Uncanny.
The Bush administration has behaved in Iraq just as Crassus behaved during his expedition to the same region.
<blockquote>On his arrival, things went at first as he [Crassus] had hoped, for he easily bridged the Euphrates and led his army across in safety, and took possession of many cities in Mesopotamia which came over to him of their own accord. But at one of them, of which Apollonius was tyrant, a hundred of his soldiers were slain, whereupon he led up his forces against it, mastered it, plundered its property, and sold its inhabitants into slavery. The city was called Zenodotia by the Greeks. For its capture he allowed his soldiers to salute him as Imperator, thereby incurring much disgrace and showing himself of a paltry spirit and without good hope for the greater struggles that lay before him, since he was so delighted with a trifling acquisition. After furnishing the cities which had come over to his side with garrisons, which amounted in all to seven thousand men-at-arms and a thousand horsemen, he himself withdrew to take up winter quarters in Syria, and to await there his son, who was coming from Caesar in Gaul, decorated with the insignia of his deeds of valour, and leading a thousand picked horsemen.
This was thought to be the first blunder which Crassus committed, -- after the expedition itself, which was the greatest of all his blunders, -- because, when he should have advanced and come into touch with Babylon and Seleucia, cities always hostile to the Parthians, he gave his enemies time for preparation. Then, again, fault was found with him because his sojourn in Syria was devoted to mercenary rather than to military purposes. For he made no estimate of the number of his troops, and instituted no athletic contests for them, but reckoned up the revenues of cities, and spent many days weighing exactly the treasures of the goddess in Hierapolis, and prescribed quotas of soldiers for districts and dynasts to furnish, only to remit the prescription when money was offered him, thereby losing their respect and winning their contempt. (Plutarch, "The Life of Crassus," <http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Crassus*.html>)</blockquote>
> For those of you who don't know Marcus Licinius Crassus was at the time the
> richest man in (late) Republican Rome. He had defeated Spartacus and was
> one of the members of the First Triumvirate along with Julius Caesar and
> Pompey. The death of Crassus changed the balance of power among
> the three
> competitors for political power in Rome and made it impossible for Caesar
> and Pompey to maintain a political alliance.
If the Iranians live up to the chance that history has given them, the triumvirate of the multinational empire will be divided just like that.
> Is there a moral in all this? Probably not.
A moral that the Iranians ought to draw from this is that they shouldn't get too cocky. Plutarch ends his tale on this note:
<blockquote>However, worthy punishment overtook both Hyrodes [the King of Perthia] for his cruelty and Surena [the Perthian general who defeated Crassus] for his treachery. For not long after this Hyrodes became jealous of the reputation of Surena, and put him to death; and after Hyrodes had lost his son Pacorus, who was defeated in battle by the Romans, and had fallen into a disease which resulted in dropsy, his son Phraates plotted against his life and gave him aconite. And when the disease absorbed the poison so that it was thrown off with it and the patient thereby relieved, Phraates took the shortest path and strangled his father.</blockquote>
Khamenei and Rafsanjani ought to refrain from behaving toward Ahmadinejad as Hyrodes did to Surena. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>