Iraq Timeline: Part V: "The Iran-Iraq War"

1979 AD
Saddam Hussein forces Ba''athist president Al-Bakr into retirement and assumes the mantle of the presidency. As part of his initial rise to power, Saddam has twenty-one members of his own Regional Command Council executed as "traitors," including the deputy prime minister and other prominent government officials who stood in the way of his personal ambitions for power. Over his decades-long rule over Iraq, Saddam would take part in several genocidal campaigns, launch an oppressive secret service effort to keep all his citizens too terrified to criticize the government, initiate several wars and flood Iraq with images of himself, in the form of portraits and elaborate works of art. Though seeing himself as a modern Saladin, the heroic Islamic-Arab defender of the Middle East during the Crusades, Saddam''s rule would be marked by terror, war and racism against non-Arabs.

1980 AD
Disputing the strategic territory of the Shatt al-Arab, Iran and Iraq go to war. Saddam hopes to acquire the strategic territory of the Shatt al-Arab, along with several border areas and Gulf islands, which he believes will give him control over the entire Persian Gulf. [2] Iran has also been supporting the northern Kurds and the southern Iraqi Shia in their revolts against the Ba''ath regime. Saddam hopes to crush the Iranian Shah in order to destabilize the revolutions within his own country. Erroneously, the Iraqi military imagines that it can make quick work of Iran, which is bogged down amidst revolts from its own internal dissenters. But Baghdad is wrong-the Iran-Iraq war will last eight years and neither side will emerge victorious.

1981 AD
The Israeli military, worried by Iraq''s potential to acquire nuclear capabilities, bomb a nuclear reactor outside of Baghdad.

1982 AD Within the period of a few months, several assassination attempts are made against Saddam Hussein by local insurgents. In Iran an "Army of Twenty Million" children-boys around the age of twelve-are sent across the minefields of the Iran-Iraqi border to clear the way for the Iranian military.[3]

1984 AD
The U.S., under President Reagan, restores diplomatic ties with Iraq. Fearful of the Islamic regime in Iran, the U.S. administration is supportive of Iraq''s war efforts. According to Sandra Mackey: "Official American help to Saddam Hussein''s multifaceted military machine came through the back door of intelligence. Illicit aid came by the way of deadly pathogens purchased from U.S. biological firms and perhaps $500 million in dual-use imports diverted by Iraq to the military sector." In other words, some of the "weapons of mass destruction" belonging to the Iraqi regime that later U.S. administrations would criticize were, in fact, originally given to Iraq by the United States. Washington also eventually provides Iraqi intelligence with reconnaissance photographs that aid in pinpointing Iranian missile targets. [4]

1987 AD
To suppress the Kurdish rebellion in Northern Iraq, Saddam''s military uses chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians, killing 238 Kurds in a single attack with poisonous gas. They also initiate a village-to-village campaign of terror, in which Kurdish civilians are separated into groups, sending children, women and the elderly into camps (where many die from starvation and disease) as men are trucked off and are presumably lined up before a firing squad, shot and buried in a secret mass grave.

1988 AD
The Iraqi army starts an intensive four-month bombing campaign of Tehran, Iran''s capital. As a result, Iran accepts U.N. Resolution 598 and a cease-fire is established between the secular Iraqi Ba''athist state and the Iranian Islamic Republic. According to scholar Sandra Mackey, by the end of the conflict the Iran-Iraq war "killed at least a million people, wounded another 2 million, engaged almost 40 percent of the adult male populations of both countries and cost roughly $1,190 billion in economic terms." [5] The war also leaves Saddam with a debt of 70 to 80 billion dollars, an economic reality that will have far-reaching consequences in the years to come.