Forty-four years ago, in September 1980, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein launched a coordinated full-scale ground and air invasion of neighboring Iran, confident his forces would capture the Iranian capital Tehran in a matter of weeks and secure a swift, decisive victory. What followed upended both leaders’ calculations: the conflict dragged on for nearly eight brutal years, claimed the lives of more than one million combatants and civilians, and left vast swathes of infrastructure and territory in ruin. Yet far from being a catastrophic footnote in Middle Eastern history, this devastating war fundamentally reshaped and solidified the Islamic Republic of Iran into the political and military entity it is today, casting a long shadow that continues to define Iran’s actions amid the 2025 US-Israeli military campaign against the country.
The invasion came at a moment of unprecedented chaos for Iran. Just one year prior, the 1979 Islamic Revolution had ousted the Western-backed Shah, a key US and Israeli ally in the region, leaving the country’s new leadership scrambling to consolidate control. The pre-revolutionary Iranian military had fractured in the wake of the uprising, and a fragmented landscape of competing factions – nationalist groups, leftist movements, and moderate religious factions – vied for power against the ultraconservative clerical bloc led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s first supreme leader.
Saddam’s gambit to topple Khomeini’s fragile new regime backfired spectacularly. Rather than weakening clerical rule, the invasion provided a catalyst for Khomeini’s faction to tighten its grip on power, eliminate political rivals, and entrench the core institutions of the Islamic Republic. For opposition figures, the conflict proved a perfect tool for authoritarian consolidation. “For a dictatorial regime, war is the best blessing because any dissenting voice can be silenced under its pretext and the foundations of totalitarianism can be strengthened,” explained Behrouz Farahani, a Paris-based Iranian opposition critic. This framing was explicitly embraced by Khomeini himself: the phrase “War is a blessing,” attributed to the supreme leader, was painted as graffiti on walls across Iranian cities throughout the conflict.
When the war finally ended in 1988, Khomeini died just 12 months later, opening the door for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – Iran’s current supreme leader – to consolidate power and launch full-scale national reconstruction. While the original “War is a blessing” graffiti faded from city walls, replaced by slogans from Khamenei, the core lessons the ruling clerical establishment drew from the 1980-1988 war have guided every major political and military decision Iran has made in the decades since.
Most notably, the vast majority of Iran’s most powerful contemporary political and military leaders cut their teeth in the Iran-Iraq War. The slain Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, his successor Esmail Qaani, former senior security official Ali Larijani (assassinated by Israel in March 2025), current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi – who led Iran’s negotiations with the US – and influential parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf all served in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) during the conflict, many remaining in military service for years after the ceasefire before transitioning to civilian politics.
Against the backdrop of the February 2025 US-Israeli invasion of Iran, analysts argue the country’s current strategy is directly shaped by hard-won lessons from the 1980s conflict. The most foundational lesson was the imperative of self-reliance. When Saddam launched his invasion, Iran found itself almost entirely isolated on the international stage: Western powers backed Saddam, and nearly all regional Arab states (with the exceptions of Syria and occasional support from Libya) aligned against Iran. Its post-revolutionary military was in disarray, and it quickly lost control of parts of the oil-rich Khuzestan province. Yet despite the isolation, shortage of weapons, and internal chaos, Iranian forces managed to push Iraqi troops back within roughly a year.
“While Iran was under attack by Iraq, they [the Iranian establishment] realised they were not going to receive any help from the outside, so they had to rely on themselves,” explained Maziar Behrooz, a leading scholar of contemporary Iranian history and author of *Iran at War: Interactions with the Modern World and the Struggle with Imperial Russia*. “The lesson from that war was missile technology, which they reverse-engineered and then improved. Today we see its result, both in Iran’s drone and missile technologies, which have inflicted substantial damage to those who have now attacked Iran.”
A second critical lesson was the value of moving critical military infrastructure underground. In the years after the 1988 ceasefire, Iran built missile and drone production facilities deep inside mountain networks and relocated portions of its nuclear program underground to avoid targeted strikes. Analysts credit this shift, born of the Iran-Iraq war experience, for the failure of US and Israeli efforts to disable Iran’s strike capacity in the current conflict.
This commitment to self-reliance extended far beyond the military, reshaping Iran’s entire political and economic approach. Before the 1979 revolution, Iran was heavily dependent on Western powers, particularly the US, for both military equipment and civilian infrastructure. That dynamic shifted permanently during and after the war. “The establishment realised it had to be independent and rely as much as possible on its own resources,” said Peyman Jafari, an Iranian historian and professor at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “Reliance on their own initiatives and strategising their policies within this framework became of high importance for them in the military, industry, intelligence, and all other fields.”
The war also reshaped how the clerical establishment consolidated domestic power. Just months before the invasion, the 1979 US embassy hostage crisis had already stoked widespread anti-American sentiment among the Iranian public, fueled by decades of resentment over the 1953 CIA-backed coup that restored the Shah to power after he ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. The invasion allowed the new regime to tie together anti-Western sentiment and nationalist mobilization to crush internal opposition. Beginning in 1981, the Khomeini-led government moved rapidly to eliminate rival factions: it cracked down on the main opposition group the People’s Mojahedin Organisation, forced out the country’s first post-revolution president Abolhassan Banisadr, launched military campaigns against Kurdish separatist groups, and dismantled remaining leftist and nationalist factions. This process created a new post-revolutionary social order: while many Iranians supported the new regime, a large share of the population stepped back as bystanders, waiting out the conflict to see which faction would emerge victorious.
This same dynamic is playing out in the 2025 conflict. After the Iranian government violently suppressed nationwide anti-establishment protests in January 2025, the incoming US-Israeli invasion allowed the regime to stoke nationalist sentiment to repair its standing with the public, while also cracking down further on dissent. Executions of imprisoned dissidents have risen, new stricter laws criminalizing “espionage” and “contact with foreign media” have been enacted, and arrests on these charges have become far more widespread.
Beyond domestic consolidation, the Iran-Iraq War created a permanent shift in Iran’s governance structure: after the ceasefire, hundreds of senior and mid-level IRGC commanders transitioned into roles across politics, the economy, cultural institutions, and even sports administration. This process began during the war, but accelerated rapidly after 1988, as battlefield veterans were redirected into building new state institutions. Jafari argues this process was bonded by a shared experience of “army brotherhood” forged during eight years of brutal conflict. “Because that war lasted very long, that brotherhood was really forged in steel,” he noted. These deep, battle-tied bonds have created a highly organized, layered state system that has surprised Western and Israeli observers by its resilience in the current conflict. Many analysts had predicted that targeted assassinations of senior Iranian leadership would collapse the system, but the opposite has occurred, a failure Jafari attributes to outdated orientalist assumptions about Iran’s governance. “This is rooted in this slivery orientalist idea that these Iranians are kind of savages who cannot organise any modern state. This system is very organised, with layers of offices, a finance system, and planning for its own survival,” he explained.
While the war taught the Islamic Republic how to survive external threats, it did not resolve deep-seated internal tensions – and analysts note the regime failed to learn one critical lesson from the conflict: repression alone cannot resolve public dissatisfaction, and over time it only deepens public discontent. Even during the war, there was underlying public discontent with Khomeini’s rule, but the regime enjoyed broader popular support and faced far fewer constraints on cracking down on dissent. Today, that balance has shifted, with a shrinking circle of power and growing distance between the state and Iranian society. “In undemocratic countries, the ability to listen to the base diminishes over time, and as repression intensifies, understanding what the base demands becomes increasingly impossible,” Behrooz noted. Jafari added that long-standing structural issues have left most Iranians disillusioned with the current system: “Because of the ideological, political and cultural restrictions, many citizens do not feel that they can be integrated in this system. Moreover, we have economic problems, poverty, mismanagement, and corruption, and that’s why the majority are fed up with the system.”
This analysis was originally produced by Middle East Eye, an independent outlet specializing in coverage of the Middle East and North Africa.
