Alexander The Great In Iraq
What can our contemporary soldiers and Marines learn from the campaign of 331 B.C.?
by Steven Pressfield
There's a great scene in the movie "Patton," where George C. Scott and Karl Malden (as Patton and Omar Bradley, in north Africa in 1943) are being driven out to the site of the recently-fought battle of the Kasserine Pass. As their vehicles approach the location, Patton makes them take a detour, insisting that the battle had been in a different place. The driver informs Patton of his error, and Bradley confirms that the driver is right; he was just out here yesterday. But Patton insists. Bradley and the sergeant/driver exchange an uneasy glance. Has the old man lost his marbles? Patton makes them press on to a site alongside some ancient ruins. "It was here," Patton says. "The battlefield was here."
He gestures out over the desert. "The Carthaginians defending the city were attacked by three Roman legions. The Carthaginians were proud and brave, but they couldn't hold. They were massacred." Bradley and the sarge grin, impressed. The boss knows what he's talking about after all.
DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN
Our troops in Iraq today may not be as knowledgeable about ancient history as Patton, but they know that armies have been clashing for thousands of years on the turf they now patrol. The land occupied by modern Iraq has been in centuries past the kingdoms of Ur, Sumer, and Akkad, and the empires of Assyria, Chaldea, Babylonia, and Persia. It has been ruled by Semiramis, Sargon, Sennacherib, Hammurabi, and Nebuchadnezzar, Ashurbanipal, Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, and Darius, not to mention Tamerlane, the Mongol hordes, Turks and Ottomans, British, French, Germans, and Russians.
But the most famous conqueror of all was a twenty-five-year-old king of Macedonia, who subdued Iraq in 331 B.C. and died there eight years later, a few months shy of his thirty-third birthday.
We know him as Alexander the Great.
How did Alexander overcome Iraq? What can we learn from his campaigns and his victories? Are there parallels between the challenges he faced in his era and those the U.S. and its allies confront today?
I've been working for the past two and a half years on a novel about Alexander. By no means can I claim to be an expert. I'm not a classicist or professor or historian. I'm just a writer of historical fiction, a Marine who never rose above the rank of E-3. But, if you'll take the following as simply one man's perspective, maybe it will provoke a little thought.
WHO WAS ALEXANDER? WHAT WAS IRAQ?
Alexander became king of Macedon at twenty and had won his greatest victories by the age of twenty-five. His era ran between the Golden Age of Greece and the rise of Rome. He led his army against the empire of Persia, earth's mightiest, and destroyed it within four years, despite being outnumbered in the field, often by as many as five to one.
He commanded at four monumental battles--the Granicus River, Issus, Gaugamela, and the Hydaspes River--in addition to prosecuting numerous sieges, desert and mountain campaigns, and a three-year counter-guerrilla war in Afghanistan. He fought summer and winter for eleven years, advancing east as far as India. He was never beaten.
What was Iraq? The land between the Tigris and Euphrates was not called by that name then. It was Mesopotamia. Its southern half was the kingdom of Babylonia; the north was called Mesopotamian Syria. Neither was independent. Both were provinces, or satrapies, of the empire of Persia.
In other words, Iraq was not an autonomous nation, it was two conquered kingdoms. That's the first big difference between Alexander's challenge and ours.
NO OIL AND NO ISLAM
Islam did not exist in Alexander's day. The Prophet would not be born for another nine hundred years. Nor had Jesus yet walked upon the earth. That would wait another three centuries. Alexander's Macedonians worshipped Zeus and the Olympian gods; the Persians were Zoroastrians. In Babylon, the chief divinity was Baal.
Nor was Alexander after oil. Horsepower was truly horse power in his day. The object of controlling a vital strategic commodity was not part of Alexander's agenda.
HOW DID ALEXANDER CONQUER IRAQ?
Alexander had already been at war with the Persian empire for three years when he entered Iraq. He had won the great battles of the Granicus River and Issus (in modern Turkey) and had conquered all of what is today Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, and part of Arabia. He had been wounded in action numerous times, including having his helmet hacked through by a cavalry saber, being shot in the chest by a catapult bolt, and brained by a heavy stone. He had faced Darius III in person at the battle of Issus, annihilated his army, and driven him in flight from the field.
The year was 332. Alexander controlled the Mediterranean seaboard; Darius held Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and the interior all the way to what is today Tajikistan. Alexander waited. He gave his rival time to raise a second army. Alexander wished, above all, to avoid a scorched-earth guerrilla-type resistance. He wanted a straight-up clash that would settle things once and for all.
In the spring of 331, he set out from Tyre on the seacoast, marching inland via Damascus and Aleppo. He entered Iraq from the northwest, bridging the Euphrates in what today is Syria, on his way to the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. His goal was the city of Babylon, 400 miles south. Darius was waiting for him there with an army of one million men (if we credit the ancient historians). Alexander had about 50,000. Babylon was on the Euphrates, about sixty miles south of contemporary Baghdad.
After a campaign of maneuver that lasted all summer, the two forces met east of the Tigris, on a plain called Gaugamela. In a monumental battle, Alexander's Macedonians routed the Persian host. Estimates of enemy dead (always dubious in ancient accounts) range from 50,000 to 200,000. Darius fled east into Iran. The second army of the empire scattered.
In the Persian camp, Alexander's forces captured Darius's wife, the Queen of Persia, and his young son and mother. (The Persian king went to war accompanied by his family.) Alexander treated them with respect, insisting that they be accorded no less honor in captivity than they had been in freedom.
ALEXANDER TAKES BABYLON
The city of Babylon was the greatest in the world. Its walls were 150 feet high and forty miles in circuit. It had been designed with so much open land inside that the city could grow crops and withstand a siege indefinitely. Alexander's army advanced south from Irbil, past Kirkuk, via Tikrit.
He was already near Babylon, and was leading his army in battle order, when the Babylonians came to meet him in mass, with their priests and rulers ... bringing gifts and offering surrender of the city, the citadel and the treasure.1
Alexander entered Babylon on October 25, 331, a little over three weeks after the battle of Gaugamela. He was now in possession of the equivalent of modern Baghdad.
PACIFYING THE POPULATION
Alexander had a number of advantages that our contemporary coalition does not. For one, he was not conquering a sovereign nation. He was overthrowing an imperial power (Persia) that had held that nation (Babylonia) in subjection.
In other words, Alexander could legitimately pose as a liberator. There's a telling phrase in Curtius' History of Alexander, describing the conqueror's entrance into the city:
A great part of the Babylonians had taken their places on the walls in their eagerness to become acquainted with their new king ...2
Their new king. In Alexander's day, the people of Iraq/Babylonia were so accustomed to being ruled by foreign powers that it meant very little to them when one alien monarch, Darius of Persia, was kicked out and another, Alexander of Macedon, came in. It was "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Except Alexander was canny enough not to portray himself as the old boss.
STEP ONE: RELIGION
When the Persians ruled Babylon, they had destroyed the great temple of Baal, the holiest site of Babylonian religion. Alexander, almost as soon as he entered the city,
directed the Babylonians [at his own expense] to rebuild the temples [that Xerxes of Persia] had destroyed, and especially the temple of Baal, whom the Babylonians honor more than any other god.3
Alexander restored the ancient religion and went out of his way to show respect for it.
Of course this was not an option for our contemporary commanders, who were regarded as infidels by the indigenous population and would not have been permitted to set foot on holy soil even if they had wanted to.
It may be (I'm speculating) that polytheistic creeds like Alexander's are more tolerant of other people's beliefs than our own monotheistic religions, Islam, Christianity, Judaism. Certainly Alexander was able to perceive his own god, Zeus, under different names in other religions and so to embrace them. This scored him big points wherever he went.
STEP TWO: CIVIL ADMINISTRATION
Having conquered Iraq, Alexander did not dismiss the local officials and magistrates. He kept them in their jobs. He kept the governor and the treasurer. He dined with them and made them his companions. He let the populace know that order would be maintained and that life would go on without any cataclysmic upheavals.
Of course Alexander didn't do this because he was a nice guy. His object was to pacify the place quickly, so he could move on.
ALEXANDER'S GOAL WAS DIFFERENT FROM OURS
Alexander's ultimate aim was not Iraq/Babylon. Iraq was just a theater of war on his march east to Persia. Alexander's goal was the conquest of the Persian empire. It was expedient for him to leave in place in Babylonia many of the governors and magistrates who had ruled under Darius, so that the continuity of daily life would be maintained -- and he would not find himself confronted by an insurrection in his rear.
Clearly this policy was not an option for our American commanders. Their mission was regime change. They could not leave Saddam and his party in power; the whole purpose of the invasion was to unseat them. That the coalition is now re-examing its mandate of de-Baathification and considering bringing back Baathist administrative and technical personnel demonstrates, perhaps tardily, the triumph of practicality over ideology.