LOL. It became clear (at latest after the Defense of Khorramshar) that Saddam's "professional, well-armed military" was no match for Iran's forces on Iranian turf.
Although the author's point isn't military history or strategy, this needs to be pointed out.
The Iran-Iraq war had essentially two phases:
1. Iraq tries to conquer Iran - Fails.
2. Iran tries to conquer Iraq - Fails.
The problem with Iran's military was primarily purges by the mullah regime against the Army officer corps, which were suspected of being loyal to the Shah. In a similar vein the Army was hamstrung by the "Revolutionary Guards". The Army tried to fight a conventional, "rational" war. The "Guards" insisted on suicidal frontal wave attacks inflicting heavy casualties.
The Army was professional, the Guards fanatical.
And despite the lack of continued support and spares for their primarily US/Western equipment (deliver en masse prior to 1979) the Iranian military, especially the Airforce showed professional superiority to their Soviet-supplied Iraqi counterparts, which outnumbered them in the final stages of the war.
Iraq despite massive international support (financial, militarily and politically) couldn't get anything more than a cease-fire (which Saddam pleaded for) and stalemate against the downtrodden and disproportionally under-supplied Iranians.
Clinton did that to our own military starting with the excuse of the Tailhook scandal. The result was the poor performance in Iraq until the Clinti=onite bureaucrats were finally replaced in the field by officers with a sense of tactics and combat. At that point came the Surge which got the credit for the turnaround but it was really the combat capable officers coming up through the ranks and finally taking charge. The increase in troops certainly helped but a year before, no surge could have been effective because the command structure tended to be bureaucrats and politicals.