The ENTIRE History of the Iran War in 20 Minutes

The ENTIRE History of the Iran War in 20 Minutes On the twenty-second of September, nineteen eighty, Iraqi jets crossed into Iranian airspace and Iraqi armored columns pushed across the Shatt al-Arab waterway. A war had started. The United Nations Security Council met that week, but it refused to name who had done what. No famous correspondent was waiting at the border. No protest movement formed in Western capitals. No widely agreed-upon name for the conflict even existed yet. And over the next eight years, an estimated five hundred thousand to one million soldiers and civilians would die, entire cities would be reduced to rubble by ballistic missiles, one side would deploy poison gas on the battlefield in attacks confirmed in writing by United Nations investigators, and when it was finally over, not a single border had moved. The war that began that morning in September would become one of the longest and deadliest interstate conflicts of the twentieth century, and one of the least remembered by the world that watched it happen in real time. How does a war kill that many people and end exactly where it started? How did the most powerful diplomatic body on earth watch one country invade another, then wait nearly two years to even demand a withdrawal, while carefully refusing to say who fired first? And how did a conflict that reshaped an entire region get so thoroughly erased from collective memory? The answers are not accidents. They live inside eight years of decisions, each of which made perfect sense to the person making it, and each of which pushed the door a little further into the wreckage no one could stop. But to understand the first shot, you have to understand the treaty that was torn up right before it was fired.