sapped morale in Teheran, and the enthusiasm of
recruits was waning as Iran’s offensives failed to
make much further progress. Iraq’s use of poison
gas added to the horrors of the war. Once more
the Iranian poor suffered the most, while the
rich could indulge in imported luxury goods.
Nonetheless, Iranians, unlike Iraqis, were allowed
a considerable degree of freedom to debate and
discuss. The shooting down in July 1988 of an
Iranian airliner, mistaken by a US warship as a
fighter coming in to attack, helped to convince the
Iranian leadership that the American ‘imperialists’
would stop at nothing. After Khomeini, the most
powerful man in Iran was Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani,
the adroit speaker of the Assembly, a cleric and
faithful follower of Khomeini. Rafsanjani, a prag-
matist, concluded that the war had to be brought
to an end. All depended on Khomeini, who had
never compromised or given way on a matter of
right and wrong. But the sorry state of Iran and the
inability of the military to mount any more offen-
sives persuaded him with great reluctance and feel-
ings of bitterness to side with Rafsanjani and with
those who wished to end the war. Accordingly Iran
accepted the ceasefire resolution of the United
Nations. On 18 July 1988, Khomeini’s message
that after eight years the war had ended without
the defeat of Iraq stunned the Iranian masses.
The death of Khomeini a year later, in June
1989, tilted power more to the moderates, and
Rafsanjani took over the leading role in the
country, though the radicals remained a powerful
group. Rafsanjani’s efforts to improve relations
with the West were obstructed by a bizarre affair,
the earlier publication by Salman Rushdie, a
British author, of The Satanic Verses, which
Muslims condemned as blasphemous. Violent
protest erupted in many Muslim countries, and
Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, a religious
sentence of death on Rushdie, who had to go
into hiding. Even after the Ayatollah’s death,
Rafsanjani was not able to undo the sentence. But
Iran’s relations with the West were improving,
buttressed by its cooperative behaviour during the
Kuwaiti Gulf War. It remained an important
factor in any Middle Eastern peace order.
Iraq interpreted Iran’s change of heart as a vic-
tory. In the aftermath of the war, Iraq decided to
crush the dissident Kurds in the north by killing
them with poison gas in their villages; 100,000
refugees escaped into Turkey. It was a crime
against humanity, but the world did no more than
express regret. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein strength-
ened his regime’s hold killing tens of thousands
and fostered his personality cult. In 1990 a sub-
servient Assembly appointed him president for life.
The growing power and pretensions of Iraq now
began to cause alarm in the West and Israel. Its
invasion on 2 August 1990 of its neighbour,
Kuwait, over which Saddam had angrily claimed
sovereignty, marked the start of a new world crisis.
That Saddam Hussein should start another war so
soon after the conclusion of the devastating and
fruitless conflict with Iran took the West by sur-
prise. Kuwait had assisted Iraq and now became
its victim. The quarrel between the small emirate
and its powerful neighbour arose out of a dis-
puted frontier and the oil field that straddled it.
Iraq also accused Kuwait of lowering the price of
oil by over-production. Iraq was desperately short
of funds, so the oil-rich emirate was a tempting
prize to seize. Even the Arab states believed that
the dispute could be mediated with their help and
accepted Saddam’s assurances that he would not
attack Kuwait. When he did so, he caught Kuwait,
Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia entirely off-guard.
It was a gamble, but with the most powerful
army in the region Saddam believed he was
safe. Kuwait was annexed as Iraq’s ‘nineteenth
province’, though the plundering by the invading
soldiers did not diminish. Iraq’s claim to the
emirate was in fact historically spurious. Kuwait
had existed as an entity (a British protectorate in
1899 and granted independence in 1971) before
Iraq was created from the ashes of the Ottoman
Empire after the First World War.
The West acted promptly, the lead given by
the Bush administration in Washington. On 6
August 1990 the Security Council passed a reso-
lution that required all member states to cut off
trade with Iraq. Iraq’s main export earner, oil, was
paralysed. In all, twelve resolutions, of increasing
severity, were passed at the UN. They required
Iraq to quit Kuwait unconditionally, and on the
initiative of the US a deadline was set for 15
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