Samir al-Khalil

“On the face of it, the Iraq-Iran war presents itself, both in its origins and in what has sustained it, as the titanic clash of two men locked in a fight to the finish. This does not go far enough only because the dominant political attribute of each man is his unprecedented concentration of authority deriving in the one case fear and in the other faith. Fear and faith are among the most elemental and primordial of all human drives; under certain circumstances they have the force to make men die in droves for no other reason than they cannot imagine doing otherwise. They have conferred onto the person will of these two men the deadly power unleashed by the decisions of this war. The final meaning of a war like this, one it shares with the Lebanese civil war but none of the Arab-Israeli wars, resides in the simple truth that its mere occurrence has taken away from all of us yet another chunk of an already battered humanity.”
― Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“In Bostan the human wave attack led to an Iraqi rout and the capture of large numbers of prisoners. Rumour has it that officers and soldiers refused to mow down masses of people deliriously careening towards them. Whatever the truth in that story, it must be admitted that if a large enough number of people are prepared to commit suicide, then even in modern warfare almost any fixed position can be overrun. The problem is one of applied mathematics: an equation made up of numbers of people, the speed at which they can run, and the distance they have to cover on one side, versus the firepower and rate of delivery of the other. Using such "tactics" in the Basra region in the summer of 1982, the Iranians lost in two attempts a hundred thousand men and boys.”
― Samir al-Khalil, The Republic of Fear