Iran: Opium Wars Vibes
Soleimani & Imperial Chinese Sound & Fury
Chinese Agitprop
By the early 1800s, the British had been extensively working in and doing business with the Chinese for about a century. The trade in Canton (now Guangzhou, down the road from Shenzhen and up the river from Macau and Hong Kong) had been robust for millennia, and the British dominated it for most of the 18th century.
During this time, the Chinese emperors were blustery. While the British sent emissaries and official ambassadors to the palace in Beijing, the emperors were largely dismissive. A Chinese court scribe is said to have remarked in a letter to King George III that the Emperor was not unmindful of the “remoteness of your tiny barbarian island, cut off as it is from the world by so many wastes of sea.”
China was the greatest power on earth, and the Emperor the most powerful person. The British would make no demands of such an awesome power, nor did the Emperor have much time to even consider requests from such a trivial, barbaric people.
Except none of it was true.
Eventually, the British wearied of the distant unreasonableness of Beijing while, far to the south, the people of Canton were growing wealthy and trade was robust. Beijing seemed not so much opposed to Canton’s wealth as confusedly disinterested and unhelpful. The British decided that if the Emperor wasn’t going to impose reasonable governance, then the British would, so they began taking coastal forts by force.
And what they revealed was that instead of the Emperor being the most powerful leader of the most powerful country, he was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. To their shock and horror, the British discovered that the most modern of Chinese cannon were actually French cannon from around 1600 — over 200 years old. British officers wrote back to the Ministry in London begging them to convince Beijing to surrender as the battles were so one-sided that they weren’t honorable. The British felt no glory in clearing fields and forts of hapless, poorly trained and ill-equipped Chinese soldiers. The Opium Wars were a revelation of the mechanism of propaganda: great bluster often conceals great weakness.
Fear & Loathing, Inc.
I’ve worked in many countries with top leadership, including some dictators. Coming from America, a somewhat meritocracy, one wonders how these people got in power. Such leaders, particularly the dictators, are often deeply stupid. If you explain something remotely complex to them, you can watch their eyebrows twitch as they attempt to hold in their brains. The answer, though, is that these people hold power because they suffer no inhibitions for violence. They will kill you before you kill them. And they will let you rot in jail — often literally — for no reason at all. They tend to have itchy trigger fingers, and the first option on their list of potential solutions — for almost any problem — is violence.
Conversely, if one considers the reasons for the U.S. losing Vietnam, the answer is the same. Wars are won when greater force is combined with greater will. The U.S. had the former without the latter. Dictators may start their careers with a weaker force, but their greater will compensates. The lesson is simple: a will undeterred by reason or morals is a potent force against those with such seeming liabilities.
Wile E. Soleimani — Genius
So what of those who thought Soleimani as smart and charismatic (terms I’ve heard used to describe him)? Or as the de facto great leader of Iranian forces? Historically, military leaders usually praise their opponents. That guy is a tactical genius! So what does that make you if you beat him? A super genius. And what if you lose? Well, my opponent is a genius.
And yet, where is the evidence? Where are Soleimani’s great victories? He probably thought of himself as Cyrus or Darius or Alexander or MacArthur. Ok, probably not MacArthur, but did Soleimani ever execute anything remotely close to the tactical genius of the Incheon Landing?
No, but he murdered 1,500 civilian protesters in Iran in the 1990s. He trains and arms rag-tag militia to lob rockets at civilians. He coordinates bombings of mildly protected or unprotected buildings, pizza shops and grandmothers. One could argue that Hezbollah has had some victories against Israel, but those are explained by Israeli intelligence weaknesses (they failed to detect some smuggled Iranian weaponry). Take a step back and ask: where are Hezbollah’s victories? Have they a great nation? Hezbollah’s victories are in their hollow diplomacy of fear.
Soleimani is empirically no tactical genius. The great victories of the Quds Force aren’t in establishing control and order but rather in sowing discord and chaos. Historically, chaos is easy; civil society is hard. Soleimani was the boy who didn’t understand chess, so instead of learning he would smash his hand down on the board of those who were playing. Eventually, no one wants to play chess, because Soleimani paces the playground with an angry fist. One may be tempted to label him the Emperor of Fear, but, more accurately, he was the errand boy of lethal incompetence.
Meanwhile, Back in Iran
It’s no secret that Soleimani is not popular among the non-military population of Iran (or the Middle East). It’s also not a secret that the Ayatollahs are similarly not popular. Such people don’t hold open elections because they don’t possess the organizational skills to cheat at the level required to overcome the shallows of dissatisfaction and the depths of loathing that engulfs their country. They rule because they possess the longest sword and the will to use it. Soleimani was that sword.
No one told the Chinese Emperor that he was weak, that China was remarkably backward, that his troops weren’t trained or equipped to take on a modern army. Now look at Iran’s army. Despite the bluster, it is remarkably backward, winless in battle, inexperienced and untested. They took for victory burrowing underground to smuggle WW2 rockets to lob onto a playground. Such is not the mark of a great army or a great leader but rather a wan facsimile celebrated for want of anything else.
Some say Soleimani reported only to the Ayatollah, but I suspect that the Ayatollah reported to him. The idea that there’s a solidified order of governance is to apply a Western concept to a region that’s proven consistently resistant to Western concepts. Historically, if you scratched the surface of many Caliphs, you would discover that the power lay not in the Caliph but in the Turkic military leader formally under him. Eventually this division formalized and the Caliphs atrophied into purely religious leaders while the Turks held the power of the sword. Or, if you’d prefer a more modern example, consider that Manuel Noriega was not the leader of the Panamanian government; he was a military leader. And yet, it was Noriega who caused the problems in Central America (arming various militia, mostly, but also running drugs and counterfeit money, just like Soleimani). The United States didn’t go after the Panamanian president, which Noriega never was.
Soleimani was one of many incompetent dictators who resorted to fatal force in ways and against targets that are, to the West, unreasonable and immoral. Like the Ayatollahs, he ruled by fear not competence.
And the great threat is not to the many in the Middle East who may be targeted by Iran — they’d been targeted for decades. From unarmed civilian protestors in Tehran to random bus-riders in Tel-Aviv, they’ve been paying the price of statecraft-by-terror for over a generation. Rather, the threat is to the power of the Ayatollahs and whether the angry fist can continue to forestall an inevitable checkmate.
About Nathan Allen
Founder of Xio Research (A.I.), Applied Magic (A.I.), and Andover (data). A.I. strategy and development leader at IBM. Academic training is in intellectual history; his most recent book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense…. Lectures on historical aspects of media, privacy/law, and power structures (mostly). Previous book: Arsonist.
