The Gulf Iran on the Defensive

By Michael S. Serrill

How battered is Iran? The question is being asked more and more frequently these days, not only in Arab chanceries but also in Washington and the capitals of Western Europe, as Tehran attempts to cope with a series of unexpected setbacks. After nearly eight years of war with Iraq, Iran suddenly finds itself on the defensive, forced to regroup and rebuild after decisive defeats at the hands of the Iraqi army. The battlefield losses in turn have increased tensions between radical and moderate factions among the ruling mullahs and led the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini to bestow his title of commander in chief to Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful Speaker of Parliament.

On the diplomatic front, Iran is as isolated as ever, especially from its Arab neighbors. At last week's Arab summit in Algiers, the leaders declared that the 21-member Arab League was "in total solidarity with Iraq and its defense of its national territories." Alone among the Arabs, Syria, which supports Iran, raised mild objections to the statement.

Hardly anyone, within the region or without, believes the Khomeini regime is about to dissolve, although once again rumors are flying that the Iranian leader is seriously ill. Certainly his rhetoric remains harsh and unyielding. "The fate of the war will be decided on the war fronts, not through negotiations," Khomeini, 87, declared in a speech read by his son Ahmed at the opening of Iran's newly elected Parliament two weeks ago. "Victory will be ours."

But will it? Among military and political analysts in the West, hope is growing that at long last the war in the gulf may be winding down to a defensive stalemate. For the first time since the war began, the military initiative in the conflict, which has caused an estimated million casualties on both sides, has decisively turned in favor of Iraq. Morale among Iran's soldiers is said to be low. "The Iranians have suffered a tremendous psychological blow," says former Gulf Diplomat James Placke. "It has left them in political disarray."

Cracks in Tehran's confidence became visible late last February, after the Iranians revived the so-called war of the cities by firing two missiles into Baghdad, the capital, and Basra, the key port city in the south. The Iraqis reacted in kind. Rockets fell on Tehran, on the holy city of Qum and other Iranian towns, and sent civilians fleeing. Between Feb. 29 and April 19, when the missile war was halted, Iraq fired 160 Soviet-made Scud-B missiles, which had been modified to increase their range beyond the normal 175 miles. The bombs killed and wounded hundreds in Tehran and other cities.

At about the same time, Iran launched what at first appeared to be a successful offensive into northern Iraq. The push was stopped by a counterattack in which the Iraqis, according to the Iranians, used poison gas; hundreds of Iraq's own civilians perished in the city of Halabja. Iran Expert Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University says the combination of Iraqi missile and chemical attacks disheartened the Iranians. "It brought home to them for the first time that they were exposed and alone."

! In April, Iraq rolled into an offensive of its own, the first major attack since it invaded Iran in 1980. In a 36-hour blitz, the Seventh Army Corps, supported by President Saddam Hussein's elite Presidential Guard, retook the Fao peninsula, a finger of land at Iraq's southern tip that Iran had occupied after weeks of bloody fighting in February 1986. An estimated 20,000 Iranian troops were routed; 3,000 were killed, wounded or captured. A day after the Fao disaster, Iranian naval forces clashed in the gulf with U.S. ships that had just demolished Iran's offshore oil platform near Sirri Island in retaliation for mine damage done to the frigate U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts. The engagement cost Iran six ships, including two of its four frigates.

Finally, on May 25, Iraqi forces threw Iranian troops out of an important salient: territory east of the port of Basra that had been a staging area for Iranian artillery bombardments of the city. The operation reportedly took just five hours, with the Iranians putting up only token resistance.

The military setbacks coincided with an intense struggle in Iran between radical and conservative factions during the run-up to elections for the 270- seat Parliament. In two rounds of voting, the radicals, who favor extensive land redistribution and other measures intended to help the poor, defeated conservative mullahs allied with the bazaaris, or well-off urban merchants, and landowners. Khomeini and Son Ahmed backed the radicals.

One of the more potent Khomeini loyalists is Rafsanjani, 53, who last week was re-elected Speaker of Parliament. That post, combined with his new designation as commander in chief, makes him the most powerful leader below Khomeini. Because he does not have the necessary religious credentials, Rafsanjani will never be able to inherit the Ayatullah's mantle. He may instead be content to serve as the power behind the throne of Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's designated successor as spiritual leader. But by assuming his new military duties Rafsanjani also risks becoming a scapegoat for future Iranian defeats.

While Rafsanjani is considered a pragmatist known to want an end to the war, for the moment his rhetoric is as militant as Khomeini's. At a prayer meeting after his appointment as commander in chief, Rafsanjani spoke of the "infallible determination of Iran to pursue the war against Iraq, no matter what the cost."

The cost is already high. "Tehran has become a city of misery," says a middle-class exile who just returned to Europe after five months in her homeland. "The wealthy get along because they can buy things on the black market. I don't know how the poor manage." Prices of staples like butter and eggs are rising as much as 15% a week, she reports, if they are available at all. Civil service pay is three to four months in arrears. For a while, Iran Air, the national carrier, accepted only U.S. dollars in payment for tickets because Tehran needed the scarce hard currency.

More important, the military setbacks have crimped Tehran's ability to finance the war. Thomas McNaugher of the Brookings Institution in Washington says that Iraqi air strikes against oil refineries in Tehran and Tabriz so severely cut production that the regime was forced to import refined petroleum products to meet its domestic needs. The U.S. destruction of the Sirri platform, says McNaugher, reduced crude output by 150,000 bbl. a day. Nonetheless, Iran still manages to export 2 million to 2.4 million bbl. of oil a day.

U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar has meantime revived efforts to bring into force a Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in the gulf. While Iran has reportedly dropped its demand that President Hussein be deposed before there can be a truce, the Khomeini regime still refuses to accept the U.N. resolution until Iraq admits that it started the conflict. The Iraqis, confident in the wake of their military successes, are not about to make that concession. Thus the war is likely to continue, if at a lower level, and increasing numbers of Iranians may come to feel, as Rafsanjani remarked after the Fao peninsula defeat, that "time is no longer on our side."

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Murray J. Gart/Washington