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The Iranians were inspired by Khomeini, who railed against Iraq's "godless" rulers, dismissing them as pawns of "the great Satan." Saddam was an "infidel guilty of blasphemy." What particularly galled the Iranians was that in the wake of the revolution, Iraq had given sanctuary to a force of some 3,000 Iranian soldiers now known as the Iran Liberation Army and gathered by General Ghoylam Ali Ovisi, 59, the former military commander of Tehran. The I.L.A. was not involved in last week's fighting but was reportedly ready to move into Iran behind the Iraqis.
As the war revved up, Tehran declared an embargo on Iraqi harbors and oil facilities like Basra and proclaimed Iranian territorial waters a "war zone." Ships passing through Hormuz were advised by Iranian navy craft to avoid Iraqi ports. While for the most part the traffic—and the oil—kept flowing, some supertanker captains hove to. Off Kuwait, a fleet of the giant ships dropped anchor, waiting for the war to end.
Particularly at the outset, the war was largely shut off from the outside world, which could only guess at the ferocity of battle by communiques issued by both sides. By the fifth day, for instance, the Iraqis claimed to have shot down no fewer than 158 Iranian planes, about as many, experts figured, as the Iranians would have been able to get into the air. Propaganda was rife on either side. Iraqi television carried bulletins on the fighting, with commentaries on what "our heroic forces" had done to "the racist Persian enemy." The Iranian media talked of Saddam Hussein's "collusion with Israel." Apparently counting on a quick and glorious kill, Saddam's government initially treated the war as a kind of media event, issuing visas for 300 foreign newsmen and busing many of them to Baghdad from Jordan, across 500 miles of desert.
By week's end Baghdad was claiming the recapture of the land the Iraqis consider theirs. The rail line from Iran's southwest oil towns to Tehran was said to have been cut by Iraqi forces, and the border towns of Khorramshahr and Abadan, where the refinery was still burning days after the first bombardment, remained besieged. Western observers assumed that the Iraqi objectives were limited and doubted that they would try to advance much farther. The Iraqi army does not have the logistics to support a campaign deep in enemy territory. And if it tried to push toward Tehran, it would encounter the forbidding 12,000-ft. Zagros Mountains. Moreover, the Iranians were fighting so grittily that even skeptics in Tehran were impressed. Said a retired senior officer: "The soldiers were humiliated by the revolution and then by the revolutionaries. What the hell are they righting so ferociously for?"