Reasons: the Idirans
The Idirans were already at war, conquering the species they regarded as inferior and subjugating them in a primarily religious
empire which
was only incidentally a commercial one as well. It was clear to them from the start that their jihad to “calm,
integrate and instruct" these other
species and bring them under the direct eye of their God had to continue and expand, or
be meaningless. A halt or moratorium, while possibly
making at least as much sense as continued expansion in military, commercial
and administrative terms, would negate such militant
hegemonization as a religious concept. Zeal outranked and outshone pragmatism;
as with the Culture, it was the principle which mattered.
The war, long before it was finally declared, was regarded by the Idiran high command as a continuation of the permanent hostilities
demanded by theological and disciplinary colonization, involving a quantitative and qualitative escalation of armed conflict
of only a limited
degree to cope with the relatively equivalent technological expertise of the Culture.
While the Idirans universally assumed that having made their point the people in the Culture would back down, a few of the
Idiran policy-
makers anticipated that, should the Culture prove as determined as a “worst possible" scenario projected, a
politically judicious settlement
might be arrived at which would save face and have advantages for both sides. This would
involve a pact or treaty in which the Idirans would
effectively agree to slow or limit their expansion for a time, thus allowing
the Culture to claim some—but not too much—success, and provide
the Idirans with (a) a religiously justifiable excuse for
consolidation which would both let the Idiran military machine draw breath and cut the
ground from beneath those Idirans who
objected to the rate and cruelty of Idiran expansion, and (b) a further reason for an increase in military
expenditure, to
guarantee that in the next confrontation the Culture, or any other opponent, could be decisively out-armed and destroyed.
Only
the most fervent and fanatical sections of Idiran society urged or even contemplated a war to the finish, and even so
merely counseled
continuing the fight against the Culture after and despite the back-down and attempt to sue for peace which
they too believed the Culture must
inevitably make.
Having drawn up these “no-lose" formulations of the likely course of events, the Idirans joined battle with the Culture without
qualm or
hesitation.
At worst, they perhaps considered that the war was being begun in an atmosphere of mutual incomprehension. They could not
have
envisaged that while they were understood almost too perfectly by their enemy, they had comprehensively misapprehended
the forces of belief,
need—even fear—and morale operating within the Culture.