Iranian Military Far More Sophisticated Than the Empire Reckoned - Drone Strike on Saudis Proves It

Washington Foreign Policy 'Experts' Are All Incompetent, Partisan Hacks

Par for the course in DC, really

Nebojsa Malic (RT) 1 hour ago

An explosive essay calling out the lack of legitimate expertise about Iran ought to be a wake-up call for the US foreign policy field. Yet the same problem also affects Washington’s analysis of Russia, China and many other places.

Victoria Nuland, among the best of the US foreign policy establishment
Imagine a field of study in which less than a third of the experts had related doctorates, half of them could not read, speak or write the language required, and just as many have never set foot inside the relevant country. Preposterous, you might say – yet scientific observation has shown that this is precisely what the US expertise on Iran looks like, according to an essay by political anthropologist Negar Razavi, recently published in the journal Jadaliyya.

Negar Razavi
@razaraz
Yes precisely @nargesbajoghli. This is a good opportunity for DC folks who took offense at my @jadaliyya piece on #Iran expertise to do what experts **SHOULD** be doing: Raise questions publicly abt evidence/agenda behind this problematic trope/repeatedly disproven claim. [link to twitter.com (secure)] …

Narges Bajoghli
@nargesbajoghli
Also worthy of 🙄—“Iran is on verge of collapse, the sanctions/isolation is wkg” is a fav trope of “analysis” in Am & Brit media coverage. It’s appeared since @ least Jan 1980. It reveals more abt anxieties of limits of western power than abt what was/is happening in Iran. [link to twitter.com (secure)] …

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3:32 PM - Sep 14, 2019
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Razavi describes the think-tank culture of DC as “a wider system of knowledge production in Washington – one which has consistently rewarded ungrounded, ideologically driven assessments of the Islamic Republic at the expense of qualified, in-depth, and evidence-based analysis.”

This is her conclusion after two years of “ethnographic fieldwork” in the US capital, attending hundreds of events, following the writings and presentations of think-tank experts, and interviewing over 180 people between 2014 and 2016. In other words, this was a serious academic study.

This culture of “expert impunity” when it comes to Iran has combined with historical and contemporary US grievances against Tehran to produce the current policy of confrontation, in which allegations are treated as unquestioned facts while any nuanced assessments are dismissed as the work of “regime apologists,” according to Razavi.


Bryan MacDonald
✔
@27khv
Your occasional reminder that a couple of years ago @CNN had a contracted Russia analyst who, by all accounts, has never been to Russia and can't speak any Russian. [link to twitter.com (secure)] …

Tony Karon
✔
@TonyKaron
"Can you imagine someone claiming to be an expert on France? Its history, culture, politics, etc. And then imagine this person cannot even speak French or has never visited France. This is what is accepted as Iran expertise in DC"
[link to lobelog.com (secure)] …

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7:58 PM - Sep 16, 2019
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If this sounds familiar, that’s because the problem is not limited to Iran. Though Razavi focused exclusively on the state of Iran expertise, her assessment applies in equal measure to the self-styled experts on Venezuela, or Russia, or China, or the Balkans...

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[link to twitter.com (secure)]