The Iran-Iraq war supports a multiplicity of partial explanations.

Evidence

What are these other problems? It might be useful to begin by looking at the long war which was fought between Iraq and Iran, two regional powers; a war which went on for many years and caused untold destruction to both parties. What were they fighting about? One could give many different answers, all of them in some measure, in some sense, true. We can look at it as a simple, oldfashioned territorial war, a war over turf, over the specific issue of the Shatt al- ‘Arab waterway—that piece of coast at the southern end of the two rivers of Iraq, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, control of which was vital to both parties. This was certainly an important element in the war, and exemplifies one of the major themes of Middle Eastern conflicts: territorial disputes. … The war could be seen, and was interpreted, as an ideological clash between radical, fundamentalist Islam as represented by the Iranian regime and secular modernism, as represented, particularly in its own propaganda, by the Iraqi Ba‘thist regime. … The war could be explained in economic terms, as a dispute over oil interests; as a conflict between regional powers for regional hegemony—for control of the Gulf, of the eastern half of the Middle East, possibly with eventual subsequent ambitions even for the western half. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1601

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader project of analyzing how the Middle East was framed for Western audiences — Lewis enumerating competing explanatory lenses (territorial, national, religious, ideological, economic, personal) mirrors Said’s critique of reducing the region to whichever filter serves the analyst.