Author’s Note on the English Edition

This article develops the argument of my Persian article published on 21 January 2015 [1]. Its historical comparisons and strategic assessments belong to the political circumstances of January 2015.

THE FATAL POLITICS OF MISTAKING A THREAT FOR A DETERRENT

On 16 November 1532, the Inca emperor Atahualpa entered the central square of Cajamarca, in present-day Peru, to meet a Spanish invading force commanded by Francisco Pizarro. What followed was not the defeat of a vast Inca army by 168 Spaniards, but an ambush made possible by a fatal misjudgement of the enemy.

 

Atahualpa commanded an experienced army numbering in the tens of thousands, stationed near the hot springs of Konoj, approximately six kilometres outside Cajamarca. He possessed overwhelming military resources, but failed to recognise the intentions of the men he had come to meet. Pizarro understood enough of Inca customs to exploit them. Atahualpa, by contrast, had little conception of the greed and brutality that governed the conduct of his visitors.

 

Convinced that a demonstration of imperial magnificence would inspire fear and secure submission without bloodshed, Atahualpa entered the square dressed in his finest garments, adorned with exquisite jewels, and seated upon a throne of gold and silver carried by eighty Inca nobles. His ceremonial procession, generally estimated at between 5,000 and 8,000 people, included attendants, musicians, nobles, and a limited guard, most of whom were unarmed or only lightly equipped. The spectacle was intended to establish the emperor’s authority. Pizarro had other intentions. His soldiers were concealed in the surrounding buildings, awaiting the signal to attack (Lockhart, 1972; Lamana, 2005).

 

According to Spanish accounts, the Dominican friar Vicente de Valverde approached Atahualpa, demanded his religious submission, and presented him with a Bible, which the offended emperor reportedly cast aside. The precise exchange remains disputed, not least because the conquerors’ accounts can hardly be mistaken for impartial testimony. But the controversy surrounding the Bible risks obscuring something far more revealing: the ambush had been prepared before any supposed offence against Christianity. Religion supplied the language through which a calculated act of aggression could be represented as a moral obligation. The alleged insult furnished a convenient justification for violence that required no such provocation. Pizarro’s men emerged from concealment, attacked the procession, massacred those gathered, and seized Atahualpa, who was subsequently executed [2].

 

The distinction between Atahualpa’s military strength and the force immediately available to defend him is fundamental. He had not led 80,000 armed warriors into the square to confront 168 Spaniards. His army remained outside Cajamarca while he entered with a largely ceremonial entourage, apparently confident that the visible authority of his imperial position would be sufficient to command respect and discourage aggression. The numerical disparity between the two armies, therefore, tells us remarkably little about the actual balance of force at the decisive moment. The men capable of resisting Pizarro were elsewhere. Those accompanying the emperor were exposed to an attack for which they were neither prepared nor adequately equipped.

 

Nor was the outcome some inevitable consequence of Inca cultural inferiority, as though European conquest were the natural reward of superior civilisation. Such an interpretation would turn a carefully prepared ambush into evidence of historical destiny. Atahualpa’s failure was more immediate and far more consequential: he underestimated the adversary before him, mistaking the conventions of imperial authority for a reliable means of restraining men who recognised no obligation to respect them.

 

The gold and silver that proclaimed Atahualpa’s sovereignty also advertised the wealth awaiting seizure. His jewels did not intimidate the Spaniards. They excited their appetite for plunder. The splendour intended to overwhelm the visitors offered no protection against soldiers concealed behind the surrounding walls. Atahualpa possessed the resources to confront an invading force, but had entered a confrontation arranged entirely on his enemy’s terms. Pizarro recognised an opportunity and prepared to exploit it. The emperor failed to understand the danger until the opportunity to prevent the attack had passed (Lamana, 2005).

 

The lesson of Cajamarca is that power, however formidable its resources or magnificent its display, becomes dangerously vulnerable when divorced from an understanding of the enemy and the means to frustrate his intentions. Under such circumstances, the demonstration of strength may advertise weakness more effectively than it deters aggression.

 

Nearly five centuries later, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Ali Jafari, appears determined to make the same mistake, with the added disadvantage that he has no comparable imperial magnificence to display.

 

 

THUNDERBOLTS FROM THE REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS

On 18 January 2015, an air strike attributed to Israel killed Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Ali Allahdadi and six members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah near Quneitra, in Syria. Two days later Jafari announced that Israel should expect ‘devastating thunderbolts’. His language was reported as part of a wider declaration that the Guards would continue their struggle against the Israeli state (Esfandiari, 2015). The loss of an Iranian commander abroad was serious. Jafari’s performance in response was something else: the familiar transformation of military embarrassment into a theatre of invincibility.

 

No country can be expected to regard the killing of its servicemen with indifference. But the right to respond and the capacity to prevail are separate questions. One belongs to political judgement; the other to the unforgiving realities of military power. Jafari speaks as though a sufficiently fierce phrase can make an Israeli military planner tremble. The calculation is more likely to run in the opposite direction. An opponent evaluates aircraft, missiles, communications, intelligence, alliances, and the credibility of retaliation. It does not normally base its war plans upon the volume of a commander’s threats.

 

There is a particularly melancholy absurdity in the Islamic regime’s technological pageantry. In 2013, the authorities displayed the Qaher-313 as an indigenous fighter aircraft; a purported image of the aircraft in flight was then exposed as a photographic manipulation, while aviation specialists questioned the machine’s claimed capabilities (Sherwin, 2013). The spectacle was instructive. The regime was offering its public the appearance of a capability for which it had yet to furnish convincing evidence. An aircraft can be painted, photographed, and praised into the skies of official propaganda. It cannot be talked into combat readiness.

 

This is not an argument against Iranian engineers, technicians, or servicemen. It is an indictment of a regime’s apparatus which repeatedly confuses their genuine labour with its own publicity requirements. A country deprived for decades of access to advanced Western equipment has every reason to invest in domestic defence industries. It has no reason to mistake a prototype for a deployed squadron, or a ministerial announcement for a functioning defence system.

 

 

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN PATRIOTISM AND POWER

No one should doubt the determination of Iranians to defend Iran against aggression. Whatever our disagreements about the Islamic regime, our country is not the property of its rulers, and its people would pay the price of a war they did not choose. That is precisely why false assurances of national security deserve contempt. Patriotism is a duty owed to the country; credulity is a favour bestowed upon those who govern it.

 

Iran inherited a substantial inventory of American and other Western aircraft under the late Shahanshah, including the F-14 Tomcat. Decades of sanctions, restricted access to spare parts, and the ageing of the fleet have imposed severe operational burdens. The F-14 remains a symbol of the sophistication once available to the Iranian air force, but neither its original prestige nor speculative claims about how many aircraft remain airworthy can substitute for a reliable assessment of combat readiness [3]. The operational problem is not solved by counting machines in hangars, still less by repeating claims issued for public consumption.

 

The position at sea is more complicated than the regime’s critics sometimes allow. Iran is not without a navy, and its submarines, mines, missile-armed small craft, and coastal systems could inflict real damage, particularly in the confined waters of the Persian Gulf. Such capabilities are designed in large part to make intervention costly, not to defeat a technologically superior air and naval coalition in open battle. Iran’s principal surface combatants do not compare favourably with the modern fleets of its strongest adversaries. The distinction between the capacity to disrupt and the capacity to command the sea is fundamental (Cordesman, 2014a).

 

Missiles are the one area in which the Islamic regime can point to a considerable and consequential investment. Iran has developed ballistic missile forces intended to threaten regional bases, installations, and cities, and to make any attack upon it more expensive. Yet the serious studies available to us in late 2014 also identify substantial problems with the accuracy and reliability of important parts of that arsenal. Large salvos might overwhelm a defender or cause terrible civilian casualties. That would make them dangerous. It would not make them a substitute for competent air defence, a modern air force, or the ability to sustain a prolonged confrontation with an adversary possessing superior intelligence and precision-strike capabilities (Cordesman, 2014b).

 

Deterrence is not magic. An enemy must believe that an attack will impose costs greater than the expected reward. Missiles can contribute to such a calculation, and it would be foolish to dismiss them. But the regime’s mistake is to assume that because it can strike back, it can necessarily prevent an attack in the first place. The two propositions are not identical. The population of Iran would discover the difference long before the men who devised the slogans acknowledged it.

 

Consider the claims of self-sufficiency in air defence. Tehran has publicised an indigenous system, the Bavar-373, as an answer to the Russian S-300, while continuing to seek the delivery of S-300 batteries that Moscow had withheld. As of this month, public announcements about development do not amount to proof that an equivalent long-range system is operational throughout Iran (Donya-e-Eqtesad, 2015). The S-300 is not obsolete merely because a propagandist finds the word convenient, nor is the Bavar-373 discredited simply because it is Iranian. The contradiction lies in proclaiming strategic independence before demonstrating that the promised capability exists. A functioning radar and missile network does not grow stronger when its manufacturers are required to applaud it.

 

A comparison with Israel is therefore unavoidable. Israel possesses advanced American-supplied combat aircraft, modern intelligence and electronic-warfare capabilities, extensive defence-industrial expertise, and intimate security links with the United States. One need not approve of Israeli policy to recognise the strategic significance of these assets. Refusing to acknowledge an opponent’s advantages may be emotionally satisfying; on the battlefield it is a form of negligence.

 

There is also the question that polite strategic language habitually keeps behind a screen: Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that Israel possessed approximately 80 nuclear weapons at the beginning of 2014 (SIPRI, 2014). Reports in 2012 also raised grave questions about the possible nuclear role of Germany-built Dolphin-class submarines, although the particulars of any sea-based deployment remain unacknowledged by Israel and cannot be treated as publicly confirmed (Bergman et al., 2012). The strategic imbalance is real even where particular delivery arrangements remain secret.

 

The detonation of nuclear weapons over Iranian cities would be an act of mass slaughter and a catastrophe on a scale that ought to make every politician hesitate before boasting of an inevitable confrontation. I fear that, if Israel resorted to such an attack, important Western governments would devote more energy to explaining away its decision than to holding it accountable.

 

 

THE USES OF AN IRANIAN THREAT

The Revolutionary Guards’ belligerence serves an obvious domestic function. It encourages a population already burdened by repression and economic hardship to identify the regime’s standing with the country’s survival. A state that cannot adequately answer its citizens’ demands can always announce that it has frightened its enemies. There is no shortage of thunderbolts in a speech. The shortage begins when one asks where they are to land, how accurately, and at what cost to Iran.

 

The danger is that others may find the performance useful for quite different reasons. Reports published on 20 January carried allegations that Iranian and Hezbollah figures were preparing an ‘imminent’ operation against northern Israel (Pleasance, 2015). Such allegations are not proof of an invasion plan. Yet once circulated as intelligence, they help turn a threat of Iranian retaliation into the premise of an Israeli claim to preventive action. An allegation becomes a headline; a headline becomes a political atmosphere; that atmosphere may be invoked to justify measures whose scale bears little relation to what has been established.

 

Benjamin Netanyahu has long presented the Iranian threat as the overriding test of Israeli security. His public statements in 2014 demanded not merely restraint of Iran’s nuclear activities but the dismantling of its enrichment capacity, while declaring that a threatening military option could strengthen diplomacy (Netanyahu, 2014). His political case is plain enough. What remains opaque is how far he would be prepared to go to achieve it, and what price Iranians would pay if the calculation moved from pressure to war.

 

If one studies Netanyahu’s rhetoric concerning Iran, particularly his insistence that the West should deal with Iran as it did with Iraq and Libya, it becomes apparent that his central political objective is not the destruction of the Islamic regime, but the annihilation of Iran as a state. I am convinced that this objective lies at the heart of Netanyahu’s political purpose. Although he has so far failed to persuade an American president to take the United States to war with Iran on his behalf, he will continue to seek either an American administration prepared to wage such a war or a crisis capable of drawing Washington into that conflict. Nor should the possibility of a manufactured provocation, including a false-flag operation, being used to bring about such a war be ruled out. Like many political activists who have not succumbed to the narratives of the mainstream media, I am convinced that the attacks of 11 September 2001 served a similar political purpose, preparing the ground for the invasion of Iraq in furtherance of the Zionist project of Greater Israel. The broader point, however, does not depend on proving this: history supplies ample examples of governments making a casus belli out of an incident, an intelligence assertion, or an enemy’s reckless words. A state genuinely concerned with its people’s safety ought not to make that task easier for its adversaries. Yet, Jafari’s threats offer him material with which to argue that an Israeli escalation is defensive, reluctant, and necessary. One side supplies the bravado; the other can supply the justification.

 

Such a war would not necessarily generate sympathy for Iran among the Muslim-majority nations of the region, particularly the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Historical Persian-Arab and Shia-Sunni divisions would undoubtedly play a part, as would the Persian Gulf Arab regimes’ fears of the Islamic regime’s regional ambitions and interference in their internal affairs. Nor should one overlook the possibility that some of these states, particularly the United Arab Emirates, might even regard the annihilation of Iran as an opportunity to pursue territorial ambitions over its southern provinces and islands in the Persian Gulf.

 

It would be a bitter distinction for Iranians killed in a war to discover that the destruction of their country had become somebody else’s opportunity.

 

 

CONCLUSION

For years I have warned of what I describe as the Iranistan project: the danger that a defeated and destabilised Iran could be fragmented through external pressure, separatism, and the deliberate exploitation of its internal divisions (Suren-Pahlav, 2010; 2013). The name expresses my interpretation of the strategic threat; it should not be confused with a publicly authenticated operational blueprint. I regard the danger as inevitable if a catastrophic regional war is allowed to develop. Whether the process is directed, opportunistic, or a mixture of the two, the country itself would be the object of the operation and ordinary Iranians its first victims.

 

The uncomfortable conclusion is that those who claim most loudly to defend Iran may be furnishing its enemies with the argument for attacking it. Jafari and his superiors have made provocation into an instrument of domestic authority. Netanyahu, in my judgement, is perfectly capable of turning that provocation into an instrument of external policy. Neither deserves the right to place an entire people between his ambitions and his opponents.

 

Meanwhile, much of the Iranian opposition in the diaspora, rather than uniting behind a coherent strategy of resistance aimed at overthrowing the Islamic regime and ending clerical rule in Iran (Suren-Pahlav, 1999; 2008), they indulge in a grotesque pantomime of a cabinet-in-waiting. It conducts imaginary contests over the presidency, the premiership, and the distribution of office in a liberated Iran, as though liberation were an appointment already entered in its diary. Others pursue personal prestige and financial advantage while announcing their undying devotion to the national cause. A country facing the very real prospect of war and dismemberment deserves better than expatriate pseudo-politicians ignorant of the rudiments of political resistance, yet remarkably adept at dividing up imaginary cabinet posts, as though Iran’s liberation depended chiefly on the allocation of ministerial perks.

 

Atahualpa entered Cajamarca with the signs of imperial authority and left it a captive because the decisive forces were elsewhere and the enemy had prepared a different kind of meeting. Iran has no shortage of men prepared to proclaim that thunderbolts are imminent. Its shortage is of rulers willing to distinguish what they can proclaim from what they can defend. The first obligation of anyone who claims to speak for Iran is to keep the country from becoming the prize in another man’s ambush.

 

 

FOOTNOTES

1 – Suren-Pahlav, S. (2015) ‘از فخرفروشی امپراتور آتاهوالپا تا "صاعقه‌های رجزخوانی" پاسدار جعفری’ [From Emperor Atahualpa’s Ostentation to Revolutionary Guard Commander Jafari’s ‘Thunderbolts of Bravado’], 21 January. Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/pe/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=1:political-article&id=85:1393-11-01 (Accessed: 24 January 2015).

 

2 – Atahualpa was initially sentenced to be burnt alive. According to Inca religious beliefs, the preservation of the physical body was essential for the soul’s passage into the afterlife. Burning his body would therefore threaten his prospect of an afterlife. To avoid this fate, Atahualpa agreed to accept Christian baptism in exchange for a less destructive method of execution. His sentence was consequently commuted from burning to strangulation, and he was executed by garrotte on 26 July 1533.

 

3 – Estimates of the number of F-14 aircraft in Iran and the subset actually airworthy vary sharply and cannot be treated as interchangeable. The precise figure of twelve operational aircraft repeated in the earlier draft has not been independently verified for January 2015 and is not relied upon here.

 

 

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