The author is a Bloomberg Opinion commentator
The significance of the war in Ukraine to the Western world lies largely in its geography: it is being fought in Europe, only a short distance from some of the richest, most open and peaceful countries in the world. In the early weeks of the conflict, many parallels were drawn with previous European wars, particularly the Winter War waged by the Soviet Union against Finland. But the war that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine most closely resembles took place in distant Mesopotamia.
Every historical comparison is flawed – history does not quite repeat itself. And yet, the reader of Saddam Hussein’s biographies, more precisely the chapters dealing with the Iraq-Iran war, cannot avoid the parallels.
It will only take a few days
Ostensibly trying to prevent Iran’s Islamic revolution from spreading to Iraq’s large Shiite community, Saddam Hussein first launched bombing attacks against Iranian military airfields and then sent tanks into the neighboring country in late September 1980. Putin also tried to portray his invasion as a preventive step – according to him, Ukraine’s “neo-Nazi regime” was creating an “anti-Russian” bridgehead for the hostile West just beyond Russia’s borders. “We neither wish to destroy Iran nor to occupy it,” declared Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz eleven days before the start of the invasion. Russian official statements matched this statement almost verbatim—Putin himself claimed as late as October 2022: “We never set out to destroy Ukraine.” Saddam’s military goals in 1980 were as vaguely defined as Putin’s in 2022: the specifics were drowned out in nationalist rhetoric. While Putin compared himself to Czar Peter the Great, who he claimed had reclaimed much of historically Russian territory, Saddam’s role model was Saad ibn Abi Wakkas, an Arab general who defeated a larger Persian army in 636, or even Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian king who in Jerusalem was conquered in 587 BC.
Like Putin in February 2022, Saddam had a vision in 1980 of how his country would win a blitzkrieg (his vision stemmed, somewhat counterintuitively, from Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967). “He apparently expected the war to last only a few days – to end with negotiations leading to the collapse of Iranian resistance,” Said Aburish wrote in the book Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge published in 2000.
Loss of meaning
Iraqi forces advanced along a wide front, capturing some villages and towns and initially looking much stronger than their poorly armed Iranian opponents. Still, like Putin’s Russia, Iraq has been unable to destroy Iran’s air force on the ground and establish complete air superiority. It also soon became clear that the front line was too long for the Iraqi troops to sustain the initial pressure. Like Putin 42 years later, Saddam underestimated the fighting spirit of his enemy: