Vic Socotra

08 May 2008

Killing al Quts

Prelude

Battlefield Photo from Iran-Iraq War

I hate to see the good weather pass off over the Atlantic, though I am sure the ships at sea are enjoying the sunshine. We are still low on the water table, and we need the precious moisture.

That is not what they are saying in Myanmar-formerly-known-as-Burma. My eyes widened a bit as the radio told me that the death toll on the Irrawaddy was climbing above 100,000, a five-fold increase from yesterday, and the Junta was not permitting relief flights. They are thorough-going bastards. I hope a nice damp spot in hell is reserved for them.

Water is an elemental thing. It has extraordinary power when there is too much or too little.

The wise guys say that we will be fighting about fresh water in the years to come, the same way we are fighting about oil today. I have a hard time accepting it viscerally, having grown up by the Big Lakes in the upper Midwest, with all the water in the world locked up right there, but intellectually I get it.

I have this contract that is hanging over my head, and I have to do some homework in it. It is a fairly mundane piece of work; my company would like, in free and open competition, to provide a few dozen contract analysts to bulk up the effort against one of the hard targets in the current zones of conflict.

While the function is mundane, the area and function caused me to prick my ears up immediately. As a card-carrying Cold Warrior, I naturally consider my credentials against the dreaded Commies as one of the signal accomplishments of my life.

But every step of the way, right to the fall of the wall, I kept tripping over Iranians. We have talked enough about the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran, and Operation EAGLE CLAW/EVENING LIGHT which came to grief DESERT ONE.

That disaster was enough to reform the US military, and usher in the reforms of Goldwater-Nichols that made the Joint Force a lethal reality. It brought in Ronald Reagan, too, and the focus and serene confidence that caused Mr. Gorbachev to open up the Kremlin, which caused the Soviet Empire to vanish in the wind like Sauron’s shadow at the end of the Return of the King.

I’m not sure that is what the Iranian militants (of whom current Iranian President Makmoud Amidineijad was one) had in mind when they took the Embassy, but the fun and games that began with that operation are still going on. You remember when Saddam was our tacit ally in the savage land war with the Mad Mullahs?

It was not long after the hostages came home, near the end of President Reagan’s first year in office. Saddam sent troops across the border to settle, once and for all, territorial questions regarding the al Faw Peninsula and the Shatt al Arab waterway.

The carnage was as awful as World War One, and included trench warfare and poison gas. It was called the “Imposed War,” and the “War of Holy Defense” in Iran. It went on for eight long years.

We followed it in a general way, as we went about our other affairs. I had a pal who still shows up on television as a commentator. He was involved in the quiet liaison supporting the Ba’athist effort against the Shia Iranians, even as we quietly and decisively supported the Muj in Afghanistan.

There were well established links on the Iranian side, as well. Many of the Islamic Iranian Air Force pilots had trained in the US. I recall the swoop-rimmed hats of the officers in Pensacola, where they went through orientation to fly the F-14 Tomcat that was the air superiority fighter we sold to the Shah, though it was the Ayatollah Khomeini who got the most use out of it.

An Iranian F-4 Phantom pilot took his chances and escaped the regime toward the end. He wound up in the States, and the Navy sponsored a tour for him to visit our squadrons and talk about the effect of sustained combat operations on aircrew and airframe. He looked tired still, and said that there was so much activity on his missions that the squawking of the Radar Homing and Warning (RHAW) gear became a distraction, rather than an aid, and he simply turned it off.

For Saddam’s part, he had an Uncle in Takrit who really hated the Iranians. His name was Khairallah Talfah, and he gained fame as an author under the encouragement of Saddam’s Ministry of Information. His seminal work “Three Who God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies” was published as an informational pamphlet in the public interest to explain everything.

You can understand that the people who had to suffer the privation of eight years of conflict would rightly agree, generally, to call it the Persian Gulf War.

That became a problem with Saddam’s ill-fated invasion of Kuwait; for a while they called it the First Persian Gulf War, though of course it was not by several dozen. That became equally problematic with the second (or Third) gulf war in which we are now embarked.

There is no general agreement on what to call it now, since the West has pre-empted the naming convention. Perhaps they will just call it the Iran-Iraq war, and since the Iranians are still fighting it, I suppose it will have to do.

I’ll get to that part, and why the Iranians are such a profound pain the butt, tomorrow.