U.S. strategists during the 1980s viewed the Iran-Iraq War as that rarest stroke of fortune in world politics: A fight between two of one’s own enemies—and more, one whose length and scale could be extended at relatively little material cost to the United States. Though intervention in the conflict came to be criticized over Saddam Hussein’s atrocities and the cratering of U.S.-Iraqi relations in the 1990s, realist strategists continue to defend the underlying strategy: The U.S. preserved a balance of power in the Gulf, badly weakening two hostile states, at the mere cost of “soft” concepts like reputation, hurt feelings, and humanitarian concerns.
Such an understanding is incorrect, and directly results from a failure to recognize collective trauma as a concrete and deeply consequential force in shaping “hard” security outcomes. This study traces how trauma narratives around the war played a key role in explaining the evolution of the Basij paramilitary to its current position as a dominant political force in Iran. I argue that the Basij’s willingness to preserve the Iranian regime during its weakest points in the 1990s—at the cost of great personal risk—is directly attributable to the collective trauma of the Iran-Iraq war, whose continued centrality in Iranian society has imbued the state with protections rarely enjoyed (especially among regimes that rely on paramilitaries).
Treating collective trauma seriously as a strategic variable reveals that U.S. policy designed to weaken Iran has instead strengthened—and on at least one occasion, perhaps even literally saved—the very regime it has often dreamed of dismantling. This, in turn, has enormous implications for how strategists should assess a wide array of U.S. foreign policy efforts, especially those sold with the tempting promise of “low cost.”
Christopher W. Ray 