Those Americans for whom Iran remains a benighted abstraction would do well to remember that over a thousand years ago, the supremely civilized forebears of the people now being massacred under our bombs were the first to elaborate the fundamentals of what we call Chess. Among the ingenious principles built by Persian savants into the game were scenarios allowing a patient strategist to lure overreaching opponents into quandaries whose inexorable logic dictated that any sequence of moves open to the ensnared could only result in their final defeat.
This stray thought occurred to me after learning the Iranians have given the name Sacred Defense 2.0 to their concerted response to the US-Israeli war of conquest. The original Farsi phrase Defa’-e Moqaddas harkens back to the eight years of a fierce collective resistance put up by the Iranian people against Saddam Hussain’s barbaric invasion of 1980 abetted by the US and resulting in the deaths of up to one million on both sides.
Today as back then, a highly motivated critical mass of 92 million Iranians have every reason to conclude that if they give in to the latest onslaught of gleefully perfidious barbarians, they will no longer have a sovereign country left to them and thus cease to exist as a unified people.
The ruinous consequences of that capitulation are prefigured for all but the willfully blind to see in the dismal aftermath of the successive rapes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon,Libya, Syria, and Palestine.
