{"id":480,"date":"2026-09-22T16:09:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T16:09:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ayatoilet.com\/?p=480"},"modified":"2026-09-22T16:09:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T16:09:49","slug":"americans-have-9-11-iranians-have-9-22-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ayatoilet.com\/?p=480","title":{"rendered":"Americans Have 9\/11. Iranians Have 9\/22!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Americans have September 11, 2001, a date so embedded in the country\u2019s consciousness that it no longer needs a year or an explanation. Say \u201c9\/11,\u201d and everyone knows what you mean. Iranians have a September date too, although strangely we have never given it the same place in our collective memory: September 22, 1980. On that day Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq invaded Iran. Iraqi aircraft attacked Iranian airfields, Iraqi troops poured across the border, Iranian cities came under attack and territory was occupied, beginning a war that would last eight years, kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis, expose Iranian soldiers and civilians to chemical weapons, devastate cities and oil infrastructure, and leave wounds that still shape Iran\u2019s view of the outside world more than four decades later. If you want to understand modern Iran\u2014its suspicion of foreign powers, its obsession with strategic independence, its determination never again to appear militarily defenseless\u2014you have to understand 9\/22.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But 9\/22 has another history, and it is far more complicated than the familiar story that Saddam Hussein woke up one morning, saw a weakened revolutionary Iran and decided to invade. Saddam certainly saw an opportunity. Iran\u2019s military had been devastated by the revolution, purges, executions, resignations, and distrust of the old officer corps. The Shah was gone, the new government was fighting with itself, the American embassy hostages were still being held in Tehran, and Iran seemed internationally isolated. Saddam hoped to seize disputed territory, establish Iraq as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, and perhaps destabilize the Islamic Republic itself. But there had also been an extraordinary series of contacts among Iraq, Iran\u2019s enemies, regional governments and figures in the West before the invasion, and those contacts have produced a historical controversy that has never completely disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the most serious allegations concerns the Carter administration and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Authors including Said Aburish and Kenneth Timmerman subsequently argued that Saddam and senior Iraqi officials had contacts with American representatives before the invasion and that Brzezinski was involved in encouraging the Iraqis. Accounts have circulated for decades describing meetings in Jordan involving Iraqi officials and American intermediaries, including the claim that Brzezinski secretly met Iraqi representatives there. Former Carter officials have disputed important parts of this account, and the documentary record does not establish that Carter ordered Saddam to invade Iran. That needs to be said clearly. But there is also evidence that makes it far too easy simply to dismiss the entire question as an Iranian conspiracy theory. The Carter administration was deeply engaged with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the rapidly deteriorating strategic situation surrounding Iran during precisely this period, and the declassified record shows Brzezinski actively considering the consequences of Iranian instability and possible political collapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More intriguingly, after Ronald Reagan entered office, his Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, traveled through the Middle East and returned with extraordinary intelligence. In an April 1981 Top Secret\/Sensitive memorandum prepared for President Reagan, Haig reported that his discussions in the region had led him to believe that Carter had given Iraq what Haig described as a \u201cgreen light\u201d for the war through Saudi Crown Prince Fahd. That memorandum does not prove that Carter planned the invasion; Haig was reporting information he had received after the fact, and Carter denied complicity. But it is nevertheless an extraordinary historical document. Within months of Saddam\u2019s attack, the sitting Secretary of State of the United States was telling the President of the United States that he had received information from America\u2019s own regional partners indicating that the previous administration had communicated approval for an Iraqi attack through Saudi Arabia. That is not something that can be wished out of the historical record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Saudi connection is itself important. Saddam was communicating with the Gulf monarchies before the invasion, and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states had powerful reasons to fear what had happened in Iran. The Iranian Revolution had overthrown one of the region\u2019s strongest monarchies and openly presented itself as a model that could spread beyond Iran\u2019s borders. To Riyadh and several other Gulf capitals, revolutionary Iran represented not merely another state but a potentially contagious political threat. Saudi and Gulf financial support would subsequently become enormously important to Iraq\u2019s ability to sustain the war. Whatever precise signals Saddam received before September 22, he had good reason to believe that an attack on revolutionary Iran would not leave him isolated in the Arab world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there is another part of this history that is especially uncomfortable for Iranians: Saddam was also talking to opponents of the Islamic Republic. Former Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar and other Iranian exiles tried to bring down Khomeini\u2019s government, and Bakhtiar\u2019s contacts with Baghdad have long been part of the historical record for this period. There were also allegations involving people associated with Reza Pahlavi and former members of the Iranian military establishment. One allegation attributed to Shahbazi claimed that these contacts involved sharing information about important Iranian military targets. Claims about Reza Pahlavi\u2019s personal role and knowledge remain disputed and should not be presented as established fact, but the larger point is important: Saddam did not look at Iran in 1980 and see merely a military opponent. He saw a fractured country surrounded by governments hostile to the revolution and populated by opposition groups who believed that Saddam\u2019s pressure might help them overthrow Khomeini.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why the war\u2019s origins matter. We can argue endlessly about whether Carter personally gave Saddam a \u201cgreen light,\u201d what Brzezinski said or did not say in Jordan, precisely what the Saudis communicated, and exactly what Iranian opposition figures told Baghdad. Historians should continue arguing about those questions because the evidence is contested. But the broader picture is much harder to dispute: Saddam believed Iran was vulnerable, knew that powerful regional governments feared the Iranian Revolution, had contacts with opponents of the new Iranian regime, and had reason to believe that an attack would not produce a unified international response against him. He gambled that Iran could be broken quickly. It was one of the twentieth century’s great strategic miscalculations. Sounds familiar? Like Trump\u2019s recent escapade in Iran! We never learn, do we?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of destroying the Islamic Republic, Saddam helped consolidate it. Nothing unites a divided country faster than a foreign army crossing its border. Iranians who hated Khomeini could still fight for Iran. The revolutionary government suddenly possessed something it desperately needed: an external enemy. The war that Saddam expected to exploit Iran\u2019s weakness instead gave the Islamic Republic a powerful source of legitimacy, mobilization, and national unity. The tragedy is that this disastrous miscalculation did not end quickly, because once the war began, almost everybody discovered an interest in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, the Gulf monarchies, Israel, China and North Korea all became involved in different ways. Their interests were not identical, and imagining one coordinated conspiracy would be misleading. What emerged instead was something arguably more disturbing: an international system in which different governments repeatedly decided that their interests were better served by influencing the balance of the war than by ending it. Iraq received enormous military, financial, diplomatic, and technological support. The Soviet Union became one of Saddam\u2019s largest arms suppliers. France became an important supplier of military equipment to Iraq. Gulf states provided enormous financial backing. Western companies sold equipment and dual-use technology. By the middle of the war, Washington itself had moved decisively toward Baghdad because the Reagan administration feared an Iranian victory more than it feared Saddam Hussein. Declassified American records show that U.S. support eventually spanned political, diplomatic, commercial, intelligence, and military spheres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In hindsight, the American relationship with Saddam is particularly extraordinary. Iraq was removed from the American list of states supporting terrorism in 1982. Donald Rumsfeld, acting as President Reagan\u2019s special envoy, traveled to Baghdad and met Saddam Hussein in December 1983, followed by another visit in 1984. Washington and Baghdad restored full diplomatic relations for the first time since 1967; American export credits helped Iraq, intelligence cooperation expanded, and dual-use American technology flowed into a country that was simultaneously developing missile, chemical, and other military capabilities. The National Security Archive\u2019s declassified records show something even more disturbing: Washington knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran, including evidence by 1983 that chemical warfare had become a regular Iraqi practice, yet the strategic tilt toward Baghdad continued because preventing an Iranian victory had become the greater American priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor was the United States alone. European companies supplied technology and industrial equipment to Iraq, while the Soviet Union supplied enormous quantities of conventional weapons. Moscow had initially been cautious about Saddam\u2019s invasion, but the Soviet leadership had its own reason to fear revolutionary Iran. The USSR contained large Muslim populations in Central Asia, Iran was supporting resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Tehran cracked down on the Soviet-aligned Tudeh Party and expelled Soviet diplomats, and Moscow increasingly saw Saddam as a useful counterweight. Billions of dollars of Soviet tanks, aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, artillery and armored vehicles flowed into Iraq. France, Germany, Britain, China and companies from numerous other countries became part of the enormous industrial and commercial machinery surrounding Saddam\u2019s war effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chemical-weapons story deserves particular attention because it reveals how morally compromised this international system became. Saddam\u2019s forces repeatedly used chemical agents against Iranian troops and later against Kurdish civilians, yet Iraq\u2019s ability to develop those weapons depended in part on imported equipment, chemicals, and industrial capabilities. The United States government itself possessed evidence of Iraqi chemical warfare while improving relations with Baghdad. Some officials in the American government objected, but the strategic calculation prevailed. Saddam was brutal, Saddam was using chemical weapons, and Saddam was an aggressor\u2014but an Iranian victory was considered worse. The result was a policy whose consequences Iranians have not forgotten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet even while Washington was moving toward Iraq, another extraordinary thing was happening: Iran was receiving weapons from America\u2019s allies and eventually through secret American channels as well. Israel regarded Saddam Hussein as a major strategic threat and supplied Iran with American-origin weaponry. An aircraft carrying American weapons from Israel to Iran crashed in Turkey in July 1981, and Iranian and Israeli officials subsequently described additional shipments. What began as an almost surreal arrangement eventually became part of something much larger. The Reagan administration itself secretly sold arms to Iran, despite publicly treating the Islamic Republic as an enemy, and money associated with those transactions became entangled with the covert effort to support the Contra forces fighting Nicaragua\u2019s Sandinista government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The whole operation began to unravel dramatically in October 1986 when an aircraft supplying the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua. Two crew members died, but Eugene Hasenfus survived and was captured by the Sandinistas. Investigators began pulling on the threads, and those threads eventually exposed what became the Iran-Contra Affair: secret arms transactions with Iran, clandestine foreign-policy operations, and the diversion of proceeds toward the Contras despite congressional restrictions. Congressional investigations followed, officials were prosecuted, and America discovered that its government had simultaneously been cultivating Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq while secretly selling weapons to the country Saddam was fighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even more astounding is the revelation by many who have now left prison after serving 20 years for drug dealing that these planes coming back to the US from Nicaragua had cocaine in them. And that the Republican Party was distributing these drugs in ghettos in swing states and swing counties with the support of local law enforcement, having changed federal drug possession laws. Police would swarm neighborhoods and arrest everyone \u2013 leading to more African Americans being incarcerated than there were slaves before the Civil War. Electoral maps were completely redrawn, and Republicans won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives as a result. Today, over 20 years later, for example, in Florida, there are over 1 million US born citizens who cannot vote because of crack cocaine convictions. There was a revolution in Iran, and a revolution in America!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This contradiction becomes even more remarkable when North Korea enters the story. Iran desperately needed ammunition, missiles, spare parts, and replacement weapons, and North Korea became one of its important suppliers and intermediaries. Soviet and Chinese-origin equipment could reach Iran through North Korean channels, with Iran paying in cash and crude oil. Follow individual transactions and the war begins to look less like a conventional conflict and more like an international trading system: weapons could originate in the Soviet bloc, move through North Korea, be financed through European banks, insured by European companies, and eventually arrive in Iran, while the Soviet Union was simultaneously one of Saddam Hussein\u2019s principal weapons suppliers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That, to me, is the real story of the Iran-Iraq War. America, Europe and the Soviet Union supplied or supported Iraq in various ways; the Gulf monarchies helped finance Saddam; Israel, North Korea and others supplied Iran; America itself secretly sold weapons to Iran while increasingly supporting Iraq; banks financed transactions, insurers insured them, manufacturers supplied equipment, intelligence agencies maneuvered, politicians calculated, and arms dealers collected commissions. No single mastermind controlled all of this. In some ways, it was worse than that. An entire international ecosystem developed around a war in which almost everyone could find a strategic or commercial reason to keep one side from defeating the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And who paid for it? Not the strategists in Washington, Moscow, Paris, London, Riyadh, or the other capitals where these decisions were made. Iranian and Iraqi families paid the bill. It was paid by the young Iranian soldier choking on mustard gas, by the Iraqi conscript sent into another hopeless offensive, by the mother who never saw her son again, by the families driven from Khorramshahr and Abadan, by the children growing up while missiles fell on their cities, and by a generation on both sides of the border whose lives were permanently altered by decisions made far above them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why September 22 matters, and why I believe Iranians should remember 9\/22 in much the same way Americans remember 9\/11. I am not suggesting that tragedies should compete with each other, or that one person\u2019s suffering somehow diminishes another\u2019s. Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered on September 11, 2001, and thousands more American servicemen and women subsequently died in the wars that followed. But Iran also has a date when its world changed. On September 22, 1980, a neighboring country invaded Iran, and what followed was eight years of death, destruction, chemical warfare, and international intrigue on a scale that is difficult for anyone who did not live through that period to comprehend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also explains something about Iran that Western policymakers repeatedly seem unable to understand. Iranian distrust of foreign powers did not materialize from thin air, nor is it exclusively the invention of the Islamic Republic. Iranians remember the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh. They remember foreign support for the Shah. They remember the turmoil surrounding the revolution. They remember Saddam crossing the border. They remember chemical attacks. They remember which countries supplied Iraq. They remember that the international community did remarkably little to stop Saddam\u2019s chemical warfare. They remember that some of the same countries publicly condemning Iran were privately selling it weapons. And they remember that when Iran appeared weakest, Saddam Hussein concluded that the moment had arrived to attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You do not have to support the Islamic Republic to understand any of this. In fact, one of the great mistakes in thinking about Iran is constantly confusing Iran with whatever government happens to rule it. The young men defending Khorramshahr were defending Iran. The families being bombed were Iranian families. The soldiers exposed to chemical weapons did not cease being victims because we dislike the government in Tehran. September 22 belongs to Iran, not to the Islamic Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One final historical irony is hard to ignore. Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Whether Carter encouraged Saddam\u2019s invasion remains disputed, and it would be wrong to present Haig\u2019s later account or the Brzezinski allegations as conclusive proof that he did. But it is equally wrong to pretend those allegations and documents do not exist. Haig, Reagan\u2019s Secretary of State, reported to Reagan that he had been told Carter gave Iraq a green light through Saudi Crown Prince Fahd; authors and former officials have argued over contacts involving Brzezinski, Iraq and Jordan; Iranian opposition figures had contacts with Baghdad; Saddam was receiving encouragement and financial backing from governments terrified of revolutionary Iran; and within a few years the United States itself was openly tilting toward the aggressor while secretly selling weapons to the country he had invaded. History is messy, contested and deeply uncomfortable, which is precisely why it should be remembered rather than simplified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans have 9\/11. Iranians have 9\/22. September 22, 1980, should be remembered not because Iranians need another grievance, but because you cannot understand the Iran of today without understanding what happened when the country was weak, divided, and isolated, and Saddam Hussein decided that the time had come to attack. The resulting war lasted eight years, drew in much of the world, created fortunes, rearranged alliances, and killed or wounded an extraordinary number of ordinary people. For Iran, 9\/22 was not simply the beginning of a war. It has become one of the defining experiences of the modern nation, and more than forty years later, we are still living with its consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s an animated movie I made on this: https:\/\/youtu.be\/MdFNAHpgioA?si=wOIx_-a9ukSwHJ92<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Americans have September 11, 2001, a date so embedded in the country\u2019s consciousness that it no longer needs a year or an explanation. Say \u201c9\/11,\u201d and everyone knows what you mean. Iranians have a September date too, although strangely we have never given it the same place in our collective memory: September 22, 1980. On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAmericans Have 9\/11. Iranians Have 9\/22! - AYATOILET<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ayatoilet.com\/?p=480\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Americans Have 9\/11. Iranians Have 9\/22! - AYATOILET\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Americans have September 11, 2001, a date so embedded in the country\u2019s consciousness that it no longer needs a year or an explanation. Say \u201c9\/11,\u201d and everyone knows what you mean. Iranians have a September date too, although strangely we have never given it the same place in our collective memory: September 22, 1980. 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