Customer Reviews

The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 (Essential Histories)

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One of the most difficult subjects for any historian to deal with - and one that many suggest should not even be undertaken - is recent history. Writing about recent history has far more risk of bias and lacks the documentary evidence that that the fullness of time tends to bring forth. In the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988, Mideast scholar Dr. Efraim Karsh attempts to summarize the main points of this brutal, but ultimately indecisive, contest of nations. The result of Dr. Karsh's study is interesting, but may well disappoint many readers. First, the military details and analysis are rather sparse, which is not unexpected given the closed nature of both Iraqi and Iranian sources. Second, Dr. Karsh clearly has a pro-Iraqi bias that tends to skew his analysis of political motives and intentions. Overall, this volume succeeds in delivering a useful summary of the Iran-Iraq War, but readers will probably not be as satisfied as they would reading an Osprey Essential History on the First or Second World Wars.

The Iran-Iraq War begins with an introduction, a chronology, a short background to the war, and a brief synopsis of the warring sides. The actual military campaigns are covered in two chapters totaling 40 pages. The author then uses several short chapters to cover selected topics: Iran's use of boy soldiers, the Iraqi and Iranian national war efforts, the campaign against the Kurds and how the war ended. The author's conclusion is entitled, "a costly exercise in futility," which tends to sum up his opinion of the war. There are a total of 9 maps (the Mideast in 1980, the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, Iran's recapture of Khuzestan, the deployment of the Iraqi corps in 1982, Iran's Dawn Offensives, Iran's capture of Fao, the tanker war, Operation Karbala 5, and Iraq's final offensives in 1988). Unlike most Osprey titles, these maps are not very useful since they don't convey very much information. Nor are the photographs very exceptional; few are actually related to the fighting and most depict only rather bland images. Finally, the bibliography does not list any primary sources or even Iraqi or Iranian periodicals (presumably the author is conversant in regional languages) and lists rather standard secondary sources like Anthony Cordesman. While Cordesman is a good source on this subject, it is not clear that the author did much original research. Considering that there are officer émigrés (such as at least one Iraqi corps commander) from both nations now in the west, the author might have included some interviews with these individuals.

While the author covers all the major battles of the war, the coverage appears little deeper than what one could glean from contemporary newspaper accounts. Not one military unit on either side is even mentioned by name, nor are any military leaders other than Iraqi general Rashid mentioned. This account is of a war of faceless, nameless ciphers. Given that some information is available in the west on some of the early armor battles and on the Republican Guard, the author seems to have done little to enrich the military side of this account. The brief section on opposing armies really only addresses the relative forces in quantitative terms, without even touching doctrine or tactics. The Iranian army, having been trained by the US, was far more dependent on air support and artillery than the tank-heavy Soviet-trained Iraqi army.

The author's pro-Iraqi bias is hard to swallow. In Dr. Karsh's view, Saddam Hussein had little choice but to invade Iran in 1980 since the Revolutionary regime was a threat to his own political survival. Furthermore, the author views Hussein's main mistake as opting for overly-limited objectives, instead of really crippling Iran's military power by going for a full-scale invasion. While the author concedes that Hussein does perpetuate a personality cult and did kill thousands of Kurdish civilians with poison gas, the Iraqi leader is consistently presented as an essentially normal leader. In the conclusion, the author again paints Iraq as being "forced to" invade Kuwait in 1990. Wait a minute! No choice but to invade? Saddam Hussein presented as a normal leader? How about the far more realistic assessment that Saddam Hussein was (is) a criminal dictator who seized the opportunity to seize some oil-rich areas in Iran when the Iranian Revolutionary had disrupted Iran's military defenses. The Shatt-al-Arab waterway dispute that the author mentions was only the Iraqi cassus belli, but he fails to mention that the Iraqi drives toward Ahvaz and Abadan were designed to grab major oil producing areas, not just remove threats to Iraqi transshipment routes. Had the Iraqi aggression succeeded, Saddam Hussein would have increased his control over the Mideast oil supply by grabbing important Iranian oil fields. He tried the same thing in 1990 in Kuwait. Saddam Hussein's motives and intentions are clear: use force to grab oil resources from weakly defended areas. Readers should also note the omission of certain Iraqi provocative acts, in particular the 1987 "accidental" missile attack on the USS Stark (but the author does mention the mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts by the Iranians). If this account is to be believed, Iraq "saved" the other Gulf States from Iranian aggression and had been forced into a difficult position from which military force was the only answer. This type of bias, combined with inadequate coverage of the military aspects of the war, reduces the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 to the second tier of secondary sources.

As I write this review, the United States and its coalition partners have recently deposed Saddam Hussein. It looks as though a long occupation is about to begin and I wanted to learn more about Iraq and its recent history. I turned to this Osprey Essential History of the Iran Iraq War because I wanted a quick overview of this conflict.

The book is 91 pages and is the typical Osprey sized paperback with plenty of pictures and maps. Without the maps and photos, the book is about 50-60 pages long and it took me about two hours to read.

The War was approximately 8 years long and there were a million or more casualties. That is a lot of history to cram into this slim volume. To be able to do this, the author had to take the grand strategic view of the War. For those looking for nitty gritty of the War, this is not the book for you. There are no Angus McBride illustrations of T-72's or Iranian uniforms. This book tells its story from the lofty height of senior leaders and nation states.

This book reminds me of one of those intense articles on history, economics and politics that one can find in a great magazine like the Economist. I own more than a 100 Osprey books and this is the best writing that I have ever come across in one of their books. Karsh's prose is economical and thought provoking.

Having finished this book, I had to re-evaluate my understanding of both Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini. They are both much more complex characters than I had understood. This is an introductory book on the War and it has inspired me to go out and learn more about the conflict. Highly recommended and very timely.

This is one of the few volumes to cover a sadly under-reported war. While it would be a good introduction to someone unfamiliar with the conflict, it is a bit shallow for those who already know a little. Karsh does a good job of analyzing the motives and thinking of both sides, without comment on the ethics of either. I found Dilip Hiro's book more informative. Even though Hiro is frankly trying to make a political point, there is a lot of hard data there if you are willing to sift it out.


The coverage of particular battles was sketchy, and the typical short format of Osprey precludes a lot of analysis and documentation. The Iran-Iraq war has yet to be described or analyzed by someone of the stature of David Glanz. Therefore, this book gets more stars than I would normally award, simply because there are so few other book worth reading on the Iran-Iraq war.

The Iran-Iraq war was a bloody, awful war even by the low standards of our times fought by two of the late 20th century's most unpleasant regimes for no good purpose. This book which is intended to serve as a brief summary of that war does a good, but not great job. Karsh knows his subject well, and paints a vivid picture of that bloodbath with Iranian "human wave" assaults ending fruitlessly in the swamps of southern Iraq, Iraq's vicious use of chemical warfare to counter Iran's numerical superiority, the "war of the cities" with both sides freely blasting away at each other's urban centers, and Iraq's near- genocidal Anfal campaign against its luckless Kurds. All in all, a remarkable canvas of horror, stupidity and fanaticism at display here. There were no saints in this war. The title of one of Karsh's chapters "The Delicate Balance of Incompetence" could sum up the entire war. Neither side displayed much virtue while having all the time in the world to demonstrate their various vices.

For those looking for a good introduction to the subject, this book is short, succinct, well -illustrated and presents a very readable narrative of the military operations. Karsh is strong on the military strengths and weaknesses of both sides, and how that impacted on the war's operations. At the same time, accounts of teenage Iranian boys being pressured to become "martyrs" at the front and of Iraq's horrific Anfal campaign against the Kurdish people put a human face on this bloodbath. At the end, Karsh gives an useful list of the lessons from the war, through some like that professionalism triumphs over blind fanaticism every time are really not lessons that any general should be having to learn. But Iran's gruesome example of attempting to use Islamic fanaticism as a substitute for military professionalism (made all the more worse by the regime's shunning for a long time the use of former officers left over by the Shah) should serve as a salutary warning for those who think that sheer courage is enough in war. More interesting in the way of lessons are Karsh's Clausewitzian criticism of Saddam for launching only a limited war in 1980. Karsh sees Saddam's crucial error as launching a limited war for general goals instead of the strategy of general war for limited goals that Karsh prefers. This reviewer would not dismiss Karsh's criticism out of hand, but the reviewer feels that Karsh is rather ignoring the flaws in the Iraqi Army with its over-centralized command structure, with the exception of an inglorious defeat at the hands of Israel in 1973 no recent experience of conventional war, and an officer corps in which political and clan ties were main criterion for promotion. Saddam's army was just barely capable of putting down Kurdish guerrillas, and to put it bluntly, Iraqis don't do blitzkrieg very well. To this reviewer's mind, even if Saddam had chosen the general war strategy that Karsh advocates, the nature of the very flawed Iraqi military machine would probably meant that things would still worked out the same.

Refreshingly, one has an account of the Iran-Iraq war that avoid the self-pity that characterizes writing on the war both in the Middle East and in the West. Instead of wicked machinations of evil Westerners out to make a fast buck out of the suffering of Iraqis and Iranians, one has an account that stresses how neither regime was nobody's puppet. Contrary to left-wing myth, most of Iraq's weapons came from in this order, the Soviet Union, China and France. The extent and importance of American and British aid to Iraq has been grotesquely exaggerated, and if anything it was the Soviet Union that was Saddam's most important ally. For some reason, China which without no restraint whatsoever sold arms to both sides escapes all censure while the United States and Britain bear all the condemnation for being the merchants of death of the Iran-Iraq war. Both regimes fought the war because they saw it as in their best interests, not because they were puppets of foreigners. In this regard, Karsh should had pointed out how culpable the Ayatollah Khomeini was in extending the war pointlessly for six years. In 1982, Saddam offered peace at the basis of the restoration of the pre-war status quo. Khomeini rejected that offer, and instead tried to export his Islamic revolution by overthrowing the Baath regime in Iraq. After six more years of bloodshed, Khomeini accepted peace in 1988 under the basis of the same terms he rejected in 1982. A major share of the responsibility for the war's carnage must rest on his shoulders. Indeed, the way the Iranians fought the war with the leadership almost indifferent to the questions of victory and defeat, and apparently the question of just how massive the Iranian death toll would be being the prime criterion for the success and failure of the operations. Truly, the Islamic republic was (still is) a callous, stupid regime led by a bigoted, irresponsible old man.

Turning to the man who started it out, Saddam, for a book by an Israeli historian, this book is surprisingly sympathetic towards Iraq and Saddam. Not that Karsh seeks to white-wash him in any way, but he often writes with thinly veiled admiration for the utterly ruthless way Saddam held on to power and survived the war. In this regard, Karsh sees the Iranians with their drive to export their revolution as the main aggressors, and portrays the Iraqi invasion as essentially a defensive move. There is no doubt that Khomeini's frequent calls for the overthrow of Saddam after June 1979 was a major cause of the war, but this reviewer feels that Karsh is downplaying Saddam's aggression and Iraq's hegemonic, expansionist ambitions. Saddam feared the Iranian call for his overthrow, but the way in which he sought to annex at first the south-western corner of Iran suggests more than defensive motivations.

All said, a good introduction to the subject, but the short format of this book does not do justice to the subject.

A good overview of a war that was never taught about in my high school. great photos and loved the portrait of a child soldier.

The essential histories series is supposed to provide brief, readable accounts of major wars. The inherent problem with this idea is that often times the wars being discussed are much too complex to be covered in substantially less than 100 pages. That doesn't mean the series is without value, but that it should only be used as a first step towards understanding a subject, not the only step. The biggest drawback in this particular installment is that the lack of background info really robs the reader of valuable context. Even though the amount of space devoted to the Iran-Iraq war in one of the general Iraqi history books like Tripp's or Marr's is considerably less, the coverage is ultimately better because of the back story of the 70s that created many of the necessary conditions for the war. Beyond that however, Karsh's book provides a limited and somewhat helpful overview of the military and political aspects that influenced the war.

Karsh's book on the Iran-Iraq war not only suffers from only skimming the surface of a complex subject, but there is also a fairly obvious pro-Iraqi bias. If someone had absolutely no background in Middle Eastern history, they would come away with the impression that Iraq was completely blameless, when in fact Iraq initially began the war. When compared with the accounts of the war in other works on Iraqi and Iranian history, Karsh's version stands alone in its willingness to absolve Iraq of any wrongdoing. Considering that the series is supposed to provide an introduction to the conflict, this type of bias is really misplaced. The editors should have taken a serious pass at Karsh's finished version or had someone else write this particular installment.

This book does a fine job of explaining the reasons behind the war (bizarre though they were) and the general progression, key moments, and outcomes of the war. Karsh writes clearly and concisely, and this volume would be ideal for any looking for a brief overview of why the war was fought, when/where it was fought, and the political situations around the world during the time of the war. However, if you're expecting the same sort of detailed analyses and in-depth examinations of military decisions and individual battles, this volume will disappoint. Either due to lack of space or a different focus, Karsh breezes by most of the important battles here, providing very little detail or analyses of the armies or their leaders.

This book does highlight the brutality and horror of this war, probably more so than other Essential Histories. From a section on the use of children soldiers by Iran to the gassing of Iraqi Kurds by Saddam, there are some hard to believe, incredibly awful accountings here. These include pictures of dead soldiers and even one of a dead Kurdish baby.. Troubling to say the least, and brings the reality of war into focus. Neither side here acted like the "good guys", but more like stubborn and power-hungry psychopaths with no regard for the lives they ruined. All in all, a very sad excerpt from our world's history.

This book serves its role, but lacks in the level of detail on military action that is expected from Essential Histories.

The historical content and political analysis in the book is so much in line with the way the war was perceived by the media and general public in many countries in the Middle East.

On the other hand, the analysis of the strategy and grand strategy of the war on page 84 is erroneous, and contradicts the basic principles of the theory of strategy. This part of the book shows lack of understanding of the theory of strategy. That is, the analysis is in favor of a general military operation, rather than a limited operation, which is strategically incorrect based on the conclusion that Iraq's limited military operation failed. What really makes the war analysis not convincing is the conclusion that a limited war failed and a general war might also have failed if Iraq pursued it. Added to that, the Iranian strategy was not discussed. The analysis also gives contradicting concepts about the reason behind the failure of Iraq's strategy. In one paragraph the reason is said to be Iraq was trying to "bite off more than it could chew", and in another paragraph the failure of Iraq's strategy was because Iraq "assigned to its military forces tasks which were too limited".

In analyzing any offensive, the author criticized the army that failed to achieve its goals and the army that succeeded by saying it could have achieved more. This type of analysis is the theme of the strategic analysis in the book.

The "Essential Histories" series from Osprey could easily be compared to the Cliff Notes series. They'll give you a nice introduction to a topic you are not familiar with, but no real depth. Most volumns are under 100 pages; therefore, don't expect many "man in the trenches" stories.

This volumn is a nice introduction to a recent war, and presented a bit better than most in the series.

I bought this book when it first came out before the current occupation of Iraq. Not only does it help explain some of the current situations now faced in Iraq, but it is perhaps one of the best Essential Histories written. Explaining in depth in the reasons for the war, and up to the use of childern by Iran in suicide offensives, the author is able to keep the reader interested and informed without overwhelming one with information.

Osprey shows that one of its many talents is covering obscure wars (in this case for those of us in the west) for those who want a deeper understanding of how such seemingly unheard of conflicts affect the modern world.