TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the book “The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards” written by Annie Tracy Samuel will be unveiled at the University of Tehran on September 23.

Nashr-e Tarikh-e Iran (Iran History Publication) has published the book with a translation by Mohammad Maleki, Mehr reported.

The unveiling ceremony will have guest speakers including Hossein Alaei, a retired senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, and Mohammad Doroudian, a writer, historian, researcher, and theorist, who has been working mostly on the history of the Iran-Iraq war. Mohammad Maleki, the book translator, will also attend the session. A university professor, he holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in ancient Iranian history from the University of Tehran.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), founded after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, is one of the most powerful and prominent but least understood organizations in Iran.

In this book, ‎originally published by the Cambridge University Press in 2021, the author presents an innovative and compelling history of this organization and, by using the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war as a focal point, analyzes the links between war and revolution.

Tracy Samuel provides in-depth coverage of IRGC history, its organizational development during the eight-year-long war, and by extension the consequences of the Iran-Iraq War on the IRGC’s present role and power in the Islamic Republic. She explores this through the IRGC’s own perspective by paying particular attention to volumes of available material and publications linked with the IRGC’s Holy Defense Research and Documentation Center while touching occasionally on other primary Persian sources like press and memoirs, as well as second-hand English material.

Central to the author’s argument is that the birth of the IRGC and its development reflected the pragmatic necessity of the revolution and defense of the country during the Iran-Iraq war and afterward in its relations with the region and the West. Central to the thrust of her argument is that ideology was important in Iranian defense: that it was not used to inform policy, but to strengthen morale. In sum, the author contends that both ideology and firepower were used by the IRGC, and that the strategy and rationale of the Iranian civil and military decision makers in the war were all the product of pragmatic thinking.

The book is set out in 12 chapters. The first two chapters introduce the main subject of the book, the establishment of the IRGC, its units, its roles, and its historians. Chapter 1 looks at the birth of the IRGC in the early days of the revolution’s history, its domestic security functions to safeguard the new revolutionary regime and serve as a loyal paramilitary organization in parallel to the regular army.

Chapter 2 discusses the history of the IRGC and explains the Iran-Iraq war from the perspective of the IRGC’s own publications, primary sources, and oral history.

Chapter 3 discusses the outbreak of the war from the perspective of the IRGC historians and authors, and Iranian views on Iraq’s decision to invade Iran. Chapter 4 turns to the early stages of the war.

A turning point in the Iranian forces’ defense is discussed in chapter 5 “The Epic of Khorramshahr” along with the ousting of Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr, which according to the IRGC authors brought about more cooperation and cohesion to Iran’s armed forces, while the IRGC’s role in the war was augmented.

Iran’s decision to continue to pursue the war by invading Iraq (in 1982) is discussed in chapter 6. Drawing on the IRGC authors and documents, Tracy Samuel maintains that this decision was made via consultation based on the IRGC’s assessment of the likelihood of further aggression by Saddam Hussein and Iran’s distrust of his regime and the unwillingness of the United Nations Security Council to recognize him as an aggressor as the Islamic Republic demanded.

Chapter 7 shows that successive operations fell short of producing the desired result for Iran. This was made more difficult by what Tracy Samuel refers to as pluralization of the war, namely the aerial bombardment of the cities by Iraq using its superior air power, its chemical and psychological warfare against the Iranian forces, and the ‘extensive support’ Iraq obtained from third parties, namely the United States following the Tanker War in the Persian Gulf.

Chapter 8 discusses Iran’s acceptance of the ceasefire in the summer of 1988 from the perspective of the IRGC. Pressure on the Iranian economy, difficulty in procuring weapons, and the declining morale of the Iranian forces all contributed to this. However, it was portrayed as a victory by the IRGC, as Iran did not lose any territory to Iraq.  In Chapter 9, Tracy Samuel argues that both the Islamic Republic and the IRGC were pragmatic in their war efforts and strategies, drawing both on ideology and firepower.

Chapter 10 turns to political and strategic lessons that the Islamic Republic and the IRGC learned from the Iran-Iraq war, giving rise to its more recent foreign policy relations in the region, and a security doctrine based on asymmetric and soft power, via ties with and support for proxies in the region to ensure the protection of Iran and its independence.  Chapter 11 looks at the IRGC’s expansion as a professional military as a result of the Iran-Iraq war, its expansion into non-military spheres, particularly countering political threats and its recent role in dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic.

This book is of interest to anybody seeking a better understanding of Iran’s place in the region and the world today. The author’s work is praiseworthy for drawing on the plethora of Persian sources and documents mainly of the IRGC’s Iran-Iraq chronology of war published a few years after the war.

Annie Tracy Samuel is a scholar specializing in the modern history of Iran and the Middle East. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She previously served as a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

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