Will the Gulf Explode?

By Strobe Talbott

The Iraq-Iran war spews sparks and ignites fuses in all directions

It is the kind of war that could drag on for months and perhaps years--or could just as easily end overnight. The conflict between Iraq and Iran might remain in quarantine, limited to battles between two angry neighbors who have a long history of ethnic and sectarian enmity. Or it could suddenly expand, touching off a full-scale confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

The danger of the Persian Gulf exploding was foremost in the minds of diplomats the world over, including those representing the superpowers. In capitals throughout Europe and Asia, U.S. envoys buttonholed their Soviet counterparts and delivered a stern lecture: with 85,000 Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan and East-West relations already severely strained, there was a strong predisposition in Washington to attach the most sinister interpretation to anything that could be construed as Soviet intervention in the Iraq-Iran war. Presidential National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski went on television to caution: "We feel it is very important for the Soviet Union, as well as for us, to respect the principle of noninterference and not to become involved in this particular conflict."

The Kremlin hurled similar warnings at the White House. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko complained to U.S. Ambassador Thomas Watson in Moscow last week that American military activity in the gulf area was a "provocation" and "a threat to peace." Watson assured Gromyko that the U.S. was acting purely defensively and would stay out of the fighting.

Meanwhile Iran and Iraq were slugging it out like determined but weary boxers, unable to land a knockout punch but also unwilling to call it quits. As it had for weeks, the struggle raged over control of the crucial Shatt al Arab waterway. After pummeling the ancient port city of Khorramshahr, the Iraqis laid siege to the Iranian refinery center of Abadan. The Iraqi advance was slowed by the fierce resistance of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, an Islamic militia passionately supportive of the ideals and fulminations of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Meanwhile, the surprisingly effective Iranian air force hit back at the Iraqis with strafing missions and bombing attacks on at least four cities, including targets on the outskirts of Baghdad. The claims of triumph on both sides seemed equally inflated; but the casualties for each were in the thousands of killed and wounded, and the property damage in the billions of dollars.

Yet the war of attrition along the Shatt al Arab was overshadowed last week by the diplomatic efforts to end the fighting--and by political maneuvers to exploit it. Like the fighting, the diplomacy and the politics could have consequences for the entire Middle East and perhaps for the world. Throughout history, war has often resulted in the reordering of international relations, and it has often been true that the longer and bloodier the war, the more divisive the political aftermath.

Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Raja'i, a strict Muslim fundamentalist, flew to New York City to present to the United Nations Security Council Iran's complaint that Iraq had started the war by attacking Iranian territory. Shortly before Raja'i's arrival, President Carter for the first time referred publicly and disapprovingly to "aggression." Since Iraq is indisputably the aggressor in this conflict, Carter's statement touched off speculation that the U.S. was tilting slightly toward Tehran, perhaps in anticipation of the release of the 52 American hostages. Out of that conjecture grew a new flurry of rumors that a secret deal was in the works: Iran would give up the hostages it has held for more than 350 days in exchange for much needed supplies and spare parts for the arsenal of U.S. weapons that the late Shah had purchased. Several scenarios, all of them denied by Carter Administration sources, were suggested. One was that there would be an Iraq-Iran armistice at the end of October, after which the hostages would be released as part of a settlement; the way would then be clear for the U.S. to rearm Iran and to back Iranian diplomatic efforts to recapture territory seized by Iraq. Other rumors had it that the hostages, who reportedly had been scattered to safe houses around Iran, had been brought back to Tehran, and that plans for another secret rescue attempt had been scrapped.

In addition to that speculation, there were renewed worries that the war might yet cause massive disruption In world oil supplies. Both Iraq and Iran have seen their precious refineries in flames, a spectacle that horrified countries as diverse as Brazil, India, France and Japan, which relied on Iraq for a significant portion of their imports. So far, the squeeze on most other importers has been minimal. The U.S. and 19 other member nations of the International Energy Agency hold estimated reserves equaling a 150-day supply of imports. Also, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are partly compensating for the war-induced shortfall by raising their production levels as much as 1.5 million bbl. per day.

But the oil market could be thrown into a panic if Saudi Arabia were sucked into the war or if tanker traffic were interrupted through the Strait of Hormuz at the southern end of the Persian Gulf. That 36-mile-wide channel has been the lifeline for some 40% of the non-Communist world's total supply. Experts fear that the price of oil could soar beyond $100 per bbl., triple the current price, if the war were to widen or the strait were to be closed.

Deterring those nightmares has dominated U.S. diplomacy and military decisions. The Carter Administration persuaded Saudi Arabia and other gulf states to stop letting Iraqi warplanes use Saudi airfields, since such complicity might provoke Iranian reprisals. But the Saudis feared they might be attacked by Iran anyway. At their request, the U.S. dispatched four highly sophisticated airborne warning planes, two tankers for mid-air refueling, a ground radar network and 436 U.S. military personnel to fly and operate all that equipment.

As for protecting the flow of oil out of the gulf, American officials remained confident that an Iranian threat to mine the Strait of Hormuz if other countries intervened in the conflict was a bluff. U.S. intelligence found no evidence that Iran was manufacturing mines or acquiring them from abroad. But just in case, helicopters rigged for minesweeping were standing by on U.S. carriers in the nearby Arabian Sea. "There is no question that we can keep the strait open," Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs David McGiffert told TIME.

While marginally more confident than earlier that the crisis could be contained, official observers in Washington and elsewhere last week began to focus on what could be the most important and troublesome consequences of the crisis. No matter how long it lasts or how it ends, the war has perilously exacerbated the instability of the Middle East by setting off a scramble among the countries in the region to choose sides. It has also led to potentially dangerous jostling between the superpowers to position themselves as advantageously as possible along the sidelines.

The Middle East has long been the scene of pacts and battle lines that can shift almost as suddenly and capriciously as the sands of the desert. But the web of political and military ties emerging around the Iraq-Iran conflict is complex and paradox-ridden even by Middle Eastern standards. The basic line-up--Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan versus Iran, Syria and Libya--cuts across almost every political, ideological and sectarian bond in the region and once again makes the old slogan of Arab unity ring hollow.

Iraq is ruled by the revolutionary Baath Party. So is Syria. Yet they are on opposite sides. The overwhelming majority of Syrian and Libyan Arabs are Sunni Muslims. Yet they are allied with the Shi'ite Persians of Iran, whom devout Sunnis consider schismatics. Revolutionary Iraq is fighting its war against Iran with Soviet rifles, tanks, planes and missiles. Its new ally, the ultraconservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia, defends itself against Iran's U.S.-made Phantom jets with the latest American equipment. As Iran chants its hatred of "the Great Satan America," its armed forces are surprising the world, thanks largely to the huge stockpiles of U.S. arms laid away by the late Shah and the skills of U.S.-trained Iranian pilots.

There is piquant historical irony in the burgeoning partnership between Iraqi Strongman Saddam Hussein and Jordan's King Hussein. The King's cousin, King Faisal II of Iraq, was slaughtered by the Iraqi military in 1958. Hafez Assad's Syria has negotiated a phony "merger" with Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, even though Gaddafi until recently was suspected of financing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, an underground organization dedicated to the assassination of Assad's fellow Alawites, members of a minority Muslim sect that controls the Damascus regime, and in 1976 Gaddafi sent his guerrillas into Lebanon to fight alongside Palestinians against the Syrian army.

The common denominator of all these unholy alliances is the old Arabic proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The Saudi princes fear Khomeini's antimonarchist Islamic revolution, so they side with Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein wants to succeed the Shah as the principal power in the gulf, so he seeks to destroy what is left of the Shah's military machine and ingratiate himself with the conservative gulf states, who then might accept Iraqi hegemony. Syria's Assad feels threatened by Iraq so he allies himself with Iraq's enemy, Iran. Assad strings Gaddafi along on the mostly rhetorical "merger" because Libya has a huge supply of Soviet arms that Syria may need to supplement its own in case of war with Iraq--and also because Gaddafi, in exchange for Syrian cooperation in the merger charade, has pulled back help from Assad's other enemies.

Perhaps most convoluted are the motivations of Jordan's King Hussein. He too fears the contagion of Khomeini's revolution, particularly if it were to spread to Iraq, which has a Shi'ite majority and is on Jordan's own borders. Also, there is some evidence that Hussein wants to re-establish himself as a spokesman for the Palestinian residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which was ruled by Jordan until the 1967 Middle East war. Hussein bitterly recalls how other Arab leaders humiliated him at the 1974 Rabat summit by designating the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. Although he dare not challenge the P.L.O. directly, the King would like to play a major part in some future round of peace negotiations. That means regaining the good will and, if possible, the gratitude of other key Arab leaders, notably the Saudis, the gulf sheiks and the region's self-proclaimed new protector, Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

Says Amos Perlmutter, an Israeli expert at Washington's American University, who has served as an occasional adviser to Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign: "The King has made a big difference. He has made it possible for Saddam Hussein to create a new Middle East axis of Iraq-Saudi Arabia-Jordan to replace the old axis of Iran-Saudi Arabia-Egypt. That old one fell apart when the Shah collapsed and Anwar Sadat isolated himself by signing the Camp David treaty. That left a vacuum, which Saddam Hussein, with a lot of help from King Hussein, is now trying to fill."

For all the participants, and for many of the bystanders as well, this welter of perishable alliances and far more durable antagonisms is fraught with risks. King Hussein has complicated his already strained relations with the various Palestinian guerrilla organizations by siding with Iraq against Iran. The Palestinian groups saw the late Shah as their own enemy because he maintained relations with, and supplied oil to Israel; they back Khomeini because he cut off the oil shipments to Israel and turned the official Israeli mission building in Tehran over to the P.L.O.

King Hussein has been providing the Iraqis with more than just moral support and an overland resupply route from the Jordanian port of Aqaba on the Red Sea. TIME has learned that he has also secretly sent antiaircraft weapons to Iraq to help against the Iranian air force.

That makes the Israelis all the more nervous, since those weapons could be used against their own air force in a new, wider Middle East war. For tactical reasons, Saddam Hussein has softened his rhetoric when talking to conservative fellow Arabs, but he has not significantly muted his denunciations of Zionism. Israel fears that Iraq's new French-built nuclear research center may eventually produce an atomic bomb. Israeli Prime

Minister Menachem Begin told the London Sunday Telegraph that Jordanian-Iraqi military cooperation "is very serious to us." Such warnings have heightened worries in the West that Israel could feel compelled to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq if Iraq emerges from this war too cocky and powerful.

Saddam Hussein, however, is in no position to dominate the gulf until he wins the war. The Iraqis expected a quick victory when they launched their surprise attack on Iran nearly a month ago. Saddam Hussein had hoped that the Khomeini regime would crumble under the first attacks. Now he needs to turn the stalemate into a clear-cut victory, or at least to extricate himself with some face-saving diplomatic fallback. Otherwise, Iraq's strongman runs the risk of falling victim to the same kind of coup that he engineered against a number of his former comrades and superiors in the on-again, off-again bloodbath of Iraqi politics.

For the superpowers, too, the burst of activity on the battlefields, in the back alleys and in the chancelleries of the Middle East represents at least as many risks as opportunities. The Soviet Union's principal move was to sign a 20-year friendship treaty with Syria two weeks ago. Israeli officials, TIME has learned, believe that the pact includes a secret annex granting the U.S.S.R. naval facilities at the Syrian port of Latakia, airbases manned by Soviet personnel, and depots for storing war materiel. If this intelligence is correct, the Soviets may have added a pawn or two to their side of the board in the chess game they are playing with the U.S. in the area. The U.S. earlier this year negotiated agreements for access to military facilities in Kenya, Somalia and Oman; it also has close ties with Egypt and is building up its Indian Ocean fleet. That network is intended to counter the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan, Ethiopia and South Yemen. Now U.S. military planners may have to reckon with Moscow's closer Syrian connection as well.

But that relationship is still not as strong or as binding as Syria's Assad would have liked. Some Arab diplomats said they expected Assad to come home from Moscow with a "super treaty" obligating the U.S.S.R. to provide Syria with unlimited military aid and perhaps even to intervene on Syria's behalf in a Middle East war. But the Soviets refused to commit themselves that far. By limiting their obligations to Syria, they hoped to minimize the fear and resentment the pact has inevitably evoked in Jordan and Iraq. In addition, the Soviets recognize that as long as Assad is politically isolated among his neighbors and vulnerable to internal opposition, the survival of his regime is not a sure thing. Nor, for that matter, is the survival of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Ayatullah Khomeini in Iran. Either or both leaders could still be swept away by the war they are now waging. Saddam Hussein has gradually distanced himself from the Soviet Union, even though Iraq has a friendship treaty with Moscow very similar to the one Syria just signed. Another cause of friction: Saddam Hussein has also been cracking down on pro-Moscow Communists inside Iraq. "To say that an Iraqi victory would be a Soviet victory is nonsense," says Arabist James Akins, a former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "Saddam Hussein is No. 1 on the Soviet hit list."

But the fact remains that the Soviet Union is still No. 1 on Saddam Hussein's military shopping list. Iraqi reliance on Soviet arms gives Moscow a certain amount of influence on Baghdad, no matter how vigorously Saddam Hussein asserts his independence.

Any military equipment reaching Iraq arrives first at the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba. TIME'S Robert Slater last week took a helicopter tour of the area and saw dramatic evidence of that resupply in action: "Normally Aqaba is a sleepy port town, one that has always lagged far behind the nearby Israeli resort of Eilat in tourist traffic as well as commerce.

Now Aqaba's harbor is bristling with vessels ready to off-load war supplies. They are lined up like runners crowded together waiting to begin a cross-country race." The Soviets are apparently providing Iraq with spare parts, food and ammunition diverted from South Yemen and Ethiopia. U.S. intelligence sources, however, were satisfied that so far there have been no Soviet shipments of lethal heavy weaponry --tanks, missiles and the like--to Iraq.

As for Iran, the Soviets would almost certainly like to replace the U.S. as the arms supplier to the Tehran government. There is also the possibility that Iran could simply disintegrate into chaos. The Soviets would clearly be pleased to pick up some of the pieces as long as they could do so without risking a major confrontation with the U.S. Nonetheless, U.S. intelligence has uncovered no evidence that the Soviets are directly fanning the fighting on the Iranian side by infiltrating arms. The Kremlin, in short, seems to be behaving like a well-heeled but very cautious, very patient gambler--placing bets all over the table, but only ones that it can afford to lose.

The U.S., by contrast, has the look and the moves if not of a loser, then at least of a player on the defensive. U.S. policy in the region has not recovered from the back-to-back traumas of American helplessness during the fall of the Shah, then the humiliation of the hostages' captivity. What Carter himself has called his "obsession" with releasing the hostages is understandable in human as well as political terms, and it partly explains why there are so few bold, long-range plans coming out of his Administration at the moment. Last week's spate of rumors about possibly trading spare parts for hostages only deepened the widespread impression that policymakers were reacting to the Iraq-Iran war as though it were essentially a new wrinkle in the old and maddening problem of how to deal with Khomeini.

Even though the U.S. has diversified its political and military stake in the region by virtue of its close ties with Egypt, Israel and Oman, it is at an overall disadvantage vis-`a-vis the Soviet Union. For one thing, the U.S. has virtually no influence of its own on the immediate combatants, Iran and Iraq. It has practically none on Iran's principal allies, Libya and Syria, and little on one of Iraq's allies, Jordan. The third major member of the new grouping centered on Iraq is Saudi Arabia. There the U.S. still has considerable influence. But it also has a huge investment that is none too secure, given the internal opposition that shook the House of Saud during the siege of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca last year.

In the short term, Administration officials see the Iraq-Iran war producing one possible benefit: greater Saudi willingness to accept an American military presence in the area, perhaps on Saudi soil. But in the longer term such a presence could tie the U.S. to a regime that some area experts believe could eventually go the way of the Peacock Throne in Iran.

Even if that event dreaded by American policymakers never comes to pass, the U.S. may find its room to maneuver in the gulf greatly limited by the traditional pro-Israel basis of its Middle East

policy. Says William Quandt of

the Brookings Institution, a Middle East expert who was formerly on the staff of the National Security Council: "The Saudis have got to have something to show for drawing closer to us, something that reduces the embarrassment of cooperating with Israel's greatest backer. Besides, even the most sympathetic Arabs are beginning to ask themselves, 'What kind of superpower can't even prevent a lousy settlement [on the West Bank] that's against American policy and paid for with American dollars? Can we trust such a superpower to deliver when it tells us it's going to protect the Persian Gulf?' "

Sadly enough, the Camp David talks on Palestinian autonomy have all but ground to a halt, at least for the moment. Egyptian and Israeli negotiators met in Washington last week with President Carter's special Middle East envoy, Sol Linowitz. U.S. officials were pleased when the Israelis for the first time proposed that Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip play a role in deciding questions of land use. But on the major sticking points, like the nature of a Palestinian governing authority for the West Bank and its relationship to Israeli security forces, none of the parties are expecting progress until the expected summit involving Carter, Begin and Sadat, and that will not take place until January at the earliest.

Thus the U.S. may find itself squeezed once again by the linkage between the issues of the Arab-Israeli dispute and gulf security. For all the evanescence of past alignments and realignments in the Middle East, the region has also been cursed with one geopolitical constant: more than 30 years of hostility between Arabs and Israelis. If the Iraq-Iran war, which pits Arabs against Persians and Arabs against Arabs, should continue to flare, then the area will have not one but two intracable, explosive conflicts. That is two more than the Middle East, or the world, can afford.

--By Strobe Talbott. Reported by Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington and Wilton Wynn/Beirut

With reporting by Gregory H. Wierzynski, Wilton Wynn

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