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To help explain its case abroad, the Baghdad government already had sent Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz to Moscow and Paris. He assured the Soviets, who apparently were as much surprised by the outbreak of war as the Americans, that Baghdad's goals were limited, but he also pressed unsuccessfully for fast military resupply. Like Washington, Moscow was quick to proclaim its neutrality—understandable since it could not afford to offend either party. For the Soviets to openly back the Iranian regime would be to go against their ties and friendship treaty with Iraq. To back Iraq could mean the loss of a carefully nurtured Iranian connection. Thus Moscow contented itself with asking both countries to stop the fighting quickly. If they did not, the Soviets warned, the U.S. would take advantage. "While calling by word of mouth for neutrality in the Iranian-Iraqi conflict," the Soviet news agency TASS said after the New York meeting between Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and U.S. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, "Washington is in fact building up tensions and making a choice between direct interference in the Iranian-Iraqi conflict and the possibility of launching international intervention in case the war between Iran and Iraq jeopardizes oil exports from the Persian Gulf area."
In Paris, French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing told Tariq Aziz that the crisis was a "bilateral affair," best solved by the region's Islamic states. An Elysée spokesman later said that no spare parts for French weapons in the Iraqi arsenal would be forthcoming while the fighting continued. But he said that France would honor a $1.6 billion arms agreement with Iraq involving the sale of 60 Mirage F-l jet fighters, as well as tanks, antitank weapons, radar, guided missiles and patrol boats—all part of an Iraqi attempt to diversify its weapons inventory away from total dependence on the Soviet Union.
Part of the Iraqi-French deal covers the sale of a nuclear reactor—a development that has caused great anxiety in Israel, which fears that Iraq, one of the Jewish state's archenemies, could develop a nuclear weapons potential. Indeed the Iran-Iraq conflict, the first recent major crisis in the region in which Israel is not involved, was being closely watched in Jerusalem. "That fight," said an Israeli official acidly, "is proof that there is an inherent instability in the Middle East of which we are not a part."
Always concerned about the spillover effect of events in the Arab world, Israeli analysts wondered how the battle would affect Israel's eastern front, where Iraqi units fought alongside the Syrians during the 1973 war; the assumption was that Iraq's commitment against Iran, another of Israel's sworn enemies, would give the country some breathing room. Said one Israeli Arabist: "The best thing that could happen, from our point of view, is that both Iraq and Iran exhaust each other and kill one another off, and that they cannot rebuild their war machines for another 20 years."