This is the third in a series of war museum reviews found exclusively in the Havoc.

     The writer had intended to stick to museums with a heavy concentration on the Second World War, in keeping with the Axis and Allies theme, but given the current world situation he couldn't resist writing about this display that had impressed him while living in Iraq in the late 1980s . . .

     Not a museum really, but a huge outdoor exhibition, this was a display of thousands of captured Iranian military vehicles and equipment spread out over a 30-acre plot of desert in northeast Baghdad late in 1988.

     The eight-year war with Iran had ended just months before. Iranian scud missiles were no longer flying into Baghdad each night delivering high explosives to a sleeping population. Taxi cabs were no longer streaming up from the south by the hundreds each day with coffins roped to their roofs carrying the heroes who had died in the immense killing fields to the east of Basra and the Shatt-al-Arab. The war was over – eight years after it began. Saddam had launched his attack in 1980 against a distracted Iran, after the overthrow of the Shah and before Khomeini had consolidated power, for the express purpose of seizing Khuzistan. He wanted to liberate, he said, the oppressed Arab population in this southwest corner of Persia, which coincidentally also had Iran's largest oil reserves. But as was the case with another dictator who attacked to the East, in June of 1941, the enemy did not capitulate as quickly as it was supposed to have. The war dragged on for eight dreadful years.

     The Iran-Iraq war was the largest land war fought, in numbers of men and units deployed, in the nearly 60 years since World War II ended. It featured tank battles larger than those at Kursk in 1943, and trench warfare complete with poison gas and division-sized frontal assaults against heavy machine guns and cannon. Yet the war was largely ignored in the world press, primarily because both sides forbid journalists from getting anywhere near the front and summarily executed those who tried. To this day, it has been difficult for historians to obtain information on it.

     The pattern of fighting was for Iran to make frontal assaults against Iraqi positions with waves of minimally trained Revolutionary Guards, supported by the Iranian army. Outnumbered Iraqi forces would inflict heavy casualties, but ultimately fall back. Then when the Iranian offensive had exhausted itself, Iraq would counterattack and retake much of the lost territory. Both countries eventually began recruiting older men and boys as the supply of draft –aged men dwindled. Both countries expanded the war to civilian and economic targets, with both sides lobbing scud missiles, carrying high explosives, at each other's capitals and population centers. Minimizing collateral damage against enemy civilians, so much talked about in the West, was not the goal; the opposite, in fact, was.

     The casualty figures were well over a million, with some estimates exceeding two million – roughly comparable to those of most of the major combatants in the First and Second World Wars, given the relative sizes of Iraq and Iran. Both sides lost a generation of young men and sacrificed for over a decade their considerable oil wealth. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and its people should have a living standard as high as that in Western Europe, as do the other Gulf states, yet Iraqis were living in 3rd World poverty by 1988. (And they still are.) Neither side occupied much of the other's territory when the war finally ended with both sides exhausted in August 1988. (It took another two years to exchange prisoners, and both sides still charge that the other is holding prisoners.)

     Saddam claimed victory, and the thousands of pieces of captured Iranian equipment he put on display in this exhibit were to prove the point. Most had been captured during the final few months of the war in the final Iraqi counter-attack on the Faw peninsula. Much was damaged, or shot up. Much of the equipment was American made, having been acquired by the Shah in the 1970s. But more of it was Russian, as the American supply almost completely dried up after 1979. There were hundreds of Patton tanks, most of them battle damaged, and even more T-72's. Hundreds of artillery pieces, trucks, personnel carriers. Thousands of machine guns, gas masks, assault rifles, ammunition boxes, all lined up neatly, each line seeming to go on for a mile. Tens of thousands of helmets. I recall poignantly a long row of small boats with Evinrude outboard motors, the kind I used to fish in as a kid. These, however, were full of bullet holes or were exposing jagged shrapnel damage. The Iranians had used them in and around the Faw peninsula or in attempting to cross the Shatt al Arab to the east of Basra.

     You were allowed to drive into this huge field and unlike just about every other place in Iraq, where you were relentlessly followed by the secret police, one could drive around unhindered between the rows of booty. You could stop and get out of the car and climb on any piece of equipment you wanted. I went once with the U.S. Embassy military attaché, who did a lot of climbing, and another time with the agriculture attaché from Montana and his Saskatchewan-born wife, both Adventists and pacifists who soon irritated me with talk every few minutes about the futility of war. (They were right of course, at least about this one.)

     I'm no expert in these things, but it seems that there was enough equipment here to outfit at least a division, if not more. The exhibit is no longer on display. Everything was hauled away after a few months. It went away, as did the memory of the war in the minds of Westerners, although this war had had a much more profound effect on the everyday lives of Iraqis than the two more recent, much more lavishly reported wars, in 1991 and 2003.

Hess

March 2003