Rivkin has put his finger right on the point: the foreword for this book is indeed written by Prof. Kaveh Farroukh and it is everything Rivkin described. In general, there is " an uniterrupted evolution of military arts, technology and tradition... ( from)... the original Kurgan-Aryan arrivals into Persia".
In short:
Persian culture spreads from the Ukraine to the end of the civilized Earth ( and even primitive Arabs and barbarous Turks learned how to pick their noses from the highly cultured Iranians they defeated time and time again); Europe owes Persia an enormous cultural and military debt for stopping the Ottomans and this debt was never acknowledged; Persian recovery from the crushing defeat at Chaldiran was due to Abbas' " military genius" ( the fact that Sir Robert Shirley took over the re-organization of Persian military is conveniently forgotten); Nader Shah's military exploits are no less than "brilliant" and a brief mention of his invasion of Delhi does not go into pesky details of pillage, plunder and mass slaughter of civilians.
There is such thing as a viewpoint and then there is bias.
There is national pride and then there is jingoism.
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