In very brief compass Karsh manages to provide an immensely useful survey of the war between Iraq and Iran. Noteworthy conclusions include: Although Iraq picked the right moment to go to war with Iran from the military vantage point, the two sides were qualitatively equal when hostilities began in September 1980. The Iraqi forces failed to gain a quick victory because President Saddam Husayn stopped them within a few days, long before they had exhausted their momentum. Iraq's strategy of pursuing a limited war could not have worked; Baghdad "should either have avoided the war completely or resorted to a general war strategy." On either side, decisive victory on the battlefield occurred only when "a relatively satisfactory pattern of combined-arms operations" had been achieved.
Karsh draws two major operational lessons from the war. First, "even non-conventional wars are won or lost by conventional means"; revolutionary zeal cannot substitute for competent leadership. Iranian human-wave tactics, for example, only worked when joined with a combined-arms operation. Second, forces in the Third World find offensive operations even more difficult than do their Western and Soviet counterparts; they should lean to wars of attrition and avoid wars of maneuver.
