Empire: World History - 124. Saddam Hussein vs The Ayatollah

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded neighbouring Iran and so began the longest conventional war in modern history. After initial Iraqi successes, a brutal stalemate set in that was reminiscent of the horrors of the First World War. The Iraq-Iran War saw the use of chemical warfare, in 1984 Saddam’s forces unleashed the first recorded use of nerve gas in battle, and there was grinding trench warfare. Iran also pioneered human wave attacks, which merely added to the extreme human toll this war took. After eight long years a ceasefire was reached but both nations were left financially and militarily exhausted. Listen as Anita and William explore this horrific and often forgotten conflict. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremple. Now, we have been looking at Iran, you know, from conception to modern era. And there is an event that Iran was involved in that often gets overlooked in modern history, but which was pivotal in Iran's image of itself, Iran's standing amongst its Arab neighbors,

and that is the Iran-Iraq War. So this is a war that we're going to talk about today. It lasted from September the 22nd, 1980, to August the 20th, 1988. And it holds the very dubious distinction of being the longest conventional war in modern history. just take that in for a second. We who study World War I and World War II, this is the longest conventional war in modern history. So spanning eight years, it involved large-scale military operations, enormous numbers of casualties. In fact, it's estimated that hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Millions were displaced during the course of the war. And yet,

sort of, it's not that long ago. And it is sort of, William, I mean, certainly for the younger generation who I've been talking to, a little bit of a blank spot. I actually visited Iran for the first time in the middle of this war. And my first memories of Iran are these pictures of the martyrs, which were posted up in roundabouts in every town in Iran. And as you were waiting in bus stations or sort of hitchhiking through the country, you would see these walls. of faces staring out at you, of people who'd just been killed in the war. And I even got caught in a air raid in Isfahan when the Iraqis bombed. Isfahan as part of the war of the cities, as it was called? Well, when you were in Iran at that time, was it all everybody was talking about,

and in what terms were they talking about it? Well, it was a time of great stress and deprivation. Not only were many people dying on the back of a revolution, which had also generated thousands of martyrs. The other thing that you kept seeing was these sort of piles of spectacles of people who'd been shot in the course of the revolution. So it was like a double cull of a generation in Iran. So it was a very battered place. You mean piles of spectacles in the street as a monument and deterrent or what? No, they had these odd montages and museums. I remember in Tabriz. I went to the museum on my second day in Iran. And as you walked into the hall of the museum, expected to see, you know, nice sort of Ottoman pottery or

or Safavid tile work. Instead, there was a sort of installation of the spectacles of people killed in the course of the revolution. Wow. Okay. So there was these two very bloody events back to back with each other. And in many ways, this is what brought the war about because the Iraqis presumed that Iran was in such a mess after the revolution and that so many of its officer Corps had been arrested, and particularly, I think, the Air Force, which is a very important part of this story, which had been an elite British and American-trained institution that attracted the really posh graduates. And rather like our image of Battle of Britain fighter races being these sort of smart young men with moustaches, I think much the same was true in Iran. And these guys

have been heavily attacked by the revolutionaries, and many of them had been put in prison. And this is one of the reasons why the Iraqis thought that they could take on what had been the most effective military in the Middle East and the largest and best equipped army in the whole region. Right. And we should look on the other side then, because while Iran is struggling to get back on its feet, you know, one may say it is culled the most capable, which always happens in a revolution. You're quite right, very like the First World War with the Russians, the revolution wipes out the officer clouds. Yeah. Well, what we're seeing is sort of Iran on its knees trying to get up. And next door, we should talk about what's happening in Iraq, because these are next to,

door countries. So first of all, just to give you an idea of Iraq, it is a place of huge importance to Shia Muslims. So, you know, we've talked about the Shia who dominate in Iran. They have two holy sites in Iraq, Najaf and Karbalah. Have you been to either of these? I've never been to Iraq, actually. It was not a place that was easy to visit when I was travelling in those parts of the world because of Saddam. I had planned to spend an entire a year in Iraq digging on an archaeological site. And the British School of Archaeology, which I was going to be attached to, was closed down by Saddam as a nest of British spies. So I never got there.

Well, I mean, he kind of has a point. Didn't we say Lawrence of Arabia came up through the trowel and the geological survey? Though I think in the setting the case of Lawrence of Arabia, he genuinely was an archaeologist before he became anything else. Yeah, I'm just saying. I mean, you know, had you gone, who knows what you would have become? But look, the 1970s in Iraq. We've got, you know, an exhausted country next door to Iraq, which is not actually weak at all, which has been benefiting a lot from foreign aid, foreign intervention, and is under the control

of a man we should talk about who is fascinating, whose name, I mean, even the youngans of you out there will know, Saddam Hussein. Yes, you tell us about Saddam, Anita, because you, I know have been doing a lot of reading about his background. I have, yeah, I know. I mean, we share a birthday. That's the first thing to mention. I'd always suspect it.

I always thought there was something suspicious about you, Anita Allen. Back of the net for Dalrymple. Yeah, so look, Saddam Hussein was born in 1937 in the village of Al-Auja. It's a place near Tikrit, and that's important. Tecrete is very, very important to Saddam, and it will be important to his entire governing style. It's one of the poorest areas of Iraq, isn't it? Yeah.

And his father was poor among the poor in Tikrit. You know, very, very modest means. And his father died before he was even born. So, you know, here he is. You know, we love an origin story, which tries to explain the psyche of a man who then wants to become the strongest man in the world. And we sort of went through this time after time with our Afghan characters. And indeed, at the beginning of the Iranian series, we did too.

But his early years were marked by terrible poverty and hardship. So he's raised by his widowed mother and his extended to Creti family. So this is not just a nuclear family. As we know it, this is a tribal thing. There is an allegiance, a blood allegiance, which is as strong as a mother, father, brother, sister who is bringing him up. But what happens, you know, is that he then, fortuitously maybe, you might say, but his mother marries again. And this time marries somebody who is a lot more wealthy. And so suddenly, you know, he has this difference in experience of being,

very poor, with nothing, raised by a tribe, and suddenly having money and influence. So these are sort of this cauldron of experiences, very young in his life. And then, William, his new family arises, and that's the Bath Party. And this is, I think, again, a very important part of the story, because it's part of that, in a sense, lost world of Arab nationalism. This is the world where you've got these secular nationalist parties. In the case of the Bath Party, it's founded by a Christian, Michelle Affleck. And I think this is a very important part of what the West failed to understand about Saddam's Iraq, because whatever else it was, the Ba'ath Party was an entirely secular party.

And Saddam was always suspicious of clerics and overzealous Muslim revolutionaries, which is why the mistake that the Bush government made later at the end of the story, invading Iraq after 9-11 because they perceived some spurious link between the Bathis and the 9-11 hijacking, which was completely false. And for all his many, many sins, and I'm not in any sense even beginning to whitewash Saddam, who was a hideous character in many, many ways, but he was a hideous secular character. The Ba'ath Party, which he climbed up, was an Arab nationalist secular party. It was not the sort of Islamist parties that we see in the region now. No, I mean, you mentioned one of the founders of the Ba'ath Party, and we should say, you know, it was founded in the 1950s, and the guy that you talked about, Michel Aflac, was a Syrian philosopher. The co-founder, a man called Salah al-Din al-Bittar is also a Syrian politician. So one is a philosopher, one is a politician, and they try to come up with this framework that will work in the Arab world, which does not rely on religious imams to control it, because I guess the thought being that, you know, these ways of running things, are capricious and sometimes not open to modernisation.

And this is very much on the Nasserite model, I think. It's anti-imperialist, it's socialist, it's nationalist, it's nationalist, and it's pan-Arab. Yeah, the pan-Arab thing is really important because the centre of the Bathist philosophy was Arab unity. So they talk about, you know, in a lot of their literature, Arab unity, cultural revival, rejection of sectarianism, of tribalism. You know, they want to create a centralised state. They want to create somewhere where, and I guess Iraq and Syria notionally are the heartbeat of this new empire, if you like the Barthist, ideal of their new empire, which will match but also interface with the modern world, which is why there's this great keenness to move away from what is seen as sort of the old ways. And Iran is now run by an Ayatala, you know, who is embracing the old ways, who embodies the old ways, who only talks about going right back to Quranic

for guidance. And for that reason, Saddam despises the Ayatollah and despises Iran and thinks it must now be very weak. I think it's mutual, isn't it? They're not great fans of each other. They're not great fans I mean, they're not going to go, you know, have a cup of coffee together. They loathe each other personally and philosophically. The other thing I think that we haven't said that's quite important to lay as groundwork here is the fact that historically most of what is now Iraq, and this is again one of these British creations in the immediate post-World War I period is the period that Iraq is created. But historically, a lot of Iraq is the old heartlands of the ancient Persian Empire. And the major sites like Baghdad and the Sassanian capital Satisiphan are all in modern Iraq, not in Iran. And the same is

true, as you said at the beginning, with the really holy sites of Shias. Karbalah and Ajaf are both over the border. So you've got two different boundaries here that play an important part in this story. In one hand, you've got the boundary between the Persians and the Arabs, and the Persians have a deep dislike of the Arabs, who they regard as having destroyed the ancient Persianate culture, in many cases. But you've also got the boundary between Sunni and Shia. And these are the ones. do not follow the same boundaries. The Shia parts of Iraq are the parts next to Iran, but there's a great deal of Iraq, which is majority Shia. In fact, the whole country is now

definitely majority Shia. And if you look historically at the boundaries, they move backwards and forwards between those two, between the boundaries of Persianness and the boundaries of Shia-ness. And it is the Ottomans who basically form what became the boundary established by the British of the modern state, due to the victories won by Salaman the Magnificent, I think, but one of those early Ottoman caliphs. And he defeats the Safavids. And that border is more or less what was founded then, I think, in 1639. Although, I mean, talking about borders, I mean, that is an ancient border line. But this war definitely flares up around a newer, more modern border. Correct. And that is this particularly long water,

the Shat al-Arab waterway. It served as a long border between Iran and Iraq. Iraq always claimed the entirety of this waterway, saying it is part of Iraq. Iran argued for a border based on something called the Thalweg principle. Have you come across the Thalweg principle? I haven't come across that. No, Thalweg principle. It would give one side control over one bank. So it would mean that Iran has control over its eastern bank. And Iraq could look after its own bank. And Iraq basically said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's both, but they both belong to us. Just one other note on what the region was like. I mean, you talked about the Ottomans sort of uniting under one idea.

I mean, the Baathas party also was not just restricted to Iraq and this ideology. And by the way, don't for one second think that there weren't atrocities going on under a Ba'athist regime because they were notorious for human rights abuses, suspension of rule of law, torture. No freedom of speech, no free press. Yeah, exactly. People were frightened of secret police under the Bathurst as well. I remember friends that were going in to report in Iraq at the period of the war and shortly afterwards. And I think everyone always found it of all the Middle Eastern countries, the one where people were willing to talk less freely.

No one would ever chat to you about politics at all because they were terrified of being picked up by the Mukabarat, the Secret Service. Yeah. And in Syria, you know, figures that we've talked about, Hafez al-Assad, who we spoke about with Kim Gartas, what does she call him, you know, that he was trying to act like the fireman, but he was, in fact, the arsonist, do you remember? So Hafas al-Assad was, you know, a Ba'athist leader in Syria, his son, Bashar al-Assad, who's currently ruling, you know, Ba'athist also. So look, this is, you know, a trans-border ideology. So you've got two sides here. You've got two sides. You've got Iraq, which is fairly powerful, getting more powerful. Iran that is depleted, both of whom

think they have this ideological claim to unite the Muslim world. So that is the recipe and backdrop for what happens on September the 22nd, 1980. You know, it's geopolitics, it's religion, it's ambition. And simple desire to control the very rich waterways that contain a great deal of oil. Yeah. I mean, maybe before we get to the actual outbreak of the war and what it felt like and looked like, we should talk about Saddam becoming all-power, taking over. An enormous personality cult, his picture everywhere. Let's talk about this, because I went to Libya when Gaddafi was in charge.

And I got a taste of what it must have been like during Saddam's time in Iraq, because every billboard had Gaddafi on it. You know, Gaddafi in a uniform, green uniform, in a brown uniform, with medals, without medals, open shirt. I remember there was a particularly fetching image of Saddam in Leidenhausen. He had all these different outfits that he had himself photographed in. And somehow at some stage, whether it was a gift from a sort of Austrian embassy or whatever.

At some stage he got himself some leaders. Yeah, well, of course. You can Google Saddam's leadership. What do you get for the man who has everything? It's obvious, isn't it? I mean, I don't want to blow the surprise for your birthday coming up in March. That's very kind of. That's the one thing I haven't got.

I know, no. The man who has everything. That's what you get. But also this, you know, we talked about his tribal loyalties and how this was a man raised by a tribe. So what he does, his form of leadership, is he does not promote through meritocracy. He promotes Ticretis above everyone else,

people who are from his family, if he like. And it should be said at the same time that this is happening in Iraq and the other Barthas country in Syria, the Assad's are doing exactly the same. And in their case, they're promoting the Aloitites, this tiny clan from which the assets are drawn.

And so what's supposed to be. to be a nationalist and pan-Arab party, in fact, becomes a kind of private club for members of the same tribe, the same tribe with the same flag. Also, what's interesting about both sides of this conflict, which is about to sort of define and dominate eight years of modern history, is that both sides try to root their existence, philosophy and right to rule in ancient history. So, you know, in Iran, we were talking about Very interesting. Isn't it?

Isn't it? Well, it's more, it's less so in Iran, where at one point the Ayatollah comes within an inch of bulldozing Persepolis because he's threatened by the Acunus. No, I was talking about the Shah. What I was talking about was the Shah who very much wanted to go back to the ancient times. And then you have this sort of the whirlwind of the Ayatollah who was trying to recreate it and go back to Koranic times, but he's still trying to reach back into the past, not in necessarily regional history, but in the Koranic history.

And Shia, and Shia history. and very much revolving around the whole mythology of Hussein and Ali and that whole bundle of myth and loyalty. Yeah, but Saddam does it too. So Saddam has claimed to Babylon, ancient Babylon and a rich history in Mesopotamia. And he also uses this to bolster up his right to rule, his right to be there. He's very much the inheritor. And we've seen this so many times in empires, ancient empires, where People either through marriage or just through claim, say they have the bloodline of somebody very important.

Well, you know, Saddam doesn't have that, but he does start evoking the ancient Babylonians to say, look, we are here to rule. So Saddam famously rebuilds ancient Babylon. And if you look at the original excavation pictures from the 1930s, this is very, very crumbly brick, crumbling into the sand. And even the Ishtar Gate, which you see now in the Berlin Museum, is. sort of half fallen apart. But Saddam decided he's going to rebuild it with modern brick. And so you have this sort of rather pointless reconstruction in sort of very, very harsh new brick that doesn't look at all like a ruin. It just looks like a modern sort of pile of bricks. It is really interesting this. And it does really set the cat among the pigeons because you have, I mean, I've seen it very recently in Punjab when I went to Amritsa. And every single time I go there, there are more

ancient alleyways, which I made a very new brick. And it feels a bit like the disnification of history. Well, in this sort of, you know, Nouveau monarchy that Saddam has created for himself, if you want to call it that. And William mentioned the Macabarad, which, again, we should maybe explain a little more who they were, but they are described as the best organized and most efficient secret service in the Arab world. But not in a good way. No, in a terrifying way.

You know, people would disappear for ages. They'd be taken to... Terrible torture chambers. Yeah, yeah. Abbe Grib was a... was a very popular destination for any dissident in Iraq, long before you heard about it after the more modern American Iraq war. So, you know, you've got this guy who is ruling as a secular with this iron fist using terror to keep his people in line. You also have him pillorying people

who have religious beliefs that they hold on to. Not everybody is a barthist. I mean, to get on, you sign on to be in the Bathurst Party, but you still worship in your own way. But he mocks the Shia Muslims. You know, he describes them as Persian sympathizers, you know, that if you are a Shia and if you're declaring yourself a Shia, you must be a Persian. He denigrates the Iranians as being Zoroastrians because he knows that's really going to bug the Ayatollah. So he starts sort of like poking all sorts of bears and the Kurds. You know, we haven't talked about the Kurds and you should maybe remind everybody who the Kurds are because they are not bounded by a national boundary. They don't have their own country, although they would like one. Tell us who they are and what

they believe. So the Kurds are an ancient people who in the 20 and 21st century found themselves split over multiple borders. There are Kurds in Syria. There are Kurds in Iran. There are Kurds in Iraq. And there was a plan in the 1921 Treaty of Sev to create a Kurdistan and an Armenia. Both of these countries were conceived of in the 1921 treaty. Neither came to be in their full form. Turkey annexed half of what was meant to be Armenia. And so there was only the rump of Armenia left in what became the Soviet Republic. While the Kurds found themselves permanently split,

and they oscillate between trying to make the best they can under the country that they were given and occasionally moments of dreaming of a United Kurdistan. And so you get the PKK uprising in Turkey and earlier. Kurdish uprisings. You have various moments in Iran when the Kurds are fighting against the centre and you certainly have that in Western Iraq where the Kurds are large, powerful, they've got some of the richest oil-producing towns and they, in the course of this story that we'll have today, will rise up and suffer a terrible fate at the hands of Saddam's bath party. It's a continual story for the Kurds suffering a terrible fit.

I mean, it seems to be just one chapter follows another of betrayal and abandonment for these people. There's a wonderful history of the Kurds that has a title that is very resonant of that. It's called No Friends but the Mountains. Oh, that's touching. But I was interested that they are actually Indo-Europeans, the Kurds are. They have their own language. They have their own cuisine. They have their own music.

You know, they do stand apart. And they have their own culture. And great music. And particularly in Iran, many of the greatest. Iranian musicians are of Kurdish ethnicity, and they have this extraordinary musical tradition, which is much admired. And when you go to Iran, you constantly meet talented Kurdish musicians. But one thing I think we should be saying also is that we've given an impression of two countries, which are gripped by very despotic regimes. We've given a picture of sort of torture and

chaos in both. But I think we should also say, that they both have extremely strong, well-educated middle classes at this point. Baghdad is a prosperous town, which is highly developed, and there are excellent universities, and there are large, very well-educated Christian minorities. I think 20% of Iraq at the beginning of Saddam's reign are Christian. And the same is true of the universities in Iran. The universities reopen after the revolution and has an extremely high academic achievement rate and produced this large, wealthy, middle class of engineers and so on. And Iran is a very prosperous country too before this war. And one of the main things that this war that we're going to describe in this

story does is that it impoverishes both countries. And both countries which have enormous positive bank balances at the beginning of this story end up bankrupted and impoverished. by this pointless, long-running war. Also, you know, since you're talking about percentages of minorities, I did mention that Saddam Hussein's favourite pastime was to poke the bear and sort of denigrate Shias and call them, you know, Iranians and disguise and things like that, which is an odd thing because I was looking at the composition of his army. Now, would you do this if you were a leader?

Would you poke fun at a religious belief or a religious identification that makes up 80% of your infantry and 20% of your officer class? But he does it. You know, that is the numbers that he has. Anywho, do you remember we talked about the waterway? Shat al-Aab. Yeah, exactly. So that becomes the start of the war. And we should say that there is no agreement among historians about the causes of this war. Some people see Saddam as this opportunist who takes the opportunity of what he sees as the decline of Iran to go in and invade. Others think that it's the use that the Ayatollah's Revolutionary Iran puts to the propaganda about spreading the revolution that drives Saddam

to think that he must move first before the Iranians do. But what's certainly indisputable is that the first military moves are made by Saddam's Iraqis. And on September the 22nd, 1980, they go across and they invade into Iran and have initially very, very successful thrust. Yeah. But I mean, one of the perhaps motives, which you haven't mentioned, and oil. You know, Saddam has always had his eye on an area called Kuzestan, which was, you know, predominantly Arab, and he always felt should be part of Iraq, and it also happens to be very oil-rich.

So there are all sorts of motivations, and you're right. People argue about why this happened. And he clearly believed that the Iranian Arabs would rise up and join his forces, and there would be a quick and easy victory, which would enormously enhance. his bank balance and of course it didn't work out like that. It didn't work out that. And you know, what's really interesting is that I've heard lots of first-person testimony. You know, my wonderful colleague at the BBC, Leicester Sett, did a series a while ago where she

talked to people who signed up right in those early days in 1980 to go and fight off the Iraqis for their incursion. And they were young. You know, we're talking about people who were either 18, 19, 20, who all went and volunteered to fight because the Iotola had made. made such a good job of convincing them that, number one, this was a holy war against infidel Iraqis, who were, you know, the bathists were infidels. Number two, that they would die. If they died in martyrdom, they would have a place in heaven with all of the promises that go with it. And that is sort of

the start of that, you know, that real ideology where to die is to be martyred is to be lucky. And that's what drove young Iran. And I heard. sort of these, you know, the ones who survived saying, you know, we believed that. We absolutely believe that in the early days. They come to regret it later, but with all their hearts, they believed it. The other thing we should say is that the early part of the war, the surprise comes with the efficiency and the amazing bravery of the Iranian Air Force. So in September, as we said, the Iraqis invade. And about 45,000 Iraqi... ground troops enter Iranian territory in four major thrusts. And there are a series of airstrikes

against 10 Iranian air bases that are meant to wipe out, just as the Israelis had wiped out the Egyptian Air Force in the in the 1967 War. And President Mubarak was the only person who got his plane off the ground. The future Mubarak was an Air Force pilot at that time. I managed to get down to the south. So at this point, the Iraqis think that they're going to be able to wipe out the Iranian Air Force, but they fail. They make a mess of it. And the Iraqi thrust into Iran is challenged, first of all, by amazing performance by the Iranian Air Force. And what's interesting about this is the Air Force was an elite unit, which was heavily trained by the Americans and the British before the revolution. And in the course of the revolution, a lot of the

pilots and a lot of the wing commanders and the senior top brass, they also have been put in prison. And there is a series of remarkable counter raids within the first two or three days of the invasion when, unlike the unsuccessful raids of the Iraqis, the Iranians do succeed in shooting down aircraft in straffing airplanes on the ground, on airfields, and dropping munitions on the runways so they can't take off. And immediately after this, the Ayatollahs and the Mullahs are forced to release a lot of the jailed Air Force pilots. Yeah, the jailed elite. Yeah, the jailed elite. They offer them their freedom. And these guys

perform remarkably in the course of the war. And it's also a surprise to Americans and other observers who have rather patronizingly believed that since the revolution, these guys weren't able to cope without the advisors and the ground units and the spare parts. And the Iranians show an amazing ability to maintain these phantoms and these F-4s and these very advanced weapon systems, which they've been given by the Americans, and to really show remarkable skill in using them against the Iraqis. So, I mean, you're talking about the support that, you know, or the part that America plays. America is supporting Iraq because it feels that Iran, you know, they need a ballwork against

this fanatical ideology. They don't like the way the Shah has been done away with. They don't like their loss of influence. So they are pumping in support to Iraq during this war. diplomatic assistant, intelligence, financial aid, you know, they are putting everything into the Iraqi war effort. Although famously Kissinger says that notorious quote, that it's a shame that they both can't lose. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it's not just the Americans. I mean, just to give you the measure of muscle on both sides, okay, you've got the Soviet Union also behind Iraq. You know, normally the Soviets would be on the other side of the border, but they're not either because, you know, ideological differences with the Baathis, fine. They don't like this idea of pan-Arab state,

but they also don't like Iran being resurgent and having more area that is ungovernable and inaccessible to them. So they also help the Iraqis with military equipment. They help them with tanks, which is going to be very, very important, with artillery and aircraft as well. The Arab states, too, it's not just the Russians that weighed in, the Soviet Union. several Arab states in the region. I'm talking about Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates. They're also pumping financial aid into Iraq's war against Iran. And you've got Western countries, France, Germany. They're providing military equipment, technology, training to Iraq. One of the arguments as to why, you know, the Germans and the French are getting involved in this at all or being interested is that, you know, it's a potential arms

market. If you've got a place hungry for your weapons, that doesn't dry up. And the most improbable scene from the present day, the most improbable ally on the other side, on the Iranian side, supplying them the aircraft parts that they need for their F-4s and their phantoms, are the Israelis. And the Israelis make massive arms sales to the Iranians in the course of this war, because however much the Ayatollah is speaking out against Israel, Israel at this point fears Saddam Hussein and Iraq far more. Right. So look, the stage is now set. We're going to take a short break. Join us after the break. that you know how the sides are balanced. We'll tell you what happens when both sides clash.

More bombs fall from the plane further back, but do not explode. We know this because the earth doesn't shake as it did before, and there are no sands. And then there is a white cloud covering the earth up ahead, and everyone has his own opinions about it. Chemicals? No way, phosphorus. They'll drop it as a signal to the next planes that bomb here.

Wait a minute. Isn't phosphorus lighter than that? there, it rises, but this is spreading over the ground. Men emerge from the white cloud and run away. All of a sudden, there is a smell of garlic. Everyone shouts, chemicals! We drop frantically to the ground. Holding my breath, I put my mask over my face, tightening the straps. My heart is pounding furiously. I glance around. With their masks on, the boys look alien. Someone standing in front of me, his voice choking, says, can't breathe. I remove the filter cover from the front of his mask.

He takes a long breath. The cloud approaches us, then passes. It feels warm inside the mask. In fact, I'm roasting. Sweat is pouring from the metal snout down my collar. The eyepieces of my mask are fogged, making everything outside look dark. I sit down and lean against the embankment. Vehicles drive past.

The drivers are not well. wearing masks. Masud takes his off. We wait to see what will happen to him. He breathes deeply and exclaims, no more smell. We rip off our masks and fill our lungs with cool, fresh air. I breathe freely, but my face is soaked and my matted hair smells of rubber. Not from Wilfred Owen, not a recollection of the First World War, but a recollection of what it was like for those fighting the Iran-Iraq war, where chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, were a signature in this battle. Where did you get that particular excerpt from? This is from an autobiography of an Iranian called Ahmed Dekhan, and he wrote about his war

experiences in a book called Journey to Heading 270 degrees. And that's an autobiographical account of what he went through. And this is the sort of thing we all imagine ended with the First World War in this part of the world, of course, but not at all in the Middle East. And I think the reason that the Iraqis used this was specifically to counter the Iranian tactics of these human waves. Do you want to tell us about that? Well, I mean, one of the things we've talked about before, which is, you know, they would lay mines and the Iranians would send out, and often very young people, you know, when I say young, 17-year-olds, 18-year-olds, who would clear minds by walking through minefields and detonating

them with their own body and then throwing sheer force of numbers at weak points. It was very, very Earl Hague and send them over the top kind of direction that went on in the Iran-Iraq War. Also, I mean, something else that was reminiscent of the First World War was there's a lot of trench warfare that took place. You had quagmired areas where, you know, either side would dig in to trenches, gains would be hundreds of meters no more, you know, which was, you know, for what, again, just think about this. This is in the 1980s when, when America is considering, and Reagan are thinking about SDI, you know, strategic defense initiatives, sending weapons out into space, you know, to put a, put a shield around the world or fire laser rockets and, you know,

it's all very space-age, but you've got this very old-fashioned war going on right here on the ground in the Arab world? The first time they tried out is the 29th of November, 1981. And they send 13,000 Iranian troops from Susangir, in northwest, towards Boston. And these guys are the kind of revolutionary elite, the Sipar troops and the Basij volunteers, and 13,000 of them go into action. and they're so sort of hyped up that they go over the top before they're meant to, and before the preparatory artillery barge has even begun, and they can't do it for fear of hurting their own people. But it works, and it turns the tide of the war,

these incredibly psyched up religious volunteers, hoping to win martyrdom by taking on the Iraqi army. And this is when the Iraqis first start using chemical weapons against these guys. Now, I mean, let's talk about the chemical weapons. The question often arises is, you know, where, where, how did Iraq get its hands on chemical weaponry? And there are a number of school of thoughts and fingers pointing all over the place. What have you come to, to think is the likely scenario here? Well, this, as you say, is something that was much examined because, of course, the claim that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction was something on which a later

war was based, and there was many investigations. And from what I can see, people tend to blame German pesticide companies, who possibly quite innocently gave the equipment to build what they thought was going to be turned into pesticides, but which were then used by Saddam Hussein against both his own people and the Iranian enemy. And, you know, so there are laboratories, certainly Saddam has put a lot of time and effort into laboratories to convert these raw materials. They is not getting just from Germany, I mean America is also sending great amounts of fertilizers. France. All these sort of supposedly for agricultural development, which are being then converted to mustard gas, which is, you know,

a throwback to World War I. Sarin gas, which is something that is newer. And nerve agents, VX, things like VX are being developed and then will be used, not just ultimately against the Iranians, but also against Saddam's own people. the Kurds in particular will suffer from this. I just very quickly get into sarin gas. I mean, are you aware of what sarin gas does to a human body? Tell me. Well, it's, I mean, it's awful. I think the account that you just read was mustard gas, you know, is the Wilfred Owen-esque reading that you just gave. Sarin is, it's an awful thing. I mean, first of all, you can't breathe, you start coughing, you have a tightness about your chest. I mean, someone's described it as

as if a belt being tightened notch by notch by notch. Every time you breathe in, it gets tighter, so you can't breathe out again. Muscle twitching, you start twitching, you have convulsions, you can't stop your body from, you know, literally trembling as if it's going to come apart. Secretions, I mean, you know, saliva, tears, sweat and other things. You can imagine, you know, just basically drooling. You have no control over your body, your pupils dilate, vomiting, abdominal pain, and then loss of consciousness, coma, death.

That is what Sarin does. Doesn't it always strike here? extraordinary that people think about the worst thing they can do it to another human being and then come up with a way of doing it and delivering it. But this is used on an industrial scale. This is not just a one-off or two-offs. He actually used it. I've got the figure in front of me, 195 times suffocating, burning and blinding thousands of Iranian soldiers and civilians. And according to some Iranian sources, as many as 50,000 are the casualty numbers of these gas attacks. And again, they're deemed to be effective because the Iranians do not initially have

the protective equipment, unlike our friend in the reading at the beginning, who did have his gas fast. Oh, God, I can imagine, and we all have our, what was the, what was the room in 1984? Room 101. Room 101. We all have our room 101. I have to say the thing I would like least in the world is to be in a chemical gas attack. Well, look, all of these battles sort of start sinking into a quagmire. The initial Iraqi push into Iran is indeed pushed back to the border. But the attempts, particularly by Rathsanjani, to have a major offensive into Iraqi territory, is a failure. And so the border is back to where everyone began, that no one's made any forward or backward movement. Well, you should say who Raph Sanjani is. I mean, that's a name that many people

will not know. This is the future president of Iran who is being groomed to take over before the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. And the West, even though the Iranians are being targeted by the chemical weaponry that you talked about, largely, you know, there isn't a huge outcry because the Iranians are loathed, you know, thanks to their hostage taking and, you know, toppling a Shah that was friendly to the West. There's no love loss for the Iranians. But, you know, can you imagine the outcry, if somebody unleashed a dirty bomb in a big city, there would be an enormous outcry. But this is a war that's fought on a legion of dirty bombings and chemical attacks. But because, you know, it's the Iranians

who are detested and who are destabilizing, there isn't this effort to stop it. Yeah. We should talk about the Tanker War. That's so important. Let's talk about that. The Tank Award. That's exactly what I was about to say. So the stalemate is kind of setting in from about 1984. Saddam looking for new tactics begins attacking Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf, trying to damage Iran's oil exports. And the Iranians responding kind, so beginning this tanker war. And it's quite similar to what we're seeing today in the Red Sea with the Western forces sending warships to protect tankers to stop them being attacked. And in the middle of this, that happens this terrible tragedy. In July 1988, a US warship, the USS Vansen, under a particularly

sort of gung-ho commander, sails into Iranian territorial waters and pursuit of some Iranian gunboats. And after a series of mess-ups, it actually shoots down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 people. This is one of the great tragedies of the war. to make matters worse, the regular administration doesn't come clean, it makes up a load of excuses, and in fact the commander of the Vincennes is later given a campaign medal. So what you have here is like a picture of a war that seems to have no end, where unspeakable horrors are being visited upon both sides, where you have a depletion of personnel, of expertise, of leadership, and of money on both sides.

That I've got some figures on. In 1980, before the war breaks out, Iraq has been sitting on reserves of $30 billion. After only three years of war, this has all been spent and is soon replaced with a foreign debt of $25 billion. And the catastrophic expense of waging war has been further exaggerated by a collapse in the oil price, which is down from $26 a barrel in 1980 to only $9. in 1982. So Iraq can only continue this war against Iran with the help of the Gulf Emirates and Saudi Arabia, who are now for the very first time getting seriously worried about Iranian ambitions. And this is the first time you have Saudi actually sending money to fight a

war against revolutionary Shia, Iran. By 1988, Iraq has built up $80 billion of debt. And Iran is about the same and they're both suffering complete financial meltdown. Well, I mean, so we limp on and limp on and it looks as though this is a war that will never end and that sort of suits the rest of the world because while they're occupied they're not growing

and then all of a sudden when it does stop the war ends July 1988, it's over. You know, I was still in school but I read accounts where everybody... But isn't it true? I mean, the world gasped like suddenly, you know, Iran-Orak war, which was just kind of a thing that was always in every news bulletin.

A fixture. It was always item number four for years and years and years. And then suddenly it's over. All those pictures of dead Iraqi tanks. There's always those pictures stuck in the swamps near the shuttle Arab. And we should say how it ended. I mean, it is, it just all of a sudden, I guess they're both completely knackered, but they agree to a peace agreement. It's only when I think, man I mentioned a few minutes ago, Rafsanjani talks to the Ayatollah. himself, Ayatollah Khomeini, and one year before the Ayatollah's death, he persuades him that for the good of the economy, which has been completely wrecked by this war, that he has to, and the phrase he uses, drink this chalice of poison. So Khomeini goes on television and announces in July

1988 that Iran will accept this UN revolution and he will drink the chalice of poison, as he says. And do you know what normally happens after a war? You have a change of leadership, You know, especially if everyone's at, but nothing changes in this chess game. The kings on both side remain the king. So Saddam Hussein remains in power in Iraq. We've talked about, you know, the battles he fights with the Iranians. We have not touched on what he does to his own people, you know, the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs. That'll be for another time when we look at that region.

Terrible gassing of the Kurds at Talabja, which I remember reading those horrific front-page stories at the time. Yeah. Yeah. I just been sort of digging into what happened. to the Marsh Arabs as well during that time, which is also appalling. The Marsh Arabs, we should say, are these extraordinary Arab tribes that live in the waterways, living this ancient Mesopotamian lifestyle, which was beautifully described in the 1920s and 30s by the travel writer Wilfred Thessinger, who I met as an old man, and remember talking to him about this.

And he took these gorgeous photographs of these extraordinary people with the same sort of reed boats that you see in Foronic and Assyrian and Bass Reliefs. And this was all going strong in the 1920s and 30s. And then Saddam decides to drain the marshes. And this whole way of life, which has been there since 4,000 or BC or earlier, is over in a decade. Utterly destroyed. So one of the surprises of the war is that the Shiite Arabs in Iran remain loyal to Iran, although they're Arabs, and the Shiites of Iraq remain loyal to their country, although they're Shiites.

And what you see in this war is, in a sense, ironically, the fact that national identity trumps ethnic or faith divisions, that people are now very consciously Iranian and Iraqi rather than Shia, rather than Arab, and that that's the prime loyalty that they have by the end of the war. It's nationalism. Yeah, nationalism as opposed to cultural identity. It is nationalism. It's the triumph of nationalism. And, of course, the big irony is that the force, which ultimately leads to the biggest increase in sheer power in the region in the years to come, will be, ironically, America. Because when America takes out Saddam Hussein in the Second Gulf War, the Ba'ath Party falls.

There's this debathification drive that goes on after the Second Gulf War. and the people who sees power are the Shia. So you can argue that George W. Bush is a more effective exporter of the Iranian revolution and the power of the Shiites than the Adonohmede himself, which is a last final thought. Well, on that, on that, on that, on that, on that, probably. Just putting on my tin hat for all the letters that come in. Just leaving that now. Thank you very much. It's all from Empire.

Join us next time when we're going to be discussing the rise of the Houthis and Yemen. We've got a stellar guess for that. So until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.