The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (65 page)

In the early hours of 22 September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran, sending seven divisions deep into Iranian territory along a 500 kilometre front. At the same time, the Iraqi air force attacked Iranian air bases and radar stations in an attempt to neutralize Iranian air power. Within a couple of days, Iraqi forces were besieging the major cities of Khorramshahr, Ahvaz, and Dezful while Iraqi artillery bombarded the oil refinery at Abadan. The ill-prepared and outnumbered Iranian forces fell back, leaving Iraq in occupation of thousands of square kilometres of Iranian territory, but contested fiercely further Iraqi advances towards the main cities. Meanwhile, the Iranian air force, which had largely escaped unscathed, and the Iranian navy went into action, destroying Iraq’s main oil terminal at al-Faw and cutting off Basra from the Gulf by blocking the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

At the UN it was the Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, not the Security Council, who reacted immediately. He offered his good offices to both sides, appealing to them to stop the fighting and to settle their differences by peaceful means. He convened the Security Council under Article 99 of the Charter because of the obvious threat to ‘the maintenance of international security’, but was rewarded merely with a statement by the President of the Council supporting his offer of mediation and appealing to both sides to resolve their dispute peacefully.
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By 25 September, with the fighting intensifying, the Secretary-General requested the Council to ‘consider the matter with the utmost urgency’. Finally the representatives of Mexico and Norway requested a formal meeting of the Council which convened in the evening of 26 September.
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At that meeting the Mexican representative challenged the Council to live up to ‘its functions under the Charter’, arguing that ‘its deliberations should culminate, where appropriate, in decisions of a binding nature – not just in declarations or recommendations.’ He seemed to be alluding to
Chapter VII
of the Charter, with its provision for robust measures to preserve collective security.
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It would have been a dramatic new departure for the Security Council to have acted on such a basis, given its record during the preceding four decades, and it was not surprising that the Permanent Five failed to heed the call. However, the Security Council resolution which finally emerged (UN SC Resolution 479) was remarkably feeble, given the gravity of the situation and the scale of the invasion which had started the war. Notoriously, the resolution did not even use the term ‘war’, let alone ‘invasion’, and spoke only of ‘the developing situation between Iran and Iraq’. It called on both states to end the fighting, urged them to accept mediation, and supported the Secretary-General in his efforts. As the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Brian Urquhart, later reflected bitterly, ‘the Security Council had seldom seemed less worthy of respect’
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Not only had the Council taken nearly five days to react to a clear violation of the Charter, but when it did so, it reacted weakly, calling on the belligerents to cease fire but not to withdraw immediately to internationally recognized borders. Since Iraq had by this stage forcibly occupied some thousands of square kilometres of Iranian territory, it seemed clear which way the Security Council was tilting. This was clear enough to the Iranian government in any case, which regarded the resolution as evidence of flagrant bias. For Iraq, it was a diplomatic triumph. The Iraqi representative, Ismet Kittani, complained that the resolution had been adopted before the Iraqi foreign minister had had a chance to put Iraq’s case. However, this visit had itself been a ploy to delay any resolution until Iraq had seized or damaged enough Iranian assets to force Iran to negotiate an end to the fighting on terms favouring Iraq.
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For Saddam Hussein, a short demonstrative war against Iran was a key part of his own political project, domestically and regionally. It was intended to capture enough Iranian territory and do sufficient damage to Iran’s already enfeebled military apparatus to force concessions from the government in Tehran. These were to be largely symbolic, but nonetheless important: the recognition of Iraqi sovereignty over the full width of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the pledge not to interfere in Iraq’s internal affairs, and, above all, the recognition by the revolutionary regime in Tehran not only of the Iraqi government, but also of the power of Iraq as a state – which Saddam Hussein would claim had single-handedly stopped the Iranian revolutionaries in their tracks.
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Consequently, the Iraqi government had no interest in any speedy response by the Security Council. Above all, it wanted to avoid any demand that its forces withdraw from Iran. Buoyed up by the Security Council’s lack of condemnation and its apparent acceptance of Iraq’s thesis that this was but the latest phase of a long-running conflict between the two countries, Iraq intensified its military campaign, eventually capturing Khorramshahr and laying siege to Abadan by the end of November.
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Iraq was now in a strong position, Saddam Hussein thought, to wring concessions from Iran. He was disastrously mistaken, but he was supported tacitly or otherwise in this belief by some on the Security Council.

The Iranian government was correct in assuming that it faced a hostile Security Council, led by three at least of the Permanent Five members. The Western powers feared the implications of the Iranian revolution for regional order and for their interests in the Middle East. The US in particular had lost a close ally in the Shah and the new Iranian government made no secret of its desire to ‘export the revolution’, threatening the oil-producing states of the Gulf who were looking to the Western powers for protection. Against this background, the continued captivity of the staff of the US Embassy in Tehran since November 1979, despite UN Security Council Resolutions 457 and 461 of December 1979,
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placed Iran in contravention of the rules of international law – something which Iran’s representatives seemed to overlook when protesting about their cold reception by the Security Council. For its part, the USSR, facing fierce criticism from Iran for its recent occupation of Afghanistan, and linked to Iraq by a multitude of ties, not least the arms used by the Iraqi forces to attack Iran, tried with difficulty to dissociate itself from Iraq, warning Iran of Iraq’s imminent invasion and stopping further arms deliveries.
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Thus, in the autumn of 1980 four of the Permanent Five members of the Security Council looked upon the Iraqi invasion of Iran less as a violation of international law and more as an opportunity, a chance to rein in a troublesome, potentially revisionist regional power. From this perspective, the war would humble, even undermine, the Islamic regime in Tehran, forcing it to concede the limits of its power and thus, presumably, to moderate its designs on the region and to modulate its hitherto defiant relationship with the status quo powers. For the US and for President Carter in particular, facing re-election in November 1980 and accused by his opponents of ‘losing Iran’, there was a hope that Iran’s predicament might provide the basis for a deal whereby the hostages could be released in exchange for the unfreezing of assets and possibly military equipment – in good time to make an impact on the presidential election in November 1980.
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For the USSR, despite its obvious anger at Iraq, the plight of Iran promised to provide openings for the USSR, as well as possibly moderating Iran’s position on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. For France and the UK, in particular, relations with the Islamic republic had been troubled, and anything that seemed to blunt the revolutionary potential of Iran and to lead to a more accommodating stance to the vulnerable oil-producing states of the Gulf was welcomed.

In this respect, therefore, four of the Permanent Five seemed to share Iraq’s view that the war was an opportunity to ‘put Iran in its place’. It was not surprising that their deliberations and resolutions should have given so much leeway to Iraq. Of course, the major flaw in this argument was the assumption that Iraq’s invasion would weaken the Iranian government, causing it to lose confidence in its revolutionary potential. The opposite was the case. The war had a galvanizing effect on the Islamic republic, causing Iranians to rally round their leadership in defence of their country and making that leadership more determined than ever to carry the revolutionary project into Iraq and beyond. As Saddam Hussein soon appeared to acknowledge, things had not gone according to plan.
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This left both Iraq and the Security Council bereft of options. Iraq could not force Iran to negotiate and the Security Council’s actions had so alienated Iran that it simply boycotted its meetings for the next seven years.

In these circumstances, as far as the UN was concerned, the initiative passed to the new Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. Unlike the Permanent Five members of the Security Council, he continued to see the failure of the UN to halt the war as an indictment of the organization and of the principles on which it had been founded. He had maintained good relations with both the Iraqi and the Iranian governments. This counted for a good deal with the latter, in view of their understandable mistrust of the Security Council itself. However, there was a limit to what he could achieve without the full participation of the P5. They were willing to give him their backing when it came to mediation, but remained as reluctant as ever to act collectively in such a way as to make an impression on the belligerents. Thus the Secretary-General’s personal representatives periodically visited Tehran and Baghdad, but lacked sufficient authority to win major concessions from either side.
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Only in 1982, with the tide of battle turning against Iraq, did the Security Council bestir itself. It seemed as if the very thing that the Iraqi invasion of 1980 had been intended to prevent was about to happen. Iran had rallied its forces and launched a series of devastating offensives which drove most of the Iraqi forces from its territory, leading to the capture of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and leaving Iran poised to invade Iraq itself. Faced by this disaster, the Iraqi government was desperate to accept a ceasefire without preconditions. The Security Council obliged and passed Resolution 514 which called for a ceasefire and for the withdrawal of forces to internationally recognized boundaries.
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Iran ignored the resolution. It had now achieved by force of arms that which the Security Council had failed to bring about in September 1980 and, overconfident in Iran’s military prowess, Iran’s leadership believed that it was on the verge of achieving its major political objective: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’thist regime in Iraq. Nor was it daunted by UN Security Council Resolution 522 of October 1982, which reiterated the terms of UN SC Resolution 514 – and pointedly welcomed its acceptance by Iraq. True to the Council’s reluctance to contemplate more forceful ways of ensuring compliance, the resolution merely called upon Iran to accept the ceasefire. Iran felt no compunction about ignoring this resolution as well.
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The threatened Iranian occupation of Iraq did not materialize, although Iranian forces did occupy swathes of Iraqi territory along the border. Equally, the regime of Saddam Hussein stayed firm, despite visible jitters in the summer of 1982. Nevertheless, the Iranian threat remained a powerful one, with Iran’s forces massed on the borders of Iraq, and there was no doubting the intention of the Iranian leadership to pursue the war until they had ended the rule of the Ba’th and had established an Islamic republic in Iraq. However, the open ambition of Ayatollah Khomeini and his government to bring about a radical change of regime in Baghdad stiffened the opposition of the US and its allies on the Security Council which then regarded such an objective as illegitimate. In these circumstances, the Iraqi government began to use all means at its disposal to meet the Iranian threat – some of which were in clear violation of international law. These brought only the mildest of rebukes from the Security Council, often phrased in such a way as to suggest that both belligerents were equally at fault.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Iraq’s repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces and against its own population in Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraq had had a programme for the development of chemical weapons – both derivatives of mustard gas and nerve agents, such as Tabun – for some years. For the Iraqi high command, these provided potent weapons against the lightly armed massed infantry attacks favoured by Iran. It seems certain that Iraq first used some form of mustard gas against Iranian forces in 1983. However, when Iran formally complained to the UN Security Council in November 1983, there was no reaction. Iran then organized an international conference of experts to examine the evidence and they concluded that Iraq had indeed been using nitrogen-mustard gas during 1983. There was still no reaction from the UN. It was only when Iran went directly to the office of the UN Secretary-General in March 1984 that it received any response.
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Acting on his own authority, Pérez de Cuéllar informed the Security Council that he was sending a mission to Tehran to look into the claims. There it found incontrovertible evidence that Iraq had used mustard gas and Tabun nerve gas against Iranian forces and reported its findings at the end of March 1984.
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Interestingly, although the report made it clear that Iranian forces had been attacked by chemical weapons dropped from Iraqi aircraft, the Secretary-General’s accompanying note failed to name Iraq. The Security Council took its cue from this and on 30 March issued a statement strongly condemning the use of chemical weapons, but also making no mention of Iraq as the perpetrator, let alone condemning Iraq for its violation of international law.
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Instead, it linked the use of these weapons to the situation created by the continuing hostilities, implying that Iran itself was partly at fault for prolonging the war. By that time the US State Department had publicly pointed the finger of blame at Iraq and had moved to block the export of certain dual-use chemicals.
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This had enraged the Iraqi government, but it soon found other sources and had the gratification of seeing that, whatever the feelings about this matter within some branches of the US administration, when it came to the Security Council the US, no less than the other Permanent Members, was unwilling to act against Iraq.