The Gulf On the Brink of Peace

By William R. Doerner

The first hint came in a statement from the general command of the Iranian armed forces, which called for "new stances in order to continue the sacred defense." Then came a startling message from Iranian President Ali Khamenei to United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, declaring Tehran's willingness to abide by U.N. Resolution 598, the measure calling for a cease-fire in the eight-year-old war between Iran and Iraq. Still, much of the world remained skeptical, aware that Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini had personally vowed to continue the fighting "with the last drop of blood in my body." Finally, Khomeini, in an astonishing turnabout, confirmed the unthinkable: Iran would join its hated neighbor in agreeing to lay down arms.

* "Making this decision was more deadly than drinking poison," Tehran radio quoted him as saying. "I submitted myself to God's will and drank this drink for his satisfaction."

Could the war that has claimed half a million lives, devastated two countries and led to the largest U.S. naval buildup since World War II finally be over? Not quite. A day after Iran notified the U.N. of its decision, Iraq bombed an Iranian nuclear-power facility at the gulf city of Bushire. Three days later, Baghdad launched new attacks along the 730-mile border between the two countries in an obvious attempt to gain more leverage in cease-fire negotiations. In response, Tehran radio broadcast an appeal for able-bodied men to go to the front.

Yet if Khomeini's sentiments were genuine -- and Arab and Western observers generally believed they were -- he had taken a giant step toward ending the conflict. Calling the Iranian decision a "major breakthrough," the U.S. State Department said the move opens the way for a "restoration of stability in a troubled region of the world."

The U.S. has good reason to cheer the cease-fire, particularly in light of how it came about. A major goal of U.S. policy in the gulf has been to prevent Tehran from seizing dominance of the region. After last week's events, Iran seems likely to emerge badly weakened, and possibly as the clear-cut loser in one of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II.

The U.S. role in the gulf war did not come without a price, monetarily and otherwise. Tehran's voracious appetite for weaponry with which to wage the conflict led directly to the Iran-contra affair, the secret attempt by the Reagan Administration to ransom U.S. hostages in Lebanon with arms for Iran. In 1987, largely to prevent the Soviet Union from assuming a greater role in the region, Washington agreed to reflag Kuwait oil vessels with the Stars and Stripes and escort them through gulf waters under U.S. naval protection. That decision sparked some Democratic demands for Reagan to seek congressional approval under the War Powers Act, especially after an Iraqi jet accidentally hit the U.S. frigate Stark with an Exocet missile, killing 37 American sailors. But political heat died down as the U.S. oil convoys continued to function. The Democratic Party platform adopted last week, for example, endorsed freedom of navigation in the gulf as a desirable U.S. foreign-policy objective.

U.N. officials moved quickly to get peacekeeping machinery in place. Perez de Cuellar invited Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to meet with him in New York this week to discuss cease-fire arrangements. Two U.N. teams were preparing to make separate visits to Tehran and Baghdad. One will investigate the status of some 70,000 prisoners of war held by the two sides. The other, led by Norwegian Lieut. General Martin Vadset, commander of the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization, will arrange details of a cease-fire. The cease-fire team's report, Perez de Cuellar predicted, "will allow me to announce the implementation of the resolution," perhaps as early as this week.

If a cease-fire holds, it may mark an end to not only a war but also a crusade. Khomeini had sought to use the conflict to help export his fundamentalist Islamic revolution from non-Arab Iran to the Arab world. The Ayatullah's dramatic about-face must have been all the more painful since it coincided with two anniversaries that are anathema to him. Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the revolt that brought to power Iraq's ruling secular Ba'athist regime, now headed by President Saddam Hussein. Last week was also the beginning of the hajj, the season of pilgrimage to the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, Islam's holiest site. During last year's hajj, 275 Iranian visitors were killed by Saudi security forces in Mecca after provoking riots there. Their deaths prompted Khomeini to call for revenge against the Saudi royal family and led to the breaking of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The origins of the gulf war have grown somewhat obscure over the years. Most authorities blame Iraq for staging the first direct attack, in September 1980, though many concede that Baghdad was mightily provoked by persistent Iranian efforts to stir trouble within Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim minority. After fighting more than three years to recapture its enemy-held land, Iran invaded Iraqi territory in 1984. Eventually, it squeezed off the Shatt al Arab waterway in southern Iraq, the country's only entrance to the gulf. At one point in the conflict, Iran held large areas of territory, notably in southeastern Iraq, and tried to establish an Islamic Republic of Iraq that would replace Hussein's government.

During the past three months, however, Iran has suffered one military reversal after another. The turning point may have been its failure to seize the strategic southern port city of Basra during the winter offensive of 1986-87. Despite Iranian human-wave assaults, Iraqi defenders managed to hold on to it. Iran's confidence was further shaken by two Iraqi tactics early this year. One was extending the range of Iraq's Soviet-made Scud-B ground-to- ground missiles so they could reach Iranian cities. Between February and April, in the so-called war of the cities, Iraq launched 160 missile attacks on urban areas in Iran, terrifying the civilian population. The other shocker was Iraq's use in March of chemical weapons at Halabja, in northern Iraq, which severely demoralized Iranian troops, even though the main victims were rebellious Kurdish residents of Iraq.

More recently Iraq has been on an offensive in which its forces have reclaimed virtually all Iraqi territory still in Iranian hands, including the Fao peninsula, staging areas east of Basra, and the oil-rich Majnoun islands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Khomeini desperately searched for ways to turn the tide, handing over command of the country's armed forces in June to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and relatively pragmatic speaker of parliament.

Although its population is one-third the size of Iran's, Iraq has more men under arms (1 million, vs. about 650,000). Iraq also enjoys an edge in tanks, training and aircraft. On the home front, war weariness began to grip Iran and military enlistments dropped sharply. The normal contingent of 300,000 baseeji (volunteers) attached to Iran's Revolutionary Guards has lately fallen off by one-third, according to Western estimates. "There's no heroism in it for the village boys," a Western diplomat in Tehran told TIME Correspondent David S. Jackson. "They're afraid of chemical weapons, and there's no chance of coming back covered in glory."

The accidental U.S. downing of an Iranian Airbus on July 3, with the loss of 290 lives, may have figured indirectly in Iran's policy switch. For one thing, Tehran chose to protest the incident by sending its Foreign Minister before the U.N. Security Council, a forum that it had assiduously avoided since Resolution 598 was passed over its objections last July. For another, the shootdown gave relatively moderate political figures a chance to argue the futility of continuing a war that, they insisted, the U.S. would never permit Iraq to lose. That line of reasoning had emerged on previous occasions. Tehran has long complained about U.S. warships' protecting gulf shipping from Iranian attack. Iran has accused Washington, correctly, of providing military intelligence to Iraq and more recently charged, altogether incorrectly, that U.S. troops helped reclaim the Fao peninsula. Says a U.S. military analyst: "Iran needed a fall guy."

Another factor may have been a growing dissatisfaction on the part of some Iranian officials with their country's isolation from the rest of the world. "One of the wrong things we did in the revolutionary atmosphere was constantly to make enemies," Speaker Rafsanjani recently admitted. "We pushed those who could have been neutral into hostility." Tehran has begun trying to re-establish some of its old ties. In June, after intervening on behalf of three French hostages being held in Lebanon, Iran resumed normal relations with Paris, ending nearly a year's hiatus. Last week the country quietly restored diplomatic ties with Canada, severed in 1980, after dropping a demand that Ottawa apologize for hiding six American diplomats following the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Few steps would give this friendliness campaign greater impetus than a move by Iran to end the gulf war.

As usual, there was speculation that Iran's change of heart might be related to the 88-year-old Khomeini's deteriorating health. In June the CIA received a report that the Imam was suffering from heart disease, a blood clot or tumor in the brain, and prostate cancer that had spread to his liver. He was said to be under constant medical supervision and receiving large amounts of medication. While reports of Khomeini's impending death have proved to be erroneous in the past, he has seemed increasingly frail in recent appearances and has not been seen in public since June 26, when he was shown on Iranian television greeting a group of Revolutionary Guards at a mosque next to his home in the Tehran suburb of Jamaran.

Whether or not Khomeini's health is failing, Iran's sudden move confounded the widespread prediction that the hostilities would not cease until he died. In the end, precisely the opposite may prove to be true. His departure is almost certain to open a period of political turmoil in Iran, with prolonged jockeying for position by, among others, Rafsanjani and Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's designated successor. Iranian leaders may have realized that the old man alone possessed the power to extricate Iran from the war. "It was vital for Khomeini to move now," said a U.S. intelligence analyst. "After his death, there would be nobody with the authority to pull it off."

Whatever combination of forces was at work, they came to a head on July 16. That evening, according to U.S. intelligence sources, there was a meeting in Tehran of senior political officials, including Montazeri, Rafsanjani, Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi and Ahmed Khomeini, the Ayatullah's eldest son. With Montazeri providing crucial support to Rafsanjani, his rival, the group decided to recommend that the elder Khomeini agree to the cease-fire. The next day they convened again and received what Rafsanjani described as a "historic and important decision of the Imam," presumably similar to the message later read on Iranian airwaves.

In that message, Khomeini admitted that he felt "ashamed in front of such a great nation" for what he was doing. But "in view of the opinion of all high-ranking political and military experts," he said, a cease-fire was "in the interest of the revolution." In a chilling epitaph for the hundreds of thousands of war dead, he declared that the conflict had been "good for those whose children were martyred."

Tehran's announcement was welcomed nearly everywhere in the Middle East. In Egypt, which has sold more than $1 billion in armaments to Iraq in the course of the war, President Hosni Mubarak cautiously expressed hope that "this is not some kind of maneuver." Syria, which because of a long history of rivalry with Iraq chose to back Iran, professed to welcome the "wise decision of the Iranian leadership."

In Israel, which has long taken great comfort from the thought that two of its avowed enemies were busy fighting each other, there was a sense of foreboding. The prospect of the battle-tested Iraqi army turning its attention to the Jewish state is unsettling to Israelis. "It seems the way the war is ending is with an Iraqi sense of victory, and this is bad for Israel," said Aharon Levran, of Tel Aviv University's Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies. Even so, few Israeli strategists believe that after eight years of bloodletting, Baghdad wants another war right away. Said Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin: "It is very difficult to see how Iraq can extricate itself from the gulf so quickly and engage Israel."

Both Iraq and Iran will need a long period of recovery. To finance its arms purchases, Baghdad has run up $40 billion in debt to Western Europe alone, considerably more if loans that will probably not be repaid to rich gulf creditors are counted. But optimists among U.S. analysts, pointing out that Iraq was placing increasing reliance on Western markets and technology before the war, foresee what one calls an "opening to the West" and a move away from Soviet influence. Iraq is likely to challenge Syria for status among Arab states, probably successfully, but some experts believe that the Iraqis will reinforce their prospective new ties with the West by moderating their anti- Israeli stance. As for Iran's long-term future, everything depends on the succession issue, which remains as murky as ever.

For the U.S., the big question is whether an end to the gulf war will allow it to reduce its formidable naval buildup in the area. The current U.S. flotilla numbers 26 ships and costs an estimated $140 million a year to maintain. The U.S. has no intention of completely ending its naval presence in the gulf, which goes back nearly 40 years, and even a partial pullback of current forces will probably depend on a reassuring period of quiet. But, said Secretary of State George Shultz, who received news of the Iranian offer while visiting Tokyo, "if the problems go away, the ship presence will go down."

Administration officials quickly claimed that Iran's policy reversal vindicated the decision by the U.S. and other Western naval powers to build up their gulf fleets. Iraq's performance on the ground doubtless had more to do with last week's decision than anything that happened at sea, but the presence of Western navies did provide a show of resolve directed against Iranian aggressiveness. In the end, said Thomas McNaugher, a gulf-state expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, the "interests of Iran and Iraq and everybody else just fell into place." For U.N. mediators in the coming months, the challenge will be to keep them there.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Bruce van Voorst/Washington