Very detailed history of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988. Covers the military, economic, diplomatic, & political aspects of the war in great detail . A great guide to understanding the international politics of the 1980s, & full of surprises. Explores the ways the war connected to other conflicts & events, such as Lebanese hostage taking, terrorist attacks in France, Iran-Contra, the Iranian Revolution, & 1980s energy prices. Depicts the Iranian leadership as at once trying desperately to pursue every means to defeat Iraq (including terrorist attacks against Iraq's arms suppliers), while simultaneously attempting to prolong the war in a cynical effort to consolidate the Islamic Revolution. The cynicism of all the players (including the economic & military supporters of Iran & Iraq) involved is a major theme. The level that the Iran-Iraq war was completely insustained by outside military & economic support was surprising to me. Iraq's war effort especially was completely propped up by lavish loans from the Gulf Monarchies, which, along with Iraq's oil sales, allowed Iraq to purchase 80 billion 1988 dollars worth of weapons. I was also surprised that the cheap energy of the late 80s was engineered by the oil producing Gulf Monarchies with the encouragement of the USA for the purposes of damaging the economies of Iran & the USSR. The book did not answer explicitly the reasoning behind why the world military and economic powers more or less openly supported Iraq, while attempting to isolate Iran (I think the answer is partly that Iran was seen after a certain point as trying to prolong the war, & also more resistant to outside aid with strings attached). This book also has a lot about the internal politics of Iran & Iraq. I was surprised (again) by the fact that Saddam Hussein kept Nixon White House-style recordings of all of his conversations, & that this trove of audio recordings was captured by the Americans to be later used as a major source for Pierre Razoux's magisterial tome. This book is also a good illustration of the balance any regime must make between maintaining a Military that is powerful enough to defeat external threats or internal opponents of the regime, but not so powerful that it can unseat or control the regime. The Appendices & notes at the end are worthwhile & handy. For instance, when I wondered how many armored vehicles were destroyed during the conflict, I could just look in Appendix I. However, I thought the notes coverage of the text was sometimes a little thin. For instance, the part about the child soldiers is controversial, and many of the details are shocking & gruesome beyond belief (e.g. the order for 1 million plastic keys to heaven), so I expected more sources backing it up (on the other hand, no amount of evidence would convince Iranian regime apologists who would take issue with the account). 

The Iran-Iraq War was translated from French, which may explain some of the odd & amusing word choices that crop up throughout this book. e.g.,“cohabitation” for “coalition government”, “authorities” for “government” (or sometimes “military leadership”), & “parallel market” for “black market” (or maybe “gray market”). One of my favorite word usages is “layout”, which is used to mean defenses & deployed forces, or forces deployed for an offensive, for either a front or the entire conflict. Another good one is the use of “precious” used as a modifier describing anything valuable such as “precious oil infrastructure”, “precious military hardware”, & “Precious hard currency reserves”. In some chapters, “precious” appeared on almost every page!