The Iran-Iraq War
Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980 and the war ran for eight years to almost exactly the border it started from. Saddam Hussein's calculation was that Iran was in revolutionary chaos, its army purged of its officers, its air force grounded for want of American spares, and its new government isolated by the embassy hostage crisis. He wanted the Shatt al-Arab waterway, whose division he had conceded in 1975, and he wanted to stop Khomeini exporting the revolution to Iraq's Shia majority. Iran did not collapse. The invasion stalled at Khorramshahr after a month of street fighting, the revolutionary guard and the Basij militia were mobilised in enormous numbers, and by 1982 Iraq had been pushed back to the frontier and offered a ceasefire. Khomeini refused it and invaded Iraq, which turned a war of aggression into a war of national defence for the other side and cost Iran six more years. The fighting took a form that looked like 1916: trench lines, human wave assaults, boy soldiers with plastic keys to paradise, artillery duels and cities shelled. Iraq used chemical weapons repeatedly against Iranian troops and against its own Kurdish population at Halabja in 1988, with the West's knowledge and no consequences. Tankers were attacked in the Gulf and the Americans reflagged Kuwaiti shipping. Perhaps a million people died. Khomeini accepted a ceasefire in July 1988 and said it was like drinking poison. Iraq emerged with an enormous army and enormous debts, and invaded Kuwait two years later. Nothing changed hands and nothing was settled. Saddam repudiated his own war aim in 1990, conceding the Shatt al-Arab boundary he had invaded over, in order to secure his eastern frontier before invading Kuwait — which is the clearest possible statement of what the eight years had achieved.
- Year: 1980 CE
- Category: War
