Yet more trivial but reactionary propaganda on behalf of the British establishment.
"British in particular feared that, with German and Italian support for Franco, the crisis could develop into a general European war pitting those two nations against Britain and France. They therefore devoted a lot of time and effort to the cause of “non-intervention”
Absolutely nothing to do, then, with a conservative government's intense dislike of the left-leaning Republican government and its association with Russia and Spanish socialists and anarchists then? Certainly not - not in Aurelian fantasy world, where of course the British government, being uniquely impartial and fair-minded, was fully supportive of all left-leaning governments, in Europe and elsewhere despite its own right wing nature.
How much more of these sorts of blinkered apologetics can the author excrete? There seems to be, unfortunately, an endless supply, all in service of his former masters. Not wanting to rock the boat is understandable when you want to keep your job, but when you retire? Creepy. Makes me faintly nauseous - especially when the author likes to kind of hint now and then that he has 'leftish' sympathies. Possibly of the Tony Blair variety, but unfortunately without the lavish funding?
I am aware that I am commenting on only one (minor) aspect of the article. However, it is symptomatic of a continuing process here, which very often spoils the total effect by casting doubt on the authors lack of partiality. (Of course there is probably no such thing as complete impartiality, but a semblance would be good. Constant propaganda on behalf of the UK establishment is what makes the British press so unpalatable, and there is no need for it here as it is done so well elsewhere).
I hate to monopolize sooo much space and attention, but I think this essay needs a more detailed and calibrated response than I have provided to prior essays posted by Aurelien and that had maybe some oflaws that James O'Donnell feels very iritated about.
But this is Part 1:
Aurelien has done something genuinely useful in this essay. The taxonomy of surprises is analytically serious. The description of the Russia-Ukraine desk head’s working day is the most honest available account of how policy management has replaced policy thinking in contemporary Western governments. The essay contributes something real to the understanding of a real problem. What follows is not a disagreement but an attempt to push one step further into the structural causes that the essay identifies and then stops short of fully naming.
Aurelien ends with the observation that our plodding, materialist, reductive conception of politics has turned out to be basically useless at anticipating real events in the world. He also notes that conceptual blindness is perhaps the most important cause of surprise: in order to anticipate something, you must believe it is possible. Both observations are exact. The question the essay raises but does not pursue is why this particular conception of politics has proven so resistant to correction despite the accumulating evidence of its failures. The taxonomy describes the symptoms with considerable precision. The structural diagnosis of the disease requires one more step.
Sun Tzu’s formulation in The Art of War is the framework the essay circles without using. Know yourself and know your enemy: in a hundred battles, no danger. Know yourself but not the enemy: one victory, one defeat. Know neither yourself nor the enemy: in every battle, certain defeat. The West has been operating in the third category with increasing consistency for the past generation. The essay’s Iran analysis, its Barbarossa parallel, its Afghanistan exhibit, its Iraq 2003 account all document the same pattern: neither the adversary nor the self was honestly assessed. Aurelien correctly identifies conceptual blindness and the policy management apparatus as mechanisms through which this happens. What he does not name is why the assessment of both adversary and self has become systematically distorted in the same direction.
The answer requires naming two structural conditions that are, in the end, the same condition stated at different scales.
The first is the five-hundred-year muscle memory. From approximately 1500 to approximately 2000, the West’s combination of military technology, organizational capacity, and willingness to use extreme violence against populations with less technical development produced results consistently enough to embed a specific institutional assumption: that confrontation produces the desired outcome regardless of the quality of the strategic analysis, because the power differential is large enough to compensate for analytical failure. You did not need to understand the internal political structure of the Congo when the Force Publique could simply cut off the hands of anyone who failed to meet the rubber quota. You did not need to understand Iranian political culture when your air capability was assumed to be overwhelming and the target state was assumed to be fragile. Five centuries of this embeds the assumption so thoroughly in institutional culture that it operates as the default even when the specific conditions that justified it have changed. The muscle memory fires. The analysis is not performed because the outcome is assumed. The surprise, when the outcome does not materialize, is genuine because the assumption was not consciously held. It was inherited.
The second structural condition is what produces the no-bad-news architecture that the desk-head essay describes from the inside. Aurelien’s desk head cannot think about the Russia-Ukraine situation because he is consumed by process. This is correct as a description. But the process did not spontaneously generate itself. The process was designed, over decades, by the specific interests that benefit from the conclusions the process produces. The think tank that produces analysis confirming Western strategic strength gets funded for the next report. The think tank that produces analysis challenging it does not get its phone calls returned. The intelligence analyst whose assessment confirms the preferred narrative is promoted. The analyst whose assessment challenges it is marginalized. Over time, the analytical ecosystem evolves toward the confirmation of preferred conclusions not through explicit conspiracy but through the normal operation of institutional selection: the organizations and individuals whose output serves the interests of their funders survive and grow, and those whose output challenges those interests do not. The result, over a generation, is what Aurelien accurately describes as the punditocracy which understands everything except what is actually important.
This is the mentat problem. Frank Herbert’s fictional mentats were human beings trained to perform honest analytical functions in a universe where artificial intelligence had been prohibited. Their specific value was their willingness to deliver accurate assessment regardless of whether it served the patron’s preferences. A mentat who tells the patron what the patron wants to hear is not a mentat. He is a courtier. The West’s analytical class has become a courtier class not because its members lack intelligence but because the institutional selection mechanism rewards courtiers and marginalizes mentats. The Russia-Ukraine desk head cannot think because he is managing process. The process exists because the thinking has been made structurally unnecessary by the specific interests that the conclusions the thinking might challenge would threaten.
Aurelien’s own description of the Yugoslavia deliberations in 1991 to 1992 is the most precise available exhibit of this mechanism. The debate was not about the situation in the country. It was about what Europe should be seen to be doing, driven by the French referendum on Political Union, the future of NATO, and the appearance of European competence. The substance was irrelevant because the process required a conclusion that served specific institutional interests regardless of the substance. A hundred European soldiers died in Bosnia effectively for nothing. This was not a failure of intelligence. It was the institutional process working exactly as designed: producing the action that served the process’s institutional requirements rather than the action that an honest assessment of the situation would have recommended.
There is a dimension of this that the essay does not name at all, and it is the one that connects the five-hundred-year muscle memory to the contemporary rentier formation. The West’s professional managerial and political class has, over the past generation, been progressively selected for its capacity to manage the extraction of existing advantages rather than its capacity to generate honest assessments that might require expensive adaptation. The politician who manages the decline of an institution while extracting its remaining rents is more useful to the specific interests that fund political careers than the politician who identifies the decline and proposes the investment required to reverse it. The investment requires acknowledging the problem. The extraction requires managing the perception. Managing the perception requires the analytical architecture that Aurelien describes with such precision: the process that consumes all available time and attention, that produces the appearance of engagement without the substance of analysis, and that systematically routes around the information that would require adaptation.
This is why the surprise is not only not avoided but has become structurally necessary. A Western political and analytical class that genuinely assessed its own capabilities and the capabilities of its adversaries would be forced to acknowledge changes that the rentier extraction logic requires to be managed rather than confronted. The closing of the power differential is bad for the specific rents that depend on the perception of Western dominance. The degradation of the military-industrial complex’s actual capability relative to its cost is bad for the procurement rents. The decline of dollar hegemony is bad for the financial sector rents. The acknowledgment of any of these would require the kind of investment and adaptation that the caretaker political class is specifically not selected to perform. The surprise is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as designed, producing the managed ignorance that the extraction logic requires.
Aurelien’s observation about unpredictability is the one that points most directly toward what is actually at stake. He notes, correctly, that almost nothing in history is deterministic, and that what seems obvious now was not always obvious then. This is the Sun Tzu observation from the other direction: the world is genuinely unpredictable, and the capacity for genuine strategic analysis consists not in the prediction of specific outcomes but in the cultivation of the adaptive capacity that genuine unpredictability requires. Life itself evolved precisely to face unpredictability. The immune system, the nervous system, the capacity for learning and adaptation are all responses to the fundamental condition of a world that cannot be controlled. The institutional architecture that the West has built for strategic analysis is designed to eliminate unpredictability from its information environment, which is to say, to eliminate from its information environment the information that would require adaptation. This produces not control but the illusion of control, maintained until the surprise arrives in a form that the illusion cannot absorb.
The oligarchic formation that has captured the Western political and analytical class has a specific relationship with unpredictability that explains the no-bad-news architecture’s persistence despite the accumulating evidence of its failures. Genuine unpredictability is bad for rents. The extraction of existing advantages requires predictable conditions: the same trading relationships, the same financial architecture, the same alliance structures, the same military advantages that generated the rents yesterday will generate them tomorrow. Investment in the adaptive capacity that genuine unpredictability requires is expensive in the short term and its returns are uncertain. The caretaker class that manages the extraction prefers the management of perception to the development of capacity, the procedural engagement that Aurelien describes so precisely to the substantive analysis that would reveal what the procedure is concealing. The bribery and blackmail that maintain the managed consensus are cheaper than the investment that honest analysis would demand.
This is not an argument that the West’s adversaries are free of the same structural pathologies. The Dragon TV transcript analyzed elsewhere on this Substack makes precisely the same analytical errors it criticizes when it turns from the diagnosis of American failure to the prescription of convergence toward the Chinese model. Sun Tzu’s principle is symmetric: know yourself and know your enemy applies equally to those who are currently winning and those who are currently losing. The specific analytical failure being described here is Western not because the West has a unique capacity for self-deception but because the West has been dominant for long enough that the five-hundred-year muscle memory is uniquely deep, and because the specific rentier formation that has captured Western political life has had uniquely long to build the institutional architecture that serves its interests.
Aurelien ends by saying that in some cases it’s perhaps excusable to be surprised. This is generous and fair. What is less excusable, and what the essay’s taxonomy points toward without fully naming, is the systematic dismantling of the institutional capacity for honest self-assessment that would reduce the frequency and severity of the surprises. The desk head who cannot think is not a personal failure. He is the output of an institutional architecture designed to prevent the thinking that would challenge the extraction logic. The think tank punditocracy that understands everything except what is actually important is not a collection of individually inadequate analysts. It is the predictable product of an institutional selection mechanism that rewards courtiers and marginalizes mentats. The surprise is not a failure of intelligence. It is the system producing the outcome its designers, deliberately or through the accumulated logic of their interests, intended. That is the structural diagnosis that Aurelien’s taxonomy of symptoms points toward and that the next essay in the series might usefully address.
A final word on contingency, because Aurelien is right about it and the structural argument must engage with it honestly rather than dismissing it. History is terrifyingly contingent. Yamamoto’s Pearl Harbour depended on a torpedo fuse developed months before the attack. The fall of the Shah depended on Khomeini’s specific theological authority within a specific Iranian religious tradition at a specific moment of that tradition’s political development. The collapse of the Soviet Union depended in part on the specific decisions of specific individuals in specific rooms on specific days in 1989 and 1991. Plekhanov had the formulation before the Marxists did: the role of the individual in history is real, and the great man—or the specific torpedo fuse, or the specific miscalculation of a specific junta general—can alter the trajectory of events in ways that no structural analysis fully anticipates. To deny this is to replace one determinism with another, and determinism in all its forms is the enemy of the honest analyst.
But the structural argument does not require determinism. It requires only the observation that structures and systems tend to overwhelm individual agency in most cases, and that the conditions under which individual agency is decisive are themselves structurally produced. Yamamoto’s tactical genius was available because the Japanese Navy’s organizational culture had selected for it. Khomeini’s authority was available because the Iranian religious tradition had maintained the institutional structure that produced it, across decades of the Shah’s modernizing suppression. The Soviet state’s specific fragility in 1989 was available because the structural pressures of the planned economy’s inefficiency had been accumulating for forty years before Gorbachev’s specific decisions accelerated the collapse. In each case, the individual is decisive at the specific moment of choice, and the structural conditions determine both the range of choices available and the consequences of each. The mentat problem is precisely this: the analytical architecture that has been built to manage perception rather than generate understanding is incapable of assessing either the structural conditions or the specific individuals who might act decisively within them, because both assessments would produce conclusions that challenge the extraction logic the architecture is designed to protect.
The specific failure that the Iran campaign exhibits is therefore neither purely structural nor purely contingent. Structurally, the five-hundred-year muscle memory produced the assumption that air power against a fragile state would succeed, because it had succeeded often enough before to embed the assumption in institutional culture. The rentier extraction logic produced the no-bad-news architecture that filtered out the assessments that challenged that assumption. The punditocracy produced the analytical output that confirmed it. These are structural conditions. But structurally, also, the Iranian state had forty-five years to observe the Western pattern of intervention, to assess its specific methods and specific vulnerabilities, and to develop the asymmetric capabilities that the pattern’s predictability made possible. The Iranians were not surprised because they had done the structural analysis that the American side had not. They knew both the enemy and themselves. This was not an accident of individual genius or specific contingency. It was the output of an institutional culture that had maintained the capacity for honest self-assessment and honest adversary assessment because its survival depended on it in a way that the American institutional culture’s survival, within the extraction logic, does not.
The unpredictability that Aurelien rightly insists on is not, therefore, an argument against structural analysis. It is the argument for the specific kind of structural analysis that builds the adaptive capacity to respond to genuine contingency, rather than the managed perception of predictability that the no-bad-news architecture produces. Life evolved to face unpredictability not by predicting the future but by developing the adaptive capacity to respond to whatever the future produces. The immune system does not predict the specific pathogen. It maintains the adaptive capacity to recognize and respond to whatever arrives. The analytical architecture that the West requires is the institutional equivalent of the immune system: not the prediction of specific adversary actions, which is genuinely beyond the reach of any analytical system, but the maintenance of the adaptive capacity that genuine unpredictability demands. That capacity requires honest self-assessment, honest adversary assessment, and the institutional architecture that rewards both regardless of whether the conclusions are convenient. It requires, in other words, the mentat rather than the courtier. The structural conditions that produce the courtier are the disease. The taxonomy of surprises is the symptom list.
There is one further capacity the essay points toward without naming directly, and it is the prior condition for everything the mentat is trained to do: the ability to isolate signal from the ocean of noise. Aurelien’s desk head anecdote names this from the receiving end. The tweet about the nationalist militants with anti-aircraft missiles arrives in a blizzard of similar signals, cannot be verified without risk, cannot be escalated without career consequences if it proves false, and is therefore not acted on. The signal is lost in the noise. This is presented as the information saturation problem, and it is that. But the structural analysis adds a dimension the essay does not pursue: the noise in the contemporary Western strategic information environment is not random. It is structured. And structured noise requires a fundamentally different analytical response than random noise.
The managed consensus produces structured noise: information that is not false in any single verifiable particular but that is systematically selected, framed, and contextualized to support specific conclusions and suppress the signals that would challenge them. Aurelien lists the correct tools for the random noise problem: what is the source, is it reliable, has it been reliable before, is there collateral, is it what I want to hear rather than what is necessarily true. These are the right questions. They are not sufficient when the noise is structured by the same institutional interests whose extraction logic the genuine signal threatens. The Chilcot Report documents this precisely: the intelligence was not fabricated. It was selected, weighted, and contextualized to support the conclusion that had already been reached. The analyst applying the correct tools to structured noise cannot distinguish signal from noise because the noise has been engineered to be indistinguishable from signal at the level of the individual piece of information. The distortion operates at the level of the pattern, not the individual data point.
The mentat’s specific training included the capacity to isolate signal from noise as a disciplined practice rather than an intuitive accident: the prana-bindu of attention, the specific discipline that allows the trained mind to perceive what the untrained mind filters before it reaches consciousness. But this capacity requires, as its prior institutional condition, something that analytical training alone cannot provide: the freedom to bring the detected signal to the decision-maker without career-ending consequences. The Soviet military intelligence officer who reported in June 1941 that the German attack was imminent was reporting a genuine signal from an ocean of structured noise produced by German deception operations. Stalin had him arrested. The institutional architecture that punishes the signal-finder is not a failure of the analytical process. It is the analytical process working as the institutional incentives have shaped it: systematically rewarding the analyst who does not escalate an ambiguous signal that turns out to be false disinformation, and systematically failing to punish the analyst who does not escalate a signal that turns out to be true, because in the latter case the failure is distributed across everyone who received the same information in the same complex environment.
The immune system’s specific genius is not its capacity to predict what pathogen will arrive. It is its capacity to distinguish self from non-self: to identify, in the organism’s internal biochemical environment, what belongs to the organism and what does not. This is signal isolation at the cellular level. The immune system that cannot distinguish self from non-self produces autoimmune disease: the organism attacking itself with its own defences. The analytical architecture that cannot distinguish genuine signal from structured noise produces the political equivalent: the policy apparatus that attacks itself, that generates the very surprises it is designed to prevent, because the structured noise it has produced to manage preferred conclusions has become indistinguishable, to its own analysts, from the genuine signals that would allow adaptation. The Iran surprise is autoimmune in precisely this sense. The structured noise that the no-bad-news architecture produced around Iranian military capability was indistinguishable, within the architecture, from the genuine signal that the capability was real and the objectives were unattainable. The architecture attacked itself. The surprise was the wound.
Aurelien next essay in the series might usefully address the question of what the treatment looks like, and whether the patient has any interest in receiving it.
When it comes down to it , we , the west , dont need to know what everyone else in the world is doing or can do , historically this is a new thing , in the past m countries around the world existed and developed without knowing what everyone else was doing.
Why do we need to know anyway ?
In the context of this essay by Aurelien its about the USA not knowing enough about Iran to be able to attack it and defeat it , why the hell does the west and the usa in particular think it has the right to do what they stupidly call "regime change " we all know what theyre up to we all know they want to get rid of the leaders in other countries who refuse to hand over control of their countries reaources to the usa or to the west.
This idea that the usa or the west is and has the right to annoint itself policeman of the world is absolutely outrageous , its bout time a big enough group of countries got together and fought back against the usa , they will only have to do it once , if done properly it will never be feesible for the usa to ever again consider itself that important that it is the policeman of the world.
What could the USA anticipated about the Iranian response to our attack?
You would think that the amount of equipment we donated to Ukraine smoldering in the fields might influence strategy. Maybe that did, I don't think a land invasion of Iran was planned for.
But another item smoldering in Ukraine should have caused much hesitation about attacking Iran: Patriot missile systems. The Russians had destroyed batteries with impunity, and those batteries that escaped destruction mainly threatened nearby apartment complexes, not incoming missiles, drones, or planes.
Surely US military bases getting blown off of their West Asian locales had to look pretty probable?
But I read this thoughtful article and if the author is not surprised then why should I expect anything different? Hubris runs rampant in the Land of American Exceptionalism.
Brazilian UN peacekeepers were not in Haiti in the 1990's, but starting in 2004.
In the 1990's, starting in 1994, there were no UN peacekeepers, but UNSC-authorized US and French troops, with some Caricom and others thrown in for political reasons.
Apart from that, having been part of similar exercises, I can witness that, as Aurelien says, it does happen that the military is sent to a faraway country with absolutely no idea of local conditions and culture, and no goals either, just an assumption that "you will figure it out when you get there".
Despite everything, the US knew that less than a year ago, they, together with Israel, conducted a military action against Iran that they had to stop after 12 days because they were running out of fuel... What was supposed to be the difference in this new action? Why should it be more successful, even though they eliminated the old leadership
"the berths at Pearl Harbour were very shallow, and it was not believed that the Japanese had torpedoes that could arm themselves in just a few metres of water (the US did not.)"
"A serious consequence of the Battle of Taranto [1940] was many harbours that were considered too shallow for air-dropped torpedoes were now vulnerable. Prior to Taranto, most navies thought torpedo attacks against ships must be in water at least 75 ft (23 m) deep. Taranto harbour had a depth of only about 39 ft (12 m) but the Royal Navy had developed a new method of preventing torpedoes from diving too deep."
However the fact of the British success at Taranto meant that any potential obstructionists in the IJN got hit hard with the epistemic clue stick. Thinking something can be done and knowing that it has been done already are very different sets of priors.
I'm not saying that they were clueless before Taranto. Merely pointing out that once someone has done something successfully then everyone else knows 100% that it's worth at the very least the old college try, too.
Am aware of midget sub use by IJN at Pearl and also Sydney. Did they have meaningful success with these anywhere? My vague impression is that only the Italians came close to excelling with these -- although how much of that is due to Panerai marketing and how much is factual no idea :P
My point was that the US already had access to information that Pearl Harbour was vulnerable to that kind of attack. Eventually, someone was going to reverse engineer the British solution or come up with their own.
I’d argue that political tooling and processes will eventually catch up to mitigate this oversaturation and help sort through the rumors. Introducing the real challenge: the premium shifts entirely to sourcing quality and verified authority. Technology might filter the noise but it only increases the necessity for actual decision-making and decisive problem-solving.
Well it might help with the data-sifting process the author describes. Unlikely to help with picking out the faint signals out of the noise, though I could be wrong. And does the benefit of faster sifting keep up with the excess of stuff generated by AI in the first place 😏
It is always the substance of an article/argument/thesis that matters, whether human, AI assisted, or 100% AI with minimal prompting. And we are already drowning in noise, we need to develop and adapt to detect the signal and filter the noise.
"Rather (and probably because the land option was not feasible) all faith had to be placed in an air campaign, but that campaign could only succeed if the state itself was very fragile, and if the main state targets could be reliably hit, and if the Iranian people, once the state was weakened, would rise up and destroy it. Thus, the wished-for political outcome generated a series of consecutive necessary false assumptions about the likely effectiveness of bombing and the fragility of the Iranian state which had to be true, otherwise the objective would need to be abandoned. "
One could say much the same about Russia and Ukraine, except that this is an existential issue for Russia, but the Russian leadership continually refuses to take this seriously.
Bringing "blind spots" and potential surprises to awareness before making decisions is what "Risk Assessments" are all about. Every Federal Agency is required by OMB to have a Risk Management office. Sadly, OMB does not have authority over the White House itself. Despite the urgings of Congress over the last ten years, the National Security Council does not have such an office, nor does the President perform mandatory risk assessments before making fraught national security decisions. Colin Powell tried to force the subject of "Risk" into decision making with his famous "Powell Doctrine." The war in Iran met absolutely none of that doctrine's criteria, especially "There is a clear objective"; "Risks have been considered"; and "The intervention has public support." Risk Management tries to force open a window of light for the inner circle monoculture of most "tightly limited, leak proof" advisers to the President. These advisors (especially John Ratcliffe of the CIA) all must have known about the likely closure of the Strait of Hormuz and remembered the Houthi's success closing the Red Sea with missiles and drones the previous year. Group think indeed!
The Powell doctrine also says, "Know your exit strategy in advance." No problemo for this President: 1) throw in the towel quickly (just walk away) when the game is clearly over; and 2) find someone to blame. I suspect Ratcliffe and Hegseth are prime candidates to take the fall. As for blaming Netanyahu, there is the problem of the Epstein tapes....
Aurelien — You're going to be disappointed by how this works out. That Iran did not disappear off the map does not mean they are victorious in this argument. And it's not over.
Real change can begin when we admit to ourselves that we live in ignorance of our Source, purpose and potential - the actual ''spiritual quest''.
Essentially, our so-called 'science' is founded on studying what appears to our 5-senses - ''sensationalism'' - and reducing every thing down to nano-levels of motion. Well, try cutting a dog into a trillion bits to discover its Real Nature as love, loyalty and excitement!
Clearly, we must refocus to see that mankind is simply exploring and investigating from ignorance of What Is Here Now. In this state of mind, we will ever remain in separation from the ''space'' in which the Universe manifests. Currently, ''science'' reflects our ignorance and can only lead us ever deeper into the deceiver mentality - a ''bug in the game'' that seeks to degrade life into absolute rejection of All That Is (W)Holy to replicate our world ''in its putrid image''.
This delusion can be re-balanced by introducing Real Education to fulfill its actual role of ''bringing out from within''. In effect, we can learn to seek re-connection to the Divine Knowingness that we interpret as space.; to re-call ITs indestructible fullness and completeness; to unveil Oneness as the Real Singularity and our Actual Nature.
In effect, we will discover our that our ''One Real Asset'' is Divine Space wherein the entire universe appears to our senses. This is our route to Real Self-Evolution; to understanding the omnipresence-omniscience-omnipotence of Divine Mind; to re-discovering our unlimited possibilities within the motion of electro-magnetic waves; the Thinking - Image-I-Nation - of That Mind.
Thus, we will come to understand DNA as a ''nano-milky way galaxy''; a transceiver in each relatively tiny ''cell factory''; with some 70 trillion in continual communication to manage our body in Divine Synergistic Co-operation. We will begin to live in awe and gratitude as we refocus in the knowingness that Space contains the Knowingness that 'runs' the entire Universe; while mirrored endlessly in our bodies - our own universe to earn.
We will realise that what 'science' studies is founded on total ignorance due to longstanding separation from Truth-Beauty-Goodness.With this transformed perspective, we can learn to re-connect and 'download' the True Knowing of Love as a Divine State of Awe & Gratitude. We will live in the Knowing that ''infinity'' is the volume and duration required to explore-investigate-discover our endless possibilities.
We will comprehend scriptural warnings as the wisdom and awareness of The Divine Law of cause-and-effect; that what we give out is destined to return as Divine Justice.
To quote Nisargadatta Maharaj, a fully-aware sage: ''There is no power on earth that is greater than this Consciousness, this sense of presence - I Am - to which the illusory individual must direct all his prayers. Then this very Consciousness will provide the illusory liberation from the illusory bondage of the illusory individual by revealing Its True Nature; which is none other than the seeker himself; but not as an individual''.
Once we transform our thinking to re-connect to the Knowingness of ''apparent space'', we will see the separation of ego-mind-body; the fearful self-protection that has created our madly imbalance world. Therefrom, we can begin to laugh at our delusions, forgive ourselves and reappraise life in the knowingness we are manifested in Love Of Life; that space is crammed with That Love as a Divine Motion Picture.
Our world of terror and injustice is a reflection of our vast imbalance due to entrapment in the mindset of those most separated from Truth. Our current state is the ''risky'' experience of 'All That I Am Not' - a point in space-time where souls - individual ''slices of the Divine Pi'' - can choose the perdition of artificial everything; or A.I. as Actual Intelligence, freely-given and fully-available through service to Love of Life; reconnection in awe and gratitude for All That Is.
Put another way, how deranged must we be to consent to the delusions of ''leaders'' whose ''answers'' uphold only endless destruction and injustice?!
Clearly, we must ''take off the old coat'', look in the opposite direction and begin a new conversation right Now.
Yet more trivial but reactionary propaganda on behalf of the British establishment.
"British in particular feared that, with German and Italian support for Franco, the crisis could develop into a general European war pitting those two nations against Britain and France. They therefore devoted a lot of time and effort to the cause of “non-intervention”
Absolutely nothing to do, then, with a conservative government's intense dislike of the left-leaning Republican government and its association with Russia and Spanish socialists and anarchists then? Certainly not - not in Aurelian fantasy world, where of course the British government, being uniquely impartial and fair-minded, was fully supportive of all left-leaning governments, in Europe and elsewhere despite its own right wing nature.
How much more of these sorts of blinkered apologetics can the author excrete? There seems to be, unfortunately, an endless supply, all in service of his former masters. Not wanting to rock the boat is understandable when you want to keep your job, but when you retire? Creepy. Makes me faintly nauseous - especially when the author likes to kind of hint now and then that he has 'leftish' sympathies. Possibly of the Tony Blair variety, but unfortunately without the lavish funding?
You might or might not be right about Aurelien’s political leanings, but you appear to have missed the epistemic forest for the particularist trees.
I am aware that I am commenting on only one (minor) aspect of the article. However, it is symptomatic of a continuing process here, which very often spoils the total effect by casting doubt on the authors lack of partiality. (Of course there is probably no such thing as complete impartiality, but a semblance would be good. Constant propaganda on behalf of the UK establishment is what makes the British press so unpalatable, and there is no need for it here as it is done so well elsewhere).
I hate to monopolize sooo much space and attention, but I think this essay needs a more detailed and calibrated response than I have provided to prior essays posted by Aurelien and that had maybe some oflaws that James O'Donnell feels very iritated about.
But this is Part 1:
Aurelien has done something genuinely useful in this essay. The taxonomy of surprises is analytically serious. The description of the Russia-Ukraine desk head’s working day is the most honest available account of how policy management has replaced policy thinking in contemporary Western governments. The essay contributes something real to the understanding of a real problem. What follows is not a disagreement but an attempt to push one step further into the structural causes that the essay identifies and then stops short of fully naming.
Aurelien ends with the observation that our plodding, materialist, reductive conception of politics has turned out to be basically useless at anticipating real events in the world. He also notes that conceptual blindness is perhaps the most important cause of surprise: in order to anticipate something, you must believe it is possible. Both observations are exact. The question the essay raises but does not pursue is why this particular conception of politics has proven so resistant to correction despite the accumulating evidence of its failures. The taxonomy describes the symptoms with considerable precision. The structural diagnosis of the disease requires one more step.
Sun Tzu’s formulation in The Art of War is the framework the essay circles without using. Know yourself and know your enemy: in a hundred battles, no danger. Know yourself but not the enemy: one victory, one defeat. Know neither yourself nor the enemy: in every battle, certain defeat. The West has been operating in the third category with increasing consistency for the past generation. The essay’s Iran analysis, its Barbarossa parallel, its Afghanistan exhibit, its Iraq 2003 account all document the same pattern: neither the adversary nor the self was honestly assessed. Aurelien correctly identifies conceptual blindness and the policy management apparatus as mechanisms through which this happens. What he does not name is why the assessment of both adversary and self has become systematically distorted in the same direction.
The answer requires naming two structural conditions that are, in the end, the same condition stated at different scales.
The first is the five-hundred-year muscle memory. From approximately 1500 to approximately 2000, the West’s combination of military technology, organizational capacity, and willingness to use extreme violence against populations with less technical development produced results consistently enough to embed a specific institutional assumption: that confrontation produces the desired outcome regardless of the quality of the strategic analysis, because the power differential is large enough to compensate for analytical failure. You did not need to understand the internal political structure of the Congo when the Force Publique could simply cut off the hands of anyone who failed to meet the rubber quota. You did not need to understand Iranian political culture when your air capability was assumed to be overwhelming and the target state was assumed to be fragile. Five centuries of this embeds the assumption so thoroughly in institutional culture that it operates as the default even when the specific conditions that justified it have changed. The muscle memory fires. The analysis is not performed because the outcome is assumed. The surprise, when the outcome does not materialize, is genuine because the assumption was not consciously held. It was inherited.
The second structural condition is what produces the no-bad-news architecture that the desk-head essay describes from the inside. Aurelien’s desk head cannot think about the Russia-Ukraine situation because he is consumed by process. This is correct as a description. But the process did not spontaneously generate itself. The process was designed, over decades, by the specific interests that benefit from the conclusions the process produces. The think tank that produces analysis confirming Western strategic strength gets funded for the next report. The think tank that produces analysis challenging it does not get its phone calls returned. The intelligence analyst whose assessment confirms the preferred narrative is promoted. The analyst whose assessment challenges it is marginalized. Over time, the analytical ecosystem evolves toward the confirmation of preferred conclusions not through explicit conspiracy but through the normal operation of institutional selection: the organizations and individuals whose output serves the interests of their funders survive and grow, and those whose output challenges those interests do not. The result, over a generation, is what Aurelien accurately describes as the punditocracy which understands everything except what is actually important.
This is the mentat problem. Frank Herbert’s fictional mentats were human beings trained to perform honest analytical functions in a universe where artificial intelligence had been prohibited. Their specific value was their willingness to deliver accurate assessment regardless of whether it served the patron’s preferences. A mentat who tells the patron what the patron wants to hear is not a mentat. He is a courtier. The West’s analytical class has become a courtier class not because its members lack intelligence but because the institutional selection mechanism rewards courtiers and marginalizes mentats. The Russia-Ukraine desk head cannot think because he is managing process. The process exists because the thinking has been made structurally unnecessary by the specific interests that the conclusions the thinking might challenge would threaten.
Part 2:
Aurelien’s own description of the Yugoslavia deliberations in 1991 to 1992 is the most precise available exhibit of this mechanism. The debate was not about the situation in the country. It was about what Europe should be seen to be doing, driven by the French referendum on Political Union, the future of NATO, and the appearance of European competence. The substance was irrelevant because the process required a conclusion that served specific institutional interests regardless of the substance. A hundred European soldiers died in Bosnia effectively for nothing. This was not a failure of intelligence. It was the institutional process working exactly as designed: producing the action that served the process’s institutional requirements rather than the action that an honest assessment of the situation would have recommended.
There is a dimension of this that the essay does not name at all, and it is the one that connects the five-hundred-year muscle memory to the contemporary rentier formation. The West’s professional managerial and political class has, over the past generation, been progressively selected for its capacity to manage the extraction of existing advantages rather than its capacity to generate honest assessments that might require expensive adaptation. The politician who manages the decline of an institution while extracting its remaining rents is more useful to the specific interests that fund political careers than the politician who identifies the decline and proposes the investment required to reverse it. The investment requires acknowledging the problem. The extraction requires managing the perception. Managing the perception requires the analytical architecture that Aurelien describes with such precision: the process that consumes all available time and attention, that produces the appearance of engagement without the substance of analysis, and that systematically routes around the information that would require adaptation.
This is why the surprise is not only not avoided but has become structurally necessary. A Western political and analytical class that genuinely assessed its own capabilities and the capabilities of its adversaries would be forced to acknowledge changes that the rentier extraction logic requires to be managed rather than confronted. The closing of the power differential is bad for the specific rents that depend on the perception of Western dominance. The degradation of the military-industrial complex’s actual capability relative to its cost is bad for the procurement rents. The decline of dollar hegemony is bad for the financial sector rents. The acknowledgment of any of these would require the kind of investment and adaptation that the caretaker political class is specifically not selected to perform. The surprise is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as designed, producing the managed ignorance that the extraction logic requires.
Aurelien’s observation about unpredictability is the one that points most directly toward what is actually at stake. He notes, correctly, that almost nothing in history is deterministic, and that what seems obvious now was not always obvious then. This is the Sun Tzu observation from the other direction: the world is genuinely unpredictable, and the capacity for genuine strategic analysis consists not in the prediction of specific outcomes but in the cultivation of the adaptive capacity that genuine unpredictability requires. Life itself evolved precisely to face unpredictability. The immune system, the nervous system, the capacity for learning and adaptation are all responses to the fundamental condition of a world that cannot be controlled. The institutional architecture that the West has built for strategic analysis is designed to eliminate unpredictability from its information environment, which is to say, to eliminate from its information environment the information that would require adaptation. This produces not control but the illusion of control, maintained until the surprise arrives in a form that the illusion cannot absorb.
The oligarchic formation that has captured the Western political and analytical class has a specific relationship with unpredictability that explains the no-bad-news architecture’s persistence despite the accumulating evidence of its failures. Genuine unpredictability is bad for rents. The extraction of existing advantages requires predictable conditions: the same trading relationships, the same financial architecture, the same alliance structures, the same military advantages that generated the rents yesterday will generate them tomorrow. Investment in the adaptive capacity that genuine unpredictability requires is expensive in the short term and its returns are uncertain. The caretaker class that manages the extraction prefers the management of perception to the development of capacity, the procedural engagement that Aurelien describes so precisely to the substantive analysis that would reveal what the procedure is concealing. The bribery and blackmail that maintain the managed consensus are cheaper than the investment that honest analysis would demand.
Part 3:
This is not an argument that the West’s adversaries are free of the same structural pathologies. The Dragon TV transcript analyzed elsewhere on this Substack makes precisely the same analytical errors it criticizes when it turns from the diagnosis of American failure to the prescription of convergence toward the Chinese model. Sun Tzu’s principle is symmetric: know yourself and know your enemy applies equally to those who are currently winning and those who are currently losing. The specific analytical failure being described here is Western not because the West has a unique capacity for self-deception but because the West has been dominant for long enough that the five-hundred-year muscle memory is uniquely deep, and because the specific rentier formation that has captured Western political life has had uniquely long to build the institutional architecture that serves its interests.
Aurelien ends by saying that in some cases it’s perhaps excusable to be surprised. This is generous and fair. What is less excusable, and what the essay’s taxonomy points toward without fully naming, is the systematic dismantling of the institutional capacity for honest self-assessment that would reduce the frequency and severity of the surprises. The desk head who cannot think is not a personal failure. He is the output of an institutional architecture designed to prevent the thinking that would challenge the extraction logic. The think tank punditocracy that understands everything except what is actually important is not a collection of individually inadequate analysts. It is the predictable product of an institutional selection mechanism that rewards courtiers and marginalizes mentats. The surprise is not a failure of intelligence. It is the system producing the outcome its designers, deliberately or through the accumulated logic of their interests, intended. That is the structural diagnosis that Aurelien’s taxonomy of symptoms points toward and that the next essay in the series might usefully address.
A final word on contingency, because Aurelien is right about it and the structural argument must engage with it honestly rather than dismissing it. History is terrifyingly contingent. Yamamoto’s Pearl Harbour depended on a torpedo fuse developed months before the attack. The fall of the Shah depended on Khomeini’s specific theological authority within a specific Iranian religious tradition at a specific moment of that tradition’s political development. The collapse of the Soviet Union depended in part on the specific decisions of specific individuals in specific rooms on specific days in 1989 and 1991. Plekhanov had the formulation before the Marxists did: the role of the individual in history is real, and the great man—or the specific torpedo fuse, or the specific miscalculation of a specific junta general—can alter the trajectory of events in ways that no structural analysis fully anticipates. To deny this is to replace one determinism with another, and determinism in all its forms is the enemy of the honest analyst.
But the structural argument does not require determinism. It requires only the observation that structures and systems tend to overwhelm individual agency in most cases, and that the conditions under which individual agency is decisive are themselves structurally produced. Yamamoto’s tactical genius was available because the Japanese Navy’s organizational culture had selected for it. Khomeini’s authority was available because the Iranian religious tradition had maintained the institutional structure that produced it, across decades of the Shah’s modernizing suppression. The Soviet state’s specific fragility in 1989 was available because the structural pressures of the planned economy’s inefficiency had been accumulating for forty years before Gorbachev’s specific decisions accelerated the collapse. In each case, the individual is decisive at the specific moment of choice, and the structural conditions determine both the range of choices available and the consequences of each. The mentat problem is precisely this: the analytical architecture that has been built to manage perception rather than generate understanding is incapable of assessing either the structural conditions or the specific individuals who might act decisively within them, because both assessments would produce conclusions that challenge the extraction logic the architecture is designed to protect.
The specific failure that the Iran campaign exhibits is therefore neither purely structural nor purely contingent. Structurally, the five-hundred-year muscle memory produced the assumption that air power against a fragile state would succeed, because it had succeeded often enough before to embed the assumption in institutional culture. The rentier extraction logic produced the no-bad-news architecture that filtered out the assessments that challenged that assumption. The punditocracy produced the analytical output that confirmed it. These are structural conditions. But structurally, also, the Iranian state had forty-five years to observe the Western pattern of intervention, to assess its specific methods and specific vulnerabilities, and to develop the asymmetric capabilities that the pattern’s predictability made possible. The Iranians were not surprised because they had done the structural analysis that the American side had not. They knew both the enemy and themselves. This was not an accident of individual genius or specific contingency. It was the output of an institutional culture that had maintained the capacity for honest self-assessment and honest adversary assessment because its survival depended on it in a way that the American institutional culture’s survival, within the extraction logic, does not.
Part 4:
The unpredictability that Aurelien rightly insists on is not, therefore, an argument against structural analysis. It is the argument for the specific kind of structural analysis that builds the adaptive capacity to respond to genuine contingency, rather than the managed perception of predictability that the no-bad-news architecture produces. Life evolved to face unpredictability not by predicting the future but by developing the adaptive capacity to respond to whatever the future produces. The immune system does not predict the specific pathogen. It maintains the adaptive capacity to recognize and respond to whatever arrives. The analytical architecture that the West requires is the institutional equivalent of the immune system: not the prediction of specific adversary actions, which is genuinely beyond the reach of any analytical system, but the maintenance of the adaptive capacity that genuine unpredictability demands. That capacity requires honest self-assessment, honest adversary assessment, and the institutional architecture that rewards both regardless of whether the conclusions are convenient. It requires, in other words, the mentat rather than the courtier. The structural conditions that produce the courtier are the disease. The taxonomy of surprises is the symptom list.
There is one further capacity the essay points toward without naming directly, and it is the prior condition for everything the mentat is trained to do: the ability to isolate signal from the ocean of noise. Aurelien’s desk head anecdote names this from the receiving end. The tweet about the nationalist militants with anti-aircraft missiles arrives in a blizzard of similar signals, cannot be verified without risk, cannot be escalated without career consequences if it proves false, and is therefore not acted on. The signal is lost in the noise. This is presented as the information saturation problem, and it is that. But the structural analysis adds a dimension the essay does not pursue: the noise in the contemporary Western strategic information environment is not random. It is structured. And structured noise requires a fundamentally different analytical response than random noise.
The managed consensus produces structured noise: information that is not false in any single verifiable particular but that is systematically selected, framed, and contextualized to support specific conclusions and suppress the signals that would challenge them. Aurelien lists the correct tools for the random noise problem: what is the source, is it reliable, has it been reliable before, is there collateral, is it what I want to hear rather than what is necessarily true. These are the right questions. They are not sufficient when the noise is structured by the same institutional interests whose extraction logic the genuine signal threatens. The Chilcot Report documents this precisely: the intelligence was not fabricated. It was selected, weighted, and contextualized to support the conclusion that had already been reached. The analyst applying the correct tools to structured noise cannot distinguish signal from noise because the noise has been engineered to be indistinguishable from signal at the level of the individual piece of information. The distortion operates at the level of the pattern, not the individual data point.
The mentat’s specific training included the capacity to isolate signal from noise as a disciplined practice rather than an intuitive accident: the prana-bindu of attention, the specific discipline that allows the trained mind to perceive what the untrained mind filters before it reaches consciousness. But this capacity requires, as its prior institutional condition, something that analytical training alone cannot provide: the freedom to bring the detected signal to the decision-maker without career-ending consequences. The Soviet military intelligence officer who reported in June 1941 that the German attack was imminent was reporting a genuine signal from an ocean of structured noise produced by German deception operations. Stalin had him arrested. The institutional architecture that punishes the signal-finder is not a failure of the analytical process. It is the analytical process working as the institutional incentives have shaped it: systematically rewarding the analyst who does not escalate an ambiguous signal that turns out to be false disinformation, and systematically failing to punish the analyst who does not escalate a signal that turns out to be true, because in the latter case the failure is distributed across everyone who received the same information in the same complex environment.
The immune system’s specific genius is not its capacity to predict what pathogen will arrive. It is its capacity to distinguish self from non-self: to identify, in the organism’s internal biochemical environment, what belongs to the organism and what does not. This is signal isolation at the cellular level. The immune system that cannot distinguish self from non-self produces autoimmune disease: the organism attacking itself with its own defences. The analytical architecture that cannot distinguish genuine signal from structured noise produces the political equivalent: the policy apparatus that attacks itself, that generates the very surprises it is designed to prevent, because the structured noise it has produced to manage preferred conclusions has become indistinguishable, to its own analysts, from the genuine signals that would allow adaptation. The Iran surprise is autoimmune in precisely this sense. The structured noise that the no-bad-news architecture produced around Iranian military capability was indistinguishable, within the architecture, from the genuine signal that the capability was real and the objectives were unattainable. The architecture attacked itself. The surprise was the wound.
Aurelien next essay in the series might usefully address the question of what the treatment looks like, and whether the patient has any interest in receiving it.
I meant this substack: https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/
When it comes down to it , we , the west , dont need to know what everyone else in the world is doing or can do , historically this is a new thing , in the past m countries around the world existed and developed without knowing what everyone else was doing.
Why do we need to know anyway ?
In the context of this essay by Aurelien its about the USA not knowing enough about Iran to be able to attack it and defeat it , why the hell does the west and the usa in particular think it has the right to do what they stupidly call "regime change " we all know what theyre up to we all know they want to get rid of the leaders in other countries who refuse to hand over control of their countries reaources to the usa or to the west.
This idea that the usa or the west is and has the right to annoint itself policeman of the world is absolutely outrageous , its bout time a big enough group of countries got together and fought back against the usa , they will only have to do it once , if done properly it will never be feesible for the usa to ever again consider itself that important that it is the policeman of the world.
What could the USA anticipated about the Iranian response to our attack?
You would think that the amount of equipment we donated to Ukraine smoldering in the fields might influence strategy. Maybe that did, I don't think a land invasion of Iran was planned for.
But another item smoldering in Ukraine should have caused much hesitation about attacking Iran: Patriot missile systems. The Russians had destroyed batteries with impunity, and those batteries that escaped destruction mainly threatened nearby apartment complexes, not incoming missiles, drones, or planes.
Surely US military bases getting blown off of their West Asian locales had to look pretty probable?
But I read this thoughtful article and if the author is not surprised then why should I expect anything different? Hubris runs rampant in the Land of American Exceptionalism.
Brazilian UN peacekeepers were not in Haiti in the 1990's, but starting in 2004.
In the 1990's, starting in 1994, there were no UN peacekeepers, but UNSC-authorized US and French troops, with some Caricom and others thrown in for political reasons.
Apart from that, having been part of similar exercises, I can witness that, as Aurelien says, it does happen that the military is sent to a faraway country with absolutely no idea of local conditions and culture, and no goals either, just an assumption that "you will figure it out when you get there".
Despite everything, the US knew that less than a year ago, they, together with Israel, conducted a military action against Iran that they had to stop after 12 days because they were running out of fuel... What was supposed to be the difference in this new action? Why should it be more successful, even though they eliminated the old leadership
The goal ever always only was to turn Iran into a failed state, and consequently no threat to Israel.
"the berths at Pearl Harbour were very shallow, and it was not believed that the Japanese had torpedoes that could arm themselves in just a few metres of water (the US did not.)"
However the British had already demonstrated a shallow water solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
"A serious consequence of the Battle of Taranto [1940] was many harbours that were considered too shallow for air-dropped torpedoes were now vulnerable. Prior to Taranto, most navies thought torpedo attacks against ships must be in water at least 75 ft (23 m) deep. Taranto harbour had a depth of only about 39 ft (12 m) but the Royal Navy had developed a new method of preventing torpedoes from diving too deep."
The Japanese independently developed such a solution.
True.
However the fact of the British success at Taranto meant that any potential obstructionists in the IJN got hit hard with the epistemic clue stick. Thinking something can be done and knowing that it has been done already are very different sets of priors.
IIRC, they already were working on the torpedo issue at the time of Taranto.
That said, at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese expected the main damage to result from midget sub attacks. The aircraft were supposed to be a diversion.
I'm not saying that they were clueless before Taranto. Merely pointing out that once someone has done something successfully then everyone else knows 100% that it's worth at the very least the old college try, too.
Am aware of midget sub use by IJN at Pearl and also Sydney. Did they have meaningful success with these anywhere? My vague impression is that only the Italians came close to excelling with these -- although how much of that is due to Panerai marketing and how much is factual no idea :P
The Japanese also tried kamikaze midget subs, not that midget subs were not always pretty kamikaze.
AFAIK, none of it worked very well.
My point was that the US already had access to information that Pearl Harbour was vulnerable to that kind of attack. Eventually, someone was going to reverse engineer the British solution or come up with their own.
Nice article...
Agreed. Wonder how AI is going to affect the problems on information glut?
I’d argue that political tooling and processes will eventually catch up to mitigate this oversaturation and help sort through the rumors. Introducing the real challenge: the premium shifts entirely to sourcing quality and verified authority. Technology might filter the noise but it only increases the necessity for actual decision-making and decisive problem-solving.
Well it might help with the data-sifting process the author describes. Unlikely to help with picking out the faint signals out of the noise, though I could be wrong. And does the benefit of faster sifting keep up with the excess of stuff generated by AI in the first place 😏
It is always the substance of an article/argument/thesis that matters, whether human, AI assisted, or 100% AI with minimal prompting. And we are already drowning in noise, we need to develop and adapt to detect the signal and filter the noise.
"Rather (and probably because the land option was not feasible) all faith had to be placed in an air campaign, but that campaign could only succeed if the state itself was very fragile, and if the main state targets could be reliably hit, and if the Iranian people, once the state was weakened, would rise up and destroy it. Thus, the wished-for political outcome generated a series of consecutive necessary false assumptions about the likely effectiveness of bombing and the fragility of the Iranian state which had to be true, otherwise the objective would need to be abandoned. "
One could say much the same about Russia and Ukraine, except that this is an existential issue for Russia, but the Russian leadership continually refuses to take this seriously.
Bringing "blind spots" and potential surprises to awareness before making decisions is what "Risk Assessments" are all about. Every Federal Agency is required by OMB to have a Risk Management office. Sadly, OMB does not have authority over the White House itself. Despite the urgings of Congress over the last ten years, the National Security Council does not have such an office, nor does the President perform mandatory risk assessments before making fraught national security decisions. Colin Powell tried to force the subject of "Risk" into decision making with his famous "Powell Doctrine." The war in Iran met absolutely none of that doctrine's criteria, especially "There is a clear objective"; "Risks have been considered"; and "The intervention has public support." Risk Management tries to force open a window of light for the inner circle monoculture of most "tightly limited, leak proof" advisers to the President. These advisors (especially John Ratcliffe of the CIA) all must have known about the likely closure of the Strait of Hormuz and remembered the Houthi's success closing the Red Sea with missiles and drones the previous year. Group think indeed!
The Powell doctrine also says, "Know your exit strategy in advance." No problemo for this President: 1) throw in the towel quickly (just walk away) when the game is clearly over; and 2) find someone to blame. I suspect Ratcliffe and Hegseth are prime candidates to take the fall. As for blaming Netanyahu, there is the problem of the Epstein tapes....
Powell's failure underscores Aurelien's point. The trouble with lacunae is that you can't see them. It takes an unusually effective leader
, as a matter of disciplined policy, to invite contrary and uncomfortable results from, often unusual or obvious sources.
If the US political and military leadership had listened carefully to Doomberg's analysis, there would have been no surprises!
Aurelien — You're going to be disappointed by how this works out. That Iran did not disappear off the map does not mean they are victorious in this argument. And it's not over.
Thank you so much for never using “them” and taking the time to identify specific actors. One of the things that puts you above the rest.
Real change can begin when we admit to ourselves that we live in ignorance of our Source, purpose and potential - the actual ''spiritual quest''.
Essentially, our so-called 'science' is founded on studying what appears to our 5-senses - ''sensationalism'' - and reducing every thing down to nano-levels of motion. Well, try cutting a dog into a trillion bits to discover its Real Nature as love, loyalty and excitement!
Clearly, we must refocus to see that mankind is simply exploring and investigating from ignorance of What Is Here Now. In this state of mind, we will ever remain in separation from the ''space'' in which the Universe manifests. Currently, ''science'' reflects our ignorance and can only lead us ever deeper into the deceiver mentality - a ''bug in the game'' that seeks to degrade life into absolute rejection of All That Is (W)Holy to replicate our world ''in its putrid image''.
This delusion can be re-balanced by introducing Real Education to fulfill its actual role of ''bringing out from within''. In effect, we can learn to seek re-connection to the Divine Knowingness that we interpret as space.; to re-call ITs indestructible fullness and completeness; to unveil Oneness as the Real Singularity and our Actual Nature.
In effect, we will discover our that our ''One Real Asset'' is Divine Space wherein the entire universe appears to our senses. This is our route to Real Self-Evolution; to understanding the omnipresence-omniscience-omnipotence of Divine Mind; to re-discovering our unlimited possibilities within the motion of electro-magnetic waves; the Thinking - Image-I-Nation - of That Mind.
Thus, we will come to understand DNA as a ''nano-milky way galaxy''; a transceiver in each relatively tiny ''cell factory''; with some 70 trillion in continual communication to manage our body in Divine Synergistic Co-operation. We will begin to live in awe and gratitude as we refocus in the knowingness that Space contains the Knowingness that 'runs' the entire Universe; while mirrored endlessly in our bodies - our own universe to earn.
We will realise that what 'science' studies is founded on total ignorance due to longstanding separation from Truth-Beauty-Goodness.With this transformed perspective, we can learn to re-connect and 'download' the True Knowing of Love as a Divine State of Awe & Gratitude. We will live in the Knowing that ''infinity'' is the volume and duration required to explore-investigate-discover our endless possibilities.
We will comprehend scriptural warnings as the wisdom and awareness of The Divine Law of cause-and-effect; that what we give out is destined to return as Divine Justice.
To quote Nisargadatta Maharaj, a fully-aware sage: ''There is no power on earth that is greater than this Consciousness, this sense of presence - I Am - to which the illusory individual must direct all his prayers. Then this very Consciousness will provide the illusory liberation from the illusory bondage of the illusory individual by revealing Its True Nature; which is none other than the seeker himself; but not as an individual''.
Once we transform our thinking to re-connect to the Knowingness of ''apparent space'', we will see the separation of ego-mind-body; the fearful self-protection that has created our madly imbalance world. Therefrom, we can begin to laugh at our delusions, forgive ourselves and reappraise life in the knowingness we are manifested in Love Of Life; that space is crammed with That Love as a Divine Motion Picture.
Our world of terror and injustice is a reflection of our vast imbalance due to entrapment in the mindset of those most separated from Truth. Our current state is the ''risky'' experience of 'All That I Am Not' - a point in space-time where souls - individual ''slices of the Divine Pi'' - can choose the perdition of artificial everything; or A.I. as Actual Intelligence, freely-given and fully-available through service to Love of Life; reconnection in awe and gratitude for All That Is.
Put another way, how deranged must we be to consent to the delusions of ''leaders'' whose ''answers'' uphold only endless destruction and injustice?!
Clearly, we must ''take off the old coat'', look in the opposite direction and begin a new conversation right Now.
"We must do Something/Like what?/Never mind, Something."
That reminds me of the eternal action syllogism beloved of all private and public institutions:
1. We Must do Something.
2. This is Something.
(therefore)
3. We Must do This.
Interesting piece of writing. But it took me over an hour to read it...