The War Last Time.

By Jerry Seib.

Jerry Seib served as The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor and wrote the weekly “Capital Journal” column for 29 years. He is the author of ‘We Should Have Seen It Coming” a book about the transformation of the Republican Party and American politics. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Dole Institute of Politics. Happily for us, he is also a contributor to News Items and Political News Items. This piece is partially based on his experience covering the Iran-Iraq war. — John Ellis

---

---

The War Last Time, by Jerry Seib.

Among the many imponderables in the unfolding military conflict with Iran, the most important may be this: How much pain and loss can the Iranians endure?

Chances are nobody knows the answer for sure, including Iran’s own battered leadership class. The damage done by American and Israeli attacks has seriously degraded Iran’s missile capabilities and naval forces, killed important civilian and military leaders and laid low the proxy forces in Lebanon on which Iran has relied to extend its reach and enhance its ability to strike back.

So, a lot of hurt is being inflicted, maybe enough to collapse Iran’s theocratic regime as it exists today.

On the other hand: It is worth remembering that the Iranian regime once showed that it is capable of enduring enormous amounts of pain and damage inflicted by a militarily superior force with broad international backing, and for years on end if necessary.

This precedent for regime survival? It was the Iran-Iraq War, which stretched for eight bloody years, from 1980 to 1988. The fight began when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, hoping to expand its oil riches and turn himself into a regional superpower, brazenly attacked Iran, assuming he could vanquish the then-nascent Islamic Republic in its infancy.

The world has largely forgotten that war, but Iran surely has not. Indeed, it was the formative experience for Iran’s current leaders.

Today, of course, Iran faces far more sophisticated foes in the American and Israeli militaries, and the taste for prolonged pain probably has faded. Still, if what’s left of the Iranian regime doesn’t share President Trump’s view that the U.S. is about to wrap up the current fight, it may well be because of this 1980s experience. Iran didn’t merely endure; it found novel ways to fight back that played to its particular strengths, and to win in the long run by simply not losing.

As it happens, I traveled to Iran in the late stages of the war as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal (and, while there, was accused of being a spy and thrown into prison briefly for my troubles). While the war was hardly popular, and the nation was by then weary of it, the Iranians I talked with—including some with little affection for the ayatollahs in charge—seemed to figure that their country had been attacked by outside forces and that they had no choice but to carry on. When I visited the war front with journalistic colleagues, the Iranian fighters seemed almost nonchalant about the violence they confronted.

Iraq began the war in September 1980, with a large military thrust into the Khuzestan province in southern Iran, near the rich oil fields of the Persian Gulf. Iran didn’t collapse, despite the fact that the attacking Iraqis had a more sophisticated military arsenal and, over time, the implicit support of the U.S. and most Persian Gulf nations, who feared the Islamic rule Iran had instituted. Instead, the war turned into a prolonged meat grinder in which Iran’s ability to endure blows—at the border with Iraq, at the Kharg Island oil-exporting terminals, and in Tehran itself—became the defining characteristic.

Iran’s leaders figured out ways to capitalize on the advantages they had. Iran has a much larger population than does Iraq, and its fighters were more passionate about their cause, which enabled Iranian leaders to launch crude “human wave” attacks. Iran also was willing to use terrorism far from the war front to drag out the fight.

For years, outside observers assumed the Iranians would have to succumb; for years they were wrong. Nobody will ever know how many died as the fighting dragged on before an eventual ceasefire. A common estimate is that the war claimed at least a million lives. A study done shortly after the war ended by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute was somewhat more conservative; it estimated that somewhere between 450,000 and 730,000 Iranians died, and between 150,000 and 340,000 Iraqis.

In any case, the war left Tehran’s leaders painfully aware of how isolated they were. Iran was “left on its own as a nascent government to confront Iraq’s tanks and chemical weapons and U.S. and Western support for Saddam,” a Brookings Institution study noted in 2020. That deeply affected the Iranian psyche, and led to the regime’s interest in acquiring a nuclear capability and developing an array of affiliated proxy forces around the region to serve as kind of an extended front line. The experience also led to deep Iranian paranoia about any internal opposition to the regime, which was attributed to some kind of international conspiracy and crushed ruthlessly.

So, will Iran be as resilient today, and again find ways to stretch out the fight against a militarily superior foe?

Perhaps. Certainly Iran today again isn’t confronting its foes frontally, but indirectly, by choking off the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf to inflict economic pain.

But there also are some big differences that could make today’s experience different. For starters, the U.S. and Israeli militaries are far more competent and powerful than was Iraq’s, which had good equipment but often proved inept at putting it to good use. Iran today faces foes that, while far less willing to put its soldiers in harms’ way, are more capable of spreading the damage far and wide.

Beyond that, the internal dynamic in Iran could be quite different today. “The Iranians of the Iran-Iraq war were in the flush of revolutionary and religious fervor, against an age-old enemy, the Arabs, who had attacked them,” notes Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Iranians today are, for the most part, demonstrably sick of and disgusted by a corrupt and hypocritical dictatorship.”

In those days, he adds, “there was a truly charismatic leader in the shape of (Ayatollah Ali) Khomeini.” Now, Iran is led by a series of Revolutionary Guard “apparatchiks and a third-rate cleric who, to make matters worse, is in hiding and inherited (his) position.”

So, yes, Iranians have a demonstrated ability to endure pain and dislocation, and to find unconventional ways to fight back. Perhaps attacks by the country that has been labeled “the great Satan” for half a century will cause even people who don’t much like the regime to rally around the flag.

But it’s also possible Iranians simply don’t want to go through that much trauma again, and instead this time will begin pushing for a way out.