When the Bath army invaded Iran on 22 September 1980, the new Iranian government was confronted by the challenge of convincing the world of Iran’s victimhood and exhorting Iranians to make the necessary sacrifices to fight what would become a long and grueling war. To meet it the Islamic Republic emphasized the destructive effects of Iraq’s use of aerial and artillery bombardment. As made clear by the literature comparing the two combatant’s respective arsenals, Iran began the war with a minor but nonetheless real material disadvantage that it never managed to overcome. While some scholars point to the social dislocations, economic implications, and geopolitical ramifications of the Iran-Iraq war, little attention has been paid, outside the fortunes and failures on the battlefield, to the role of modern armaments in the conflict. Especially unexplored is how that small but real difference in military capability influenced Iranian understandings and narratives of the war. Inheritors of the impressive Pahlavi arsenal, Iranian narratives of the war erased much of Iran’s advanced weaponry in favor of depictions that emphasized the humanity of Iranians. In order to study those narratives, my presentation will engage the diaries, memoirs, novels, film, and political posters produced during the period, as well as letters of the Iranian Mission to the United Nations.
This paper argues that depictions of Iraq’s advanced and destructive weaponry, in both official and private narratives, represented an important method by which Iranian society and the Islamic Republic defined itself. Often contrasted to Iran’s supposed lack of comparable technologies, Iraq and its soldiers became not inhuman or evil monsters but faceless technologies that attacked from afar and left Iranians suffering in their wake. Bombardment became a frame through which many of the inevitable experiences of war—death, dismemberment, pain, and deprivation—were brought into focus, overshadowing other sources of such hardships. The destruction wrought by Iraqi artillery and aircraft was further instrumental to the Islamic Republic’s bid to portray its country as an aggrieved victim worthy of world sympathy. While Iranians fought ferociously and victories were celebrated, ultimately the acceptance of suffering from bombardment carried the conviction of the country’s innocence. In portraying suffering Iranians as human and Iraqis as destructive machines, such depictions helped reinforce broader revolutionary narratives of a noble and humane Iran confronting a cold and immoral outside world.
