The Shia Shift: Why Iran and Hezbollah Abandoned Martyrdom

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : Although Iran sustained extensive casualties, it had little hope of otherwise overcoming Iraq's quantitative and qualitative military advantages.
56% : This is best demonstrated by looking at how Iran and Hezbollah previously employed martyrdom operations.
53% : Although Iran pioneered these martyrdom operations, Hezbollah refined them to lethal effectiveness.
41% : In the chaotic aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Saddam Hussein, hoping to exploit the weakness of his long-time rival, invaded Iran in September 1980.
40% : Neither Syria's Alawites nor Iraq's Shi'a militias -- many of which count Iran as their patron -- have adopted suicide operations in any systematic fashion.
39% : Curiously, even as new groups embraced martyrdom operations, the pioneers of the tactic -- Iran and its Shi'a proxies -- have quietly abandoned it.
39% : Nor is this limited to Hezbollah; in fact, Iran itself has also abandoned suicide terrorism, as have its other Shi'a allies.
39% : While Iran lacked sufficient numbers of tanks, artillery, aircraft, and trained soldiers, its population was roughly three times that of Iraq's.
38% : The shift in the source of suicide terrorism has gone almost entirely unnoticed in the West, where Iran is still often regularly portrayed as a martyr state led by religious fanatics.
34% : The decision Iran and its Shi'a allies have made to abandon suicide terrorism
33% : Repeatedly during the war, but especially during the initial campaign to run Saddam's army out of Iran, human-wave attacks helped overrun Iraq's front lines.
31% : This shift reveals Iran and Hezbollah's brutally pragmatic rationale for suicide operations, strongly challenging the popular notion that Tehran is a "martyr state" or irrational actor.

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