The significance of the war in Ukraine to the Western world lies largely in its geography: It’s being fought in Europe, only a small distance away from some of the wealthiest and most avowedly peaceful nations of the world. Parallels with earlier European wars, most notably the Winter War unleashed by the Soviet Union on Finland, abounded in the conflict’s early weeks. But the war that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is coming to resemble most was fought in distant Mesopotamia.
Every historical comparison is a stretch — history doesn’t quite repeat itself. And yet, to a reader of the chapters of Saddam Hussein biographies that deal with the Iraq-Iran war, the parallels are unavoidable.
Ostensibly trying to prevent Iran’s Islamic Revolution from spreading to his country’s large Shiite community, Saddam Hussein first launched bombing raids on Iran’s military airfields and then sent tanks rolling into the neighboring country in late September 1980. Putin, too, has sought to portray his invasion as preemptive — to him, Ukraine’s “neo-Nazi regime” was creating an “anti-Russia,” a beachhead of the hostile West, next to Russia’s borders.“We wish neither to destroy Iran nor to occupy it,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz declared 11 days before the invasion began. Russian official statements matched this one almost verbatim — and as late as October 2022, Putin himself claimed: “We have never set the goal of destroying Ukraine.”Saddam’s military goals in 1980 were as vaguely defined as Putin’s in 2022: specifics drowned in nationalist rhetoric. While Putin has compared himself to Czar Peter the Great, who, according to him, won back much historically Russian land, Saddam styled himself another Sa’d Ibn Abi Waqqas, the Arab general who defeated a numerically superior Persian army in the year 636, or even another Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who conquered Jerusalem in 587 B.C.
