By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the war the US had imposed on Iran through Saddam of the repressive Ba’th minority regime of Baghdad, in a bid to overthrow the Islamic system of government or at least detach oil-rich Khuzestan, if not dismember the country.
Needless to say, Washington miserably failed in all its goals despite dragging the war for eight long years by keeping the almost dead and defeated Saddam on life support through billions of dollars of financial aid from the oil-rich Persian Gulf Arab reactionary regimes, and supply of lethal arms from throughout the West – and even the East – including internationally banned chemical weapons.
Thanks to God Almighty, the faith of the Iranian people made them triumph over state-of-the-art military technology of almost the whole world, with not a single inch of territory lost to the invader (for the first time in history), even though the US and the West subjected the Islamic Republic to ever-increasing economic sanctions, coupled with waves of assassination of senior Iranian officials as well as ordinary citizens by their terrorist agents, the MKO hypocrites.
Indeed, Iran and the Iranian people are indebted for their epic successes to the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA), who called the 8-year Holy Defence a blessing-in-disguise for the nation to knit ranks, offer sacrifices for safeguarding their faith and soil, and tap the latent talents of the Iranian people towards making the Islamic Republic self-sufficient in all fields including defence and other sophisticated industries.
Here lies the strength of the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Revolution which continues to inspire the people at home, in the neighbourhood, and beyond, in the struggle against cultish and clannish dictatorial regimes, the despicable Zionists occupying Palestine, and the macabrely murderous terrorists, whether non-state actors like the takfiris or the state terrorism of the terrorist-in-chief, the US.
This is the reason the US is mad with rage today, but there is nothing it can do, except the toothless illegal sanctions, to stem the tide of progress of the Iranian people who at every turn have turned challenges into opportunities to defeat their avowed enemies.
Today Saddam, who on 17th September 1980 had torn in front of TV cameras the 1975 Iran-Iraq border before launching an unprovoked all out ground, air and sea invasion of the Islamic Republic on September 22 on the orders of the US, is no more.
Even his over-inflated image of a self-styled champion of Arab chauvinism has long faded from public memory, except for the brutalities of his Ba’th minority regime that massacred millions of Iraqi Shi’a Arab Muslims, along with racist persecution of the Kurdish minority.    
We remember how this coward in the initial days of the war had seized the border towns of Qasr-e Shirin and Mehran, and occupied Iran’s southwestern port of Khorramshahr, only to be bogged down in Khuzestan, before retreating when Iranians launched counterattacks to lift the siege of Abadan and liberate Khorramshahr.
We also remember how the Iranian navy destroyed almost the entire Iraqi navy in the headwaters of the Persian Gulf, while the air force in the epic operation H-3 near the Iraq-Jordan border destroyed 48 enemy aircraft on the ground.
These are certainly heroic achievements of the Holy Defence, but what is more important and the key to the success of the Iranian combatants – even today – is not mere armaments or military tactics. It is the faith in God, the Prophet, and the Ahl al-Bayt, which was manifest on the warfronts amidst the thunder of shells, in the form of the Kumayl Supplication, and the Ziyarat-e Ashura of the Immortal Martyr of Karbala, Imam Husain (AS).
In other words, the spiritual power that blunted the Ba’thist war machine and has continued to blunt the sordid sanctions of the US, is the secret to the success of Islamic Iran, which is fully confident that the day is not far when like Saddam, the illegal Zionist entity, along with the CENTCOM terrorists and the rootless regimes of the region will soon be a thing of the past.