The Most Powerful Partner in Crime

How the United States took sides in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988
M. Willemse
Pages: 130 pages
Shipping Weight: 210 gram
Published: 07-2008
Publisher: WLP
Language: US
ISBN (softcover) : 9789058503107

Product Description

The First Persian war, better known as the Iran-Iraq war, was one of the bloodiest and most costly armed conflicts of the twentieth century. For many westerners, it was merely a far-away conflict and the region only seemed to catch significant interest when the United States openly flexed their muscles in Operation Desert Storm, to free Kuwait of their evil invader. Suddenly the lies and losses of the devil that was Iraq reached every living room in the Western hemisphere, and the more than a million casualties the longestconventional war of the century had cost were soon forgotten, overshadowed by an armed conflict that somehow seemed more important.

This thesis does not attempt to clarify the reasons why the sudden change of political direction from the United States concerning Iraqoccurred, or which particular American interests were at stake that made them decide to invade Iraq. Nor will the Iran-Iraq war itself be detailed; just the broad strokes where the course of the war influenced Washington’s decisionmaking will be touched upon. In its attempt to lay bare the backbone of what was once America’s stance and policy towards the region, during the Iran-Iraq war to be exact, one cannot help but discern a certain level of hypocrisy. The cynical would note that it is interests and not moral standards that tend to dictate a superpower’s foreign policy and that feigning the opposite would be obscuring the truth.