Iran’s seaborne forces have got western governments worried. In the past fortnight the US and the UK have been fervidly trying to form a naval coalition to protect commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf against this relatively weak country, but it has yet to materialise. How on earth does Iran manage to make life so difficult for countries with powerful armed forces that they simply cannot get their act together?
One reason is that the western powers do not agree on how to deal with Iran. For another, though, you have to go back over thirty years and recall an incident that may be long forgotten in the West but remains fresh in the minds of the Iranian military, especially the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In the closing years of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War, both sides attacked merchant ships in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Iraq was responsible for most of them, 283 in all, with 173 due to Iran. Despite this – and although it was Iraq that had started the war by invading Iran immediately after the 1979 revolution – by the closing stages of the conflict the US had sided with Saddam Hussein. By early 1988 US support was so secure that Iraq even felt able to make considerable use of chemical warfare, most notoriously against the Kurdish town of Halabja when around 5,000 civilians died. Washington made little criticism of the attack.
