The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88
This is an excerpt from the paper...
The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 was the longest conventional war between sovereign states in the 20th century. As a war it was grimly retrograde, consisting for the most part of static, positional infantry warfare, not unlike the Western Front during World War I. The war was launched by Iraq on September 22, 1980, following an Iranian refusal to abandon boundary concessions on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway that Iran had secured in a 1975 treaty (Pelletiere, 1992, p. 34). After two years of fighting on the defensive, Iran went over to the offensive, but made little more progress than Iraq had. Technically the war ended by negotiated settlement; in practice it simply ran down (Pelletiere, 1992, pp. 146-48). The following essay will concentrate on the alternatives faced by each of the rival powers in the 1980 crisis that led to the war, and Iraq's decision to resort to military force. Conflict between Iran and Iraq has deep historical roots. The Tigris and Shatt-al-Arab rivers form a natural boundary between two distinct geographical and climatological regions: to the west, the low-lying,irrigable Tigris-Euphrates valley; to the east, the more mountainous Iranian upland. This distinction was formative of the earliest periods of recorded history, when the Sumerian and later civilizations of Mesopotamia -- which corresponds roughly to modern Iraq -- periodically faced "barbarian" incursions from the Iranian plateau to the east, and at a later date were conquered
. . .
er of which would be forthcoming for the Khomeini government. However capable the weapons, they might reasonably be expected to decline rapidly in effectiveness without expert maintenance and support.
On the other hand, oil income and superpower support are only partial substitutes in war for manpower and overall economic capacity. This is particularly true, with respect to manpower, at the relatively low development level of both Iran and Iraq. Neither was in a position, as the United States has been in recent years, of largely substituting capital (in the form of equipment and technology) for labor (in the form of troops) in the waging of war.
Thus, viewed in strictly military terms, the odds were heavily against Iraq even in 1980, though less so than in 1975. Moreover, Iraq was far more vulnerable than was Iran. Geographically it was smaller, and its largely flat terrain offered fewer obstacles to an invader than did the more rugged topography of Iran. Much more serious was the shaky unity of Iraq itself. As was pointed out in the Introduction of this essay, Iran has substantial cultural, linguistic, and ethnic unity.
In contrast, Iraq is deeply fractured on ethnic and religious lines. While Iran has some kind
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Soviet Union, Arabic-speaking Shias, Iran Khomeini, Iran Iraqi, Khomeini Tehran, Fearon War, Nor Iraq, Iran Saddam, Tigris Shatt-al-Arab, Iran Saddam's, correlation forces, hiro 1991, neorealist model, risk war, khomeini government, iran-iraq war, military terms, hiro 1991 pp, iran iraq, international conflict, 1991 pp, population southern iraq, internal political dynamics, control own game, own game pieces,
Approximate Word count = 3674
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
