ABSTRACT
In a tradition that dates back to the time of Thucydides, and the Peloponnesian War, the systematic examination of conflict and war has long been a preoccupation of political scientists seeking to resolve the enduring question: why do wars occur? This study directly engages with this question with a specific focus on explaining why the conflict between Iran and Iraq escalated to war in 1980. This conflict led to arguably the longest and one of the more costly conventional wars of the twentieth century. This conflict is interesting for a variety of reasons, not least because it has received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature on the causes of war. Most importantly, however, it represents a puzzle for some of the leading methods in analyzing the causes of conflict, in that concentrating exclusively on material capabilities, or alternatively emphasizing issues and foreign policy interaction, does not adequately explain the primary triggers for this war. Taken together, however, these methods allow for a more thorough understanding of why this war happened when it did.
