Author: Martin Kramer

In Iran, survival isn’t victory

On By Martin Kramer

On February 27, 1991, President George H.W. Bush addressed the American people, announcing the end of offensive military operations against Saddam Hussein’s forces. Iraqi troops had been completely expelled from Kuwait, which they had invaded the previous summer. During six weeks of bombing and a 100-hour ground campaign called “Desert Storm,” the U.S. and coalition allies destroyed about two dozen Iraqi divisions, hundreds of Iraqi aircraft, thousands of tanks, and Iraq’s weapons industry. A retreating Iraqi column was utterly destroyed during its escape from Kuwait. Gruesome images from that “highway of death” vividly showed the scale of Iraq’s defeat.

The following day, February 28, Bush made this entry in his diary:

It’s now early Thursday morning on the 28th. Still no feeling of euphoria. I think I know why it is. After my speech last night, Baghdad radio started broadcasting that we’ve been forced to capitulate. I see on the television that public opinion in Jordan and in the streets of Baghdad is that they have won. It is such a canard, so little, but it’s what concerns me. It hasn’t been a clean end—there is no battleship Missouri surrender. This is what’s missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.… The headlines are great. “We Win.” The television accurately reflects the humiliation of Saddam Hussein and it drives the point home to the American people. But internationally, it’s not there yet, at least in the Arab world that has been lined up with Saddam.

The fact that the enemy refused to acknowledge defeat troubled Bush. “Obviously,” he comforted himself, “when the [Iraqi] troops straggle home with no armor, beaten up, 50,000 … and maybe more dead, the people of Iraq will know.” But if they knew, Saddam regime’s made sure they never showed it. In 2003, Saddam shared his perspective with American television journalist Dan Rather:

In 1991 Iraq was not defeated. In fact, our army withdrew from Kuwait according to a decision taken by us. Yes, it withdrew, but when we were back within our boundaries, the boundaries of Iraq, the Iraqi army was not defeated. Nor was the people of Iraq…. It was [Bush’s] decision to…. stop the fighting. And, consequently, Iraq was not defeated.

No one knows how the current Iran war will end, but two things seem certain. The Supreme Leader will not send his representative to sign an unconditional surrender on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. And whoever leads the regime will declare victory for Iran, regardless of how much damage the U.S. and Israel inflict. In that respect, the Islamic Republic is no different from Saddam’s Iraq.

Iran has not experienced a military victory against a foreign enemy since the 18th century. As a result, its leaders are skilled at presenting defeats as draws, and draws (like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s) as victories. This is a coping strategy that allows Iran to preserve some dignity as the inheritor of past empires, which once thrived on legendary military triumphs and territorial conquests. A self-soothing narrative hides from Iranians the simple truth that Iran isn’t a global power. It’s not even the leading power in the Middle East. It’s too poor, corrupt, mismanaged, and divided to enjoy such a high status, no matter how much the regime tries to rally Iran’s people into sacrifices.

It’s now being said that if the regime remains in power, it’s somehow a triumph. “To survive would count as victory for Iran’s regime,” announces the Economist. But that’s Saddam-think. Survival isn’t victory unless it’s accompanied by a strategic gain that outweighs military losses. Since 1978, the Islamic Republic has aimed for Iran’s dominance of the Persian Gulf and the broader Middle East through ambitious weapons programs and support for proxies across the region. Survival is a poor substitute for losing all that, and most of it is already gone.

In 1991, George H.W. Bush had people around him who reassured him that it didn’t matter what people in the streets of Amman or Baghdad thought. What mattered was the objective achievement of defined war aims. They understood then, and we know in retrospect, that the war finished off Iraq as a pretender to regional power. Mission accomplished.

Thirty-five years later, Operation Desert Storm is remembered as the last decisive victory the United States won in a regional war—even though, at the time, America’s president thought it wasn’t a “clean end.” If that war didn’t end cleanly, the Iran war won’t either. The question is whether those who launched this war have the wisdom to realize it.

Header image: President Donald J. Trump attends transfer of remains of six US soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait, March 7, 2026, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. Official White House photo by Daniel Torok, public domain.

Syria in the Fertile Crescent

On By Martin Kramer


In 2015, I gave a lecture on the deeper historical background to the civil war in Syria, and I published it in my 2016 book The War on Error. Under present circumstances, it seems as relevant as ever, and I wouldn’t change a word. 

When the revolution (or uprising, or insurgency) started in Syria in 2011, many people saw it as the obvious continuation of the so-called Arab Spring. There had been revolutions in Tunisia, then Egypt and Libya—countries with Mediterranean shorelines. When conflict broke out in Syria, analysts initially read it as an extension of the same process.

In retrospect, it was not. The countries of North Africa are fairly homogeneous and overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. There are regional and tribal differences in Libya, and Egypt has an important Coptic Christian minority. But revolutions in these countries did not involve the transfer of power from one religious or sectarian or ethnic group to another.

In Syria, political transformation threatened to do precisely that. And so what evolved in Syria wasn’t an extension of the “Arab Spring,” but a continuation of another series of conflicts, far more devastating in their effects. Going back from the present moment, chronologically, its predecessors included the post-2003 Iraqi civil war, the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, the Lebanese civil war from 1975 through 1989, and, still more remotely, the Armenian genocide of 1915. These might conveniently be called the wars of the Fertile Crescent.

What is the Fertile Crescent?

What the Arabs somewhat laboriously call “Iraq and Sham” or “Iraq and the Levant” (from which derive ISIS and ISIL) has a perfectly serviceable English name. It was invented by James Henry Breasted, an American Egyptologist at the University of Chicago, and popularized in his 1916 book Ancient Times. Breasted defined the Fertile Crescent as the expanse of territory set between the desert to the south and the mountains to the north—a place constantly under pressure from invaders, precisely because it is sustaining of life (Breasted called it “the cultivable fringe of the desert”). He marked it as a zone of “age-long struggle … which is still going on.”1

“Fertile Crescent” gained popularity in the West because it seemed fertile in another way, as the site of the earliest biblical narratives and the birthplace of monotheism. It was the presumed locale of the Garden of Eden, which generations of early cartographers sought to place on a map.2 It was the site of the Tower of Babel, which purported to explain the emergence and diffusion of different languages. It was the stage for the wanderings of the patriarch Abraham, who crossed it from east to west—a migration in the course of which he came into communion with the one God. The Bible, before it linked the Holy Land to Egypt, linked it to Mesopotamia. And while the peoples of the Fertile Crescent may have been many, and of many languages, they were the first to imagine God as one.

The Fertile Crescent thus came to signify diversity amidst unity: a multitude of peoples believing in the existence of one God. This was in contrast to Greece and Egypt, which were cases of single peoples of one ethnic origin and language believing in many gods. It was in the Fertile Crescent that Islam would be tested as a unifying force for diverse populations. Only after passing that test did it expand across the globe. The Fertile Crescent itself then would be folded into the great Islamic empires. In the last of them, the Ottoman, it sometimes flourished and more often languished as a single, borderless expanse.

Sykes-Picot

But in 1916, the same year that Breasted popularized the phrase Fertile Crescent, Britain and France concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, dividing this zone into states and drawing straight borders through the desert. Within those borders, Britain and France imposed one faction over all others in political orders that depended to some degree or another on coercion. Power in Iraq and Syria coalesced around minorities. In Iraq, a Sunni minority was imposed over a Shi‘ite majority; in Syria, a Shi‘ite-like minority, the Alawis, over a Sunni majority. (The Kurds, minorities in both countries, were at the bottom of the heap.)

In Mesopotamia, Britain imported a Sunni monarchy from Arabia and bound it to the indigenous Sunnis of Baghdad and its surroundings, giving them dominion over a vast territory unified under the name of Iraq. The French initially tried a very different approach in Syria. Whereas the British sought to unify, the French originally intended to divide: for a period in the 1920s and 1930s, what would become Syria was in fact divided into an Alawite state, a Druze state, the states of Aleppo and Damascus, and Lebanon. In 1937, the French acceded to the demands of Syrian nationalists, and also unified Syria (excluding Lebanon). But at the same time, the French worked to empower minorities, above all the Alawis, by recruiting them into the military, in order to keep Arab nationalism in check. After independence, the Alawis parlayed that advantage into their own dominion.

While the rulers of Syria and Iraq stood, from a sectarian point of view, on opposite ends of the spectrum, they were both cases of post-colonial minority-domination in states engineered from the outside. Still, there was a difference. Syria’s ruling minority was much more of a minority. The Alawis in Syria are probably no more than twelve percent of the population whereas the Sunnis in Iraq are probably about twice that percentage. And while the ruling Sunni minority in Iraq had an integral connection with the wider Sunni majority in the region, the ruling Alawis in Syria had no such backstop, and ended up relying on distant Iran.

Perhaps Breasted would have warned us that this order couldn’t last. That it lasted as long as it did was the result of ruling minorities modernizing their repressive machinery in ways the ancients could never have imagined. But this machinery was discredited and dismantled by the United States in Iraq, and it has broken down from within in Syria. Power is now shifting from one religious or sectarian group to one which happens to be larger or more powerful or more connected to sources of outside support. Or it is fragmenting altogether.

From Strength to Weakness

There is much irony in the contraction of Iraq and Syria. Both states, at their twentieth-century high watermarks, were strong enough to project their power beyond their borders, and they even tried to redraw them. Iraqi nationalists believed that Iraq should have been awarded still wider borders, especially along the Persian Gulf littoral. Syrian nationalists likewise claimed that “greater” Syria should have been incorporated within Syria’s borders. The 1919 General Syrian Congress passed this resolution: “We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, nor of the littoral Western zone, which includes Lebanon, from the Syrian country. We desire that the unity of the country should be guaranteed against partition under whatever circumstances.”3

But it wasn’t to be. A separate Lebanon and Palestine came into existence. For this reason, Syria refused to reconcile itself to its own borders. Indeed, for three years, from 1958 to 1961, Syrians readily agreed to dismantle their own independent state, and incorporate Syria into a union with Egypt called the United Arab Republic.

Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, when he thought he had the opportunity, attempted to redraw Iraq’s borders by force, through his invasion of Iran and his occupation and annexation of Kuwait. Syrian president Hafez Assad likewise occupied Lebanon and gave safe haven to the Kurdish PKK, which was headquartered in Damascus. Iraq and Syria seemed to have become powers in their own right. In the case of Syria, in particular, American secretaries of state and even presidents came to Damascus as supplicants, hoping to win its ruler over to their geopolitical concepts of regional order.

Now all that has been reversed. Not only is Syria no longer capable of projecting its power beyond its borders; others are meddling inside Syria, to advance their own agendas, in alliance with the various domestic factions, while Syrian refugees flee the country in the millions. Syria’s elites once regarded the state’s external borders as inadequate to Syria’s great historical role, but Syria is now incapable of preserving unity even in its “truncated” borders. Syrians were educated to believe that the state of Syria was the nucleus of a greater Syria, itself the nucleus of a greater Arab unity. But in practice, Syria itself could not resist imploding into a de facto partition, driven by deep internal divisions.

Now it is not Syria’s power, but Syria’s weakness, that threatens the region. Albert Hourani, the historian of the Middle East, once wrote this: “Even were there no Syrian people, a Syrian problem would still exist.”4 That is exactly where the Middle East is now stuck. There is no Syrian people, but there is still a Syrian problem, and it will continue to dominate the region and worry the world, perhaps for years to come.

Since this disorder has no name—certainly none as succinct as “Sykes-Picot”—I propose to call it, for now, the Breasted Fertile Crescent. This would be a Fertile Crescent made up of shifting principalities, subject to occasional intervention by surrounding powers, characterized by variety and diversity, essentially without fixed borders—a place where Shi‘ites struggle against Sunnis, Arabs against Kurds, the desert against the sown. The Breasted (dis)order will persist, until some great outside power or group of regional powers proves willing to expend the energy needed to restructure the Fertile Crescent in accord with their interests—something the Ottomans did for four hundred years, Europe did for fifty years, and America has not yet attempted at all.

Notes

  1. James Henry Breasted, Ancient Times: A History of the Early World (Boston, MA: Ginn, 1916), 100–1.
  2. See Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
  3. J. C. Hurewitz, The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, vol. 2: British-French Supremacy, 1914–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 181.
  4. A.H. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 6.

Aida in Old Tel Aviv

On By Martin Kramer

Some years ago, I purchased a delightful 1924 poster at auction, advertising a performance of Verdi’s opera Aida by the Eretz-Israel (Palestine) Opera in Tel Aviv. The date of the performance? Exactly a century ago: November 18, 1924. The poster reads: “The Opera ‘Aida’ will be performed for the second time under the Direction of Mr. M. Golinkin at the Eden Theatre… beginning (spelled as ‘begining’) at 8 p.m. sharp.” The poster’s three languages are arranged in blocks, with Hebrew at the top, English in the middle, and Arabic at the bottom, likely reflecting the expected audience interest in the production.

I was drawn as much to the aesthetics of the poster as to its content. The Giza Pyramids, the Sphinx, an obelisk, and green palm trees dominate the background, evoking the exotic landscape of Egypt. The poster features a limited palette of pastel green and black on a white background, now yellowed with age. The pastel green complements the palm tree imagery. A riot of fonts and typographical elements in all three languages—along with misspellings and unusual spellings—further enhances its charm.

Aida promotional poster, 1924. Photo by author.

Mordechai Golinkin was a trailblazer for opera in the Yishuv. Born in the Russian Empire, he displayed exceptional musical talent from an early age and earned widespread acclaim as a conductor. Inspired by the Balfour Declaration, Golinkin founded a Jewish choir that toured Russia to raise funds for establishing an opera in Palestine. In 1923, he arrived in Tel Aviv and founded the Eretz-Israel (Palestine) Opera. Despite precarious finances and makeshift venues, he staged eighteen Hebrew-translated productions during the Opera’s four years under his leadership. When the funds were exhausted, opera largely disappeared from Mandatory Palestine. However, in the 1940s, Golinkin encouraged the revival of the genre by successors, and at the age of 73, he conducted the inaugural performance of the Israel National Opera in 1948.

The 1924 performance advertised on my poster was held at the Eden Theater, then a silent movie house in Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek neighborhood. Opened in 1914, the original (“winter”) theater was a concrete marvel of its time, seating 800 people under one roof. (The long-abandoned Eden is now slated to become a luxury hotel.) The poster’s warning that the performance would begin at 8 p.m. “sharp” was no mere formality. Golinkin later lamented that Tel Aviv’s residents were “unused to punctual theater attendance,” arriving late and having to stand in the corridor behind the doors for the entire first act of the Opera’s premiere performance.

I attempted to find information about the performance of Aida at the Eden Theater but couldn’t locate a review. However, I did come across an amusing piece in the Ha’aretz daily, published the morning after the November 18 performance, offering readers tips on how to enjoy the next performance for free. The advice appeared in an “About Town” column, credited to a pseudonym I couldn’t decipher. My translation follows.

Aida on the Cheap

Anyone who cannot afford three liras for a room, a penny for an egg, pennies for a glass of milk, a few coins for a loaf of bread that doesn’t quite meet weight standards, a lira for a minor luxury, or earns 25 mils a day in torn trousers, or generally anyone who either wishes but cannot or can but does not wish to buy a ticket for the opera Aida and listen to Radamès, is invited to come tomorrow to the Eden (but not all the way in) and secure an appropriate spot around its perimeter. The grounds are expansive and welcoming, the walls of the Eden are thin, its upper windows are wide open, and the voices of the singers are powerful enough to reach every heart. The visitor will assuredly hear the opera in all its precision. And if the cries of the boy hawking the daily Do’ar Hayom don’t shake the foundations of the temple while the priests are performing their rituals, the ballet is dancing, and the trumpets are blaring, it will still be possible—even for an untrained ear—to distinguish between the cracking of sunflower seeds and the shelling of pistachios in some discreet corner of the Eden, or hear the sound of the libretto’s pages being turned by the audience, and even the beating hearts of the new singers making their debut in Tel Aviv for the first time—not to mention clearly hearing, very clearly indeed, the tapping rhythm of Golinkin’s right foot or his soft whisper, like a pssst, directed into an ear:

“Play forte, my friends. Softly now, thieves.” In moments of anger: “Pianissimo, you devils!”

Those who wish may also bring ladders (as is customary), lean them against the walls, and climb higher and higher to the small windows, enhancing the experience by adding sight to sound.

The opera management may rest assured that this reverent audience will examine every detail with a precision finer than a hair’s breadth, interpreting everything beyond the strict letter of the law. The gathering will arrive at the Eden an hour before eight and remain outside until midnight, even though the press of people will be great, the winds cold, and the rains dripping—and, of course, no one will have a raincoat.

Source: Ha’aretz, November 19, 1924. Header image: Original Eden Theater in 1914.