November 14-2014
A new academic work just out takes a detailed look at the Iran-Iraq war—but chiefly from the Iraqi perspective.
That’s because Iraq’s classified documents on the war were captured when the United States Army overran Baghdad in 2003. Tehran’s secret documents on the war remain a secret.
The book is “The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History.”
The 1980-88 Iran-Iraq 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.
The book 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 Saddam Hussein’s desperate attempts to improve the competence of an officer corps that he had purged to safeguard its loyalty to his regime, and then to weather the storm of suicidal attacks launched by Iran’s revolutionary regime relying on children sent to run across Iraqi minefields.
The authors are Williamson Murray of Ohio State University and Kevin Woods of the Institute of Defense Analyses in the United States.
The book was released last month in paperback by Cambridge University Press and sells in the United States for $29.99.
The authors have selected 200-plus documents from the many thousands available to profile the perceptions and attitude of Saddam and those closest to him. The result makes chilling reading — mass slaughter on the battlefields, psychopathic torture and execution of Iraqi commanders and regular soldiers deemed to have “failed” in their duty, the systematic use of chemical weapons on troops and civilians alike — all are coldly and proudly justified in the Iraqi documents.
Other sources depict the tactic of Iran’s dictatorship in its war until victory — the “martyrdom” of countless thousands, including children, who were “sacrificed” to walk across enemy minefields, allegedly with plastic keys to paradise around their necks.
