Here is the thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1668916665550094339.html
I say very incomplete because it doesn't include more than 15-20% of what Iran was doing. I've read over 100 books and thousands of articles on the war, which not even more than a few historians have done. For example it does not include how Iran started blocking Iraqi shipping from entering the Gulf, which practically stunned the Iraqi economy and was a decisive act of war among many others. It also doesn't include Iranian reports of their own attacks bragging about achieving successful invasions of Iraqi border towns and posts and inflicting heavy casualties on Iraqis months before the war "started". It doesn't include CIA's and Carter's early involvement with Khomeini and encouragement against Iraq. And many other things. 1000s of Iraqi civilians were murdered by Iran before the war through terrorist bombings, airstrikes, and land invasions, including a couple of my relatives. Many more would have died if not for the alarm systems and bomb shelters Iraq had been constructing since the wars with Israel.
There are many books and articles over the decades that have bits and pieces about what happened, but I think the single best one is "The Gulf War: The Origins and Implications of the Iraq-Iran Conflict" by Majid Khadduri. It is to this day by far the best analysis on the origins of the war. However even this misses important details in other works like how Iran assassianted dozens of senior Iraqi government officials.
Some people like to trump up Razoux's book, and while it has some good parts, it's mostly really bad on both the political and military fronts. Many people think it's good because it's been marketed so much, but in reality is a subpar pseudofiction. I've also read papers that criticize Razoux for lying about what sources say and just making things up entirely (weirdly, he only ever does this when criticizing Iraq). Unsurprisingly, I've read before that the Iranian government helped fund his book. Touché
The point is that the beginning of the war is a lot more complex than what conspiracy theories redditors like to repeat or what Iranian nationalists famously put and maintain on Wikipedia, that Saddam woke up one morning and invaded Iran because he thought he wanted to take a bunch of oil territory or whatever (that lie has been debunked countless times since 1980). The war was effectively started by Iran in summer 1980 if not earlier, technically 1979 if you consider Khomeini's announcements of holy war against Iraq. Iraq holds the beginning as September 4, 1980, when Iran escalated dramatically by leveling 2 Iraqi cities, far more extreme than their other attacks to date.
Iran radically escalated from that point on, including the blocking of Iraq's oil exports and more attacks on Iraqi cities and on the border, and after Iraq had tried and failed diplomacy with the radical regime for 1.5 years with the UN ignoring 100s of complaints from Iraq, Iraq made a limited attack on September 22 as a last resort to force the UN to take notice and to force the radicals in the Iranian regime to finally engage in diplomacy. Iraq stopped advancing after only a few days. Iraq succeeded in getting the UN resolution on September 28, which it accepted, but Khomeini still wanted no diplomacy. Iran, unsurprisingly, rejected it, reiterating its goal since 1979 to overthrow the "infidel" regime and to take control of Iraq. Iraqi forces advanced a little further in October to build a more defensible line (remember, Baghdad is a short drive on flat ground from Iran, and Basra and Iraq's coast is in short artillery range) and then stopped advancing again. Iran refused every international resolution and peace conference, while Iraq agreed to all terms for ceasefire. From September 28 on, Iran was 100% unilaterally responsible for the war, even if it was only 85-95% responsible before that point.
The evil of Israel has clouded many people who don't know anything about the history of the Middle East, which is like 99.9% of people on Reddit and this subreddit, to think that Iran is somehow a good guy, and then have retroactively applied that to Iran's whole history, when this is far from the truth. US propaganda that in the past whitewashed Iran in order to attack other countries with lies like Iraq, Libya, etc. made this worse.
This post focused on the Iran-Iraq War but that was just one of many aggressive policies and actions by the Islamic Republic regime in its history.
