Iraqi Government, in Statement With Iran, Admits Fault for 1980's War

The Ledger:

In a move that is likely to inflame further Sunni Arab resentments, the Iraqi government publicly acknowledged for the first time on Thursday that Iraq was the aggressor in 1980 when it touched off a bloody eight-year war with Iran. READ MORE

In a joint statement at the end of a three-day visit by the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, the new Shiite-led Iraqi government said that Saddam Hussein, the overthrown Iraqi leader, and other officials in his government must be put on trial for committing "military aggression against the people of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait," as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.

It was an effort to bring to a close the bitter legacy of the war in which nearly a million people were estimated to have died and tens of thousands more were displaced as refugees.

An Iraqi Foreign Ministry official who helped write the communiqué, Labeed Abbawi, said the admission was intended not as an acknowledgement of guilt on the part of the Iraqi state or people, who also suffered staggering casualties in the war. Rather, he said, it was meant to lay the responsibility for the war squarely on Mr. Hussein and other leaders of his government, many of whom face trials later this year for their roles in the killing of Iraqis.

"The file of the war, we want to put it behind us," he said. "We want to open a new path of cooperation."

Even so, it was a gesture of warmth toward Iran, which has long sought formal recognition of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against it during the war, and underscored how the political landscape here has shifted, with Iraqi Shiites, many of whom spent years in exile in Iran, now running the government.

The statement is not likely to sit well with Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who ran the country for decades but have been largely left out of the National Assembly, which will draft the new Iraqi constitution, since boycotting national elections in January. Shiites control the government for the first time in modern Iraqi history, and Sunni Arabs, isolated politically, have begun to chafe under their rule.

Sunni resentment has hardened recently, with a leading Sunni cleric accusing a government militia, made up largely of Shiites, of carrying out mosque raids and killings. On Thursday, two Sunni groups called for the temporary closing of dozens of Baghdad mosques as a protest.

"People will not accept it," said Saleh Mutlak, a member of the National Dialogue Council, a coalition of Sunni Arab political leaders, of the admission of responsibility for the war. "It looks like these people want to pay back the favor that Iran did for them," he said, referring to Iraq's new government.

Historians still debate the precise reasons for the start of the war between the two countries in 1980. It began during the Iranian revolution, and some experts say the new Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, agitated for a religious war to incite Iraq's large Shiite population to rebellion.

Others have accused Mr. Hussein of starting the war, saying he was seeking to capitalize on the chaos in Iran to overturn a 1975 agreement that fixed what he considered an unjust border in the Shatt al Arab, the waterway the two countries share at its southern end, and to seize the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan.

A United Nations investigation after the war effectively assigned responsibility for the start of the war to Mr. Hussein, said Farideh Farhi, a professor of Iranian politics at the University of Hawaii, but Iran's claims of huge sums in war reparations unresolved.

Ms. Farhi said the statement Thursday appeared to be directed more at Mr. Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iran, an issue very important to Iranians. As the Iraqis drew up guidelines for the trials of Mr. Hussein and other Baath Party leaders, they decided not to extend prosecution to any crime perpetrated outside Iraq's borders, and Iranians want international recognition that they suffered under Iraqi gas and chemical weapons attacks.

"The issue for Iranians is not whether or not Iraq is identified as the aggressor," she said. "That was something that had been settled before. The issue that is not settled for them is the issue of war crimes. During the time the Iraqis were using chemical weapons on Iran, the international community was not willing to take a side on that issue."

Underscoring Iran's ties to the religious leadership in Iraq, Mr. Kharazi called on the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf on Thursday. The Iranian minister's visit began on Tuesday, just two days after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Iraq. ...

In another sign of just how far the relationship between Iraq and Iran has progressed since the administration of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari was sworn in, the communiqué said Iran had agreed to open consulates in Basra and Karbala, Shiite-dominated cities in southern and south central Iraq. For its part, Iraq will open consulates in Kermanshah and Khorramshahr, cities in western Iran near the Iraqi border.

The communiqué pledged border security improvements, condemned Israel and, in a clear appeal to Iraq's Sunni Arabs, called for the participation of all nationalities and sects in the new government.