AHC and WI: Iran-Iraq War Ends Early

With a PoD in the 1982 course of the Iran-Iraq War*, how can said war end by 1984? Who "wins" in this scenario and what are the effects?

There's a lot to work within the OP -- Khorramshahr, Basra, an attempt on Hussein's life -- so what works?

*that is, a PoD in 1982 having to do with the war, and happening in Iran or Iraq -- no just killing Reagan or anything
 
My usual threadkilling reply

The only time Iraq had a ghost of a chance of winning the war was in 1980. Afterwards, no element of surprise, no clue how to get it done, and nowhere near enough resources to pull it off, even with generous credit at the international arms bazaar to buy just enough to make Iran's life hell without handing them any war-winners as OTL.

Iran OTOH had nowhere the credit or access to decent mid-range weaponry as Iraq and gutted their US-trained officer and NCO corps, and repudiated the folks that made and supplied their best gear leaving them even more boned. It's a startling surprise that they managed NOT to lose.

They did have lots of bodies and managed to drown the Iraqis in rivers of little boys' blood to get exactly what they had when the war started, only less hundreds of thousands of men, billions of dollars poorer, and absolutely zero foreign sympathy or rebuilding aid.

About the only PODs that could've shortened the war were:


  • (A) Iran's revolution managed to settle into a bourgeois, bazaari
    period where they kept the armed forces more or less intact, renegotiated terms with the foreign oil companies, and didn't threaten the Gulf Oil states by preaching Islamic revolution to their restive Shi'a populations. SH would never have dared taking on an intact, effective Iranian army with access to Western resupply. He knew that was an invitation to Iranian tanks in Baghdad in six weeks and his head on a pike after an internal coup.

  • (B) Saddam Hussein got shut down hard by the UN, Arab League, etc. If the Gulf Oil states never opened their checkbooks funding Iraq, the war would've been over in a few weeks with a status quo antebellum peace, only Iraq would get saddled with reparations to Iran at UN gunpoint.
The central tragedy of the war is that nobody gave a sh** about either side (it was widely considered a bastard vs bastard fight) and many fervently hoped they'd both lose and they did, big time, economically and socially.
Understandably, nobody at the time really had the stomach to bring Iraq to heel or support Iran with enough to kick Iraq's a**back across the Shatt-al-Arab.
The Soviets were busy entrenching themselves into a quagmire in Afghanistan. The US was having a merry time supplying the mujahedeen giving the Sovs a black eye and pissed about the hostage crisis but hadn't quite gotten the RDF off the ground that could intervene. Even then it took massive sealift and six months to get more than a tripwire force to Saudi in Desert Storm anyway eleven years later.
 
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