16
FACING THE FOE: THE HOSTAGE CRISIS, THE IRAQ-IRAN WAR, AND THE AFTERMATH (1979–1989)
All the while that the Council of Experts deliberated over the articles of the Islamic constitution and the supreme authority of the guardian jurist, a crisis of great magnitude was in progress, one that shook Iran’s relations with the outside world and initiated an adversarial encounter with the United States that shaped their relationship for decades to come. The hostage crisis of November 1979 started an international tremor that for the following fourteen months would enrage the United States, preoccupy world media, appall public opinion worldwide, and irreparably damage the image of the Islamic Republic. A devastating conflict with the Ba‘athist regime in neighboring Iraq compounded Iran’s external troubles. While the first event offered the Islamic regime a chance to symbolically engage a superpower, the prolonged war with Iraq proved a calamity that adversely affected lives of Iranians and Iraqis alike. As in most revolutions, domestic turmoil found an adversarial projection beyond its borders, even though neither of the two events, the hostage crisis or the Iraqi invasion, was entirely unavoidable.
Yet both events boosted Khomeini’s uncompromising stance and helped consolidate his Islamic order at the expense of his contenders. What he proudly labeled the “second revolution” was an attempt to eradicate not only the remnants of what his camp labeled as “royalist sedition” but also the “compromising liberals.” Khomeinists exploited the hostage crisis, and the assumed threat of “world-devouring” America (emrika-ye jahan-khawar), to steal the show from the left, the first to “expose” (efshagari) the great powers’ “sinister imperialist plots.” The war, in contrast, helped silence any contestation of clerical supremacy by labeling it “traitorous.” The experience of defending the “Islamic homeland,” moreover, gave new legitimacy to the regime, which basked in its patriotic glow, and helped raise a generation of veterans tied to the Islamic Republic through sacrifice and blood.
EXORCISING THE GREAT SATAN
On November 4, 1979, a group of young hard-liners who called themselves Students Following the Line of the Imam (Daneshjuyan-e Payro-e Khatt-e Imam) in a dramatic move took over the compound of the American Embassy in Tehran. They seized sixty-six US diplomats and staff and held them hostage, presumably demanding the shah’s repatriation by the United States to stand trial in a revolutionary court. A week earlier, in late October 1979, the shah, by then a ghost of his past, had arrived in New York to receive urgent treatment for his cancer. Having approached his influential friends for an entry visa to the United States, among them Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller, his arrival in New York aroused further suspicions in the conspiracy-infested climate of the revolution in Iran. The bitter memories of the US intervention in the coup of August 1953 fueled a sense of déjà vu that was highly opportune for whoever wished to exploit it.
The 444-day hostage crisis proved as beneficial to Khomeini’s camp as it was damaging to Iran’s international standing. Immediately after the seizure, a few of the US embassy staff were paraded before cameras, an audacious gesture to gain publicity that was amply covered by world media. Images of blindfold and terrified Americans (some of them taken from behind their consulate desks where they had been issuing visas to terrified Iranians seeking residence in the United States) soon turned into iconic markers of American humiliation in the hands of vengeful fanatics.
Furthering the demand for the shah’s return, the Students of the Imam Line, as they came to be known, alleged that the embassy of the world-devouring superpower was a “spy den” (laneh-ye jasusi) conspiring against the revolution, aiding “idol worshippers,” and somehow aiming to stage a coup and restore the shah to power. In Iran’s revolutionary atmosphere “exposing” such mischiefs, no doubt, could arouse huge popular sentiment. If further conspiratorial pretexts were needed, they were readily offered by meetings between members of the provisional government and the American diplomats and statesmen. Already, occasional meetings between Bazargan and William Sullivan (1922–2013), the American ambassador in Tehran, were portrayed in the leftist and Islamic hard-line presses as compromising and suspicious. A meeting between Ibrahim Yazdi and the US secretary of the state at the time, Cyrus Vance (1917–2002), during the UN General Assembly in New York, aggravated the charges of conspiracy. A meeting between Bazargan and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US national security adviser, during the anniversary celebration of Algerian independence in late October 1979 added fuel to the paranoiac climate. Though all negotiations revolved around mutual concerns and the need to revamp US-Iran relations in the aftermath of the revolution, and even sought remedies for excesses of the Pahlavi era, this apparently was not enough to vindicate Bazargan in the eye of his radical critics. Soon these contacts became a major part of the “exposés” by the hostage takers to discredit the provisional government.
The intention to take over the embassy was a familiar part of the radical left’s agenda, rehearsed earlier and unsuccessfully staged. No less than three times before the takeover by the Students of the Imam Line, the US embassy had been attacked by leftist militias—first on Christmas 1978 and again on February 13, 1979, two days after the victory of the revolution. The second assault by the People’s Fada’iyan was deflected with the cooperation of Ibrahim Yazdi and the provisional government. Later, a self-styled revolutionary komiteh was stationed in the embassy and headed by a thug-turned-revolutionary—who evidently was on the embassy’s payroll. A further attempt by the Mojahedin paramilitary took place weeks before November 1979. All attempts evidently were meant to be symbolic and gain publicity for the perpetrators, but thanks to the radical left, lessons in hostage taking were quickly learned by the Islamic understudies.
The terminology of the hostage crisis, too, part of the widespread neology of the early revolutionary days, was a joint product of the left and the Khomeinists. The “line” (khatt) indicative of an ideological line evidently came from the Marxist milieu and was quickly spread in the linguistically contagious environment of the time eager to differentiate one “position” from another. “Clarify your position!” was a common cautionary message at a time when minute ideological variances separated the Marxist from the Marxist Islamic and both of them from the radical Islamist line. Occupying the US embassy was a bold move by the Students of the Imam Line to outmaneuver competing trends on the fast-changing revolutionary stage. That they were of the “Imam’s line” implied a certain personal loyalty to the leader of the revolution, though, as it turned out, not entirely to the clerical or lay Khomeinist factions around the Imam. Acting as a free agent, the students were a handful of young and idealistic men and women of mostly middle or lower middle classes motivated by the anti-imperialist discourse and in solidarity with world liberation movements (fig. 16.1). Such sentiments were rampant in the Islamic associations in universities, often in competition with the leftist publicity. The sense of urgency attached to the seizure of the embassy was meant to be dramatic, even theatrical.
Expressions of moral indignation throughout the crisis were a powerful propaganda weapon in the hands of the Students of the Imam Line forcing all other revolutionaries to jump on the bandwagon. The seizure turned into a crisis of unprecedented scale. To the surprise of many, Bazargan included, Khomeini unabashedly backed the takeover of the embassy not only as a valiant move by the committed Islamic youth but also a preemptive measure to “expose” the American “satanic” plots in the hand of “spies” masked as diplomats. Still residing in Qom, Khomeini on the surface was reluctant to intervene in the affairs of the provisional government, while he actually routinely and overtly undermined it, often with undisguised relish. He gave inflammatory interviews to international media calling on Islamic militants worldwide to rise up against world-devouring superpowers, he appointed radical clergy critical of Bazargan to executive and judiciary posts and to the offices of Imam Jom‘eh (leader of Friday prayers) in every city, and extolled rabble-rousers and their maverick behavior. If he needed any pretext to rule by decree, the constitution was about to award it to him. Soon his escalating militancy became all the more apparent to all who hoped for a quick end to the hostage crisis and revolutionary chaos. As Bazargan had once noted, the Imam himself proved the most potent source of confusion. He resembled Iran to “a city of hundred mayors” and his own government a “knife without a handle.”
Figure 16.1. Produced by the Students of the Imam’s Line for the World Liberation Movements conference in Tehran in January 1980, the poster in English and Arabic shows Iran spearheading the struggle against the United States. Its citation by Khomeini was the inspiration for nasty anti-American propaganda during the hostage crisis.
Middle Eastern Posters. Collection, Box 2, Poster no. 49, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
The first victim of the hostage crisis, predictably, was the provisional government. It resigned on November 5, a day after the seizure, and Khomeini eventually accepted the resignation a few days later. By late October, though, it had been largely paralyzed and ready to quit. It faced harassment not only from the unruly komitehs backed by Khomeinists and the revolutionary courts but also from the free-agent Revolutionary Council, with its semiclandestine and revolving membership. The council was set up by Khomeini almost as a parallel authority to the provisional government, as if from the start he intended to pull off all the authority from under the government and put all the blame for chaos and contention on its shoulder. Bazargan was attacked both by Marxists and the Islamic left, who accused him of sheltering “dependent” (vabasteh) capitalists and actively collaborating with the United States and its agents. Bazargan’s “step-by-step” transition had clearly run aground.
After veraciously digging the remnant of the documents in the embassy, the “revelations” (efsha-gari) made of the Students of the Imam Line revealed few earth-shaking spy stories. Though they landed ‘Abbas Amir Entezam (b. 1933), the spokesman of the then-defunct provisional government, in prison on charges of collaborating with the US embassy, there was little substance to the charges of American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. What seemed to be routine intelligence gathering by embassy staff, handicapped by lack of credible sources, appeared to the embassy invaders as undeniable evidence of the superpower’s design to destroy the Islamic Revolution. With unparalleled obsession, the students pored over thousands of embassy files in search of agents and spies, plots for assassination and overthrow, and enemies within. They even pasted together, unbelievably though it may sound, thousands of classified documents that were hurriedly shredded by the American staff minutes before the embassy’s complete takeover. The Herculean act of document recovery, however, did not reveal much of a conspiracy.
What eventually did emerge out of this frantic exercise in exposing “malicious imperialist intrigues” were many published volumes of Asnad-e Laneh-ye Jasusi (Documents from the Den of Spies), demonstrating years of close US monitoring of Iran’s domestic affairs and regional developments. What every intelligence unit of any embassy in any country around the world would routinely perform appeared to the wide-eyed Students of the Imam’s Line as undeniable proof of US espionage. The documents revealed a high level of attention to detail but also a bureaucratic sense of benign negligence toward the bigger picture and the underlying revolutionary pressures that were building up under the glittery surface of Pahlavi regime.
As far as the postrevolutionary period was concerned, beyond the nitty-gritty who’s who and the means of establishing contacts with new authorities, the US diplomacy and intelligence gathering appeared to be less concerned with the makeup of the revolutionary regime and activist Islam. Rather, the US embassy was engaged with repercussions of the new regime domestically and for the region: the potential Soviet benefits from the fall of the shah, security of the Persian Gulf, and consequences of the reactivation of the Tudeh Party and various other brands of Marxism in Iran. Khomeini was seen more as a rabble-rouser than a potent nemesis, and Bazargan as a potential fellow traveler on the road to diplomatic normalization. There was little admission of past mistakes, and even less about ways to offset the loss of a valuable ally such as the shah. The Islamic Revolution was seen as a regional headache, yet to be figured out and dealt with.
For the students and the captivated Iranian public, the hostage episode first appeared as a triumph, a preemptive move to avert another 1953 coup, so it seemed, thanks to revolutionary alertness of the young and unblemished students. But from the start the crisis decidedly tilted the political discourse toward greater militancy as the students successfully adopted the rhetoric and techniques of the left. Not only they were empowered by the fall of the provisional government, they persuaded Khomeini and his allies to place higher ideological bets. The slogan “Neither East nor West but the Islamic Republic” had to be amended with a more potent “anti-imperialist” label. Now the frequently uttered slogan in the rallies, “Death to America” (marg bar Amrika), a relic of the Tudeh slogans of the 1950s, was matched by Khomeini’s fiery denunciation of America as the “Great Satan” (shaytan-e bozorg)
Almost becoming a voodoo-like invocation, the satanic attribute, first uttered in November 1979 by Khomeini in a routine diatribe against the United States, may have been rooted more in Cold War propaganda than in an Islamic notion of Satan. To be sure, the Qur’an does have its Great Satan leading an army of smaller demons. Yet Satan was barely ever perceived beyond the context of worldly temptations and an agency for personal damnation. He is a fallen angel capable of mischief and deceit but devoid of dark destructive powers. Applying this to the United States as a demonic superpower, with an almost apocalyptic connotation, seems to have been inspired by more mundane sources. In the new Islamic garb, demonizing America went beyond the Cold War invective. It came to predicate an ultimate act of “othering,” as if in cosmic combat the Islamic Revolution was leading the forces of good against the evil armies of hegemony and decadence. That such a dichotomy appeared in a land that once nurtured the Zoroastrian belief in eternal war between good and evil is striking.
In a more historical Iranian experience, however, one can only draw a parallel with Safavid Shi‘ism. The cursing of the Caliphs and other desecrations of Sunni symbols were rooted in the vulnerability of the new Shi‘i state versus the military might of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Anti-Sunni propaganda not only reflected anxiety about Ottoman hegemony but also generated legitimacy for the new Safavid state. It consolidated its social base and allowed it to eliminate its real and potential rivals. “Curse and rebuke” (sabb va la‘n) of the first three Righteous Caliphs, scandalizing ‘Aisha, the wife of the Prophet and leader of anti-‘Ali revolt during the first civil war, even the ritualistic burning of the effigy of the second caliph ‘Umar (‘Omar-koshan), cursing of the first Umayyad caliph Mu‘awiya, his son Yazid and some of the celebrated figures of early Islamic history, and steady harassment of the Sunni and crypto-Sunni population of Iran helped consolidate the Safavid base, especially among the restive Qezilbash. For centuries to come, the Shi‘i propaganda generated a powerful counternarrative to Sunni history, with a lasting impact on Iran’s identity.
With some historical latitude, it may be argued that the modern Students of the Imam Line in their praise of the Imam were not unlike the Qezilbash of the Safavid era. Nor was the cursing of the American demon entirely unlike the damning of the Ottoman Sunnis. And Khomeini was as much a prophet for the Islamic Revolution as Isma‘il was for the Safavid revolution. Such a parallel, ahistorical as it may seem, is sociologically constructive. To define its identity in moments of crisis, Shi‘ism has relied on an element of social cohesion, charismatic leadership, a persecution narrative, and an external Other, real or imagined. Here in the Islamic revolution, the alien Other reappeared as a demonized United States so as to allow for the political legitimacy of the Shi‘i clerical body and secure its ascendency. Students of the Line of the Imam hence facilitated a leap to a new era of international animosity, severing the Islamic Republic from the Pahlavi past.
To this end there was no dearth of enthusiasm. In front of the embassy, along Roosevelt Avenue (renamed Mofatteh), there was a spirit of fanfare: thousands gathered everyday to take part in anti-American and anti-Israeli rallies or to witness the spectacle. “Committed” graffiti artists were hard at work depicting on the outer walls of the embassy ad hoc scenes of American crimes and graphic expressions of revolutionary victory. Sayings of the beloved Imam were painted in huge size, including Emrika hich ghalati nemitavanad bekonad (roughly, “America can’t do a damn thing”), an assurance from Khomeini that despite much talk in the media, the United States was in no position to take any military action against Iran. There were vendors selling their goods: grilled corncobs, fresh walnuts, and oven-roasted beets, all delicacies of the poor now brought to the affluent neighborhood in north Tehran. In the aftermath of the Camp David accords and the subsequent Egypt-Israeli peace treaty signed in March 1979, young peddlers in front of the US embassy were selling crude string puppets of the “three corruptors: Carter, Sadat, and Begin.” The Tudeh Party, too, had to make its presence felt. Every morning a large bouquet of flowers was delivered to the front gate of the embassy as a token of Tudeh appreciation of the heroism of the students.
The street culture of the hostage crisis also brought street booksellers to the thoroughfare in front of the US embassy (renamed “Den of Spies”) offering “blank cover” clandestine translations of Russian Marxist-Leninist pamphlets along with popular writings on Islamic ideology; works of Al-e Ahmad, Shari‘ati, and Taleqani; hasty translations of popular histories about US crimes in Vietnam, international Zionism, and crimes of Israel against Palestinians; pamphlets published by Fada’iyan and Mojahedin; and portraits of Mosaddeq, Mirza Khuchak Khan, and martyrs of the Islamic Revolution. The small collection of books and posters was an iconic representation of a revolutionary culture in the making, with its diverse origins and curious readership in search of a political identity.
As if he were a clairvoyant, Khomeini’s assurance about the US inability to do any harm proved true on April 24, 1980, when Operation Eagle Claw undertaken by the US Army Delta Force in collaboration with other units of the US armed forces attempted to rescue the hostages. The operation was a total failure. In a highly elaborate, multistage military plan, US troops first were to land on a deserted airstrip in the middle of the central Iranian desert, then fly some four hundred miles north with helicopters to a secure base near the capital, then storm the embassy compound, and after releasing hostages, drive them over to an airstrip near the capital and fly them back to safety abroad.
The operation, however, was aborted halfway through because of logistical problems and while troops were still landing in the inhospitable Lut desert south of the oasis town of Tabas. In a frantic move to return to their base, three US helicopters crashed with a huge C-130 military transport aircraft, resulting in the death of eight servicemen. The failure was caused by no less a biblical calamity (more accurately, a Qur’anic one) than a momentary sandstorm. This was a huge discredit to President Carter and the Carter administration even though in retrospect it displayed his sound judgment to abort the operation. The perception of divine intervention projected a sense of invincibility onto Khomeini’s image and vastly boosted his revolutionary resolve. Soon after, when Khalkhali rushed to the scene of the crash, where charred bodies of the victims were still exposed, his jubilant sneer against the backdrop of the empty desert appeared grossly surreal. In front of Iranian TV cameras he irreverently kicked their remains with his shoes as if he were raking through the ruins of a forlorn empire. To many Iranian revolutionaries the debacle was a living testimony that the United States indeed could not “do a damn thing.”
BA‘ATHIST MENACE REVISITED
The Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980 was a rude awakening for the Islamic Republic and an unexpected retreat from the empty rhetoric of the hostage taking and the pretensions of “bringing the United States to its knees.” Reminiscent of earlier episodes from Iran’s long history, here, too, turmoil at the center encouraged intrusion into the vulnerable periphery. At the end of the Safavid era, when Iran’s western frontiers were overrun by Ottoman armies and those in the north by Russian troops, or in the postconstitutional era when turmoil in Tehran invited occupations from all directions, were two distinct reminders of past vulnerabilities going back to the Roman-Parthian and Byzantine-Sasanian times. The Iraqi regime’s aggression, however, added an ideological facet to the ancient border tension along the Zagros range.
For Saddam Hussein and his Ba‘athist cohorts there was an added ideological facet. Arab nationalism, in its Ba‘athist permutation east of Damascus, suffered from a sense of insecurity toward Iran that was fueled as much by Iraq’s own religious and ethnic complexities as by Saddam’s skewed, and barely concealed, ambitions to become champion of the Arab cause. The postcolonial complex of Ba‘athist nationalism was bound to invent its own demons nearby. Saddam’s Tikrit clique, in particular, was brimming with racial and cultural hatred for “Persians” (‘Ajam). They were viewed as historical enemies of the “Arabs,” who, despite defeat and humiliation in the early days of the Islamic era, according to the Ba‘athist narrative, persisted over the centuries and encroached on Iraq’s Arab supremacy. The time had come to put the enemy in its place, not through a war of propaganda but through the barrel of a gun. Invoking the early history of Islamic conquests (al-Futuh) and Arab armies routing Sassanian defenses in successive battles, Saddam hoped for a quick victory. Ominously, he named the Iraqi offensive Qadisiya after the decisive battle in 636 fought on the west bank of Euphrates. In that battle, the Iranian loss opened Mesopotamia to armies of Islam and soon after brought the loss of Ctesiphon, the capital of the Sasanian Empire (north of today’s Baghdad), and the beginning of its rapid downfall.
Iran’s historical claims over the Shi‘i holy sites and the Shi‘i community of Iraq added to the Ba‘athist resentment. Capture of Baghdad in 1508 and in 1638 under the Safavids, Nader Shah’s occupation of the shrine cities of Iraq in 1743, and Karim Khan’s occupation of Basra in 1775, though distant memories, had not entirely lapsed from the modern Iraqi narrative. Fierce Wahhabi anti-Shi‘i campaigns in southern Iraq and the sack of Karbala in 1802, on the other hand, incensed Iranians. The aborted campaign in 1821 by the Qajar prince-governor of western Iran, Mohammad ‘Ali Mirza Dowlatshah, in part was motivated by concern for protection of the Shi‘i community. Even though the conclusion of the 1823 and 1847 Perso-Ottoman border treaties stabilized the frontiers and diminished both the Ottoman and the Iranian territorial ambitions, Qajar moral authority over Shi‘i Iraq endured throughout the nineteenth century.
The unfavorable treatment of the Shi‘i community, once the Mamluk dynasty of Iraq was supplanted in 1831 by Ottoman direct rule, rekindled Iranian resentment. Yet Naser al-Din Shah’s 1871 visit and his cordial reception by the Ottomans was but one example of how the Iranian state tried to reassert its authority albeit symbolically. Predominance of the ulama and of the seminarians of the Iranian origin in the teaching circles of Najaf and Karbala has in effect made these centers inseparable part of Iran’s religious fabric. A steady stream of Iranian pilgrims to southern Iraq and a large community of Iranian permanent residents in the shrine cities bonded the two countries even after the formation of modern Iraq. That by the 1960s and 1970s tens of thousands of Shi‘is with dual Iranian-Iraqi identities were residing in the pilgrimage cities of southern Iraq further injured Ba‘athist sensibilities.
The ethnically diverse population of Iraq that had been glued together under the British mandate now had to be tied up by a police state wallowing in its oil wealth. Saddam saw revolution-stricken Iran both as a threat and an opportunity. Iraq’s 1975 territorial compromise with the shah over demarcation of the Shatt al-Arab waterway (or what Iranians knew as Arvand Rud) had wounded his ego and whetted his expansionist appetite. In July 1980, a week after the shah’s death in a Cairo hospital, Saddam appeared on Baghdad television denouncing the earlier settlement with Iran and shredding the Algiers Declaration. Shatt al-Arab, he claimed, was in Iraqi territory in its entirety. Sole access to the two-hundred-mile waterway not only offered Iraq strategically secure access to the Persian Gulf but also exacted a major blow on Iran’s commercial shipping and access to the Persian Gulf along its southeastern province of Khuzestan.
Saddam also entertained other ambitions. With purges of Iranian armed forces after the revolution, and the ensuing chaos in Iranian defense, he saw a golden opportunity to “annex” Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province, or what the Iraqi regime called Arabistan, to the “Arab motherland”—a Ba‘athist dream of an Anschluss. With about 40 percent of the Khuzestan population then conversing in an Arabic dialect or of some Arab descent, Saddam believed he had a popular base inside Iran. Although a leftist-inspired and Iraqi-sponsored secessionist movement known as Jibhat al-Tahrir (liberation front) flickered briefly in the early months of the revolution, there was virtually no support inside Khuzestan for Saddam or Ba‘athism, even among Sunnis of the province.
Only weeks after the victory of the revolution, the ethnic Arab activists in Khorramshahr led by pro-Ba‘athist Jibha al-Tahrir and its left-leaning associates put out a list of three demands. They called for cultural autonomy and adoption of Arabic as the official language of the Khuzestan province, use of Iran’s oil revenue as a first priority, and an exclusive Arabic-speaking cohort to govern the province. Months of negotiations with representatives of the provisional government and with Khomeini and his aids reached a deadlock and eventually led to an armed confrontation in Khorramshahr on May 29, 1979. The commander of the Iranian Navy, Admiral Ahmad Madani (1928–2006), a popular National Front figure, led the government forces that crushed the secessionist rebellion. There were at least fifty-five dead and many injured. The Khorramshahr incident, the first of several ethnic rebellions in other provinces, demonstrated the Islamic Republic’s commitment to a strong and centralized state, a policy that in Baghdad’s view reaffirmed Iranian hegemony of the Pahlavi era.
Beside Khorramshahr incident, Saddam’s fear of a Shi‘i revolution in Iran had deeper roots. Although in early 1979 he had congratulated Khomeini for the revolution’s success and even invited Bazargan to Baghdad, his shift to a hostile posture came after Khomeini and his hard-line supporters called for the “export” of the Islamic Revolution to neighboring Iraq. The Islamic Da‘wa Party, a cleric-dominated Shi‘i revolutionary organization active since the 1960s, emerged as an eager partner. The Da‘wa Party was responsible for a Shi‘i uprising in Najaf in 1977 that had been brutally put down by the Ba‘athist regime. In the absence of secular parties, Da‘wa epitomized Shi‘i grievances and years of repression, torture, and killing.
The Iranian revolutionary message was carried not merely over the airwaves and through clerical channels, but also by provocative acts that made Saddam even more concerned with a recurring Shi‘i rebellion in the south at a time when prospects of a second Kurdish revolt in the north were not far off. Following two assassination attempts against senior Ba‘athist figures, by April 1980 Saddam was anxious enough to go as far as detaining and then executing Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1935–1980), the most visible leader of the Da‘wa, on charges of support for the Islamic Revolution and attempts to replicate it in Iraq. His sister Amina bint Huda al-Sadr (1937–1980) was tortured and killed before his eyes. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a respected theologian and author of a trilogy expounding on political, economic, and philosophical dimensions of his perceived Islamic order, had already spent time in Saddam’s jail on charges of sedition.
These executions, followed by more arrests and executions, were warning signals to Khomeini and his Iraqi sympathizers. His years of exile in Najaf made Khomeini a familiar face among the Shi‘i clerical leadership of Iraq, who viewed him with a mix of awe and fear. Baghdad’s extreme measures had the reverse effect, for it heightened anti-Ba‘athist sentiments in revolutionary Iran and further blackened Saddam’s image as a brutal tyrant. As it turned out, the Shi‘is of Iraq were not entirely sold on Khomeini’s revolution. Despite sympathy for the Islamic Revolution, droves of them recruited into the Iraqi army fought against Iran and died for their country. Yet hatred for Saddam and the Ba‘athist regime persisted. It was too deep to be diminished even by the horrifying experience of an eight-year war with Iran. Shi‘is continued to be discriminated against, intimidated, and kept out of the ruling circles in Iraq. These were conditions that swayed the Iraqi Shi‘is toward clerical leadership and its Islamic political alternative.
Saddam’s blend of anxiety and expansionism was further fed by Iranian opposition figures in exile, an all-too-familiar phenomenon in history of revolutions. With the demise of the shah, senior Pahlavi army officers in exile, such as General Gholam-‘Ali Oveysi, viewed Saddam as a potential ally. They were apparently in cahoots with Shapur Bakhtiar, then in exile in Paris, who unmindful of Ba‘athist ambitions, viewed Saddam as a valuable counterbalance to the harm brought by Khomeini. The hostage crisis, the fall of Bazargan’s provisional government, and the shah’s demise consolidated the Islamic Republic’s stance. Even in the early months of the war, there were nebulous hopes among opponents of the Islamic regime that the Iraqi invasion would weaken Khomeini and open a road to Pahlavi restoration. Four months into war with Iraq, and as late as January 1981, the hostage crisis was still in progress, adding uncertainty to the future of the Iranian revolution. These were incentives to engage in a conflict, hoping that Iran’s anti-American belligerence and the general anti-Iranian climate in the West would work in their favor.
A SACRED DEFENSE
Despite many months of hostile exchanges over the airwaves and at border posts, the full-scale Iraqi invasion came as a surprise. On September 22, 1980, Iraqi air strikes targeted Iranian air force bases deep inside the country (map 16.1). Concurrently, the Iraqi infantry and amphibious forces crossed the Shatt al-Arab, and breaking through the southwestern and western borders, they infiltrated deep inside Iran’s strategic positions. With unconcealed desire, the invading army aimed to occupy the oil-rich province of Khuzestan. Pushing back feeble Iranian defenses all along the western borders, and as far north as Kermanshahan province, the Iraqis’ rapid gains within the first few weeks of the conflict were significant. Claiming the entire Shatt al-Arab waterway, the Iraqi siege of Khorramshahr, Iran’s most important commercial port in the Persian Gulf, and near destruction of the nearby city of Abadan, Iran’s most important oil refinery, were severe blows to Iran’s defense, economy, and morale. Iraq’s control of the Zagros heights along the Luristan and Kurdistan frontiers, moreover, meant the loss of a crucial natural strategic advantage that had protected Iran through the ages.
Yet Iraqi gains proved transient. When the first shock of the invasion had passed, Iranian resistance and its reconstituted defenses, despite the huge odds, were effective enough to withhold Iraqi advances. In a matter of weeks, the Iranian armed forces—or what was left of them—along with the Revolutionary Guards, disorganized and inexperienced but steadfast, and soon after with the help of the Basij volunteer militia, managed to bring the Iraqi advances to a near halt. In less than a year Saddam’s army was in retreat. A foreign intrusion in the midst of the revolution brought most Iranians behind the Islamic regime, and soon the war became a unifying cause despite its many domestic divisions. As it turned out, the “sacred defense” (defa‘-e moqaddas), as it soon was labeled, became a blessing to a regime then in the throes of a deadly domestic struggle versus the People’s Mojahedin and other opposition forces. Incredible feats of sacrifice by hundreds of thousands of young Iranians fighting and dying at the front electrified Iranian society. Despite Iran’s many instances of civil war and wars of succession and despite two rounds of occupation by European powers, this was the first time since the Russo-Persian wars of the early nineteenth century that Iranians had experienced a full-scale invasion. Remarkably, with the exception of the People’s Mojahedin, whom Saddam harbored in 1986, throughout the course of the conflict there was no known case of collaboration with the enemy or defection to the Iraqi side. Even the few senior officers of the shah’s army who have set their hope in Saddam’s victory quickly gave up.
Map 16.1. Iraq-Iran War, 1980–1988
By late November 1980 Iran had amassed some two hundred thousand regular troops and one hundred thousand Revolutionary Guards and volunteers on its southwestern front. Iranian special forces, moreover, with naval and air support, attacked the Iraqi oil export terminals on the southern tip of the Faw peninsula. The Iraqi defensive posture changed the course of the war and forced the invading army to dig in along its advanced lines. Thus began trench warfare that lasted for nearly eight years, at huge human cost to both sides. Iranian counteroffensives in January 1981 in the Battle of Susangerd, forty miles northwest of Khuzestan’s provincial capital, Ahwaz, was the first of many that came in its pace (see map 16.1). Banisadr, who at the time also served as commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces, oversaw an operation that proved ineffective and caused massive casualties. Dejected and tired of animosities in Tehran, he spent the greater part of his time behind the front lines, preoccupied with the course of the war, hence lost more ground to his many nemesis in the capital (fig. 16.2). He was perhaps unfairly blamed for the failure of the first Iranian counteroffensive. The operation was marred by rivalries between the regular armed forces and the Revolutionary Guards and by the aftereffects of heightening political quarrels in Tehran. Both the command and the rank and file had to adjust to new realities: revolutionary turmoil, multiple sources of power within the regime, and the dictates of a total war.
Figure 16.2. Banisadr visiting the front (Susanged?), c. January 1981.
Kaveh Golestan and Alfred Yaghoubzadeh, Jang: Do Gozaresh az Jang-e Iran-Iraq, 1359 (Tehran, 1360/1981), 50 (photographed by Alfred Yaghoubzadeh).
After the ousting of Banisadr in June 1981 and the takeover by the Supreme Defense Council, appointed by Khomeini and headed jointly by two of his senior clerical aides, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and ‘Ali Khamenei, there was a semblance of greater coordination. The Revolutionary Guards called in September 1980 to fight alongside the embattled Iranian armed forces learned to be more practical in driving the enemy back. Though untried and hardly battle-worthy, the challenge of the war built up the spirit of the Guards, solidified their ranks, and raised their prestige, sometimes unfairly at the expense of the regular forces. The propaganda machine of the Islamic Republic invariably gave preference in its coverage to the Guards and credited them with major gains. Soon emerging as a powerful arm of the Islamic state, the Revolutionary Guard Corps relied on its militia spirit and organizational spontaneity, extensive indoctrination, and generous state funding to compensate for the lack of experience and training of its new recruits. In Khuzestan, together with the Basij paramilitary force, the Guards staunchly resisted Iraqi offensives, and in joint operations with the regular army managed to push the Iraqis behind the border. On the southwestern front, and especially in the Battle of Khorramshahr in the fall of 1980, the Guards fought valiantly, sustaining massive losses.
By September 1981, the Iranians forced the Iraqis to lift the siege of Abadan, and by December, the Iranian regular army units had pushed back the Iraqi army along the western and northwestern fronts. Fighting pitched battles, by May 1982 Iranian Guards and Basij volunteer units finally recaptured the ruined port of Khorramshahr at huge human cost (see map 16.1). The Battle of Khorramshahr—dubbed “Khunin-shahr” (city of blood), claimed thousands of young Iranian lives. It was a drama of blood and martyrdom that boosted Iranian morale rather than having huge strategic value. The Iraqi retreat behind Khuzestan’s borders, and from most other sectors of occupied Iranian territory, was an undeniable victory for Iran. This was despite Iranian military and economic disadvantages, and despite regional and international isolation, a turning point after nearly two years of carnage and destruction. Having recovered its losses, Iran stood at a clear advantage to end the war in its own terms. Yet the war continued for reasons beyond defense of the “Islamic motherland,” as Iran labeled it in the Iranian media.
CULTURE OF THE WAR
Stories of bravery and resistance by regular army recruits, purged officers returning to service—some directly from the jails of the Islamic Republic—the Revolutionary Guards, and Basij volunteers moved millions of their compatriots. The “human waves”—or “cannon fodder” as cynics called it—mostly consisted of young volunteers spearheading counterattacks, or, more accurately, sent off on suicidal missions by Revolutionary Guard commanders and low-ranking clergy who served as the “ideological-devotional” commissars behind the lines (fig. 16.3 and fig. 16.4). With astounding audacity some of the volunteers crossed Iraqi lines and with grenades in hand went under Iraqi tanks. The Islamic regime saw such sacrifice as the edifying fruit of the revolution. War unified the society against a foreign intruder, giving it unprecedented resilience. The siege of Khorramshahr in September and October 1980 was particularly galvanizing. Although Iranian resistance failed and the ruined city fell into Iraqi hands, acts of endurance boosted Iranian morale and heralded eventual victory over the Iraqis.
Young volunteers were mostly a by-product of Iran’s demographic revolution that had started in the early 1970s. These were teenagers who at times, despite their parents’ wishes, escaped home, buying one-way tickets to the front on the intercity bus services. Others took their school textbooks with them to the front to study in their spare time. Still others, with the blessing of their family, left for the front as if going on an outdoor excursion, taking with them rugs, bedding, and samovars. Once there, a few received sufficient military equipment or protective clothing. Often they had very little or no training. After each operation, thousands of corpses lay rotting on the parched plains of Khuzestan, amid dust, mud, and heat, some run over by tanks or smashed to pieces by shrapnel.
Figure 16.3 and Figure 16.4. Luring children to the front was one objective of the state-sponsored cult of martyrdom. The extra push up the hill (left) is symbolic. The message on the wall (right) has Khomeini saying, “Our leader is a twelve-year-old who throws himself under the tank with a grenade in hand.”
(Left) Kaveh Golestan and Alfred Yaghoubzadeh, Jang: Do Gozaresh az Jang-e Iran-Iraq, 1359 (Tehran, 1360/1981) (photographed by Kaveh Golestan). (Right) Middle Eastern Posters. Collection, Box 4, Poster no. 208, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Those bodies that could be identified and sent back to their families occupied rows of humble graves in overflowing local cemeteries. Every town and village soon had its own martyrs’ section (or “flower garden of martyrs,” as they were named) with tombstones adorned with framed youthful portraits and heartbreaking epithets. These were recruits of what Khomeini called the Army of the Twenty Million. Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, where the largest number of war victims was laid to rest, displayed the state’s appropriation of the cult of martyrdom. Red-colored water falling through spouts into large decorative pools, a reminder of the blood of the martyrs, welcomed visitors. These were Iran’s sites of memory. On religious holidays the martyrs’ section, with its ever-expanding rows of fresh graves, awaited the relatives who came to listen to prayers for the dead and sermons in praise of martyrdom.
Beyond television and radio coverage and military communiqués, frequent encounters with popular symbols of sacrifice reinforced shared sentiments. Hundreds of bridal canopies, known as hejleh, were set up wherever a young unmarried war victim lived, often in low-income neighborhoods. A glittering structure of mirrors, lamps, feathers and flowers, often plastic, and parchment with Qur’anic verses and Shi‘i martyrdom poetry, these canopies were meant to celebrate the figurative wedding of a fallen warrior, a moving reference to Shi‘i lore visualizing the unconsumed wedding of Qasim, the young son of Hasan ibn ‘Ali, the Second Imam, who fell in the Battle of Karbala in 680. A whole mournful funerary cult enveloped war martyrdom reflected in posters, films, and propaganda literature (pl. 16.1).
The outpouring of emotions was further aggravated as the war raged bloodier and casualties became more numerous. Visual representations of the war emphasized the recurrence of the suffering of early Shi‘i history. Huge makeshift murals in the streets, in public places, and in barracks behind the front lines depicted scenes of Karbala with injured bodies of Hosain ibn ‘Ali, his companions, and his loyal double-winged horse Dhul-Janah. Painted in dramatic settings and bright colors, they evoked a cross between popular narrative paintings (carried by dervish storytellers) and the publicity murals made for low-priced movies of the prerevolutionary cinema. Yet in other murals, subtle emphasis was placed on blending the paradigmatic tragedies of the Shi‘i past with sacrifices of the present, and at times with a messianic undertones.
A sentimental visual language and iconography was visible in the blooming red tulips and roses that signified the blood of the fallen heroes in the garden of martyrs, a familiar theme in Shi‘i mourning imagery. A blazing horizon was reminiscent of the Karbala-like struggle and sacrifices on the model of Hosain, and the green color in warriors’ headbands and on their flags hinted at their acquired sacredness. Captions were further reminders of the sacred narrative. One mural showed in the foreground a fallen Hosain ibn ‘Ali and his fatally injured horse at the close of the Battle of Karbala on the day of ‘Ashura, the most sacred date in the Shi‘i calendar. The background showed a modern battlefield as if a scene of the war with Iraq. The caption in Arabic complimented the moving iconography: “All lands are Karbala, all days are ‘Ashura” (pl. 16.2).
Another mural, to be repeated on the streets of the capital, showed a luminous holy figure with covered face—presumably Hosain ibn ‘Ali—holding to his bosom a young fallen hero in military uniform, a Revolutionary Guard or Basij, no doubt. It was as if the “King of the Martyrs” were offering his blessing to his contemporary emulators, a message underscored by the caption “Martyrdom is an honor inherited from the House of the Prophethood and Guardianship [nubowwat va wilayat] by their followers.” Playing on the theme of welayat and its contemporary heir, numerous other murals embedded Khomeini’s portrait and cited his sayings in support of the “sacred defense” (pl. 16.3).
Beyond murals, war propaganda elevated martyrdom to a new eschatological plane. To further dramatize the messianic connotation of the “battle of good versus evil,” reportedly the warriors in the wake of major counteroffensives were allowed to see on the horizon an apparition of the Mahdi, the Imam of the Age, clad in white and on the back of a white horse. Even if this was a mere wartime myth, its wide reportage by word of mouth implied an implicit desire to elevate the war to a messianic cause, which soon became characteristic of the second stage of the conflict.
A common venue for such sentiments was in martyrs’ last testaments (vasiyat-namehs), which appeared in newspapers and propaganda publications of the Islamic Republic. Almost a genre of folk literature, they followed a set pattern, with predictable catchwords, a melodramatic style, and pedestrian syntax. Over the years the frequent publication of these testaments made their content more predictable as if they were produced as a routine obligation. Although they were to be read by members of the author’s family, especially mothers and fathers, they frequently addressed the general public, referring to them as Islamic brothers and sisters. That these last testaments were to appear in newspapers or be collected and preserved by authorities added incentive to their production. Mostly written by the Basij recruits in their late teens and early twenties, they imbued innocence but also fascination with the battlefield.
Often written before the volunteers left for the front or while at the front, the authors testified, as was customary, to their belief in God, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, but they also expressed glowing commitment to the revolution and to the “sacred defense.” Almost invariably they saluted Khomeini in exaggerated terms, calling him a prophetlike Imam, light of God and his spirit—the latter a wordplay on Khomeini’s first name, Ruhollah. References to his radiant face, his steely willpower, and his mesmerizing words were not uncommon. Invariably, they affirmed faith in Hosain, the Third Imam, as lord of the martyrs. The cult of Hosain was omnipresent. Some authors expressed their gratitude to God, or to Khomeini, for granting them the chance to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Islam while others revered Hosain and the heroic story of Karbala as their inspiration. Preoccupation with blood, sacrifice, and martyrdom was often couched in a crypto-mystical language rife with such catchphrases as wishing to “ascend to the heavens” and “see the divine countenance.” The authors begged forgiveness from their parents for often undefined, perhaps uncommitted, sins and thanked them for their selfless labor. They were proud to denounce any material attachment. Absolute obedience to the Imam and to the exalted goals of the revolution was frequent advice offered to fellow warriors and the public. Doing good and trying to be honest and kind were among other counsel. To women, often addressed as “Islamic sisters,” the key advice was to live chaste lives and observe the hijab. Saluting the fallen soldiers in the “war of the good against the evil” was also a common assertion, perhaps camouflaging anxieties for the unknown challenges ahead.