Could the US-Iran conflict become a clash of civilisations?

There has been almost universal condemnation of Donald Trump for his threats to Iran’s “cultural sites”. Even officials in his own administration have distanced themselves from the idea that American missiles could target the heritage of ancient Persia. Many have pointed out that the United States is a signatory to the 1954 Hague Convention that prohibits the destruction of such sites as a war crime. Indeed, the US has taken the lead in protecting them under international law, most recently in a UN Security Council resolution in 2017 that followed the trail of destruction left by so-called Islamic State.

So what is the President playing at? He has tweeted that he has a list of 52 targets, one for each of the American hostages taken by the Iranians in 1979. They “will be hit very fast and very hard” if Iran attacks US citizens. His only response to criticism has been defiance, rather than clarification.

Trump may be sending a warning to the Iranian regime that it cannot hide behind human — or even archaeological — shields. If that is what he means, however, he has not said so. On the face of it, he proposes to treat the ruins of Persepolis, Susa, Isfahan and other ancient cities as legitimate targets if the conflict with Iran were to escalate to full-scale war. The British government has explicitly distanced itself from any such notion.

Yet the whole history of humanity is littered with examples of such destruction. The ancient empires razed temples, monuments and entire cities to the ground to demonstrate the supersession of one civilisation by another.

Perhaps the most notorious example was the destruction of Jerusalem, one of the greatest cities in the world, by the Romans to punish the Jews for their revolt. Josephus reported that “nothing was left that could ever persuade visitors that it had once been a place of habitation”. Hadrian later built a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, on the site. When Rome converted to Christianity, Jerusalem became a place of pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. The Muslims then erected the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. The Crusaders turned mosques into churches; the Mamelukes and Turks did the same in reverse. Present-day Jerusalem is the first time in history that all three religions have received equal rights and respect in this holy city.

In modern times, too, cultural desecration has been used as a weapon of war. Napoleon filled Paris with his plunder, but he also used Cologne Cathedral as a stable for his cavalry. The Russians preferred to burn Moscow rather than leave it to the French.

In the 20th century, the concepts of war crimes and genocide were coined to describe forms of destruction that were both human and cultural. In the Second World War the deliberate bombing of cultural sites began with the RAF’s bombing of Lübeck and the Luftwaffe’s “Baedeker raids” on British cathedral cities, but escalated to the point at which the Nazis were razing Warsaw to the ground, while the British and Americans blitzed every major German city.

In 1944, a rare attempt at mediation was made to save the Abbey of Monte Cassino, fortified by the Germans and besieged by the Allies, but the cradle of Latin monasticism was left in ruins. The culmination of this global conflict, the costliest in human but also civilisational terms of all time, was of course the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — cities not only of industrial but also cultural significance to Japan.  

World War II may have marked a turning point in the long history of man’s inhumanity to man, but the urge to destroy the heritage of the past has continued unabated. To the legacy of war has been added that of ideology: the systematic erasing of inconvenient eras of the past, for example in China’s Cultural Revolution.

Iranian leaders may pose as defenders of their country’s heritage against the Americans, but the iconoclastic tendencies that are always immanent in Islam have been responsible for widespread destruction in the Muslim world, from Mecca to Mosul. The Islamic Republic of Iran had its own “Cultural Revolution” in the 1980s, nearly as violent and xenophobic as its Chinese counterpart. The deposed Shah’s adulation of ancient Persia was shunned in favour of its Islamic history. It is only comparatively recently that the mullahs have acknowledged their country’s pre-Islamic past. And the barbaric establishment conduct of Iranian forces in Syria, led by the late General Soleimani, suggests that they care little for Muslim heritage either.

President Trump is not about to pick up where President Truman left off in 1945, by bombing Iran into the Stone Age. His tweets are certainly bellicose, but his actions speak more softly than his words. Compared to past presidents, from Roosevelt to Johnson and from Nixon to George W. Bush, Trump has so far been responsible for no new wars. His belligerent rhetoric has been backed by carefully targeted precision strikes, but never by large-scale military onslaughts. Trump proclaims the art of the deal, not the martial arts. He may be offensive, but he does not mount offensives.

This means that the conflict with Iran is unlikely to turn into a clash of civilisations. In the West, there is no desire for a war against Iran, let alone Islam. Trump knows this perfectly well. By far the most significant of his recent tweets, however, was the briefest of all: “IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” This is Trump’s bottom line. In order to prevent Ayatollah Khamenei getting his finger on the nuclear button, the President will go to literally any lengths and use any means — even if that means collateral damage to cultural sites. Anyone who thinks Trump is wrong about this should ask themselves this: would you care to be the US President who made possible a second Holocaust?