“He who can destroy a thing, controls the thing,” said Paul Atreides, the protagonist, played by Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s version of Frank Herbert’s legendary sci-fi film Dune. “He who controls the spice controls the universe!”
Paul Atreides rallied the thousands of Fremen as he took over leadership to fight in a guerilla war against the Emperor Of The Known Universe, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.
It's almost as if the Ayatollah was a big fan of the story. In his decades-long preparation for a US attack, he has adopted most of the tactics used by the Fremen against the Harkonnens.
As Paul’s father was leaving Caladan on his way to take over the stewardship of Arrakis, he told his son: “On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power. Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.”
Look familiar? Trump said in the first days of the war that the US Navy would quickly defeat any attempt by Tehran to block shipping or confront American forces. Trump has gone to Arrakis and is relying on his sea power in a desert country.
“If Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, it won’t last very long. The United States Navy is the most powerful naval force in the world, and it will be dealt with very quickly” Trump boasted.
The basis of the Dune story is an almost identical asymmetric war scenario to what is now playing out in Iran. The Atreides were facing overwhelming military power after the emperor promised the Harkonnens five legions of his elite Sardaukar troops, a sci-version of the US Marines, who by all accounts suffer from conditions as extreme as on Salusa Secundus.
Paul countered by allying with the Fremen, and avoided meeting the Sardaukar head-on. For years Paul operated a guerrilla war, destroying the production of the spice — in the story “the most valuable commodity in the universe”.
Another parallel was in the Lynch version, the Fremen’s success was based on a new asymmetrical technology, a sonic weapon that converted sound into blasts. Like Iran’s sophisticated drones, these “Weirding Modules” were only good at close quarters, but then they were devastating – a storyline missed out in the modern version starring Timothée Chalamet and directed by Denis Villeneuve, and not in Herbet’s books either, added by Lynch.
Interestingly, both Lynch and Herbet made heavy use of allusions to classical Middle Eastern history, referring to the Fedaykin, or “those who sacrifice themselves”, as well as Jihad, Mahdi, Shai-Hulud, and other terms derived from Arabic and Islamic concepts. The whole story is loosely based on the legend of “The Old Man of the Mountain”, a title given in medieval times to the leader of the Nizari Ismailis, a secretive Islamic sect based in an impenetrable mountain fortresses in Persia (now Iran) and Syria during the Middle Ages
All Paul had to do was negate the Emperor’s heavy weapons, which he did by eventually taking advantage of a sandstorm that cut visibility.
In the same way, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has triggered its Decentralized Mosaic Defence doctrine (DMD), disbursing its forces into the desert. At the same time, Tehran is using the pinch point of the Straits of Hormuz to disrupt oil traffic in exactly the same way that Paul Atreides brought spice production to a halt. The Straits are so narrow that Iran’s own Weirding Modules have effectively countered the might of the US navy.
It seems that the Ayatollah also read his Herodotus and the account of Spartan king Leonidas de facto defeat of Persian king Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. In that story, the classic quote (in both the book and the movie) was when a Persian general demanded the Spartans hand over the weapons, Leonidas replied: “Come and get them!”
After Leonidas was killed the Greeks mounted a commemorative inscription on the rock walls of Thermopylae, a stelai, commemorating his heroism that by all accounts was there for several centuries. It said: “Stranger, go tell the Lacedaemonians [Spartans] that we lie here, obedient to their laws.” The IRGC’s Fremen warriors show the same sort of fanatical commitment to fight to the end as the Spartans, who only wished for a “glorious death” of martyrdom.
Like oil, the spice is essential to space travel, and without it the Spacing Guild, which operates the spaceships, would be brought to a halt and interstellar travel and trade stopped. The Emperor came under impossible economic pressure. He soon faced a rebellion by the corporate CHOAM and the Spacing Guild who promised to see him live out his life in a “pain amplifier” if he didn’t rectify the problem.
“The spice must flow!” Baron Vladimir Harkonnen exclaimed realising the danger he was in as he lost control of the situation.
In the final conflict, Paul Atreides made use of the Fremen’s mastery of the desert and overwhelmed the emperor’s troops. Trump said that the US has “the greatest military ever assembled” and that Iran would be making a “very big mistake” if it attacked US forces or shipping.
But, like the Emperor, Trump did not count on the Ayatollah’s control of the worms – the Shahed drones, which are much more powerful and have a much longer range than Ukraine’s FVP drones. Since Iran swapped to China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system in the last year, these drones have become much more accurate and able to flummox both Israel's air defences and the US’ electronic warfare counter measures. bne IntelliNews’ military analyst Patricia Marins has described them as a “cheap version of a cruise missile.”
By adopting asymmetrical warfare tactics, the IRGC is using its “desert power” to successfully face down America’s Sardaukar. It has reportedly broken its forces into 31 autonomous cells and scattered its missiles and drones across the country in underground “Sietchs” (based on the Arabic word “sīq” or “sīk”, meaning a narrow passage or canyon), which the US has struggled to locate and destroy. These forces can emerge suddenly from the sand and deliver devastating blows to US troops, who remain exposed at out-in-the-open military bases across the Gulf region.
In an early attack, Iran reportedly destroyed several advanced THAAD radar stations — four out of the US global total of eight — blinding one of America’s most sophisticated missile defence systems. As bne IntelliNews reported, the US is now being forced to redeploy THAAD radar stations from the Indo-Pacific region, shipping them to the Middle East.
It was also reported on March 14 that Iranian missiles are destroying critical US Air Force assets faster than they can be replaced. Since the short 12-day war with Israel last year, Iran has significantly upgraded the technology of its drones and reportedly switched from US GPS guidance to the Chinese BeiDou satellite network, which has improved their ability to avoid electronic warfare countermeasures and increased missile accuracy.
In one video released last week of an Iranian missile attack on a US base, the missile reportedly avoided sophisticated Patriot interceptor missiles and hit its target.
If Operation Epic Fury plays out in a similar way to the Atreides’ attack on the Emperor of the Known Universe, then Iran’s leadership may hope not only to withstand the US assault but to emerge strengthened. If Iran keeps control of the Straits of Hormuz and imposes what will be in effect a sanctions system that only allows the spice to flow to “friendly countries,” Iran’s Supreme Leader emerges as the Kwisatz Haderach.
No comments:
Post a Comment