AHC: Averting the Iran-Iraq War

Is there any plausible way to avert the Iran-Iraq War short of removing Saddam Hussein from leadership or preventing the Iranian Revolution from occurring?

It sounds like the territorial disputes were a bit tough to resolve, which is why I'm asking.
 
My thoughts on preventing Iran-Iraq War

To avert the Iran-Iraq War, you have to butterfly away the perception that Iran's military has been gutted by the Revolution because Iraq wouldn't have dared take on the Iranian military at full strength with access to US/UK resupply.
Keep in mind, Saddam Hussein had several dogs in the fight -
One- he knew the Saudi and other Gulf States didn't want Shi'a revolutions popping up, propped up by the Iranians and were perfectly willing to throw money at him to squash the Iranians.
Two- the deliberately vague boundaries of the Shatt-al-Arab made him think, hey, now that neither Iran or the UK ain't looking, time to take what should be theirs as they saw it.
Three, he thought the ethnic Arabs of Khuzistan where 80% of Iran's oil happens to be would rise up in rebellion and join their Iraqi brothers if they just kicked down the door.

To avoid that required several PODs, say the Iranian military cooperates in arresting SAVAK and other Shah puppets and generally not firing on revolutionary activists during the lead-up to the Shah's abdication more or less what we saw in the fall of Ceausescu.
They "convince" SCIRI (the ayatollahs) to take a moral advisory role in a provisional government and convince what would be the Basij and Revolutionary Guards to wear Iranian Army or police uniforms under secular chain of command instead of be beholden to any religious or political party. They had the weaponry and tactics but not the political will to do so from my very sketchy reading of the lead-up to the Revolution, mostly James Clavell's Whirlwind.

I see it as very difficult IMO, b/c the Iranian military was selected for loyalty to the Shah and technical proficiency, not political leadership AND both the Shah and the ayatollahs were terrified/very scornful any strains of Ataturkism in the Iranian military.
With AH you run into all kinds of PODs where faction A could and SHOULD have done something sane and effective but was ideologically ASB for them.

FWIW the fundamentalist ayatollahs under Khomeini were politically very savvy in coming out on top of the rugby scrum of Tudeh (Communist) activists, social democratic activists and other religious factions in the revolutionary mix after the Shah abdicated.
They were a dog's breakfast in running a war and an economy but great at forming and maintaining the social consensus that an Islamic republic was worth attempting.
I'd have liked to see the secular and religious players in the Revolution establish a republic where democracy and pluralism flourish, where the economic growth spurred by oil is shared more equally and the economy diversified, Iran shares fully in the technological and social trends of the latter 20th century.
I think of Turkey, Iran, and several other countries forming a free trade union in the area that helps stimulate their economies and decrease tensions considerably instead of a paranoid pariah state prompting everyone in the area to gear up and repress the Shi'a populations under Sunni elites' control that's distorted the Middle east and especially Persian Gulf States' politics for the last thirty years.
 
Iraqi Kurdistan rises up, tying down the higher-readiness units of the Army. The revolt is suppressed after 3-6 months, but by then Iranian contacts get wind of the Iraqi plans and have bolstered their defenses. Saddam cancels the invasion of Khuzestan (the only province he sought, for approx. 80 billion reasons), and attacks Kuwait a decade earlier.
 
Oh TxCoatl... I thought I was the only one who even had a vague interest in the Iran-Iraq War on this site, it's so nice to find someone else who has an interest like me! Unfortunately it makes it a pain in the ass because you said all the things I would've said.

1. On a personal/cultural level, get rid of the worst anti-Persian aspects of the Ba'athist regime, changing them away from unifying Arab nationalism is impossible because A. that's what Ba'athist ideology is all about and B. it's the glue that held together some pretty disparate segments of Iraqi society. But get rid of Saddam's desire to violently expand into Iran. Violently expand elsewhere? Sure, but dissuading Saddam from attacking what for all intents and purposes should be a weak and useless target (Western experts thought the war would end in a few weeks seeing how well the Iraqis advanced initially).

2. The weakness of the new regime had to be either downplayed or not happen at all. This is impossible as Iran burned every bridge it could with the Americans and in addition to suspending diplomatic relations, the United States also embargoed spare parts and arms to the Iranian military, most importantly the air force, which as a result played a very short but rather decisive role at the beginning of the war, and left afterward when they no longer had any spare parts. You CAN keep the command structure of the Iranian military intact, but you CANNOT prevent an American embargo of every last thing they had happily supplied to Imperial Iran in years past.

3. Have Iran avoid the stupid missteps it made in the Persian Gulf. These made it look more likely that the Americans were going to kick the Iranians to the curb or at least turn a blind eye while Iraq pulled out all the stops to crush them. Saddam has to be smarter than OTL to be truly and completely afraid of American intervention however, this wisdom escaped him in the First Gulf War.

4. If only because they don't want someone starting a war in their backyard, somehow make it clear that the Saudis and the rest of the Arab states aren't going to go for a war. This is a big change in their traditionally conservative policies that were willing to use violent folks like Saddam to revert anyone who upset the way things were, later this same idea was used against Saddam, but it applied to Iran back then (and still does) when it was a new regime whose revolutionary Islamic doctrine basically scared the crap out of the Arabs the same way the Russian Revolution scared Western Europe.

5. Reduce the conflict to a bunch of decisive border skirmishes that Iran wins completely (probably requires that "no purging the Iranian military" idea). Saddam figures that the forces of his great Arab empire would be better spent elsewhere and backs off from mighty Iran.
 
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