Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That chilling announcement by the Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein last week sent shock waves of alarm to the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, as well as to 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...
...Iraqi announcement briefly sent up the prices of spot oil and metals and put pressure on the cost of insurance for tankers. Then Iran declared that no attack had taken place, and U.S. reconnaissance photographs appeared to back up the denial. In a startling communiqué at week's end, the Iraqi military command admitted that it had not struck Kharg Island after all. But, it said, it had hit tankers and other ships in the area. Most diplomats concluded that Saddam Hussein had announced the phantom attack in a desperate warning to the West that Iran must...
...week ended, the bodies of the fighters still littered the ground where they had made their assaults. "Either the Iranians will come to make peace with us, or we will kill them all," said an Iraqi officer. "They cannot take our land." For miles behind the Iraqi lines, tanks, armored personnel carriers and heavy artillery were dug into the brown-gray sand. Iraqi forces seemed to be well supplied. "The Iranians attacked in waves," said the Iraqi commander near a place in the wasteland called Al Azarh, "but they had no chance...
...mile-wide Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf shipping lane through which 20% of the West's crude oil travels. That threat grew more worrisome as Iran launched yet another offensive, its biggest since July 1982, against Iraq. By week's end Iranian forces had occupied 37 Iraqi border villages, and were engaged in fierce hand-to-hand battles with Iraqi defenders on the outskirts of Al Azair. Thousands of men on both sides were reported killed. Said a U.S. diplomat: "The worse the fighting, the greater the chance for miscalculation...
What were Saddam-Hossein's reasons for attacking Iran? Certainly, the Iraqi president hoped to take advantage of the political turmoil in Iran and the chaotic state of the Iranian army--most of its ablest generals were purged after the Shah's ouster--to settle an old border dispute. But this was the least of his motives; Saddam-Hossein, whose regime has never enjoyed full domestic support, meant to use the war to solidify his domestic political standing. Khomeini had just made public his plans to export Iran's Islamic revolution, and Iraq, with its large population...