[BRIEF NOTE] Niall Ferguson's Apocalyptic Misreadings

[rfmcdonald]

I'd like to thank the participants in this discussion on USENET's alt.history.future forum for pointing me in the direction of Niall Ferguson's recent essay in The Telegraph, "The origins of the Great War of 2007 - and how it could have been prevented". Ferguson gets a lot of things wrong, in his overestimation of the demographic differential between Europe and the Middle East, his misreading of the willingness of Iranians to fight, his passing over the force-multiplier effect of advanced technology in war, quite probably the willingness of the Iranian government to fight a nuclear war with Israel, and the survival of Iran as a functioning state after encounting the Israeli nuclear arsenal. A nuclearized Iran, Abiola Lapite argues convincingly in the comments to this post, does indeed pose a serious problem to the world. It isn't such an immediate problem, though, and it certainly doesn't need to be so luridly described.