Shatt border
The legal-geographic fuse.
Maps of the Shatt, Khuzestan, Faw and the tanker lanes are the four images that matter.
English news maps of 1991 overwrote these 1980s maps in public memory.
Maps
Khuzestan 1980-82
Invasion and expulsion.
Basra-Faw
The long southern war.
Tanker lanes
Gulf shipping as a front.
Halabja
A city on the crime map.
Portrayals
Iranian Sacred Defense cinema
A large state-supported film corpus English viewers rarely see.
Western news stills of gas victims
The main English visual -- late and thin.
Iraqi state TV of the 1980s
Victory broadcasts that 1988 contradicted.
Halabja monument
Kurdish public history.
Iran-Contra hearings
The US political portrayal: scandal, not the trench.
Academic monographs
The actual English record -- unread beside Vietnam paperbacks.
Rituals
Sacred Defense Week (Iran)
Annual state commemoration.
Halabja anniversary
16 March in Kurdish and human-rights calendars.
Diaspora memorials
Quiet halls in LA, London, Stockholm.
Sayings
Tehran's war museums and Halabja's monument are the two poles of public geography.
There is no Anglophone cenotaph equivalent -- the gap is the story.