The Iran–Iraq War began when Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 and, after a lengthy period of attrition warfare with fluctuating fortunes, was stopped by a ceasefire in 1988, finally ending in 1990 when Iraq, attempting to gain advantage during the Gulf War, accepted the territorial boundaries which had existed at the beginning of the war. The formal casus belli was Iraqi claims to territory that would have increased its ability to control northern Persian Gulf waters, and especially the part known as the Shatt al-Arab, vital for entry to oil exporting ports in both countries. In fact the war was fought, on both sides, more as a test of which country should become the dominant regional power. Saddam Hussain, Iraq’s president, had always sought to be the leader of a revolutionary pan-Arab movement, which threatened the national basis of other countries of the Middle East. While Iran is not, strictly speaking, an Arab nation at all, the religious complexities of Islam made a clash between the two states inevitable. The Iranian revolution which put the Ayatollah Khomeini in power in Iran was a Shi‘ite fundamentalist movement, while the Iraqi regime was dominated by the Sunni sect (although Shi‘a Muslims are actually in the majority in that country as well). Therefore Iran’s call for Muslim unity threatened Hussain’s control of his people, and was also an alternative to his own, originally more secular, call for Arab unity.
The war was deeply anachronistic, resembling the mass infantry trench warfare of the First World War (1914–18), but combined with some elements of modern high-technology warfare. Certainly it was brutal, and while no reliable figures exist, estimates of casualties of perhaps a million on each side are entirely plausible. Although Iran had, under the former regime of the Shah, by far the best equipped and most modern army in the Middle East, the subsequent break with its supplier, the USA, rapidly degraded Iranian forces. Saddam Hussain had built up a less technical army which was, nevertheless, by the end of the war, one of the biggest military machines in the world. Just as in the First World War, the conflict became a stalemate almost from its beginning, and the total amount of land gained or lost was never great. The war had enormous consequences for international oil trade and for confusing, and exposing the inadequacies of, the foreign policies of the USA, the Soviet Union, the European Communities and the whole of the Gulf region. There were also several violations of the embargoes on supplying materials of potential military application to both sides. In general the Western nations tended to favour Iraq, particularly because of fear of Islamic fundamentalism sweeping the region, and even more so after Iran started to threaten general shipping in the Persian Gulf, but just over two years after the cease-fire they were themselves taking up arms against the regime of Saddam Hussain in the Gulf War.
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