Drone aside, what else US lost to Iran

Two senior political analysts say Iran's recent capture of an intrusive US reconnaissance drone has undermined the legitimacy of the American hegemony and challenged the future of its global governance. The cyberjacking of a US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft by the Iranian Army's electronic warfare on December 4 while in violation of Iran's air sovereignty “highlights a deeper reality,” than a mere signification of the escalation of tensions between Tehran and Washington, Flynt Leverettand Hillary Mann Leverett wrote on the Race for Iran website. Levertts added the juxtaposition of Iran's complaint to the UnitedNations over the US violation of its airspace with Washington's “un-evidenced, trust-us” accusations that Tehran that had conspired to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington is very revealing. The analysts said unlike Washington's allegations, Iran's claims are “based on their physical possession and display of the captured drone-that is, on actual evidence, of the clearest, hardest, most “smoking gun”-quality (or perhaps one should say, “smoking engine exhaust”-quality) that one can imagine.” Yet, despite the solidity of Tehran's evidence against the US, Leveretts said it would be “very surprising” if Iran's accusations elicit “anything like a serious hearing” by the United Nations Security Council. “Washington will rely on subservient Europeans, a pliable Secretary General, and its ability to pressure other states not to support a serious discussion of the Iranian charges to avoid such a scenario,” they said. The United States, as the global hegemon (albeit a declining one), caninvoke and even distort international law for its own ends and purposes, but has multiple ways to forestall having international law invoked against it, the Leveretts added. The Leveretts added that if a state adopts internationally endorsed measures to defend itself or its nation against a more powerful state, the behavior would immediately be condemned as “revisionist” or as the US policymakers typically put it, “destabilizing”. It's in this context that one should assess the dismissively hostile reaction of Western media and policymakers to the criticisms of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the UN Security Council and other established structures of global governance, the Leveretts noted. “Ahmadinejad points out how unfair and dysfunctional these structures are-among other reasons because they are less and less reflective of the actual distribution of power and influence in the world,” they said. “An important element in the Islamic Republic's grand strategy is a calculation that larger and larger parts of the world are becoming less and less willing to keep living under American hegemony,” the Leveretts pointed out. The analysts went on to say the US refusal to meet the challenge posed to it by the Islamic Republic to shift to a diplomatically-oriented line of policy brings the intertwined crises of American hegemony and global governance closer and closer to “a major inflection point.” “A point at which a critical mass of non-Western states says, in effect, that they have had enough, and begins taking serious economic and political steps to rein in the United States,” the Leveretts said. If the US were to launch a military campaign against Iran, Tehran will not surrender to Washington's continuing assertion of its hegemonic prerogatives, the article added. The Leveretts concluded that a US-led war against Iran, however, will be “a disastrous undertaking for the United States.”