Iran-Iraq War
The eight-year war Saddam Hussein's Iraq launched against revolutionary Iran in 1980, one of the century's longest and bloodiest, ending in stalemate.
On 22 September 1980, Saddam Hussein sent his army across the border into a country in chaos, expecting a short and victorious war. He got the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Eight years later the frontier had not moved, perhaps a million people were dead, and both dictatorships were still standing. The Iran-Iraq War settled nothing between the two states and reshaped almost everything inside them.
Why Saddam invaded
Iran in 1980 looked like easy prey. The revolution had shattered its army, executed or exiled its officers, and cut it off from its old Western suppliers. Saddam saw a chance to tear up the 1975 Algiers Agreement and seize full control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, to grab the oil-rich, Arab-populated province of Khuzestan, and to make Iraq the dominant power in the Gulf. He also feared Ayatollah Khomeini, whose calls for Shia revolution threatened Iraq's own Shia majority. Iran calls it the Imposed War; Saddam expected it to last weeks.
A modern war fought like the First World War
Instead it froze into something out of 1916. After Iran halted the invasion and pushed the Iraqis back to the border by 1982, the front settled into trenches, minefields, and barbed wire. Iran, short on equipment but long on manpower, threw waves of young volunteers, the Basij, some of them teenagers, against fortified Iraqi lines. Iraq, better armed by its foreign patrons, answered with poison gas: mustard, then the nerve agents tabun and sarin, in the first large-scale chemical warfare since 1918. Both sides fired missiles at each other's cities in periodic 'wars of the cities,' and both attacked oil tankers in the Gulf.
The world watches and the bill comes due
Outside powers quietly tilted toward Baghdad. The Soviet Union and France armed Iraq; Gulf monarchies bankrolled it; the United States restored relations, shared intelligence, and looked away as Saddam gassed Iranians and, at Halabja in 1988, his own Kurds. Iran, largely isolated, learned to build missiles and cultivate proxies rather than rely on anyone. By 1987 the United States was escorting reflagged Kuwaiti tankers and skirmishing with Iranian forces; in July 1988 an American cruiser shot down an Iranian airliner, killing all 290 aboard. That month, his cities battered and his oil economy wrecked, Khomeini accepted a UN ceasefire, saying it was like drinking poison. The fighting ended on 20 August 1988 roughly where it began. Its legacy outlived it: the Islamic Republic emerged hardened, militarized, and certain the world had abandoned it, convictions that still drive its pursuit of missiles and asymmetric power. Saddam came out buried in debt to the Gulf states that had funded him, debt he chose to solve two years later by invading Kuwait. The war that changed no borders set the next one in motion.