“The grasshoppers of West Asia.”
Between Iran and America, a strong nation confronts the merely powerful.
12 MAY—No one can say with certainty, at this writing, how Iran’s defense against U.S.–Israeli aggression will turn out. Except that anyone who thinks carefully about this knows very well the Islamic Republic and its 93 million people will come out the victors.
No, it is not yet clear what victory will look like—not if one is looking for the immediate terms of a settlement in this latest phase of the long war the American and Zionist terror machines continue to spread across West Asia. Last weekend President Trump ostentatiously rejected Iran’s latest peace proposals, delivered per usual via Pakistan, as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!”
This is mere posturing of the sort we have seen for months in the Trump regime’s relations with Russia. And just as the United States has failed over many years to impose its will on the Russian Federation, neither the United States nor Israel has any chance of breaking Iran, and Iran, turning the thought upside down, runs little risk of breaking.
History, so often a reliable guide to what is out our windows, is clear on this point. This is a war between a strong nation and another that, even with a vicious client in the region, is merely powerful. There have been various confrontations of this kind over the past century, and indeed longer than that, and they almost invariably turn out the same way.
In contests between the strong and the powerful, the former is bound to prevail. This is my “takeaway,” as the corporate dailies so tiresomely put it.
B–52s and B–2s dropped 30,000–pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” bombs, commonly known as “bunker busters.” F–18s, F–22s and F–35s fired “Joint Air–to–Surface Standoff Missiles.” Naval vessels launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and “Precision Strike Missiles.” MOPs, PrSMs, JASSMs—and you have to love the Pentagon’s techno-speak: All of this and more rained down on the Iranian people, their apartment buildings, their hospitals, their schools, their universities.
This was Operation Epic Fury once the aggression began 28 February. The figure going around is that the United States and the Israelis struck 13,000 targets before the current ceasefire—if it counts as one—took effect a month ago last week.
And through it all you saw Iranians, by way of videos posted daily on social media, crowding the streets and squares of Tehran, gathering on the bridges the aggressors were targeting, or simply going about their business as best they could—stirred but determined so far as one could make out.
Before the world’s eyes, Iranians have turned Operation Epic Fury into Operation Epic Desperation.
The Islamic Republic has neither an air force nor a navy to speak of. Its missile programs are advanced, and these have counted for much in this war, needless to say. But it is otherwise no match for the Americans and Israelis as measured by its military capabilities. How to account, then, for the prevalent certainty among Iranians, evident from the streets on up to their diplomats and senior officials, that they will survive this nightmare—that Iran will go on being Iran?
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” President Trump threatened, evidently in a state of “shock and awe” as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps exerted control of the Strait of Hormuz with nothing more than cheap drones, speedboats and primitive mines. This was last month, just before the ceasefire was agreed.
What did Trump mean by this? What would be the point of destroying not any kind of strategic asset but a civilization and the institutions wherein it manifests? Why did the Americans and Israelis deploy all that high-technology weaponry against so many civilian targets?
My answer is simple. The military planners in Washington appear to have concluded that the ultimate objective of this operation is not the destruction of missile silos or airfields or drone factories: The ultimate objective must be the destruction of what makes Iranians Iranian—their shared spirit, their consciousness of themselves, their common identity however great their differences.
Parenthetically, the Israelis have long understood this. As they finish leveling the Gaza Strip and attack one village after another in the West Bank, they know very well that what they must destroy apart from hospitals, houses, flocks of sheep, and olive groves is the consciousness of Palestinians. The grotesque freaks populating Bibi Netanyahu’s cabinet—Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben–Givr, Orit Strook, et al.—are very clear on this point.
What do the Iranian people have that Americans and Israelis lack? This is our question. And as I consider it my mind goes back to the Vietnamese and their struggle in behalf of… altogether in behalf of who they were.
Two years after the Vietnamese drove the Americans out of their country, Wilfred Burchett published Grasshoppers and Elephants (Urizen, 1977), the on-the-ground story of the final 55 days before the American defeat. Burchett, famously enough, reported the war from “the other side” and left behind, in voluminous journalism and numerous books, the most penetrating account of the war now residing in the record.
Burchett began by quoting from a speech Hồ Chi Minh delivered in 1951, midway in the Việt Minh’s fight against the French colonial forces:
Because of the imbalance of forces, some people compared our resistance to a fight of grasshoppers against elephants. To a certain extent, for those who saw only the material and transient aspect of things, the situation really seemed like that. Against enemy planes and artillery, we had only bamboo spears…. We look not only at the present but also the future; we place our trust in the strength and morale of the people. Thus we resolutely reply to the waverers and pessimists:
“Today, yes, it’s the grasshoppers that dare stand up to the elephants.
“Tomorrow, it’s the elephant that leaves its skin behind.”
Three years after Hồ delivered that speech, General Giáp defeated the French at Điện Biên Phủ.
I do not know whether the Iranians have ever studied the Vietnamese experience, although many non–Western nations struggling to defend their independence and sovereignty have made it a point to do so over the years. And Iran is greatly more advanced today than Hồ’s Vietnam was in the 1950s and 1960s. Its military has a lot more than bamboo spears in its inventory.
But the principle Hồ articulated, and that runs all through Wilfred Burchett’s exceptional accounts of the war against the Americans, holds for the Iranians today as it held for the Vietnamese back then. In what must stand among the extraordinary triumphs of the last century, a strong nation defeated one that was only powerful.
Seyed Marandi, a former advisor to the Tehran government and now a frequent commentator on Iran’s foreign relations, said something simple but thought-provoking during one of his frequent commentaries the other day. “The Americans do not understand Iran,” he remarked. “Everything they say about Iran is the opposite of true.”
Mirandi goes to the core of the question in two sentences, and I cannot be at all surprised: He knows America and its people and the compulsions of its purported leaders well, having been born in Richmond, Virginia, and having spent his first 13 years in the United States.
There are many ways to characterize America in the early 21st century, and very high among them is its incoherence—its lapsed faith in itself and more or less everything it once purported to stand for, its profound post–September 11 anxieties, its incessant abuses of its citizens and its consequent disunity and disorder, its market fundamentalism and its worship of the profit god, its obsession with consumption and appearances, its indifference to its own public space—and what I call international public space—its lawlessness, its rampant egotism and narcissism, its preoccupation with frivolous “entertainment,” its studied ignorance of others, and on and on and on.
America reenacts a consciousness of its history but evinces no regard for it. Somewhere in the not-so-distant past—in inverse proportion to the ubiquity of lapel pins on public figures, I casually venture—America stopped believing in itself and lost all sight of its professed purpose.
Back in the 1990s, the Iranians’ term for the state of the United States was “Westoxicity,” which I will assume is self-explanatory. Mohammad Khatami, the much-respected reformist who served as president from 1997 to 2005, sought to counter this sentiment by promoting what he called a Dialogue of Civilizations. But even Khatami, who I much admired, spoke of “critical engagement” rather than the customary “constructive.” Iranians are a worldly, sophisticated people—the film, the painting, the jazz, the best of the writing, the philosophical productions all reflect this—but a shared recognition of the ennui that has long beset America remains a recognizable thread running through their culture.
It is not difficult to account for this state. Those who purport to lead the United States have long entertained an obsession with power. And this obsession—very directly as measured by the defense budgets—has rendered America as we find it today: It is powerful but weak.
This is Mirandi’s point, if I read the above-quoted observation properly. How could a nation as wayward as the United States, as hollowed-out, understand another with a living awareness of its history, its culture, its public space, its civilizational achievements, altogether its confidence in what it is and who its people are?
It is the difference between what the ancient Greeks termed techne and telos. The former refers to method, means, the “how” of whatever matter is to hand. Telos denotes purpose, the “why” of things, a people’s objective, their North Star.
Historically and to a point understandably, Americans have been preoccupied with techne since the early settlers exhausted themselves clearing forests and laying corduroy roads into the wilderness. It is latterly—since the prewar rise of Big Science, and certainly since the 1945 victories—that this preoccupation has turned into a deleterious obsession. And in mistaking techne for telos, as Americans are wont to do, they have rendered themselves powerful at the expense of their strength.
In his straight-to-the-point manner, the ever-interesting Simplicius put the case this way in a May 2 piece on his Substack newsletter. I will quote the pertinent passage at length:
Victory is won by the nation with the greatest moral-spiritual alignment and unity, not the nation with the most gizmos, gadgets, and fancy “cheap” toys. In fact, if you did a study you’d likely find there is an inverse correlation between higher technological fetishization of the military-industrial apparatus and an attendant lower moral-spiritual fiber of its people. This process is not an “accident,” but a natural self-evolving feedback loop between a people and their culture’s slow detachment from unifying cultural principles toward the void-filling materialism that naturally sprouts like weeds in a patch of dead lawn.
The West is in serious cultural decline, and must increasingly rely on gimmicky “techne” to prop up the diminishing and depleted “passionarity” (to borrow Gumilev’s term, from his concept of ethnogenesis) which can no longer move the world by its own sheer cultural inertia and vitality, and must now resort to heavy-handed force using a crude and limited set of technical instruments.
Lev Gumilev, 1912–1992, was a Soviet anthropologist and theorist. His highly original notion of passionarity denotes an intense kind of energy that lends some people—Gumilev’s “passionaries”—a dynamism that comes to inform the whole of a society. Passionarity reminds me a little of Bergson’s elan vital, and it seems very right for Simplicius to invoke it as a sort of collective phenomenon: Alastair Crooke, the ex-diplomat and now publisher of Conflicts Forum, has lately taken to pointing out that Shi`a Islam is historically revolutionary, and this latest confrontation with the United States and Israel has revived the Shi`a tradition.
Doesn’t this view of things suggest what we witness today in West Asia—an exhausted nation in confrontation with another with no aircraft carriers or B–2 Stealth bombers, no MOPs, PrSMs or JASSMs, but possessed in full of its vitality and its purpose?
Uncle Hồ and the Vietnamese showed the world a half-century ago how grasshoppers are bound to fare against elephants. Are not the Iranians doing the same once again as we speak?
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This is a revised and expanded version of a piece that appeared in Consortium News.
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