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Donald Trump is not the first ruler who thought he could push around Iran, which used to be known as Persia, and before that was an area of the world ruled by the Akkadians, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Medes, the Scythians, the Babylonians, the Archimedeans.
The Persians won their empire beginning in about 552 BC when they defeated the Medes, who ruled what is now northern Iran and Mesopotamia. Then the Persians turned west and conquered and annexed Babylonia, now Iraq and part of Turkey, around 540 BC. From there, they turned south to conquer Egypt around 525 BC, and then they turned east and went after what is now India in 518 BC, occupying the northwest regions for about two centuries. Turning west again, the Persians went after the Greeks in 499 BC, finally occupying Cyprus and some of the Greek regions in Asia Minor, but failing to take Athens and Sparta. That campaign lasted from about 492 to 490 BC. Then they put down revolts in Egypt and Babylonia from 486 to 484 BC. But then in 480 BC, the Greeks revolted and took back Macedonia, but lost Athens. In 477 BC, another Greek revolt rose up, and fighting went on until 449 BC, at which point, the Persians lost what is now Turkey and their last foothold in what would become Europe.
So go back and have a look at those years, beginning in 552 BC through 449 BC. That’s a fucking century of war fought by the Persians to take and control and then lose empire.
Trump keeps talking about the Iranians being “at war” with the U.S. for 47 years. The Persians thought nothing of fighting wars, not fake Trumpian wars, that lasted two years, five years, ten years, war after conquering armies and taking land. A couple of centuries later, the Persians would go up against Alexander’s armies, fighting dozens of battles between 334 and 327 BC, with Alexander himself dying in Babylon in 332 BC at the age of 32.
History marches on, and on, through the Parthian empire, conquering Romans and others, through the Sasanian empire that controlled Persia for four centuries. That would be four centuries of battles, one after the other, against Romans and more Babylonians and Armenians and…I’m losing my ability to follow it all, and I’m only in the third century AD, and they’re still fighting Romans and Kushans – the empire that is now Afghanistan, parts of India and Pakistan and Uzbekistan and Nepal and Tajikistan.
Are you getting the drift here? Trump has got himself not into a new forever war but has just become the latest fool to toy around with a forever war that has been going on for several thousand years. You have to wonder if anyone in the White House or the Pentagon bothered to get out the Encyclopedia Britannica and look up “Iran” or “Persia.” Correction: you don’t have to wonder because you already know the answer.
They didn’t.
It’s even questionable, now that they’re moving several thousand Marines into the region on a ship and the words “boots on the ground” have re-entered the lingo, if they bothered having a look at a fucking map of Iran. Here’s one:
See all that dark brown stuff running from the far north in Iran, down to the gulf and around the Strait of Hormuz and all the way to Iran’s southern border? Those are mountains, which range in height from more than 15,000 feet all the way through dozens and dozens that exceed 12,000 feet, down through more dozens in the 10,000-foot range…
Do you know what mountains mean militarily? They are very, very difficult to cross. You can fly over them, of course, but in Iran once you fly over one mountain range, there’s another. And then another.
And if you look up Iran in the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will immediately come across the word “arid.” That means not much water. In fact, the flat regions of Iran are deserts. So, if you want to invade Iran, you’ve got to bring your own water, which you have to do anyway, because drinking the local water will make American soldiers sick.
Well, at least we have some experience there. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we had to bring our own water to drink. If you were with the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I was in 2003 and 2004, everywhere you looked, you saw pallets of bottled water. Many, many pallets of water. Which had to be driven into the country, or more often, flown into Iraq and Afghanistan on military transport aircraft.
That would be the same military transports that move soldiers around, and move food for those soldiers, and move their ammunition, and their artillery cannons, and their Humvees…
And everything else.
Iraq is 169,000 square miles with a population in 2003 of 27 million people. Afghanistan is 653,000 square miles and in 2001 had a population of 20-25 million people.
Iran has 93 million people, and there are 636,000 square miles of it.
We couldn’t conquer little 170 thousand square mile Iraq with its 27 million people. We definitely didn’t conquer the 20 million or so people of Afghanistan.
It’s overwhelming, writing about war. Any war. Any time. In ancient history, or twenty years ago, or today, no matter where the war is, or why it is being fought, or by whom against whom.
Our way of fighting wars ever since the war we fought in Vietnam, which by the way, we also lost, is to invade the country with our “overwhelming force” and our “warrior ethos” and immediately set up a series of little Americas where our soldiers can stay when they are not out in the country we have invaded actually fighting the enemy. We call them “basecamps,” and we build big berms around them, and we put up concrete walls and we string miles of razor wire, and we build concrete bunkers to protect ourselves, and at least in the last couple of wars, our soldiers did not go outside the basecamps unless they were in heavily armored vehicles that were built to be as impervious as possible to IED’s, which the enemy used to kill American soldiers.
We didn’t have to worry about drones back then, but as the war in Ukraine has taught us, now we very much have to worry about drones, which can knock out an armored vehicle like a tank that costs several million dollars with a drone that costs a thousand dollars or even less.
Russia has tens of thousands of drones. Ukraine has tens of thousands of drones. The two countries – one huge, with a huge population, the other small, with a comparatively tiny population – have fought each other to a standstill. Drone warfare largely accounts for this.
Iran has many thousands of drones. They are so good at drone warfare that they taught the Russians how to use drones in war and how to manufacture them. Their drones are delta-wing affairs with large warheads that can fly below radar and are very, very difficult to shoot down. Iran is using their Shaheed drones, which cost about $20,000 to $50,000 each, against U.S. targets around the Middle East, and against oil and gas facilities belonging to Gulf nations and to Jordan.
We do not have thousands of drones. We have some very, very expensive drones such as the Reaper, which cost millions of dollars. If you want to know how things are going with the U.S. military and our foray into drone warfare, you can read this article from Aviation Week, published in its March 9-22 issue, sent to me by a friend.
(A subscription to the online version of Aviation Week is $139.00, or I would provide a link.)
In case you can’t read the text, it describes a training exercise for the 82nd Airborne Division which was provided with 42 unmanned aircraft surveillance drones, of which they were able to get only four (4) “up at any point in time,” according to the article. The four drones identified some of the targets they were dispatched to find, but only 42 percent of the targets were hit by mortars in the training exercise. Crucially, the four drones were able to identify 399 more targets that were not hit because, according to the article, “the sheer volume of the targets identified by the reduced number of airborne drones exceeded the unit’s ability to summon mortar, artillery, or air attacks within the eight-day event. We just couldn’t shoot because the fires apparatus or our own human bandwidth – cognitive bandwidth – wasn’t there to process it and get it done.”
Have another look. They were issued 42 drones, of which they could use only four, and the article tells us that the drone could stay airborne only 28 to 29 minutes, and then “took 2.5 hours to recharge.” The article goes on to say that the infantry soldiers did not carry enough recharging capacity, so they had to wait for vehicles to arrive with generators to provide power, and “the vehicles struggled to continue to generate electrical power when repositioned to different locations.”
Everything I’ve read about the war in Ukraine has said that drone units have to “reposition” constantly in order to avoid being hit by enemy drones which are continually surveilling their locations so they can hit them with mortars and artillery and…enemy drones.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this article describes a disaster in U.S. military drone capability. But not to worry – two of the Trump sons have started a company, or invested in a company, to provide drones to the Pentagon. The company is still getting going, but again not to worry, they’re already making money.
What we learn from all that history about all those wars and the current stories we are reading about Trump’s war on Iran, including the story in Aviation Week, is this: Wars are gigantic machines for the production of solving problems that are almost never solved adequately, so the wars are lost, one after another, by either side, it doesn’t matter which, because the side that “wins” loses too in blood and treasure. Wars also serve another purpose: to make profits for companies which produce war making materials. Wars achieve that goal almost every time. In the time of the Persians and the Greeks, someone was manufacturing bows and spears and slings and swords and shields and armor and helmets and catapults and other apparatus that threw huge stones. Empires were made and unmade, and people got rich even back then.
It never stops. More wars, more weapons, more military problems. Donald Trump has a huge problem right now. With all the bombs and missiles and jet planes and aircraft carriers and destroyers and submarines at his disposal, Iran has a coastline that runs hundreds of miles along the gulf, from which they can shoot missiles or launch drones at anything in the water that floats, most especially oil tankers carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil to countries such as Japan and China and Indonesia and yes, the United States and Europe. And Iran has the Strait of Hormuz, which makes drone launching and missile shooting by Iran even easier, because it’s only 21 miles wide, and those oil tankers are the proverbial sitting ducks of warfare.
One of the ways you can solve military problems is with alliances. In the Corinthian war, Persia allied itself with Athens and Corinth and Thebes to fight Sparta and the Peloponnesian League…and they won! In Evagoras I’s revolt, which ran from 391 to 376 BC -- that’s 15 years of fighting – Persia allied itself with old enemy Athens and one of the empires it conquered earlier, Egypt, to take over the island of Cyprus. Don’t ask me why they wanted to fight 15 years over Cyprus. That would take more history than I have time for. But they did it! They made allies out of enemies and won yet another war in a long, long series of wars.
With the exception of Israel, Donald Trump didn’t bother making alliances before he went to war against Iran, and now when he wants other countries ally themselves with his war effort and help him protect the Strait of Hormuz…well, let’s just say they’re not standing in line to volunteer.
One of the many things that Donald Trump does not understand is that these ancient civilizations, of which Iran is certainly one, made war over anything, or any reasons, including that some ruler killed another ruler’s brother or cousin. For centuries, war is what they did.
Having some asshole with orange hair lobbing missiles and bombs at them is nothing new. Used to be big stones and slings and arrows? Now it’s modern slings and arrows? It’s still outsiders doing nasty stuff to people who have lived there not for centuries, but for thousands of years. Trump is just another newcomer with an ego itch to scratch, like an Alexander with a fake tan.
Wars are overwhelming because so many people have died for such ridiculous reasons. Trump is just another ridiculous reason in a long, long list of them. To the Iranians, he’s not even a ruler of a rival empire, except in his own mind.
