Although we may disagree – and disagree profoundly – with Erdogan’s Turkey, a state that has elevated geopolitical opportunism to an art form, that wears the Palestinian cause like a seasonal garment to be displayed at the UN and folded away when trade deals with Israel require discretion, that oscillates between NATO and Moscow with the loyalty of a weathervane in a hurricane, that harbors Muslim Brotherhood networks while selling drones to their enemies, and that wraps neo-Ottoman ambitions in the language of Islamic solidarity the way a con artist wraps a brick in gift paper – despite all of this, intellectual honesty is not selective, and when a serious man says a serious thing, the origin does not diminish the accuracy.

And Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, a former intelligence chief who understands the grammar of warfare better than any diplomat currently operating in the Middle East, has just delivered – in an interview with TRT Haber – the single most excoriating assessment of Iran’s strategic incompetence that any official in the region has had the courage to articulate publicly.

Fidan’s argument, stripped to its core, is mercilessly simple: if you have not developed cyber intelligence, signals intelligence, electronic intelligence, space-based surveillance, aviation technology, advanced air defense systems, radar networks, and electronic jamming capabilities – if you have not done your homework across every one of these domains – then you have no business even entering a skirmish, let alone a war, with Israel and the United States.

Not a war. A skirmish. He was explicit: a state that contemplates confrontation with these two powers must achieve near-total competence across the full spectrum of modern warfare before it fires a single shot. Anything less is not resistance. It is suicide dressed in slogans.

Had any Arab official uttered these words, the Arab street would have branded him a coward, a traitor, a normalizer, a servant of Zionism. They would have quoted Quran – “How many a small company has overcome a large company by permission of Allah” (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:249) – and dismissed strategic planning as a lack of faith. This is the intellectual culture that has produced seventy-seven years of uninterrupted military humiliation at the hands of a Hebrew state smaller than New Jersey – five armies defeated in 1948 by a country with no air force, the Sinai lost in six days in 1967, the Yom Kippur surprise squandered in 1973, and every confrontation since ending in the same result: Arab defeat, Israeli expansion, and another generation raised on the promise that next time will be different.

This is the belief that divine favor substitutes for........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)