The situation in the Gulf is not only highly dangerous but also utterly uncertain. No one seems to be in a position to predict the course of events. There has been a great deal of speculation in the West that Iran might finally launch the long-awaited offensive on June 1 which coincides with the beginning of Ramadan (the Muslim month of fasting). But it has also been said that the Iranian leaders are divided on whether to press the advantage which their numbers – over 500,000 troops are massed on the various Iraqi fronts – and their willingness to die give them. How Iraq will respond to the Iranian offensive is even more obscure. It has been threatening to blow up the Iranian oil installations at Kharg island and thus block Iranian oil exports which is its principal source of foreign exchange. But its capacity to do has yet to be fully demonstrated. Moreover, what happens if the Iranian offensive on the land succeeds even if its oil exports stop? And what if in response to Iraqi bombing of the Kharg island, the Iranians hit ships close to Kuwaiti and Saudi shores as they have already done, or even targets on land which they have not done so far except a long time ago when they dropped some bombs in Kuwait. The Americans have provided 400 Stinger missiles to the Saudis in order to enable them to deal effectively with the Iranian threat and the Saudis are said to have employed Taiwanese pilots who know how to use such weapons. But the Saudi rulers are known to be extremely cautious and they can ill-afford a reverse at Iran’s hands. So they might think discretion as the better part of valour.
There is an interesting aspect to this confused and confusing picture. Perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the cold war in the forties, the United States and the Soviet Union are ranged on the same side in a major international confrontation. Indeed, the Soviets have resumed military supplies to Iraq in a big way. Western commentators have sought to explain this development in terms of the suppression of the pro-Moscow Tudeh party in Iran and Teheran’s unremitting hostility to the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. But the Kremlin has seldom been known to be all that solicitous about the fortunes of a communist party and surely it can live as easily with the Iranian opposition to its presence in Afghanistan as it can to the Pakistani. If this line of reasoning is correct, it follows that the main reason for its support to Iraq is that it does not favour in the Gulf the kind of convulsion which an Iranian victory over Iraq would produce. In plain words, the Soviet Union is on the side of the forces of status quo in this explosive area. But why? For fear of direct US intervention? That can, however, only add to instability in the region and provoke in course of time intense anti-Americanism. That should suit the Kremlin in this period of second cold war when the Reagan administration has treated it with scant respect. What then is its explanation? None comes to mind. Russia, as Sir Winston Churchill once said, remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a riddle.