Who actually won the Iran Iraq War?

Quick summary: Iraq invades Iran, expecting quick victory. plucky Iranians fight back. after years of gruelling warfare Iranians recover lost territory. Iranians reject compromise peace, demanding the overthrow of Iraqi regime. Iranians invade bits of southern Iran. then Iraqi counteroffensive recaptures their lost territory, and everyone decides to stop.

I'm not sure, but I think both sides might still hold POWs from the war.... hang on, there is no Iraq anymore, does that mean Bushi is holding Iranian POWs?

Iran suffered more casualties because at the time their military was much less advanced and they relied on wave after wave of sacrificial draftees as their trump card. It's really horrifying.

One additonal note is that Iraq invaded when they did because they expected to take advantage of post-revolutionary chaos. Which they did, for a time. Although the part of Iran they occupied was fairly barren, I believe it did contain some oil fields which b/c of the war were rarely if ever exploited.

Most of the schoolkids seem pretty disinterested, but still you can see militarism at its basest level.

It will be interesting to see who will actually win Gulf War II.

Perhaps was the real 'winner' the USA . Hostile to revolutionary Iran, officially supportive/privately wary of Saddam there is evidence Washington covertly armed both sides.

"We wanted to avoid victory by both sides," a Reagan official told the New York Times. Kissinger: "I hope they kill each other" and "too bad they both can't lose."

whichever side had the most tea-loving cats, of course!

What a bloody mess. Although the most horrifying sentence in that article comes when they're running the casulty figures for Europe in WWI:

France suffered over 1,300,000 deaths and over 4,200,000 wounded. The percentages of pre-war population killed or wounded were 9% of Germany, 11% of France, and 8% of Great Britain.

One of my very favorite films, Les vampires, was shot in an almost-deserted Paris at the very height of that war, and it's quite amazing to think that at that very moment France was undergoing an attrition that would eventually cost it a TENTH of its population.

The world is a truly horrible place, often enough.

sorry

a tenth killed or wounded... not a tenth killed. OK, so some of those wounded would have been crippled and maimed and stuff, but not all of them.

still I take your point.

I gather that in Iran they have incredibly garish monuments commemorating the war dead in the Iran Iraq war. And a fountain of blood. and a wax work museum with loads of dead Iranian soldier waxworks for you to look at.