Describe the reasons for the military conflicts between the Arabs and Persians?
Answers
This invasion led to eight years of war between Iran and Iraq. On 17 September Iraqi President Saddam Hussein announced that Iraq abrogated the 1975 Algiers Agreement and intended to exercise full sovereignty over the disputed Shatt al-Arab river.
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Answer:
Explanation:
The geopolitics of the contemporary Gulf are dominated by a triangular conflict between the three most powerful states of the region - Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Emerging from an earlier history of western intervention, and from the process of state building within Gulf states in the post-1918 period, this conflict has dominated the region for the past quarter of a century, and shows no sign of abating: no stable resolution of the conflict, one in which each state feels itself to be at a potential disadvantage, has yet been achieved. Yet if this instability is evident to all, the causes of it remain less evident. There is, at first sight, no insuperable international obstacle to peace between these three states; there are plenty of mechanisms that could resolve those issues - territorial, economic, political - that divide them. It is this apparent conundrum that the article which follows seeks to examine i.e how this apparently factitious conflict came about, and what its underlying determinants are. The central thesis is that the causes of instability in the Gulf, of past conflicts and probable future ones, lie much less in a continuous history or in the geopolitics itself, in past external intervention or relations between local states, and more in the contemporary domestic politics of these countries. The story is one of how in the modern period politics has both created linkages between the two peoples that hitherto did not exist, and has at the same time constituted new barriers between them, as well as between the two major Arab states of the Gulf themselves.
2 In this perspective, the conflict between Gulf states, and between Arabs and Persians, is a product not so much of imperialist interference, or of long, millennial or atavistic, historical antagonisms, but of two interrelated, modern, processes, state formation and the rise of nationalism. This is visible in the nature of the psychological gap that divides Arabs from Iranians: one of the most enduring features of the strategic situation in the Persian Gulf is the gap, as much psychological and cultural, as economic, military or political, between the Arab and Iranian perceptions of the region, a point I would like to illustrate with an anecdote. In the spring of 1980, I visited the Centre for Arab Gulf Studies at the University of Basra. The Centre was situated in the university campus, on the outskirts of Basra, but a few miles from the frontier with Iran. It would have taken little more than an hour to walk to Iran. Within months, the area was to be convulsed by the war which was to last for the following eight years. In the course of the discussion with faculty members I asked whether any of them had ever been to Iran. The answer was no. I asked to see the Iranian newspapers that they had in their library : some old copies of the English edition of Kayhan, from the time of the Shah, were produced. I asked if anyone spoke Persian. A junior colleague was produced: a Palestinian, who was an expert on Hafez and Sa'adi. This academic centre, closely tied to the party and state structures in Iraq, had no resources with which to evaluate, let alone understand, the powerful neighbour lying nearby.
3 The purpose of this story is not to single out the faculty of the Centre for Arab Gulf Studies in Basra. It illustrates a broader characteristic of relations between the two communities, and one that could certainly be replicated on the Iranian side as well. The Arab world occupies a place in the consciousness and history of modern Iran, but very much as a symbolic point of reference, negative for Iranian secular nationalists, selectively positive for Islamists. Iraq has been important as the site of the holiest cities of Shi'ite Islam, Najaf and Karbala, and networks of clerics and traders have grown around these pilgrimage routes. But in the modern period such connections have, largely, been without political import. Thus, while references to Russia and Britain, America and Germany would be mandatory, one could write the modern political history of Iran up to the time of the revolution without mentioning Iraq or the Arab world at all. The same applies, grosso modo, to Iraq up to the fall of the Hashemite monarchy1. Arabs and Persians are aware of each other's existence, and of the long history of culture, religion and politics that has linked them. There is not between them the complete chasm that, until at least very recently, separated Arabs and Israelis. Yet proximity has not produced, and is not producing, greater knowledge or understanding. The antagonism, or lack of shared perception, between the two sides is enduring, and is an important constitutive element in the unstable strategic situation in the Gulf.