The Past Isn’t Dead

The CFR website has posted an interview with Marks Hibbs, a nuclear policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, discussing the details and possible implications of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s new report on Iran’s nuclear program. It’s worth reading in full, but this mention a 2004 meeting between then-IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei and former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is particularly interesting:

Rafsanjani, during the meeting, actually became very emotional and almost broke into tears. He was explaining to people at the meeting with the IAEA that he had been on the front of the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s and had seen the Iranian soldiers who had been attacked with chemicals by Iraq. People at the IAEA who have been looking at the Iranian program have thought about that meeting again and again. The Iranians were at war with Iraq; Iraq had unleashed chemical weapons on them. Many people who have been studying this program in Iran since then have wondered whether the Iranian leadership, after the Iran-Iraq War, took a decision to develop a nuclear weapons capability in secret to make sure that the kind of vulnerability Iran experienced in the Iraq War would never happen again. The IAEA’s report doesn’t answer that question.

The horror and deprivation of Iran’s hugely destructive eight year-long war with Iraq was the defining event for Iran’s current leadership,and continues to shape the consciousness of much of its population. They remember that not only did many in the West support Iraq in a war that Iraq initiated, but that the "civilized world" sat back and basically did nothing in response to Iraq’s illegal use of chemical weapons against Iran. In addition to demonstrating the need for their own nuclear deterrent, that experience also made the Iranian leadership understandably skeptical of the fairness and efficacy of international arms control conventions. While this obviously doesn’t mean that Iran should get a pass on its obligations under such conventions, it’s important to understand as one factor determining the regime’s course.

Memories of the Iran-Iraq war also come up in Golnaz Esfandiari’s report on reactions of Iranians to the uptick in talk of Israeli strikes:

Iran fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s in which 1 million people are thought to have been killed. Iranians have expressed concern about the return of such hardship in telephone and other conversations with RFE/RL. In most cases, these Iranians have withheld their identities to protect themselves from possible government retaliation. [...]

"I cannot sleep out of worry," says a 56-year-old woman in the capital, Tehran. She says she thinks military action against the Islamic republic would benefit the clerical establishment and negatively affect the people. "A war will unite the regime, and it will also force many to unite behind a regime they don’t even support," she says during a phone interview before asking: "What else should we do, [cheer] for Israel, which would kill our countrymen working in the nuclear sites?"

Like many others in Iran, she suggests that strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel or the United States aimed at halting or slowing Iran’s nuclear progress would prompt a full-fledged war. That belief has been strengthened by promises by Iranian officials of retaliation for any such act against the country.

We should remember that the 1980 Iraqi invasion came at a time when the Iranian government was in serious danger of collapsing under its failures to make good on its revolutionary promises. The Iraq invasion provided the government a rallying point and lifeline at a moment when it was experiencing a serious crisis of legitimacy. Some American supporters of an Iran war suggest that the same would not be true of a foreign attack today, but, as shown above, actual Iranians seem to disagree with that.