The irony of the Big Lie about Iran’s alleged “47-Year War On America” is that the imperatives of Empire caused Washington to take actions in the decades after the February 1979 Iranian Revolution that amounted to the opposite – a relentless five decades long Washington instigated war on Iran.
First, as we showed in Part 1, Washington’s foolish refusal to extradite the Shah and meet the reasonable demands of the hostage-holding students facilitated the takeover of the Revolution by theocratic hardliners; and then in rapid fire succession Washington launched successive overt and covert attacks on the Khomeini-dominated government that caused it to permanently harden its stance against the US government.
The primary and defining battering ram of Washington’s post-1979 attack on the new Iranian government was its extensive aid to Saddam Hussein during his eight year war on Iran. Anyone with at least a passing knowledge of the hundreds of thousands of death and sweeping economic devastation that this war brought to the Iranian people might well understand why the ritual chant “death to America” took hold during these early days of the Islamic Republic.
As it happened, Saddam Husein launched his war in September 1980 partly out of fear that the Islamic revolution in Shiite Iran would spillover into Iraq, where 35% of the population was Shiite; and also because he opportunistically recognized that Iran’s regular military had been badly impaired owing to sweeping purges of suspected pro-Shah officers by the new regime.
Moreover, Hussein also recognized another even more important Iranian strategic disability: Namely, that the new regime had inherited a sophisticated military arsenal largely equipped with U.S.-made hardware from the Shah’s era, including F-14 Tomcat fighters, M-60 tanks, Hawk missiles, and various artillery systems, but that this formidable arsenal had been largely sidelined by lack of maintenance and spare parts.
Again, the Washington keepers of the Empire were the culprit. Determined to show that they would not be pushed around by a rag-tag band of 400 students holed-up in the US Embassy, the Carter Administration imposed a wide array of sanctions and trade embargoes on Iran. These actions included suspensions of arms export licenses, cancellation of pending arms sales and an Executive Order in the spring of 1980, which initiated a trade embargo that stopped the flow of most civilians goods as well as US military exports and spare parts to Iran.
Again, there was no reason for Washington’s hostile act of economic warfare against the incipient Islamic Republic except the imperatives of Empire. If anything, the fall of the Shah should have been a wake up call to Washington to get the hell out of the region because nothing of importance regarding America’s Homeland Security was at stake – even as the new found oil-wealth pouring into these nations and statelets had inherently become an engine of political turmoil and economic dislocation.
In any event, Washington’s embargo on weapons spare parts tilted the balance heavily against Iran when Saddam Hussein invaded the latter in September 1980. Lack of access to essential maintenance components had resulted in the grounding of much of Iran’s air force and rendered most of its ground-based armored units inoperable. By 1982, up to 70-80% of Iran’s U.S.-sourced equipment was non-functional due to lack of parts, forcing the military to cannibalize operational vehicles and aircraft for spares and repairs.
The US embargo not only isolated Iran from its primary supplier but also pressured allies and third-party nations to withhold support, thereby exacerbating the degradation of its conventional capabilities.The Reagan administration intensified these Carter restrictions in 1983 with Operation Staunch, a global diplomatic campaign aimed at blocking arms sales and spare parts to Iran, particularly for its legacy US planes, tanks and other weaponry.
The Reagan initiative involved lobbying other governments to halt exports of dual-use technologies and military items, effectively creating a de facto international blockade on Iran’s resupply efforts. The impact was profound: Iran’s air force, once boasting over 400 combat aircraft, dwindled to fewer than 100 operational planes by the mid-1980s, as engines, avionics, and munitions became unobtainable.
Similarly, tank fleets suffered from mechanical failures without replacement tracks, engines, or electronics, leading to stalled offensives and defensive vulnerabilities. Iran attempted workarounds through black-market smuggling and reverse-engineering, but these were insufficient and costly, often resulting in subpar performance of the legacy US weaponry upon which its regular military had been built by the Shah.
Yet the arms and spares embargo wasn’t even the half of it. The embargo’s left Iran’s regular army (Artesh) in a state of chronic disrepair, unable to match Iraq’s Soviet- and French-supplied forces in mechanized warfare. So faced with these equipment shortages, Iran’s military leadership shifted to desperate improvisations, most notably the infamous“human wave” attacks employed from 1982 onward.
With limited artillery, disabled air support, and drastically reduced armored mobility, the regime mobilized the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij volunteer militia. The latter especially was comprised of poorly trained civilians and youths as young as 12 years, which were literally deployed as cannon fodder to overwhelm Iraqi positions through sheer numbers.
This tactic involved waves of lightly armed infantry charging across open terrain, clearing minefields with what became their body parts. Consequently, Iran absorbed staggeringly heavy casualties to breach the Iraqi lines, as seen in operations like Beit-ol-Moqaddas (1982) and Karbala-5 (1987).
Thus, during the 1982 offensives, 90,000 Basij, including 12-year-olds bound by ropes, charged minefields, clearing paths at what was estimated to be 40% or higher casualty rates. Yet without spare parts, Iran’s mechanized advances had completely faltered, thereby compelling reliance on what amounted to ideological fervor and demographic advantages. This resulted in staggering losses, of course, estimated at over 200,000 Iranian military deaths owing to the human wave tactic alone.
In the midst of this carnage, Washington made an outright pivot to active support of Saddam Hussein in 1982, albeit on a not very well concealed “covert” basis. So doing, Washington provided crucial battlefield intelligence and operational aid that eventually tilted the balance against Iran.
This utterly pointless intervention, moreover, occurred after Iran’s successful 1982 offensives threatened Iraq’s collapse. Yet owing to the hostage crisis’s fallout and the alleged Carter “weakness”, which caused Washington’s prolonged humiliation during that 444 day ordeal, the keepers of Empire on the banks of the Potomac plunged ahead. They convinced President Reagan to sign National Security Directive 114 in November 1983, authorizing support to prevent Iraq’s defeat.
And yet and yet. In the hindsight of history the winner of that war astride the Persian Gulf made not a damn but of difference to the Homeland Security of America. Nevertheless, the Warfare State apparatchiks on the banks of the Potomac determined to rescue the clear aggressor in this case—-Saddam Hussein – only to pave the way for two successive wars designed to remove the Iraqi leader barely a decade later.
Of course, the American public and its so-called representative in the US Congress long ago forgot about Washington’s rescue of Saddam, but, alas, neither the the mullahs, the regime in Tehran nor the Iranian people suffer from any such memory failure. That’s because the aid provided to Iraq under the 1982 executive order led to horrific battlefield casualties owing to US directed chemical warfare attacks on the badly equipped Iranian forces and barely armed and totally untrained Basij volunteers and others.
In this instance, the US supplied real time satellite imagery, becoming Iraq’s “eyes in the sky.” From 1984 onward, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) provided Baghdad with high-resolution photos from KH-11 satellites, detailing Iranian troop movements, supply lines, and defensive positions.
This “spotting help” enabled precise Iraqi counterattacks. For instance, during Iran’s 1984 Majnoon Islands offensive, U.S. imagery helped Iraq target Iranian concentrations, inflicting heavy losses. By 1986, daily intelligence briefs included satellite-derived maps, radar data, and signals intercepts, allowed Iraq to anticipate human-wave assaults. One declassified CIA memo from 1984 noted U.S. assistance in “battlefield interdiction,” which involved hitting Iranian forces with chemical strikes informed by American intel.
Despite knowing of Iraq’s CW use since 1983, Washington continued sharing intelligence that aided targeting for gas attacks. A 1984 DIA report confirmed mustard and tabun use but prioritized preventing Iranian victory. In 1988, amid Iraq’s Anfal campaign against Kurds, U.S. satellites tracked Iranian-Kurdish movements, indirectly enabling the infamous Halabja gassing.
Finally, the Reagan Administration normalized relations with Iraq in 1984, removing it from the terrorism list and provided $1 billion in agricultural credits, some diverted to military use.
At the end of the day, of course, Washington ‘s so-called “tilt” to Iraq during the 1980-1988 war left a huge scar on America’s image in Iran, to put it mildly.
During the years after 1984 the war stagnated as the Iranian forces suffered massive casualties and losses of what battlefield equipment they had left. Accordingly, when Iraq’s 1988 Tawakalna offensives, aided by U.S. intel and CW, recaptured the strategic Fao Peninsula, Iran was forced to accept UN Resolution 598 which ended the war.
But it also amounted to a quasi-surrender. In fact, Supreme Leader Khomeini called it “poison,” but economic collapse and staggering losses compelled it.
The war’s toll cannot be underestimated. It included upwards of 500,000 Iranian dead and more than $600 billion in Iranian economic losses. And more importantly, it entrenched the IRGC in power and fueled anti-US sentiment widely across the nation’s populace.
Indeed, the US aided gassing of Iran’s child soldiers symbolized how the actual war between the US and Iran arose, and most definitely they did not start it 47 years ago.
Moreover, it was in the context of Washington’s decisive tilt to Iraq that the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut occurred. And what happened there, not surprisingly, is not nearly what its cracked up to be by the neocons and warmongers, as we will amplify in Part 3.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
