SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: even the sharpest minds in the West are unwilling to face the fact that Iran is a great power. What is the reason for this near-universal failure?

Ultimately, it all goes back to the issue that even the sharpest minds in the West are unwilling to face the fact that Iran is a great power. What is the reason for this near-universal failure? 

Is it residual racialism? Is it the GDP fetish? Is it just that people are not used to thinking carefully about what constitutes suggestive evidence (economic size, industrial strength, etc) and what constitutes diagnostic proof (the test of the battlefield)? 

I suppose different logics apply to different sorts of minds. But underlying it all is a lack of respect for empirical reality. A sort of Brahminism that privileges theory over empirical reality; that insists on the map when the territory has been revealed. 

When the strongest military power in the system launches an all-out attack on a state, attempts to decapitate and disarm it and fails, and that power destroys most of its bases and denies it military access to the region, and establishes firm control over a region of vital strategic importance — that is a strategic and operational military defeat. 

And the defeat of the strongest power in the system proves—beyond reasonable doubt for any serious empiricist—that the state is a great power. Special pleading is for losers. It has no place is serious analysis. 

Western strategic thought has decayed to such an extend that demonstrable facts simply fail to dislodge defunct pictures of the world that people have in their skulls.

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Policy Tensor

@policytensor

The good thing about this ridiculous episode is that he’s flailing around and trying to find cheap tricks instead of falling for the hasbara recommendation to blow the whole wad in a failed bid to disarm Iran. It suggests to me that, perhaps after a few more failed tricks, the US