Can Russia and China stop the Middle East from becoming a global war for oil and gas? From Pepe Escobar at sputnikglobe.com:
Once upon a time, by the Don river, in the southern steppes of what today is still known as “Ukraine”, the Great King of Persia, the mighty Darius, leading the most powerful army ever assembled on earth, received a puzzling message from a foe he was pursuing: the nomad ruler Idanthyrsus, King of the Scythians.
A Scythian envoy arrived at the Persian camp carrying a bird; a mouse; a frog; and five arrows.
And then he left, in a rush.
Wily Darius interpreted the message as the Scythians ready to submit to the Persians.
Not so fast. It was up to Darius’s senior foreign policy advisor, Gobryas, who also happened to be his brother-in-law, to break the code:
“Unless you Persians turn into birds and fly up in the air or into mice and burrow in the ground or into frogs and leap into lakes, you will never get home again but stay here in this country, only to be shot by Scythian arrows.”
Well, apparently this tale from the depths of the pre-Silk Roads proves the strategic nightmare of waging war against elusive nomadic horse archers on the Eurasian steppes.
But that could also be a tale about waging war against invisible urban guerrillas in sandals and RPGs hidden in the rubble in Gaza; flash mini-squads emerging from tunnels to hit and burn Merkava tanks before disappearing underground.
History also tells us that Darius failed to bring the Scythian nomads to a head-to-head battle. So, in the autumn of 512 B.C., he pulled a pre-American gambit in Afghanistan 2,500 years before the fact: he declared victory and left.
