Review: The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq's Maritime Swordplay by Nadia El-Sayed El-Shazly

Trump’s Iran war convinced me to go back and read multiple articles and books about the disastrous history of the Persian Gulf following the events in 1953 and then the revolution in 1979. In August 1953, the CIA alongside Britain’s MI6, orchestrated a covert coup d'état code-named Operation Ajax to overthrow Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The U.S. and Britain were angry after Mossadegh nationalized the country’s oil industry, stripping control away from the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). Fearing a total British oil embargo would collapse Iran's economy and push Mossadegh into a communist alliance with the neighboring Soviet Union, the U.S. stepped in. The CIA bribed military officers, paid mobs to stage violent anti-government riots, and weaponized the press to create artificial chaos in Tehran. Ultimately, Mossadegh was arrested, and the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was restored to absolute power as a loyal, autocratic ally of the West—an intervention that successfully secured Western oil interests for the next quarter-century but sowed deep anti-American resentment that would explode during the 1979 revolution leading to Carter’s downfall during the hostage crisis and Reagan’s ascendancy. But that’s another story. The current mess in the Strait of Hormuz and the ascendency of Iran as the real power in the Persian Gulf has its origins many decades ago and one of those events was the infamous Tanker War which, I, to my shame, had either ignored at the time or totally forgotten.

The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq's Maritime Swordplay by Nadia El-Sayed El-Shazly pretty much is the definitive user manual if you want to know how a localized ground brawl escalates into an international naval free-for-all. First published in 1998, the book provides a microscopic view of the 1984-1988 phase of the Iran-Iraq war, when the conflict spilled over into the vital shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf. El-Shazly does not see the whole mess as a random series of maritime skirmishes, but as a deliberate strategic calculation by a desperate Iraqi regime trying to break a bloody stalemate.

What makes her story so compelling is the combination of high-stakes strategic theory and raw data. She employs the classic military heavyweights, such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, to explain why Saddam Hussein chose to weaponize the sky above the Gulf. Iraq couldn't match Iran's massive manpower pool or its geographical depth on land, but they had a serious edge in airpower. Baghdad hoped to choke Iran's oil economy with a campaign against commercial shipping, engineer international intervention and force a reluctant Ayatollah Khomeini to the negotiating table. It was pretty much a textbook case of attempting to use military leverage to force a diplomatic solution when the ground war went sideways. Sound familiar? This book is a stark reminder that the ocean is never insulated from the politics of the land, and commerce often follows its own rules even when missiles fly.

The entire study rests on the incredible data that El-Shazly was able to pull together. She secured specialist access to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping records, the equivalent of the Holy Grail for tracking merchant ship casualties. In these records she compiles a painstaking, month-by-month ledger of the conflict that shows up some hilarious, if tragic, ironies of wartime commerce.

Her data, for example, shows how economic self-interest regularly overrode political loyalties. You had tankers owned by Iraq’s supposedly staunch Arab allies casually cruising into Iranian ports to lift crude oil because the profit margins were just too good to pass up. Her work reveals the exact anatomy of the attacks, showing that Iraq actually fired most of the anti-shipping strikes using French-supplied Exocet missiles, while Iran used asymmetrical tactics such as speedboats, mines, and shore-based Silkworm missiles after they began to retaliate. Deja Vu all over again.

El-Shazly comes up with an overall total that shows Iraqi forces fired more individual strikes against commercial vessels than the Iranians, thus blowing the current Western media spin that Iran was the only aggressor on the water.

The data tracks the weird mayhem of identification errors – Iraqi pilots bombed friendly vessels or vessels carrying oil belonging to their own backers because it’s easier said than done to fly through a chaotic combat zone in the dark.
It tells of the exact moment Kuwait got worried enough to ask the great superpowers to step in, leading to the iconic re-flagging operation where the US Navy started escorting merchant ships flying the American flag.

The figures given by El-Shazly perfectly illustrate the slow-motion panic of the Iraqi command. The strategy was an escalatory gamble born of pure anxiety. They had to make the war somebody else's problem, so the international community would intervene and stop it, and that was exactly what happened when the US military footprint in the Gulf reached a point of no return.

Cut to today in 2026 and the reverberations of this maritime swordplay are louder than ever in international diplomacy. If you look at current flashpoints, from the regular disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz to the broader maritime chokepoints in the Middle East, the playbook being used today was written during the Tanker War.

The most obvious legacy is the template for asymmetric naval warfare. In the 1980s, Iran recognized that it did not require a large conventional blue-water navy to confront Western superpowers. They discovered that a combination of cheap sea mines, fast attack craft and shore-to-ship missiles could do as good a job as well. This creates a constant nervous deterrent in diplomatic venues today. Western diplomats cannot simply threaten naval blockades or freedom of navigation operations without reckoning with the massive insurance hikes and economic fallout that El-Shazly meticulously detailed decades ago.

Moreover, the Tanker War changed the perception of outside protection of the regional states for ever. The re-flagging of Kuwaiti ships established a precedent that the flow of oil was ultimately guaranteed by global powers, a fact that still underlies the security architectures of the Gulf states today. This created a dynamic where maritime security is never simply a local issue but a global economic trigger. Reading El-Shazly’s book today is more than a nostalgic walk down memory lane. It’s a stark reminder that the rules of engagement, the vulnerabilities of merchant shipping, and the diplomatic brinkmanship playing out on modern waters are the same games these nations have been playing for forty years.

She touches briefly in the final chapter on the USS Stark incident as well the tragedy of the Iranian passenger plane. On July 3, 1988, the high-tech Aegis air defense cruiser USS Vincennes—affectionately dubbed "Robocruiser" by its own crew for its captain’s aggressive swagger—managed to mistake a massive, slow-climbing civilian Airbus A300 for a rapidly descending supersonic F-14 Tomcat. Despite the Iranian passenger jet squawking a perfectly civilian transponder code and flying precisely within its designated commercial corridor, the American warship fired two surface-to-air missiles, instantly vaporizing 290 innocent people. In a masterclass of geopolitical gaslighting, the U.S. Navy initially blamed the civilian pilots for not radioing back on military frequencies they couldn't hear, while President George H.W. Bush later famously declared he would "never apologize for the United States of America, ever, I don't care what the facts are." Naturally, the ship's crew returned home to a hero's welcome, complete with combat ribbons, and the captain was awarded the Legion of Merit for his "exceptionally meritorious conduct"—proving that in the theater of modern warfare, blowing up an airliner full of families is just another day of stellar resume-building.