Adventure, the thrill of crossing vast lands en route to victory, glory, and prize, quickly made way for disaster.
Told they would help fascism defeat Bolshevism, the Italian Army’s Alpine Division journeyed east, to the depth of the Russian steppe; 16,000 men went, and fewer than 4,000 returned, part of a huge non-German corpus that lost an estimated 250,000 Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian men in the snowfields of Stalingrad.
Wars are, by definition, celebrations of folly, but the futility of those soldiers’ deployment stands in a league of its own, considering the distance and harshness of the land where they fought, and the madness of the cause for which they died.
Now, as foreigners crowd battlefields from the Middle East to Ukraine, the madness returns.
FEW WARS were the exclusive business of just two nations. King David’s army had two foreign battalions (the Kerethites and Pelethites); Hannibal deployed Libyans, Greeks, and Gauls; and modern Britain and France conscripted multitudes of Africans and Asians.
RUSSIA’S PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un attend a state reception in Pyongyang, earlier this year.
Seen this way, Russia’s current deployment of more than 10,000 North Korean troops to help it fight Ukraine is natural. Well, it isn’t. The Korean deployment is an improvisation forced by Russia’s huge casualties, at least 408,000 irreplaceable soldiers, including 78,000 killed, according to independent analyses surveyed this week by The New York Times.
Ironically, Russia’s Korean cannon fodder will be deployed not far from where other foreigners once fought not for Russia, but against it, led to die in an alien land for an alien people in the name of ideas in which they didn’t believe.
Yes, it was a very cynical deployment of foreign warriors, an inversion of what happened in the 1930s in Spain, where thousands of foreigners died in a civil war they joined voluntarily, to serve a cause in which they really believed.
Then again, even wartime Germany’s abuse of its foreign fighters does not compare with what Iran’s foreign legion has been doing to the rest of the world.
Iran’s network spreads
THE IRANIAN network of foreign militias evolved gradually and spread opportunistically.
What began in the 1980s with the establishment in Lebanon and Gaza of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, was emulated two decades later in Iraq, as Tehran used the unraveling of Saddam Hussein’s state to plant in it militias like Asaib al Hal Haq and Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba.
The following decade, Iran used the Yemeni civil war to sink roots in the Arabian Peninsula, by funding, arming, and training the Houthi militia that deposed the Yemeni government. By this decade, Iran has emerged, thanks to its proxy scheme, as the effective ruler in three Arab capitals – Beirut, Baghdad, and Sana’a – in addition to its older domination of Damascus.
Iran’s proxy warriors are not mere adjuncts to someone else’s war effort, the way the Italians, Hungarians, and Romanians were for the Germans. The Germans also fought the Russians, and German soldiers died in much larger numbers than the foreigners who joined them.
That’s not what the Iranians do. The Iranians have foreigners die not alongside Iranian soldiers, but instead of them. In all their foreign meddling, the mullahs have been careful to send from Iran only commanders, advisers, and mentors, not fighters. The Iranian military itself, notwithstanding its recent pair of missile salvos on Israel, has not fought anywhere since the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988.
Morally, this method of having others die for your cause is appalling, an emblem of the Islamist Revolution’s hollowness, hypocrisy, and cowardice. This scheme’s masterminds are the same people who, during the Iran-Iraq War, cleared mines by collecting from their cities homeless children before sending them to walk on minefields.
One is at a loss to understand how Iran’s Yemeni, Iraqi, and Lebanese underlings, all ethnic Arabs, tolerate the Persian masters who send them to die. But that is their problem, not the rest of the world’s. What is the world’s problem is not Iran’s methods, but its aims. And the aim, it takes no statesman to suspect, is to dominate the Middle East today, the Arab nation tomorrow, the Muslim faith the morning after that, and the rest of mankind the morning after that.
ON THE face of it, the Iranian project is driven by ordinary imperialism, a quest to expand Tehran’s sway by creating one overland corridor from historic Persia through Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea, and another, through the Arabian Peninsula, to Africa’s shores.
In this sense, Iran’s ploy is a version of Russia’s imperial agenda. Yet Russia is not out to destabilize the Middle East. Iran is. In all three lands where it deployed its proxies – at an estimated annual cost of more than $1 billion – the local government has lost its political effectiveness and the country itself lost its sovereignty.
That is how Lebanon became politically paralyzed, economically destitute, and militarily someone else’s battlefield; that is how Iraq became someone else’s garrison; and that is how Yemen became a launchpad for a war on international navigation.
These schemes are not merely about Iran’s relations with its neighbors. They are about the entire world; about the international system’s foundations; about respect for sovereignty, independence, and inter-civilizational harmony.
It is no coincidence that this scheme comes from the same people who, as a matter of strategy, faith, and reflex, oppress women, machine-gun demonstrators, and hang gays. The proxy project is their way of taking what they do at home to the rest of mankind.
The rest of mankind, for its part, has yet to fully understand Iran’s menace, but that is natural, certainly not unprecedented. The Alpine Division’s Italian soldiers also didn’t get it, not even when already on the train that took them east, never suspecting that their locomotive’s driver was the Angel of Death.
