behind because the people in charge of them in most of the Gulf states were the rulers, monarchs who had been put in place by outside powers, who had dubious claims on power from Saddam's perspective. And so he sought to destabilize not only the Gulf Republic or the Gulf monarchy, but the Iranians, the Iranian revolution as well. So his dream was multifaceted.

So what does that initial invasion look like? It was several divisions. I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head streaming across the border, but they had, it wasn't like, I think a lot of people misunderstand wars between countries that aren't in Europe. They seem to think that like, oh, if they had tanks, there were only a couple dozen, or if they had aircraft, maybe they used them for recon. And that straight up was not the case here.

I mean, these were like fully men. mechanized armored divisions with, you know, BMP infantry fighting vehicles, T-62s, and T-55 tanks early in the war, and eventually T-72 tanks on the Iraqi side. Going up against the Shah's military, or the former Shas military, which was, again, America's ally in the region. It was the most powerful state short of Israel in the region. I mean, the Iranian military was armed with F-14 Tomcats, and they were the only country that the U.S. ever exported the F-14 to. and those were going up against Russian or Soviet made MIG-25s that the Iraqis were fielding.

So you have these high-performance fighter jets dog-fighting way over the battlefield. You've got S-U-17s on the Iraqi side, dog-fighting F-5s from the Iranians at lower-level altitudes. You've got cobra helicopters, like you mentioned earlier. There was a cobra helicopter on the Iranian side

that shot down a M-23 and two M-21s, supposedly. And that's just in the air. Then you add the land combat, and it looked essentially like World War II. It was World War II-style mechanized combat, but the war very rapidly ground down to a World War I-style stalemate, with trenches dug on either side and infantry arrayed against a large front line that didn't make for any great gains on either side. And so very quickly the war ground down into this stalemate, this war of attrition that bled both sides substantially. I have a question about how. these two powers were supplied. Because just one thing that you said was that eventually the Iraqis had

T-72 tanks. So does that mean the Soviets picked aside? And did the U.S. pick Iran, even though we just lost the Shah? Or, I mean, how exactly did the great powers get involved at that point? So for the Soviet perspective, they had had historical ties with Iraq going back some time. But when Iraq invaded Iran, the Soviets were not thrilled with that. because they hadn't been warned in advance. And so one of the first impacts of the invasion was that the Soviets actually did cut off supplies to Iraq for a little bit. They cut off supplies of weapons and tanks and things of that nature. But on the flip side, the Iranians weren't doing themselves any favors in terms of friendliness to the Soviets.

And so the Soviets realized very quickly the Iranians weren't any more likely to be their friends. So they went back to supplying the Iraqis. The U.S. for its role, supported Iraq and Iran, the idea being that they would bleed each other dry. at least toward the latter parts of the war. Early in the war, the U.S. was not quite shocked by the invasion. I mean, the U.S. knew the invasion was coming. We had satellite imagery of it and things of that nature. But there was no communication necessarily between Saddam's government and the U.S.

government saying, hey, we're going to invade Iran in a couple days. You know, it wasn't anything like that. Yeah, and I think it's important to remember, like, how weird and complicated everyone's relationship was with the Middle East and the, I mean, it's still complicated and weird now. But, you know, was it 1979? Saddam receives the keys to the city of Detroit. I believe so. Right.

And, you know, it had made a $250,000 donation to one of the churches there. Like, we had, you know, America had had very complicated relationships with Iran that were further complicated by the revolution. Like, so it's hard to draw like clear distinctions, I think. Right. Right. And I think what's important for, for especially an American audience to remember is that, you know, we, often get lost in trying to see exactly where the line on the ground is for American involvement. You know, was America involved at this point or at that point? And America's involvement is

one issue entirely. But there's another set of actors on the ground in any given situation, especially in a situation like Iran versus Iraq, who have their own motivations and their own goals and their own things set in mind, their own mindset on what they want to accomplish from this war, from this conflict that has very little to do with the U.S. And so Saddam's perspective, from what I've read, is that he largely was annoyed with the U.S. I mean, he wasn't necessarily afraid of the U.S. reaction to his invasion of Iran. It was more of like, hopefully America stays the hell out of the way because we need to do what we need to do, you know, and I think that gets lost, especially in American audiences a lot.

You know, I mean, we tend to see ourselves as the center of the world, right? So this war went on for eight years. And I think we're used to that kind of drawn-out conflict now. But this is, that's a long time, right, for this war to go on. Like, can we talk a little bit more about why it bogged down and what the nature of the conflict was like over the course of those eight years? Yeah, because very quickly the war stopped being about, I mean, Saddam's goals, early in the war, he had, he wanted to take, Kuzistan province in southwestern Iran, which is Iran's oil-rich province. He wanted to take Kuzistan, and he thought once his force took a couple of the major cities

in that province, that the Iranian revolution would fold. That didn't happen. But what that means is that what he was going for was essentially a regime-change war. He wasn't happy with just the battlefield staying as is, you know, once he captured territory. He wanted the regime in Tehran to fall, which is exactly what the Ayatollah then called for with his regime. was, well, no, I don't think you're legitimate either. We'd like the government of Baghdad to follow as well. And so both sides wanted the toppling of each other's government. So it wasn't necessarily a traditional border skirmish at that point.

It was a total war. And so that's why it bogged down was because when you're talking in terms of total war, it's really difficult to negotiate smaller aspects of how you would settle a war. When each side wants the other side, like straight up, okay, yeah, we'll talk peace once you once you leave Baghdad, like that's a zero-sum game kind of thing. Like that's not going to work. Nobody's going to want to negotiate on those. Okay.

So when does this thing expand from the battlefield? Because civilians get involved at some point, right? In 1982, 83 is when missiles really in large quantities start getting fired into cities. But it's really toward the end of the war when both sides start developing their own longer range missiles. Because once Iraq started firing ballistic missiles into Iranian cities, most countries didn't want to sell them ballistic missiles anymore, just because that looks kind of bad, and the rest of the world gets kind of frustrated with you when you do that.

And so the Iraqis, it was kind of on them to modify their missiles at that point, to make them long range enough to strike Tehran, because the Soviets weren't just going to give them the keys to a missile that could do that, because they knew what the Iraqis were up to. At that point, civilians started dying in large numbers. I believe the numbers that have been quoted as 20,000 on either side, and both Baghdad and Tehran were killed by missiles falling from the sky. These are innocent civilians just going about their daily lives.

These missiles were fired at such a range that the accuracy of them. These were not tomahawks that hit a building that you aim at. They hit the district that you roughly aimed at maybe if you're lucky. These were the scuds, right? Scuds and missiles of that nature, right. And so with the attacks on cities became the threat of chemical weapons use on cities, at least by the Iraqis. Because at this point in the war, the Iraqis started using sulfur mustard and other

chemical agents on formations of Iranian troops down near Basra. So the fear was that Iraq would start putting chemical warheads on these scud missiles and firing those into Tehran. And so toward the end of the war, that was actually one of the factors that started to really impact the Iranian leadership financially was that thousands and thousands of people fled Tehran to go live in the hills because they were terrified of chemical war, especially after the Halabja attacks in northern Iraq. Yeah. What are those attacks? Can you expand on that? Yeah, so Halabja, the Halabja attacks took place toward the end of the war. Basically, there was, the Iranians had infiltrated forces across the border.

This was 1988. Had infiltrated forces across the Iraqi border and was working with local Kurdish forces to try to capture the city of Halabja and eventually put pressure on the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. In response to this incursion into Iraqi territory, which was seen as a critical incursion and a critical threat, Saddam Hussein authorized his cousin of his to embark on the Al-Anfal campaign, which was to put down this Iranian-backed Kurdish uprising. And he did so brutally. And so they launched a chemical attack on the city of Halabja. And on March 16, 1988, they launched a chemical attack on the city of Halabja, and it killed thousands of people.

Innocent people were fixated in the streets. And this was part of a broader campaign. Again, this gets covered up in the historical record. much like what's happening in Syria gets covered up by the chemical weapons there. Everybody pays attention to the chemical weapons attack, and they don't pay attention to the fact that there were also conventional attacks happening against civilians, not that one is more important than the other, but they both need to be kept in mind. And so in this case, it was the chemical attacks on Halabja, but also the bulldozing of entire communities along the border with Iran to create a sterile zone.

I might actually argue that the chemical weapons attack ended up being more important than any other kind, because that was part of the whole, quote, proof that was used to evade Iraq by the United States, saying that they'd used chemical weapons before in Iraq and they would use them again. It just seems like it was hugely important, even if, you know, other attacks were just as bad. Definitely. And I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't more important in a grander scheme. I meant to the people on the ground necessarily, there's not a whole lot of difference between being killed with one or killed with the other. They both suck. It's losing a family member is terrible either way.

But definitely in the grand scheme of things, the chemical attacks, like you said, led into the U.S. justification for the war in 2003, which is weird because there was no punishment for the attacks at the time. Right. It would be like if we're talking 2040 and we're punishing Assad for the chemical attacks in 2013, it would be a little bit weird, you know.

I think you're both right. You are. You're both right because it was funny. I was talking about something similar earlier. today with a colleague, as I've been doing a lot of research about the Battle of Fallujah lately, because I don't know if you all are aware, but there's a video game coming out about the Battle of Fallujah. And one of the things that people, I've noticed, leftist activists and journalists are

extremely focused on when they talk about the Battle of Fallujah is the use of white phosphorus, right? But the use of white phosphorus is horrible, but there are other, like, barrel bombs and other high explosives used to carpet that city was far more devastating than the use of the white phosphorus, right? And we tend to, when a weapon like chemical weapons are used or something like white phosphorus is used, arguably a chemical weapon, but I don't want to get into that argument. It is used to, we don't talk about the other sometimes more devastating and horrifying effects of the munitions that are used. But also, you're right, Jason. And that was actually my next

question was what is the legacy of that use of chemical weapons there and what were you know if we could move out of the timeline of the immediate story for a minute like how do you think that affected the region and everything that's come out that came after it in the next like three decades well and I can't speak of course for the Kurdish population as a whole and I'm not a Kurd myself but from what I've gathered speaking to a lot of Kurds from northern Iraq halabjo was pretty much it in terms of reconciliation with the Iraqi state. Like after Halabja, it was very clear like, no, we're not going to be part of the Iraqi state like any other part of the country. We're going to have autonomy at the very least and independence if we get what we want.

Just because, you know, when you're willing to gas people, and again, it's the same kind of thing that we've seen in Syria. We're like, once chemical weapons come out, all bets are off the table and people don't, when you're exterminating people as if they're vermin, people don't really want to negotiate with you anymore. They don't really want to be part of your social group anymore. And so I think that the damage that it did was far more substantial than had they just used conventional weapons because of the nature of deaths from chemical weapons. And so I actually do agree with you there, Jason. And that's part of the lasting legacy, yeah, among the Kurdish population. But then, again, as we mentioned, the U.S. used that as justification for the invasion in 2003.

But the war feeds into the 2003 invasion in more ways than that. And if you'd like, I can expand on that. Well, yeah, I mean, yes, absolutely. But firstly, I want to do just a little bit more table setting back in the 80s, if we can. As I do want to know, is there, I mean, I had there's all sorts of, there's a couple more things I want to know specifically about, about then before we really get into the legacy stuff. First of all, like, at the time, how did all of this affect the price of crude oil? Well, oil stayed pretty much. I mean, there were, there were, there were, there were,

increases in oil, but they weren't necessarily always related to the Iran-Iraq war, because the U.S. put a lot of pressure on its partners in the region to keep it that way, to keep oil prices low. But also, after Jimmy Carter, the U.S. had started moving toward oil independence in many ways. And so the cost of oil wasn't necessarily going to impact the U.S. because of oil price increases in the Middle East. It was going to impact Europe and China and Japan, places like that. But the fact that there was a threat to the global oil market was why outside power, started getting involved. And so starting in 1986, you started having U.S. warships escorting allied, I will call them cargo ships through the Persian Gulf, these being Kuwaiti vessels,

but also, you know, Italian vessels and things of that nature that were carrying oil from around the world because both sides had started attacking oil ships, ships carrying oil from their opponent, basically to try to cut the economic lifeline out from under them. So it was part of the war that expanded around the same time as the attacks on the cities, actually. And didn't, sorry. Sorry, Jason, you go ahead. No, it's just what I was going to say is I love the fact that the oil from the Middle East actually doesn't come to the United States hardly at all. That was one of my favorite facts to learn that it's actually the United States gets deeply involved in.

It's all because of our allies. It's Japan and it's Europe, but Japan most of all. And in a sense, you know, I've thought to myself once the U.S. is energy independent or even before them, you know, we don't have a dog in this fight. You know, I mean, it's just a very interesting circumstance to me. This is not our oil. Yeah, it's definitely, it's fascinating. And the degree, I mean, to which both sides sought to interrupt each other's oil supply was extreme. I mean, Saddam was so set on striking Iran's oil production facilities that he had to devised this full-fledged, weird social game that he played with the Iranian leadership because

he knew that they were paranoid. That was the one thing Saddam understood was paranoia. And so he knew that the Iranians guarded their oil facilities with their F-14s and that his Air Force was terrified of dogfighting the F-14 because the F-14 at the time was pretty much unmatched as a fighter aircraft. So he figured, well, the best way to get our aircraft able to strike this oil refinery is to get the F-14s out of the air. And the only way to get them out of the air is to ground them. We don't have the means to strike their airfield. So he called one of the Gulf leaders. I'm not sure if it was the Saudi king or somebody else. And he essentially told them, hey, we've received intelligence that an Iranian F-14 wants to defect in a couple of nights, and they're going to

come to your country. So just keep an eye out. There's an F-14 coming. Knowing full well that that Gulf leader was going to leak that information to the Iranians, they did. The Iranians heard one of your F-14s is going to defect. They panicked and put all the F-14. pilots in jail. And while the F-14 pilots were in jail being investigated for a possible treason plot, Saddam struck the oil refinery. It's absolutely brilliant. You got to give him credit, even though he's an awful human being. He understood paranoia. You are listening to Angry Planet. We're going to pause there for a break. We are talking about the Iran-Iraq war. We will be right back. All right. Welcome back to Angry Planet. We are talking about the Iran-Iraq War.

So we were just starting to kind of get talking about the what I'll broadly call like the international coalition's involvement. Did any of them ever get involved in the actual fighting? Was there anything beyond just escorting? Did any U.S. or Italian soldiers ever die? Or did they do any attacking? Well, not on the land battlefield necessarily. There were Arab contingents that showed up from various countries that were standing with Iraq, but they weren't anything large. it was like a group of a couple hundred volunteers at a time.

The only real involvement would be later on in the war. Once the U.S. started getting involved, escorting ships through the Persian Gulf, there were two instances that stand out in particular. One being the attack on the USS Stark and the second being the shootdown of an Iranian airbus full of civilians. And they're connected incidents, they're connected issues in the sense that USS Stark was escorting ships through the Persian Gulf, scouting oil ships as we discussed earlier. When it came under missile attack by an unknown aircraft, the missile struck the ship and nearly sank it,

at which point the U.S. Navy went on high alert, and ship captains were a lot more likely to shoot first and ask questions later because nobody wanted a repeat of what happened to USS Stark happening to their ship. What's interesting about the attack on U.S.S. Stark is that it's been historically put off as a stake by the Iraq, Iraq apologized very quickly for the attack. They said we didn't mean to, didn't mean to hit your ship. We were going after an Iranian ship. We just saw the first ship on the radar and fired at it.

America accepted the apology and moved on. What has come out since then is that it wasn't an accidental attack. It was actually Saddam Hussein's personal private jet had been modified with a Mirage fighter jets radar in the nose and they strapped an exocet missile to this thing and flew it out into the Persian Gulf and struck the Stark with it in revenge for the Iran-Contra scandal. Or as Saddam called it, Iran-Gate. He was so frustrated with Iran-Gate, he wanted to strike back at the U.S. and let the U.S. know, hey, we're pissed off at you. And so he had his personal jet outfitted to carry anti-ship missiles. And that jet is in Iran today.

The Iranians own that jet today. And I'll get to that momentarily, but how that happened. But yeah. So why did we bring down an Iranian jet? Were they related? You said they were related or did I misunderstand? Yes. So the USS Vincennes was in the region as well. And the captain was a little bit agitated by what had happened to USS Stark about a year prior. So the crew was on high alert. When they saw an aircraft taking off, they, according to the record,

panicked and fired missiles at it and shot it down. whether or not the crew actually thought they were under attack is beyond what I'm going to get into here today. The fact remains that if it was an accidental shootdown, awarding the captain of the ship for that incident several months later was probably not the best move by the U.S. Navy because it reinforced the sense that the Iranians had interpreted of the incident that America had become directly involved in the war. Even though from our perspective we weren't, from the Iranian perspective, that was America willing to shoot down airliners full of their civilians. It's time to get back to the negotiating table because we can't defeat the Americans, was the perspective that they had. And shortly after the shootout of the airliner, the Iranians accepted the United Nations ceasefire proposal. So it was instrumental in ending the war, even if it was an accident. And what are some of the broader consequences as we start to trend of that specific incident other than just ending the war?

Of the shootdown incident. Of the shootdown incident, yes. Oh, long term. It's poisoned relations with Iran between Iran and the U.S. I mean, look what happened when the Russians shot down an airliner over East Ukraine a few years ago. You know, that poisons relations between countries, especially when one side straight up refuses to acknowledge that any wrong was done. I mean, if it was an accident, you come out and acknowledge that it was, we didn't mean to, and you hope to resolve things. You pay the families, reparations, whatever. But that's not what we want to do, because that opens up an entire accountability, liability book. and then we're talking international courts with the Islamic Republic of Iran suing the United States government,

no U.S. president is going to willfully go into that. So I think that's why we haven't seen true justice for what happened. And I think that's going to remain an issue between Iran and America for a long time. As much as we're frustrated in the U.S. by the hostage crisis, they're frustrated by things like us shooting down airliners full of their people and not apologizing. So when we go back to the end of the war, one thing that really struck me, you know, you've said earlier it was attrition, you know, people were behind their trenches. So I just did a quick search. And because I thought this was the case, Iran's population is twice the size of Iraq's. And I'm just kind of wondering how they were, Iraq put up such a fight, how they were so even. matched and how it again you know as matthew asked it's it's a long war how it took eight years to

fight through it and then a jetliner you know being shot down to end it yeah well i mean so i need on this a little bit earlier the iran military was was largely purged after the revolution and so that's when you saw the irgc become i think the islamic revolutionary guard corps so you had essentially two parallel militaries in iran for a while or you still do you had two parallel military in Iran, but for a while in the war, they weren't coordinating too well. And so you'd have these, these hordes of poorly trained children a lot of the time. I mean, 12 to 15 year olds, often unarmed or armed with an RPG and maybe an extra round for it, running toward machine guns, toward, you know, hauled down T-72s and, and artillery positions and things like that. I mean, it was essentially like,

World War I, like I was saying earlier, you know, you look at the attrition rates in World War I, it's what happens when you throw infantry against machine guns on flat battlefields. You know, this is in Afghanistan where you can hide in the mountains and take pot shots at people. This is open desert. They see you coming for a while. And so that combined with the fact that it was two very economically well-off nations, and both countries had oil money, and they could keep funding the war for a while. It allowed the war to spiral as if it was a European war in that sense, you know,

where European countries have their empires to pull upon and call upon economically to supply their wars. Iran and Iraq had their oil to call upon and supply their war as well. So what is the, how does this thing end? And who gives up what? Well, it ends effectively. The border doesn't really change. I mean, there were sections of Iranian territory that the Iraqis still held, but Saddam ended up giving those back a couple years after the war for nothing anyway.

So effectively, the war changed nothing. Other than killing many on either side, you know, the death toll is not clear to this day, but it's at least 680,000 killed, likely over a million killed in this war for no real territorial gains, you know. But the way the war ended was when both sides started to see the price of oil drop. that more than anything really affected their ability to keep fighting. And the reason the price of oil started to drop was because the United States government started to get a little bit worried about where the war was heading, not only with the use of chemical weapons,

but with things like the attack on the Stark and the shootdown of the airliner, the U.S. government started to realize just how quickly this entire thing could spiral. And so the government put pressure, U.S. government put pressure on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in particular to flood the market with cheap crude oil. While this was happening, those same two countries were giving massive war loans to Saddam's military. So that's part of the other reason that Saddam was able to afford this war was he had oil money, but also tons of money coming in from the Gulf states who were using him at this point as a proxy to fight the Iranian. What becomes of Saddam's political power in Iraq after this war? Saddam's power really solidified during and after this war because he had an enemy that he could point at and a reason for all of the security state,

security apparatus. And the Iranians had much in the same going for them. It justified a lot of security measures that might have otherwise been unjustifiable. And part of that was that Saddam ended the war with one of the largest militaries in the world. I mean, I think it was like the third or fourth largest military in the world. I mean, it was not something to laugh at. You know, and that's that's why it's easy for us, I think, in 2021, to look at Iraq and say like, where was, where was, where was the threat that the outside world saw. But if you watch the news footage from the late 80s or the early 90s, people were genuinely afraid of the Iraqi war machine because it was, it was huge on paper. And that's all people really look at is what something is on paper. They don't realize that,

yes, it's huge, but it's huge for a reason because they just got done fighting a war and it's not necessarily going to be effective against the U.S. military. It just looks like a lot of tanks on paper, and a lot of people get carried away with that. So the legacy, though, of the war on Saddam's political power was definitely that he was able to justify a lot of things that he wouldn't necessarily otherwise have been able to get away with. He got rid of a lot of competition in the name of, oh, that's treason. You're fighting against you're a coward. You lost that battle, so you're a coward. Or you won that battle. Now you're a threat to me because everyone supports you. So now you die in a helicopter crash. It allowed him to streamline his government and really make the Ba'ath party,

the Saddam party. It was no longer about keeping the Ba'ath party in power in Iraq. It became the Ba'ath party is Saddam. So you keep the Ba'ath party in power to keep Saddam in power because Saddam is ultimately the most important thing in the country because he saw himself as the embodiment of Iraq. So if he dies, Iraq dies was his thought. And how 10 years later does this lead into Iraq invading Kuwait? So like I had mentioned, Kuwait had supplied Iraq with a lot of money during the war. And that was part of the reason that the Kuwaitis thought they had earned some favor with the Iraqis. but the Iraqis after the war realized they had this large military and nothing to do with it.

And large militaries historically in Iraq have staged coups. I mean, that's the story of Iraq's military history is the story of coups. That's how Saddam came to power. He, in fact, took part in a coup and then it failed and then took part in another coup and came to power. I mean, the guy did two coups in one lifetime. That's two more than I've done. You know, that's miraculous. You can't coup just once, though.

I feel like once you've cooed once and you've gotten to, taste for it. You're going to coo again. And also, I mean, that happened in Venezuela. I mean, that's actually, I mean, the first time Chavez, you know, tried to take over, he utterly failed and was put in jail for a little while, came right back out, and eventually took over the government. And then your favorite example, Matthew, what happened with Adolf Hitler? I don't remember. I seem to remember there was a coup and then some jail time. And then something else happened.

I don't quite recall. Yeah, it's hard to keep track of. So, you know, yeah, like, failed coups that lead to successful coups are pretty common, I think, right? Definitely, yeah. And so in this instance, basically what the war did is it put Iraq in debt to the Kuwaitis. So Iraq started to claim that a couple of things. One, that the Kuwaitis weren't really respecting them enough for what they had done to defeat the Iranians in their eyes. But also, they started claiming that the Kuwaitis were using slant drilling.

to try to drill an oil field that was below the Iraqi-Qaeda border. So Saddam repeatedly threatened the Kuwaitis and said, you have to refinance our war loans, you have to forgive our war loans or else. And so the Saudis forgave the war loans for their part. The Kuwaites did not. And it's important to remember that Kuwait used to be part of Iraq. Iraq tried, wanted to take it back several times and has threatened to take it back several times.

And every time Iraq has tried to militarily retake Kuwait, outside powers have stopped it. And so from Saddam's perspective, Kuwait had only been an independent country for 50 or 60 years at this point. I mean, it really, it wasn't legitimate in his eyes. Not that he's correct, but that's his perspective. Let him have it, I guess. And so the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and very rapidly took over the whole country. I mean, within 48 hours had the whole country under control because the Iraqi military was really good at fighting by that point.

I mean, they just fought for eight wars against Iran. So Kuwait's unprepared military was nothing. It was a pushover. And that invasion, of course, spawned the U.S. response. And you got to, again, come back to Saddam's perspective, he wasn't really paying attention to America. America wasn't the first and foremost thing on his mind. There were other issues at the front of his mind, namely being the Shia majority in his country and the fact that most of the Iraqi army was Shia. And that if he didn't find something for them to do, they might find something for themselves to do.

And that something might be removing him from power. Yeah. All right. And then there's another classic character that is watching all of this unfold and getting involved. What is Osama bin Laden doing during all of this? So he's hanging out and he's watching the American intervention, the American deployment to Saudi Arabia with growing frustration because he sees this as infidels in the Holy Land. He goes to the Saudi king after Saddam had invaded Kuwait and he tells him, I will raise an army of Mujahideen. We will come and defend Saudi Arabia and liberate Kuwait.

And the Saudi king says, thanks, but I'm going to go with the largest military in the history of humanity. Appreciate the offer, bro. And bin Laden took that personally. He was very frustrated by that. And he was frustrated to see American soldiers in Saudi Arabia. That factored into his declaration of war on the United States and part of his justification for the September 11th attacks, which brought the United States back into the region 10 years later. If you don't manage your Wahhabism, the Wahhabism will manage you. It's something my father always tried to tell me.

And, you know, it's an old family lesson. What about Russia? What's Russia's part in all of this? And what are the consequences for it broadly? Right. So when Saddam invades Kuwait, the Soviet Union is going through its own issues. They've got their own stuff to deal with. They've got their own.

Iraq is the furthest thing from Gorbachev's mind in 1990. It shouldn't have been. because part of the U.S. having the Saudis and the Kuwaitis flood the oil market with cheap crude, part of the long-term effect of that was that the Soviet economy and the Russian economy, which relied on oil, which relied heavily on crude oil by that point in the Cold War, to keep the country running, also lost its primary source of revenue. And so historically, one of the major factors of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the drop in oil prices. And what I see a lot is a disconnect between people who recognize that fact and people who recognize the fact that the U.S. put pressure on the Saudis and the Kuwaitis to flood the market with oil to end the Iran-Iraq war.

I don't see a lot of people connecting those two, and I don't really know why. Because it's pretty obvious to me that if the oil market is flooded for Iran and it's flooded for Iraq, it's also going to be flooded for the Soviet Union at the exact same time. And it's going to have the exact same impacts on their economy as well. Did you think that was on purpose? I mean, was that the America being so smart that we were trying to tank everybody at the same time? I don't know if it was deliberate. Nothing I've seen has led me to believe it was deliberate to hurt the Soviets, but I also don't think that there was a lot of effort to not hurt the Soviets with it.

I think it was one of those things where if it hurts some, it hurts them. But that's not our goal. You know what I mean? Something that you'd mentioned when we were first talking about the story, And this is something I think people also don't connect a lot of time is that cheap oil does not just mean cheap gas for your car. Right. What are there can you like, it also means cheap plastic. Right.

And, and that's something that, you know, I've noticed and I don't know if there's necessarily like a, a genuine scientific tie here. But there was an increase in the manufacture of cheap plastic goods in my childhood in the 19, 90s that came from places like China who get this cheap oil from the Middle East. And so the idea that that there is a tie there isn't that outlandish, I don't think, because suddenly there's this glut of oil globally. And it's not like everybody in the U.S. knew that and just started to drive more to keep the demand up. Like the oil went somewhere. And it went into strategic reserves in different countries, but it also went into plastics. And I think that's part of the reason plastic was so cheap for a long time and is so cheap to this day is because of the fact that oil is so cheap. I mean, as expensive as oil has gotten in the past, there aren't a lot of other liquids that you can buy

in that quantity for that price. $100 for a barrel of oil, a 55 gallon drum, you can't get milk for that price. So it's a cheap liquid at the current rate. And what does Iran

learn from all of this? Iran learns that when push comes to shove, they don't have any friends. And that they got to make out for themselves. And so that's why you see a lot of Iranian emphasis on producing their own military equipment, but also the ability to maintain their own military equipment, be it rockets, aircraft tanks, small arms, anti-tank missiles, whatever. The other thing the Iranians were kind of pioneers in, especially during the Iran-Iraq war, was the use of drones. They used some of the first reconnaissance drones on the battlefield with weaponry on them. They, I believe they had one armed with some kind of a bomb.

like a dumb bomb that they had tried to use. And as ineffective as it may have been, it was before we were doing it. And I think that ties into why the Iranians are so good at drone warfare today. Yeah, I think that's really interesting, a little-known fact about the Iran-Rak war, specifically and Iran generally, is that they're a drone pioneer. And yeah, they were using, they were using dumb bombs. They would basically, they were almost like RC planes that they were flying over, you know,

like troop, and then just dropping bombs. And they actually produced in the 90s a movie all about the first drone pilot. And it's the first Eradian drone pilot. It was very strange. Anyway, just a side tidbit. Jason, do you have any other questions? Well, I was just going to mention that I think it's fascinating how they are so independent.

And they have their own space program, I mean, which of course can be used to deliver missiles anywhere in the globe, but they actually have their own satellites and they've been developing their own rocketry. I mean, you know, is that, do you think that's all a result of the fact they learned they had no friends? No, definitely not all of it. I mean, the Iranians have always had a lot of heavy industry in high tech, but what they learned in that war was they got to be self-sufficient in every way in the next war because nobody really supplied them other than the North Koreans would give them missile parts. but nobody really stood with the Iranians.

I mean, the Iranians had their soldiers being gassed on the battlefield and the world's reaction was, okay, both sides need to stop using chemical weapons. And it's like, but both sides aren't using chemical weapons. One side is using chemical weapons.

And the Iranians learn from that, that we can literally be gassed on the battlefields and the world will say, now, now, settle down, and that's it. And so if you want to defend yourself,

if you want to deter your enemies, you have to do it yourself. All right, I think with that about covers it. Is there anything else you think we need to hit before we bounce out? I think that just about covers it. Do you have anything you want to plug? Not really. No, unfortunately.

Just glad to be here. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. Yeah, glad to be doing something with my day. Yeah. I guess I got a Twitter account. That's my first and last name. R-M-S-H-A-B-A-N-I-A-N. Follow me if you want information on stuff like this or terrible posts.

There's a mixture of both. So enter at your own risk. Sounds like every other Twitter account out there. Essentially, yeah. Thank you so much for coming onto Angry Planet and explaining all of this for us. I'm no problem. Glad to be here, guys. That's it for this week. Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is at Angry PlanetPod.com.

You give us just $9 a month. Be a part of our substack. We're putting on a weekly newsletter and two premium episodes of Mark. The next one is Rick Pearlstein's immediate reactions to the death of Rush Limbaugh in which he recites certain Rush Limbaugh calls from memory. It's a very weird conversation. Look for that very, very soon. Find us on Facebook and on Twitter and wherever fine pods are casted. We'll be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.