The Iran-Iraq War: 1980-1988 (Karsh)

Efraim Karsh's military and political history of the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq War, published by Osprey in its Essential Histories series in 2002. Karsh, a historian of the modern Middle East, situates the war's origin in Saddam Hussein's territorial ambitions over the Shatt al-Arab waterway and his calculation that Iran's post revolutionary government was militarily weak, treating the conflict as fundamentally an interstate war over territory and regional power rather than a sectarian or religious one, and pointing to Iraq's own Shia-majority population's continued loyalty to the Iraqi state as evidence against a straightforward sectarian reading. Its strength is a clear campaign level military narrative grounded in the war's territorial origins. Its limit is a short, single volume format that treats Iran's own revolutionary ideology and war aims in less depth than a dedicated study of the Islamic Republic would.