by Laingen, Yazdi, Entezam, and Bazargan.) In particular, echoing a March 1979 warning from Pentagon analyst Howard Teicher regarding Iraqi designs on Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province, Cave pointed out that Iraq had created a front organization that could instigate unrest among Khuzestan's majority–Arab inhabitants—yet Cave emphasized that war could still be avoided if the strength of Iran's armed forces did not continue its post-revolutionary decline. Furthermore, Cave urged his Iranian interlocutors to monitor the movement of Iraqi troops using the CIA-built IBEX systems from the reign of the Shah. Although Teicher and Cave's predictions proved accurate, they were the product of circumstantial evidence disputed internally within the U.S. government, and the significance of Cave's briefing has been debated. For example, according to Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analyst Wayne White, who was not aware of the intelligence that informed Cave's briefing: "The Iraqi army was doing little more than continuing its well-known annual schedule of primarily battalion and brigade-level training exercises ... Very little of the Iraqi military was anywhere near the Iraqi-Iranian frontier." Similarly, the head of the Iran desk at the State Department, Henry Precht, stated: "I had no impression at the time that anyone believed Iraq was planning a major attack although we thought that [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] might be stirring up the Kurds. At the time I did not think he would take on his larger and still probably more potent neighbor." On the other hand, Gasiorowski contended that "If Iran's leaders had acted on the information provided in Cave's briefings ... the brutal eight–year [Iran–Iraq War] might never have occurred." Iraq's invasion of Iran in September 1980 was preceded by a long period of tension between the two countries throughout 1979 and 1980, including frequent border skirmishes, calls by Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini for the Shia of Iraq to revolt against the Ba'ath Party, and allegations of Iraqi support for ethnic separatists in Iran. On June 18, 1979, U.S. chargé d'affaires Charlie Naas asked Yazdi about the deterioration in relations; Yazdi stated he "does not know what might be bothering Iraq ... certainly we have done nothing to bother them." Khomeini had recently condemned Iraq's arrest of Shi'ite leader Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, but Yazdi claimed this had nothing to do with any effort to export the Islamic Revolution to Iraq: Iran was merely concerned with protecting the sacred Shi'ite sites in Najaf and