Abstract
The relationship between Iran and Iraq, since Iraq achieved independence in 1932, has been marked by periods of alliance and cooperation and also periods of rivalry, friction, and devastating war. Cooperation was largely the product of the common regional security needs of the two countries and brought Iran and Iraq together in the Saadabad Pact in 1937 and the Baghdad Pact in 1955. Friction resulted from border disputes, particularly over the Shatt al-Arab, competing regional ambitions, the differing domestic and foreign policy orientations of regimes, and, at various times, the alliances Tehran and Baghdad forged with competing world powers. The presence of large, often rebellious, Kurdish communities in both Iran and Iraq provided each country with the means to cause difficulties for the other—although the Kurdish problem proved far more acute for Iraq than for Iran. Iraq’s large Shi‘i community (a portion of whose members were of Iranian origin), the affinities members of this community felt with fellow Shi‘is in Iran, and the fact that Shi‘ism’s holiest shrines were located in Iraq, created a potential instrument (though not always the reality) for Iranian influence in Iraq and aroused Baghdad’s suspicions.
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Notes
This point is also made in Shahram Chubin and Sepehr Zabih, The Foreign Relations of Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 174.
For the text in Persian, see Feridun Adamiyyat, Amir Kabir va Iran, 4th ed. (Tehran: Khwarazmi Publications, 1354/1975–76), pp. 135–38.
These arrangements are well described in John Marlowe, The Persian Gulf in the Twentieth Century (London: Cresset Press, 1962), p. 205.
The 1847 Iran-Iraq boundary was also confirmed by the Tehran Protocol of 1911 and the Constantinople Protocol of 1913. See R.K. Ramazani, The Foreign Policy of Iran, 1500–1941 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966), p. 263.
For an account of these various disputes, see Chubin and Zabih, The Foreign Relations of Iran, pp. 172–76; Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 2nd. ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004), p. 109;
R.K. Ramazani, Iran’s Foreign Policy, 1941–1973 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), pp. 401–03.
The handling of the dispute over Bahrain and the three islands is described in Ramazani, Iran’s Foreign Policy, pp. 408–18. See also Richard Schofield, “Anything but Black and White: A Commentary on the Lower Gulf Islands Dispute,” in Security in the Persian Gulf Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus, ed. Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 171–87.
The details of the agreement reached in principle by the shah and Saddam Hussein at Algiers were spelled out three months later in the “Iran-Iraq Treaty on International Borders and Good Neighbourly Relations,” signed by the Iranian and Iraqi foreign ministers at Baghdad on June 13, 1975. The treaty and its three protocols lay out mutual undertakings to ensure border security, define the land frontier between the two countries, define the thalweg as the median line in the Shatt al-Arab and outline agreed principles governing shipping in the Gulf The text of the treaty is reproduced in Majid Khadduri, Socialist Iraq (Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute, 1978), pp. 245–60.
Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1980), p. 3. The authors paraphrase Clausewitz to note that in unlimited wars “where the issues are not territorial and subject to negotiation, but rather the ‘overthrow of the enemy,’ only a complete military victory suffices to achieve the goal.” Chubin and Tripp characterize Iran, much more than Iraq, as fighting a war not just for territorial gain or for limited aims, but for broad, ideologically defined concepts (such as “the defense of Islam”) where nothing but total victory will suffice. They argue that Saddam Hussein went to war with more limited territorial aims that he imagined would be achieved, as had been the case in previous Iran-Iraq confrontations, once (Iraqi) military superiority was demonstrated, but that he misunderstood that he was facing a regime very different from the shah’s. (Ibid., pp. 27–30). However, even if he began the war with limited aims, and reverted to them when Iraq was on the defensive, the rhetoric he and Iraqi officials and propaganda organs utilized often mirrored Iran’s in describing the war as one for the very soul of Islam, Arabism and Iraqi survival, and a war between antagonistic regimes, ideologies, religious orientations, even races.
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© 2004 Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick
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Bakhash, S. (2004). The Troubled Relationship: Iran and Iraq, 1930–80. In: Potter, L.G., Sick, G.G. (eds) Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980427_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980427_2
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