Episode 55: Oil vs. Blood. A Collision of Supply Chains and Sacred History

Something cirtical is missing in our planning for, discussions of, and expectations about the Iran conflict. through the largely Ignoring the lens of centuries old belief systems, cultural idealogy, and theological resolve, we start to see that the West's game-theory calculus is dangerously incomplete. Drawing on the 1,345-year-old Shia legacy of Ashura — the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali at Karbala — I explain why Iran's nearly 100 million people operate from a belief system the west just does not understand. I will excplain how even the use of the term "decapitation strategy" ignites a cultural memory of the very crucible form which the nation and its beliefs wore born. When dying for justice is in fact the ultimate victory, surrender is simply unthinkable. With the assassination of Khomeini fulfilling a thousand year old prophecy, we open our eyes to the possibility that anyone expecting a quick resolution is likely misreading a crucial asymmetry.

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Transcript

Speaker 4 0:01

Welcome to The Sovereign Guide. I'm your host, Alistair McDonald. Let's get started.

Speaker 2 0:27

As we go to record this episode, we are officially one month, into our two week invasion of Iran, and what I want to do is to take a step back to redirect the conversation, your attention towards something that is far more important and far more long lasting than our immediate concerns about. The Rait of Horus, the price of oil, the disruption to global supply chains. All of these are serious chief among them, the loss of life on both sides and what appears to be a much larger loss of life that potentially lies ahead. All of these things are of course, incredibly important, but I feel that they're getting all the ink and digital attention that they could possibly ever hope for. I want to widen the aperture a little about this conflict to be able to include a sweeping core narrative of history that is being completely overlooked, not just by the politicians that are pulling the levers and making this happen, but the media and the talking heads and the pundits who are chiming in on everything about the logistics of conflict and whether or not we should pursue this strategy or this tactic, something nobody is talking about that's really at the core of all of this.

Speaker 1:54

In a groundbreaking piece of work in 1953, the mathematician and savant, John Nash. He came up with a game theory model for understanding how to resolve conflict and avoid war. It's a simple model of bargaining that he formulated, and in it he laid out by his math four critical elements that need to be considered when we look at the relative power of one nation against another. Now it's worth pointing out that when we speak about these four dimensions of power, but he and his, uh. The right hand man, John Harya, the Hungarian born mathematician, who himself won a Nobel Prize for work done in 1961. Uh, identifying these four things, they can actually be measured. Now. It's not something that I have the qualification to do or the time for us to even attempt to go into, but what matters really is just what they are. The first and most obvious of these four things is the thing that is getting all of the media's attention right now. Resource power. The resource power of each player, the player that has more money, more troops, and more ammunition is more powerful. Makes perfect sense. The second is threat power. This is measured by comparing how much damage my strategy or my threat can do to you versus the damage your optimal threat strategy can do to me should war break out. The third is coalitional muscle. This one speaks for itself. We are not doing a great job of that right now by shaming allies for not stepping in, But this is obviously something that we understand the ability to bring in the resources and power of others to support us in our bargaining or in our conflict, but what I think needs more attention than any of these is something that is not being discussed. And I'm gonna dive into that next. And this is the relative resolve. The relative resolve of one party compared to the other to achieve its objectives, resolve can be measured quantitatively, as I say, by determining the degree of risk aversion that each player has and what success looks like for them and what price they are willing to pay. Is it simply a dollar amount that they stand to lose the other party? Is it a body count? A number of individuals that they're willing to sacrifice in their approach to achieve the outcome? The player with the least risk aversion has more resolve, that player is gonna take greater risks to achieve their objectives than the other will. The idea of measuring a person's. Particular degree of resolve by measuring their willingness to take risks or to feel loss, uh, is is an old idea. But, uh, John Nash, simply formalized this. So with this preface, here's where I want to go next. Bear with me if you can. At no point in what I'm going to share with you, do I intend to signal or convey any sort of judgment, any sort of assignment of right or wrong, stupid, or brilliant. I'm simply laying out a hidden backstage philosophical infrastructure that's not being discussed. God, created war so that Americans would learn geography. So said Mark Twain, allegedly a now famous quote, perhaps apocryphal, but worthy of attention, and maybe a charcoal

Speaker 3 5:44

It was just a few short years ago that COVID occurred, and I remember clearly the sense, this collective sense that it was just a few weeks. You know, we just have to just have to sacrifice for a short while. Let's just grin and get through this. Put your mask on social distance and we'll flatten the curve, you know. And I think this is the thing, this is the narrative that we all had and we, we believed it. And we believed it in part because we really wanted to believe it. I dunno about you, but it was over two years later that I was still standing in line six foot apart from others with a mask on. To board an airplane where I would sit right next to that person and get the opportunity to lift my mask when eating. We have recently launched an excursion into Iran, and as then, as now we are choosing to believe and hear, and the messaging and the narrative is, it's just a couple of weeks. We're just gonna do this, take care of it. Eliminate evil from the Earth in its one of its many iterations, and it'll be back to business as usual. In his book, the Prince Machiavelli says this. I quote, you must never believe that the enemy does not know how to conduct his own affairs. Indeed, if you want to be deceived less and want to bear less danger, the more the enemy is weak or the less the enemy is cautious so much more. Must you esteem, fear and respect him In the year six 80, the first Umayyad Kali died. The Umayyad were the predecessors, the prior generations of what we today call Sunni Muslims. Those titles of Sunni and Shia were not known to us. They were not used until some cases two or three centuries later. But the death of this Umay Kif meant that his son Yazi the first ascended to the throne. At the same time, a man by the name of Hussein Ibin Ali, who was himself, the actual direct grandson of the prophet Muhammad, took offense to this. He considered this. Ascendants to the Throne by Yazi, the first to be a usurping of the actual right and righteous leader who in his opinion should have been, and this is the structural divide between the Shia and Sunni philosophy as we know it today. It was his belief. That the passing of the torch, so to speak, would be a bloodline, hereditary continuity via himself, Hussein, I Ali, and he considered that yazid. The first was, as I say, a usurper coming in, not because of righteous divine selection, but instead political and military. Qualification or ascension. He couldn't tolerate this. His conscience wouldn't allow it. Who knows? Maybe even his own personal aspirations couldn't allow it, and he felt that this was something worthy of rebellion. So he gathered up a very small cadre of. 72 followers. Many of them family members, some of them soldiers, some of them farmers, but a cadre of individuals that were willing to separate themself from this environment and launch some form of a rebellion. So he left Medina. And traveled toward Kufa in Iraq where he was hoping to rouse, uh, other characters to join him in his rebellion. But this small band of 72 companions and family members and so forth were intercepted by a huge umay army, and they were blocked from accessing the Euphrates River. Stuck in the desert of Caral, a particular area that will come up and be more important as we go forward. They were pinned down there for 10 days and on the 10th day, cut off from water supplies beaten down by the difficulty environment, and massively overwhelmed by the opposing force of the umayyads later to become Sunni. They were terribly slaughtered. Hussein Ibin Ali himself was beheaded. Women and children were taken as slaves and shipped off to Damascus in Syria, modern day Syria. This created an existential division inside the philosophy and theology of Islam. To his followers, Hussein Ibin Ali had done the purest, bravest thing that anyone possibly could do, which is not to fight, but to be willing to die in fighting injustice. And standing for what is ethically and morally and spiritually true. Remember that his blood was the pure bloodline of the prophet Muhammad himself. His death catalyzed an awakening for people that weren't followers that suddenly became them, and people that were followers that were racked with guilt, they felt that they had let him down. Hussein Ibin Ali had shown up and led from the front, willing to die, willing to see his own son slaughtered in the service of not what was expedient or even what was the high probability positive outcome in the service of spiritual commitment. This created what we now know to be The dividing separation between, again, what we refer to now as the Sunni and Shia, and it left a radical, radical legacy in the eyes of the Shia theology and philosophy and their interpretation of Islam and what is right. I'm not qualified to put my thumb on the scale in either direction, but that's not what matters. It was on the 10th day, which is a day called Asura. It was the 10th day of the Islamic Luna calendar that they were all completely decimated. The legacy that was created by this did multiple things, four specific things. The first is it took the courageous. Pure blooded Hussein and elevated him instantly to martyrdom. His martyrdom was one of the ultimate example of commitment, not to himself or even to his family's comfort and wellbeing, but to the faith itself. The death on this day of Asura, as I say, the 10th day of the Islamic Luna calendar. It became a reference point, not just to speak about historically, but to, to effectively serve as an eternal, an eternal rallying cry for the oppression of what we now refer to as the shield. This meant that Hussein's Hussein's legacy became a specific theology of protest against injustice. He considered yazid the first's actions to be unjust, to take power away from the core belief and the followers of it. To the sheer, Hussein didn't die. He certainly didn't lose. He actually moved into eternity and what appeared to be his loss was in fact his Supreme win because the true essence of Islam was one of dedicating themselves. To the cause, to the belief in this philosophy, victory is defined by standing for justice, not surviving the battle. The secondary wave that I mentioned, this wave of realization that rippled through the communities, brought about the sense of redemption via atonement. All of the individuals that had had the option. To stand by him taking on an in an impossible battle with impossible odds that chose not to plagued by guilt, and at the same time called by inspiration to try to follow in his footsteps, the courage and so forth, that he had translated into a desire to not be absent, to show up when the Hussein of our time. And the oppressors of our time arrive when the Hussein of our time calls for help by sacrificing himself. No sheer can deny the call. This Resistance Against Oppression has a name. It's called Zulu, Z-U-L-M-I don't speak Arabic. You'll have to excuse my my language. There is a saying in Shia. That is every day is Asura and every land is Kabala. I mentioned this particular area, they were moving through Iraq when they were cut off and denied access to the Aras. This was the Kabala region. Every day is Asura, and every place is Carala. This saying has survived this philosophy, this thinking, this belief system and the saying has survived 1,345 years. Anybody that's seen as an oppressor is cast into the role of Yazid first. Every one of them. The motivation to fight becomes a religious duty, not a geopolitical one, not even one about resources or family or personal wellbeing. It is a religious call to literal arms to fight the yids of the world from prevailing. It is their interpretation of good versus evil, and you cannot give up. You cannot give up. In fact, you cannot lose. The only way you can lose is by giving up in this framework. Martyrdom is of course, the highest honor. It is the short path to spiritual perfection. It is the ultimate ascension and desire of anybody, no matter how poor, how rich, how strong or how weak you are called by your core belief to show up when it matters most. S every day is a, sure everywhere is Karbala. The Ayatollah Khomeini came into power 45 years ago. He was recently just like Hussein, effectively decapitated their religious icon, their Hussein of today. Has made the ultimate sacrifice and 1,345 years of generations of people of belief systems waiting for their equivalent opportunity to have been the one that raised their hand when the call came in, have all arrived in the present on approximately July 10th of this year. It will be the 1,346 anniversary of Asura and the beheading of Hussein. At Karbala, we are choosing to believe that we have engaged in a conflict with largely symmetrical risks and rewards that will quote unquote be over whenever we want. And maybe last a few weeks, how do you beat an enemy, an opponent for whom the only loss is there surrender. How do you win? It's worth remembering that the core premise unknown to us at the time, but revealed in the years that followed for the nine 11 attacks was that a small, a small cadre of individuals were animated by what they took to be the insult of US troops in the holy land. Now they were not tanks driving around Mecca. But the United States having any sort of military presence in Saudi Arabia was considered a, a personal theological and political affront to everything that mattered to those individuals. We had a name for them, Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda represented a very small minority of individuals that took the same martyrdom as motivation to heart. Just a small cadre, maybe a couple of hundred thousand at best. According to the data that I see, Iran is a nation of almost 100 million people. And the level of dedication that they show to their belief dwarfs anything that the average American has for their family and wellbeing, would you sacrifice your infant son on principle? Those actions that animated response, weaponized response by Al-Qaeda created implications and impact and decisions and downstream effects for us that continue to affect our everyday life in the United States. And it was a small cadre of individuals. Literally remember those old, that old footage doing pull-ups on monkey bars and running around in the desert? Nothing particularly dangerous. We're talking about a scale of capacity, almost a hundred million people nested inside a geographic fortress. If you're not familiar with the terrain of Iran, it's worth looking at. It is a geographic and geological fortress that has not only had Its religious leader beheaded effectively, but sits with apparently according to the US government, 400 kilograms of uranium closer apparently than they've ever been to nuclear weapons. This could be the first time in approximately 500 years. That a naval power has been drawn to a halt against a land power. We have absolutely lost control of the Strait of Horus, and that's with marginal weapon usage on their behalf. The asymmetric. Upside and downside is so skewed that we would need, by we, I mean the western world. We would need to have a belief system rooted in a vision of success that has us willing to sacrifice our infant sons to finish this war. When we think about the scale, when we consider, for example, that Al-Qaeda spawned what became ISIS and isil years later, something we are still dealing with, I'm still connected to through networks that I won't go into in Western Central Africa fully a quarter of a century later. That spirit of resentment. Is still animated and it doesn't have, that, does not have 1,345 years worth of history behind it and a recently sacrificed martyr in Khomeini. This does a couple of things. Not only does it tell us from a game theory perspective, we've spoken in previous. Conversations about John Harya and the resource power and, uh, alliance power and so forth, something that's worthy of being revisited. But we know from game theory alone that not only have we created more nodes of conflict, and are those nodes more amplified and invested in conflict, but they can hold their metaphorical breath. For almost one and a half thousand years, and we we're worried about the price of oil going into the summer at $110 a barrel. We're worried about the election cycle that's coming up, split between red and blue, and what's, which way is it gonna fall, come November? What I'm pointing to is duration, tenacity. How long can the American political machine keep an animated populace engaged? Because we're facing people that will fight for eternity in heaven and they will fight for their eternity and fight in ours. We've just announced that we will be sending, probably sending ground troops in, uh, initial small wave. You know, much like, Hey, just a couple weeks, take care of this. Just like COVID, deploy some of the Marines, airborne, et cetera. Get them on the ground. Tidy this up super quick. I can tell you this. That this is not Iraq. Iraq was a nation of one quarter of the population with nowhere near the nuclear weapons and none of the geological and geographic advantages of the fortress. That is Iran. The Sunnis do not carry the same level of historical precedent with every generation being taught from a very young age to look for. You should be so fortunate as to grow up in a generation where your Hussein of the day is drawn into the battle of injustice and inevitable martyrdom. This is a whole other level. There will be a regime change. Should the United States have to start enlisting another 250,000 Gen Zs and millennials and send them off to Iran, there will be a regime change, but it won't be in Iran.

Speaker 5 25:24

That's it for this episode. Thanks for being here. Hey, there's only two things that you have in your life. Your time and your attention that you've given both to me for these few minutes of today means everything. Cheers.