Lost in the fog of war or any geopolitical crisis is its cultural-historical aspect. This is especially true of the Iran War, which reveals a clash of cultures that in some ways are surprisingly similar.
It was President George W. Bush who said that Americans are not good at looking in the rearview mirror. And so lost on the United States may be the irony of a country that fought a revolution against an empire that never understood it only to become an empire that never understands the countries it keeps invading.
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq: There’s a long list of nations where the U.S. conducted warfare on and off for years only to leave with little or nothing to show for it. Decades later, China-weary and -wary Vietnam has become a U.S. trading partner. (It reminds me of what Philharmonia Virtuosi music director Richard Kapp once said of the old Soviet Union, which was that we didn’t have to wage war on it; we could’ve merely seduced it with our culture.)
This could’ve been our relationship with Vietnam from the get-go. Instead the war dragged on for almost 20 years (1955-75), culminating in a chaotic departure that mirrored the situation on Afghanistan (2001-21), which is back under Taliban control and is now at war with Pakistan.
After nine years of war (2003-11), Iraq is a democracy of sorts, often teetering on the edge of violence and now threatened, as is much of the Middle East, by the war with Iran, which unlike the United States is very much a rearview-mirror culture. The Iranians see themselves as the heirs of the Persian Empire (550-330 B.C., which had its origins in what is now southern Iran but which at its peak was far larger, stretching across 2.1 million square miles from the Balkans to the Indus Valley and Egypt.
Before Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the Cultural Revolution of 1979, Iranians called themselves “Iranians.” But with the monstrous connotations of the revolution, which gave rise to the hostage crisis of 1979-81, many Iranians began identifying themselves as Persians, although the country is made up of a variety of ethnic groups.
This alone should tell you something about the mindset of a people who may not always win but refuse to lose. Another case in point — the conquest of the Persian Empire by the Greco-Macedonian king Alexander the Great, officially on Oct. 1, 331 B .C. on the plains of Gaugamela in what is now northern Iraq. In the “Shahnameh,” or “Book of Kings,” a panoramic work by the Persian poet Ferdowsi (written circa 977-1010) that is considered one of the longest, and greatest, epic poems in world history, the conquest by Alexander, or Iskandar, is ordained by his having actually been — wait for it — Persian.
Yes, if you can’t beat’ em, join ’em. Now the Iranians are up against someone who also knows how to spin but wouldn’t know the “Shahnameh” from the musical group Sha Na Na.
Additionally, I don’t think it’s clear to the Trump Administration or the United States at large that this is not like Venezuela, in which Trump substituted a communist he hated in Nicolás Maduro, with one he could do business with, the country’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez.
“We pick our friends. We do not let our friends pick our enemies”: That’s how one African leader responded to a question about getting along with both Israel and the Arab states. Whether or not Trump was prompted to wage war by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there’s no such thing as picking a friendlier ayatollah as the culture that created the supreme leader is one of systemic, multilayered autocracy.
Trump can’t out-spin the Iranians, as they are a more sophisticated society with ancient antecedents. But Trump has bigger and better weapons. It remains to be seen, then, which narrative will prove more compelling in the end.