Iraq fought it as mainly a defensive war in what really was a "non-war". Iraq put out millions of land mines and then supplimented the mines with thousands of machine gun batterys in sand bag defenses. Iran sent (basically) high school kids with little or no training into the "holy war" to run into the minefields, get blown up and machine gunned--lather-rinse repeat ad infinitum until they realized it was futile. The US did little to arm Saddam, who they already knew at that time was no better than the Iahtollahs in Iran fueling the fight.
Iraq did little as far as offensive maneuvers except in localized areas where they had intel that told them the Iranians might be planning an offensive themselves. Iraq got most of it's tanks and weaponry from the then-Soviet Union. Many of those 80's era tanks and jets were falling apart during the first gulf war--and most of the tanks were used as dug-in defensive positions in the second gulf war. Some Iraqi pilots upped their birds and defected to Iran in the first gulf war.
The US DID fund weapons for the Mujahadin in Afghanistan against the Soviets.
Iran has been strutting and sabre-rattling the last couple of years for a good reason. There are US and coalition forces on both the Iraq and Afghan borders. If the US forces wanted, Iran would be in a 2 front war from the word go. They are scared excrementless and their sham leader Achmaattentionpotato is getting his people fired up. Getting on the world stage and saying he's going to nuke Isreal isn't all that smart either. If you look back in history since the 50's, countries that messed with Isreal ended up on the short end of the stick.
ROX
Iraq was forced into a defensive war because their initial offensive to capture the disputed waterway was eventually beaten back by the Iranians. The Iraqi army was pushed back into Iraq that for a time Basra was under real threat of falling to the Iranians. Iraq was finally able to stabilize the front pretty much (reminiscent of WW1 trench warfare) behind a series of built of defenses (mass sand berm walls, like the ones they build during the First Gulf War) and were able to beat back the mass zerg rushes of the Iranians.
We were also training some elite units of the Republican Guards in guerrilla warfare because the US military believed there was a real chance of Iraq falling to the Iranians. So they shipped these units off to the US were they were trained by Green Berets.
US support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War consisted of several billions dollars worth of economic aid, sale of dual-use technology, non-U.S. origin weaponry, military intelligence, special operations training and in some cases direct military operations such asOperations Eager Glacier, Earnest Will, and Prime Chance. These operations were not only to ensure unrestricted shipping in the Gulf but to also ensure Iraq's economic survival.
ack-ack
