Existential Threats
I really don't have time for this, but reading these comments at Greenwald's place about Ledeen's new book made me want to spit:
Ledeen's book, says McCarthy, "is required reading for anyone -- which ought to mean everyone -- desirous of understanding the existential threat we face and why its beating heart is Tehran."
So rather than spit, I made this plot this morning, comparing a variety of fairly standard markers of developmental advancement and international power. The data are taken from the CIA world factbook for all but the last column. The last column is Separative Work Units, the standard unit for measuring uranium enrichment capability. Estimates for national capacity come from Krass83 for the US, and from Lewis for Iran. Since you can't see the Iranian quantity in the plot, I will inform you it is 0.00015.
By international standards, Iran is a poor, underdeveloped country with substantial infrastructural lacks. If such a country is indeed an existential threat to ours, it can only be the result of some mighty serious mismanagement of American power.
Updated with some minor wording changes.
posted by Andrew Foland | 3:21 PM
9 Comments:
Mismanagement is this administration's middle name.
Thank you for that graphic!
It's unbelievable (I guess it's not really) that our media is once again cheer leading for a needless war.
Is the presence of Makezine Blog in your blogroll some sort of ironic hint about the possibility of creating homemade nukes? I would be amusedht to see the special issue of Make devoted to guerrilla insurgency.
I'm not disagreeing with your basic point that it is silly to think that Iran is an existential threat to the United States, BUT...
Your graph would be more informative if many of the measures were normalized on a per capita basis. Given that the US has a 4-1 population advantage, I'm not sure that the gap in phones or "literates" is really as significant as your graph portrays.
As an aside, I wonder what the correct denominator for kilometers of paved roads is? Normalizing by the square root of arable land makes sense from a scaling perspective - doing so gives the US a 12-1 edge instead of the graph's 33-1 advantage.
Finally, I'm not sure it is all that helpful to advance the case that the Iranians are a "backwards" people. That particular rhetorical move is often a precursor to nasty behavior.
anonymous--
the decision not to normalize most quantities per capita was a deliberate one. The relevant quantities in a conflict would be the aggregates. (The extensive, not the intensiv,e variables, if you prefer). Even literates, which indicate (if only very roughly) the "engineering bandwidth" available to a government that mobilized its people.
That said, this was something I tried to do in about 20 minutes just to make a point (and be able to get back to other things I needed to be doing :) ). So you may already have thought more about it than I did.
And your last point is very well taken. I tried to word it quite carefully but perhaps even so I failed. But it's a simple fact that by most measures of economic and technical advancement, Iran simply isn't in the same league as the United States. I don't know any better way to put that, but I'm open to suggestions.
Incidentally, afterwards I thought about putting oil production on the plot and I think now I probably should have. Purely for dramatic effect.
The US produces about twice the oil that Iran does.
Your graph sounds interesting...where is it?
anon (2?)--click on the figure in the post.
in addition to oil production, a comparison of oil reserves might be helpful to our understanding...
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