382 • 19 THE REASSERTION OF ISLAMIC POWERBroadly speaking, the Gulf states realized that their own security de¬
pended on never letting one country become strong enough to control all
the others. As you may recall from Chapter 10, this is the balance-of-
power concept that kept the peace in nineteenth-century Europe. During
the 1970s the country that had dominated the Gulf was Iran, due to the
shah's military buildup. When a rebellion, abetted by South Yemen (and
indirectly by the USSR), had threatened Oman's sultan, Iranian troops res¬
cued him in 1973. When the Kurdish revolt against Iraq heated up in
1973-1974, Iran stopped arming the rebels only after Iraq agreed in 1975
to share its control over the Shatt al-Arab waterway, an agreement that
Iraq would denounce in 1980 and revive in 1990. The Islamic revolution
eclipsed Iran's predominance, at least for a while. Saudi Arabia was too
sparsely populated and inadequately armed to replace Iran as guardian of
the Gulf.
But Iraq aspired to do so. The second-largest of the eastern Arab states
in both area and population, Iraq had used its abundant oil resources
since the 1920s to build an economic infrastructure suited to both indus¬
trial and agricultural development. Political turbulence from 1958 to 1970
(plus the Kurdish revolt) slowed its growth, but after that it became more
stable, under the authoritarian rule of Saddam Husayn, and developed
rapidly. The country was armed by and aligned with the USSR.
Yet Iraq did not live up to its potential. With two rivers, abundant oil,
deserts, mountains, and fertile valleys, it could have wielded greater power
but for the divisions among its people. Iraq's Muslims are more than 60
percent Shi'i, and about 30 percent of its Sunni Muslims are either Kur¬
dish or Turkish; yet the government had always been controlled by a Sunni
Muslim and Arab elite. Still, Iraq aspired to unite the Arabs, as Prussia had
led Germany's unification. It laid claim to Kuwait from the 1930s, trying
to annex it in 1961 and occupying it in 1990. Iraq has never made an armi¬
stice agreement with Israel. It tried to block Sadat's peace efforts and gath¬
ered all the other Arab heads of state to condemn the Egyptian-Israeli
peace treaty in 1979. When Egypt's Arab League membership was sus¬
pended, Iraq hoped to replace it as the leading Arab state. But how could
Iraq prove itself?
Its answer was to attack revolutionary Iran in September 1980. President
Saddam Husayn accused Iran of violating the 1975 treaty (which he had ne¬
gotiated on Iraq's behalf) by not giving up a piece of its mountainous terri¬
tory closest to Baghdad. Iran had also kept three Gulf islands that the shah
had annexed (from the United Arab Emirates) in 1971 because of their
closeness to the Straits of Hormuz. Iraq expected Iran's restive minorities,
especially the ethnic Arabs of oil-rich Khuzistan, to rebel against Tehran