COVER STORIES Seeking power and revenge, Iraq attacks Iran along a crucial oil artery
Suddenly the nightmare, the conflict that had only been discussed as a worst-case scenario, was at hand—war amid the oilfields and across the vital oil routes of the Persian Gulf. Day after day last week, Iraqi pilots flying Soviet-built MiGs headed eastward for bombing raids on military targets and oil facilities across the Iranian border, including the Tigris-Euphrates estuary known as Shatt al Arab. Caught by surprise at first, the Iranians responded with attacks of their own, sending American-made Phantom F-4 fighter-bombers against Iraqi cities and installations. A fearful battle was under way. Iraqi armor and infantry punched across 500 miles of desert front at many points, surrounding two key Iranian cities but running into stubborn resistance and counterattacks. In the Shatt and in the northern gulf, naval craft skirmished and bombarded shore installations.
After months of border clashes, Iraq and Iran were at war, upsetting an already precarious balance in a volatile, politically unstable region that provides approximately 40% of the non-Communist world's oil and is a cockpit of superpower rivalry. "Whether it has been declared or not," said Iraqi Defense Minister Adnan Khairallah early on, "it is in fact war." The struggle escalated quickly and as it did, spread to key oil facilities on both sides—Basra, Kirkuk and Mosul in Iraq, Abadan and Kharg island in Iran. With thick black smoke pluming from bombed tank farms and refineries, petroleum-consuming nations around the globe anxiously calculated and then recalculated the implications. Said one U.S. official in tallying up the damage: "Once oil installations became fair game, the stakes became much higher for everyone."
Given the limited military capabilities of the combatants, the war did not appear likely to be a prolonged one, although Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini pledged to fight until "the government of heathens in Iraq topples." Mediation efforts by the U.N. were rebuffed, but the Conference of Islamic Nations dispatched a "goodwill mission" consisting of Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq and Tunisia's Habib Chatti, the organization's secretary-general, to the combatant capitals. No matter how long the struggle continued or how soon it ended, the shock waves had already reached out from the gulf. They included concerns about:
Oil Supply. Within days of the outbreak of heavy fighting, oil shipments from Iraq and Iran were suspended, including crude deliveries through Iraq's pipelines to the Mediterranean. Between them, the two nations export just over 3 million bbl. per day, around 20% of gulf crude shipments, an amount that would not necessarily be critical at a time of a global oil glut. But there was the dire possibility that the Strait of Hormuz, 30 miles wide at its narrowest point, at the southern end of the gulf, might be closed because of the hostilities. Halting the flow of the supertankers that steam through the passage would have a devastating ripple effect (see following story) by preventing the shipment of oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the smaller gulf states. That kind of drop in world supplies would be intolerable.