ABSTRACT
In his book 1979: The Year That Shaped the Modern Middle East, David Lesch contends that 1979 was a watershed year in modern Middle East history, particularly notable for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But the first major event in the Middle East in 1979 was the culmination of the Iranian Revolution, when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile and established Iran as an Islamic republic. Across the Middle East, Iran’s Shiite Muslim revolution inspired both Sunni and Shiite Muslims who had become disenchanted with secular Arab nationalism. But it was also a threat to Sunni Muslim regimes, such as Saddam Hussein’s neighboring Iraq, which had no wish to see their Shiite populations fanned to religious and political fervor by Iran’s clerics. Saddam seized an opportunity to assert Iraq’s leadership among Arab nations by claiming to defend the eastern bounds of the Sunni Muslim world against the radical, Shiite extremism ascendant in non-Arab Iran. With those goals in mind, Iraq invaded Iran and began the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). To prevent either Iran or Iraq from becoming too powerful relative to the other, the United States pursued a policy of “dual containment” by supporting first one side and then the other during the war. It openly armed Saddam Hussein and, in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, the administration of Ronald Reagan also secretly sold weapons to Iran, in violation of its own arms embargo, and, without informing Congress, covertly used the arms-sales revenues to fund a war in Nicaragua. The outcome of the Iran-Iraq War set the stage for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the ensuing Gulf War of 1991.
