Chemical weapons and the Iran‐Iraq war: A case study in noncompliance

نووسەر: AVED ALI

The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War inflicted enormous human costs, as each side sustained hundreds of thousands of casualties.1 In addition, the eco- nomic devastation wrought by the war was staggering. The damage to each nation’s infrastructure, the billions of dollars in lost oil revenues, and the squandering of precious currency on the acquisition of massive arms purchases that sustained the eight-year war continue to affect both nations to this day.2 One of the darker chap-ters of the war was Iraq’s use of chemical weapons (CW) against Iran and Iran’s decision to employ chemical weapons in response. 

The use of CW by both sides created a number of dan- gerous precedents that continue to resonate. From a global perspective, the use of CW by Iraq and allegedly by Iran demonstrated that Third World weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators could potentially gen- erate significant tactical military and strategic political benefits from the use of such instruments in conflict.3 Given the international community’s initial reluctance to condemn and punish Iraq for its chemical attacks, many Middle Eastern analysts speculate that Iranian se- curity elites used the Iraqi CW experience as a prime motivator in developing Iran’s WMD programs and improved conventional capabilities. From the Iraqi per- spective, its use of CW most likely emboldened Saddam Hussein and key Iraqi military officials to continue de- veloping Iraq’s WMD programs and pursue aggressive regional security policies—a development that mani- fested itself during the 1990-91 Gulf War and continues to be of intense international concern.