in these futile offensives. Regardless, leaders in Tehran refused to give up, in part because
of their expectation that the Shiites of southern Iraq—long oppressed by successive gov-
ernments in Baghdad—would rise up to support their Shiite brethren from Iran.
Another front, the so-called tanker war, opened in August 1983, when Iraq
stepped up attacks in the Persian Gulf against ocean-going oil tankers, most of which
were from neutral countries. Most of these attacks failed, largely because the Iraqis
relied on French-supplied Exocet missiles unable to penetrate the hulls of the large
supertankers. Iran proved to be more successful in curtailing Iraqi oil exports, because
the main oil-export terminals lie just across the border from Iran. They fell victim to
Iranian attacks early in the war.
In an attempt to break the stalemate, Iraq in February 1984 began attacking Iran-
ian cities using warplanes, short-range rockets, and medium-range missiles. Iran
responded with its own attacks against Iraqi cities. These tit-for-tat raids came to be
known as the “war of the cities.” Iraq had the advantage of air superiority because the
Iranian air force had deteriorated without access to spare parts for its U.S.-supplied
fleet. Iran, however, had a bigger advantage: Its main cities had developed well east-
ward of the border and thus stood out of range of most Iraqi attacks, but most of
Iraq’s principal cities are located near the border and thus made easy targets for Iran-
ian missiles. Bombardment of the cities continued at various stages for the remaining
four years of the war. By 1988 Iraq had developed a longer-range missile capable of
hitting key Iranian cities. These attacks caused widespread panic among civilians just
as Iran’s military forces began suffering major defeats on the battlefield.
U.S. Intervention
At the outset of the Iran-Iraq War, the United States had declared its neutrality while
hoping that both countries would lose the war. The administrations of Jimmy Carter
and Ronald Reagan were particularly hostile toward Iran because of the crisis in which
fifty-two U.S. diplomats were held hostage between November 1979 and January 1981
in Tehran. The Reagan administration initially also had no sympathy for Iraq, which
Washington believed to be a client of the Soviet Union.
The U.S. attitude began to shift in 1982 after the successful Iranian counter-
offensive and Khomeini’s call for an Islamic holy war against U.S. allies in the region.
In February 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from a list of countries
designated as having supported or facilitated terrorism. Iraq’s presence on that list had
made any kind of military cooperation between the United States and Iraq illegal;
removing the designation signaled the administration’s “tilt” toward Iraq in its war
with Iran. The first real U.S. support for Iraq took the form of a secret supply of data
from satellites and other intelligence information that helped Baghdad bolster its
defenses against Iranian offensives.
The Reagan administration followed up in 1983 with the approval of loan guar-
antees enabling Iraq to buy U.S. agricultural products. These guarantees started at the
level of $400 million in 1983 and rose to more than $600 million four years later,
allowing Iraq to spend its increasingly scarce cash on weapons. By 1985 the adminis-
tration was permitting Iraq to buy military-related equipment and supplies directly
from the United States (including material that Iraq would use to develop the chem-
ical weapons that it would use against Iraqi Kurds as well as Iranian soldiers).
IRAQ AND THE GULF WARS 431