In September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, believing the latter to be weakened by the recent revolution and looking to aggrandize Saddam Hussein with territorial conquests. Instead of an easy victory, though, Iran mobilized and was able to push Iraq back to its start line, with heavy losses, by mid-1982, when Saddam Hussein proposed a cease fire on the principle of the status quo ante bellum. This time, Khomeini decided that Iraq had been weakened by their failures against Iran, and ordered Iran to invade Iraq, hoping to overthrow Hussein and make Iraq into an Iranian client state. This proved a significant failure, mobilizing the opposition of most of the rest of the world and eventually bleeding Iran white with losses of both population and materiel. Eventually, after six further years of war, peace was achieved--on essentially the terms Hussein had proposed in 1982. Despite surviving the war, Iraq was also badly damaged by it; the expense of fighting the war had led the Hussein government to rack up significant debts, and that combined with continuing dreams of becoming the dominant power around the Persian Gulf played a role in his invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and, ultimately, his overthrow in 2003.
But suppose that Iran had accepted Hussein’s peace offer in 1982? Suppose that an entire generation of Iranians had not been killed or maimed in human wave attacks, that Iraq had not run up a debt of hundreds of billions of dollars maintaining and building its military, that Iran-Contra and American support for Iraq hadn’t happened? What would be the results?
But suppose that Iran had accepted Hussein’s peace offer in 1982? Suppose that an entire generation of Iranians had not been killed or maimed in human wave attacks, that Iraq had not run up a debt of hundreds of billions of dollars maintaining and building its military, that Iran-Contra and American support for Iraq hadn’t happened? What would be the results?