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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (119312)	11/12/2003 1:23:43 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 281500

The last act--some might say that it was the most dramatic act of all--came forty years later. The protagonists were the Sassanid Khusro II "the Victorious" (590-628) and the Byzantine Heraclius (610-641). In the face of a succession struggle in Byzantium, Khusro made a breathtaking sweep from Armenia through Anatolia and Syria down to Egypt. In effect, he had finally fulfilled the old Sassanid dream of a Mediterranean empire--only briefly though. Heraclius made a heroic reorganization of Byzantine defenses and counterattacked. The culmination was a great defeat of the Sassanid army on the plains of northern Iraq in 627. Khusro II was murdered a year later. The epilogue is well-known. At the time of Khusro II's death in 628, Mohammed was about to return in triumph to Mecca. He and his Arab armies were the real victors of the exhausting Perso-Byzantine wars. By the end of the century, they had conquered most of the Byzantine empire and virtually all of the Sassanid. Most of this territory has remained Muslim, if not Arab, until the present day. From Crassus to Augustus to Trajan to Shapur I and Galerius, to Julian to Khusro I and Justinian, and to Khusro II and Heraclius--what are the lessons of the seemingly all-but-endless war between Rome and Persia? The first, perhaps, is a simple deduction concerning imperial aggression: Empires often seek security, but sometimes they just simply seek. The Parthians had done nothing to justify Crassus' invasion. The Sassanids, for their part, seem to have been less interested in avenging Roman invasions of Iraq than in acquiring a larger empire for themselves. On the other hand, once the Rome-Persia conflict was engaged, it had a momentum of its own. More than one scholar has come away with the sense that Romans and Persians continued to fight each other for centuries because neither one could find another opponent worthy of their mettle. Neither Rome nor Persia had another great empire on its immediate border. Romans might fight in Germany, Persians might fight in Central Asia, but for each side, the Romano-Persian duel was the main event. A third point is the paradox of parity. The two powers' relative equality ensured that the conflict would go on and on. As soon as one side got the advantage, it tended to press it too far, like Trajan or Khusro II, and thus allowed the enemy to recoup. There was a constant cycle of conquest, overextension, and forced retrenchment. Augustus had demonstrated that Rome's security dilemma in the East was soluble through negotiation. The Parthians seemed quite willing to accept his point. Over time, nevertheless, it came back to war, as the forces of greed and glory reasserted themselves. First Trajan and then the Sassanids gave in to the temptation of the battlefield. Ironically, for all the centuries of conflict, very little land changed hands. Rome, the civilizer of Europe, barely touched what is modern Iraq. Persia left little mark on Syria or Anatolia. Finally, of course, is an example of the irony of war if ever there was one: The Arabs inherited the energy that the two powers wasted on the conflict. In the long run, for both Rome and Persia, victory proved to be little more than a mirage. This article was written by Barry S. Strauss and originally published in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History in Fall 1999.Barry S. Strauss is a professor of history and classics and the director of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Rowing Against the Current: On Learning to Scull at Forty (Scribner, 1999).