We happily sold equipment to both sides in that one. The idea back then was their money was good, they were only using the stuff on each other (most of the time) and a lot of it no longer had a lot of value in the US.

I personally guarded the warehouses and bunkers where some of that stuff came from and know what I am talking about on this. I even have met one of my Iranian counterparts on this who eventually immigrated to the US. He had been an enlisted man in the Iranian Air Force who had unloaded some of the shipments.

Iraqis were getting a bunch of junk and some newer stuff, most of which was promptly blown up by the Iranians.

The Iranians were mostly getting spare tires for F-4 Phantoms which were being phased out of US military service and we had fucking acres of those tires that were otherwise going to get used as landfill or burned if Ollie North had not made the deal with Iranian and Saudi arms dealers to dump the stuff at absurdly profitable margins, then got paid for stuff for the contras and Afghan freedom fighters. The reason Ollie was considered so much a hero on that is he actually funneled the money out to the black projects like the Contras when everyone else involved was commonly just stealing what they could while the Contra front line troops were given the very worst of the scraps. Even back then, the original people in charge on the Contra supply lines were ripping off so much that the entire thing was falling apart. They were eve dumping loads of supplies meant for the contras in order to make room in their aircraft for cocaine shipments. That's the real reason some of the smugglers were killing each other but nobody going to jail for it. They were all allowed to haul dope, but the deal was they had to take the lower paying CIA jobs in order to be allowed to haul dope, but they would snitch each other off to the CIA over issues like the military supplies just getting tossed over the jungle somewhere, or even worse, crap supplies dumped over the jungle, then better weapons hauled further south to be traded to the Colombians for dope.

Realize, that was how the Afghanistan and Contra situations got tied together, the Afghan one officially supported, with the Contra funding being denied by Congress while Reagan personally supported them in every way he could.

The other merchandise sent to Iran was older generation HAWK missiles which were compatible with the older generation launchers that the Iranian government had "inherited" from the Shah's arsenals. I was told personally by the technicians in charge at 2 LAAM Battalion (is was their warehouse bunkers where the missiles came from) that the missiles were being shipped complete and functional, but due to their age and lack of compatibility with new launch and guidance software, incapable of tracking and shooting down modern US fighters. they even had questions of the missiles being able to down Iraqi fighters, but figured they could look good chasing after them and maybe hit something, but the guidance systems were not much good for shooting down something much faster or smaller than an airliner.

That stuck in my head for a while, especially when a mysterious rocket shot down an airliner off the coast of NY later on in the 1990s. Realize by that period the Iranians could consider the older generation Hawk missile launchers to be disposable. They had spent a lot of money on those missiles and were probably still ticked off about them not being good enough to down the Iraqi fighters.

The Iranians really like the concept of missiles, and an outgrowth of their efforts to improve on the lackluster missiles everyone else was willing to sell them is what caused the birth of their current ballistic missile industry.