Modern Day Iraq and Iran

This conflict was something that had been brewing for centuries. Modern day Iraq and Iran have conflicting interests and disputes over borders and control dating back to the Ottoman Turkish Empire as well as the Persian empire under the Safavids (Hiro, 1991). The majority of this war was fought by Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. Both political leaders fighting to protect what they thought was theirs and what they wanted to take from the other side.

Iran's main arguments for conflict were to either capture Iraqi oilfields thereby giving them bartering chips to secure the heavy firepower that Iraq had and Iran desperately needed, or to attack the Iraqi artillery that had laid a continuous barrage onto the Iranian civilian area since the commencement of the war (Hiro, 1991). Option two became the primary strategy due to the high amount of emotion from the Iranian leaders, the worrying that national unity would disintegrate if a ceasefire was to be enacted, and the fact that oil was now a commodity and the revenue was beginning to rise promptly. Iran showed it's true colors displaying disdain for the request of the international community to hold a ceasefire, and at the beginning of Ramadan, initiated their offensive on the southern border changing their status from invaded to invader (Hiro, 1991).

Saddam Hussein chose the war strategy that the German's made famous, the blitzkrieg. The Iraqi army laid waste to the areas of Iran that they conquered. They left a wake of destruction behind them an example is the 356 Arab-inhabited villages in Khuzestan province turned into piles of ash completely eviscerated from the map (McCuen, 1987). Despite all of the efforts the Iraqi army put forth, the Iranian military ...

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...feed themselves or their family. The resources used could have helped gain political allies, stop the war assuming that people could actually talk their problems out, and even possibly stop Iran and Iraq from tearing each other to shreds and leaving nothing left on either side of the fence.

Works Cited

El-Shazly, N. E. (1998). The Gulf tanker war: Iran and Iraq's maritime swordplay. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Hiro, D. (2002). Iraq: In the eye of the storm. New York, NY: Thunder's Mouth Press.

Hiro, D. (1991). The longest war: The Iran-Iraq military conflict. Routledge.

Hunt, C. (2005). The history of Iraq. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

McCuen, G. E. (1987). Iran Iraq war. Hudson, WI: Gary E. McCuen.

Reuters. (2003). Saddams Iraq. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Roskin, M. G. (2010). Political science: an introduction (11th ed.). Pearson Education.