Best Books on the Iran-Iraq War: The Forgotten Gulf Conflict

The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years, killed between 500,000 and one million people, and ended with neither side having gained anything meaningful. Iraq had not toppled the Islamic Republic. Iran had not exported its revolution to Baghdad. Both economies were shattered, both armies exhausted, and both countries were left with the kind of military debt that would shape their decisions for the next decade. It is one of the most destructive conflicts of the twentieth century and one of the least known outside the region. The war gets overshadowed in Western memory by the Gulf War of 1990-91, which it directly caused. Understanding the Iran-Iraq War means understanding why Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, why the Islamic Republic survived its first decade, and why American policy in the Middle East has been contradictory ever since. ## How the War Started Saddam Hussein launched the invasion of Iran in September 1980 for reasons that seemed rational at the time. The Iranian Revolution had overthrown the Shah in 1979, the new Islamic Republic was urging Shia Muslims in Iraq to rise against Saddam's Baathist government, and Iran's military, purged of officers associated with the Shah's regime, looked weak and disorganized. The Khuzestan province of Iran had a large Arab population. Saddam expected a quick victory, a negotiated settlement that would give Iraq control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, and perhaps the collapse of Khomeini's government under the pressure of military defeat. None of those things happened. The invasion unified the Iranian population behind the revolutionary government, the Iranian military reconstituted itself faster than anyone expected, and what Saddam had planned as a limited war of months turned into an eight-year attrition conflict with mass infantry assaults, chemical weapons, and city bombing campaigns. ## The Essential History **The Iran-Iraq War** by Pierre Razoux is the most comprehensive single-volume history in English. Razoux, a French military historian with access to sources on both sides, covers the military campaigns year by year while also explaining the political and strategic calculations that drove each side's decisions. He is particularly good on the international dimension: the Soviet Union sold weapons to both sides at different points; France sold Iraq Exocet missiles and Mirage jets while managing to maintain diplomatic relations with Tehran; the United States tilted toward Iraq after 1982 while secretly selling weapons to Iran in the episode that became the Iran-Contra scandal. Razoux does not moralize about American inconsistency, but the picture he paints is damning on its own terms. American policy toward the Iran-Iraq War was not strategically coherent. It was a series of reactive decisions made by different agencies with different priorities, resulting in a policy that simultaneously supplied intelligence to Iraq to help it fight Iran and secretly sold Iran missiles in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon. ## The American Tilt: Supporting Saddam After the Iranian Revolution, the United States had no diplomatic relations with Tehran and an increasingly urgent interest in preventing Iranian victory in the Gulf. An Iranian-dominated Iraq would have given the Islamic Republic control over a large share of Persian Gulf oil production and a land border with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. American policy therefore tilted toward Iraq despite Saddam's use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces and against the Kurdish civilian population of northern Iraq. **Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush** by Barry Lando is the most detailed account of how American and European governments provided Iraq with the technology and intelligence it needed to fight the war and develop its weapons programs. Lando is a journalist who covered the Middle East for CBS News and his account draws on congressional hearings, declassified documents, and interviews with participants. The book is polemical in places but the factual core, that Western governments knew about and facilitated Iraq's chemical weapons program during the Iran-Iraq War years, is well-documented and important. ## The Iranian Side Most accounts of the war are told primarily from an Iraqi or Western perspective, partly because Iranian sources are harder to access. **Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran** by Elaine Sciolino is not specifically a war history but it is the best starting point for understanding how Iranians experienced the revolutionary decade that included the war. Sciolino was the New York Times Tehran bureau chief and brings the same quality of reported journalism that distinguishes the best Cold War histories. Her account of how the war shaped Iranian political culture, the cult of martyrdom, the veterans' political influence, the lasting grievance about chemical weapons attacks, is essential context for anyone trying to understand contemporary Iran. ## The Human Cost and the Forgotten Chemical Attacks The Iran-Iraq War was the first major conflict since World War I in which chemical weapons were used systematically. Iraq used mustard gas and nerve agents against Iranian infantry in multiple major battles. In March 1988, Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing between 3,200 and 5,000 civilians in a single day. The Reagan administration's response was to block a Senate resolution condemning the attack and to continue providing intelligence support to Iraq. The Halabja attack and its political aftermath are central to understanding the moral collapse of American policy in the region during this period. The United States government was aware that Iraq was using chemical weapons and chose to continue supporting Iraq because the alternative, Iranian victory, seemed worse. That calculation had consequences that reverberated through the 1990s and beyond. ## Why the War Matters for Everything That Followed The Iran-Iraq War left Saddam Hussein with the largest military in the Arab world and an economy shattered by war debt, much of it owed to Kuwait. When Kuwait refused to forgive the debt and continued overproducing oil in ways that kept prices low, Saddam's calculation that invasion was his only option becomes at least understandable, even if catastrophically wrong. The Gulf War of 1990-91 was a direct consequence of the Iran-Iraq War and the policies that shaped it. The Islamic Republic's survival of the war also shaped Iranian politics permanently. The fact that Iran had survived eight years of war against a better-equipped enemy, with most of the international community supporting that enemy, became a foundational narrative of the republic's identity. It is a major reason why the Islamic Republic has treated international pressure with such persistent skepticism ever since. ## Further Reading For more books on Cold War history and Middle Eastern conflicts, browse the full [history category](/category/history) on Skriuwer.