Word: iranian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...body lying in a marsh outside the Iraqi village of Al Beida was badly decomposed, but the swollen face appeared to be that of a youth. The Iranian soldier had apparently died of a head wound suffered in the battle to keep Al Beida, now little more than a ghost town of rubble, from slipping back into Iraqi hands. He would have remained an unknown casualty of an equally unknown skirmish in the Persian Gulf war, if the Iraqi information officer who was leading foreign journalists on a tour of the front had not stopped to pick...
Iraqi aircraft attacked Iranian forces, which clung tenaciously to Majnoon oilfield. At week's end military officials in Baghdad claimed that Iraqi forces had also destroyed four oil tankers and commercial ships near Kharg Island, the major terminal for Iran's oil exports. Along the border near Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, troops loyal to the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini massed for yet another offensive. Iraq appeared to have lost a bit of its much vaunted technological edge with the news that one of the five Super Etendard fighter-bombers it had bought from France had been...
...Ayatullah's Revolutionary Guards and was intended to embolden the young volunteers in suicidal human-wave attacks. The bottom corner of each page of the book bears a printed blood-red splotch, symbolizing glorious martyrdom. There are photographs showing the Ayatullah in the midst of adoring Iranian masses, and crude political cartoons depicting a crumbling Star of David or a malevolent Menachem Begin loading a cannon with shells provided by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. A message emblazoned on the back cover reads: WHY DO WE WANT TO LIBERATE JERUSALEM? WE CAN DO IT THROUGH THE LIBERATION OF IRAQ...
...Such an Iranian victory would certainly appear to represent the worst possible outcome. The prospect of holy war sweeping down on the relatively stable Persian Gulf regimes should strike fear into the hearts of all the Middle Eastern people particularly, and in general of all the people around the world hurt by the oil shocks of the 1970s (which means everyone) Iran has reserved to itself the right to close the critical Straits of Hormuz, through which 60 percent of the West's oil flows. The fanatic ideologues behind the revolutionary Iranian regime would not be averse to a hobbling...
...simple reality of this bloody desert war of attrition is that neither side has any real justification for what it is doing, and victory for either would have terrible world consequences. A good case can be made that an Iranian victory would be the greater evil, but this gives no weight to any argument that our government should support Iraq. U.S. policy should seek to defuse the crisis as much as possible with the limited diplomatic tools available, but this must no include aid for either side...