Persian Gulf Security & Iran-Iraq War (POLI341) PDF

Today we're going to be talking about the Persian Gulf as a security region and the Iran Iraq war. I want to let you know that of course, for a variety of reasons, we're a little bit behind in terms of the syllabus. So in the next little while, before next class, I will post for you a kind of update...

Today we're going to be talking about the Persian Gulf as a security region and the Iran Iraq war. I want to let you know that of course, for a variety of reasons, we're a little bit behind in terms of the syllabus. So in the next little while, before next class, I will post for you a kind of updated version of the syllabus reflecting the timeline of lectures. From here on in, we won't be cutting anything. It'll just be a question of condensing a few things that may have been scheduled to carry over across 2 lectures instead happening in one lecture. And we'll fit everything in so it won't be too dramatic, but that way you'll know what to expect in coming lectures. So anyway, let's get into the whole question of the security region of the Persian Gulf. So why, like what? Why do we do that? Why do we look at that in the context of this class? It relates to the idea of the Persian Gulf as a contained security region within a or a regional subsystem within the not just the international state system, but within the Middle East more broadly. So regional subsystems feature a system of different actors, some of whom are in alliance with each other, some of whom are rivals, and all of whom see their key interests as being located immediately within that subsystem. So the subsystem isn't only a geographical grouping of states that happen to be in close proximity to each other, but it's also, you know, more specifically a regional system that has these different alliance patterns, that has these different rivalries and that is self-contained in terms of where, again, those actors believe their primary interests to be. So two key events that would shape the contemporary politics of the Gulf would be first of all, a series of former British colonies gaining independence. Of course, we're familiar with, you know, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine gaining independence in one form or another at in a in a previous era across the 1920s to 40s. But then the British would maintain colonial control over some key Gulf Emirates, namely Kuwait, Bahrain, which were oil rich and which upon independence, upon gaining independence kind of like activated, if you will, the onset of the secure of this the the regional subsystem of the Persian Gulf. There was also, in the early 1970's, the dramatic rise in oil prices that occurred globally as a result of the oil boycott imposed upon countries that were still selling a weaponry to Israel in the midst of the Arab Israeli war of October 1973, notably the United States. And so even though that oil boycott didn't target every country in the world, it mainly targeted the US. The importance of the US in the global economy was such that the knock on effects were to create some kind of massive spike in global oil prices and a massive slowdown for many countries economies around the globe. However, as we know, as we discussed already in in a previous context, for oil producing countries in the Persian Gulf, the dramatic spike in oil prices didn't represent a moment of economic slowdown or recession, but rather it represented a moment of dramatic spike in revenue because they were the ones selling the oil. The oil had quadrupled in price. And so why do we locate that particular moment as this key turning point? Because before that time, these states in the region have limited ability to project power and influence beyond their own borders, be it within the broader region or or internationally. But now they could. Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia in particular, had vastly increased their military and economic power across the 1970s. Their foreign policies became much more ambitious. And that would notably include, in the case of Iraq, launching a war against Iran. So I was talking about British protectorates in the Persian Gulf, Oman, Kuwait and the crucial states which include all of those listed, which would then fuse together to become the United Arab Emirates. What's significant for our purposes is that with the British withdrawal from the region, although the United States and the UK would maintain a naval presence in the region, would continue to exert some influence on the region. Essentially what we would see would be the drawing down of the colonial era and the rise correspondingly of regional powers. So in that context we can talk about the balance of power theory, something with which many of you may already be familiar. The balance of power theory that simply holds that states seek to balance each others power, that in any given either on a global level between superpowers or on a regional level between regional powers, states will seek to balance each other's power to match perceived threats from rivals or from potential rivals. And they do so by increasing military and economic strength and by forming alliances. Though there's those are the two key ways in which states seek to engage in balancing behaviour in that context. Like balancing is typically regarded as a more defensively minded approach. It is more defensive in nature, but any state that pursues an aggressive foreign policy or seeks to disrupt that balance, that equilibrium typically will meet with a response from a state or from an alliance of states to try to neutralize that that emergent threat. In order to balance effectively, it's also important to emphasize you have to credibly show your willingness to use military force in the event that a potential rival doesn't stand down. So you have to commit to matching an opponent's strength credibly if the opponent doesn't believe, if you don't do enough to convince the opponent that you're serious about using military force and that you have enough military force to to counter them, then the balancing won't be effective, which carries our over in turn into the concept of deterrence, deterring a potential enemy. So it's also important to emphasize something that we actually explored in a different context in our previous unit on identity, which is that domestic issues, issues of identity, issues of how people perceive themselves domestically, excuse me, as well as this transnationally matter not only realist and balance of power approaches to understanding state behavior. And when we look at the of the Iran Iraq war in a moment, we'll have an illustration of how and why that operates. So in the Gulf region, we see how domestic issues would be a factor and how leaders in the region would take domestic issues into account alongside international ones in in their decision making. So regime security, when we speak of domestic issues, especially in a context of an authoritarian regime such as existed both in Iraq and in Iran during that time, to speak of domestic politics is to speak certainly of what local populations might want or how indeed how they see themselves, But also it relates to the notion of regime security. And what I mean by that is that elites in, excuse me, elites in power will worry about external threats, will worry about the possibility of being attacked by an enemy state, but they will also worry about the possibility of having their authority challenged or even having someone attempt to overthrow them domestically. So the fear that you might get attacked by an enemy state falls into the category of traditional security concerns, kinds of concerns with which the study of international relations has traditionally preoccupied itself. Whereas regime security again relates much more to potential threats from within, which are particularly acute in context of authoritarian regimes. Democracies may have to worry sometimes about regime security as well. They might have to worry about a coup d'etat threatening to overthrow a democratically elected regime. There are different ways in which democracies have to contend with domestic issues in general and regime security in particular as well, but it's especially an acute fear for authoritarian regimes. And so if we explore how that played itself out, we see that this has been true in the Gulf security region in on repeated occasions. Iraq would initiate the Gulf War with Iran in 1980. It would last until 1988. Not long after that, Iraq would initiate another war, which also would become the Gulf War actually become known that way with through the invasion in August of 1990 of Kuwait. In each case, scholars have argued that Saddam Hussein, who was the dictator of Iraq in both those instances, was driven by his ambition to cement his status as a major regional power. Cement Iraq's status as a major regional power, especially also in the aftermath of another major what, what had up till then been the major regional power, if you will, the the the most powerful Arab state, in some sense kind of removing itself from the scene. How did that happen? What, what did that look like? Why was the field now clear, so to speak, in 1980, for Saddam Hussein to try to assert himself as the leader of the most powerful Arab state and to kind of assume the mantle of leader, if you will, of the Arab world? Who had been the previous leader? You guys know this? I see people talking to each other. You're right. I'm telling you, whatever your intuition is, is correct. Yeah. Yeah. It was Nasser. It was Nasser as a leader, and it was Egypt as a country. Of course, Nasser had had died in 1970. So there's a 10 year gap there. Who was Nasser's successor in Egypt? Yeah, Sadat. Exactly. What did Sadat do that kind of pulled Egypt off the scene as far as the the foremost Arab state in terms of kind of military power and leading the pack, so to speak? Yeah, peace with Israel in 1979? Exactly. So Egypt makes peace with Israel under Sadat. Egypt that year gets kicked out of the Arab League and now Saddam Hussein is like, yo, I will be the man I and, and literally that was something that he was widely known to crave was that leadership. It's not just something that one or two people have written about, but it's it's been written about widely by various scholars. You can check out Fuad Ajami writing about Saddam Hussein very consciously trying to move the centre of gravity of the Arab world to Iraq post 1979. What? Are the circumstances of domestic unrest, in other words the concerns around regime security, motivating Saddam Hussein in the context of his invasion of Iran in 1980? The year prior, not only had Sadat made peace with Israel, but of course that was also the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. And the Islamic Revolution in Iran was in terms of the vision and brand of Islam being promoted by the then head of state who came to power, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Ayatollah Khomeini had a specific vision of Iranian power rooted in the theocracy that he installed, centered around his interpretation of Shia Islam, which is the majority religion in Iran and which is also though the majority religion in neighboring Iraq, although Saddam Hussein was Sunni. And so now you had with the influence of Iran, which was calling for revolution in other parts of the Arab world. You had Shia groups in Iraq receiving influence and support from Iran calling for Saddam Hussein's overthrow, which was a extra factor pushing Saddam Hussein to try to neutralize this threat by invading Iran. So Saddam Hussein chooses war. There's domestic unrest in Iraq, which he perceives to be having orchestrated, having been orchestrated by Tehran after the Iranian revolution and then in the Gulf War that he would initiate in 1990. Saddam Hussein's regime likewise perceived, according to some scholars, that there was an international conspiracy that the rising oil exports by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, both of whom were aligned with the West, Kuwait especially being aligned with the British and the Americans. That they were exporting more oil as a way of underselling Iraq, which was also producing oil, of course, but which was getting less revenue as the market was being flooded. He also perceived joint US Israeli plans to strike at Iraqi weapons of mass destruction targets. It's not exactly clear whether such plans existed, but what we do know is that in 1981, when Saddam Hussein had been building a nuclear reactor near Baghdad with close assistance from France, the Israelis did bomb it and and thus wrecked his nuclear program. So it wouldn't be unrealistic to imagine that the Israelis might try something like that again. And it was in this context, Ray Takay argues, that Iraq attacked Iran. It should also be noted Saddam Hussein expected that to be a war that he could win relatively easily. He wasn't planning on taking over all of Iran, but he was planning on seizing oil rich territory near the Iraqi border, seizing it from Iran and just kind of challenging Iran to do anything about it. Iran had previously had as a superpower patron the United States previously, meaning before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which we touched upon as well briefly already this semester with the US selling them a lot of sophisticated weaponry. But now the Islamic Revolution was very, very explicitly anti American and there were going to be no more weapons coming from the Americans. And at the same time, Iran condemned the Soviet Union and didn't want to buy weapons from them either. So Iran lacked a superpower backer, lacked a reliable source of arms, lacked dependable allies. It hadn't consolidated its control over the state completely either. The revolutionary regime hadn't consolidated that control yet. And moreover, there were elements within the military who had been loyal to the Shah who had been overthrown in the revolution. So there was a question as as to whether in fact the Iranian military would even kind of stand up and fight on behalf of a regime that had been obviously anti Shah, had overthrown the Shah. Nonetheless, after Iraq invaded, Iran's new government under Ayatollah Khomeini managed to as usually consolidate domestic political power, mobilize society. It was surprisingly resilient in the face of the Iraqi invasion. Ray Takei writes that for the new elites in the Iranian theocracy, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the invasion by Iraq was not just a question of an Interstate conflict that was fought for territorial adjustment or limited political objectives. It was a contest of ideologies between Saddam Hussein's secular Arab nationalism, such as he presented it on the one hand, and the Shia theocracy of Iran on the other. Thus, even though Iran hadn't initiated the war, once the war happened, it became this extension of the of the Islamic revolution that had happened the previous year. And although Iraq had technological superiority, they had bought weapons from a variety of sources and had a very modern military. The rhetoric in Iran was that Iran would outdo Iraq on the basis of having ideological fervor like their their ideological commitment to the struggle would compensate for Iraq's superior technological military strength. Are there any questions or points thus far so we can talk a little bit about the lead up to the war? There had been an agreement between Iraq and Iran back when the Shah was still in power that was cemented in Algiers with the signing of the 1975 Algiers Agreement. It was an agreement to end a border dispute. According to the agreement, as you see, Iraq agreed to the Iranian definition of their border. And in exchange, Iran agreed to stop supporting a guerrilla war being waged by Kurdish insurgents in northern Iraq, which was kind of a thorn in the side of the Iraqi state for a long time. And there had been, as you see, prior to the outbreak of war, border skirmishes between Iraqi and Iranian forces. There was a lot of Iranian propaganda in favor of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, propaganda which was meant to resonate with the Iraqi population. It should be noted, in as much as the Iranian revolutionary government under Ayatollah Khomeini was predicated upon, you know, their interpretation of of Shia religious ideology, that one of the centers, historically one of the most important global centers of Shia learning is in Iraq at Anajaf. So I the idea that Iran could try to stir up a key component of the Iraqi population on the basis of a kind of Shia revolutionary fervor. This was something that did indeed resonate within certain sectors of the Iraqi population. Moreover, as you see, in addition to his fears of domestic unrest, Saddam coveted Speaking of oil rich regions he was hoping to seize from Iran along the Iraqi border, the Kurzistan province of Iran, which is ethnically Arab. Although a majority of Iran's population is ethnically Farsi, not Arab, there are Arab speaking regions. Notably Kurdistan also happens to be oil rich. Saddam Hussein was thinking, you know, we could just kind of grab that and, and, and keep it for Iraq. Here is Saddam Hussein meeting with the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, in Algiers in 1975 when the Algiers agreement was brokered. Now we'll talk about some of the timeline of the war, But it's interesting to look at the question of misperception, excuse me, as a key concept in international relations relating to decision making by elites leading up to and during war. So when you look at the history of either offensives that elites expected to succeed but which failed, or offenses which did succeed in surprising the the rival country. In either case, scholarship emerges in political science explaining misperception, Either the misperception on the part of those who were attacked by surprise and didn't see it coming, or the misperception on the part of those who launched an attack confident that it would succeed and ended up learning the hard way that no, they they had miscalculated. So in this case of a failed offensive by Iraq, we can look at some of the miscalculations that Saddam Hussein made in assuming that the war would go well and that it would go relatively easily. Remember, this is a war that ended up lasting fully now eight years until 1988, and that ended up claiming, all told about a million lives, Iraqi and Iranian together. It was a way longer and way costlier war then Saddam Hussein had bargained for when he started it. What are some of the miscalculations he made that led him to expect that it would go much more smoothly than that? First of all, it seems he expected that Iranians in the border area, specifically in the Kusistan province, would rise up against the Islamic Republic and basically, you know, join in with the Iraqis, throw their lot in with them, treat them as liberators, and that that would make things go much more smoothly. That did not happen. Saddam Hussein expected that the Iraqi military, with its technological superiority weapons it had bought from the Soviets and from the French in large quantities, would just smash through Iranian defenses and quickly win the day. That did not happen. They got bogged down quickly in warfare. That was often compared, in fact, to the trench warfare of World War One, in which the numbers of dead were astronomically high and offensive sought to gain, you know, just a few 100 feet, just a few 100 yards of territory seized from the enemy. And, and when they succeeded in doing so, excuse me, it would be at tremendous cost. So instead of a kind of mobile modern war with all of these modern military vehicles smashing through Iranian defenses and quickly seizing territory, what ended up happening was much more this static, kind of disastrous war that was much, much more costly. Then the other thing is that Saddam Hussein figured that the Ayatollah Khomeini was, you know, having newly seized power, was not a seasoned statesman and would not have, again, the support of his army and wouldn't have a unified government backing him and that the Iranian government might kind of crumble in the face of this attack. And that did not happen either. If anything, the inverse happened. The Ayatollah Khomeini kind of met the moment and saw this as an opportunity to assert his his true control and his true authority over an embattled country. If anything, it was in some sense almost like a gift to Khomeini. Any questions about this? So here's Khomeini himself, who in his day, you know, was a widely mediatized figure in global news from the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979 to the time of his death in 1989. And Khomeini, as we touched upon briefly before, really made this War One about ideology and about how Iran's ideological fervor, its commitment to the ideals of the Islamic Revolution, were going to carry the day. So Ayatollah Khomeini quickly started making proclamations about what Iran was fighting for. Who's famous for saying, you are fighting to protect Islam, and he, namely Saddam Hussein, is fighting to destroy it. Saddam Hussein's regime being secular, it was portrayed as an infidel invader. It's also interesting to note that, as you see, Iran wasn't satisfied with just neutralizing the Iraqi invasion and then calling it a day. They had, as you see, a maximalist aim of defeating Iraq conclusively on the battlefield and even overthrowing Saddam Hussein's government. So by 1983, as we'll see, Saddam Hussein actually was like, hey, why don't we just do a ceasefire? Like, this is really getting out of hand. Even though he was the one who had started the war and it was the Iranians under Ayatollah Khomeini were like, no, man, you started this thing like, you're in it now. We're going to keep going until we win. So this embodies the maximalist aim that Iran was bringing to the table. Likewise, Iran developed and propagated a rhetoric, as you see, of martyrdom and collective sacrifice. In other words, no matter how many Iranians were killed fighting in the war, and a great many of them were killed, this was seen as something glorious with, you know, a heavenly reward awaiting martyrs in the afterlife. This was really rhetoric that the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime promoted actively to the point where they even assembled brigades of teenagers from poorer neighborhoods, poorer parts of the country, boys of 1516 who would who they were, you know, too young to fight. And they were given these red headbands with revolutionary slogans on them, and they were sent to run into the minefields and detonate Iraqi mines as a kind of human mind clearing operation. And this was emblematic of the rhetoric of collective sacrifice that was promoted by the Iranian regime under Ayatollah Khomeini, really this idea that no body count was too high for them to absorb in this service of this greater goal. So martyrdom, collective sacrifice were portrayed as means towards victory and spiritual elevation of the Iranian body politic. Hence this last point as I was touching upon it, the use of human wave tactics for attacking Iraqi positions, for clearing minefields. In other instances, human wave tactics also involved armed soldiers who were sent in human waves knowing, you know, that most of them would get cut down and few of them would actually ever make it to the positions that they were supposed to attack. And so we can talk about the international dimensions and how this were, how these were interlinked with the goals of the various sides. In 1980, the Speaker of Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the elites within the Ayatollah Khomeini's government, said in a speech, We see this war as an American war. Thus, it is natural for Saudi Arabia, Jordan and others to support Iraq. In other words, countries in the region that had an affinity with the United States and that we're kind of rooting for Iraq. Was it actually an American war? Not really. Saddam Hussein initiated the war for his own ends. He would actually, in time, receive covert American support, but he didn't have American support to invade at the outset. Framing it as an American war from the Iranian perspective, of course, was a way of arguing that Iran wasn't only fighting its neighbor Iraq, but that it was fighting what the Ayatollah Khomeini regularly described as the Great Satan, the United States as a kind of, you know, great, great global evil. In the rhetoric of Ayatollah Khomeini and his government, the various Gulf states, the Western European states who supported Iraq, were likewise demonized. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein was hopeful not just when he launched the war, but as the war kept rolling on. He was hopeful that the war could present an opportunity for Iraq to establish itself as the leader of the Arab world, for Iraq to assert its military supremacy, for Iraq to enrich itself. The United Nations tried to mediate. Or bring the two sides to a ceasefire. The Palestine Liberation Organization and its leader, Yasser Arafat, tried to bring that about. Other actors tried to bring that about. But Iran and Iraq were locked in a kind of death match, and they were not interested in mediation, compromise, ceasefire. That's not what they wanted. Any questions about any of this? So we can explore as the war rolled on, the ways in which the factors of ideology and misperception contributed to dragging it on further. So by March of 1982, Saddam Hussein perceives that Iraq is losing. He suggests both sides withdraw from pre war borders. By June of that year, Iran had expelled Iraqi forces from its territory. So Saddam Hussein was willing to accept that his invasion had failed. And if Iran was willing to accept that repulsing the Iraqi invaders represented success, they could have reached a ceasefire then and there. It would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But the aforementioned Speaker of the parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani recounted during that time in Iran, no one was prepared to accept a ceasefire. By that, he means no one in the government, not the people of Iran who had to do the dying. At that time, we convened a meeting regarding the direction of the war and the Imam, meaning the Ayatollah Khomeini, commanded that no one should speak of a ceasefire and that the war must achieve its goals. So there wasn't even permission to talk about ceasefire in the meeting as a kind of idea like what if we considered this it was forbidden to speak of a ceasefire when they convened to discuss the direction of the war more. War was the only option. Now the Iranians had their turn at misperception. They saw their initial success in 1982, and they thought that they could win a swift victory against Iraq. They wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This was their objective, if not by reaching all the way to the capital Baghdad and overthrowing him, as USUK forces would eventually do in 2003. That wasn't so much their goal. Their goal was to cause sufficient unrest within Iraq that Saddam Hussein would be overthrown, and they saw the war as a unifying principle for their new regime. So this is an important one as well. It's an important point to make is the way in which throughout history, various regimes have perceived war to be a factor that though of course it can be very costly in terms of blood and treasure, it can have what they perceive to be the benefit of galvanizing the country's population and forging unity, including support for the government, where otherwise that support might be a lot more fragmented. So Ray Takei writes, the goal of exporting the revolution through continuation of the war became a consensus position within the Islamic Republic, as embodied by this statement by Rafsanjani, whereby Ayatollah Khomeini had expressly forbidden any discussion of a ceasefire. So now war in some sense wasn't just a means to an end, but it was an end in and of itself in terms of how prolonging it forged the new government in Iran into a stronger force. The war would escalate and then over the years, finally, finally wind down. By 1984, we see the first recorded use of chemical weapons by Iraq targeting Iranian forces. By 1985, as the two armies were more or less stalemated in the zone that you see depicted in the map here, they resorted to firing missiles and and using aircraft to bomb each other's major population centers in what became known as the War of the Cities. So each side targets the other's population centers with surface to surface missiles. Iraq then starts targeting Iranian oil infrastructure in August of 1986. Iran seizes the Ultra strategic Alpha Peninsula, Ultra Strategic because it's right on the Persian Gulf and it's a key oil exporting zone, seizes it and then seizes the western Bank of the Shot Al Arab River, which forms part of the border between Iran and Iraq. And then over the next few months, Iraq would try to retake it, would eventually retake it. And then by August of 1988, both sides are truly exhausted and they agree to implement a ceasefire. Excuse me. And as we discussed before, the toll of the war is widely accepted as having exceeded 1,000,000 combined casualties from both sides, combatants, civilians and all. This is a photo of Iraqi forces victorious after the recapture of the AL FAW Peninsula from Iran, which is kind of the final move of the war and which only represented Iraq recapturing territory that had belonged to it in the first place before the war broke out. So really underscoring then the futility of the entire exercise in terms of its destructiveness and in terms of, from the Iraqi perspective, Saddam Hussein having initiated the war, we see that it actually really achieved nothing. But it has a lot to teach us about the Gulf as a security region, and it has a lot to teach us about misperception in wartime. Are there any questions about any of that? Yeah, that's a good question. the US was quietly backing Iraq against Iran. And I think, you know, it wasn't because the US really liked Iraq very much, but it was more because they were, they saw an opportunity to neutralize Iran or degrade Iran in a war that was already underway anyways. And they liked that opportunity. But, you know, there are definitely scholars and analysts who have argued that when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, that the Iraqis actually thought that they had a green light from the United States, Although it's hard to imagine that they would have because the United States was fairly close to Kuwait and probably wouldn't have wanted Iraq to take it over. But that this kind of presented, you know, that the January 1991 Gulf War, in which the US and a bunch of allies fought to eradicate Iraq from Kuwait and and, you know, kick Iraq out of Kuwait, liberate Kuwait, was really kind of the first major war fought by the Americans after the Cold War had ended. And so there are many who argue that, you know, in addition to the practical matter of wanting to make sure that Iraq didn't control more of the world's oil supply by occupying Kuwait, that that was also an opportunity for the US to kind of flex its muscles. Now is the sole global superpower with the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union disintegrating and that the US could kind of show the world that, you know, it was not to be trifled with. So I think those are plausible elements of an explanation for the why the US did that. I mean, the kind of the stated purpose by George Herbert Walker Bush, who was president at the time, was, you know, this aggression will not stand. And the, the, you know, the, the importance of Kuwaiti oil and the importance of the principle of Kuwaiti sovereignty, which America didn't want to see violated that those were the main reasons. But I think it could be certainly plausibly argued that there was also this vision around demonstrating US power in in this unipolar moment immediately following the Cold War. Excuse me, Any other question? Yeah, well, they, they still had, they still had a, a fairly modern army in 1980. It was just that there was no way for them to get supplies like, you know, spare parts of any kind, which is a key part of, you know, upkeep for a military, especially if you're fighting for any period of time. So these were all weapons that Iran had bought mainly from the United States prior to the revolution. So now it had all of this stuff, some of which is very sophisticated, in fact, but it had no, you know, no spare parts, nothing to maintain their tanks and planes. But they were still able to mount a defense. They were still able to get their hands on some weaponry. By the mid 80s, they had started buying some weapons from China. And because they were fighting a defensive war initially, they were able to kind of contain Iraqi advances. They kind of had the the advantage in that, in that way that the army on the defensive typically has the advantage in the face of an invader. So it was the combination of those factors really. And and the Iraqis, just like they had all this really modern stuff, but they weren't that great at using it, basically, yeah. How did it affect his relationship with civil society and the population, the idea of martyrdom and collective sacrifice by the state? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, a lot of Iranians, you know, a lot of Iranians didn't like the regime when it seized power. And then a lot more of them came to, you know, detest or resent the regime once those strategies were being put into place. And then others, you know, did kind of become believers or side expedient to support that approach. It's a good question. It it's it's one I think that's worth doing a deep dive on, you know, in terms of delving into literature on that topic. One source that is not scholarly, but that I think is kind of surprisingly good that many of you may have encountered is that graphic novel Persepolis by Marjan Satrapi, as I think is her name right where she she talks about it's kind of her recollections as a girl in the midst of the revolution and afterward in Iran. And yes, not a scholarly source I should mention, but but an interesting kind of like entryway into examining some of those domestic perceptions. And then there's there's definitely scholarly literature that you could look at from there. Indeed. Any other question? All right, cool. Well listen everyone then take care of yourselves and see you next week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.