The Gulf heats up.

THE WAR in the Persian Gulf between Iran and Iraq is in its fifth year now, with no prospect of its ending in the near future. The conflict suddenly heated up in mid March when Iran unleashed yet another in a long series of "final offensives" against Iraq. Tens of thousands of youthful Iranian soldiers boarded small boats and attacked across the marshlands of Hawr al Hawizah, only to die in droves when they came up against the better-armed, better-trained Iraqis. The air war has also heated up, with each side conducting regular bombing attacks on the enemy's cities--raids with more psychological than military effect.

By all accounts, Iraq's Saddam Hussein badly wants to end this war, which he started in a fit of absentminded avarice back in 1980. But the Ayatollah Khomeini refuses to negotiate a truce, preferring instead to offer up human sacrifices in demonstration of the incorruptible purity of his Shiite fundamentalist convictions. Not since the Children's Crusade, perhaps, has the world witnessed such fanatical eagerness to throw youngsters into the heat of war for causes deemed holy by the organizers. The Children's Crusade was a sorry and short-lived affair, however. The Gulf War is being compared more aptly, and more ominously, to the greatest religious conflict in European history: the Thirty Years' War. Stand by for a peace to be concluded in the year 2010.

The diplomatic alignments engendered by the war are bizarre. The United States, France, and the Soviet Union are all quietly backing Iraq--the superpowers not because they want to see an Iraqi victory, but because each fears the unforeseeable consequences of an Iranian victory. France, evert pragmatic, is in it largely for the sake of profitable arms sales. Syria, though a Soviet ally, backs Iran against its arch-rival in Baghdad. Israel, a monster and a pariah to the ayatollahs, has nonetheless sent clandestine arms shipments to Iran, calculating that a Persia defeat of an Arab country would be a better outcome than an Arab victory (my enemy's enemy is a friend, though an enemy). The Saudi sheiks are backing their erstwhile enemy, Hussein, not wanting to see the Gulf fall under the shadow of a confident and fanatical Iran.

The net result: The ware has to led to the re-opening of an American embassy in Baghdad, in order that the United States might better help Iraq, a Soviet ally, defeat Iran--which is being supplied by Israel, an American ally--while simultaneously embarrassing Syria, a Soviet ally, and transforming the eternal enmity between Saudi Arabia (a U.S. ally) and Iraq (a Soviet ally) into the peace for our time. Such are the glories of war and detente, Middle Eastern style. The only logical thing about it is that the French, as usual, make money on the deal.