Regional instability

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A is the Strait of Hormuz. Western governments were worried because most of the Gulf's oil exports pass through this narrow strait by tanker, and Iran, which lies on its northern side, could attack tankers or try to close it, cutting oil supplies to the West.

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Source A criticises Saddam because it shows him holding up a banner for 'Justice for Palestine' while carrying a sack of Kuwait's oil and standing on a crushed Kuwait. The cartoonist is saying that his concern for the Palestinians is a trick to distract attention from his real aim, which was to grab Kuwait's oil, and that he is a hypocrite, because he complains about Israel's occupation while occupying Kuwait himself. I know that after invading Kuwait on 2 August 1990, Saddam announced on 12 August that Iraq would discuss leaving Kuwait only if Israel withdrew from the occupied Palestinian territories. This 'linkage' was meant to win Arab support and divide the coalition forming against him, and the cheering crowd shows it had some success: the PLO and many Jordanians and Palestinians backed Saddam. But his real motives were economic, such as Iraq's war debts and his anger at Kuwait's overproduction of oil. The cartoon was published in Britain in August 1990, when Britain was sending forces to the Gulf, so it reflects British hostility to Saddam.

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Source B is very useful for showing the human effects of the war on the Kurds. The photographs show the bodies of men, women and even babies lying in the streets of Halabja, so they prove that the victims were mainly civilians, not fighters. The fact that the bodies have no visible wounds suggests chemical weapons, and I know that on 16 March 1988 Iraqi aircraft attacked Halabja with mustard gas and nerve agents, killing about 5,000 people. As photographs taken within days of the attack they are powerful, direct evidence that is hard to deny. However, their provenance limits them a little: Iran held the town and brought foreign journalists there because it wanted the world to condemn Iraq, so the scenes photographed were chosen to shock. The photographs also show the result of the attack but not who carried it out or why.

Source C helps to answer the question of why. Broadcast by Iraqi state radio, it calls the Kurds 'traitors who have sold themselves to Khomeini'. This reflects the fact that the main Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, had co-operated with Iran during the war, and it explains why Saddam's regime treated the Kurds as enemies. As evidence of what happened it is unreliable: it was propaganda from a government controlled by Saddam, trying to deny responsibility and blame Iran. But that makes it useful in another way, because it reveals the regime's attitude and the way it tried to cover up its crimes.

Neither source shows the full scale of what happened to the Kurds. Halabja was part of the wider Anfal campaign led by Ali Hassan al-Majid in 1987-89, in which thousands of villages were destroyed and tens of thousands of Kurds were killed, while Western governments that backed Iraq said little. Overall, Source B is the more useful for showing the effects of the war on Kurdish civilians, but used together the sources are more valuable still: B shows the suffering, and C, despite its bias, shows the thinking that lay behind it.

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Outside powers did a great deal to make the Gulf unstable in the 1980s, but the main responsibility lay with the region's own leaders, Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, whose decisions started and prolonged the decade's central conflict, the Iran-Iraq War.

There is a strong case against the outside powers. Western interference had helped create the anger behind Iran's revolution: in 1953 the CIA and MI6 helped overthrow Iran's elected prime minister, Mossadegh, and the USA then backed the Shah's harsh rule for more than 25 years. In 1979 the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought the Cold War closer to the Gulf, and in 1980 the Carter Doctrine committed the USA to defending the region with force. During the war, outside powers armed both sides: the Soviet Union and France supplied Iraq, the USA gave it intelligence, and Israel and, secretly, the USA sold weapons to Iran. This helped keep the war going for eight years. Western silence over Iraq's use of chemical weapons encouraged Saddam, and the US Navy's role in the Tanker War led to clashes, including the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988.

However, the war itself was begun by Saddam Hussein. In September 1980 he invaded Iran because he wanted control of the Shatt al-Arab and perhaps the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, and he hoped to become the leading power in the Arab world. No outside power ordered him to do so. It was also Iraq that began attacking tankers in 1984 and that used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians, killing about 5,000 at Halabja in 1988.

Khomeini was just as responsible for the length of the war. By 1982 Iran had driven Iraqi forces out, but instead of making peace Khomeini invaded Iraq and demanded Saddam's overthrow, prolonging the war for six more years. His aim of exporting the revolution also alarmed the Gulf monarchies, who formed the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981, and Iranian-backed militants bombed the US and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983. Deep regional divisions, between Sunni and Shia, Arabs and Persians, and the Kurdish struggle against Baghdad, also fuelled the instability.

Overall, I disagree with the statement. Outside powers created some of the conditions for instability and made the war longer and more deadly by selling weapons and protecting their oil interests. But the key decisions - to start the war, to continue it, and to use chemical weapons - were taken in Baghdad and Tehran. Outside powers made the instability worse; they did not create it.