Review of 'The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards' by Annie Tracey Samuel-Alemzadeh (original) (raw)

2023, International Journal of Middle East Studies

The history of the Iran-Iraq War is an unfinished project, Annie Tracy Samuel tells us, because it is present in the constantly developing identity of Iran's military elite, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards is a book about the significance of writing the past in the service of the present. It delves deep into tens of thousands of pages of untapped material, namely, the IRGC's publications in Farsi, to present an alternative reading of the longest war of the twentieth century and one of its main agents, Iran's IRGC. It is a valuable monograph not only for students of the contemporary Middle East, Iran, and the IRGC, but for anyone with an interest in historiography, narrative construction, and military history, at large. The IRGC has become the most powerful and most controversial organization in Iran's postrevolutionary history. It was formed shortly after the 1979 revolution with the mission of protecting the revolutionary creed. The IRGC immediately became the hub for leaders and volunteers with the utmost dedication to Ayatollah Khomeini and his Shiʿi-Islamist vision. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, a cadre of Revolutionary Guards and volunteers lived up to the prevalent image of dedicated soldiers of Islam by presenting as selfless troops who embraced falling in action as martyrdom: they confronted the Iraqi army's firepower with their faith. This is how the IRGC's war performance is commonly portrayed, both in many of the state's ideological outlets and in existing scholarship. Often, the dominant domestic narrative emphasizes the power of Shiʿi faith, while scholarship produced outside of Iran portrays volunteers as fanatics who were deployed in waves resulting in significant losses of life. Tracy Samuel's book challenges this narrative through a meticulous study of the IRGC's war historiography. Tracy Samuel invites us to peruse the IRGC's prolific historiography of the Iran-Iraq War to learn more about their self-understanding and to see how they perceive their existence as a revolutionary army and their role in the most definitive stretch of the Islamic Republic's history. Most importantly, she invites us to think about how the IRGC takes seriously the task of writing history, and its awareness of what history means for consolidating the organization's position within the Iranian state. The IRGC is in possession of the largest and richest war archive in Iran, and its multiple offices have been prolific in publishing analyses based on documents held at this archive, even publishing many of the original documents themselves. Tracy Samuel offers a thorough reading of a great number of such IRGC publications, particularly those published by IRGC's main research and publication office, the "Holy Defense Research and Document Center" (HDRDC). The resulting book is the first comprehensive English-language study of a set of the IRGC's voluminous publications. Many assume that state-sponsored publications in Iran are highly ideological and therefore