And God Himself will destroy them.
Posted on 04/07/2007 5:48:21 PM PDT by Valin
Persians have been at odds with the West and neighboring Asians since the battle of Thermopylae. Today’s nuclear showdown is history repeating itself. Classicist Victor Davis Hanson tells what we can learn. If a no-nonsense Greek infantryman holding the pass at Thermopylae were to be told that, 2,500 years in the future, Western constitutional states would still be facing an apocalyptic struggle with a totalitarian government in Persia, he would hardly be surprised.
Persians, or Iranians as they’re called today, have been at odds with both the West and neighboring Asians since antiquity. In that sense, the bumper-sticker anti-Americanism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is nothing new. Neither was Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent hatred of the Great Satan.
Darius I incorporated most of the Greeks of Ionia under the Persian Empire, and would have done the same in mainland Greece had the Athenians not stopped him at Marathon in 490 B.C. A decade later, his son Xerxes invaded Greece with a half million infantry and sailors, only to be ruined at Salamis and Plataia by the Athenian-Spartan alliance.
Westerners—including Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, the Spartan King Agesilaos, and Alexander the Great—sought payback against the imperial Achaemenids, who ruled over a Persian Empire that stretched from what is now Pakistan through Saudi Arabia to Egypt and north into Turkey. By Roman times, long after the fall of the Achaemenids, the Parthians—another Persian dynasty—continued the East-West struggle, destroying Crassus and nearly his entire Roman army at Carrhae. The subsequent Sassanid Persians fought the Byzantine Greeks constantly for control of Anatolia and the Levant, before themselves falling to the wave of Arab Islamic invaders.
Iran’s location explains much of this violent history. It is not only a bridge from the Orient to the West, but also a north-south clearinghouse between Russia and the Arab world. The Strait of Hormuz currently forms the bottleneck for global petroleum commerce, but even in the age of sail, the narrow sea passage always served as a means for Iranians to shut off all entry into the nearby Persian Gulf.
Much of Ahmadinejad’s apparent domestic appeal stems not from his posture as an Islamist who takes on Israel on behalf of the Palestinians but as a leader who seeks to restore a Persian and Shiite claim to Muslim greatness. The efforts of Iran to undermine the Iraqi government, overturn Lebanese democracy, finance Hezbollah, and use Syria to balance the Gulf sheikdoms are not so different from the management of shifting alliances and intrigue that enabled Cyrus the Great to cobble together the first Persian Empire.
So throughout the checkered history of Iran and the West there have been constant themes that suggest that our current rivalry with Tehran is neither new nor surprising. Fairly or not, Westerners have always viewed their relations with Persia in terms of freedom versus despotism, of individual citizens at Thermopylae fighting the coerced hordes of Xerxes’ subjects. Roman poets likewise depicted Romans fighting Parthians as free-minded Western infantry battling treacherous nomadic horsemen who shot arrows even as they seemed to ride away.
Religion, too, has been an old fault line. Zoroaster, founder of ancient Persia’s religion 600 years before Christ and a millennium before Mohammed, painted a binary world of light against darkness in an apocalyptic and all-encompassing belief system—a view not all that antithetical to subsequent Shiite Islam’s emphasis on struggle and martyrdom. Persians, it seems, have always embraced religion in terms of good believers versus all the rest—without the pacifism of the Sermon on the Mount.
But then again, Iranians have some reason to be paranoid about foreign interventionists and intriguers. We hear much from them today about the “den of spies” in the American Embassy 30 years ago, about the 1953 Anglo-American overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammed Mosaddeq, and about the joint Russian-American virtual takeover of Iran in 1941. So is Western conflict with Ahmadinejad’s restive Iran inevitable?
Not exactly, since there have also been periods of realist engagement between Persians and Westerners. Just as historian Xenophon, in the fourth century B.C., believed that Cyrus the Younger was a pro-Western reformer who might bring Persia into the Hellenic world, so, too, the modernizing Shah Reza Pahlavi and the reformer Mosaddeq in contrasting ways both wanted Iran to incorporate ideas from the West.
Long after Ahmadinejad and the Iranian theocracy are gone, a powerful and proud Iran will still emulate and rival, still befriend and distrust Westerners—captive to a history that is as illustrious as it is volatile.
Victor Davis Hanson, a classics scholar and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Ping
The article does not mention that the Iranian government early in WWII began to position their country as an ally of Germany. The Brits, Americans, and Russians invaded to secure the Southern supply lines so that American logistics could still reach the Russians. The invasion took about two weeks and was launched from Iraq.
I don't accept the basis of this article at all. "Persians" are not a problem. Islam is. So the Persians fought the greeks 2000 years ago.. so what? Great powers fight each other over time.
I don’t accept your premise that Islam is the problem. The problem is the Salifist/Wahabist/Khumeinist sects of Isal.
So they invaded Europe in the 5th Century BC. That does not constitute a 2500 year war. The Romans and Byzantines only fought them in Asia. The Macedonians, Mongols and Arabs conquered them. The Brits and Russians invaded Iran numerous times. Today our firepower versus them is like a million to one in our favor if we factor in nukes. They are not a dire threat. If they start anything; just wipe them out. No sweat.
OK, fair enough.
I don’t accept the basis of this article at all. “Persians” are not a problem. Islam is.
I agree with you. If Iran wasn’t Islamo-fascist, I rather doubt Iran would be our enemy.
Was it not Islam under the guise of Persia then and today Islam under the guise of, as you post...” the Salifist/Wahabist/Khumeinist sects”...
Seems to be Islam no matter what.
I also disagree... its 2497 years since the invasion of Darius in 490 BC , Thermopylae 480 BC .... to the present day, but discounts the period of the Shah when Iran was OUR guys in the mideast and a powerful ally.
Islamofascism and Wahabiism is the real enemy not Persians. We should show a friendly face to the people of Iran and isolate and weaken the Mullahs.
And God Himself will destroy them.
***The invasion took about two weeks and was launched from Iraq.***
It should also be noted that Iraq supported the Nazis by bombing British air fields in Jerusalem.
They'll keep digging until they find something older than the Sumerian civilization ~ but my guess is they can't do it.
Why Thermopolae and not Marathon?
Bump for later reading, interesting title.
btt
Our First order of business must be to demand and achieve from the Congress Legislation that requires all persons involved in reporting or publishing the news report all sources of income for their selves and their direct family members.. That is not a violation of the First Amendment as it does not prevent them from publishing anything. We just need to know and have a right to know who is buying these “main stream” media whores.
Get that done and watch the house of cards that is the Left ad the Islamofacists fall..
They will fight tooth and nail as corrupting our Press is America’s Achilles heel.. Our Founding Fathers were honest men and it is difficult for honest men to see the devices of the wicked.
The Boat Deal the Cheap House the “Hot Stock tip” the “Options” and “great investment advisor”
The truth will come out, Somewhere sometime the right fellow or women will not be for sale no matter how hard you try to control who has access to your gravy train.
The truth will come out and in time we will lay out your crooked game for all to see.
W
Addendum..The same should be made public for all Media Corporations who their advertisers are as well as their investors.
W
Our First order of business must be to demand and achieve from the Congress Legislation that requires all persons involved in reporting or publishing the news report all sources of income for their selves and their direct family members..
That’s a really scary idea.
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