Geopolitical Origins of the Iran-Iraq War

Abstract

The origins of the Iran-Iraq war are geopolitical in two essential ways. Territorial issues, including the Shatt al-Arab boundary and five other zones, were a direct cause of contention. Nonterritorial conflicts also had key roles, but territory has been the measure in assessing their outcomes. Control of disputed land is the primary means of demonstrating prevailing power. T HE Iran-Iraq war, which began in September 1980, has become the bloodiest and most destructive military conflict since World War II. The estimated toll includes more than one million dead, one million refugees, and thousands of prisoners of war. The war costs each combatant country as much as $1 billion monthly, and the total cost to date may exceed $300 billion.' The once prosperous economies of Iran and Iraq are seriously crippled, and full recovery from war damage will probably take more than a decade. The possible effects of the war on both regional stability and international security are understood, but the origins of the conflict are not. In the eight years since the outbreak of hostilities, attacks on oil shipments in the Persian Gulf, the intervention of the United States and other nonregional governments, and the sensational aspects of the conflict have tended to obscure the origins of the war. One group of analysts argues that the primary cause was the dispute about the 105-kilometer-long Shatt al-Arab boundary. Another group contends that this dispute was a pretext for the escalation of hostilities of other sorts, all of which were nonterritorial. Both explanations of the war's origins are inadequate, because they fail to address the full range of causal factors. A geopolitical analysis encompasses virtually all the relevant factors: ones intrinsically territorial like the boundary dispute and those of a different nature. This article first outlines the chronology of the conflict and then examines its underlying causes from a geopolitical perspective.