BLOODY STALEMATE
In the early 1980s, many Western engineering and building contractors working in Iraq witnessed from the leisurely space of their hotel balconies a spectacle they would never forget. At night, the entire horizon was suddenly scorched and illuminated, a migraine-like strobing produced by the unceasing flashes of artillery fire and explosions, accompanied by an ominous chest-bass rumble. This continued for hours. When morning came, a long, bedraggled line of civilian vehicles would snake back into town, coffins strapped to their roofs, the recent war-dead inside. The cycle was repeated night after night.
The contractors and other foreigners were shocked witnesses to the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), a conflict that despite its years of horror is strangely sidelined in modern Western military history. Sandwiched between the Vietnam War (1965–1975) and the Gulf War (1990–1991) and roughly coterminous with the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989), the Iran–Iraq War has been largely overshadowed by conflicts that play more strongly in Western consciousness. Yet the scale of the Iran–Iraq War was dizzying: eight years of World War II–style armor, artillery, and infantry battles accentuated by chemical weapons attacks, burning cities, and blazing oil tankers. The casualties from this war are estimated at anywhere between one million and two million.
The casualties from this war are estimated at anywhere between one and two million.
The Iran–Iraq War therefore demands our attention, not least for its potential to hold a unique position in the world’s military narrative. Some historians and strategists have defined the Iran–Iraq War as the last conventional war in history. That is a bold claim in an age that has been packed with conflict since 1988, so it deserves testing. But we can raise the possibility that the Iran–Iraq War is not only the last conventional war to date but could also be the last conventional war ever.
We should first establish our definition of conventional warfare. Typically, conventional warfare is fought between nation-states by conventional military means—that is, with small arms, artillery, armor, combat aircraft, and warships, and not by nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The military effort is primarily directed at destroying the operational capability of the opposing army. Conventional warfare is usually compared to counterinsurgency, which, as well as being tactically dissimilar to open warfare, is typically fought within state boundaries. In conventional warfare, states lock horns on the
