A Nightmare for the Future: What If Iran Defeated Iraq?

The time is one year from now, June, 1987. The Iranian Army besieges Basra, which falls. Iraqi defenses crumble and the Ayatollah Khomeini's forces capture the North Rumailah oil fields, among the richest in the world. What does the United States do? Nothing.

Saudi Arabia does nothing either. The Israel Lobby in Washington has denied it the defensive weapons with which it might have countered Iran.

In September, 1987, Iran publicly charges Kuwait with receiving war shipments for transfer to Iraq. A week later its forces overwhelm Kuwait's defenses and seize the giant Burgan and other oil fields, giving the fanatically anti-American Ayatollah Khomeini control of Iran's, Iraq's and Kuwait's oil, comprising altogether one third of the non-Communist world's reserves.

What will the United States do? Probably nothing this time either, but the battle of Washington begins.

Israel argues against opposing Iran to whose victories it has contributed both materially with secretly-supplied war materiel and psychologically with orchestrated "hate-the-Arabs" campaigns inside the United States. The single-issue Israel Lobby, whose role is to kill U.S. friendship with the Arabs, urges that opposing Iran and helping the Arabs would be a reversal of longstanding U.S. policy.

Did not the United States and the late Shah of Iran, in the early 1970s, trigger and sustain a Kurdish revolt against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the Lobby asks? Didn't Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, at Israel's urging, sell the Shah up to $25 billion in military equipment in the 1970s to assure Iran's dominance over the Arabs in the Gulf? Did we not countenance Iran's aggressive seizure of Arab-owned Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs Islands in 1971?

Left unsaid by Israel but hanging tacitly in the air is a factor contributing to America's passivity in an obviously dangerous situation: We have tolerated Israel's military assistance to Iran. Was Israel ever safer than when Israel's own military strength on the West was augmented by a powerfully-armed Iran on the East, squeezing the Arabs in between?

The Ayatollah Khomeini will die, the Lobby insists. His successors will probably not be hostile to the United States. Meanwhile, the Lobby maintains, Iran must continue stronger than the Arabs so that Israel will be safe. After all, is America's main goal in the Middle East not a safe Israel?

Under Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz, whose leading Middle East advisor seems to be Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, America's will is sapped. A free-floating and quite independent element in the atmosphere called "terrorism" absorbs all attention. In the classic nightmare, the dreamer is chased by a nameless horror. Intellect tells the legs to run faster but they do not respond. As the horror gets closer and closer, the dreamer awakes suddenly to a safe reality. In this real life nightmare, however, the will remains paralyzed and the horror does not vanish. Khomeini keeps Kuwait while America wrings its hands in an agony of worry that it is making the wrong decisions.

It is December, 1987. Khomeini decides to go for broke. Calling for Islamic solidarity and alleging mistreatment of Shiites living near oil-producing areas of Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the Iranian Army pushes south from Kuwait, first seizing the oil-rich Kuwait-Saudi neutral zone. Israel and its Lobby in Washington, like Pavlov's dog, strenuously oppose resisting Iran, but this time they lose.

The U.S. Air Force helps destroy the remainder of Iran's oil exporting capability and bombs all roads leading to the fighting front. Khomeini denounces the "Great Satan," his term for the United States, and calls on the now lesser "Satan," the Soviet Union, for help. The latter denounces U.S. "aggression" but makes no overt move to support Iran. Rather, it begins secretly to infiltrate men and military equipment into Iran, towards the warm water and the oil.

A stalemate is reached: The United States, with help from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, stops Iranian forces before they reach the Saudi, Qatari and UAE oil fields. But Iran holds Kuwait and the southern, or Shiite, portion of Iraq. The regime remains strongly ensconced in Iran with the help of Soviet men and equipment. Its wealth in petroleum is overwhelming. Seeking to dislodge it might be all but impossible and would hazard a dangerous confrontation with Russia.

How did this nightmare begin? Conventional wisdom says Iraq began the present war with Iran when it launched a September, 1980 attack. Correct. But behind this was America's Mistake Number One: Supporting, with Israeli connivance, a Kurdish revolt in Iraq several years earlier.

This pressured Iraq, with bitter resentment, to give Iran half the Shalt al-Arab River, Iraq's only outlet to the Gulf. To get that half back Iraq attacked in 1980.

U.S. Mistake Number Two was arming Iran to the teeth. For one thing its excessiveness helped bring down the Shah's regime. Also, Khomeini can now use that giant pool of military material to fight and, perhaps, defeat Iraq. Realpolitik called for arming the weaker side, not the stronger, because the stronger always had the potential for going it alone, as Iran is doing in the current situation, and throwing its weight around. This mistake might have been corrected before the Shah's humpty-dumpty fell off the wall, but Kissinger imposed a gag order, in Israel's interest, preventing criticism of the disproportionate military buildup.

Mistake Number Three, and this underlies all of our other problems in the Gulf and in the Arab-Israeli context as well, is making Middle East decisions solely on the basis of whether they will help or hurt Israel. And especially should we avoid accepting Israel's own assessments of what's good for it, which we too often have done up to now.

Our policies made on Israel's behalf have left us with little influence on a really dangerous situation in the Gulf, either with the Arabs or the Persians. In the Palestine context, having by our actions indicated to the Israelis that they can have everything, and to the Palestinians that they can have nothing, we have lost our influence with the Israelis and all but what we call the "moderate" Arab regimes. And these, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, are embarrassed, and even endangered, by our policies.

Frightful as any ordinary nightmare is, the horror is unreal and awakening banishes fear. The American nightmare in the Middle East soon could be all too real. Perhaps fear of it will awaken us from our present dangerous sleep.

—Andrew I. Killgore