Posted on 11/19/2005 5:00:05 AM PST by FerdieMurphy
THEY WERE not hard to spot — the dead tanks — as they littered the sides of the main Baghdad-Tehran highway deep inside Iran. Heavy twisted monsters, blasted by artillery, mounted on stone plinths like trophies as a warning to any other army that came to fight and die here, as Saddam’s divisions had done. After 40 I stopped counting.
On the Iranian border itself the little town of Mehran had become a shrine to martyrdom and death. Like a mini-Stalingrad, it had been razed three times during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, its streets filled with the corpses of Iranian child soldiers sacrificed in human-wave assaults; but in the end the Iranians expelled the invader at an awesome human cost.
Saddam has gone, but Mehran is once more in the front line of potential war. The Iran-Iraq border is just a few miles to the west of the town on a flat plain — ideal tank country. The border itself is marked by a meandering stream but on either side now are the opposing armies of the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, all waiting for orders from above. If the Americans do ever invade then it will be here, as the shortest distance to Tehran from Baghdad; and that little stream the Rubicon for a war of unimaginable consequences.
In No10 the tom-toms of war of war are drumming again as Tony Blair warns that he will not tolerate the meddling hand of Iran in the affairs of Iraq. In Washington the neoconservative tom-toms are even louder, warning that the West must “surgically strike” at Iran’s hidden nuclear facilities and robustly challenge Iranian state-sponsored terrorism. Nor it seems can the EU countenance Iran’s rise as a nuclear power either. A new nuclear crisis now looms later this month with the threat of UN Security Council sanctions over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme.
In Tehran the hardline President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has done little for foreign relations with his chilling call for Israel to be wiped off the map. We are, it seems, close to the on-ramp for another spectacular confrontation in the Middle East.
But before we succumb again to the hysterical warnings of our leaders it is worth seeking a cold-eyed measure of this new enemy they would have us fight. Iraq and Iran are very different. Iran is nearly four times the size of its neighbour and six times the size of Britain. How could an already undermanned American army expect to control such a huge territory?
Nor will those already fabled “surgical strikes” by the US Air Force deliver a decisive blow to Iran’s growing nuclear capability. Iran’s nuclear plants are already well hidden across its huge land mass. And all that a partial strike will do is unleash an unstoppable war without significantly damaging the enemy’s capability.
Iran’s population at 70 million is three times that of Iraq’s and it has one of the youngest populations in the world. Iran’s standing army is estimated by the CIA to be 520,000-strong, but each year 817,000 17-year-old Iranian boys are potentially available for military service. That is an awful lot of martyrs or suicide bombers.
The Iranians are Persians, not Arabs, a consideration entirely absent from most neoconservative analyses of Iran’s supposed weakness. Persian imperial dynasties date back to Cyrus the Great, around 530BC, and Xerxes, 486-465BC, who plagued the Greeks.Unlike the chaotic Arab shambles of Saddam’s Iraq, Iran remains a hierarchical society where the vast majority live in rigid terror of the authorities above them, religious or imperial, and will utterly obey their commands.
In many ways Ayatollah Khomeini, who came to power in 1979, was the greatest Persian Emperor, fusing his own version of Shia Islam into a state ideology. And during the Iran-Iraq war he revived the ancient Shia tradition of martyrdom: hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many of them children, died in futile suicidal assaults over minefields. “The Tree of Islam has to be watered with the blood of martyrs,” said Khomeini without regret.
Martyrdom is still the state religion. Huge posters of the war dead and Palestinian and Lebanese suicide bombers dominate every surface in Tehran and every speech of the political leadership. Any attempt to threaten or invade Iran will be a huge asset to a regime longing to re-energise its faded legitimacy among its own downtrodden population. Invasion by the Great Satan would be a godsend.
Nor should we underestimate Iran’s capacity to punish its enemies at long range. In 1982 Iran sent a thousand revolutionary guards to Lebanon to spread the Islamic revolution. The plan failed but Iran was behind three of the greatest acts of postwar terrorism: the American Embassy bombing in Beirut and the blowing up of the US Marine and French paratrooper barracks by suicide bombers in 1983. The French and the Americans left Lebanon in defeat soon afterwards.
Iraq is a mess but widening the conflict by attacking Iran would be an act of madness. That little stream on the western edge of Mehran is a Rubicon we must never cross.
Well I see that you were responding to 20 and so hadn't made it to 45 or 48, so although it probably doesn't mean much I apologize for assuming you had read everything.
You certainly have a deft hand at poking a hornet's nest!
Don't you think that some of the anti-muslim rhetoric on this site is over the edge. I am not a scholar but I do like reading history and it seems irrational to me. There was none of this anti-muslim horror in the early 20th century. Islamic terrorism seems to me to be a relatively new thing, not counting the middle ages when there was terror all around. I don't see how being irrational about the middle-east will help us defeat Islamic terrorism.
Your priorities are a perfect of how political correctness is being used to place a higher value on being phony nice over factually honest.
Do you have anything of substance to offer on this forum, or just the childish fluff you've posted on this thread?
The more you post the more your ignorance is displayed, and coupled with your immaturely offensive style, the less it seems worth the time to respond to you. You obviously like to type more than you like to read.
As a brief stab at a little enlightenment, if it won't rock your ignorant bliss too much, though, let me just say that Sheik Wahabbi, the name sake of Wahhabiism, the violent fundamentalist strain of Islam practiced in much of Saudi Arabia and responsible for much of the terrorist attacks in recent decades lived in the seventeenth century. His claim to fame is that he chastised Muslims as having gotten off course from their god-given mission of taking over the world by whatever means necessary, and brutally punishing all who stand in the way.
So much for your "terrorism seems to be a relatively new thing, not counting the middle ages".
I don't know why you want to hang out on this forum, anyway, unless it's as an agitator. You're a natural born liberal.
Try reading your own posts.
No doubt.
I honestly think we have sufficient cause to be righteously indignant, to tell you the truth. That may occasionally sound like irrationality, but the truth is a harsh reality. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." That is the truth of our generation.
And it is a truth impelled not by our wishes, but by the intransigence of our sworn enemies. It is they who have declared the boundaries that prevent neutrality, and it is they who bring the war to innocent civilians.
I think it would be nice to lower our voices and our rhetoric, because not all of the Religion of Peace is of the fanatical position. But show them to me. They are afraid to speak, and they can not control their out of control brothers.
The so-called moderates are enablers of the radicalists. In the middle of the one-hundred percent Moslem countries there is peace, because they have already dispatched their enemies. In Europe, and in America, when they grow strong enough, we can expect the same treatment.
What is truly irrational is thinking that we, or France, can let colonies of people come into the country, set up their own little enclaves, and that they will then be peaceful citizens of the new country.
Sounds like "I know you are, but what am I."
Like I said, you're immature, uninformed to the point of naivety, and not worth any more time responding to.
Have a nice life in your sheltered little world.
The million martyr march needs to go to a stadium where we can drop a nice welcome for them.
A stadium is too small. How 'bout San Francisco ? :-D
If there are even two good people in San Francisco, they should be removed first.
But don't look back, you will turn to salt.
I don't have anything against Muslim-bashing for their acts or for the statements of the "fundamentalists". I don't have any problem with calling black-Americans on the problems of their culture, it's not a PC thing. Calling Muhammed a pervert, thief, etc., doesn't serve any good purpose, true or not, that I can see. I admire the President of Afghanistan and the President of Iraq and it's a little schitzophrenic supporting GWB and the wars and reading that stuff here. It does sound quite a bit like the insults the Muslims hurl at the Jews, not intended to educate or rebuke, just to create hatred.
Maturity = bombast and insults.
I suspect I've read a lot more on these matters than you have and have known both Muslims and Christians from the Middle Est (primarily Iraq and Iran) for 35 years. I have no clue, huh? Quit hiding behind shadows and making equivocal statements that are either clueless, baseless
or spineless?
“The Tree of Islam has to be watered with the blood of martyrs
Lets get the tactical nuke hose out and give them the nuke watering they so desperately want and deserve
You said simply that I need to read more history. Maybe you meant I need to read more history on the middle-east. The fact is I doubt I could read more history if I wanted to and that's what you have no clue about.
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