The Iran-Iraq War: The Politics of Aggression

One should not be surprised that a conference held in Tehran in 1988 on the topic of the Iran-Iraq war would result in a stark indictment of Iraqi aggression. What is more surprising is that this collection of essays, many written by Western scholars and Iranians residing in the West, comes close to meeting scholarly standards of discourse. Many of the papers succeed in capturing the Iranian sense of victimization, of having the costly eight-year war imposed on them by Saddam Hussein. Needless to say, there are Iraqi and Arab sides of the story that are not told here, but this collection is at least a start in sketching one side of the story that had a devastating impact on the Middle East and set the stage for Iraq's subsequent aggression against Kuwait.