Iran-Iraq War

iran-iraq-war

The eight-year war between Iran and Iraq from September 1980 to August 1988, initiated by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of revolutionary Iran. It killed between 500,000 and a million people, used chemical weapons, and ended in a ceasefire that changed nothing except the human landscape.

Saddam Hussein launched the invasion of Iran on 22 September 1980, calculating that the revolutionary chaos following the fall of the Shah had left Iran militarily weak and internally divided. The calculation was wrong on both counts: Iranian resistance was fierce, the revolutionary regime mobilised mass armies motivated by religious and patriotic fervour, and Iranian counter-attacks eventually pushed Iraqi forces out of most of the territory they had initially seized. The war then settled into a brutal stalemate along a front reminiscent of the First World War: artillery barrages, trench systems, mass infantry attacks — including human-wave assaults by teenage Basij volunteers walking into minefields — and the use of chemical weapons. Iraq used mustard gas and nerve agents against Iranian forces and against the Kurdish population of Halabja in 1988, killing thousands in the worst chemical attack since the First World War. The United States, officially neutral, provided Iraq with intelligence, weapons, and financial support — a policy that would have profound consequences when Saddam subsequently turned his reconstituted military against Kuwait in 1990. The UN Security Council’s ceasefire in 1988 ended the fighting without resolving any of the issues that had caused it; the border remained exactly where it had been before the invasion.

The Iran-Iraq War is one of the most significant and least understood conflicts of the twentieth century. Its significance lies not only in its direct costs — in the physical destruction of western Iran, in the militarisation of Iraqi society that made subsequent violence easier, in the massive debts that pushed Saddam toward the Kuwait adventure — but in what it revealed about the international order’s willingness to permit atrocity when strategic interests were served. The United States knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces and did not meaningfully protest; European companies sold Iraq the precursors for those weapons; the Security Council’s response was a ceasefire resolution that demanded neither accountability nor withdrawal to the pre-war borders. The lesson both Saddam and other regional actors drew was that chemical weapons use carried no decisive international consequence. That calculation proved wrong when the weapons were used against the Kurds in 1988 — but not immediately, not in ways that prevented further use, and not in ways that prevented Saddam from retaining power for another fifteen years.