Williamson Murray - The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History

The IranIraq War is one of the largest, yet least documented conflicts in the history of the Middle East. Drawing from an extensive cache of captured Iraqi government records, this book is the first comprehensive military and strategic account of the war through the lens of the Iraqi regime and its senior military commanders. It explores the rationale and decision-making processes that drove the Iraqis as they grappled with challenges that, at times, threatened their existence. Beginning with the bizarre lack of planning by the Iraqis in their invasion of Iran, the authors reveal Saddams desperate attempts to improve the competence of an officer corps that he had purged to safeguard its loyalty to his tyranny, and then to weather the storm of suicidal attacks by Iranian religious revolutionaries. This is a unique and important contribution to our understanding of the history of war and the contemporary Middle East.

WILLIAMSON MURRAY is Adjunct Professor at the US Marine Corps University, a Senior Fellow at the Potomac Institute, and Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University.

KEVIN M. WOODS is a Historian and Defense Researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses.

The 19801988 war between Iraq and Iran was one of the largest and, yet, one of the least documented conventional conflicts in the twentieth century. Western reporters, regional experts, and a few historians managed during the intervening years to develop useful if primarily secondary narratives of the events. Many of these works, cited throughout this volume, remain essential to any study of the IranIraq War.

The relative paucity of primary sources on the IranIraq War changed with the collapse of Saddam Husseins regime in 2003. Upon entering Baghdad, Coalition forces captured official Iraqi government records and recordings, including thousands from the period of the IranIraq War. Using these records, this book looks at the strategic and military context of the war primarily through the lens of the Iraqi regime and its senior military commanders. The inside view of the war from Baghdad does not resolve the problem of primary source material from the Iranian perspective; however, it does provide a new and significant window into the war.

This book the third in a series of histories exploring the former Iraqi regimes perspective on its major wars is also the final product of the Iraqi Perspectives Project. As with the prior studies, the authors believe that in addition to contributing to the existing scholarship on Iraq, this study serves three purposes. First, in keeping with the traditional purpose of military histories, we believe it will contribute to the education of the next generation of military leaders. Second, it provides an unvarnished look at senior military decision making inside of a totalitarian regime. It is hoped that the material cited here, and which is available at the Conflict Records Research Center, Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, will lead to additional research across many disciplines. Finally, while the events of the IranIraq War may seem distant from recent challenges in the region, the echoes of that war are just under the surface. Many of the organizations, leaders, and narratives that animate much of the recent sectarian divide in Iraq have their modern roots in the IranIraq War. The men who now dominate Irans senior leadership were young men on the battlefields of the IranIraq War under conditions of both strict international isolation and the large-scale use of chemical weapons.

More than thirty years after the beginning of the war, Iraq and Iran remain unsettled countries. The reasons, both ancient and modern, seem purposely designed to frustrate all attempts to settle issues by peaceful and violent means. Given this history, it might be tempting for policy makers outside of this region to ignore the past or overinterpret more recent events. This book and the related research seeks to, as a historian once defined his craft, interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view toward managing the future, but to do so without suspending the capacity to assess the particular circumstances in which one might have to act, or the relevance of the past actions on them. The past is never predictive of future events; however, it can be instructive.