The war that wasn’t

By Elíades Acosta Matos

On Sept. 16, 1980, the inhabitants of the Iranian province of Khuzestan awoke to a start. A sudden darkening of the skies, a perceptible tremor and an advancing underground rumble made them think of a cataclysm, a strange combination of solar eclipse and earthquake, the harbinger of great tragedies and misfortunes. And it was, only that it was not a natural event, but the unstoppable advance of 190,000 Iraqi soldiers who were invading the country, accompanied by 2,200 tanks and more than 450 warplanes.

The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight long years. What Saddam Hussein’s generals designed as a lightning campaign in the style of the German offensives of World War Two ended in an endless war of trenches and attrition. As in World War One, combatants saw the use of siege artillery, poison gases, strings of barbed wire. Soldiers charged at bayonet point, crossing minefields under the deadly fire of enemy machine guns. Poison gas alone, a weapon banned in all international conventions, killed more than 50,000 Iranians.

Still, after so many years, few experts can pinpoint the real causes of a conflict that proved to be inexhaustible, like the flames of a burning oil well. Repeated attempts to end it – by the U.N., the Non-Aligned Movement, other Arab countries – and calls for dialogue by the international public opinion failed. Only after one million and a half people lay dead on both sides, two million had been wounded and four million displaced, was there a ceasefire and an uneasy peace. The map of the region did not significantly change, except that the two countries emerged from the conflict weakened and more vulnerable. Most important, the progress of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and its growing influence among the masses of poor people in the region were stopped.

The bloodletting, chaos, suffering and destruction resulting from a pointless war are now well known. They only served the geopolitical and hegemonic interests of Israel and the United States. The latter emerged as the great instigator from the shadows, providing logistical support and intelligence information to Iraq, and selling weapons to both warring nations. An accusatory photograph made at the time of a smiling Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with an also smiling Saddam Hussein synthesizes the situation. In the Iranian case, despite express prohibitions and a total embargo, weapons were sold secretly in Iran-contra fashion.

Now everything has already been established with rigorous precision and a huge cache of declassified documents proves what at the time was suspected but not proved: the Iran-Iraq war was instigated and encouraged, supported, sustained and exacerbated by the same governments that were tearing their hair and making tearful public calls for peace and dialogue, governments that approved an arms embargo while gleefully violating it under the table, and condemning the stubbornness and lack of political will on the warring parties in New York, while ensuring support and material support in Tehran and Baghdad, so Iran and Iraq would not alter their positions.

Unfortunately, this imperialist mode, this postmodern version of the Roman Machiavellianism known as “Divide and conquer” did not stop at the end of that forced and bloody war. Neither did it stop after many minor conflicts in Africa, Asia, Latin America, even in Europe, conflicts where no one could find a rational explanation for the bitterness of the opponents and where all attempts at peace or mediation failed. They revealed the action of the same instigators, seeking the same gains, except that the documents that prove it have not yet been declassified.

In our continent we have just witnessed the power of that machine, and have been on the verge of seeing a confrontation between two sister nations in a conflict fueled by third parties, a conflict that only benefited foreign interests. The restoration of economic and diplomatic relations between Colombia and Venezuela, the embrace of the leaders of the two countries in the hacienda of San Pedro Alejandrino, Santa Marta, under Bolívar’s gaze, meant much more than the triumph of common sense and reason. For the first time, two nations have come together and wiped out the almost infallible imperialist method of pitting them against each other, bleeding them and controlling them. Therein lies the historic significance of the embrace between Chávez and Santos. That is the essential contribution of this peace between Colombia and Venezuela.

The imperialist machinery of forced fights in this case used its entire arsenal to achieve its objectives, from placing U.S. military bases in Colombia (a clear provocation to Venezuela to raise its combat readiness and increase its military spending) to mobilizing its media empire to accuse Venezuela of being a haven for FARC guerrillas. But in the case of these seasoned troublemakers, what they don’t say is as meaningful as what they speak. For example, they did not say that the Colombian state controls only 35 percent of its territory; therefore, it is absurd to demand that a nearby country that controls thousands of miles of common borders in remote jungles with imprecise boundaries, exercise its functions of government while challenged not only by leftist guerrillas, but also by far-right paramilitaries and drug traffickers.

I remember one of the criticisms leveled at George W. Bush’s neocon clan by Zbigniew Brzezinsky, a man of impeccable anti-communist history, active today as an adviser to Obama and a leading figure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the same think tank that has promoted the theories of Soft and Smart Power, as repeated ad nauseam by a disappointingly unimaginative Hillary Clinton. That architect of Reagan’s final strategies against the USSR and the socialist camp, and tireless organizer of the Afghan guerrilla struggle against the Soviet army, castigated those sorcerer’s apprentices who had led his country into the swamp of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, saying they were so clumsy that they had not understood anything in the manual for the operation of the machinery of fighting bequeathed to them, and that, instead of attacking and occupying countries, the idea was to pit them against each other, citing the case of Iran-Iraq and Colombia-Venezuela.

As we say in Cuba: “A guilty plea relieves the prosecutor’s burden.”

Nor was it necessary for Brzezinsky to tell us all that. It was enough to study a little history with a sharp eye, and observe that Washington’s own Fratricidal Fighting Machine, now turned into the Machine of Convenient Forgetfulness, tries to make us forget, with its banality of entertainment stars, soccer games and promotion of Ferraris and toothpaste.

The question to ask is the same one phrased in the his novels by Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon: Who benefits from a crime? Because it is criminal to pit brothers against each other and then steal the bloody loot from the ruins and human suffering.

No, neither the Colombians nor the Venezuelans experienced the tragic and foreboding morning felt by the inhabitants of the Iranian province of Khuzestan on Sept. 16, 1980. Who was kept awake by the feverish insomnia of his frustrated greed is the empire’s instigator.

Eliades Acosta Matos, a Cuban writer and philosopher, is a member of the Progreso Semanal/Weekly team.