There are two (maybe three) great origin myths of the western world. We begin our stories either with the ancient Greeks or with the ancient Jews. Sometimes we get sophisticated and say that "we" as the west are the merger of the two -- a third story frame. At the heart of the troubled subject of Iranian/western relations is the simple fact that the Persians are the 'bad guys' in BOTH of the underlying two myths. The Greek narrowly escaped being swallowed by the Persian empire. The contemporaneous Jews did not escape that fate, although thanks to Esther they survived it. Yes, there are other more recent sources for the animosity, and there is the sociological fact that our elites will always want us to have foreign enemies. It is better we aim our bile at foreigners than at the domestic elites themselves! So, at any rate, the latter believe. Beyond all that: Iran is Persia and Persia have always been the enemy. Since long before there was Islam.
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By any sane understanding of recent events, the US is now at war with Iraq. Of course, it is an unconstitutional war. All of them since 1945 have been. Big deal. What is odd is the way the commander-in-chief has been talking about this one. It is a manner of talking that stands out for its incoherence and malice (yes, those are mutually consistent facts) EVEN given the recent US history of acts of war initiated by unilateral C-in-C commands -- an altogether unlovely history, surely. One statement stands out. When Iran threatened retaliation, POTUS replied that Iran "has never won a war, but never lost a negotiation." Huh? I guess this means that since HE is the artist of the deal, they have finally met their match, because he can beat them at their one strong point. It is historical nonsense. Iran (fka Persia) has been winning wars at least since its conquest of Lydia in 546 BC. Yes, it was halted by the Athenians and Spartans working together a few years later, but...
This is an important day in the history of the Middle East. It is the anniversary of the final day of the four day Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, in Iraq, in 636. The Sasanian Empire, centered in what we now call Iran, first came into existence in the middle of the third century AD, and became at once the great eastern rival of the Roman Empire. The fatal blows to the Sasanians in the 7th century came not from the west, from what by then was known as Byzantium, but from the growth of new Moslem Arab powers. Qadisiyyah was the decisive five-day battle that led to the defeat of the Sasanians, the loss immediately of Iraq and ultimately Persia/Iran itself, Sasanian homeland, to the new militantly Islamic wave in the region. The battle was a ferocious enough struggle and story tellers began embellishing upon it immediately. In recent times, it is invoked within the Arab/Moslem world as a great victory over a people who were not "of the book." Saddam Hussein of Iraq...
HARPER's has recently excerpted the following from a new translation of Herodotus's THE HISTORIES. I submit it with no further intrusion. Just suppose that someone proposed to the entirety of mankind that a selection of the very best practices be made from the sum of human custom: each group of people, after carefully sifting through the customs of other peoples, would surely choose its own. Everyone believes his own customs to be far and away the best. Indeed, there is a huge amount of evidence to support the conclusion that this attitude to one's own native customs is universal. Take, for example, this story from the reign of Darius. He called together some Greeks who were present and asked them how much money they would wish to be paid to devour the corpses of their fathers -- to which the Greeks replied that no amount of money would suffice for that. Next, Darius summoned some Indians called Callantians, who do eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of t...