Quote:
Originally Posted by Shipwreck
And how does Iraq invading Iran back in 1980 fit in your rather simplistic strawman of Iran taking advantage of every opportunity to over-power Iraq ?  |
You're not the particular fly I want in my web, but if you just gotta insist.
Iraq retreats; Iran invades Iraq
Saddam Hussein, realising that he had no realistic hope of remaining in Iran, ordered his troops to withdraw to the international border between Iran and Iraq. He believed that his battered army would only be able to fight knowing that it was fighting for the homeland, and that they could rely upon the static defenses which had been built.
He announced that, for humanitarian reasons, he was withdrawing his army from Iran in order to help Lebanon, which had been invaded on 6 June 1982. He asked the Iranians to consider the plight of the Lebanese, although Saddam would obviously have been more concerned about avoiding an Iranian attack than the threat faced by Lebanon, and to make peace.
However, not only did the Iranians refuse to make peace, but that also increased their demands. Aside from the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime, they demanded $150 billion in war reparations and the repatriation of 100,000 Shi'ites expelled from Iraq before the war.
It is unlikely that anyone in Iran seriously expected that Iraq would accept these terms; and only offered them as a way of getting Saddam to refuse peace, thus making him continue to look like the aggressor. In fact, many within the Iranian government were demanding that the war be expanded into Iraq.
On 21 June, Khomeini hinted that the expulsion of Iraqi troops would not be followed by a cessation of Iranian attacks, but by an invasion of Iraq. The following day, the Iranian Chief-of-Staff Shirazi said that the war would continue "until Saddam Hussein is overthrown so that we can pray at [the Shi'ite holy city of] Karbala and Jerusalem."
This statement was not long in being fulfilled. On 13 July, the Iranians crossed the border, in force, aiming towards the city of Basra, the second most important city in Iraq.
US response:
"While condemning Iraq's chemical weapons use . . . The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims" [Document 43].
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq43.pdf