One obvious weakness in the Iranian game plan is they do not seem to have a plan B

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It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. ~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

The talent of the strategist is to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives. ~ Carl von Clausewitz, On War

On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all peoples. All who attempt to lift it will injure themselves badly, though all the nations of the earth will gather against it. ~ Zecharaiah 12:3

Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid. ~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed. ~ Carl von Clausewitz, On War

The Lord will roar from Zion and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the heavens will tremble. ~Joel 3:16

War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means. ~ Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Peace is maintained by the equilibrium of forces, and will continue just as long as this equilibrium exists, and no longer. ~ Carl von Clausewitz, On War

~

As the Iranians stare down the barrels of NATO, Azeri and Israeli hi-tech weaponry, they could do worse than reach for their bookshelves to see what worlds of wisdom they can glean from them. After all, that is what New York Times best selling author Azar Nafisi and her coterie did during the 1979 Islamic Revolution when, instead of getting with the Ayatollahs’ program, they read Nabokov‘s Lolita under their bed sheets. And though Reading Lolitia in Tehran makes for a dismal night-time read, as the current situation demands that Iranians be much more focused in their choice of reading, I would instead recommend Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Clausewitz’ On War as two classics that should be essential reading for any and all Iranians.

Although far greater scribes than me have praised Tolstoy’s epic, one pertinent vein in it is the obsequious and self-serving sycophants who surround Tsar Alexander. Characters like Prince Vasili Kuragin, his son, Anatole Kuragin, Mademoiselle Bourienne, surrender monkey General Mack von Leiberich and similar degenerates should never have been allowed near the seat of power as they did untold harm to Russia and, in Mack’s case, to Austria as well. Any Iranian, who thinks their country is not awash with such characters is, to me, suspect, and I say that as one who has not only met many such individuals within the Islamic Republic but have had many more of such folk pointed out to me by patriotic Iranians whilst there.

Moving on to Clausewitz, anyone who denies his genius is an obvious fool and, all the more so as I am using Clausewitz as a shorthand here for today’s art and science of war, as understood by all current maestros of those ever-evolving dark arts.

Although POTUS Trump tells us that the American Armed Forces, which he nominally commands, are the bravest and best the world has ever seen, let’s give the British and Israelis, amongst others, their due. When MI6 founded the BBC in 1922, one of its founding pillars was that its propaganda had to be all-encompassing and its mission was not just to hammer home one or two points, as Mein Kampf’s Great Lie advised but to instead create an entire ecosystem that served Albion’s core needs. It is for that reason that the Brits can follow Sun Tzu’s maxim that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

The Israeli Defence Forces, to their credit, are obsessive magpies, who picked up their tricks from forces as diverse as the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, in which many of its War of Independence veterans had previously served. Throw in their victimhood narrative and their supremacist claims to Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese land, as expressed in their catchy national anthem (The Song of Hope), and they are a formidable foe. Then add in that the NATO powers dance, for whatever overt and covert reasons, to their incessant drum beats and one must think twice before warring with them.

Now add Clausewitz’ fog of war, which is where the first section of War and Peace ends at Austerlitz, when Napoleon’s forces literally emerge unheralded from the early morning fog to crush the Third Coalition and only Prince Kutuzov, who eventually defeated Bonaparte in Russia’s 1812 Great Patriotic War, is savvy enough to see what the cocky Corsican is up to.

Would that Iranians could whittle away their lives reading Clausewitz, Tolstoy and the Bible (the source of England’s greatness) but, as things currently stand, they have swarms of Israeli and NATO hornets buzzing about their ears and they are in a right pickle, not least because their enemies want to obliterate them.

But, they should rejoice for The Good Book is there to remind them that they are Amelek here, as Genesis and countless other Old Testament books tell us in the goriest of ways, to be exterminated, whereas prostitutes like Rahab, who perform the horizontal role allotted to them by their Israeli masters, will be exalted and held in high esteem by God’s chosen tricks.

If Iranians wonder why they are damned and treacherous prostitutes are elevated to secular sainthood, they should do some introspection on such things as the tanker war, when they slugged it out in the Straits of Hormuz with the late Saddam Hussein. They might also reflect on how, having fought Iran, Saddam was then suckered into invading Kuwait, an unfortunate event which led not only to the fall of Saddam’s Iraq but to the effective control of much of West Asia by the American military and their Gulf State, ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood proxies, all of which has led Iran to be very exposed to both direct and indirect attacks by Israel and by any other of NATO’s regional attack dogs.

As things currently stand, Israel has given Iran a very bloody nose and one that seems to be within neither the Queensbury Rules nor the internationally agreed rules of war, which Israel and its American backer have never taken too seriously.

Although Iran keeps telegraphing that its ace is to once again block off the Strait of Hormuz, as they have been telegraphing that for decades if certain red lines are crossed, one must assume that NATO has made some contingencies against Iran closing that key commercial artery. One such contingency is that red lines apply to NATO’s enemies and not to NATO, who don’t even have to negotiate in good faith, just as their ancestors never had to with those of earlier generations they succeeded in exterminating.

One obvious weakness in the Iranian game plan is they do not seem to have a plan B, just as the heroic Syrian Arab Army did not have a plan B if and, as it transpired, when the Tiger Forces were sidelined to the Iraqi border.

Whereas Iran’s wriggle room has been reduced over time, Iran’s Western enemies have engineered it that they have a surfeit of highways and byways open to them on their long-declared path to Persia and they have plenty of well-placed helpers, such as their spies in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), paving the way for them and more still in Bahrain, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based, and elsewhere, even in the Shia heartlands of Azerbaijan and Iran itself, cheering them on, and giving them the strategic deep strike capability and command, control and coordination cohesion that Iran and, more so, its regional allies, lack.

Iran must rebuild those alliances and fortify those that remain intact. One way to do this would be to start a reading club, a sort of revamped Reading Lolita in Tehran caper, but where innocuous Western novels are replaced by the tomes mentioned above and the reading circle be confined to the military planners not only of Iran, but of Russia, North Korea and China as well. Then, working on Clausewitz’ maxim that principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference, their combined theoretical and applied efforts might combine to accelerate the decline of the American Empire and begin the ascent of something more substantial that is more worthy of all our diverse talents.

Just as the Good Book long ago told us that there is nothing new under the sun, so also is there nothing particularly new or novel in any of the above. Because Japan was a far away country about which the Yanks knew nothing even after Pearl Harbor, they immediately commissioned Ruth Benedict, an expert on the Hopi Indians of northeastern Arizina no less, to pen The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, which remains a bedrock of Japanese studies to this day and which, with the help of the CIA, helped spawn Area Studies, which still feeds directly into the various agendas of the CIA, MI6, Mossad and related bodies.

This is not to say that the battle for the Middle East will be won in the libraries of Princeton and Oxford but it is to say that, if Clausewitz could produce such an eternal masterpiece by hitting the libraries of Prussia, then the High Commands of Russia, Iran, China and North Korea could do worse than spending their time reading and finessing the lessons of Clausewitz and Tolstoy in Tehran.