Europe came to the forefront in the early1980s in part because the opportunistic and unsuccessful attack ofSaddam Hussein ofIraq on Iran in 1980 began a major war that lasted until 1988. This conflict continued after theIraqi forces were driven out of Iran in 1982. The decision was taken by theIranians to invade Iraq in an attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This commitment ensured that Iran seemed a far less serious threat toAmerica’s allies in theGulf, especiallySaudi Arabia. During the war, the West provided indirect support to Iraq, not least by sending warships to protect tanker traffic in the Gulf from Iranian attack. This deployment led to clashes betweenAmerican andIranian forces, clashes in which the latter were defeated. Although largely armed by theSoviet Union, Iraq was also provided with Western weaponry. However, in contrast to the situation from 1990,South-West Asia in the 1980s required only a relatively modest outlay of American resources, which ensured that attention could be devoted elsewhere.
Jeremy Black,The Cold War: A Military History (2015)
The most important departure fromdeterminism during theCold War had to do, obviously, with hot wars. Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape:Lenin even relied on them to provide the mechanism by whichcapitalism would self-destruct. After 1945, however, wars were limited to those between superpowers and smaller powers, as inKorea,Vietnam, andAfghanistan, or to wars among smaller powers likethe four Israel and its Arab neighbors fought between 1948 and 1973, or the threeIndia-Pakistan wars of 1947-48, 1965, and 1971, or the long, bloody, and indecisive struggle that consumed Iran and Iraq throughout the 1980s.
The tension between these conflicting aims is perhaps particularly acute in the latetwentieth century because of the publicity given to the existence of various alternative “models” for emulation. On the one hand, there are the extremely successful “trading states”—chiefly inAsia, likeJapan andHong Kong, but also includingSwitzerland,Sweden, andAustria—which have taken advantage of the greatgrowth in world production and incommercial interdependence since 1945, and whose external policy emphasizes peaceful, trading relations with other societies. In consequence, they have all sought to keep defense spending as low as is compatible with the preservation of nationalsovereignty, thereby freeing resources for high domesticconsumption andcapital investment. On the other hand, there are the various “militarized” economies—Vietnam inSoutheast Asia, Iran and Iraq as they engage in their lengthy war,Israel andits jealous neighbors in theNear East, and theUSSR itself—all of which allocate more (in some cases, much more) than 10 percent of theirGNP to defense expenditures each year and, while firmly believing that such levels ofspending are necessary to guaranteemilitary security, manifestly suffer from that diversion of resources from productive, peaceful ends. Between the two poles of the merchant and the warrior states, so to speak, there lie most of the rest of thenations ofthis planet, not convinced that the world is a safe enough place to allow them to reduce arms expenditure to Japan’s unusually low level, but also generally uneasy at the high economic and social costs of large-scale spending upon armaments, and aware that there is a certain trade-off between short-term military security and long-term economic security.
Paul Kennedy,The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (1987)
A curious military force of professional soldiers, mullahs, neighborhood militiamen and schoolboys as young as 13, linked by an intenseIslamic fervor, broke the long deadlock in the Persian Gulf war by routing entrenched Iraqi troops.
Why should we hate the people we once loved because of a war that mars even our memories?
Frouzanda Mahrad, an Arabic poem byLamia Abbas Amara (translated by Mike Maggio in: Buckley, Jorunn Jacobsen (2002).The Mandaeans: ancient texts and modern people. New York: Oxford University Press.). This poetic line alludes to how the Mandaeans, an ethnoreligious group, were divided by the Iran-Iraq War.
The need to escape, whether frompoverty orpunishment, can force people into themilitary, while others are encouraged and sustained even in combat by their owncultures.Values andideologies, includingreligion andnationalism, motivateindividuals just as they donations. Religions promiseimmortality or rewards in theafterlife for those who die in battle. Thousands of Iranian volunteers marched across mine-strewn battlefields in the long war between Iran and Iraq in the1980s, believing that they would go directly to heaven when they died because theayatollahs had told them so. Some carried keys they had been given which were supposed to speed their entry.
In September 1980, Iraq went to war with Iran. Saddam's ostensible aim was to capture theShatt al-Arab waterway that separates the two countries, but in reality he wanted to secure the Iranianoilfields and strike a blow againstIran’s Islamic revolution which threatened to seduce his ownShia minority. After some initial successes, the Iraqi army was pushed back. Saddam’s forces seemed on the verge of collapse until the US provided Iraq withsatelliteintelligence on Iranian troop manoeuvres, allowing Saddam to deploy hisaircraft with greater effect.
Certain aspects of the Iran-Iraq conflict — including trench warfare, barbed-wire fences and soldiers attacking machine-gun emplacements across open ground — echoed the fighting of theFirst World War. But there were some sinister innovations, such as Iran’s sending ofhuman waves ofyoung boys — who were told that they would become ‘martyrs’ if they were killed - across minefields. No less horrific was Saddam’s profligate use ofchemical weapons against the advancing Iranian troops. The conflict settled into a war of attrition. By the time a ceasefire was agreed, in July 1988, both sides were effectively back where they had begun — with over a million lives lost.
