Why couldn't Iran defeat the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war? Doesn't Iraq have like four times as much people...

Why couldn't Iran defeat the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war? Doesn't Iraq have like four times as much people? Also Iran has Indo-European Aryan blood while the Iraqis are dirty semites.

Iraq also had both sides of the Cold War supporting it.

Why couldn't Germany defeat Britain in the early stages of WW2? Weren't they supposed to be ubermensch with the blood of Aryans while the Brits were filthy anglos?

The Iranian troops were as motivated as WWII Japanese troops, whereas the Iraqis were your typical, shitty, unmotivated Arab military. Saddam had many luxuries for his troops to raise their morale, but that didn’t increase their fighting ability.
Also, the Iranians, although they started out with less state-of-the-art technology than Iraq, were much better trained and knew how to properly maintain what planes, tanks, helicopters, etc. they did have.

But the question is why couldn't the Iranians defeat the Iraqis, not the other way round. The war ended in stale mate eventhough Iran with 4x times as much population and more motivation as you said, should have totally obliterated the Iraqis

They just went thorough a revolution, politically they're unstable, this affects their military effectiveness
Most of their air force are still loyal to the Shah for instance, but they still join up the fight anyway,: there's alot of distrust going on

If a british infantryman is kept out of bayonet range, his low morale and cowardice are irrelevant: he'll shoot and shoot and shoot until he's dead or his enemy is.
The iraqi's, as a cowardly army but with good discipline, were partial to massed armoured columns. When space opened up for them to practice such, they were in their own, they legitimately did very well.

They only had three times the population of Iran, fyi. The reason they weren’t able to push forward is because they, like the Iraqis, had almost exhausted their heavy military hardware, and advancing with infantry alone, into a foreign country, is extremely costly, and Iran had already lost many lives.
Probably the main reason the Iranians didn’t want to invade Iraq was because almost the entire world was against them, including the US, the USSR, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. They were worried that if they advanced into Iraq, outside countries would have a valid casus belli to get directly involved and obliterate Iran.

Because they didn't realize war wasn't a video game, and throwing mobs of infantry at the other guy isn't as lethal as the Generals AK mob.

This is without question the main factor. Pic related is also relevant.

the Soviets pumped a shit ton of support into the Iraqi forces

The iraqis bribed their emperor so they had to wait to overtthrow him before they could start an offensive because he wouldn't allow it. The new government wasn't very good at war, but the iraqis weren't either, and using child-suicide bombers will make God hate you and cause you to lose a lot of people in the war.

>. The war ended in stale mate eventhough Iran with 4x times as much population and more motivation as you said, should have totally obliterated the Iraqis

As it turns out, Human Wave attacks are most of the time not terrible effective against ""well"" prepared defenses

There was a truly massive disparity in firepower in favor of Iraq. I think these quotes from p. 186-188 "Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991", dealing with the Iraqi Army's best divisions and their initial invasion of Iran, are relevant here:

>Iraq had deployed 2,750 tanks, 1,400 artillery pieces, 4,000 APCs, and 340 fighter-bombers [for the invasion of Khuzestan]. Against this, Iran could muster probably no more than 500 operation tanks, 300 operation artillery pieces, and less than 100 operable aircraft. Iran had close to 100,000 troops in the Revolutionary Guards Corps, but at the time these were little more than militant students and street thugs who had no military training. Roughly one quarter of Iran's army was tied down fighting a Kurdish revolt, and Iran had only two badly depleted divisions, two equally reduced brigades, and some lightly-armed security forces to contend with the nine well-armed divisions that Iraq had committed to the invasion.

>The local balance of forces in Khuezestan was even more favorable to the Iraqis. The 92nd armored division was the only major Iranian formation in that area, and it took several days before it could deploy company-sized formations, much less the entire division. Otherwise, the Iraqis faced small platoon- and company-sized elements from the Iranian Army, Revolutionary Guards, and gendarmerie fighting mostly with small arms and without any central direction. Most of the Iranian forces did not even try to delay the Iraqi invasion, retreating to cities and other defensible positions. Nevertheless, two weeks into the campaign, the deepest Iraqi penetration was only 65 kilometers into Iran, and in most sectors the Iraqis had gone no further than 20-30 kilometers.

Israel backed Iran

From page 3:
>In every battle the Iraqis were able to bring enormous firepower to bear against the outgunned Iranians. Despite this advantage, Iraq's invasion of southwestern Iran did little damage to the disorganized and demoralized Iranian military, nor did Baghdad conquer anything of military or economic value in 3 months of unimpeded defenses. By the end of the war, Iraqi forces not only enjoyed a very sizable advantage in numbers of equipment but also possessed an equivalent edge in the sophistication of their weaponry. For instance, Iraqi forces deployed nearly 5,000 tanks compared to the less than 1,000 tanks Iran could muster- and most of the Iraqi tanks that saw the brunt of the fighting were advanced T-72s and T-62s, while the Iranians were mostly equipped with miserable Chinese Type-59s. Whereas the Iraqi Air Force had nearly 700 combat aircraft, including new French Mirages and Soviet MiG-29s, the Iranians had less than 100 flyable U.S. F-14s, F-4s, and F-5s, few of which were fully functional as a result of the US arms embargo. Still, Iraq was able to eke out a win in 1988 only by resorting to liberal doses of chemical warfare and creating local force ratios of 20- or even 30-to-1 in tanks, troops, and guns.

they feared the iraqi warrior

Not even a bong but
>british infantry
>low morale
>cowardice
>iraqi troops
>>>>>>>disciplined

I've never seen an iraqi soldier capable of either pouring piss out of a boot with the instructions on the heel or capable of doing anything he doesn't want to do for more than 3 seconds.

t. former burger soldier

Iran had undergone a revolution.
Many of it's officers (not the generals since those were probably the shah's buddies, but the NCO's the captains, etc. some of which might've supported the revolution when it was unclear what direction it would go) were purged.

it was cut off from many of the nations that would've otherwise supplied it's military with food, uniforms, ammunition, weapons, etc.

it's Tomcats were crippled thanks to US maintenance crews basically sabotaging or attempting to sabotage shit when leaving the country.

Germans thought the brits where the same ethnically. They saw the war with the UK as one between misguided brothers. British POW tended to be treated well and hitler origimally wanted them to be allies. Same applies with scandinavia, netherlands etc

Iran gained momentum and the tide turned against Iraq in the late 80s, at which point the USA intervened. US battlegroups attacked Iranian oil rigs and container ships in Operation Praying Mantis in an attempt to hasten the end of the war by forcing Iran to the negotiating table. It worked. An unintended by-product of this American intervention was the shoot-down of an Iranian airliner by the US Navy, killing hundreds of innocent civilians. This incident is nearly forgotten in the US....but not in Iran.

Tl;dr Iran was winning the war when the USA intervened.

Its part of the reason but not as simple.

The core problem was that both armies were unable to overcome their structural and doctrin issues.

Iraq essentially employed a painfully slow blow EVERYTHING to bits tactic that made them so unflexible that armoured regiments were encircled by infantry.

Iran meanwhile relied very heavily on large scale Infantry attacks to break the enemy lines. The valuable Mobile units where then used to exploit the gaps.

Against defending Iraqis this failed because the Iraqi engineers were actually quite skillfull and their defensive systems became more and more elaborate. Iran meanwhile had no way of acquiring enough war material to break such elaborate defensive systems. As a result they were essentially stuck with charging head on into the enemy trenches. They Iranians hoped that a combination of revolutionary fervor and Iraqi exhaustion would eventually lead to an Iraqi collapse.

>attack a country under going a political, economic, and military revolution
>have every major power in the West supporting you
>still end up getting your asses kicked by the end of the day
>Arabs
Not even once.

What era are you referring to, Walt? Because the French mixed line and column formation of the Napoleonic wars was developed to keep green conscripts from routing, as was their reliance on the attack column more generally.

Its on the aggressor to win the war they instigate, not the defender. So the question stands, why couldn't the Iraqis, with almost the entire western world supporting, funding, and augmenting their military, win a battle against a nation that was undergoing a complete societal crisis at the time? Arab incompetence? Iraqi overconfidence?

Different user, but a mixture of both. The Iranians were utterly fanatical due to the Iranian leadership combining Iranian nationalism with a fiery interpretation of Shia Islam. The Iraqis expected that large armored formations would be able to quickly break Iranian morale through breakthroughs, this did not happen in most cases. In most cases the Iranians could simply throw more men into the fray until the local Iraqi leadership would begin to fracture enough that the Iraqi attack would be stalled. Furthermore, the Iranians were able to still launch strong attacks by husbanding what few assets they had in concentrated assaults. The Iranians would throw in IRGC Basij (militia/paramilitary) and Pasdaran (IRGC regulars) at Iraqi positions until they achieved a breach in the Iraqi lines. If this was successfull, Artesh (regular Iranian military) would try and exploit the breach with mechanized and armor units. In this way the Iranians could mitigate their vehicle shortage.

They had just come out of the revolution and were pretty much fucking useless.

Iran started it, it wasnt iraq, in fact iraq supported the shah and was against islamism

>Human Wave attacks
stop this fucking meme already, this did not existed since WW1

Wut. In 1988 the Iranian Frontline was collapsing.

This whole thing had a distinct WW1 feeling club m8. Large scale offensives that lacked the mobility to seriously use breakthrougs, massive defensive systems, huge casualties for the attackers etc.

The crucial difference is that both sides were unable to domestically produce modern weaponry so access to the international arms markets was crucial.

attack without the vehicle support isnt synonym to human wave attack senpai

Because Iran will forever be destined to be the bitch of the Arab world.

>Iran started it
Wrong, retard.

Iraq was so laughably incompetent that other Arab militaries shit all over them. I once found a paper by an Egyptian officer explaining this using Israel. Basically, getting their shit pushed in over and over by Jews forced other Arab nations to sit down and seriously think what they were doing wrong regularly, while Iraq was off diddling itself in the corner not paying attention. When he rips into Saddam, it's not
>Egypt would do this instead
but rather
>Israel would do this instead

He can shit on Iraq all he wants, Egypt was largely no better in any of their wars and in many ways were worse.

British infantry circa napoleon. I really should have made that distinction. Obviously, that has no bearing on their modern performance. The pre-napoleonic british army wasn't looked at very favourably by society in general, really unfairly so, which had quite the impact on its quality. I'm not calling them cowards because the british are inherently cowardly, they're not, but because british society and its military structure produced such. It's hard to be a professional soldier when everyone hates professional soldiers, and it gives one few reasons to join beyond a desperate need for an income and few reasons to fight beyond fear of a flogging.
It's early modern discipline, competence but not necessarily spirit, like the army of Frederick II. You can ask an Iraqi to operate hardware and be reasonably assured that he'll do it, especially compared to an iranian. He'll hold the line without breaking, so long as adequately supplied and doesn't think he's going to be run through, but he ain't gonna attack with any speed, he won't charge unless there's at least an inch of rolled steel between him and who he's charging at, hence their preference toward soviet doctrine. We saw a repeat of that character in the current ISIS conflict, both with their disastrous rout at the start and their current slow and safe advance back into lost territory.