the Iran-Iraq war took 8 years to resolve (I think more people should compare this war to the Iran-Iraq war)

Very well said. It’s a little known war - one of the most useless and wasteful ever and one that shaped the Middle East of today - but it was the last large-scale conventional and attritional war between two more or less decently mechanized peer forces the world had seen before 2022. Siege of Basra in 1987 would put even Bakhmut to shame. There are a number of very interesting potential similarities that could be analyzed, both at the level of war strategies and how a society of an aggressor country, although tired of years of war and sacrifices, reacts when it sees its own country threatened, like Iraq in 1986.

There are of course also quite a few differences too, primarily that both of those countries' armies were far more incompetent than both Ukraine and even Russia today.