China is not a bystander to the War in Iran
- David Bruns
- 20 hours ago
- 3 min read
Weapons of Mass Deception, our very first book together way back in 2015, was based on a little-known side story of Middle East history.
In 1980, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, invaded western Iran. Saddam was after territory and was looking to push back against the Iranian hardliner theocracy, which had come to power after the 1979 coup. That invasion kicked off a bloody 8-year war that ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1988.
[Side note: We have a novella about an Iranian side character in WMD. Battle Djinni is the origin story of Reza Sanjabi, an Iranian operative that Don Riley met during the negotiations for the Iran nuclear peace talks that were signed in 2015.]
But old Saddam wasn’t done with his trouble-making in the region. Just two years later, Saddam invaded his southern neighbor, Kuwait. That military excursion led to Operation Desert Storm, a 35-nation coalition led by the US that drove the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.
If you’re of a certain vintage, you probably watched the First Gulf War live on CNN. (For you youngsters, 24-hour cable news was not a thing in the early 1990s. Also, we didn’t talk about red-blue politics ALL THE TIME. Hard to imagine that today, right?)
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
One of the most compelling things about what we were seeing on CNN was these grainy, black-and-white, smart-bomb images. You know, the ones that ended with a blinding flash. That flash was coalition air power hammering the Iraqi infrastructure.
In a desperate attempt to salvage his air force, Saddam convinced Iran, who was a “neutral” party in the conflict, to take about 100 of his aircraft for “safe-keeping.”
Why would Iran, who had just fought a massive war with Iraq only a few years before, agree to harbor the air force of their enemy?
Because they saw another country as an even bigger threat. In 1991, Iraq and Iran had a common enemy: the United States. (Also, Iran kept all of the planes as war reparations.)
That story became the premise for Weapons of Mass Deception. We asked the question: if Saddam trusted Iran in 1991 with his war planes, why not use that same play again with his WMDs?
That’s how the book starts: In 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s son hands off five nuclear devices to an Iranian intelligence officer….
Why are we bringing this up now?
Apart from the fact that Iran and nuclear weapons are still an issue more than a decade later, there’s another reason. Something eerily similar is happening right now.
Iran is placing some aircraft in Pakistan, ostensibly to shield them from US-Israeli bombing. While the number of aircraft is small, the situation illustrates a larger point about what’s going on in this part of the world.
The reported aircraft movements to Pakistan and Afghanistan add another layer to the conflict: while diplomacy continued in public, Iran was allegedly moving assets across borders — and regional players were quietly calculating how to avoid being pulled deeper into the war.1
Pakistan is engaged in a complex balancing act. On the one hand, they are serving as a diplomatic conduit between the US and Iran for peace negotiations. On the other hand, Pakistan is anything but a disinterested party. In addition to getting 80-90% of their oil via the Gulf of Hormuz, they have very strong ties to China…who is an ally of Iran.
Pakistan’s reliance on China for military assistance has grown sharply over the past decade. A Stockholm International Peace Research Institute study found that China supplied about 80% of Pakistan’s major arms between 2020 and 2024. Islamabad also maintains close economic ties with Beijing.
Last week, we wrote about Chinese companies putting out targeting data of US assets in the region. This week, the “neutral” party hosting peace talks is not really neutral at all.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch and China is not an innocent bystander to the War in Iran. If China wants to see a certain outcome, it has levers to influence that outcome.