How Is the Persian Invasion of Greece Like the Iran War?

 

“In these books, an emperor, an officer and an orphan look for anything that resembles a clear victory in the fog of war.

 

In the past few weeks, some observers have noted that the United States and Iran are fighting two different wars at the same time.

 

With their superior forces, the United States and its ally Israel want to show the world that their regional demands have physical power behind them. The leaders of the Islamic Republic, by contrast, with their cheap drone attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, are hoping to consolidate a fractured home front by taking a stand in their front yard. “External aggression by the Great Satan,” the retired Australian general Mick Ryan recently pointed out, “is always good for clerical legitimacy in Iran.”

 

In other words, one side is employing the tactics of conventional warfare, while the other wages a campaign that is primarily political and economic. Opponents using different means to fight while possessing different notions of victory is often a recipe for a messy and expensive war. As the Christopher Newport University historian John O. Hyland makes clear in his impressive PERSIA’S GREEK CAMPAIGNS: Kingship, War, and Spectacle on the Achaemenid Frontier (Oxford University Press, 453 pp., $140), a similar lesson can be drawn from the conflict between the Persians and the Greeks some 2,500 years ago.

 

The Greek account is that this war was a clash of civilizations, a view that some in the West still hold. But that perspective “could not have been more foreign to the Persian understanding,” Hyland writes. The Persians, with their vast forces, already saw their dominance as complete and viewed the war, he argues, as a problem of managing a nettlesome disturbance at the remote northwestern edge of their empire.

 

In addition, Hyland says, Western commentators have missed another important aspect of the Persian view, which is that the emperor Xerxes, new to the throne, needed to demonstrate to his subjects that he was a fitting supreme ruler.

 

Hence the stately, monthslong march of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors and courtiers through modern-day Turkey, across the Dardanelles and into Greece in 480 B.C. It was, Hyland says, more of a performative display of imperial power than an attempt to destroy the Greek military or bring the Greek mainland under Persian rule.

 

Indeed, Xerxes achieved surprisingly little in his Greek expedition. He commanded a huge army and, as Hyland writes, “the largest trireme fleet ever seen.” But after winning a clash at Thermopylae and burning Athens, he suffered several humbling defeats, most famously in the straits of Salamis.

 

Despite the setbacks, Xerxes claimed he had been victorious. The message to his empire was that he had fulfilled his goals of, as Hyland puts it, “royal order, punishment of the wicked and restoration of peace.”

 

Reading Xerxes boasts, it’s hard not to hear echoes of President Trump’s pronouncement that the United States has “already won” its war with Iran. But Donald Trump and the emperor of Persia aren’t the only leaders to have put a spin on an ill-begotten military operation. In the late summer and fall of 2004, Tom Mowle, at the time an Air Force officer, served a four-month tour of duty in the Iraq War. As he recounts in CHAOS IN THE GREEN ZONE: My Time as an Iraq War Strategist (University Press of Kansas, 240 pp., paperback, $24.99), he sat in Baghdad trying to formulate rationales for a war that he believed “violated both domestic and international law.”

 

Before the war, the U.S. government had insisted that the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Bush administration officials had also asserted that the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans with open arms, turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy that would transform the Middle East. Now, after the fighting was underway, Mowle was supposed to come up with a plan to make that transformation happen. He didn’t get very far.

 

The real value of this odd little memoir is not his dissent, but that it offers us something more unique: the story of a staff officer who labors in a war he never witnesses. He knows almost nothing of it, and indeed never sees combat. He spends all but a few hours of his tour of duty in Baghdad’s Green Zone, the heavily protected district that sat in the middle of the Iraqi capital but was walled off from it. He goes, in part, because he is estranged from his wife back home, who apparently is happy to see him leave.

 

At times the book veers into satire. While American soldiers and their allies on the front lines were worried about staying alive amid roadside bombs, Mowle sought ways to improve his work-life balance, even joining an evening bridge game. He was also pleased when he managed to secure a place to live that was “closer to the gym and,” he writes, “on the same side of the Palace as the pool if I preferred to swim laps.” At the same time, he candidly admits, “Our lack of understanding of Iraqi culture, Arab culture and Islam was pathetic.”

 

Perhaps the oddest aspect of this tale is how it ends. Like an inverse Odysseus, almost the first thing Mowle did when he got home to Colorado was divorce his wife — because one thing he had learned in Iraq, he reports, is that “life was too short and too unpredictable to sit around and wish things would get better.”

 

The reality is that most people in war are bystanders who simply try to survive the conflict. That perspective, all too often neglected by scholars of war, comes through powerfully in MOLLIE BRUMLEY’S CIVIL WAR: Surviving the Guerrilla War in Arkansas (University of Oklahoma Press, 228 pp., $32.95), by the historian Theodore Catton.

 

For Brumley, an orphan living in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains as the Civil War raged across 1860s America, victory meant keeping herself and her loved ones alive, even if it also meant eating wild plants in the woods. On May 25, 1862, she kissed a boy she liked as he enlisted in the Confederate Army. His name was Valentine Williams. She was 14 years old. He was reported missing and presumed dead barely six months later, in the battle of Prairie Grove.

 

War is a great test of stamina for soldiers and civilians alike and the guerrilla war that arose in Arkansas, especially as the federal army swept through, tore the Ozarks to shreds. At the end of 1863 Mollie married another Confederate, Henry Cole. He eventually deserted to fight as a guerrilla soldier closer to home, only to be attacked by Unionist guerrillas as he sat in front of his house. Mollie helped Henry escape the assault and later discovered four shots had passed through her skirts.

 

Catton illuminates how war reaches every part of the populace, often warping them in the process. In the winter of 1864-65, people in the Ozarks began to starve. Those who had food hid it, only to have their floorboards torn up by desperate men looking to eat. In a memoir written decades later, Mollie recalled them as “human devils.” When a drifter came into the Cole family’s house and brandished a pistol, Mollie’s mother-in-law pulled a hatchet from her skirts and drove the man away.

 

At war’s end, Mollie’s husband, Henry, went to a Union steamboat on the Arkansas River to surrender. As he walked toward the boat’s gangway, he was shot in the chest by a bandit. His killer threw him into the river and fired several more rounds into him. Mollie searched widely for his corpse, riding 400 miles and walking another 100.

 

Back home, she learned that her first love, Valentine Williams, was not dead after all. In 1867, she married him and lived many decades more, giving birth to eight children and writing her autobiography. Before she died at 86 in 1934, she looked back on how the war had made her believe that “the grave” was her “only chance for peace and rest.”” [1]

 

1. How Is the Persian Invasion of Greece Like the Iran War? Ricks, Thomas E.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 24, 2026.