This link is to a game discussion board on the Iraq Iran war.  Not a direct help, but there are some other links, sources, and information buried there.  An hour or two will turn up some starting points for you.

Damm.  I forgot URLS frequently get corrupted on this web site.  Try pasting in this:

Damm.  I forgot URLS frequently get corrupted on this web site.  Try pasting in this:

I think the Iranians are being sold a little short here ... with the Shah's army purged, the mullahs organized grassroots resistance, stopped the internationally funded and equipped invaders, pushed them back, then managed to counterattack into Iraq itself.  After eight years of stalemate in which perhaps 600,000 died, Saddam couldn't do any better than accept a UN ceasefire ...

Edit: 600,000 is listed in Forty's "Defining Moments: Modern War" as casualties, not deaths ...

I spoke with a Marine NCO who went on an observer mission to the Iran-Iraq war in the early eighties. He said it reminded him of two blind men throwing rocks at each other in a football stadium. Artillery concentrations on empty desert, pincer movements that converged on nothing.

I think Saddam Hussein was like Mussolini. He saw the wholesale dismemberment of the shah's armed forces by the mullahs after they took over, and he thought he could conquer and loot the western, ethnically Arab provinces that had most of Iran's oil. He enraged the Iranians who fought back and threatened to topple him, so it became a fight for his life. It was a successful war for him in that he cheated the hangman for another 18 years, but the debts he ran up caused him to invade Kuwait.  

An instructor at the Military Language Institute gave a talk in 2006 in which he spoke of his interaction with Saddam Hussein suring the war. He took U.S. satellite imagery to Iraq when Iran seemed to be winning. His orders were to show the images to Saddam and his senior commanders. He could  point out what the images contained, i.e. formations, strengths and positions. He was forbidden to give any analysis. Saddam impressed him as being rather dense. Maybe that's why he failed.

I read an article about the Iran-Iraq war in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1990. I think it's author was a former military attache in the region. It was a pretty succinct, but accurate overview of the war. It might be a good place to start in your reading.