Memories and Reflections

The shooting war has ended, thanks to the merciful intervention of Russia to end what became  a lop sided victory for the Azeris and a devastating humiliation for Armenia. Videos of the carnage shows that the Armenians left behind  many dead and there was evidence of a rout in some places. Most of their armor has been destroyed or damaged and unlike the Azerbaijanis, having very little money, they cannot replace them.  Some observers question whether they have any point in doing so as they are isolated in the world political environment, a history of war with the Islamic world, driven out of their homelands in Turkey, and getting only clucking noises of support from former “Christendom”, now   totally secular and indifferent to Eastern Christianity. Russia allowed the war to continue for 44 days in order to ensure that Armenia, which had been trying to steer an independent course, is now totally dependent on Moscow.

 

 

The first lesson from this is that  One of the worst things that can happen to an army is to have won a war against a rather hapless opponent. So it was in the Armenian victory over the Azeris in  1988-1994. in which the Armenians not only defended the  Armenian  enclave of  Artsakh ( Nagorno -Karabakh )but also seized a sizable piece of Azeri territory  which they have tenaciously held onto for 29 years.  The Armenians assumed this exaggerated sense of military superiority and disparaged the fighting qualities of  the Azeris.  They believed that their deficit in manpower and equipment  would be remedied by the valor of their soldiers. They fought bravely but uselessly.  This is a frequent feature of all nations and peoples ( as well illustrated in the book Knowing Ones Enemies)

In the intervening period the the nation of Azerbaijan has gone  through  an extensive modernization period, especially the military, with the objective of regaining their territory. Look elsewhere for the rights and wrongs and moral high ground on this issue.Ill leave that to the international lawyers..however like most land disputes it is only settled by warfare. In the meantime Armenia rested on its military laurels, allowing the Azeris to get far ahead of them in military preparedness.The Azeris had a huge  quantitative and qualitative advantage over Armenia, a factor which owed much to their oil . On the other hand Armenia exists primarily on largess provided by the Armenian diaspora throughout the world, and Russian loans.

The  second lesson is that this war is what Samuel Huntington   ( The Clash of Civilizations) termed a “fault line conflict,” which tends to be typified by extreme brutality, long lasting , ( with perhaps  a time of peace but always returning to warfare) and  usually terminated by the complete destruction of one side and ethnic cleansing. The war between the Azeris and Armenians has a long and very bloody history as evidenced by mass slaughter of civilians by both sides dating  back to nineteenth century (see my previous blog on the conflict). The modernists, writing on these type of wars, shy away from any mention of culture or religion, evidencing “secular myopia” as Huntington termed it.   In this war there are number of allegations of war crimes, killing prisoners, decapitation of  the dead, cutting off ears, etc. It was a war over territory, and inevitably, identity.

Some have termed it a war of the drones, which is true to some extent it was. Azerbaijan was well supplied by Israel and Turkey with some of the latest in drones which wrecked a devastating toll on the Armenian armor with anti tank missiles. It was not  a matter of comparing  kind of tanks since both sides had  Russian built T-72’s , T-80’s and some older models  against Azeri  T-72’s and the newer T-90’s.

As in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Isreali war that the “experts” announced the end of armor as the sagger equipped Egyptians infantrymen knocked out many Israeli tanks. But the primary problem was that the Armenians were unprepared for combined arms warfare.  Heroics cannot replace training, doctrine, strategy and common sense.Specifically they lacked mobile air defense weaponry which could make short work of the drones. Astute military analysts are advocating that the great powers carefully assess the lessons of this war as there is much to be learned.

In this war the Azeris reclaimed 80% of the land lost to the Armenians in the earlier war. Only the intervention of the Russians prevented the total absorption of Nagorno-Karabakh into Azerbaijan. President Ilhan Aliyev of Azerbaijan claimed that his forces destroyed one billion dollars worth of Armenian military equipment. It is a fact that the Western orientation of Azerbaijan was the locomotive for the modernization of Azerbaijan guided by the wise policies of Aliyev who opened lucrative relations with Israel and the West.

So what are the results?. Armenians are demoralized, rightly blaming their government for incompetence, particularly their bull headed president Nikol Pashinian. They are holding on to the more populated parts of Nagorno Karabakh by virtue of Russian “peacekeepers” deployed into the region.  Turkey has solidified their relationship with Azerbaijan, another step toward Turkish presidents pan-Turkish scheme of allied turkic solidarity up to the Chinese border. They were tightly won even into the Azeri victory, even importing Syrian Arab surrogates to fight for Azerbaijan, alongside Turkish military training teams.

The  Russians have secured a foothold in the ” soft underbelly” of Russia with peacekeepers basically guarding the remainder of the Nagorno-Karabakh
entity in place of Armenia. Azerbaijan has not given up  its claim to all of the Armenian enclave, which means the conflict remains unresolved. Moreover Russia alone drove the peace settlement , bypassing completely the earlier  Minsk settlement structure  composed of  France, the U.S. and Russia.  The West was totally excluded  from the latest  treaty.

It is much more complicated with Iran. No doubt their large Azeri population is ecstatic  over their fellow Azeri victory in the war.The Azeri victory solidified Azeri ethic separatist inclinations. No doubt  quiet a few Persians are happy too,  happy that their fellow Shia   scored a victory over the Christian Armenians, but the more pragmatic  Iranian  rulers,  fear the idea of the Russians on their doorstep. Russian intervention in Iran dates back over two centuries. One Russian expert opined  on twitter that the Russian moves were predicated on putting pressure on Iran.

 

The power struggle in Iraq today centers on the  struggle  between Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Both have militias as part  of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU).There is a total of 67 Shi’ite factions  of which only four belong to the anti-Iranian Al Sistani faction. The PMU was originally established by Al Sistani to combat the threat of the ISIS in 2014 when it appeared the ISIS would overrun Baghdad. The Fatwa issued by Al Sistani has been used by the Pro-Iranian organizations to assume control of much Iraq’s political environment since then. Al Sistani’s religious doctrine emphasized , a “Quietist” religious role for Shi’a clerics, as opposed to the all encompassing Faqih Villayet doctrine of the Iranian  Shi’ite rulers.  The four factions of Al Sistani’s are seeking  to limit  PMU influence in  Government of Iraq, and curtail pro-Iranian activities. The pro-Iranian PMU have been involved in violence against Iraqi civilians and massive corruption.  One element of the PMU, Raba Allah, is  more of a street gang than militia, has been carrying out criminal acts against civilians.

 

The four Sistani units, well trained and equipped, decided in Marc to withdraw from the PMU but there have been a number of mediation efforts by the Iraqi government to mend fences. The present situation is not clear.  However, the promotion of Abu Fadik, an Iranian loyalist, to the PMU deputy commander position, and the appointment of Abu Muntadher  Al -Husseini, from the pro-Iranian Badr organization as PMU as General Secretary, has basically derailed the conciliation.

This month the Al-Sistani factions, issued a statement pledging their allegiance to Iraq, and asking for integration into the Iraqi Armed Forces. This the Iranian  PMU, adamantly refuses to do, obviously under the orders of their Iranian masters.

While the split has had wide coverage on local media, the Iraqi government  has taken little notice, and the PMU has indicated it is simply a move by the four Al Sistani factions, without Al Sistani’s approval. This is an indication of the massive influence of Al Sistani, in that even the Iranian surrogates cannot openly defy the Grand Ayatollah Al Sistani.

The fact is however that Al Sistani is 90 years old and there does not seem to be any Iraqi   nationalist clerics who could take his place– in terms of devotion or influence. While the split of the pro Al-Sistani factions hurt Iranian pretensions, it does not  curtail Iranian influence in Iraq. The reason is simple: The inaction of the Iraqi government, and specifically the weakness of the Prime Minister Al- Kadhimi, who was elected with high expectations and hopes. But he has been a  woefully weak PM,  and seems to be hoping that a Biden administration will ease the pressure on Iran, thus giving him a period of tranquility for his rule, obviously submitting to greater Iranian control in order to maintain a Quisling type government.

The conclusion — for the foreseeable future–is pretty clear, until a general on horseback, possibly a Sunni, arrives on the scene,  has the loyalty of the army, and can motivate it to get off its haunches and move against the Shia Iranian vassals, the Iranian stranglehold will tighten. Of course the  few vestiges of democracy  now in Iraq will gradually disappear, but then as it said- quite frequently -A thousand years of tyranny is better than one day of chaos.

 

 

 

After many years of relative peace it is no longer quiet on the Western  Front.

The thumbnail sketch of the issue. 1884 Spain colonized Western Sahara, formerly populated by Muslim Berber tribes.Over time they became Arabized. IN 1934 It becomes a Spanish province known as Spanish Sahara. Many of the men served in General Franco'[s Moorish legions that July ultimately defeated the communist/socialist “republicans” for control of Spain in the Spanish civil war , 1936-39.It actually  began with a revolt by nationalist Army officers in Spanish Sahara.

It is a totally desert area, with one of the lowest population densities in the world. The  native tribespeople are generally bedouin tribes people, and some were fishermen.  Until Spain controlled it it was basically left untouched by foreigners, mostly because few thought it was with worth  much. The Spanish, however took great pride in being a colonial power, and when huge  high grade phosphate deposits ( 1.7 billion tons) were found in the region  it became much more important to the Franco regime.  Then in the early seventies, a one hundred mile conveyer system was built to bring the ore from the inland desert to the port constructed for it. ( al Aiun)

The Spanish rule of the region was marked by high handed methods, sometimes brutal, and through the elders of the  Arab Sahrawi tribes. The Spanish were not known as subscribing to the “Hearts and Minds” approach to foreign internal development.As it happened so often the taste for nationalism originated with Europeans, Spaniards who were still longing for the lost  “Republican” regime in Spain and that infected the Sahrawi youth.

1973 Tribes in region began an insurgency against the Spanish and in 1975 the Spanish departed as General Franco lingered on his death bed so long it became a standing joke on late night TV. Immediately a three way battle began as Morocco, Mauritania and the newly formed Polisario Front , the armed wing of the proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic  Republic (SDAR) claimed the region. Poor Mauritania was unable to contend with the Polisario guerrilla warfare and gave up their claim in 1979.  Morocco did not, and so the warfare continued until 1991.  The United States brokered an accord in 1993 and an UN organization known as MINURSO deployed to oversee a referendum which has not happened. Bangladesh has contributed to most troops to theMINURSO.

The war between the Polisario and Morocco was a bloody one with the Sahrawis inflicting many casualties on the Moroccan army of ill trained villagers lost in a desert environment. Again and again road bound Moroccan convoys were ambushed  and wiped out. Even with French active support, mostly air and special elite troop trainers,  and  American materiel aid, the Moroccans  were humiliated time and again. The Polisario perfected the operations conducted by David Stirling and his jeep transported troops in WWII. Special Air Services (SAS) troops drove through the desert and attacked German and Italian units and lines of communications hundreds of miles behind Enemy lines. The Polisario perfected this and many other tactics that were later used by the ISIS, using Toyota pick up trucks armed with heavy machine guns. They on several occasions crossed the border into Morocco and attacked Moroccan towns at one time traveling 500m kilometers through Moroccan territory with 1500 men and 200 jeeps. This tactic convinced  the Moroccan king that something had to be done.

The Polisario, on the other hand were being  generously supplied with Soviet weaponry by Algeria, North Korea, and Libya,   supplying weapons, including some armor, and  sophisticated Air Defense  weapons. The Cubans were supplying  training teams. Of course world “elitist” opinion at the time held the attitude that revolutionary warfare was always destined to always win and that the revolutionaries were possessors of the holy grail.The war in Vietnam,  Palestine, and  in various South American countries had indelibly embedded that belief. The Polisario had the advantage of having the support of the Sahrawi people, the “informed” class in Europe ,and also the benefit of being able to run back into Algeria when being pursued by the Moroccans.

At this point It should be noted that Algeria and Morocco have been traditional enemies since the departure of the French.  They fought a border war in 1963 in which the Algerians were soundly trashed. Having spent time  in both countries I can attest to the vast difference in character. the Algerians having bought into socialism have suffered the inevitable effects that socialism always brings, principally inertia and a lack of individual initiative. They are not a happy people, usually at war with themselves. Crossing into Morocco was like traveling from a dark night into  bright sunshine. Morocco is not a shining example of a democracy but it has at least  a  generally benevolent authoritarian rule—-comparatively—-  in any event. Compared to most Arab countries, Morocco has enjoyed decades of stability although  the late King Hassan narrowly  escaped a couple of assassination attempts.

The Moroccan  military leadership was notoriously inept until a young General  by the name of Ahmad Dlimi  came on there scene. He is a great example of the” great man”theory in a smaller vein.. KingHassan retired his cronies in the military leadership, finally accepted the seriousness of the situation and took measures to stop the Polisario incursions and  devastating attacks on Moroccan army units.

The losing war war for Morocco changed radically when General Ahmad Dlimi convinced King Hassan to let him run the war (1979) He dismantled the many small Moroccan outposts which were  frequently being overrun by the Polisario, reorganized the army, concentrated on training, used lessons learned, ( something  most Arab armies disregard), replaced slow moving vehicles with jeeps and  Toyota  type vehicles, and made use of American Special Operations training  putting an offensive sprit back into the army. The Polisario did not fold their tents and creep away however, and their attacks continued, disappearing into the mountainous regions and the vast desert as well as fleeing back into Algeria.

In 1980 General Dlimi came up with the concept of the “strategy of walls” and the berms. The Moroccans over  the years have constructed a wall of 2,700 kilometers of sand and rocks,  with a 5 kilometer wide minefield in front of the wall. With the help of the Americans, many sensitive detection devices were installed and 300 fortified posts and and observation points.  It encloses about 80% of the Western Sahara leaving 20% of desert to the Polsario. About 150, 000 Moroccan soldiers man the berm and the Algerian border fortifications.

All through the eighties the Polisario launched attacks against remote parts of the wall but gradually both sides realized then war was not winnable and in 1991 an accord was signed and the MINURSO,  ( United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara)the UN peacekeeping organization deployed to the Western Sahara, which today consists of 493  personnel, including 245 Military personnel. It has been mostly successful for the simple reason that returning to war was not an option for either side, so the cease fire held for 29 years……until the ” Abraham Accords” became a reality and as it appeared that Morocco might join the UAE and Bahrain in entering into the accord with Israel, Algeria and Iran got nervous. Morocco has never been in the forefront in the forever war against Israel and would seem to be on course to join 6the Accords, inciting Algerian officials to aver that they will will never allow the Zionist state (Israel) on their border, meaning watch out Morocco. So in early December this year  the Polisario set up road blocks on the main road from Morocco to the western part of North Africa, while Polisario officials made war noises and pledged never to allow Morocco to obtain full sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

 

Hezbollah, one of Iran’s most trusted surrogate  groups, and one of its best, has been involved in training Polisario groups and Iran has launched a full throated propaganda campaign to influence the direction of the opinion on Western  Sahara.

I have not really gotten into the the rights and wrongs of the issue.  But there are a couple of points that should be noted. MINURSO is there to oversee a referendum of the native people, but it will never happen because Morocco  knows  it will lose…..despite the famous “Green march”in 1975 in which King Hassan sent thousands of Moroccans to settle in the Western Sahara. Morocco had been one of the most consistent American allies in the diplomatic arena, and President Trump recently offered his support to Morocco in their claim of ownership.

My opinion was summarized in a statement made by Moammar Gaddafi in one of his lucid moments, “the last thing the Arab World needs is another small state.”

 

 

 

 

 

.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/western-sahara-conflict/

My Paper presented at the 13Th ASMEA conference (virtually) Without footnotes ….Slides inserted in the paper.

 

 Historical Considerations in Understanding Iran’s Military and Their Way of War

 By Norvell B DeAtkine

 

Academic and media angst at the early January killing of Qassim Al-Soleimani, head of the Iranian state-sponsored terror organization, al Quds, by an American missile, exposed the long history of American ignorance of Iranian strategic objectives at every level of foreign policymaking by successive administrations. Many saw the event as portending a spiral of violence leading inexorably to all-out war. However, the unpalatable truth is that Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979, a fact well documented by David Crist in his book,The Twilight War.[1] The Iranians have mostly used surrogates to perpetrate a litany of terror attacks and provocations, which, until the killing of  Al – Soleimani, were usually met with angry denunciations but little action. In a region of the world where strength must be constantly demonstrated, the U.S. influence has declined precipitously. We have been unable to contend with an Iranian way of war that is ignored or submerged in a morass of academic and political wishful thinking. The fundamental problem is a prevalent one. Americans lack interest in history, and tend to view other peoples’ actions through the lens of our own culture. The manner in which different cultures fight should be the starting point in understanding our adversaries, especially one as crafty and intractable as Iran. There are many sources covering the direction of Iranian strategy, but generally they do not adequately cover the historical and cultural environment in which the Iranian way of war has developed.[2]

 

Way of war is best defined as a pattern of fighting which is recurrent in history of a people.   The weapons change, perhaps tactics, and newer ideologies are introduced, but underneath it all, the culture, inexorable, near immutable remains.  I hope to depict in this paper the continual cultural thread, which defines the Persian way of War. In doing this it critical to view the military history within the overall Persian culture. Military culture is a subculture of the general culture, and in fact it generally is more conservative and more resistant to change than other institutions. However, the concept that there is such a thing as a “way of war” is a contentious issue and applying it to specific peoples or cultures is fraught with the dangers of walking into an academic minefield, especially given the current academic inability to separate cultural studies from dark illusions of racism. This is particularly true in writing anything  seemingly critical of non- Western military cultures, which are apt to bring on charges of “military orientalism.[3] Nevertheless, one need not  be an anthropologist, or linguist in classical Greek, but merely a serious student of military history to understand that culture is the primary determinant of a way of war.  Edward T. Hall,[4] in his series of works on culture conclusively demonstrates that culture determines every aspect of our lives. It is illogical to assume that warfare is the exception.

This word “orientalism” has become a pejorative term in much of the Middle East scholarship, and has often clouded useful scholarship.  In other words, hoping to find continuity, in the current Iranian way of war to that waged by the Achaemenid Persians is too theoretical and fanciful.  Based on my personal on-the ground experience and many years studying warfare, it is true that one can find exceptions to a continuity of military culture, but they are rare.  It is not an aberration that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) looked back to the era of  early Islamic conquests to model their method of warfare. [5]  The Islamist concept of war as envisioned by the Pakistani Brigadier S.K. Malik in his much-read book, The Quranic Concept of War, laid out a doctrine that was fundamental to the ISIS conduct of its operations.[6]

 

In examining ways of war, several American military historians turned it into an analytical industry that continues to pull in increasing numbers of young psychologists, historians and innumerable pundits.[7] In his book, The Western Way of War; Infantry Battle in Classical Greece,   American historian Victor Davis Hanson, defined a Western way of war, exemplified by the Greek method of fighting  the Persians, who have been described as fighting an “eastern way of war.”  The western way of war was predicated on the spirit and martial élan of the citizen soldiers disciplined by military training and city-state loyalty. They were citizens with leaders elected or appointed on the basis of a meritocracy. This was in contradistinction to the Persian habit of leaders appointed on the basis of loyalty to the King or part of the royal family – a system followed by most Middle East countries today based on loyalty to the regime as the major factor.

 

 

 

There are massive volumes of work on culture including a number of approaches which often tend to obfuscate more than clarify.   Using a definition presented to my classes at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School by redoubtable professor Gary Weaver, of the American University, culture is defined as a “way of life of a people passed down from one generation to the next through learning.”[8]   Culture is formed by a myriad of factors, e.g., history, language, religion, geography etc. The people of a culture are shaped by the culture in the form of a bell-shaped curve, some totally, some not at all, but the vast majority to a considerable degree, resulting in a predominately common world view.  Moreover, as studies indicate, cultures change very slowly, especially in more traditional societies.

 

The Greek view of the Persians was usually derogatory[9], but often  because the Persians preferred to fight their battles in a different manner, eschewing the all-out frontal assault.  Many historians[10] analyzing the warfare of that era, including John Keegan, in his History of Warfare, have depicted the Persian way of war as one of evasion, delay, and indirectness, particularly gifted in psychological warfare, and the use of intelligence.  Because of these attributes, the Persians were usually pictured as effeminate, weak, fighting for pay only, and linked together by chains to prevent fleeing from the battle. Unfortunately, we do not get a full picture of the other side of the story as the Arab invasion of Persia[11]destroyed much of the narratives of earlier Persian history. Moreover, the multilingual aspects of the Persian Empire inhibited a large volume of historical narratives being produced, so the Persian version is largely unrecorded.  in his book, Shadows in the Desert, Dr. Kaveh Farrokh, [12]gives a more balanced view and points to the superiority of the Greek armor with their longer spears, and better swords to the inferior fighting equipment of the Persians. The Persians depended upon their mounted and infantry archers to decimate the enemy before having to close for hand-to-hand combat.[13] One of the major problems of the ancient Persians warring against the Greeks was the multilingual nature of the huge Persian armies. The linguistic issue inhibited transferring commands to the diverse national units who fought with different equipment, doctrine, and varying loyalty to the Persian royal house. Against the Greeks this was fatal.

 

It was Russell Weigley, in his American Way of War[14] that brought the theory into concrete reality, especially for American veterans who observed on the ground the accuracy of his analysis of the American way of war in WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam, which could be compared to in a large degree, to the Iraqi wars.  He and his acolytes hammered on the thesis that Americans demanded a total military victory, crushing the enemy with the use of overwhelming firepower, relying on technology, and mostly ignoring any ambiguities surrounding the issues involved.  From these cultural attributes the fascination with technology of weapons of war permeated the American way of war.  As many have pointed out, American dependence on technology was one of the primary problems of their forces in Vietnam and Iraq.[15]

 

To a degree the “Persian “way of war is the epitome of an Eastern way of war[16], and while it as certain similarities to the Arab way of war it has significant differences.  The ancient Persian method of war was centered on the archers, many of whom were mounted. They could “cloud out the sun” with cascades of arrows. In a modern sense, their way of war was based on standoff weaponry, preferring to win by decimating the enemy without close combat.  Fast forwarding to Iraq, the vast majority of American casualties against the Iraqi surrogates of the Iranian regime resulted from Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) and mortars – not close quarter combat. Also, in the Persian- Greek wars, the Iranians depended on surrogates as much as possible. This was not to say that the ancient Persians lacked courage or ability. As Herodotus wrote, they were proud men and brave fighters, and esteemed courage more than any other nation[17]

 

 

The military historian, John Keegan while acknowledging the importance of technology and other factors, basically and unequivocally viewed way of war as rooted in culture. He wrote, “Culture is nevertheless, a prime determinant of the nature of warfare, as the history of its developments in Asia clearly demonstrates.”[18] He expanded the thesis of Victor Hanson, demonstrating that the Muslim disrespect  and ignorance of Western Christianity and European culture debilitated their ability to defeat Western armies beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of   Egypt in 1798.[19]  The tenacity of Middle Eastern cultural values is evident in only superficial absorption of Western doctrines, military ethos, and techniques, which  has continued in Middle Eastern military establishments to the present day.[20]   For instance, many of the deficiencies of the Egyptian army recorded by Winston Churchill in The River Wars were still apparent to this writer[21] a hundred years later. The June 2014 dissolution of the Iraqi army in the face of a numerical smaller ISIS force, gave rise, belatedly, to the exasperated, “It’s the culture, stupid!”

 

World View

 

The elite of Iran see themselves as perpetual victims, surrounded by enemies, in a virtual state of siege. From this, they perceive Iran as insecure, and this is aggravated by a hidden sense of inferiority.[22] This sense of inferiority is often disguised by bellicose pronouncements of military[23] and national superiority. The elites see Iran as the indispensable and leading power in the Middle East, kept from their natural role by surrounding regional enemies and international great powers, in the most part of the last century, by Russia and Great Britain, and now the United States.[24] As Sir Percy Sykes so undiplomatically wrote, “Persians are remarkably vain, and they think so highly of their barren desert country they cannot conceive of any power failing to covet it.”[25] The renown historian of Iran, Richard Frye, wrote, “The central fact of this culture ……is the rather intangible feeling among the people that Persian culture – traditions, outlook on life, and the like – will always survive political domination and the onslaught of new ideologies.”[26]

 

Despite the plethora of invasions by alien peoples, Arab, Turks. Mongols, Afghans, and the later era, control by imperial Russians and British forces, the Iranians were able to maintain their distinct Iranian culture. But politically each era of foreign domination brought with it the factionalism of those who resisted and those who bought into it. The long history of foreign involvement in Iran has produced a strong element of xenophobia.[27]

 

 The Influence of Iranian National Character on their Way of War

 

There are many critics to the whole idea of a “national character” or the “modal character” or other appellations used by anthropologists to characterize a people. The quest to understand their politics, daily living patterns, and especially the below the water “ice berg” effect that often bewilders casual observers, and infuriates those who view Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword as racist or pseudo-science.   Without getting into the exotica and esoterism of cultural studies my study of military culture indicates, the near immutability of cultural norms, despite generations of changes in technology, political rule, foreign domination, and the much-ballyhooed “the global village.” This can be demonstrated by the observations of Iranian/Persian culture over the centuries.  The Greeks, Romans, Byzantines all saw the Persians as an implacable enemy possessing imagination, guile, and a disarming ability to suborn factions of their allies. Their ability to turn the Greek city-states into warring factions, using propaganda and diplomacy, was unmatched.  The historians noted the Persian use of intelligence, and psychological warfare, including “psychological profiling.“ Unlike the Greeks, who often buried their heads in the sand and hoped for the best, the Persians maintained agents moving about the city states, gathering information, dispensing stories to add fuel to the fires of the perpetual city -state rivalries and jealousies. Backing up their “soft power” the Persians intimidated their enemies using their ponderous armies, “that drank the rivers dry”[28] as they passed, terrorizing towns that lay in their path.

 

Darius the Great spoke for all the Persians when he identified himself as the center of justice and righteousness. Tom Holland in his book Persian Fire, wrote, the hubris exhibited by Darius was, “Closely reflecting how they (Persians) saw themselves. No people had a greater faith in their own virtue.”[29]     Other observers added that the Persians were so convinced of their superiority, they were susceptible to ridicule, often reacting in a thoughtless manner and given to raging desires of reprisal and revenge. They could tolerate the occupier’s foreign cultures, but at the same time viewed them with contempt.[30] They used this feigned tolerance to undermine their enemies by cunningly using their own traditions against them. The quick and inventive Iranian mind was captured in   the seminal work on Iranian society by J.J. Morier, The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isphafan,“ In the preface Sir Walter Scott wrote, “the genius of the Persians is lively and volatile to degree much exceeding other nations of the East.” [31]

 

The topography of Iran is a critical factor in the formation of an Iranian character. Iran is very large country with population centers mostly along a very narrow ring[32] around the sparsely populated central barren areas of Iran. The vast distances have created an insular culture among the Iranians, with a strong element of provincialism.[33] Creating an Iranian identity is still an ongoing process.

The diversity of peoples and city-centric town dwellers was observed by Edward G. Browne’s, A Year Among the Persians, one in which the inhabitants of one small city could not find a generic word for city, only the name of their city.  In the passage of a century, that has changed only incrementally.[34]

 

Critical to the study of the Iranian   national character is the hubris and self-confidence of the elites, long commented on by visitors and observers. As aspect of this among the elite, is the appeal of irredentism. They feel their place in the world has been stymied by Western powers and seek to redress it.  Graham correctly assessed the Persian elite’s sense of their place in the world as beleaguered, yet being the center of the universe.[35] When I traveled in Iran in 1968 and 1969, the elite of Shiraz and Isphahan, were not reticent in speaking of Basra as a part of Iran.  To them it could be considered as a sort of Anschluss with Iraq. Of course, in the Iran -Iraq war, the Shi’a of Iraq, much to the chagrin of the Mullahs, turned out to be more Arab than Shi’a.

 

The Impact of the Shi’a Clerics

 

Shi’a clerics have an immense impact on the national character.[36]  They were never dominated by the political leaders of Iran, and now constitute a critical part of the ruling class.  Reza Shah tried to secularize Iran and limit the power of the clergy by undermining them, with some success, but he realized he did not have power to destroy their power.[37] His son, Mohamed Reza Shah, however, tried to confront the clergy head on with disastrous results.[38] The immense power of the mullahs, fueled by their religious endowment money and popularity among the poor and urban lower middle class was something that the governing elite and Western intelligence agencies missed in 1979.[39] Historically, the Shi’a clergy,  has been a restraining influence on modernization, and dichotomous in terms of a unifying force.[40] As one of the unifying forces among the rural and poor Iranian people, their influence conversely, has also been a divisive factor.  Many of the more educated class have been agitating for an abolition of the overall authoritarianism of a state-imposed religion for close to a century. In fact, the irony of the secular vs. religious battle in Iran is that current rulers of the “Islamic” regime have gained total control of the religious clergy as in the words one authority on the subject, Mehdi Klalagi,

“Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the current supreme leader, or ruling jurist, of the Islamic Republic—has bureaucratized the seminaries and created a vast administration to handle every aspect of clerical life, including health insurance, student housing, curricula, clerical credentials and more. The establishment now has very strict rules regulating admissions, the issuance of credentials and granting permission to wear clerical clothing.”[41]

 Strategic Considerations.

 A critical aspect of the way of war is the military topography.   In this, despite the record of many foreign invasions, Iran enjoys a relatively favorable defensive military topography and climate. While psychologically paranoid about the aggressive intentions of the regional countries around them, and more emphatically, the Western powers, which in the Iranian mind includes Israel, the Iranians enjoy a favorable geostrategic environment that few in the Middle East do.  The Zagros, and Elburz Mountains, the forbidding interior, the lack of water, severe climatic conditions, and a mostly urban population, present tremendous obstacles to any modern invading army.  As those who have studied Middle Eastern urban warfare,[42]

including the Iraqi occupation of Khorramshahr, and the Iraqi retaking of Mosul from the ISIS can attest, it is a laborious and bloody operation. Therefore, paranoiac suspicions aside, the Iranian regime is relatively safe behind their topographical obstacles, giving them latitude to concentrate on their strategic offensive goals, fairly confident no one will be foolish enough to launch a land war against them. The addition of nuclear weapons, which will inevitably be added their arsenal, will give them additional freedom of maneuver.  Ironically, the nuclear agreement made by Western powers, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran by Western powers,[43] facilitated their capability to employ their unconventional way of war.[44] The relative safety offered by Iran’s military topography enables it to concentrate on its expansionist designs, an offensive strategy, rather than defensive posture.  It is a distinctly Iranian form of Lebensraum, ingathering the Shi’a of the world under the Iranian embrace. The weak Western and Gulf Arab response to Iranian provocations have created a vacuum in the Middle East and the West is not inclined to militarily challenge Iran.

 

Strategic Goals

 Michael Eisenstadt, an astute expert on Iran at the Washington Institute of Middle East Policy, defined the major strategic goals of Iran as first, attaining self-sufficiency, particularly in military industry, secondly, transforming Iran into a regional power projecting influence through the Middle East, and thirdly, building  up their military strength to preclude another tragedy such as the Iran-Iraq war.[45] Following the dictums of the early Persian kings, it is far better to intimidate enemies into submission that beat them into it. I would go a bit further. Iran wants to be on the world stage as a world power, perhaps a second tier, but a world power nonetheless.   Moreover, I would point out the fourth strategic goal as being the control of the Persian Gulf as a standalone objective. In my view it has been a primary goal of Iranian regimes for centuries. The view of Iranian elite, secular or religious, has always been that their well-being depends upon their control of the Gulf. Even using the term “Arab Gulf” infuriate them. To the Iranian elite, the Persian Gulf is considered a Persian lake. The media in Iran repeatedly hammered that theme.  From the time of the Achaemenid era, the Persians have regarded the Gulf as vital. An Iranian article from 1968 in their state – run media accurately conveys the Iranian historic view of the Gulf, and stands as an example of long-term objectives outliving regime change.  The media of Islamic regime could have been this written today:

“…Iran today represents the most important factor in the future of the Gulf, and that our population is more than twice the size of the Arab littoral states. Nevertheless, we are ready to collaborate with the sheikhdoms to safeguard the security of the Persian Gulf – but they must never forget, so long as Iran is there, the Persian Gulf will never be an Arab Gulf.”[46]

 

      Iranian Military Following the Achaemenid Empire

 After the destruction of the Persian empire by Alexander the Great in 331 BC  A measure of military glory was regained  by the successor dynasties, the  Greek Persian Seleucids, followed by the warlike  Parthians, a tribal nomad people from the East who destroyed the Seleucid dynasty  and created a diverse tolerant civilization and perfected long  distance warfare , being particularly adept on   horseback firing arrows that penetrated Roman armor. They were particularly famous for mastering the technique of being able to launch their arrows riding away from the battlefield, apparently quite effectively.[47]  The three Persian dynasties that followed the demise of the Achaemenid empire, the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanian continually fought wars against the Romans, the Byzantines (Eastern Roman Empire) and later the Arabs.[48]

The following empire, Sassanians, revived the old Persian empire, as many Persians saw the Parthians as foreigners.  The Sassanians introduced a number of military reforms such as the use of heavily armed cavalry and reestablishing units of elephant-borne infantry.  In fact, the East Romans adopted the Sassanian reorganization of military administration. The Sassanians continued the Persian traditional effectiveness with propaganda, the use of intelligence and surrogates for certain types of warfare.[49]  Their type of warfare struck the Arabs, who were beginning their wars against the Persians,  as effeminate and degenerate.[50]  The long Byzantine wars against the Persians prompted Maurice, one or the Emperors of the Byzantines, to sum up the lessons learned in the wars against the Persians whom he depicts as “wicked, dissembling, and servile,”[51] in his treatise Strategikon. At the same time, he pictured them as brave patriotic, obedient, prosecuting war with precision and persistence inducing a war-weariness on their opponents.[52]

 

After the Arab invasion of 641 until the buildup under Shah Mohamed Pahlavi, the bright spots in Persian military were that achieved by Abbas the Great (1588-1629) and Nadir Shah (from 1736-1747).   It is important to note that from 1055 to 1501 the Persians were ruled by Turks, and traditionally the Persians have seen the Turks as warriors but a dull unimaginative people.[53] Most of the wars fought by the “Persian” empires were by Turkish tribes and mercenaries.  However, the Safavid dynasty was of great importance establishing Shi’ism as the state religion, and establishing a strong central government which lasted for 200 years, but they were not successful against the Ottoman Turks in warfare.[54]

 

 

The Persian/Iranian Military in the Modern Era

 After humiliation by the Afghans in 1722 and the demise of the Safavid dynasty, the advent of the Qajar dynasty with the exception of the reign of the Shah Abbas and massive European intervention in Iran, Persian rule did not extend much beyond Tehran for two centuries. Throughout the colonialist period, the military units were either under British, Russian, or Swedish command.  Under the Pahlavi’s, despite the attempt of Reza Shah to build up his military, most observers at the time opined that it was only useful for parades and ceremonies.[55] The Persian army was ineffective against tribal pro-German uprisings in World War I and even worse in World War II.[56] The Iranian flirtation with Germany incurred the invasion by Russian and British forces to which the Iranian resistance lasted only 48 hours.  Despite the exorbitant taxes levied on Iranian merchants to build an effective army, the majority simply fled before the Soviet and British attacks.

 

The massive military buildup under Shah Mohamed Pahlavi, beginning in the Sixties, and continuing until his departure in 1978, primarily with American equipment and trainers, at one time reaching 35000 military and contractor personnel. The American training missions in Iran (ARMISH and GENMISH) did manage to instill a degree of professionalism in the Iranian military, especially the air force, but following the revolution, as is usually the case in the Middle East, Western training quickly dissipated,  but did  endure long enough to give Iran an advantage in the Iran-Iraq War.[57] The increased size and assumed prowess of his army prompted the Shah, at the request of the Sultan of Oman, to test out his military by deploying units to fight the Dhofari rebels in Oman.  These units were a combination of recruits bolstered by Special Forces, some of the best Shah had.  The results were mixed.[58]

The rapid collapse of the Imperial government in 1979, was brought about by a number of factors,[59] one of the most salient being the poor health of the Shah, his perpetual indecisive nature, and the authoritarian nature of the regime in which officials were unable to take bold action on their own.[60] From the military point of view, the lack of discipline in the military and the lack of leadership exhibited by the officer corps, especially senior leadership was striking. In the run up to the “Islamic” revolution and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini the perfidy, cowardice, and treacherous nature of many senior leaders was repulsive.  But the cultural lesson imparted by General Robert Huyser’s  mission to put backbone into the Iranian military leadership was even more telling. The Chief of Staff of the Supreme Military Staff, General Gharabaghi explained to him.

“You should understand that things are very different from your country. If you expect an individual to accomplish anything, you give him a specific order. Once the order is given, the person then has to be constantly supervised, otherwise you see no progress. People in my country have been trained that way for hundreds of years.”[61]

General Huyser’s observations, who had visited Iranian military prior to this visit, undercut his contention that the military could have created a military regime if allowed to by the Washington squabbling bureaucrats. I would suspect that General Huyser’s optimistic view of the Iranian military was colored by the very accomplished Iranian penchant for pageantry…the “dog and pony” shows always presented to VIPs, which were very impressive[62]

 

The Washington squabbling itself was true enough[63] and a difficult obstacle, but the real problem was explained by General Abbas Gharabaghi, and some of the other top military commanders; the military did not know how to work as a team because they had always simply awaited the Shah’s directives. No one wanted to take responsibility. Cross cultural analyses invariably point out that Iranian culture requires a visionary leader to lay out the plan and then direct the subordinates on how to accomplish it.[64] They eschew collective tasks and basically trust only their family or very close friends. Other experts on Iranian politics have pointed out the Shah’s regime was an edifice built on mistrust. He designed the structure that way – as most Middle Eastern leaders do.  One edge of the army sword points toward the enemy and the other toward the capitol

 

 The Iran-Iraq War

To some Western observers the Iranian military performance in the war was a surprise, fighting much better than had been expected [65](especially by Saddam Hussein) but my analysis is that the Iranians demonstrated their continued ineffectiveness fighting a conventional war. Their enemy, the Iraqi military, was “professional” in name only.  Iraq went to war with incompetent military leadership, mostly old and inadequate equipment, having only about a third of Iran’s eligible males to fight the war, a poor logistic system, total lack of strategic planning, and an army held together primarily with fear. The political leadership was unable to rouse a national war spirit in which most of the people referred to it as “Saddam’s war.” [66]

Despite the paeans of praise from Western pundits who had apparently expected the Iranians to crumble,[67] in conventional war Iranians were equally hapless., resorting to using young men in mass human wave attacks to open gaps in porous Iraqi defenses for the elite units to move through. While much of this ineffectiveness is laid at the door of Khomeini and his purge of the military, in reality, most of the senior army officer corps was deadwood anyway, and the Iranians would not have fared much better had all of them remained in the army. In fact, the imagination and effectiveness of the smaller Iranian units were a direct result of the field grade officer corps being drastically thinned allowing younger, more zealous officers to take the battle forward. The influence of years of American training given to the Iranians was valuable in this regard. Certainly, in the air force the Iranians were far superior in tactics and flying skill.

 

Where the Iranians did well were in the same fields as in Achaemenid times. They were superb in intelligence, propaganda, intrigue, deception and construction of military infrastructure to further their operations. They were much cleverer than their Iraqi opponents, usually one step ahead in planning and nimbler in meeting reverses.  They also had the immense advantage of fighting to defend the Motherland and Shi’a religion against the latter-day minions of Caliph Yazid[68] represented by the Saddam Hussein Sunni regime. Their tactics in the swamps of southern Iraq were extraordinarily well executed but were exceptions. In strategic planning and execution, however they exhibited the same problems that bedeviled the armies of Darius; over centralization, lack of coordination among elements of the ground forces, in this case the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)[69] and the Artesh (army), and an overwhelming hubris mixed with contempt for their Iraqi enemy.

 

The ingenuity of the Iranians at lower levels of command were respected by the Iraqis, e.g. the creation of bridges using cork just below water’s surface to conceal them from Iraqi detection, deception tactics, rapid reinforcement of penetrations of Iraqi lines, small unit infiltration tactics, and dependence on small unit leader’s initiative. The Iraqi officers professed a great degree of admiration for the Iranian imagination and ingenuity. which was obviously lacking on their side[70]

 

There was little Iranian command structure at the beginning of the war, and individual units were left to fight for their existence on their own, in urban areas like Khorramshahr.

However, later, as the Iranian command, reconstituted itself, the authoritarian nature of the Iranian culture reasserted itself and much of the small unit effectiveness was smothered under Iranian religious leader’s direction and lack of military knowledge.

As the war dragged on, the Iranian command structure reformed, and much less initiative at lower levels was apparent. The Iranians resorted to mass frontal “human wave” attacks, which they repeated again and again despite immense casualties, attacking Iraqis in well-fortified areas.  The Iranians were fighting out of their cultural parameters, mostly out of desperation, partly out of military ignorance. Conventional war and its requirement for combined arms requirements were well beyond them. They generally failed to bring their main advantageous cultural attributes in the fighting against the Iraqis.

In some areas the Iranian resemblance to early Persian Empire war fighting techniques is eerily similar.  The great king Xerxes moved huge armies of various nationalities to attack the Greeks, some of the contingents being little more than civilians with light weapons. This was repeated in the Iran-Iraq war. As Iraqi General Aladdin Makki told American interviewers, at the first (1982) battle of Basra, “They (Iranians) used thousands of people in a way we had never seen before:

Waves of civilians with light personal armor, wearing skirts or dishdashhara. had been told by their clergy that Najaf or Karbala was there.” As Makki continued, “they repeated this tactic five times.”[71]

 Iranian intelligence was excellent as might be expected, according to the head of Iraqi intelligence, Major General Mizher Rashid Rashid al Tarfa al Ubaydi. The Iraqi intelligence organization was riddled with Iranian spies – as they discovered after the war.[72] On the other hand, the noted volubility hubris of the Iranians, noted by all the observers of Iranian society through the years, was a major factor in the poor Iranian protection of sensitive information. They used non-secure communication between units, their mullahs gave away military information in their sermons, and the Iranian newspapers, anxious to present favorable narratives about operations, gave Iraqi analysts critical information.

 Following the war with Iran and Saddam’s ill-fated attack on Kuwait and involvement in subsequent wars against the West, Iraq was reduced to the level of an impoverished third world state, with three contending ethnic factions vying for control or self-governance.  The Iranian regime correctly saw their opportunity and renewed their bid for regional power reintroduced age-old Iranian imperialism rebranded as an alternate Islamist movement. A particular trend in the Arab world extolling Sunni triumphalism, as espoused by Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State presented the Iranian regime a ready-made opportunity to brand themselves as the protectors of Shi’ism, expanding their influence into Shi’a communities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.

 

The Military Under the Islamist Regime

 the Iran – Iraq war and the IRGC absorbed the role of leading the Iranian worldwide offensive. Their specific function was as an expeditionary force using small detachments similar to the special operations force of the United States to assist and train other surrogates to do the dirty work of killing and destruction.[73] Their prize accomplishment was the training of the Hezbollah, and the reflected glory of purportedly driving the Israelis out of Lebanon. The successes of the Huthis in Yemen, Iraqi militia groups, the tenacity of the Hamas in Gaza, as well as their critical support of Assad in Syria, have added immensely to their reputation.

Their primary instrument was to constitute a force which contained all the attributes of those things Iranians have always excelled in, to wit; subversion, intrigue…in short…. political warfare executed with verve and professionalism.

The primary weapon of Iranian expansionism, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, (IRGC), a force composed primarily of ethnic Persians, with impeccable Islamic credentials initially was formed to serve as a counterweight to an Iranian military, tgat was not trusted by the Islamic regime. However, as the Iran-Iraq war dragged on, the IRGC was equipped with heavy conventional weapons to fight as a spearhead in several major Iranian attacks. The hyped effectiveness of the IRGC in the Iran -Iraq war, was largely the result of a media campaign, not only in Iran but also in the Western world, that gave them a luster not wholly deserved. [74]

 

The IRGC, as part of the strategy and doctrine of the Islamist regime, has been written about and analyzed in copious amounts of literature, but usually based more on current indicators than historical and cultural factors[75]. With the secrecy that surrounds all of the Islamist regime in Iran, hard information is difficult to acquire and much of it is what they want us to know.  However, some observers view the future utility of the IRGC with skepticism. Ostovar wrote, “Conflict has driven the IRGC’s institutionalization as a military, security service, political entity, socio-cultural force, covert operator, economic conglomerate, media mogul and mechanism of foreign and strategic policy.” [76] 

They also have psychological operations units, and civil affairs units for the tactical and operational levels, presenting soft power force multipliers that are of utmost importance to the Iranian way of war.[77] Human intelligence work is a special forte of the IRGC as well.  However, like most Middle Eastern countries there are multiple intelligence and security organizations overlapping and watching each other.  No one, or any organization, is totally trusted.  The non-lethal branches of the IGRC are critical in that it is a basic premise of the Iranians that they will be at war against a superior conventional military force and have to win wars avoiding head on clashes with the modern hoplites, eschew conventional war, and win using other means.

 

Al-Quds

 In the evolution of the Iranian Islamic regime, the IRGC, and its spawn, the Basij, has evolved from a force to safeguard the Islamic regime to become inextricably part of the regime.  The IRGC spawned the Quds force as the ultimate weapon to continue the irredentist aims of the regime. Unable or unwilling, and smart enough to avoid fighting a conventional war, the Quds force has expanded and matured into a first-class subversion and terrorist organization, to continue  Iranian illusionary dream of becoming not just a regional power but one recognized as a world power.[78] The Quds force working within the culture of Iranian penchant for intrigue, indirection, and subtle maneuvering, has become the premier Iranian tool for advancing Iranian national goals.

The elite Quds force trains surrogate forces, as they have in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. They are also particularly masters and specialists in terrorism, so much so that the US Department of State considers Iran the world’s premier sponsor of state terrorism. In the 2019 report correctly singled out Iran as one of the world’s worst sponsor of terrorism. The regime has spent over 700 million a year to support terrorist groups that serve its proxies and expand its malign influence across the globe.”[79]

The Quds force is far more than a terrorist organization however, as it assiduously cultivates allies in the Middle East and throughout the world. Iran depends on these allies to carry Iran’s water in regional conflicts. As Afshon Ostovar wrote,” at the spearhead of this effort, Quds has become a pillar of Iran’s strategic and foreign policy.”[80] Unlike many terrorist organizations, they do not generally crow about their successes.  They also are very adept, as one might expect, in covering their tracks. For instance, the Iranian terror attack on the Khobar Towers in 1996 went cold as it took a year to pin it on the Iranians. For a number of years, a number of Western academics maintained that Iran was on our side in the war against the ISIS. This fiction was maintained (and still is by some) until it became clear the Iranians, consistently downplayed the ISIS threat, and were assisting the travel of ISIS terrorists through Iran into Iraq.  The enduring strength of Iranian support among the Western “informed” class is demonstrated by the persistent lament that the Iranian terrorism is simply a defensive weapon of the weak, or fearful, very similar to the appellation applied for so many years –by some of the same people- to Soviet aggression[81].

The Quds force was buoyed in influence by the mythical persona of Qassem Soliemani who had become the Che Guevara of the Middle East, popping up all over the trouble spots. Western media has embellished his image and warrior reputation, but he was undoubtedly a key and important asset for the ambitious Iranian regime.  His enlarged ego and propensity to seize authority not given to him by the Islamic government, was illustrated by his communication in 2008 with General David Petraeus offering to meet and work out a security arrangement for Iraq.   The Supreme leader was not amused and he was passed over for command of the IRGC but remained in command of the Quds force. His loss to the ambitions of the Iranian regime is considerable but not irreparable.

The Basij

A very important, although less glamorous organization, is the Basij organization. In the Iran-Iraq war they were the fanatically loyal cannon fodder of the Islamic regime. Their mission was to run through the Iraqi minefields and barbed wire fortifications, opening a path for the IRGC and army infantry to advance through. Today, nearly four million of them are engaged in public works, businesses, producing propaganda, and in their morality role, similar to that of the shorta el Din of Saudi Arabia, harassing women for improper attire, and maintaining ideological and Islamic purity of Iranian society. To do so they are embedded throughout all the towns of Iran and civil institutions of Iranian society. It is a strictly volunteer organization, and like the former Ba’ath party membership in Iraq, it is very helpful to members in pursuing other more lucrative employment. Its central role in the Iranian power structure has inevitably evolved into an institution evidencing corruption and massive nepotism. The diversity and sociology of Iran has always mitigated against unity and it is one of the missions of the Basij to remedy that problem., The Basij will be the ideology commissars among the people, informing, providing networks of security neighborhood watches, propagandizing the people with entertainment such as festivals,[82]

They have become their own huge monolithic industry and public service practitioners. Free from competition in bidding for the massive government contracts, their agencies, contactors, and public officials are everywhere.[83] Nothing ensures public support for a Middle Eastern regime more than a capability to provide employment, not even the fear of the security apparatus.  This is the primary reason for the bloated bureaucracies in the Middle East.  Having connections with the Basij is an important   factor in gaining employment, university entrance, and social elevation. They will also perform the disagreeable tasks of putting down sectarian and tribal disturbances with extra judicial punishments handed out randomly.

 

Surrogate Warfare

The Iranians use surrogate organizations like Hezbollah, Amal and Hamas to do their dirty work. The bombing in 1983 of the Marine barracks in Beirut is one example. Another is the 1994 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina. When that is not possible, they pay organizations or individuals to carry out the terror attacks.   Multiple organizations such as the PFPLF, the Abu Nidal organization, none of whom are Shi’a in composition, have been used.   For quite a while they tried to cultivate the PLO under Arafat but their wholehearted support of the rival HAMAS organization in the Gaza undermined that alliance. The Iranians used a Libyan connection to carry out the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, apparently in revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian airliner by an American warship in July 1988. They usually maintain some plausible deniability, but their predilection to boast about their “successes” in these actions often undermine their credibility. All this is in consonance with great Persian empires who used the many dominated nations, and tribes as cannon fodder and auxiliaries.

 

The Shi’a factor in Iranian Military Culture

 Religion in the form of Islam is a great galvanizing factor in consideration of the Iranian Way of War. Islam and the near mystical power of the Prophet’s sayings and the Qur’an are difficult for Westerners to assess in estimating the combat abilities of Islamic armies.  However, the use of Qur’anic verses and slogans have been critical elements of success through the ages. Moreover, the Shi’a sense of martyrdom provides an additional emphasis to the power of Islam among the soldiers and officers. Shi’ism is the religion of sorrow and martyrdom. Martyrdom is a celebrated status among the Shi’a and is exemplified by one scene a Western observer recorded, noting the anguish of several Iranian soldiers, returned from Iraqi prisoner of war camps.  They were weeping at the grave of Ayatollah Khomeini, lamenting their guilt at being alive and not dying for their leader.[84]

The doctrine of the Shi’a revolves around the twelve Imams, all of whom, with the exception of the last, called the hidden Imam, were killed, allegedly by Sunni intrigue. The last Imam went into occultation (941 AD) and will someday reappear.  Until that time the Shi’a clergy evolved a system allowing clerics to guide the faithful until the Hidden Imam returns. With advent of Ayatollah Khomeini, this was further drastically modified to provide for a “government by the expert,” wilayet e- Faqih. This gave Khomeini, (the expert) dictatorial powers. So, in distinction from Sunni Islam, the Shi’a have a centralized hierarchy of authority, which crosses national borders. This gives the Iranians regime a particular and powerful source of power not available to the Sunni Arab leaders.[85] A third factor which gives the Shi’a clergy of Iran increased influence in all spheres of Iranian life is the use of Ijtihad a doctrine that evolved among the Shi’a scholars, providing the ability to basically reinterpret Islamic traditions and law – a factor theoretically not available to the Sunni. In this way the senior Shi’a clerics can and have

interpreted Islamic law to fit their military and political doctrine.[86] A fourth factor is the Shi’a use of taqiyya, which originally was to protect themselves from Sunni persecution often strays into a characteristic of Shi’a in a crisis allowing Shi’a to disavow their religion to protect themselves. [87]

 

 

The Artesh (Regular Army)

Most importantly many of the faults that plagued the Imperial army and the Islamic Iranian army in the Iran -Iraq war are still present. The mostly peasant soldiers are given mediocre training, suffer draconian punishment, are officered by second rate quality officers, and with the Islamic “Jihad” motivation fading, morale is low.[88]  Training is imparted largely by rote and most of the units are hollow in that they are severely under-equipped and under- manned.  The sectarianism of the Pahlavi era still exists and, in some areas, has been exacerbated by Basij fanatics imposing death sentences for “immorality.”  A major weakness is the lack of combined military operations, partially because of intra service and personal rivalries and also because the Islamic regime prefers it that way as a method of coup-proofing.  The embedded rivalry between the IRC and the regular armed forces remains as the primary obstacle to overall Iranian military effectiveness.[89]

 

The excessively large regular army (Artesh), an army of mostly rural peasants, barely literate, with health problems, particularly strength issues from lack of proper nutrition, exists primarily for intimidation purposes.[90] These weaknesses are compounded by leadership and command and control issues, the politicization of the officer corps, Iranian traditional distrust of anyone outside their family, unquestioning obedience to authority,  bureaucratized logistics system, a culture of people who generally waits for instructions, and a very thin layer of elite officers able to exercise initiative and operate without stultifying authority.[91]

Conclusion

In this article I have emphasized the Iranian use of deception, guile, indirection, and byzantine methods of warfare. Some would see this as simply a broad-brush demeaning of a people and their moral compass. It would require a thesis of considerable length to accurately compose   how the Iranian culture evolved into this type of warfare.  But suffice it to say that the Arab, Mongol, Turk, Afghan and more recently British and Russian rulers of Iran have left a residue of extreme xenophobia and a personality that hides behind subterfuge to maintain self-respect. It was Ibn Khaldun   who aptly described this characteristic among subjected peoples.[92]  Iran

way of war sets them apart from the Western made it difficult for Western leaders to recognize.  The subtle Iranian methods have prevailed from the time of the Achaemenids. Their irredentism, contrasted to the ham-fisted Turkish method of leveling Kurdish villages, is habitually concealed behind a benign face molded by the latest in soft power, and the ill-wlll residing in the Islamic world toward the West, especially the “great Satan”, the United States.    Behind this face will be an imaginative brain   featuring  programs of indirection, disorientation, dissimulation, Islamic piety, and the particular Iranian trait to be all things to all people. This approach allows the Iranians to support a Sunni Hamas organization as the ruling regime in the Gaza strip, a regime   beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that sees the Shi’a as little more than infidels.

 

Like the strategy of Darius, every Iranian move will be backed up by intimidating threats, belligerent boasts of power, and a well-advertised military with videos of Iranians firing missiles, conducting military training operations, [93] and a nuclear capability only coyly denied.    Meanwhile their well- funded lobbies and well-intentioned (some not so) supporters in Western capitols, will always be available to disseminate enough doubt to sabotage any strong reaction to Iranian provocations.[94] The elite of the Western world, comfortable in their environment, seemingly will grasp any exculpating argument, however weak, to avoid confronting Iran. The tepid Western response to numerous provocations has not gone unnoticed by the Islamic leadership.

 

 U.S. Army literature[95] on the Iranian methods of war-fighting concentrate on the traditional methods of war, apparently from study of Iranian training and operational manuals, going into detail on Iranian tactical offensive maneuver concepts, and movement to assembly areas etc.   There is also the usual bean counting e.g., numbers of tanks, artillery pieces etc. This is largely a waste of time except as exercises for tactical intelligence operators.   The Iranians are not going to fight a conventional war unless forced to do so as in the Iraq war. The grievous economic and human loss of the Iraqi war taught them the folly of that. Their culture society and economic structure cannot sustain one.

 It is very likely that the Islamic rulers in Iran will continue to instigate many small and perhaps some major disturbances in the Middle East and worldwide. The Islam regime survives on the fuel fed by their real and fabricated enemies. They need an enemy and the promotion of violence in order to stoke the flagging spirits of the faithful.  To always assume they will act as rational actors is a debatable point. [96]

An old Kurd addressed his people after hearing the great Persian Shah give fulsome promises of security and peace to his tribe.  (related in the great book describing the Persians, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isphafan).

You have never had any dealings with them [Persians], and therefore you permit yourselves to be lulled into a sense of security by their flattering expressions and winning and amiable manners. But I have lived long among them and have learned the value of what they say. Their weapons are not such as you have been accustomed to meet in the bold encounter and open attack.; instead with spear and sword, theirs are treachery, deceit, falsehood…………Lying is their national vice.[97]

 

 

 

 

There are few places in the world that can outdo the Caucasus for having an Alice in Wonderland attraction, a fatal one however, especially the two nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Once, both entities, the Azeri and Arminian communities, were under the Ottoman Turks. When then Ottoman Empire collapsed after WWI, and the Russian Czarist empire collapsed with it, the two communities established themselves as nations. and immediately went to war against each other. Massacres of civilians were perpetrated by both sides, but particularly, by the Azeris, as they -as today- had regular Turkish and Islamist groups fighting for them.

. The discovery of oil in Azerbaijan was very important to the British and there is much to read about that… try Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game¹ or his The Hidden Fire².” The British were changing from coal to oil for their Navy’s fuel, and Azerbaijans immense quants of oil g fueled British interest in adding Baku to their empire.  As quoted in Hopkirk’s book,  he described the city of Baku,   as a city where “huge fortunes were made or gambled away overnight. Baku’s new rich, some of them barely literate ,  built themselves  on the seafront palaces of  great opulence. Famous European luxury stores opened branches on Baku’s elegant tree-lined avenues, along which ran smart horse drawn trams.” However by the time the British arrived in 1918, labor strikes, ethnic fighting, and  oil discoveries elsewhere, Baku   was “only as ghost of its former self.”

With the resurgence of Russia under the Bolsheviks, the two communities became part of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federated Republic. But shortly thereafter, the Soviets divided it into two Soviet Republics, the Armenian and and Azerbaijan. Both republics had a mixture of Kurds, Armenians and Azeris, but with the exodus of Armenian refugees pouring across the Turkish border, trying to escape the genocidal Turkish policies, the Armenian population grew much larger and with a better educated population.

Initially the enclave of Nagorno Karabakh, within Azerbaijan, but populated primarily by Armenians, was promised to the Armenian Republic by the Bolsheviks, but in the Stalinist era, It was officially awarded to Azerbaijan. It was part of Stalin’s divide and rule policy.

Occupied by Soviet troops until the USSR fell apart (1991), the two nations redeclared their independence and immediately were again  at each other’s throats. Despite having most of the military advantage,in terms of Soviet weaponry ( the collapsing Soviet troops basically just left weapons in place and departed) leaving most of it in the areas controlled by the Azeris, the Armenians long known for martial prowess, gained the military advantage. Many Russian officers joined the Armenians and a few joined the Azerbaijanis. In the truce that followed, Armenia maintained control of the Nagorno Karabaugh enclave and gradually the Azeri inhabitants were evicted or fled. ( depends on who you read) and a very narrow corridor, the Lachin. The Armenians also occupy other parts of Azerbaijan surrounding Nagorno Karabakh including a narrow corridor called the Lachon corridor which is a life line connection between Nogorno Karabakh and Armenia proper.
Armenian troops on parade
Azeri armor mostly supplied by Turkey.

In the Caucasus region, the Armenians who are Orthodox Christian, have few friends, even their fellow Christian Georgians, are not particularly well disposed toward the Armenians. (All the pipelines pass through Georgia which brings employment and transit fees). However the one critical support the Armenians have is their support from the world-wide Armenian diaspora, mostly Armenians who fled the Turkish genocide following World War I. The Russians also have a soft spot in their heart for the Armenians, as many of the early Communists were Armenians (example: Anastas Mikoyan, and despite the fervent anti religious attitude of the Communists, the Russians still see themselves as protectors of the Slavic and Armenian Christians. The pan-slavism of Russia was very evident during the Serbian wars in 1991-2001.  Gorbachev in his memoirs called the Armenians “brothers” and was very much kinder to the Armenians than the Azeris in his memoirs, frequently citing Azeri massacres of Armenians and their suffering under the Ottoman Turks.

The Azeris are Shi’a Muslim, but after 70 years the anti-Muslim politics of the Soviets has produced a more liberal variety of Islam, enabling them to be friends of the Israelis, the United States,  and especially their fellow Turks of Erdogan Turkish government. One of the many odd facts of this conflict is that both Turkey and Israel have supplied weaponry to Azerbaijan.  As one of the few Islamic countries with diplomatic relations with Israel, they are an important facet of Israeli diplomacy. The  Muslim world, in terms of words, at least, support Azerbaijan, and the “Christian world” of Western Europe is dependent on oil from the Caucasus. However Iran is a special case. Despite their affinity with fellow Shi’a of Azerbaijan, the Iranian government is covertly supporting Armenia, while placating their links with Azerbaijan with soothing words about a negotiated settlement, allowing the clerics to mouth  anti Armenian cliches and Islamic brotherhood.

Why this anomaly? Well because Iran has a very large population of Azeris, whom the Persian leaders do not wholly trust. They fear some sort of nationalist movement on the part of the Azeris to consolidate all Azeris with the Azerbaijan nation, including a large hunk of Iran.In fact the Azeris of Iran have revolted twice, the last time in 1946.

 

At this point the main pipeline is routed from Baku through Georgia to Ceyhan in Turkey.It handles over a million barrels a day. The second pipeline runs from Baku through Georgia to Georgian port of Supsa. the third one runs from Baku to the Russian port of Novorossiiysk on the Black Sea. All bypass Armenia. But the conflicts (Ossetian break away) in Georgia, and the fact that two of the pipelines run close to Armenian territory Making two of the main pipelines very vulnerable to Armenian or tribal sabotage. Armenia get its natural gas from Iran through the Iran Armenia pipeline and most of its oil from Russia.
The bottom line is that Western Europe has become largely dependent on oil and gas from Azerbaijan and Russia. To an extent Western Europe lives in a fear that Russia can economically strangle Europe by withholding oil and gas. Hence their milquetoast pandering to Putin’s aggressive moves. It should be added that The US has been almost inert in responding to Erdogan’s to Erdogan’s blatant aggression as well. In that respect, Europe has become beholden to the good graces of Azerbaijan and Turkey, a fact that Erdogan has been using very successfully to cover his irredentist intentions.

 

Why is it an centripedal conflict? Despite the new  apparent agreement to meet and negotiate, the last sessions were simply shouting matches and nothing was accomplished. So it is no guarantee of any success. Armenia is isolated with only the world-wide Armenian and tepid Russian support, with a few friends like Assads’ Syria. On the other hand  Azerbaijan with Turkish support as part of Erdogan’s Pan Turanism ambitions, creating a United Turkic federation from Istanbul to the Border of China, holds most of the cards. But the immense economic and geo-political  factors involved could possibly create a  Bosnia-Herzegovina situation dragging in other reluctant regional and world power involvement.

The UAE and Sudan establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, Oman hosting the Israeli PM  visit, and Israel  supporting the Azeris are harbingers of a new face of the Middle East. As a inveterate skeptic on anything pertaining to diplomatic alliances in the Middle East, I am on a wait and see watch.

 

¹The Great Game is primarily about the British-Russian rivalry across Central Asia. A very good and readable history of the competition.

²Like Hidden Fire is about the German insinuating itself into the Eastern question, (Turkey)  Central Asia, and India to overcome the power of the British empire.  It was generally termed the drag nach  osten  policy.

 

WordPress millennials and GenZ techies came up with this great new format which I, and apparently millions of others, cannot understand .I am trying to use it but has every disadvantage and no benefits as far as I can see. But time marches on. Im looking for an alternative to WordPress.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/yom-kippur-war-intelligence/

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/yom-kippur-war-debacle/

The above two articles are excellent analyses of lessons unlearned from the Yom Kippur/ Ramadan war (1973) war. There have been tons of lessons learned, many very good ones one should read and digest but these two articles point out some very critical ones that have not been properly covered.

Of course a salient one always surfaced is the intelligence failure. Despite numerous warnings the Israeli intelligence just could bring themselves to predict an Egyptian crossing of the canal. Much of that was due to overwhelming Israeli hubris. As George Garaych at the American staff College at Leavenworth Ks. ( Now at Baylor University) presciently warned, next to losing a war, nothing is more dangerous than winning one too easily…as the Israelis did in 1967. See George Gawrych “The Albatross of Decisive Victory; War and Policy between Egypt and Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars.”

The endless dissection of the near disaster to Israel in the 1973 war by Israelis and outsiders has rarely been replicated by Arabs. When one sees an Arab post mortem on the wars…if they admit they lost…… it is always ascribed to a political or military personality or to an outside power intervening. One of the main reasons their ability to improves so limited. Certainly. with an exception of a few Arab brave souls none would admit that cultural issues including religious ones limit their ability to increase their proficiency.The closest to that I’ve seen to criticism is “Crossing the Suez “by General Saad Shazli ( who was later fired by Sadat)

The first article was by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen. He is a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served in the IDF ( Israeli Defense Forces) for 42 years. He commanded troops in battles with Egypt and Syria. He was formerly a corps commander and commander of the IDF Military Colleges.

He wrote there are two messages written about on the Israeli view of the 1973 war; One is that there was a massive intelligence failure and the other one promises that the necessary lessons have been learned and corrected. Not so says General Hacohen. As he Writes one the the reasons for the “fiasco” went far beyond the intelligence failure. As he wrote, In fact the “Intelligence failure has been used as a coverup for the “many deficiencies” of the the Israeli Defense forces, particularly their senior leadership. The leadership was unprepared for the war and training for the officers was lacking. One of the prime Politcal-military mistakes was the religious belief in the power of “deterrence”…sort of along the lines …..the Egyptians wouldn’t dare attack etc. He gives number of other reasons. One I wrote about as a student paper at the Staff college, i.e. that the Israelis were so enamored with AirPower that they neglected artillery. Their belief was that they had “flying artillery.” Believe me folks, until now, there is no substitute for adequate artillery firepower.

The second article by Dr Hannah Shai, a lecturer in military thought in the political science Department at Bar-IIlan university takes a different and very interesting tact.

Under Moshe Dayan in 1957, the IDF became a youth camp for commanders. Commanders were expected to retire at 40-42 so they could have a second career in civilian life. Dayan did not see military command as a profession. President Ben Gurion adamantly opposed this but in the end it became part of the IDF ethos…young dashing commanders, energetic, with new ideas, aggressive and ensued with offensive spirit.

President Ben- Gurion adamantly opposed this idea but eventually it became part of IDF Ethos. As he wrote. ”

military service must be a life’s mission. Only then will someone give the best he has. A life’s mission is a mission for one’s whole life…. We cannot suffer a single defeat, because then we are lost. It depends first and foremost on the quality of the commanders, and I view the problem of the quality of the commander as inextricably linked to the fate of the people of Israel rather than a purely military problem…. What suited the Hagana [underground organization] doesn’t suit the IDF…. An army must be an army…. Two [career] cycles are dangerous for an army.

It created turmoil in stability and the officers lacked all around education in staff and command positions. In the Israeli post-mortem of the war the Aganat Commission of Inquiry stated “that that divisional battles were conducted as oof they were company- level battles“

We also have those issues in out own army, maybe not as severe, but certainly they are there. The lessons of Vietnam have been hashed and rehashed over and over but as the Iraq mess showed we have not learned much. see my article. https://limacharlienews.com/foreign-policy/vietnam-to-iraq/

The easy war in 1990, and the easy 2003 conventional part of the war set us up for a difficult insurgency war war in 2004 to………… ?

Just a few miles off the Turkish shore lies the small Greek island of Kastellorizo, an Islands of about 5 square miles inhabited by about 500 Greeks. Looking at a map one can see that there are a number of small Greek islands ( Some not so small like Rhodes) that lie just off the Turkey shore, seemingly in Turkish territorial waters. This was brought to my attention by an excellent article by Jack Dulgarian in Global Security Review DEFENSE & SECURITY Entitled “Kastellorizo Is The Key To Turkish & Greek Ambitions In The Eastern Mediterranean”at

Kastellorizo is the Key to Turkish & Greek Ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean

His conclusion and key points are as follows:

“Turkey can quickly seize Kastellorizo and her satellites without repercussions. Claims to the islands, unchallenged military defense, an unstable domestic economy, a robust military, and apathy from Western powers on the global stage are all significant factors that can push President Erdoğan into this operation.”

“Taking Kastellorizo could also be a final play by Turkish grand strategists to get Greece to renegotiate the defining principles of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which resulted in a Greek EEZ(exclusive economic zone) in the Aegean and Turkey ceding Cyprus (an agreement that Turkey has already broken). If Greece remains unprepared, it will lose territory, Turkey will gain a stronger foothold in quasi-internationally recognized Greek waters, NATO will remain submissive to an ally gone rogue, and Erdoğan will emerge as the dominant player in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.”

To get the details of the dispute you need to tread the short concise article.

My addition to this article is more historical. First of all the Greeks inhabited the western shores of Turkey since the time of Homer, about the middle 2nd millennium and remained there until after the WWI, in which they are displaced from their homelands by the Turks, revitalized after being allied with Germany in WWI. The expansion (in modern parlance termed imperialism) of the Ottoman Empire gradually brought the entire Greek population of Western Turkey under Muslim Turkish (Ottoman) occupation. As Bernard Lewis in his excellent book, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East, notes over a million Greeks some of whom spoke only Turkish and a smaller number of Turks, living in Greece, who only spoke Greek were forcibly resettled in their nation, as prescribed by the 1923 Lausanne Protocol. Being a loser in the war and the aftermath involved that the Ottoman Empire being divided up, the Sultan deposed, and the “modern Middle East” was created. Very few Greeks remain in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul ( Constantinople) and a couple of Islands in the Turkish Straits.

Secondly, like its Iranian neighbor, Turkey is an irredentist state with a ruler intent on establishing as much of the old Ottoman Empire as possible. Since the Lausanne Treaty Turkey has invaded and seized sizable portion of Cyprus,( 1974) ejecting all the Greeks, and earlier with a bogus referendum in the Syrian province of Alexandretta , once mostly Arab speaking, in 1939; Now known as the Hatay Province.

The differences between the two are in their way of war. Iran is subtle, cunning, using guile and weaknesses of the opponent, carefully assessing the situation before committing their resources. The Turkish despot Tayyip Erdogan is molded in the Turkish fashion, brute strength, overpowering force and predilection to use force, oblivious to civilian casualties. The Turks bomb and bombard Kurdish villages in both Turkey and Iraq without regard to civilian casualties.

Both Iran and Turkey see themselves as carrying the torch of Islam, Shi’a variety from Iran and Sunnism in Turkey. The problem is that in both varieties Political Islam or Islamism as it is called is totalitarian and radical. Both ruling cliques have embedded inimical views of minorities, especially Jews and Christians. Erdogan has hitched himself to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the more insidious varieties of Islamism, and sees his new Ottoman Empire reaching into Europe by way of his control of hundreds of mosques and by way of of his turkic ancestry ( not wholly true) into Central Asia. Left to their own devices a confrontation is likely but not for the foreseeable future.

The yellow area depicts Greek speaking areas in 1910. The Orange is also Greek speaking but different dialect. Image from Wikipedia.

The Bottom line is simple. If Turkey chooses to invade these Islands , the Greeks cannot repel it. The Europeans will shrug their shoulders and so will the USA. There will be denunciations from various diplomatic organizations and world bodies but nothing will be done. And Erdogan knows it. What is ultimate objective to “renegotiate the Lausanne agreement giving Turkey control over these Greek offshore Islands.

As UK PM Neville Chamberlain said so famously….” How horrible it is , that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing…” That basically will be the Western reaction.

The ramifications of doing nothing, however, will be severe as the Lausanne agreement created the Middle East national boundaries and the cry from many who feel cheated, including the Kurds, will be to undo the Lausanne to their advantage. Effect? Further turmoil.

Myself in middle with Turkish officers on Cyprus. I highly respect the Turkish officers but abhor their political leadership. Erdogan has euthanized the officer corps after the attempted coup d’etat in July 2016.