Iran is very politically unstable. Either Teheran is sure Iraq can't fight back or it risks triggering a revolution in its own territory
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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John Fredrick Parker
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How much tension between Iraq and Iran is still there, though? If (by chance) both sides are sure west between them is inevitable, it’s only a matter of one of them deciding the other’s distractions are more a hindrance than their own; then war would be upon them whether they wanted it or not.
The Battle of the Golan and the Battles of Masnaa and Deir Zeimoun will be the next update and while I don't want to tip my hand... well, you're not exactly wrong.
"See, we're not that bad!"
There is very little reason for Iran to jump into this debacle.
For one, there's the political instability that has seized them since 1978, and while its mostly under control, why take a risk? Second, most of their disputes with Iraq were solved in Tehran's favor in the Algiers Agreement of 1975. And third, unlike the Islamic Republic, the Pahlavis had zero interest in exporting millenarian Twelver Shiism across the Middle East as a revolutionary campaign and wouldn't have any ideological reasons to seize, say, Karbala.
The Iran-Iraq War stemmed mostly from Saddam deducing (not entirely incorrectly) that Iran in 1980 was much weaker than the Iran that bullied him into the Algiers Agreement in 1975, in part because he knew the Mullahs had just purged basically the entire American-trained military leadership and he was therefore convinced that he could take must of Arab-majority Khuzestan and its oil if he wanted it as revenge for 1974 but also opportunistically with the post-revolutionary chaos in Iran. Saddam was a horrible person but not dumb, and he was also in OTL 1980 not yet the colorful, flamboyant Middle Eastern problem child that the US media portrayed him as, building him up to be the Gaddafi of the 1990s (the sense of unfinished business around Desert Storm surely aided a bit here); he was a run-of-the-mill despot in a region full of them, and he didn't get where he was through stupidity.
As such, the likelihood of an Iran-Iraq War ITTL, thankfully for the people of both countries, is extremely low, IMO.
The US may advise Iran that adding more fuel to a already large regional war would be a very bad idea.
That, too.
But in the end, there's very little reason for Iran to pile on. They stand to gain little and much to lose, and while Mohammed Reza was a vain moron, many of his advisors weren't that dumb, and having survived a close brush in 1978-79, there's little appetite to tempt fate once more.
So there is some backlash to Israel's actions but it doesn't seem to be on the level that happened in OTL with the Siege of Beirut.
Exactly. And I’d say the backlash is more amongst leaders mad about the geopolitical implications while the public is more ambivalent
The Battles of the Golan and Masnaa
The Battles of the Golan and Masnaa
The Golan Heights had been occupied - in the view of the UN and Syria, illegally - since 1967, when they were seized in the Six Day War and turned into an effective fortress for the IDF. Its position was hugely strategic both due to its physiographic features - a vast, raised plateau running fifty kilometers from the Ruqqad River's deep gorge to the southern slopes of Mount Hermon, which had been used by Syria as a prime position to lob artillery shells into Israel prior to 1967 and credibly threaten much of the north of that country, and now in 1982, as it had in 1973, gave Israel the prime position to defend its north and also a clear sallying ground from which to launch assaults in the direction of Damascus.
The Syrian offensive against the Golan in 1973 had been an initial success for a few days thanks to the element of surprise, but that was not replicable in 1982. For one, without Egypt occupying the vast majority of Israeli attention to the south, and with Jordan a less-than-official participant in the war (though by May 20th a Jordanian expeditionary force had been attached to the Syrians at Nawa), it was widely expected that Syria would bear the brunt of fighting directly, even with so much of the IDF having pressed into southern Lebanon. Two, the IDF was not so easily surprised this time, and Syrian spies had confirmed that the Golan was put on full alert the same night that the Osirak strike was launched. As such, an immediate attack would have done the Syrians little good - the Golan was already a nest of artillery, anti-aircraft, and pillboxes.
Nonetheless, Rifaat al-Assad - the commander in charge of the operation - was hugely frustrated that it had taken Syria over a week to mobilize and that they would not be attacking the Golan head-on until May 20-21, a full three weeks into the war, after several days of airstrikes of mixed effectiveness. This boiled down to a deep disagreement within the Ba'ath Bloc about what exactly the strategic goal was, Syrian focus at first on arresting Israel's advance into Lebanon, and Saddam's insistence upon a simultaneous double-strike across a prepared front in both the Golan and the Bekaa Valley. Against their better judgement, the Assads granted this, consoling themselves that Israel was never not going to be prepared, so they may as well make their preparations as robust as possible themselves.
Would that have helped? Maybe. Israel did indeed spend much of the week leading up to May 21hardening the positions on the Golan, but it is hard to see how an attack on May 13th or 14th would have gone much better. The assault across the Golan began at 0440, with about 180,000 Syrian troops broken up into two corps - one from Sasa in the north, towards Damascus, and one from Nawa in the south, towards the Jordanian border. They were supported by 1,000 tanks, 500 pieces of artillery, and five squadrons of the Syrian Air Force launched from airfields in or around Damascus. The northern, right wing of the Syrian advance was aimed at the Israeli kibbutz of Merom Golan at the base of Mount Bental, while the left wing of the attack was aimed at the settlement of Keshet near Mount Peres, coincidentally sharing the name of the Israeli PM. Syrian estimates suggested that Israel would have between 100-150,000 troops or thereabouts throughout the defenses of the Goland. For Syria, which had another 20,000 or so men in Lebanon, it was the largest force they had ever put into the field, larger even than their deployment in 1973; for Israel, it was a far cry from the half-million troops they had deployed nine years earlier, and they had over a hundred thousand deployed across Lebanon, too, with reservists being quickly equipped and prepared in support operations.
Syrian commanders were heartened by reports from Masnaa, where the day before Iraqi forces had managed to make contact with PLO, Lebanese militias and Syrian troops on the Peres Line and had, in the space of a few hours, pushed Israelis back into their secondary trenches at both the Masnaa Crossing and at the Bar Elias-Deir Zenoun sector, threatening to collapse the right half of the Israeli position in upon itself. While by midnight the Israelis, equipped with superior night-vision equipment, had been able to reconstitute themselves in Masnaa proper and carry out a series of targeted night strikes that arrest the Iraqi advanced, the Syrians were bullish as the 21st dawned that this was not the IDF of nine years ago they were facing and that Israel was about to pay a serious price for their war of choice.
That was not to be; the Battle of the Golan, which began on May 21st and would last eleven days until the Syrian withdrawal on June 2nd, was one of the bloodiest engagements since the Korean War, and fighting looked more like World War One trench warfare, now with screaming jets and aerial rockets involved, than it did any kind of maneuver warfare like in the battles for the Sinai nine years earlier. Syrian forces ran headlong into a gauntlet of steel, fire and lead; artillery fire, though imprecise, rained down overhead, while the Israeli and Syrian air forces did battle in the skies above, the booms of their engines and the roar of exploding air-to-air missiles and planes being struck thundered over the Golan. While Israel had not set landmines on their side of the ceasefire zone, they had nonetheless set other more rudimentary booby-traps such as tire spikes, covered pits and other obstacles to make it easy for them to gun down Syrian soldiers who looked like they might be about to break through.
The air battle, which had been ongoing for weeks, intensified particularly in the segment May 21-24, with the sky turning red with fire and smoke. The IDF air force, having studied the dogfights of the recent Swedish-Soviet skirmish diligently, had been training and retraining their pilots for months based on the information gleaned; the Syrians were highly unprepared and their air forces suffered disproportionate losses in those days that they were truly exposed for the first time, forcing Iraqi jets to be diverted southwards from their support role over Masnaa, where they had been doing genuine, real damage to the Israeli position. It was in many ways a story of two battles - though the fighting in east-central Lebanon was no less a grueling trench warfare, the Iraqis held their own, and the IDF was forced to pair ever successful counterattack with a tactical retreat as their position became overwhelmed.
The world watched, amazed at the bloodshed being meted out across fifty kilometers at the disputed Israel-Syria border. In space of ten days, Syria suffered close to fifty thousand casualties, over a quarter of their deployed force. They lost two hundred of their thousand tanks and saw close to fifty planes shot down and an additional twenty forced to retreat with severe damage, three-fifths of their five squadrons brought forward. Israel, by contrast, took about twenty thousand casualties, hardened down in their stubborn defenses, losing only seventeen fighters and forty tanks. This stood in sharp contrast to the nearly three weeks of intense fighting in and around Masnaa, where the Iraqis actually lost fewer men, but were nonetheless unable to break all the way through after their initial successes, and both sides sat dug in by the end, not having gained an inch in either direction since the first few days of fighting.
In a war cabinet meeting, Peres agreed not to pursue the retreating Syrians towards Damascus on June 3, agreeing with the assessment that a counterattack was a vulnerability and that the defense of the Golan had been a major success; Eitan and other IDF commanders were also growing increasingly concerned about the viability of the position in Lebanon, and wanted it immediately reinforced. As such, IDF reservists were deployed northwards to the stalemate, where Iraq had not only acquitted itself gamely but, far from home in a hostile land, prevented one of the famed Israeli counterattacks and encirclements that had dogged Arab militaries for so many decades. The Golan may have been secure and the Syrians embarrassed, but Lebanon was a much more open question as the calendar turned to June...
Well god damn, Iraq is carrying the war on its back. Wonder if Syria will turn this around or if the Soviets will offer more and more covert support
I think that is a very optimistic result for the Arabs, I can't see the Syrian Army, long the weakest of the big Arab armies inflicting 20,000 casualties on the IDF fighting on the defensive from prepared positions while only taking 50,000, I would expect a 5 to 1 loss ratio at an absolute minimum.
Iraq was a fairly competent Army, as their war with Iran proved (though considering the condition of Iran at its start they stood to do better). Both sides have issues at Deir Zenoun/Masnaa, but they've acquitted themselves well.
Thank you for this feedback; I didn't want this getting to be an IDF-wank especially when they had declined a fair deal in quality/strength by 1982 but wasn't sure what was or was not optimistic for Syria here, especially plunging into the meat of the defense. I'm guessing IDF casualties should probably get adjusted down? (Syria suffering a 30% loss rate is after all pretty horrible, so I'm hesitant to adjust that up). Maybe 5k-10k casualties?
You're telling me that the IDF weakened at some point in time OTL before reclaiming and surpassing that point of strength again? Wtf?
Surpassed?
The IDF’s need for conventional forces declined dramatically after they made peace with Egypt and returned the Sinai; Egypt was always the biggest threat militarily and they needed a substantial army to face off against them. Jordan and Syria, much less so - hence why the IDF even today is way over reliant on air strikes
Investing in your air force over your army has never failed except for the times such strategy was poorly executed
The Iraqis are also presumably being helped by local forces who know the area well, unlike the Israelis.
I think 5-10k is a sensible range, though the IDF will have a much lower KIA percentage from being on the defensive and having a much more effective medical service.
The air battle should be a curbstomp as in Operation Mole Cricket so I would expect that the Israeli Army would have had a rough few days before IAF obtained air supremacy and then it should have gone south rapidly for the Syrians.
Harry Truman unavailable for commentInvesting in your air force over your army has never failed except for the times such strategy was poorly executed
Perfect, I’ll make sure to modify the passages a bit accordingly
FloridaMan561
Banned
That was actually on my mind when reading the last update. I don't think Saddam has the missile capacity at that point to launch the attacks he did during the Gulf War.