It is not particularly surprising that Iran has finally accepted the UN security council resolution of July 20, 1987, calling for a ceasefire in the nearly eight-year-old war between it and Iraq. Broadly speaking, three factors account for the change in Iran’s stand. Since last April, the war on the ground has gone against it; by now the Iraqis have recaptured all the territories the Iranians had earlier seized from them. The world’s lukewarm response to the shooting down of their airliner by the United States involving the loss of 290 lives was a clear signal to the Iranians that their isolation in the international community was virtually complete and that there was little that the Reagan administration would not do to stop them from regaining even temporary ascendancy over Iraq. Finally, the more realistic elements in the Iranian leadership apparently led by the speaker of the National Assembly, Mr Rafsanjani, have been asserting themselves successfully for some time. So it would not be surprising if it turns out that the top brass in the regular armed forces has been ranged behind this group. Indeed, the leadership’s recent decision to place the irregulars and the armed forces under one unified command was one of the clearest indications that Teheran may be moving towards acceptance of a ceasefire.
It is self-evident that both Iran and Iraq have been bled white by the prolonged no-holds-barred war and desperately need respite to try and put their economies together again. Of the two, Iran has been the stronger on account of its much larger population and the revolutionary fervour of its people, especially the youth who have been willing to die in thousands in their religious crusade against the “heretical” Iraqis. But it has also been the worse sufferer. While oil-rich fellow Arab governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have provided billions and billions of dollars to Baghdad in their search for safety against revolutionary and Shia Iran, Teheran has had to depend solely on the resources it could raise by exporting oil, that too, in defiance of Iraqi air raids on its transit points. Similarly while Iraq has had no difficulty in importing arms from various countries, France being the most important of them, Iran has had to balkanize its hardware, including fighter planes, for spares and to make do with such supplies as it could secure from disguised sources such as Israel, North Korea and China. Even the Soviet Union has sold more weapons to Iraq than Iran. Above all, the United States has used its powerful presence in the Gulf to make things difficult for Iran.
There can be no question turn Iran has suffered grievously and that a more rational and less fanatical leadership in Teheran would have ended the war much earlier. But it does not necessarily follow that the unbelievably heavy losses in terms of human lives and resources will help cool the revolutionary ardour in Iran. Teheran’s failure to impose its terms on Iraq can fuel Iranian nationalism just as it can compel an agonizing reappraisal of its policies on the part of the leadership. It will be idle to try and predict the likely course of events in Teheran. We have to wait and watch. The prevailing uncertainty cannot but be further reinforced by the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini continues to defy predictions of an early death and that so long as he is alive, the succession issue cannot be settled. Meanwhile two more potentially destabilizing factors have entered the already explosive gulf scene. First, China has begun to provide ballistic missiles to countries in the region which could gravely aggravate the sense of insecurity among them. It has already sold Silkworms to Iran and intermediate ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia and there are reports that it may accede to requests for similar weapons from Syria and Libya. Secondly, Saudi Arabia has concluded agreements for weapons and creation of base and training facilities worth as much as $40 billion with the United Kingdom and Kuwait is planning to buy weapons worth $ 20 trillion in the coming years. All these moves can at best help contain Iran; they cannot help coax it back into the world community as a responsible member.
On the face of it, the United States has won the gamble in the gulf. It can certainly claim that its intervention in defence of the right of free passage for non-combatant vessels has been a major factor behind Iran’s decision to accept a cease-fire. But the deeper reality is different. As William Pfaff has put it (International Herald Tribune, July 15) the United States has used enormous resources in the eighties to undo the damage flowing from its decision in the early seventies to fuel the Shah of lran’s ambition to be a regional superpower and sell highly costly and sophisticated weapons to him and “one might ask if the policy in the 1990s may not be directed to undoing the outcome of the current US policy.” Indeed, it is reasonably certain that Washington would soon be trying to woo Iran which it continues to regard as the key to the Gulf and thereby further confuse the picture. In such a context, India will be well advised to maintain its present neutralist low-profile stance of doing business with whoever is interested in doing business with it on a purely commercial basis.