Tried to learn more about Iran, only became more confused

[PanzerJaeger]

But even here, I don't understand because from what I know about the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam attacked first. But why did he attack a new regime that obviously would be looking for some sort of symbol to get the public to rally behind them during a period of revolutionaries? Did he honestly think he was going to be able to conquer all of Iran? Because otherwise the only thing that war was ever going to do was simply make the fundamentalists more legitimate in the eyes of the Iranian people.

Fear of Shia ascendancy was the primary motivation. The invasion was actually defensive in nature, a reaction to the growing Iranian sponsored insurgency in Iraq. Iraqi leaders were being killed at an alarming rate. The Shia are often portrayed as the victims during Hussein's rule, but they were militant from the onset.

As for the goals, they were limited territorially to the Shatt al-Arab, but we're more focused on bringing down the Islamic Republic through counterrevolution. In hindsight it may seem misguided, but at the time Iran was in chaos and there was no great loyalty to the clerics.