Iran-Iraq War

Iran-Iraq War (formerly known as the Gulf War) was an armed conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Ba'athist Iraq lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, making it the 20th century's longest conventional war.

Quotes

• The most important departure from determinism during the Cold 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 which capitalism would self-destruct. After 1945, however, wars were limited to those between superpowers and smaller powers, as in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, or to wars among smaller powers like the four Israel and its Arab neighbors fought between 1948 and 1973, or the three India-Pakistan wars of 1947-48, 1965, and 1971, or the long, bloody, and indecisive struggle that consumed Iran and Iraq throughout the 1980s.
  • John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005), p 261
• A curious military force of professional soldiers, mullahs, neighborhood militiamen and schoolboys as young as 13, linked by an intense Islamic fervor, broke the long deadlock in the Persian Gulf war by routing entrenched Iraqi troops.
  • John Kifner, April 7, 1982, http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/07/world/in-iran-s-war-youth-and-islam.html
• Why should we hate the people we once loved because of a war that mars even our memories?
  • Frouzanda Mahrad, an Arabic poem by Lamia 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.