The American Armada
The opportunity to demonstrate the tilt came soon. Kuwait had watched with growing nervousness Iran's battlefield successes, perhaps made possible by U.S. arms sales and intelligence information. Iran was now also attacking ships calling at Kuwaiti ports, and to protect itself Kuwait decided to try to draw in the United States. In September 1986 (before the scandal broke), it approached both Washington and Moscow and asked if they would be interested in reflagging some Kuwaiti vessels, that is, flying their own flags on Kuwaiti ships and then protecting these new additions to their merchant marine. The initial U.S. reaction was lackadaisical. But when the U.S. learned in March 1987 that the Soviet Union offered to reflag eleven tankers, it promptly offered to reflag the same eleven ships -- which would both keep Soviet influence out of the Persian Gulf and give the United States the opportunity to demonstrate its support for Iraq.[94]
The Kuwaitis accepted the U.S. offer, declining Moscow's, though chartering three Soviet vessels as a way to provide some balance between the U.S. and the USSR,[95] the Kuwaitis being less afraid of Soviet contamination than their American saviors were. Undersecretary of Political Affairs Michael H. Armacost explained in June 1987 that if the USSR were permitted a larger role in protecting Persian Gulf oil, the Persian Gulf states would be under great pressure to make additional facilities available to Moscow.[96] The U.S. view was that only one superpower was allowed to have facilities in the region, and that was the United States. Thus, when in December 1980 the Soviet Union proposed the neutralization of the Persian Gulf, with no alliances, no bases, no intervention in the region, and no obstacles to free trade and the sea lanes,[97] Washington showed no interest. By August 1987, the U.S. had an aircraft carrier, a battleship, six cruisers, three destroyers, seven frigates, and numerous supporting naval vessels in or near the Persian Gulf,[98] in what a Congressional study termed "the largest single naval armada deployed since the height of the Vietnam war."[99]
The Reagan administration claimed that the reflagging was merely intended to protect the flow of oil. It warned that "any significant disruption in Persian Gulf oil supply would cause world oil prices for all to skyrocket," grimly recalling how events in 1973-74 and 1978-79 demonstrated that "a small disruption -- of less than 5% -- can trigger a sharp escalation in oil prices."[100]
In fact, however, oil -- and oil prices for that matter -- were never threatened. There has been a worldwide oil glut since the early 1980s, with much underused production capacity in non-Persian Gulf nations. Despite the horrendous human costs of the Iran-Iraq war, oil prices had actually fallen by 50 percent during the course of the conflict.[101] By the end of 1987, two thirds of all the oil produced in the Persian Gulf was carried by pipeline. The Congressional study noted that even in the unlikely event of an actual shutdown of the Persian Gulf, the impact on oil supplies and prices would be minimal.[102] In no sense then could the Strait of Hormuz be viewed as the "jugular" of the Western economies.[103]
Fewer than two percent of the ships that did transit the Strait came under attack, and even this figure is misleading because many of the attacks inflicted relatively minor damage.[104] Only one Iranian attack in ten caused serious damage.[105]
Significantly, Iran became more aggressive in attacking shipping _because_ of the U.S. naval presence.[106] Between 1981 and April 1987, when the U.S. reflagging was announced, Iran struck 90 ships; in the little over a year thereafter, Iran struck 126 ships.[107] As the Congressional study noted, "shipping in the Persian Gulf now appears less safe than before the U.S. naval build-up began."[108]
If the U.S. were concerned with free navigation, it might have given some consideration to a Soviet proposal that the U.S. Navy and all national navies withdraw from the Persian Gulf, to be replaced by a United Nations force.[109] But Washington wasn't interested. Indeed, some, like the _New York Times_, noted that it was the United States that could close the Persian Gulf -- to Iranian exports -- though the _Times_ added that "such action would of course be unthinkable unless requested by the Arab states of the region."[110] So much for freedom of navigation.
It was Iraq that started the tanker war in the Persian Gulf proper in 1981, and that continued these attacks into 1984 without a parallel Iranian response at sea. Two months after Iraq stepped up the pace and scope of its attacks in March 1984, Iran finally began responding.[111] Iraqi attacks, however, outnumbered those by Iran until after the United States announced its reflagging.[112] The U.S. Navy protected the reflagged vessels, and in April 1988 extended its protection to any neutral vessels coming under Iranian attack.[113] In practice, this meant that Iraq could strike at Iranian vessels with impunity, with the U.S. Navy preventing retaliation by Teheran.
Washington justified its policy by noting that Iraq only attacked Iranian ships, while Iran targeted the ships of neutrals: Kuwait, in particular. This was a dubious legal argument on two counts. First, Kuwait was a neutral engaged in rather unneutral behavior. Among other things, it opened its ports to deliveries of war material that were then transported over land to Iraq.[114] Second, Iraq too hit neutral ships, even Saudi Arabian ships -- when they called on Iran.[115] Iraq declared certain Iranian waters a "war exclusion zone," but as an international law expert has noted, Iraq's "method of enforcement has closely resembled German methods" in World War II, and "under any analysis the Iraqi exclusion zone cannot be justified." The "attacks on neutral merchant vessels by both sides must be condemned as violations of international law."[116] There was thus no legal justification for the U.S. to take Iraq's side in the tanker war.
Still less was there any sense in which the U.S. Navy could be referred to as a "peacekeeping" force. Gary Sick, a former National Security Council officer in charge of Iran, asserted that American naval units "have been deployed aggressively and provocatively in the hottest parts of the Persian Gulf." "Our aggressive patrolling strategy," he observed, "tends to start fights, not to end them. We behave at times as if our objective was to goad Iran into a war with us."[117] According to a Congressional report, officials in every Persian Gulf country were critical of "the highly provocative way in which U.S. forces are being deployed."[118] When in April 1988 the U.S. turned a mining attack on a U.S. ship into the biggest U.S. Navy sea battle since World War II,[119] _Al Ittihad_, a newspaper often reflective of government thinking in the United Arab Emirates, criticized the U.S. attacks, noting that they added "fuel to the Persian Gulf tension."[120]
The aggressive U.S. posture was in marked contrast to the posture of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union too was escorting ships in the Persian Gulf, particularly vessels carrying weapons to Kuwait for Iraq. On May 6, 1987, Iranian gunboats attacked a Soviet merchant vessel,[121] and two weeks later one of the Soviet ships chartered by Kuwait was the first victim of a mine attack since 1984.[122] These facts are not widely known, because the Soviet response was extremely mild.
Soviet policy in the Persian Gulf was the subject of a study commissioned by the U.S. Army and written by reputed intellectual heavyweight Francis Fukuyama of the Rand Corporation. Fukuyama concluded that Gorbachev's "new thinking" in foreign policy was only rhetoric as far as the Persian Gulf was concerned because Moscow continued to pursue "zero-sum" (that is, totally competitive) policies vis-a-vis the United States. But the facts presented in the study suggest a rather different conclusion. Fukuyama notes that the "Soviets, it is true, were facing a U.S. administration that was itself playing very much a zero-sum game in the Persian Gulf....What the Soviets would have done if faced with a more collaborative United States is untestable and consequently unknowable." Nevertheless, for Fukuyama the USSR is to blame since Gorbachev had been accommodative in other areas of policy in the face of U.S. intransigence and thus might have been so in the Persian Gulf as well.[123]
Fukuyama acknowledges that the Soviet Union refrained from following other, more aggressive policies in the Persian Gulf, such as trying to outbid Washington for influence with Kuwait. He observes that Soviet naval units in the Persian Gulf were not offensively deployed, in contradistinction to those of the United States. (Indeed, Fukuyama points out that since the early 1970s Moscow had slowed the development of its power projection capability, unlike the United States.) The USSR sought to use economic and political instruments of policy in the Persian Gulf, rather than predominantly military ones as the U.S. did. And when Moscow did seek its own advantage in relations with Iran, it did so in response to the secret dealings in Teheran by the White House.[124] In short, if Soviet policy in the Persian Gulf can be criticized for insufficient "new thinking," by comparison U.S. policy reflected a Stone Age approach.
The provocative U.S. naval deployments in the Persian Gulf took a heavy toll on innocent civilians. In November 1987, a U.S. ship fired its machine guns at night at a boat believed to be an Iranian speedboat with hostile intent; it was in fact a fishing boat from the United Arab Emirates. One person was killed and three were wounded.[125] The most serious incident was the shooting down by the U.S. cruiser _Vicennes_ of an Iranian civil airliner, killing all 290 people aboard. The commander of another U.S. ship in the Persian Gulf noted that while "the conduct of Iranian military forces in the month preceding the incident was pointedly non-threatening," the actions of the _Vicennes_ "appeared to be consistently aggressive," leading some Navy hands to refer to the ship as "Robo Cruiser."[126]
These tensions in the Persian Gulf continued to promote one important U.S. goal: they encouraged the Persian Gulf states to enhance their military cooperation with the United States. As noted above, the United States had used the Iran-Iraq war as a lever for obtaining additional basing rights in the Persian Gulf region. The reflagging operation further enhanced the U.S. position. According to an Associated Press report, the U.S. general in charge of the RDF claimed that the "United States gained unprecedented credibility with Arab leaders as a result of its large-scale naval commitment in the Persian Gulf." This commitment, he said, enabled the U.S. to establish better diplomatic and military ties with Persian Gulf states.[127]
Indifference And Diplomacy
Aggressive U.S. naval deployments in the Persian Gulf elicited no dissent from the _New York Times._ The editors acknowledged that Washington's "profession of neutrality is the thinnest of diplomatic fig leaves," that in reality "America tilts toward Iraq." But the tilt was "for good reason," for it was a strategy designed to achieve peace.[128] The administration had been confused, the _Times_ admitted, but now Washington had developed "a coherent policy to contain Iran. It has thereby earned the right to take risks in the Persian Gulf."[129] And when the risks resulted in the destruction of the Iranian airliner, the editors declared that the blame might lie with the Iranian pilot, but if not, then it was certainly Teheran's fault for refusing to end the war.[130]
This is the common view of the war, widely promoted by Washington -- that Iran was the sole obstacle to peace. A review of the diplomacy of the war, however, shows that while Khomeini certainly bears tremendous blame for the bloodshed, the blame does not stop with him.
When Iraq attacked Iran on September 22, 1980, the United Nations Security Council waited four days before holding a meeting. On September 28, it passed Resolution 479 calling for an end to the fighting. Significantly, however, the resolution did not condemn (nor even mention) the Iraqi aggression and did not call for a return to internationally recognized boundaries. As Ralph King, who has studied the UN response in detail, concluded, "the Council more or less deliberately ignored Iraq's actions in September 1980." It did so because the Council as a whole had a negative view of Iran and was not concerned enough about Iran's predicament to come to its aid. The U.S. delegate noted that Iran, which had itself violated Security Council resolutions on the U.S. embassy hostages, could hardly complain about the Council's lackluster response.
Iran rejected Resolution 479 as one-sided -- which it was. When Norway called for an internationally supervised withdrawal of forces, Iraq replied -- accurately -- that this violated 479. Iran refused to engage in any discussions as long as Iraqi forces remained on its soil.[131] In the meantime, State Department officials proposed "a joint U.S.-Soviet effort to promote a settlement," but Brzezinski argued that this "would legitimate the Soviet position in the Persian Gulf and thus objectively undercut our vital interests."[132] No U.S. initiative was forthcoming. A few more unfruitful Security Council meetings were held into October, and then there were no further formal meetings on the subject of the war, despite the immense carnage, until July 1982.[133]
There were a number of third party mediation efforts. The first was undertaken by Olof Palme, representing the UN Secretary General. Palme proposed that as an initial step the two sides agree to have the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway cleared. Iraq, however, would only agree if it could pay the full costs (thus legitimating its claim to the entire river), and no agreement could be reached.<134> Then, the Nonaligned Ministerial Committee proposed a cease-fire simultaneous with withdrawal, with demilitarized zones on both sides. Iran accepted and, for a while, Iraq did as well. But Baghdad soon changed its mind, hoping to win on the battlefield. In neither of these instances was any significant outside pressure put on Iraq to settle.[135]
In early 1982 another mediation effort was begun by the government of Algeria, which had helped Iran and Iraq reach a border agreement in 1975 and had also served as a go-between for the release of the U.S. embassy hostages. On May 3, 1982, however, an aircraft carrying the Algerian foreign minister and his team of experts was shot down in Iranian airspace by an _Iraqi_ fighter plane. Five years later a captured Iraqi pilot was said to have admitted that the attack was intentional, with the objective of having Iran be blamed for the action.[136] Whether this is true or not, the shootdown eliminated from the scene the most experienced mediators.
By the end of May, 1982, Iran had recaptured nearly all its territory and Iraq was looking for a way out of the war. The Islamic Conference Organization and the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council tried to mediate a settlement. On June 3, three men led by an Iraqi intelligence officer attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to Britain, according to one report with the hope of provoking an Israeli invasion of Lebanon that would create the conditions for the Persian Gulf combatants to end their fighting so they might face their common enemy, Israel.[137] Israel needed no encouragement to march into Lebanon; it knew the provocation had nothing to do with the PLO or Lebanon, but invaded anyway. But the Lebanon war did not dissuade Iran from continuing the Persian Gulf war, and may even have derailed the mediation efforts.[138]
Iraq offered to withdraw its remaining forces from Iran and to cease fire. In Teheran a vigorous debate ensued as to whether to accept the offer or to continue on. The militant mullahs had seen their power grow during the war; though the Shah had originally been ousted by a wide range of political forces, the crusade against Iraq had enabled the right-wing clerics to mobilize the population and to prevail over their domestic opponents. In addition, just as Iraq had erroneously assumed that Iran was on the verge of collapse in September 1980, so now it looked to Iran as though Saddam Hussein was about to fall. Khomeini decided to go on with the war, declaring that Iran would not stop fighting until Saddam Hussein was overthrown, Iraqi war-guilt assigned, and reparations paid.
The government of Iran thus bears major responsibility for the death and destruction that followed. But, significantly, no industrial country gave strong support to a peace settlement at this time.[139] Within the United States government, Secretary of State Alexander Haig proposed some sort of international peace conference (though without U.S. participation, and of course with no Soviet participation). The proposal, Haig recalls, "failed to win the attention of the White House." Haig notes that the "war was then at a critical stage, an Iranian offensive having recovered nearly all of Iran's lost territory, and it is possible that a properly designed initiative could have succeeded in ending the hostilities."[140]
On July 12, 1982, the Security Council met on the issue of the war for the first time since 1980 and called for a withdrawal to the pre-war boundaries. Iran considered this further proof of the bias of the United Nations, since the call for withdrawal came at the first moment in the war when Iranian forces held any Iraqi territory.[141]
Iraq responded to Iranian victories on the ground by making use of its advantage in technology: it escalated the tanker war, employed chemical weapons, and launched attacks on civilian targets. Iran retaliated by striking Persian Gulf shipping starting in 1984 and launching its own attacks on civilians, though on a lesser scale than Iraq. Iran charged that the Security Council's handling of each of these issues reflected animus against Iran.
In 1984 the Security Council passed a resolution on the tanker war that was directed primarily against Iran's actions and made no reference to Iraqi conduct except to call for all states to respect the right of free navigation.[142]
On chemical weapons, the Security Council passed no resolution. The United States condemned the use of chemical weapons, but declined to support any Council action against Iraq.[143] The Council did issue a much less significant "statement" in 1985 condemning the use of chemical weapons, but without mentioning Iraq by name; then, in March 1986, for the first time a Council statement explicitly denounced Iraq. This, however, was two years after Iraq's use of chemical warfare had been confirmed by a UN team.[144]
In 1983 a UN team found that both sides had attacked civilian areas, but that Iran had suffered more extensive damage than Iraq. Teheran wanted the Security Council to pass a resolution that indicated Iraq's greater responsibility, but the Council refused to do so, and no statement was issued.[145] In June 1984 the Secretary General was able to get the two sides to agree to cease their attacks on civilians. Both sides soon charged violations, but UN inspection teams found that while Iraq was indeed in violation, Iran was not. By March 1985, the moratorium was over.[146]
At this time, jockeying for position with Moscow was still a crucial consideration for the United States. In a section of a draft National Security document that elicited no dissent, U.S. long term goals were said to include "an early end to the Iran-Iraq war without Soviet mediation...."[147]
Iran remained committed to its maximum war aims, a commitment not lessened by the fact that Oliver North, apparently without authorization, told Iranian officials that Reagan wanted the war ended on terms favorable to Iran, and that Saddam Hussein had to go.[148] But it was not just North's unauthorized conversation that encouraged Iranian intransigence; the authorized clandestine dealings between Washington and Teheran no doubt had the same effect.
In late 1986 the Iran-Contra scandal broke, forcing the U.S. to go all-out in its support for Iraq in order to preserve some influence among the Arab states jolted by the evidence of Washington's double-dealing. In May 1987, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy met with Saddam Hussein and promised him that the U.S. would lead an effort at the UN for a mandatory arms embargo of Iran; a resolution would be drawn up calling on both sides to cease fire and withdraw, and imposing an embargo on whoever didn't comply, presumably Iran. The U.S. drafted such a resolution, but the non-permanent members of the Security Council altered it to include the formation of an impartial commission to investigate the origins of the war, as Iran had been insisting, and to eliminate the mandatory sanctions. On July 20, 1987 the revised document was passed unanimously as Security Council Resolution 598.[149]
Iraq promptly accepted 598, while Iran said it would accept the cease-fire and withdrawal of forces if the impartial commission were set up first. The U.S. and Iraq both rejected Iran's position, asserting that Iran had no right to select one provision out of many in the resolution and impose that as a first step.[150]
The Secretary General then travelled to Teheran and Baghdad to try to work out a compromise and he made some progress. According to the leaked text of his private report to the Security Council, Iran agreed to accept an "undeclared cessation of hostilities" while an independent commission was investigating the responsibility for the conflict; the cessation would become a formal cease-fire on the date that the commission issued its findings. This was not an acceptance of 598, but an informal cease-fire might have meant an end to the killing as surely as a formal one. Iraq, however, insisted that "under no circumstances" would it accept an undeclared cease-fire.[151] Instead of seizing the Iranian position as a first step toward a compromise, the United States, in the words of Gary Sick, "pressed single-mindedly for an embargo on Iran, while resisting efforts by Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar to fashion a compromise cease-fire."[152]
"Could the war have been ended by a compromise in early 1988?" Sick has asked. "The answer will never be known, primarily because the United States was unwilling to explore Iran's offer. The U.S. position -- and sensitivities about even the perception of any sympathy toward Iran -- were a direct legacy of the Iran-contra fiasco. They may have contributed to prolonging the war for six unnecessary months."[153]
Finally, in July 1988, with Iranian anti-war sentiment growing widespread, Ayatollah Khomeini decided to end the fighting. On July 18, Iran declared its full acceptance of Resolution 598. But by this time Iraq had turned the tide of the land battle, having regained virtually all of its own territory, and Saddam Hussein refused to accept the cease-fire. Baghdad continued offensive operations, using chemical weapons both against Iran and its own Kurdish population. It was not until August 6 that international pressure got Iraq to agree to a cease-fire, and it went into effect two weeks later.[154] Both regimes continued to kill their own citizens -- Kurds in Iraq and dissidents, especially leftists, in Iran -- but the Persian Gulf war was over.
The Iran-Iraq war was not a conflict between good and evil. But though both regimes were repugnant, it was the people of the two countries who served as the cannon fodder, and thus ending the war as soon as possible was a humane imperative. Instead of lending its good offices to mediation efforts and diplomacy, however, Washington maneuvered for advantage, trying to gain vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and to undercut the left. The United States provided intelligence information, bogus and real, to both sides, provided arms to one side, funded paramilitary exile groups, sought military bases, and sent in the U.S. Navy -- and all the while Iranians and Iraqis died.
Three months after the end of the war, U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy Seth Cropsy expressed his hope that the outcome of U.S. operations in the Persian Gulf would dispel the "national reluctance to interpose American military forces in third world conflicts when important issues are at stake."[155] Those opposed to U.S. interventionism will not share this hope. Not that there weren't important issues at stake; there were. But they were not the danger of Soviet invasion or the threat that the Western economies might be deprived of oil. For Washington the important issue was whether it would be able to maintain the status quo in a region of great strategic value to the Pentagon and economic value to the oil companies. But for those outside the corridors of power, the real issues have been, and will continue to be, how to promote peace, justice, and self-determination in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere -- and these issues do not lend themselves to gunboat diplomacy.
U.S. Dept. of State, _U.S. Policy in the Persian Gulf_, Special Report No. 166, Washington, DC: July 1987, p. 11.
Freedman, "Soviet Policy...," p. 52; Michael Lenker, "The Effect of the Iran-Iraq War on Soviet Strategy in the Persian Gulf," in _Gulf Security and the Iran-Iraq War_, ed. Thomas Naff, Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1985, p. 95.
_Washington Post_, 16 Aug. 1987, p. A23.
S.Prt. 100-60, p. ix.
Dept. of State, _U.S. Policy in the Persian Gulf_, pp. 1-2.
S.Prt. 100-60, p. 2.
S.Prt. 100-60, p. 4.
S.Prt. 100-60, p. vii.
Ronald O'Rourke, "The Tanker War," _Proceedings_, U.S. Naval Institute, May 1988, p. 34.
Ronald O'Rourke, "Gulf Ops" _Proceedings_, U.S. Naval Institute, May 1989, pp. 42-43.
S.Prt. 100-60, p. 3.
Rourke, "Tanker War," p. 32; Rourke, "Gulf Ops," p. 43.
S.Prt. 100-60, p. ix.
Fox Butterfield, "Soviets in UN Council Ask for U.S. Pullout From Gulf," _New York Times_, 16 July 1988, p. 2.
"What If Iran Attacks Again?" _New York Times_, 20 Oct. 1987, p. A34.
Rourke, "Tanker War," p. 30.
Rourke, "Tanker War," p. 32; Rourke, Gulf Ops," p. 43.
Rourke, "Gulf Ops," p. 47.
S.Prt. 100-60, p. 37.
Robert L. Bambarger and Clyde R. Mark, _Escalation of the Conflict in the Persian Gulf_, CRS, May 30, 1984, printed in Hearings, _Offshore Oil..._, p. 593.
Ross Leckow, "The Iran-Iraq Conflict in the Gulf: The Law of War Zones," _International and Comparative Law Quarterly_, vol. 37, July 1988, pp. 636-38, 644.
Gary Sick, "Failure and Danger in the Gulf," _New York Times_, 6 July 1988, p. A23.
S.Prt. 100-60, p. 29.
Rourke, "Gulf Ops," p. 44.
Steve Lohr, _New York Times_, 20 Ap. 1988, p. A16.
U.S. Policy in the PG, p. 5.
Rourke, "Tanker War," p. 30.
Francis Fukuyama, _Gorbachev and the New Soviet Agenda in the Third World_, R-3634-A, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, June 1989, pp. viii, 43.
Fukuyama, _Gorbachev..._, pp. 60, 47, 28-29, 53, 45.
Rourke, "Tanker War," p. 33.
Commander David R. Carlson, "The _Vicennes_ Incident," letter, _Proceedings_, U.S. Naval Institute, Sept. 1989, pp. 87-88.
AP, "U.S. Wins Arab Respect with Gulf Ship Escorts," _Newark Star Ledger_, 19 Oct. 1988, p. 4; see also Richard Halloran, _New York Times_, 4 Dec. 1988, p. 32.
"Why the U.S. Navy is in the Gulf," _New York Times_, 6 July 1988, p. A22.
"What If Iran Attacks Again?" _New York Times_, 20 Oct. 1987, p. A34.
"In Captain Rogers's Shoes" _New York Times_, 5 July 1988, p. A16.
R. P. H. King, "The United Nations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1986," in Brian Urquhart and Gary Sick eds., _The United Nations and the Iran-Iraq War_, New York: Ford Foundation, August 1987, pp. 10, 14-16, 23.
Brzezinski, _Power and Principle_, p. 453.
King, "The United Nations...," p. 10.
Farhang, "Iran-Iraq War...," p. 673; King, "The United Nations...," p. 18.
Farhang, "Iran-Iraq War...," pp. 673-75.
Gary Sick, "Trial By Error: Reflections on the Iran-Iraq War," _Middle East Journal_, vol. 43, no. 2, Spring 1989, p. 236.
Dilip Hiro, _Iran Under the Ayatollahs_, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 211; Noam Chomsky, _The Fateful Triangle_, Boston: South End Press, 1983, 197n.
Dilip Hiro, _Iran Under the Ayatollahs_, p. 211.
Farhang, "Iran-Iraq War...," pp. 675-76.
Alexander M. Haig, Jr., _Caveat_, New York: Macmillan, 1984, p. 334n.
King, "The United Nations...," p. 17.
Leckow, "The Iran-Iraq Conflict...," p. 640.
Elaine Sciolino, "How the U.S. Cast Off Neutrality in Gulf War," _New York Times_, 24 Ap. 1988, p. 2E.
King, "The United Nations...," pp. 19-20.
King, "The United Nations...," p. 18.
King, "The United Nations...," p. 19.
Tower Commission, pp. 117-118.
Tower Commission, pp. 49-50.
Sick, "Trial By Error," p. 240.
Hearings, _Developments in the Middle East, September 1987_, Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, Committee on Foreign Relations, Senate, Sept. 1987, p. 19; Sick, "Trial By Error," p. 241.
Kuwait KUNA, 19 Sept. 1987, _Foreign Broadcast Information Service_, FBIS-NES-87-183, 22 Sept 1987, pp. 45-47.
Gary Sick, "Failure and Danger in the Gulf," _New York Times_, 6 July 1988, p. A23.
Sick, "Trial By Error," p. 241.
Sick, "Trial By Error," pp. 242-43.
Bernard E. Trainor, "Navy Sees Gulf Activity as Portent of New Era," _New York Times_, 25 Nov. 1988, p. B10. The words are Trainor's.
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