2 - Historians

Summary

Chapter 2 traces the development of the IRGC’s efforts to document the Iran-Iraq War, including the people, activities, and publications that make up that enterprise. It focuses on the project’s origins and foundations, the work undertaken to record the history of the war as the conflict was ongoing, the methodology and approach applied to those efforts, and the publications that have resulted therefrom and on which the present book is based. In doing so, it demonstrates that the development of the IRGC’s documentation of the war mirrors the evolution of both the Iran-Iraq War and the IRGC as a whole, which highlights how the project emblematizes the organization and the war’s centrality to its legitimacy and identity. It argues, in other words, that in order to understand the IRGC, we must understand its members not just as Guards but also as historians.