Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, was a Sunni secular modernist and a sworn enemy of radical religious Islamism. In 1980, directly after Khomeini took power, Hussein invaded Iran. Perhaps he considered the country ripe for the picking due to its internal turmoil; perhaps he had his eye on Iran’s oil; perhaps he felt threatened by Khomeini—as he had good reason to be: Khomeini blatantly announced his intention to export his revolution, and secular Iraq, with its large Shi’i population, was the obvious first market for this export. Whatever Hussein’s aims, his war proved catastrophic for both countries. Both lost nearly an entire generation of their young men and boys. Not since World War I had such vast armies met head to head nor had so many lives been squandered so casually for such trivial gains. And throughout this war, the United States funneled arms and funds to Iraq, bolstering its capacity to keep fighting to the last Iraqi, because the United States feared that the Soviets might gain ground in this strategic region, now that the United States had lost its foothold in Iran. Helping the Iraqis was a way to weaken Iran and possibly keep the Soviets at bay. Here again was a catastrophic intertwining of the Muslim and Western narratives, the one narrative still about secular modernism versus back-to-the-source Islamism, the other still about superpower rivalry and control of oil, though couched in rhetoric about democracy and totalitarianism.