Iran-Iraq War (1987): 598 and collapse of hopes

A 1980-88 war of trenches, cities and tankers that killed hundreds of thousands and ended with UN Resolution 598 -- no triumphant peace. Iraq invaded Iran on 22 September 1980, hoping to seize the Shatt al-Arab and a disordered post-revolutionary Iranian state. The Islamic Republic survived the first winter; the war then became an eight-year struggle of trenches, human-wave assaults, missile strikes on cities, and a "tanker war" in the Persian Gulf.

About 500,000-1 million people died, scholarly range, the majority Iranian in many estimates, with Iraqi losses also enormous. Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and, in 1988, against Kurdish civilians at Halabja. The UN Security Council's Resolution 598 (1987) framed a ceasefire that both sides accepted in 1988, effective 20 August.

Neither capital got the political victory it had promised. Saddam Hussein's Iraq emerged militarised and indebted -- a prelude to the 1990 Kuwait invasion. Iran's "Sacred Defense" became a founding myth of the Islamic Republic. English-language memory is thin beside Vietnam or 1991; for the Gulf, this was the longer, bloodier war.