A late-Cold-War conventional war that used twentieth-century trenches and chemical crime -- and left both states armed for the 1990s. Trenches, gas, and a war of exhaustion -- a comparison Iranians themselves sometimes made, not a claim of equal scale.
Missile strikes on cities in the "war of the cities" were a political use of reach, not an ICBM story -- a related technology of fear. Iran used revolutionary committees and later a more regular army mix; Iraq used a Baath party state and later massive conscription. Both built cults of martyrdom and victory that the 1988 line contradicted.
Check each criteria to confirm findings against the atlas verdict.
A late-Cold-War conventional war that used twentieth-century trenches and chemical crime -- and left both states armed for the 1990s. Trenches, gas, and a war of exhaustion -- a comparison Iranians themselves sometimes made, not a claim of equal scale.
Missile strikes on cities in the "war of the cities" were a political use of reach, not an ICBM story -- a related technology of fear. Iran used revolutionary committees and later a more regular army mix; Iraq used a Baath party state and later massive conscription. Both built cults of martyrdom and victory that the 1988 line contradicted.
Arms and credits from France, the Soviet Union, and others to Iraq, and a thinner, more covert stream to Iran (including the later Iran-Contra scandal in US politics), made this a world war of invoices. Iran turned inward to reconstruction and a guarded revolutionary state. Iraq turned to Kuwait. The 1991 and 2003 wars sit on this debt and army.
About 500,000-1 million dead is the usual published band. Iranian military deaths are often put near the higher end of hundreds of thousands; Iraqi deaths are also in the hundreds of thousands. Precision is impossible. Border and Shatt claims, fear and opportunity after Iran's revolution, and Saddam's bid for Gulf primacy. Most historians treat it as an Iraqi decision, not an accident.
This explains a campaign, battle, or weapon in context. It is not a league of nations. It does not replace the full topic page.
Next question: 12 December 1979 coup · Open the topic: Iran-Iraq War
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