This is the prime rule in planning and initiating an attack on any adversary: Do not underestimate your enemy or overestimate yourself.
In “estimating” the Iranians, it is essential to understand a key aspect of the Shia Islamic religion, the defining element of the Iranian national identity: Martyrdom is fundamental to Shia Islam. This, among other things, is what sets it apart from Sunni Islam.
Sunni Islam is, by far, the dominant faith and practice of the planet’s nearly 1.5 billion Moslems, mostly in Southeast Asia with only a small percent in the Middle East.
Shia Islam was born in a war against Mohammed’s surviving family and its supporters, resulting in the execution and mutilation of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn ibn Ali. About 20 years earlier his father Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, was assassinated.
Husayn’s “martyrdom” is the foundation story of Shia Islam. While Shia can be much less austere than Sunni Islam, encouraging the good life with all its pleasures, it actively embraces suffering and death for the sake of the faith in God.
For Christianity, death is the ultimate enemy. However, unlike Christianity which claims to have conquered death for the believer, Shia Islam elevates death when it is the ultimate expression of Islam, which literally means submitting to God’s will. This includes suicide as “witness” to submission to God.
When it first started, Israel was surprised and stunned when Palestinians began blowing themselves up on public buses during the Intifada uprisings. The Palestinians are almost all Sunni Moslems, and suicide had not been part of their resistance. These new suicide assaults pointed to the growing influence of the Shia Hezbollah in the region.
Among other considerations, this sets Shia apart from Sunni Islam.
Rather than martyrdom, Sunni Islam promotes jihad, the sacred struggle to spread Islam, be it peacefully through education and assimilation, or at the point of the sword if attacked. It also emphasizes defending the Moslem nature of lands once converted to Islam, and relentlessly struggling to regain those lands for Islam should they be lost to non-believers. This drives the attempt to eradicate the Jewish state in order to restore the land’s former Moslem sovereignty.
What is more, Sunni Islam’s rigorous monotheism opposes the veneration of humans, even and especially Mohammed himself, whom it is forbidden to portray in any way. Shia not only allows the iconic representation of the Prophet, but also reveres a number of what you might call “saints,” harboring a messianic expectation of the return of the hidden 12th Imam − the legitimate successor to the Prophet.
Given its elevation of martyrdom, no amount of pounding will make Shia Iran submit, since suffering for one’s identity is revered. This likely makes it more intractable than Imperial Japan or Third Reich Germany. It took A-bombs to force Japan’s surrender, and fanatical German resistance continued in Berlin itself to the very end when there was no chance whatsoever of victory.
No matter what our political leaders expect, no amount of suffering will cause Iran to surrender, either officially or tacitly. The only way it can be made to stop resisting is by locking it down through a large-scale invasion and occupation by overwhelming military power. To think otherwise is to overestimate our military ability.
The rule of thumb for invasion is that it generally takes three times as many attackers as it does defenders. That is why in 1991 General Norman Schwarzkopf’s 750,000 army was content to drive elements of Saddam Hussein’s military out of Kuwait. However, he stopped short of actually invading Iraq with its million-man armed forces, even divided as it was along ethnic and sectarian lines. We did not field enough troops for that.
In the case of a far more committed, cohesive Iran with its nearly 1.25 million available soldiers, it would likely take close to a 4 million person invading force to have any real chance of success. Counting all active duty, reserve and guard personnel, the total size of the U.S. armed forces is less that 3 million in uniform. Perhaps that is why we are starting to hear rumblings about reviving the draft.
However, the underlying realty in our present attack on Iran has little to do with strategy or tactics and everything to do with properly “estimating” the people whose country we are blowing up from the air. Breaking their things will not break them.
We are not prepared to do what it would take to prevail. They are prepared to take whatever we dish out, since it fits tongue and groove into their fundamental identity as heirs to the martyred Imam, and now to the assassinated Ayatollah.
Bruce Diamond of Fort Myers taught Interdisciplinary Studies at FGCU, with a focus on Civic Engagement, Social Ethics and Critical Thinking Skills. He earned a Doctor of Divinity degree from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Iran is prepared to take whatever we dish out | Opinion
Reporting by Bruce Diamond / Fort Myers News-Press
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