Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Kallie Szczepanski. History Expert. Kallie Szczepanski is a history teacher specializing in Asian history and culture. She has taught at the high school and university levels in the U. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Szczepanski, Kallie. Impacts of the Iraq War on the Middle East.
National Security Definition and Examples. Forty years ago, a major war between Iran and Iraq set the stage for far-reaching and lasting regional dynamics. It was an existential battle for the Iranian leadership, coming just one year after the revolution in Iran.
The war claimed at least one million lives. The legacies of the war are numerous. In the decades since, Iran has developed a marked capacity to mobilize Shiite communities across the region, penetrating previously impervious political and ideological spaces, particularly in Iraq but also in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.
Moreover, it was in Iraq, during the formative stages of the war, that the Islamic Republic first started to implement a proxy network, one that has expanded region-wide particularly in Syria and Yemen in recent years. Tehran extended its support to other opposition groups, like the Kurds, but it was particularly focused on spurring a Shiite insurgency campaign within Iraq, encouraging mass defections from the Iraqi military, and trying to trigger an uprising among the majority-Shiite population.
That was to no avail. The opposition groups and fighters Iran backed were immensely divided and lacked battlefield experience or discipline. The international community labeled them fundamentalist Shiite Islamist terrorists, and the Baath regime had an impressive capacity to repress and co-opt, as well as insulate its armed forces from mass defections.
The vast majority of Shiite personnel within the Iraqi army — along with Sunnis — fought loyally during the war. This was not out of loyalty to the regime, necessarily, but to prevent Iraq from becoming colonized by Iran or from following in its theocratic footsteps. Despite the best efforts of Iran and its Iraqi partners — who even recruited and mobilized Iraqi military defectors and prisoners of war to establish the Badr Brigade militia — they did not come remotely close to overthrowing the Baath regime.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein consolidated his rule of the Baath Party in a bloody putsch that eliminated possible competitors. It was also the year that the shah and his family were forced into exile and the Iranian revolution installed a theocratic state led by Khomeini.
Following the abduction of 52 American hostages in the U. Embassy in Tehran, the country found itself largely isolated internationally. The hostages were released after days. From that time on the relationship between the two countries was defined by Iraq's Baathist secular Sunni government versus Iran's theocratic Shiite one, he says, although several events paved the way to hostilities breaking out.
In , an Iran-backed militant Shiite group tried to kill Iraq's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and was suspected of trying to kill the minister of culture and information. The response was swift and ruthless: more than 40, Shiites of Iranian origin were deported. During this time, Saddam tried and failed to sever the close ties between the religious hubs of Najaf and Karballah in Iraq and Qom in Iran. Iran-Iraq war Tensions soon spilled over into outright war when Saddam invaded Iran in September Many also see the war as yet another phase in an ancient struggle between the Persians and Arabs.
Saddam had reason to feel confident that the war would be short and Iraq victorious — his intelligence services reported that the Imperial Iranian Army was in shambles after most of its highest ranking officers were executed. It also lacked parts for its American-made weapons and equipment. The West also supported Saddam, knowing that the war would preoccupy the Iranians from exporting their revolution elsewhere in the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia.
Saddam had something else on its side: In , the U. It is widely believed that these were eventually used on Iraqi Kurds and Iranian border towns. The new Iranian regime saw the war as a test to the government, which helped mobilize society.
The Iran-Contra Affair was a secret U. The controversial deal—and the ensuing political On November 4, , a group of Iranian students stormed the U. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion and occupation of neighboring Kuwait in early August Alarmed by these actions, fellow Arab powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt called on the United States and other Western nations to intervene.
Hussein defied United Following years of diplomatic friction and skirmishes between Israel and its neighbors, Israel Defense Forces launched preemptive air strikes that The United States and Iran have never formally been at war, but tensions between the two countries have persisted for decades. Below is an overview of the long-running conflict between Iran and the United States—and measures taken economic and otherwise in the wake of flare On October 6, , hoping to win back territory lost to Israel during the third Arab-Israeli war, in , Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a coordinated attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Taking the Israeli Defense Forces by For several decades, the U. But ironically, the reason Iran has the technology to build these weapons in the first place is because the U.
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