Ali Khamenei’s presidency of Iran extended from 1981 to 1989, meaning it covered nearly the entire duration of the Iraq–Iran War. It was Khamenei who guided policy and managed the war with the “Ba’ath regime,” tasked by the “Velayat-e Faqih” (Guardian Jurist) to inflict defeat upon Saddam Hussein. The war ended with no victor, after both countries lost millions of young people—either killed or disabled—and spent hundreds of billions of dollars on armaments and the networks and brokers of the “war economy.” In 2006, the new Baghdad regime executed Saddam Hussein, three years after American forces captured him in a hole where he was hiding. Twenty years after the execution of the “Hero of the Second Qadisiyah”—specifically in 2026—Saddam’s rival in that duel, Ali Khamenei, was killed in an American–Israeli bombardment on Tehran.
Research, studies, and literature in both East and West continue to investigate the causes of that absurd Iraq–Iran War, searching for the party responsible for launching the first attack and igniting its spark, as well as the party that insisted on perpetuating it, rejecting all calls to contain it and bring it to a swift end. In that eight-year conflagration, American fingerprints were explicitly evident. A famous photograph from 1983 shows Donald Rumsfeld, envoy of President Ronald Reagan (and later U.S. Secretary of Defense), shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. America was supporting the Iraqi regime in more than one way and method in its war against the Iranian regime. Two years later, in 1985, it became clear that there was another form of American support, but this time for the opposing party—the Iranian regime! According to documents exposed in the “Iran-Contra” scandal, the United States supplied Tehran, in a secret deal, with a quantity of urgently needed weapons, on the condition that Iran use its influence to secure the release of five American citizens held hostage in Lebanon. To finalize the agreement, George H.W. Bush (later U.S. President) met in Paris with Abolhassan Banisadr, the Iranian Prime Minister, in the presence of an Israeli representative. Prior to this, specifically in 1981, Israel had bombed the Iraqi Tammuz nuclear reactor near Baghdad, destroying it completely.
The conflict—ideological and personal in origin—between Khomeini’s Tehran and Saddam’s Baghdad was raging and sustained through a pipeline of arms and financing from international actors who had devised long-term “crisis management” blueprints for the region. The objective was to exhaust both sides and ensure that neither party emerged strong with a crushing victory from that war. There was a covert, unannounced policy of “dual containment” through supporting destruction and counter-destruction, burning human and economic potentials in the furnace of a mad, unchecked war that would bequeath hostility and resentment for generations to come. In 1993, this term—“dual containment”—emerged into the open, registered in the name of Martin Indyk, then a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The Iranian regime, emerging from the eight-year war, maintained a semblance of calm and a “cold official peace” with neighboring states, but continued to execute a new policy in the region, which it viewed as the realization of its old doctrine of “exporting the revolution.” It intervened in the region and began infiltrating environments and societies via political Islam organizations (particularly Shia ones), working to organize the ranks of their elites into armed political parties. To lead this mission, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) established a special operations unit at the end of 1988 named the “Quds Force.” This force intervened in numerous countries and conflicts, contributing to the rise of regional proxies operating under direct orders and fatwas from Tehran. In parallel with the policy of forming regional proxies and supplying them with trained, directed militias to secure a prominent presence for the Islamic Revolution’s regime, the Iranian leadership began in the early 1990s to develop the nuclear program whose foundations had been laid by the Shah’s regime. Tehran’s efforts to enrich uranium and open nuclear energy facilities were never far from the watchful eyes of American and Israeli surveillance. The fatwa issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in 2003 prohibiting the production and use of any type of weapon of mass destruction did nothing to convince the Hebrew State of the “peaceful” nature of this program, and consequently failed to stop Israel from monitoring and sabotaging it.
As for Iraq, the second party targeted by the “dual containment” policy, it sank into fatal quicksand following the sudden order issued by Saddam Hussein to divisions of the Republican Guard to occupy the State of Kuwait in August 1990. In searching for the reasons that encouraged Saddam Hussein to occupy Kuwait, reference is frequently made to his meeting with April Glaspie, the U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad, in late July 1990. Glaspie informed Saddam that the United States “had no opinion on Arab-Arab disputes,” an utterance the Iraqi President reportedly interpreted as clear American “indifference” and a disposition toward taking a “neutral” stance if his forces entered Kuwait. He thus rushed to invade the small neighboring state, subsequently announcing its annexation to Iraq as its 19th province! History tells us that the United States rejected the Iraqi occupation and led an international coalition to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. It then imposed a blockade on Iraq throughout the subsequent years that weakened the regime and undermined its foundations, before occupying the country alongside Britain in 2003 and toppling Saddam’s regime.
Accordingly, is there a conspiracy woven—and continually woven—by “Western circles” targeting the Middle East? However, is it fair and “scientifically objective” to label the Western (specifically American) engagement and preoccupation with a vital region—one containing the most important and largest energy resources and reserves, the most critical maritime straits and corridors, alongside Israel, and a region that breeds and exports extremist religious movements whose evils have reached the ends of the earth—as a “conspiracy”? And can all this intelligence penetration occurring within the very bowels of a state that used to portray itself as a sole decision-maker and actor managing capitals and regions—the liquidation of the first, second, and third tiers of its military and political leaders and nuclear scientists, and the detonation of the personal wireless communication devices of thousands of fighters and cadres belonging to a highly trained military party—be classified as a form of “conspiracy”? Or is it a real act executed by a party to manage a war, eliminate its enemies and rivals, and register a military prowess that completely paralyzes the opponent?
The reality is that “conspiracy” is the preferred Eastern translation for what America and Western nations conduct under the banner of “crisis management” to steer and reshape the region as dictated by their interests. The American and Western interest in the Middle East, the continuous political and military intervention in its regions and states, and the backing of one faction against another to achieve interests and influence, is interpreted by the other side as “tasks dictated by national interest.” Meanwhile, in the lexicon of regimes and many elites, it is a “conspiracy” aiming to “distort doctrine and identity” and undermine “steadfastness and resistance.” It is a type of fabrication and recklessness, an evasion of rigorous analysis and deep engagement with a reality imposed by the agendas of major powers and global entities that have changed, and continue to change, the destinies of countries and peoples in the East. What exacerbates the public’s belief in the existence of this “conspiracy” is the caricatured treatment of the “conspiracy theory” topic, portraying anyone who wishes to track, research, investigate, connect developments and events, and question movements and intentions as someone obsessed with “conspiracy theories,” seeking to acquit failed totalitarian regimes and justify their continuous defeats.
In an article titled “The Theory of Western Targeting or the Conspiracy Theory?” published in October 2010 in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, researcher Mohammad Sayyed Rassas writes:
“The volume of intellectual, cultural, and informational preoccupation within Western research centers and universities regarding Arabs, Muslims, and Islamic thought and religion in the ‘post-Moscow’ phase reminds many of what existed in those research and academic centers toward the Soviet–Eastern European subject, and toward the ideological issues specific to Marxism. At the same time, an ‘Islamophobia’ trend is occurring in the West that echoes the McCarthy era and the hysteria of anti-communism, and prior to that, what took place in Britain against the ideas of the French Revolution during the Napoleonic Wars until the defeat of the French Emperor in 1815.”
Hence, when reputable Western research centers publish papers and studies about our region—some of which transform into strategies and action programs for influential international and regional powers and actors, capable of changing the region and reshaping it for long years to come (such as, to cite a current example, the Zamir Military Doctrine and the Nagel Committee report regarding Turkey)—we must rush to the tools of scientific analysis, argumentation, and comparison, rather than resting upon the explanations of the “conspiracy theory.” We must study the new balances of power, delve into all possibilities, examine the scales of power between various sides, and scrutinize the planned trajectories for trade routes and energy pipelines. Only then can we succeed in presenting a picture that approaches the reality of what is to come, thereby forecasting future developments and variables—so that we are not caught off guard later by the enormity of events, penetrations, and the imposition of a status quo by force, only to resort, as a cover for our inadequacy and failure in reading and forecasting, to hanging all of it on the peg of the “conspiracy theory” and the numbing interpretations it provides.
