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If there were no sanctions, there probably wouldn't have been a war.
The Shah and Saddam both understood it was better to reach a peaceful outcome than go to war, and they eventually settled their differences. Apparently, Saddam even offered to have Khomeini killed, an offer which in hindsight the Shah probably should have accepted, along with taking a much tougher stance against the clergy rather than focusing on the communists.
With the Shah gone, mostly as a product of his own tragic missteps, and a new radical regime in town, things changed. The whole idea of the Iranian Islamo-Marxist revolutionary government was seen as a threat that could spread across borders, especially into neighbouring Iraq.
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