If Peace in Persian Gulf Is Someone’s Victory, Look Again Tomorrow

If the firing ceases between Iran and Iraq, who will have won? A question with many answers--some simple, others not so obvious.

Leaving aside the elation that will gladden everybody who has seen the war more as senseless slaughter than as an agency of rational political calculation, how will the balance sheet look for the parties most concerned?

Iraq attacked hoping to overthrow Iran’s revolutionary regime or, failing that, to blunt the revolution’s expansionary tendencies. History will record that Iraq failed to achieve its first aim but succeeded in its second: It seems unlikely that battered, bloodied and beggared Iran will attack any other country in the foreseeable future.

Against its success at preventing an expansion that Iran may or may not have contemplated, Iraq must balance its human and material losses and its colossal debt to Arab allies and foreign arms suppliers. Time and oil revenues will gradually compensate for these.

More difficult may be Iraq’s assimilation of tens of thousands of prisoners of war, mostly Shia Muslims, who have undergone years of revolutionary indoctrination in Iranian prison camps. Will a continuation of Saddam Hussein’s police-state oppression be tolerable to them and to the other Iraqi veterans who fought for eight years to preserve it? Or will they expect something more--political freedom, perhaps--in recompense for their sacrifices?

Iran’s leaders had hoped, in the springtime of the revolution, that the pious Muslim masses the world over would emulate their struggle and topple their secular masters. Some encouraged this by preaching, others by material and political support, others by military assistance. Defeating the secular, socialist Iraqi president who dared to attack the revolution became a cherished vision, with Hussein’s head on a platter its Holy Grail.

Now the hope of achieving this through war has vanished, and in this sense Iran has lost. Moreover, Iran must deal with its own, and greater, human and material losses. Unlike Iraq, it has no debts, but its oil revenues must be divided among a larger population spread over a much larger country.

Yet Iran will surely claim a victory as well, and not without reason. Iraq attacked during a period of political confusion. It was backed by the bottomless purses of the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, the superb weaponry of the Soviet Union and France and the political support of the United States. To have fought to a standstill an enemy backed by the political and military might of both superpowers is no mean achievement.

If the text of the victory sermon goes on to say that this, like the holding of American hostages, was but an episode in the unending struggle of the Islamic Revolution, it is hard to see the Iranian public repudiating its government for prudently ending this phase of the struggle now.

Iraq’s Arab allies, indirectly parties to the war, must be awaiting the next turn of the card with bated breath. If Iraq persuades itself that it has achieved victory, the Arabs--and Israel--may have to deal with a stronger and more dangerous Saddam Hussein than the one they were already apprehensive about before the war. Consequently, these foes of Iran may not want to see it too diminished in a postwar world.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, another concerned party, may regain strength when two of its most important members stop fighting. But a cease-fire will not dissolve the ideological animosity between Iran and Iraq, and the other OPEC members may have to make sacrifices in their own production levels to grease the wheels of concord. War-damaged Iran and Iraq, after all, can justly claim that their incomes should be given priority over those that came through the conflagration unscathed.

For the United States, the only scenario that Washington ever considered was a settlement with neither winner nor loser. If that is the script now being written, U.S. policy-makers may claim at least joint authorship. American business people, moreover, can look forward to the former belligerents’ rebuilding campaigns or, if the cease-fire leads to cold war instead of peace, their rearmament programs.

But the United States also benefited from the war. American military dominance in the Persian Gulf, the feeling of dependence fostered among the Arab states, the weakness of OPEC and the back-burner status of the Arab-Israel conflict may quickly erode as the war threat dissolves, leaving us, too, wondering whether we came out ahead or behind.

Ending the killing is an absolute good. But victory and defeat are chameleon concepts that change color with time and point of view. Ask the Germans, or the British, or the Japanese.