Everyone wants to know who is winning the war. Breathless procrastinators spend all day watching fuel prices, podcast hosts rush to their microphones, and a brigade of “serious” analysts have taken over TV studios. Despite this fury, many questions are yet to be answered, but the Iran war already has one winner: middle management.
Never before has there been such a decapitation strike as the US and Israel have accomplished against Iran. There has been endless discussion about the conflict, but not enough time has been spent detailing how revolutionary the sheer scale of this elite annihilation is. Since the war started, Iran’s executive and defence staff have been assassinated at a truly unprecedented rate.
The Defence Minister, IRGC Commander-in-Chief, and Army Chief of Staff have all been eliminated, as well as Ayatollah Khamenei. These are only a few of the long list of senior officials and officers who have been successfully targeted. For almost all of human history, hundreds, thousands, then millions had to be marched through to reach the centres of national power; now they can be struck in a matter of hours. Much has been written about nuclear weapons, but the ability to remove a nation’s elite through precision bombing is another new frontier in modern warfare.
The few historical comparisons to such a devastating blow to the upper echelons of a state are not conventional. Only clashes from worlds apart, such as those involving the Spanish in the New World, seem at all similar. The conquistadors’ massacre at the festival of Toxcatl in Tenochtitlan, or the infamous surprise attack on Atahualpa at Cajamarca, are the truest comparisons to the decapitation of Iranian leadership that we have seen so far. Both of these, with the help of significant domestic tensions, led to the destruction of the great pre-Columbian empires of Mexico and the Andes. Despite this precedent, Iran is not crumbling; it is fighting back.
American bases have been levelled, the Strait of Hormuz blocked, and global politics sent into turmoil. Such a response is only possible due to the strength of the lower parts of the Iranian hierarchy, despite the snake’s loss of its proverbial head. In a world where middle management is often despised, the war is teaching us that we need it more than ever.
Imagine a Britain where the Cabinet, Cabinet Office, and General Staff had been annihilated: would we be able to answer a foreign threat? I suspect not. While, under the system of mission command, the military could hopefully fire back against a serious opponent, whether it has the matériel to last more than a few hours is a different question.
On a political level, the questions are far more worrying. It is common to malign the heads of our governing institutions, but what would happen if they were removed? What national political structure could organise any response? It is tempting to say the fish rots from the head when summarising our problems, but, like the sickly fish, we still would not function without one.
I am not suggesting a British IRGC, but something far more radical: a political society which has a middle.
Of course, foreign attack would have a unifying force, but a decapitation strike would be far more devastating to the UK than it has been to Iran. None of our institutions are strong enough to wield and direct political power in such an emergency. Perhaps Holyrood would be saved from such a decapitation because of its unimportance, but what help would that be? Britain works on a direct-to-consumer model of politics, where legislators sell an often faulty product to voters, who then demand monetary compensation. No one is “in this together”, and we have the interpersonal bonds of a customer service chatbot.
I am not suggesting a British IRGC, but something far more radical: a political society which has a middle. A military-style mission-command chain throughout all of society is unlikely; AngloSpartanFuturism is probably unachievable, but it would be a great podcast name. Nor does there need to be a dangerously post-liberal great chain of being; we need a political will that passes through all society. Right now, we have the voter and the ruler, with only tattered customs in between.
The basics of collective society suggest that our leaders are the tip of the spear. The Iranian state has much to be criticised for, but it has proven it can regrow this sharp edge and still function. Democracies like Britain should be even stronger in this respect than despotic regimes like Iran, but does anyone think we are? In the geopolitical garden of Western Europe over the last 50 years, such thoughts have been unnecessary. In a dangerous world we are often told our military needs rearmament. The truth is our society needs it far more.
