Oddly enough this started when former actor and state gov. of CA, Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbent Carter in a landslide victory............adn ended when George Bush sr. became President.........................

Iran–Iraq War

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Iran–Iraq War
Part of the Persian Gulf conflicts
Iranian soldier with gas mask in the battlefield
Date 22 September 1980 – 20 August 1988 (7 years, 10 months, 4 weeks and 1 day) Location Iran–Iraq border Result Stalemate ·         Iraqi failure to annex territories on the east bank of the Shatt al-Arab and bolster Arab separatism in the region of Khuzestan ·         Iranian failure to invade and capture Iraqi territory and to topple Saddam Hussein ·         UNSC Resolution 598 Territorial changes Status quo ante bellum; observed by UNIIMOGbased on Security Council Resolution 619
Belligerents
Iran ·          KDP ·          PUK Support: ·          United States (Secret arms) ·          Israel[1](Secret arms) ·          Soviet Union (Secret arms) ·          Brazil ·          Italy ·          Spain ·          Portugal ·          Japan ·          Sweden ·          Pakistan ·          China ·          Syria[2] ·          Libya ·          South Korea ·          North Korea[3] ·         (For other forms of foreign support, seehere)	Iraq ·          MEK Support:[show]
Commanders and leaders
Ruhollah Khomeini Supreme Leader of Iran Abulhassan Banisadr 1st President of Iran Mohammad-Ali Rajai  † 2nd President of Iran Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani Chairman of the Parliament Ali Khamenei 3rd President of Iran[11] Mir-Hossein Mousavi Prime Minister of Iran Mostafa Chamran  † Minister of Defence Mohsen Rezaee IRGC Commander Ali Sayad Shirazi Chief of Staff Massoud Barzani Leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party Jalal Talabani Leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Nawshirwan Mustafa Deputy Secretary General of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim Leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq Abdul Aziz al-Hakim	Saddam Hussein President of Iraq Ali Hassan al-Majid General and Iraqi Intelligence Service head Taha Yassin Ramadan General and Deputy Party Secretary Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri Deputy chairman, Revolutionary Command Council Abid Hamid Mahmud Lieutenant GeneralSalah Aboud Mahmoud General Tariq Aziz Foreign Minister and Revolutionary Command council member Adnan Khairallah Minister of Defence Saddam Kamel Republican Guard Commander Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou Leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan Uday Hussein Son of Saddam Hussein Qusay Hussein Son of Saddam Hussein Maher Abd al-Rashid General Massoud Rajavi President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran Maryam Rajavi co-leader of PMOI
Strength
At the onset of the war: 110,000–150,000 soldiers, 2,100 tanks,[12] 1,000 armoured vehicles, 1072 artillery pieces,[13] 320 aircraft, 750 helicopters After Iraq withdrew from Iran in 1982: 350,000 soldiers, 700 tanks, 2,700 armoured vehicles, 400 artillery pieces, 350 aircraft, 700 helicopters At the end of the war: 900,000 soldiers, 2,500,000 militia, 400 tanks, 800 armoured vehicles, 600 artillery pieces, 60–80 aircraft, 70–90 helicopters	At the onset of the war: 350,000 soldiers, 2,650 tanks, 4,000 armoured vehicles, 800 artillery pieces, 600 aircraft, 350 helicopters After Iraq withdrew from Iran in 1982: 175,000 soldiers, 1,200 tanks, 2,300 armoured vehicles, 400 artillery pieces, 450 aircraft, 180 helicopters At the end of the war: 1,500,000 soldiers,[citation needed] 5,500–6,700 tanks, 8,500–10,000 armoured vehicles, 6,000–12,000 artillery pieces, 1,500 aircraft, 1,000 helicopters
Casualties and losses
123,220–160,000 KIA and 60,711 MIA(Iranian claim)[14][15] 200,000–600,000 killed (other estimates)[14][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] 800,000 killed (Iraqi claim)[14] 320,000–500,000 WIA[17][24][25] 40,000–42,875 POW[24][25] 11,000–16,000 civilian dead[14][15] Economic loss of US$627 billion[14][16]	105,000–375,000 killed[14][24][26][27][28] 400,000 WIA[27] 70,000 POW[17][27] Economic loss of $561 billion[14][16]
100,000+ civilians killed on both sides[29] (not including 182,000 civilians killed in the Al-Anfal Campaign)[30]
¹ The exact number of Iraqi Shia that fought alongside Iran is unknown. The Iraqi political parties SCIRI and Islamic Da'wa Party supported Iran during the war. Iran would sometimes organise divisions of Iraqi POWs to fight against Iraq.

[show] ·         v ·         t ·         e Iran–Iraq War

[show] ·         v ·         t ·         e Persian Gulf Wars

The Iran–Iraq War, also known as the First Persian Gulf War,^{[31][32][33][34][35]} was an armed conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Ba'athist Republic of Iraq lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, making it the 20th century's longest conventional war.^[36][37] It was initially referred to in English as the "Gulf War" prior to the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s.^[38]

The Iran–Iraq War began when Iraq invaded Iran via air and land on 22 September 1980. It followed a long history of border disputes, and was motivated by fears that the Iranian Revolution in 1979 would inspire insurgency among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority as well as Iraq's desire to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state. Although Iraq hoped to take advantage of Iran's revolutionary chaos and attacked without formal warning, they made only limited progress into Iran and were quickly repelled; Iran regained virtually all lost territory by June 1982. For the next six years, Iran was on the offensive.^[39] A number of proxy forces participated in the war, most notably the Iranian Mujahedin-e-Khalq siding with Ba'athist Iraq and Iraqi Kurdish militias of Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan siding with Iran—all suffering a major blow by the end of the conflict.

Despite calls for a ceasefire by the United Nations Security Council, hostilities continued until 20 August 1988. The war finally ended with Resolution 598, a U.N.-brokered ceasefire which was accepted by both sides. At the war's conclusion, it took several weeks for Iranian armed forces to evacuate Iraqi territory to honour pre-war international borders set by the 1975 Algiers Agreement.^[40] The last prisoners of war were exchanged in 2003.^[39][41]

The war cost both sides in lives and economic damage: half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, with an equivalent number of civilians, are believed to have died, with many more injured; however, the war brought neither reparations nor changes in borders. The conflict has been compared to World War I^[42]:171in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across trenches, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, human wave attacks across a no-man's land