Iranian General’s Hare-brained Chutzpah
What do you suppose is it about the leaders, particularly the generals and admirals, of so many Middle Eastern nations, that leads them to be so boastful? Is it a cultural thing? Or is their psychological indoctrination as young officers so intense and irresistible that it overwhelms their common sense? One could almost wonder if Middle Eastern military academies include in their curricula such courses as Basic Battlefield Saber Rattling I&II, Advanced War Zone Saber Rattling and then perhaps post-graduate courses in Geo-Apocalyptic Saber Rattling?
We all remember Saddam Hussein’s bravado prior to the Gulf War, him standing on balconies brandishing automatic pistols or assault rifles, firing them into the air above the heads of adoring throngs of loyal Iraqis who believed his boasts about destroying the infidel Americans in the “Mother of All Battles.” He got his Mother of All Battles, alright, and it didn’t go too well for his supposedly indestructible Revolutionary Guards, much less his lesser units. Proving that the ingrained tendency to bluster is undeterred by hard lethal lessons, Saddam repeated his public demonstrations of bravado preceding the Second Gulf War, the MoAB that resulted in the total destruction of his vaunted Guards units as well as his own ignominious execution by hanging.
Now here we are years later and similar braggadocio is coming from Saddam’s old nemesis, Iran. Faced with possible military action by western powers to halt Iranian development of nuclear weapons, Iran’s generals and admirals are boasting that they will rain death and destruction on the United States and Israel. This time the bluster is coming from the Iranian version of the Republican Guards, the Revolutionary Guards, one of whose generals seems just a bit brash:
The semiofficial Fars news agency quoted Gen. Ami Ali Hajizadeh of the Revolutionary Guards as saying U.S. bases are in range of Iran’s missiles and could be hit in retaliatory strikes. He referred to Israel as “occupied territories.”
“Measures have been taken so that we could destroy all these bases in the early minutes of an attack,” said Hajizadeh, chief of the Guards’ air-space division.
All these bases, huh? The swaggering general, commander of the air wing of the Guards, is also confident that his command is a match for the U.S. Navy vessels now in the Persian Gulf:
Hajizadeh said the Guards also successfully test fired an anti-ship missile that could sink U.S. warships in the Gulf. Gen. Hajizadeh told state TV that the shore-to-sea ballistic missile, called “Persian Gulf,” has a range of 300 kilometers (180 miles).
Someone should inform the general that test firing a missile is a tad different situation from deploying and using missiles tactically. My advice to General Ali would be to go to this official Navy website and scroll through the warfighting capabilities explained there, keeping in mind that the information is several years old, meaning, no doubt, that the technologies and capabilities revealed there are even more advanced and effective by now. He should pay particular attention to the defensive, anti-missile systems such as the Aegis BMDS and the Sea Sparrow. His naval counterpart, on the other hand, might be more interested in the shipboard anti-surface (anti-fast boat) weaponry such as the Phalanx Close In Weapon System (CIWS) or the new, remotely-operated Typhoon chain gun created by Israel’s Raphael Corporation and now on many U.S. vessels. Of course, none of this even takes into account the hundreds of combat aircraft, both carrier-borne jet fighters and attack helicopters available to the admiral commanding the battle area.
Somehow, I don’t think the United States Navy is breaking sweat over the warfighting prowess of the Revolutionary Guards. Many of our older Navy commanders are probably mindful of the supposedly invincible Republican Guards of Iraq and how most of them ended up. Do you suppose General Ali will still have such hare-brained chutzpah once his Revolutionary Guards have suffered a similar fate?
If he’s still alive, that is…
Crossposted at American Thinker somewhere.
Category: Terror War
He’s not talking to us, but to his fellows, and probably in the normal language they use. It may sound flowery and impractical to us, but it gets the message across to other Iranians.
Here’s an American example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50_iRIcxsz0
He probably has no idea what we can do. If he has any brains at all, he will know that his army relies on fabrication to project an image of more force than he has. He may well think that we do the same. The notion that we would keep any new tactical advantage secrete until it is superseded would be foreign to him. We, and possibly the Israelis, are unique in that regard.
Another possibility is that the testing isn’t going so well, and he’s talking loudly in an effort to conceal the problem while they try to fix it. A retaliatory attack of the type he describes would have to be co-ordinated and controlled by computer. My completely civilian guess is that the military missile system is, by nature and number of operators, far less secure that the nuclear enrichment project.
Now that huge oil reserves have been found under Israel, and just off its coast, the smarter generals are sharpening their sabers, not rattling them.
The rattling of sabers was Marshal Jean Lannes’s version of diplomacy. It didn’t end well for him either, and he wasn’t up against either America or Israel.
I do not care for Persia or for Araby, but I prefer “THE ARABIAN GULF” — just to be NON-Diplomatic to Iran (“I RAN” ??)
I have had a theory for years that the problem is testosterone poisoning. Think about it, the whole region seems to be in perpetual ‘roid rage. Most arabs and persians are hairy little men who swagger around talking big talk and beating up on those smaller than themselves as if that makes them big men. I think we need to develop an estrogen bomb.
Frankly, I just get a kick out of seeing a Yiddish word to describe an Iranian leader. You know, they’d have a cow if they saw that.
Susan: damn, there goes the cover for Project Kardashian . . . . (smile)
What’s the Persian word for “dipshit”?
@#7-derka derka ?
@#7 Bache Kooni or beshoor should both work just fine.
It’s ‘dawin’, sometimes called ‘dawawin’. Boasting about things that haven’t occurred yet, and likely won’t. Arabic has a word for it, because it is part of the culture. They know that no one believes them, but they say it for themselves and their buddies, as valerie said above.
I, too, enjoyed the use of the Hebrew (later used in Yiddish) hutzpah for a Persian. Took some ????? to do that!