Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Iraq's Arab neighbors. It suggested that after 41 months of bloody but inconclusive fighting between Iraq and Iran, the Iraqis had decided to make good on a longstanding threat to close down Iran's biggest oil-exporting terminal. If that happens, the Iranian government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has threatened to retaliate by blockading the 40-to-60-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the non-Communist world's crude oil passes. Such a closure, in turn, could widen the war considerably. President Reagan declared only two weeks ago, "There...
Saddam Hussein has every reason to be worried. Five years after the revolution that toppled the Shah Ayatullah Khomeini's theocratic regime has consolidated its power at home, settled most of its international debts and demonstrated that it is willing to hurl a virtually limitless number of young volunteers against Iraq in kamikaze-like assaults (see following story). In three separate offensives last week, tens of thousands of Iranians, some of them barely nine or ten years old and armed merely with rifles and grenades, tried to break through Iraq's defenses, only to be cut down...
Nonetheless, Saddam Hussein is not sanguine about his country's prospects. Although he started the war in the hope of toppling the Ayatullah, Saddam Hussein has long since learned that his country, which has only one-third the population of Iran, lacks the might to achieve a victory. His repeated offers to negotiate a settlement have been rejected by Khomeini. Most Western analysts take Saddam Hussein's latest threat seriously: if Iran achieves a breakthrough on the ground, they believe, Iraq may feel compelled to attack Kharg. Saddam Hussein probably could not destroy the facility, since...
That crude is expected to bring Iran $24 billion this year, half of which will go to finance the war. Khomeini seems to doubt both the seriousness of the situation and the ability of the U.S. to do anything about it. "Saddam Hussein is going to fall," says the Ayatullah, "and neither America nor any other power can keep him in office." Maybe not. But what is worrying is that neither the U.S. nor any other power may be able to prevent two bitter enemies from turning their particularly vicious regional war into a theater of international conflict. -By William...
Iraq, which began the war in September 1980 in an attempt to overthrow the regime of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, which seemed quite vulnerable at the time, has belatedly realized that it can neither win nor afford the conflict. By threatening to destroy Iranian installations, including the Kharg Island oil terminal, Iraq hopes to push other gulf nations and oil-dependent Western countries into pressing Iran to negotiate a peace agreement...