religious complexities ofIslammade a clash between the two states inevitable.
The Iranian revolution which put theAyatollahKhomeini in power in Iran
was a Shi‘itefundamentalistmovement, while the Iraqi regime was domi-
nated by the Sunni sect (although Shi‘a Muslims are actually in the majority in
that country as well). Therefore Iran’s call for Muslim unity threatened
Hussain’s control of his people, and was also an alternative to his own,
originally more secular, call for Arab unity.
The war was deeply anachronistic, resembling the mass infantry trench
warfare of the First World War (1914–18), but combined with some elements
of modern high-technology warfare. Certainly it was brutal, and while no
reliable figures exist, estimates of casualties of perhaps a million on each side are
entirely plausible. Although Iran had, under the former regime of the Shah, by
far the best equipped and most modern army in the Middle East, the
subsequent break with its supplier, the USA, rapidly degraded Iranian forces.
Saddam Hussain had built up a less technical army which was, nevertheless, by
the end of the war, one of the biggest military machines in the world. Just as in
the First World War, the conflict became a stalemate almost from its beginning,
and the total amount of land gained or lost was never great. The war had
enormous consequences for international oil trade and for confusing, and
exposing the inadequacies of, the foreign policies of the USA, the Soviet
Union, the European Communities and the whole of the Gulf region. There
were also several violations of the embargoes on supplying materials of
potential military application to both sides. In general the Western nations
tended to favour Iraq, particularly because of fear of Islamic fundamentalism
sweeping the region, and even more so after Iran started to threaten general
shipping in the Persian Gulf, but just over two years after the cease-fire they
were themselves taking up arms against the regime of Saddam Hussain in the
Gulf War.
Iron Curtain
The iron curtain was a much used term which referred to the outer limits of
the Soviet Union’s sphere of control, behind which secrecy often made it
difficult for the West to obtain reliable information, from the immediate post-
war years until the collapse of Soviethegemonyin Eastern Europe in the late
1980s. It is normally attributed to Winston Churchill, the British prime
minister during the Second World War, but was in fact used as early as 1920
and, prophetically, by the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, to describe the Soviet
dominance over Eastern and South-Eastern Europe which would follow a
German surrender. The concept was also partly geographic, delimiting the
actual frontiers of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe, but just as much meta-
phorical, because other countries, with no geographical continuity, like Cuba
Iron Curtain