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#11
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Paul Michael Brown wrote:
Ed Rasimus wrote: Those readers of RAM who have been following these postings as well as Amir who has offered them might enjoy the background piece written by Tony Cordesman on the Iran-Iraq war at: http://www.csis.org/burke/reports/90...qII-chap13.pdf So I was immediately suspicious of Amir's original post because certain parts of it featured sophisticated prose that has been absent from his other posts. It came as no surprise when another poster revealed Amir's effort was copied from a web site. This is suspicious, but hardly proof of inaccuracy or dishonesty. That distinction is academic, though, when the OP gives mixed signals about his sources. He claims to be an Iranian Phantom driver - which may imply to some that he was close to the actual events, closer to being an eyewitness than armchair aviators like me. I have little problem crediting accounts like the one Amir provides when I have a decent idea of where they came from. If Amir claimed he witnessed the event because he was there, spoke with pilots he knows who were there, read official reports describing the event and their own sources - I could still doubt the story, but I'd have a better idea of just what the poster was asking me to belive. In this case, he spits out the story, claims to be a fighter pilot and baldly claims he's read unspecified reports. Moreover, scanning through Coredesman's piece I found this tidbit regarding Iranian F-14 ops: "According to most sources, the Phoenix missile systems and/or guidance avionics in the Iranian F-14As were sabotaged when the war began, and have not been operational since. The Phoenix systems are reported to have been sabotaged by Iranian Air Force personnel friendly to the U.S. shortly after the Shah's fall, although some sources report they were sabotaged by Iranian revolutionaries to prevent air force operations. This meant Iran could not make optimal use of its best fighter, or use an advanced all-weather, air-to-air missile with good shoot-down capability and a range up to 124 miles (200 km)." Cordesman's conclusion that sabotage precluded Iranian use of the AIM-54 stands in square conflict with other posts by Amir. Even accounting for the passage of time, the dimming of recollection, and a substantial TINS factor, I remain VERY leery of his stories. To give Amir the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Cordesman presents the above information as the result of reports - implying a degree of controversy rather than consensus. The copy that I saw had cites for other interesting factoids (including one to the author's own work on the war) but not for the above claim of sabotage. Even the nature of the sabotage (assuming that this really happened) is up for grabs - pro-Islamic revolutionaries, pro-American (or perhaps, as others have said, but ommitted here Americans). I don't think it's a huge leap to include unsuccessful sabotage or no-sabotage-at-all among the catalog of possibilities both consistent with Amir & Cordesman. |
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