Saddam Hussein's regime always told its people that the brutal 1980-1988 conflict with Iraq's eastern neighbour was a great triumph.

But now Iraqis in Basra feel free to debunk the myth of the original Gulf War, one of the longest of the 20th century and one whose death toll of hundreds of thousands dwarfed that of the latest conflict.

"In every family you can find a terrible story," said 35-year-old Hamad, a former soldier who was wounded in the war which ended in a stalemate widely seen as a mutual defeat.

"I lost my cousin, three of my best friends. It was the collapse of a generation," he said, looking out toward the Shatt al-Arab waterway -- control of which was one of the original disputes that sparked the eight-year war.

"The Iraqi people are brave people, great people, but Saddam let us down. It was a sort of treason," he said.

A row of some 30 statues representing the Iraqis who died in the conflict dominates the vista along the Basra waterfront, each one pointing to the southeast towards Iran.

Saddam may have been run out of town by the United States in 2003 but back in 1980, Washington was happy to see the Iraqi leader take on the Islamic regime in Tehran after the humiliation of the US embassy hostage-taking there.

In 1982, Iranians shelled Basra, the capital of southern Iraq, and killed scores of inhabitants, whose deaths are commemorated in the city's "Museum of the Martyrs of Hostile Persian Shelling."

Dresses of schoolgirls and the uniform of a civil defence schoolboy apprentice are on display inside glass cabinets, bearing a quotation from Saddam: "Martyrs are nobler than us all."

The museum has seen better days and did not escape the looting which gripped Basra in the immediate aftermath of the fall to British forces earlier this month of the city of an estimated 1.5 million.

A photo of a youthful Saddam touring the city along with Iraq's recently vanished information minister, Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf, has been ripped in half.

Few people along Basra's waterfront, which was effectively sealed off and patrolled by soldiers in Saddam's time, believe their former leader's story that Tehran was to blame for the conflict.

"Who began the war? Not Iran. It was Saddam Hussein -- his behaviour alone," said Jaffa al-Dirawa, well aware that such a statement could have sealed his death sentence just a couple of weeks ago.

"At that time Saddam thought that the (1979) Iranian revolution would transfer from Iran to Iraq. All the Iraqi people know it is a fact that Saddam was mistaken.

"The people of Iran are Muslims. They are our brothers, not our enemies."

The Shiite population of southern Iraq has traditionally shown less enmity towards Iranians, who are also mostly Shiites, than the Sunnis concentrated in the centre and north of the country.

Iraq invaded southwest Iran in September 1980, justifying it as a counter-attack after skirmishes and shelling along the border. Saddam once said he had acted "to maintain the independence and dignity of Iraq".

For several years and after a reversal of initial gains on the battlefield, Saddam sued for a ceasefire but to no avail.

Many observers say the crux was the hostility between the secular-minded Saddam and the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been expelled from Iraq two years before his 1979 Islamic revolution transformed Iran into an Islamic state.

Dirawa was grateful that Saddam had been forced from power but said he would not be sucked in by US claims that his country had been "liberated" to thwart Saddam's alleged programme of weapons of mass destruction.

"This war was about petrol. That war was a war without reason," he said.

SPACE.WIRE