Persian Expedition

Iran has been much in the news lately, from its declaring it will "never" give up its "right" to develop nuclear weapons technology, to tales of sniffer drones trying to hunt for hidden uranium enrichment sites.

[Governments, especially tyrannical ones, do not have rights; only individuals do. In the realm of international relations, it's a misguided and dangerous fantasy to believe anything else but a Hobbesian State of Nature exists, in which Might trumps Right, and it's best to Carry a Big Stick. In the Best of All Realistically Possible Worlds, the Carrier of the Biggest Stick would be the United States -- what, you really want to live in a world in which the mad evil mullahs have the bomb, just to satisfy some bizarre notion of "fairness"?]

(a further aside: I always hated the snide saying, "oh, do you think might makes right?" No, but might is what gets its way, so the right had better be mighty, because being right and dead does nobody any good...)

Michael Ledeen, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank, has long pointed out Iran as one of the prime poles motivating Islamic terror:

Thirdly, the brilliant maneuvers of the Army and Marine forces in Fallujah produced strategic surprise. The terrorists expected an attack from the south, and when we suddenly smashed into the heart of the city from the north, they panicked and ran, leaving behind a treasure trove of information, subsequently augmented by newly cooperative would-be martyrs. Above all, the intelligence from Fallujah — and I have this from military people recently returned from the city — documented in enormous detail the massive involvement of the governments of Syria and Iran in the terror war in Iraq. And the high proportion of Saudi "recruits" among the jihadists leaves little doubt that the folks in Riyadh are, at a minimum, not doing much to stop the flow of fanatical Wahhabis from the south.

Thus, the great force of the democratic revolution is now in collision with the firmly rooted tyrannical objects in Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh. In one of history's fine little ironies, the "Arab street," long considered our mortal enemy, now threatens Muslim tyrants, and yearns for support from us. That is our immediate task.

It would be an error of enormous proportions if, on the verge of a revolutionary transformation of the Middle East, we backed away from this historic mission. It would be doubly tragic if we did it because of one of two possible failures of vision: insisting on focusing on Iraq alone, and viewing military power as the prime element in our revolutionary strategy. Revolution often comes from the barrel of a gun, but not always. Having demonstrated our military might, we must now employ our political artillery against the surviving terror masters. The great political battlefield in the Middle East is, as it has been all along, Iran, the mother of modern terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and the prime mover of Hamas. When the murderous mullahs fall in Tehran, the terror network will splinter into its component parts, and the jihadist doctrine will be exposed as the embodiment of failed lies and misguided messianism.

Now, the best measures to take at this juncture to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, which would be a disaster of enormous scale for the cause of freedom, are not obvious. However, many pundits are out there claiming that "no good military options exist" for attacking the suspected sites.

What they really mean is, they'd like it to become Conventional Wisdom that there are no military options, so that we find ourselves bound to inaction, like Gulliver, by their Lilliputian strands of negativity.

It is utter nonsense!

Let's suppose it's true that we cannot be sure of destroying all suspected sites from the air. The argument is then that the only other option is complete invasion and occupation, which given the unprecedented! quagmire! failure! disaster! (NOT!) of Iraq, we cannot possibly do in larger Iran.

As if that were the only model of military action!

Such people have ZERO sense of history.

Let me tell you about the famous Anabasis, the March of the 10,000 Hoplites in 401 BC, also known as the Persian Expedition, as described by Xenophon:

Xenophon accompanied a large army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger, who intended to seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II. Though Cyrus' army was victorious in a battle at Cunaxa in Babylon, Cyrus himself was killed in battle and the expedition rendered moot. Stranded deep in enemy territory, the Spartan general Clearchus and most of the other Greek generals were subsequently killed or captured by treachery. Xenophon played an instrumental role in encouraging the Greek army of 10,000 to march north to the Black Sea.

This feat of arms was unprecedented. Completely surrounded, deep in hostile territory, their leaders slain, an entire empire mobilized against them in a foreign land, the Greeks did not panic and devolve into a mob of every man for himself, but democratically elected new leaders and methodically fought their way home, arriving in Hellenic lands in 399 BC.

Keep in mind that they had to live off the land. They had no aircover. They had no armored vehicles. They had no humvees, armored or otherwise. They had no GPS. They had no medevac. No radio.

Their technology was not any different from that available to the Persians, either.

How did they succeed? They had a better doctrine of warfare, and perhaps more importantly, were cut from a finer cloth: they were free men who did not shrink from what was merely nearly impossible.

And they retained their discipline.

Now, given the superior discipline of the U.S. armed forces, PLUS the fact that we dominate technologically nearly like gods, with complete air superiority to allow inexhaustible resupply, and with tanks that are the equivalent of the phalanx of the Greek hoplites, who can seriously doubt that a single combat division couldn't simply drive into Iran and go wherever it pleased?

I mean, how could they possibly stop it?

heck, probably even a single Brigade Combat Team could do it.

It might be slow going, and the press would call it a failure after 3 days, but in Victorian days, the Brits thought nothing of sending out punitive expeditions that would take months to achieve their objectives.

But there is absolutely no way in a few weeks or months it couldn't simply visit, in person, every suspected nuclear site and neutralize it.

And think how destabilizing to the regime that would be! The mullahs and their imported foreign thugs would be exposed as completely powerless! The campaign could declare every town it passed by as "liberated", and by not attempting at all to directly "take over" the country, would have less chance of provoking a nationalistic backlash.

A modern day Persian Expedition should be considered a viable option, in spite of what the naysayers who want to cage American power would like us to believe.

History teaches otherwise.

The only advantage the 10,000 Hoplites had over our army of today is that they didn't have to put up with seditious reporting from CNN and their ilk!