This conflict was something that had been brewing for centuries. Modern-day Iraq and Iran have conflicting interests and border and control disputes that date back to the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Persian Empire under the Safavids (Hiro, 1991). Most of this war was fought by Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. Both political leaders were fighting to protect what they thought was theirs and what they wanted to take from the other side. Iran's main arguments in support of the conflict were the capture of Iraqi oil fields, thus giving them barter chips to secure the heavy firepower that Iraq had and Iran desperately needed. , or to attack the Iraqi artillery that had continuously bombarded the Iranian civilian area since the beginning of the war (Hiro, 1991). Option two became the main strategy due to the high emotionality of Iranian leaders, concerns that national unity would disintegrate if a ceasefire was adopted, and the fact that oil was now a commodity and revenue they were starting to grow rapidly. . Iran showed its true nature by showing contempt for the international community's request to maintain a ceasefire, and at the beginning of Ramadan, it started the offensive on the southern border changing its status from invaded to invader (Hiro, 1991). Saddam Hussein chose the war strategy that the Germans made famous, the blitzkrieg. The Iraqi army devastated the areas of Iran that it conquered. They left behind a trail of destruction, an example being the 356 villages inhabited by Arabs in the province of Khuzestan transformed into piles of ash completely eviscerated from the map (McCuen, 1987). Despite all the efforts made by the Iraqi army, the Iranian army... middle of paper... feeds itself or its family. The resources used could have helped gain political allies, stop the war under the assumption that people could actually talk about their problems, and perhaps even keep Iran and Iraq from tearing each other to shreds and leaving nothing on either side of the barrier. Shazly, N. E. (1998). The Gulf Tanker War: The Maritime Duel Between Iran and Iraq. New York: St. Martin's Press. Hiro, D. (2002). Iraq: in the eye of the storm. New York, NY: Thunder's Mouth Press.Hiro, D. (1991). The longest war: the Iran-Iraq military conflict. Routledge.Hunt, C. (2005). The history of Iraq. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.McCuen, G. E. (1987). Iran-Iraq War. Hudson, WI: Gary E. McCuen.Reuters. (2003). Saddam Iraq. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.Roskin, M. G. (2010). Political Science: An Introduction (11th ed.). Pearson Education.