Best Books on the Iran-Iraq War

The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years, from 1980 to 1988. It killed somewhere between 500,000 and one million people, wounded two million more, and displaced millions of civilians. Both countries used chemical weapons. Iraq received military intelligence, economic aid, and diplomatic cover from the United States. Iran received covert weapons shipments from the same country. The war ended with no territorial changes and no clear victor. Most people in the West know almost nothing about it. That ignorance has costs, because almost every major Middle Eastern conflict of the past four decades connects back to this war. ## How the war started Saddam Hussein launched the invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980, nine days after a secret meeting with American officials in Jordan. His calculation was that Iran was weak, the revolutionary government was in chaos, and a quick military campaign would establish Iraq as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. He was wrong about almost everything. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the regular army, despite their disorder, fought back ferociously. What Saddam expected to be a six-week campaign turned into eight years of grinding attrition warfare that recalled the Western Front of World War One: trenches, poison gas, mass infantry assaults across no-man's-land, and artillery barrages that consumed men and ammunition by the millions. ## Three books that cover it **The Iran-Iraq War** by Pierre Razoux is the most comprehensive single-volume account of the conflict available in English. Razoux is a French military analyst, and his account is particularly strong on the operational dimensions of the war: how both armies were organized, what tactics they used, why Iraqi armor failed to exploit early breakthroughs, and how Iran's "human wave" infantry tactics evolved over the course of the war. He also covers the diplomatic context carefully, showing how both superpowers and regional powers manipulated the conflict to serve their own interests. This is the book to read if you want to understand the war itself. **Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq** by Kanan Makiya, writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, was published in 1989 and remains essential for understanding why Saddam went to war and how he maintained power through eight years of catastrophic losses. Makiya, an Iraqi dissident, analyzes the Baathist system of terror, patronage, and ideological control that allowed Saddam to fight a ruinous war without facing domestic revolt. The book is not primarily about the war, but it makes the war comprehensible. **The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future** by Vali Nasr covers the war's long-term consequences for the Sunni-Shia divide in the Islamic world. Nasr argues that the Iran-Iraq War was in part a war about whether the Iranian Revolution's specifically Shia character would spread to the Arab world, and that Saddam's brutal suppression of Iraq's Shia majority after the war planted the seeds of everything that followed, including the insurgencies that erupted after 2003. ## The chemical weapons question Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian troops repeatedly during the war, most infamously at the Battle of the Fish Lake in 1983 and in subsequent engagements. The United States knew about these attacks, had satellite imagery confirming them, and chose to continue supporting Iraq. The Reagan administration removed Iraq from the state sponsors of terrorism list to facilitate the relationship. The same chemical weapons infrastructure was later used against Iraq's Kurdish population at Halabja in 1988, killing thousands of civilians. The American response to Halabja was to block a Senate resolution condemning Iraq. This history matters because the same weapons programs, and the same American willingness to look away from their use, became the foundation for the false intelligence claims about weapons of mass destruction that justified the 2003 invasion. ## What the war did to both countries Iran emerged from the war with a generation of young men dead, an economy shattered, and a revolutionary government that had consolidated power through the wartime emergency. The moderate voices in the early revolution had been sidelined or eliminated. The war gave the hardliners the conditions they needed to entrench themselves. Iraq emerged technically as the "victor" but with a debt of $80 billion, an army of battle-hardened veterans, and a dictator who had been encouraged by Western powers to believe he could act with impunity. Two years later, he invaded Kuwait. ## Further reading Explore more books on Cold War history and Middle Eastern conflicts at [/category/cold-war](/category/cold-war).