Carter administration has problems too.
Nojeh Coup
In July 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski of the United States met Jordan's King Hussein in Amman to discuss detailed plans for Saddam Hussein to sponsor a coup in Iran against Khomeini. King Hussein was Saddam's closest confidant in the Arab world, and served as an intermediary during the planning. The Iraqi invasion of Iran would be launched under the pretext of a call for aid from Iranian loyalist officers plotting their own uprising on July 9, 1980 (codenamed Nojeh, after Shahrokhi/Nojeh air base in Hamedan). The Iranian officers were organized by Shapour Bakhtiar, who had fled to France when Khomeini seized power, but was operating from Baghdad and Sulimaniyah at the time of Brzezinski's meeting with Hussein. However, Khomeini learned of the Nojeh Coup plan from Soviet agents in France and Latin America. Shortly after Brzezinski's meeting with Hussein, the President of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr quietly rounded up 600 of the loyalist plotters within Iran, putting an effective end to the Nojeh Coup.[5] Saddam decided to invade without the Iranian officers' assistance, beginning the Iran-Iraq war on 22 September 1980.
because
In The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict by Dilip Hiro states on the cover text,
How was Iraq - at a 3 to 1 disadvantage in population - able to sustain an eight year war and arm one-tenth of its entire population? ... It had been a bloody and expensive conflict. Conservative Western estimate put the total number of war dead at 367,000 - Iran accounting for 262,000 and Iraq 105,000. With more than 70,000 injured, the total casualties were put at over million. The official figures, given a month later by minister of Islamic guidance in a radio interview, put the Iranian dead at 123,220 combatants, and another 60,711 missing in action. In addition 11,000 civilians had lost their lives. Tehran's total of nearly 200,000 troops and civilians killed was in stark contrast to Bagdad's estimate of 800,000 Iranian dead." page 250.
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