THE TIDE TURNS 345
Iran's oil; perhaps he felt threatened by Khomeini-as he had good reason
to be: Khomeini blatantly announced his intention to export his revolution,
and secular Iraq, with its large Shi'i population, was the obvious first mar-
ket for this export. Whatever Hussein's aims, his war proved catastrophic
for both countries. Both lost nearly an entire generation of their young men
and boys. Not since World War I had such vast armies met head to head
nor had so many lives been squandered so casually for such trivial gains.
And throughout this war, the United States funneled arms and funds to
Iraq, bolstering its capacity to keep fighting to the last Iraqi, because the
United States feared that the Soviets might gain ground in this strategic re-
gion, now that the United States had lost its foothold in Iran. Helping the
Iraqis was a way to weaken Iran and possibly keep the Soviets at bay. Here
again was a catastrophic intertwining of the Muslim and Western narra-
tives, the one narrative still about secular modernism versus back-to-the-
source Islamism, the other still about superpower rivalry and control of oil,
though couched in rhetoric about democracy and totalitarianism.
The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988 with no winners, unless you count
Iran's mere survival as a victory. Iraq certainly ended up in ruins, its trea-
sury exhausted by the pointless bloodshed. Saddam Hussein licked his
wounds for two years, and then, in 1990, he made a bid to recoup his
losses. A double-or-nothing risk-taker if ever there was one, Saddam in-
vaded and "annexed" neighboring Kuwait, hoping to add that country's oil
to his own. Apparently, U.S. ambassador April Gillespie had given him
reason to believe the United States would back him in this venture too.
Instead, the United States led a coalition of thirty-four countries
against its erstwhile ally in an assault code-named Desert Storm, a short
war that destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure and culminated in the
firebombing of Saddam's pathetic draftees as they were dragging them-
selves back toward Basra on what came to be known as the Highway of
Death. This time Iraq was absolutely, totally, and unambiguously defeated-
and yet the war ended with Saddam Hussein somehow still in power,
somehow still in control of his core military outfit, the elite Republican
Guard, and still able to crush-as he savagely did-the rebellions that
erupted in the wake of his defeat by the West.
After the war, the United Nations imposed sanctions that virtually severed
Iraq from the world and reduced Iraqi citizens from a European standard of