Postscript The Beginning of the Oil Wars 1980-1983
The invasion of Iran opened divisions between the other major oil producing nations in the Middle East, though not along the lines that many pundits predicted in the immediate aftermath of the Soviets entering Tehran. Iraq had long-standing territorial disputes with Iran, especially over rights in the Shat Al Arab waterway. It had also harboured a number of high profile religious and secular exiles from Iran and thus relations between the two nations had been frosty throughout the whole of the 1970s. While there might have been a degree of schadenfreude at the disaster that had befallen their neighbour the fact was that Iran was a neighbour, one with which Iraq shared a long border. It didn’t take long for the Iraqi government, in particular its leader General Zayd Nasr, to conclude that it was in Iraq’s best interest to support the insurgency against the Soviets, in which endeavour they expected the wholehearted support of the USA. Nasr’s predecessor, Saddam Hussein, had been deposed not only because of his increasingly eccentric rule, which had become less a one-party state and more something uncomfortably like an absolute monarchy, but because he had sought to play the USA and USSR off against one another to obtain military support to fulfil his ambitions for a Greater Iraq. The USA had been every bit as alarmed by this as had Nasr and his supporters and they had tacitly supported the coup that replaced Hussein with an altogether more coherent and restrained leadership in Baghdad in 1976. Given his governments firmly anti-Soviet credentials it was little wonder that Nasr was baffled by the hesitation of the USA to support them now, forcing them to look to Europe, and then towards Asia, to find the weapons with which to equip the insurgency.
This reticence can be explained by the fact that the priority of the Rockefeller administration was to pull back oil prices that had surged in the aftermath of the invasion. Rockefeller’s preferred means of achieving this was to persuade Sudia Arabia to increase production to calm markets. The Saudi oil fields were huge and capable of completely offsetting any global impact from the loss of Iranian output, indeed Saudi output was arguably the largest single factor in controlling world oil prices. Through OPEC the Saudis had been working to stabilize the price of a barrel of oil at a level that guaranteed a stable income for the nations in the Middle East and beyond that were dependent on oil exports. In this endeavour they had been able to count on the support of the Socialist regime in Iran, for whom oil revenues were the only thing that could finance the social programs they counted on to keep the population content and the failure to deliver on promises about living standards had been major reason for discontent in Iran. The Saudis had no desire to see a new secular regime in Tehran that was less willing to co-operate, and they certainly didn’t want to see one that might be dominated by religious elements. Saudia Arabia was home to all Islam’s most holy sites and, in the eyes of the Saudi leadership, the de facto centre of the Islamic faith. They had not taken kindly to the bitter criticism from exiles who claimed that the Saudis willingness to turn a blind eye to the oppression of Muslims in Iran amounted to a betrayal of Islam and proved they were unworthy to be guardians of the holy sites. This goes a long way towards explaining why despite making the required diplomatic noises condemning the Soviet invasion the Saudis privately called for nothing to be done that might escalate the situation, meaning not supplying the Iraqis and the Iranian resistance movement with the arms they were calling for. At the same time the Saudis were keen to build up their own military and given how crucial the Saudis were becoming to President Rockefeller’s plans to stave off a global economic recession he was willing to accommodate their requests, which also provided a boost for American arms manufacturers.
Not all Saudis were willing to let the invasion go unopposed and there was a great deal of unofficial Saudi support for the Iranian resistance. Much of this was financial assistance, which was welcome, some was Saudi volunteers eager to join the fight, which was far less so. These volunteers were all too often seen as spoiled rich boys whose zeal rapidly diminished when they had to face the harsh realities of training to fight. One notorious example was the group led by a scion of the Bin Laden banking family. This group arrived in Iraq in mid-1981 and were stuck in a training camp for the next year, where they made few friends among their intended Iranian comrades. In May 1982 bin Laden’s group was finally allowed to travel to Iran, at which point they promptly disappeared. The huge rewards put up by the Bin Laden family for information about their fate in later years drew this disappearance to public attention, even prompting a rather crass documentary series on the Horizon channel in the 2000s but produced nothing except a series of dead-end leads and ludicrous claims. The most common theories are that they were captured by the Soviets or that Iranian bandits, who may have hoped to ransom them back to Saudi Arabia, were responsible for their deaths. There were the inevitable claims that Bin Laden and his comrades had been shipped off to a Soviet Gulag and had been seen alive in Central Asia as late as the 1990s, naturally without anything resembling substantial evidence.
The invasion also sent out shockwaves that had a major impact on the northern and eastern borders of Iran. Much like Iraq India shared a long section of border with Iran, and this northwest region of the country was overwhelming populated by Muslims. Issues over distribution of economic opportunities as India grew wealthier had fuelled friction between the different ethnic communities in India, with the Muslim minority feeling especially aggrieved. While the threat of a Soviet controlled Iran on their borders didn’t resolve India’s ethnic tensions, it did allow them to be glossed over somewhat while India’s political attention focused on persuading the Soviets to leave Iran, one way or another. India had developed a substantial indigenous arms industry by the late 1970s and was well able to lavish equipment on the Iranian resistance, with substantial amounts of financial aid coming from those in the Indian Muslim community who had benefitted from countries prosperity despite the very real inequalities. The invasion of Iran also served to kick India’s program to develop an independent nuclear deterrent into high gear, which would have a knock-on effect across the rest of Asia. India also deployed substantial military forces to the Iranian border and there was a genuine fear in Moscow that India might intervene directly during 1980, which alongside the increasing losses among Red Army conscripts deployed to Iran led to increasingly strident calls for a change of direction in Soviet foreign policy and preferably a focus on its internal economic issues. The Soviet media might not have reported these disputes inside the party, but the power of the Soviet rumour mill soon meant they were common knowledge
Afghanistan was the only one of Iran’s neighbours to openly support the Soviet invasion, because it already a pro-Soviet government in power. The Afghan government was already unpopular, and this open support only made matters worse for them. Many weapons intended for the Iranian resistance were smuggled through Afghanistan, and a tithe of them found their way into the hands of the Afghan hill tribes and fuelled a steady rise in violence as the government found itself unable to enforce its will outside of Afghanistan’s urban centres and the Afghan army was faced with poor morale and a high level of desertion from its conscript ranks. This stoked fears in Moscow that the Indians were deliberately destabilizing Afghanistan and with the Afghan government crumbling the Politburo decided to send troops into Afghanistan in October 1981, despite the grave unease taking on this further operational burden provoked among the commanders of the Red Army. Propaganda framing these actions as demonstrating the strength of the Soviet Union impressed no one inside the USSR, let alone outside. People queuing for hours to obtain the essentials of everyday life couldn’t have cared less about exporting the communist revolution to the rest of the world. The only thing that the Russian people cared about with regard to Iran and Afghanistan was the steady stream of dead soldiers being shipped home from parts of the world that they shouldn’t have been sent to in the first place and combined with economic impact of the embargoes imposed by the west the hardline leadership of the Soviet Union saw its support from the military and the nomenklatura drain away. This encouraged reformist critics like Boris Yeltsin to voice their opinions more openly and build up their own support base inside the Soviet establishment.
With so many flashpoints emerging around Iran there was a considerable diplomatic effort by western nations to stop any further escalation. The British naturally focused their attention towards India and the United Arab Emirates, which had only been formed in 1972 after the last of the seven states that made it up had finally become independent from British influence. They retained friendly relations with the British and the appearance of Royal Navy warships in the region to guard oil tankers in 1981 was broadly welcomed by the UAE. The British also now publicly agreed to aid the Indians in their nuclear program, something they had been accused of secretly doing for some years. The new Conservative government firmly believed in the deterrent power of nuclear weapons and far from destabilizing the region the prospect of India acquiring these weapons would show the Soviets the folly of their intervention in Iran, especially as it also led to the acceleration of other nuclear programs. The prospect that nations in the Middle East itself might try to acquire nuclear weapons was a major concern especially as there were nuclear reactors under construction in Iraq and Libya, though in both case the construction had been hedged with assurances that the reactors were purely intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy, which after all the USA and Europe had pursued with considerable enthusiasm.
US diplomacy was increasingly focused on trying to cool down the acrimonious relationship between Iraq and Saudi Arabia and form a common front between all of Iran’s neighbours. This effort suffered a major setback in the aftermath of the occupation of Afghanistan and a clash between Iraqi border police and an Iranian Army patrol in September 1981. Which side of the border this brief and bloody firefight took place was a bone of contention and there was a real fear that this would turn into an all-out Iran-Iraq war, something which even the Iranian resistance didn’t want to see, they after all were fighting to remove foreign invaders, not swap one group for another.
The dispute would eventually fizzle out by the end of 1981, but it did lead to a fresh surge in oil prices, which had remained about fifty percent higher than the pre-invasion level, and now surpassed even the previous peak reached when the Red Army entered Tehran. The USA looked to Saudia Arabia to reassure the world about the security of oil supplies and this time the Saudis failed to do so, content to see the higher prices become the new normal. President Rockefeller now came under increasing attack from those in his own party who had previously supported his pragmatic approach to the Middle East. Those on the left who had been calling for radical policies on energy conservation and those on the right demanding a harder line on the invasion had already been critical of Rockefeller, who now saw his support from the political centre ground crumbling. Arguably this reflected the fact that the centre ground in American politics was disappearing as the nation became more and more polarized over how the country should move forward in a world where the USA could no longer be certain of retaining its position the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet.
The situation between Iraq and Saudi Arabia continued to fester, and a major bone of contention between them was Kuwait. The old idea that Kuwait was a ‘lost province’ of Iraq had never quite gone away and the fact that the country was increasingly under the influence of Saudia Arabia, further strengthening their power in the international oil market, did nothing to improve relations between Iraq and Kuwait. A fresh bout of Iraqi sabre rattling in February 1983 caused such panic in Kuwait that they turned to the Saudis for military support. That at least was the official position of the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments after Saudi Arbia dispatched two infantry divisions, one mechanized division, and the country’s sole tank division, 1st Medina Armoured Division, to ‘protect’ Kuwait on the 19th of March 1983. The view of the Iraqis, and many neutral observers, was that the Saudis had strongarmed the Kuwaitis into allowing the occupation of their country on a flimsy pretext.
This intervention provoked outrage in the major European capitals, already facing a looming crisis in the German Socialist Republic, though much of this was directed at Washington rather than Riyadh. It may have been couched in suitably diplomatic language but the question being asked by the governments in Britain, Germany, Poland and France was how on Earth had the Americans allowed this to happen? The consensus was that the Saudis wouldn’t have dared to make such a move without at least tacit US support, or at least the belief they had such support. What had actually happened was a catastrophic misunderstanding between the USA and Saudi Arabia. At a meeting between the US ambassador in Riyad and the Saudi Foreign Minister the ambassador had assured the Saudis that the USA understood that they had legitimate security concerns about Kuwait and the threat of an Iraqi annexation. This assurance was framed in such a way that the Saudi foreign minister was able to ‘hear what he wanted to hear’ and take it as an American greenlight for their own intervention.
With US insistence that the Saudis should withdraw ringing hollow in Baghdad they prepared their own military action. On the 22nd of April 1983 the Iraqi forces crossed into Kuwait, led by four divisions of the Iraqi National Guard, the 1st Hammurabi Armoured Division, 2nd Nebuchadnezzar Armoured Division, the Belshazzar Mechanized Infantry Division and the 3rd Basra Motorized Infantry Division. The first major clash between the Saudis and the Iraqis took place west of Kuwait City on the 24th of April and it consisted of a series of skirmishes between mechanized and armoured forces that ended after three days without any conclusive outcome. What both sides had imagined to be swift decisive action became a war that dragged on for the next four years, devastating Kuwait and seeing Iraq and Saudia Arabia targeted by IRBM attacks, with the threat of chemical warfare looming large in the conflict. The oil production infrastructure of both nations would also be an important strategic target, causing major disruption to production and making the mere doubling of global petroleum prices after the invasion of Iran seem like a golden age.
It was a terrible irony that only a month after the beginning of the Iran-Saudi War, on the 25th of May, the new Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin announced that they were withdrawing from Iran. The withdrawal was a phased affair and the Iranian resistance stepped up their attacks to speed their departure along, though they achieved the exact opposite, and the last Red Army units didn’t leave until September 1983. What they left behind was a shattered country, with obvious parallels to the situation in Cuba after the US withdrawal in 1973, including a huge exodus of refugees as Iran’s infrastructure collapsed.
The seemingly unending chaos in the Middle East had a massive impact not just on the global economic situation but on the political shape of the world through to the Millenium. In Europe this would be retrospectively referred to as the Great Thaw, to more radical elements on the right in US politics it would be decried as the ‘defeat of the west’. The only thing everyone could agree on was that it marked the end of the political status quo established after the end of the Second World War and if the period of 1984-2000 avoided a new global war it was still every bit as tumultuous as the 1930s and 40s.
