vice president) to negotiate a peace agreement in Algiers in March 1975. Incorporated
into a formal treaty signed on June 13, 1975, the agreement had two key elements.
First, Iran and Iraq essentially agreed to split the Shatt al-Arab down the middle by
recognizing the thalweg line as the boundary between them; a thalweg is the center of
any navigable channel that is the border between two countries. This compromise rep-
resented a significant concession by Iraq because the previously disputed border was
along the eastern, or Iranian, side of the waterway, which meant Iraq had controlled
the entire channel. Second, the treaty had general provisions for good relations between
Iran and Iraq, including a pledge by each side not to aid insurgent groups in the other
country. This part of the agreement ended Iranian support for the Iraqi Kurdish rebels,
whose revolt against Baghdad collapsed as a consequence.
Less than four years after the Algiers treaty, the Iranian Revolution brought to
power a regime in Tehran with nationalist aspirations and a religious zeal that leaders
in Arab countries perceived as threatening. The mullahs in Iran asserted a claim to
Bahrain—a Persian Gulf island-nation with a majority Shiite population off the coast
of Saudi Arabia—and called on Shiites to rise up against the Sunni-led regimes in the
Gulf region. These regimes included Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had taken full con-
trol of the government in July 1979 after several years of serving as vice president and
the power behind the scenes. As a Sunni leader of a country with a Shiite majority,
Hussein had reason to fear a revolt inspired by the radical Shiite leaders in Tehran.
Iraq suspended diplomatic relations with Iran in October 1979 (Iranian Revolution,
p. 379; Saddam Hussein Takes Power, p. 420).
The prospect of outright conflict between Iran and Iraq grew with several incidents
in April 1980: Baghdad blamed Iran for an unsuccessful assassination attempt against
Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz; Iraq demanded that Iran withdraw from three
disputed islands; Iraq executed a respected Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-
Sadr, an event that led Iran’s new leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to call for Iraqis
to topple the “corrupt regime” in Baghdad, which in turn drew a heated response from
Hussein; and suspected Iraqi agents attacked the Iranian embassy in London.
By late summer, Hussein apparently had concluded that the political and military
weaknesses of the new Iranian regime afforded him an opportunity to assert Iraqi dom-
inance over its neighbor and to reverse the territorial concession involving the Shatt
al-Arab that Iraq had made five years earlier. On the political front, Khomeini’s new
government was beset by disagreement between radicals and moderates over how far
to push the revolution. In terms of the military, Iran’s army had suffered greatly
because of the revolution. Khomeini’s government purged it of thousands of officers
suspected of remaining loyal to the ousted shah, leaving the military divided and in
chaos. Moreover, the United States, which had been the shah’s major supplier of
weapons, had halted the flow of armaments and vital spare parts after Iranian students
took U.S. diplomats hostage in Tehran in November 1979. With the Iranian army
weakened and the government distracted by revolutionary infighting, Hussein report-
edly believed an attack would give him significant leverage over Iraq’s old enemy and
would preempt any attempt by the mullahs in Tehran to oust him from power.
Within this context, Hussein appeared before the National Assembly on September
17, 1980, to announce his government’s abrogation of the 1975 Algiers treaty and to claim
all of the Shatt al-Arab. “This Shatt shall again be, as it has been throughout history, Iraqi
and Arab in name and reality, with all rights of full sovereignty over it,” he said. Hussein
424 IRAQ AND THE GULF WARS