Stuxnet the Invincible

Yesterday”s New York Times finally broke the story  of 2010.   The gravest threat to world peace since the fall of the Soviet Union has been temporarily vanquished by a….. wait for it…… computer virus.  The Stuxnet virus finally gained its rightful place in the pantheon of world peace activists when the Times spotlighted its extraordinary success in reversing the momentum of the Iranian nuclear program by rendering many of its main computers inoperable and likely obsolete.   As a related story in the The Telegraph details, Russian scientists  working in the Nantaz facility, have warned  the Kremlin that they could be facing “another Chernobyl” if they are forced to comply with Iran’s tight deadline to activate the complex this summer.

The real news broken by the Times story of course is that the Stuxnet virus, the most sophisticated cyber weapon ever witnessed on earth, was more than likely created in Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility.   That is not really news to those of us who have for years admired and appreciated Israel’s extraordinary technological prowess;  but it might be news to a stubbornly ungrateful world that has been spared, at least for the moment, the economic catastrophe that might have ensued if Israel had been forced to take military action against Iran.

So while world leaders may be breathing a bit easier tonight, perhaps they ought to be paying a little more attention to  some of these  basic realities:  The West’s  security interests are being safeguarded by a tiny country the size of New Jersey; that the small country is on the very front lines of a war that it still largely refuses to either name or recognize; that peace is unlikely to come to the Middle East  – or to the rest of the world for that matter – until the scourge of the West, based in Tehran, is completely defeated and the  worldwide religious movement it leads is forced into ignominious retreat.

While there are no guarantees of anything  in this world,  it is a safer bet than most that Israel’s powerful technological capabilities and the tremendous ingenuity of its scientists, offers a key weapon in determining who will  ultimately win the war of civilizations in which we are all presently engaged.

Daily Blurb #3

Free Jonathan Pollard

Yesterday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a letter to Barack Obama requesting clemency for Jonathan Pollard, a man who has been in prison for 25 years for a crime which usually attracts prison time of  no more than four to seven years.  Pollard’s crime was to deliver  classified documents to the Israeli government which had a bearing on U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and greviously affected the intelligence gathering this involved.  It was claimed at the time that Pollard’s spy work led directly to the death of U.S.  operatives in the Soviet Union  and around the world.  Following the opening of the Soviet archives  in the late 1990s, it became clear that Pollard’s activities had almost no impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and in the words of late former  Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who had at one time become the most devoted anti-Pollard declaimer,  its impact on U.S. intelligence gathering “was minor.” Why, then, is he still in jail, serving a life sentence for activities that put  him on the same level of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen, whose spying really did result in the deaths of American operatives?

The answer is that as much as at least two  presidents have sought to commute his unreasonable sentence ( which was itself imposed in direct contravention of a plea bargain), the outcry from the defense and intelligence establishment has been so strenuous that neither  Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush felt the political costs worth the effort.

Yet coming at a time when U.S.- Israel relations are at an all time low, the release  of Pollard, who became an Israeli citizen a decade ago, could aid efforts to improve attitudes on both sides.   Certainly Barack Obama, who has the most unfavorable rating among the Israelis of any American president in history, could benefit from this beneficent act.  Notwithstanding the fact that basic justice demands it.

Iran Rejects Western Culture

There is no better indicator  of Islamic  Iran’s approaching death rattle than this piece from yesterday’s Washington Post.  Iranian universities and public schools, which have been surprisingly free during the course of the revolution to teach Western science and the humanities are now being overhauled to be properly Islamicized.   The government’s ” Program for Fundamental Evolution in Education and Training,” amount to the kind of social and cultural engineering predicted by George Orwell in 1984.  By seeking to strip the curricula of schools and universities of Western humanistic values the regime, in an effort to control a burgeoning middle class whose increasing emphasis is on individualism, will only feed the fire of counter revolution, the embers of which still smolder from the June, 2009 uprising.  The Internet, which the regime is also seeking to control, will play a leading role in bringing together opposition groups who will eventually join to topple the regime.  Perhaps the gutting of the education system may prove the last straw.

Jeff Danzinger and the Ivory Coast Cartoon

I have always wondered why cartoonists are cut far more slack than any other editorial writer.  They literally get away with murder in both their irreverence for facts and their willingness to parody the truth.  Take Jeff Danzinger’s cartoon which appeared in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times.  Danzinger’s makes the unsubtle comparison here between Ivory Coast’s defeated president Laurent Gbagbo and the Bush/ Cheney victory in the 2000 election.  Both, you see, failed to receive a plurality of votes from the public, but both nevertheless clung to power – supposeldy, at least in Danzinger’s mind, illegitimately.

The analogy is as spurious as it is hateful.   Gbagbo’s followers have unleashed a campaign of violence and intimidation against the declared victor Ouattara’s supporters, resulting inthe  suspected deaths of 200 people.   A mass grave report is being investigated.  Nothing of the sort followed the inconclusive Bush- Gore election of 2000.   During the month it took to sort out the results, there were no violent uprisings, no killings and both camps conducted themselves with dignity  as the results of the Florida returns were examined.

The matter eventually fell to the U.S. Supreme Court which adjudicated the matter and assigned the victory to Bush who had constitutionally secured enough electoral votes to assume office.

We should note that Danzinger’s cartoon, which draws such an invidious comparison, actually mocks our own Constitution by assuming that Bush was as illegitimate a leader as an African tinpot dictator.  It is unfathomable how such a stupid and constitutionally illiterate a comparison could be made by a cartoonist of such experience and renown.    The readers of the Los Angeles Times deserve much better.

The Mexican War of Survival

Will Mexico cease to exist as a self governing nation state?

That is a question that we might all be asking ourselves considering recent developments in that country and a growing likelihood of the outbreak of some kind of civil war.

Not a day goes by without a news item revealing yet another outrage perpetrated against a judge, a prosecutor, a political leader or a major business figure.  Kidnappings and killings have reached into such formerly safe enclaves as Acapulco, Cancun and Monterrey.

Today’s Los Angeles Times reveals how even the country’s most important national enterprise, PEMEX – a natural gas exploration and refining giant, has been cowed and intimidated by the drug lords.   Tracy Wilkinson reports that 30 employees of the corporation have gone missing for a month, with no word from them or their supposed kidnappers.  No one wants to talk about the abductions – not the familys’ relatives, not the government investigators and not even the government itself.  Why?   For fear of reprisals from the drug cartels who seem to have penetrated and intimidated every echelon in Mexican society.

Wilkinson reports this frightening reality:

“The capacity of the traffickers to exert influence over a company as mighty as Pemex only solidifies the widely held perception that the cartels are growing in size and strength despite the government’s crackdown.” “How is it,” asked a relative of a kidnapped worker, “that Pemex, supposedly the backbone of the nation, can be made to bow down like this?”

Despite the capture of the drug kingpin  ‘Le Barbie’ last week,  the view that the country is slowly falling apart due to increasing fear and an ensuing collaboration by ordinary citizens with criminal elements is gaining increasing currency.

That is because the public  trust that should exist in police and government forces are actually working to protect Mexican society rather than collaborating with the  Cartels, has substantially eroded.  Last month it was discovered the murdererers of the popular mayor of Monterrey were actually city policemen and included his own bodyguards.  It sent a sobering message of what has happened to Mexican society – you can’t trust anyone, any time.  Its everyone for themselves in a Mexican War  of Survial.

The increasing opinion of Mexican editorialists is that President Calderon’s  four year  struggle with the Cartels is not succeeding and as Wilkinson reports, may be leading to a growing assumption that the country is headed towards break up.  Feuding cartels will  battle it out over huge swathes of territory, making local elected government an anachronism.

The consequences of a potential Mexican collapse for the United States are underplayed and simply underreported in this country.   Such an eventuality would produce a refugee crisis that would make the South Asian crisis of the late 70s look like a family picnic.  It would cause untold hardship and violence in our own border towns and it would create a humanitarian crisis of unparalleled duration.

For years I have called for United States intervention in the mess that is Mexico – a devotion of our resources to destroying the cartels.  We MUST pay more attention if we are going to prevent this war from spilling into our southern cities and border towns and becoming not only Mexico’s War for Survival, but something of our own.

Tony Blair Has Mashalled the West’s Tough Journey

Tony Blair’s recent published autobiography ” A Journey” is remarkable in a number of ways.

The first is that it is penned solely by the former prime minister without the benefit of a ghost writer;   The second is that it is a insouciantly honest  portrait of a Western leader that doesn’t seek to hide deep  insecurities or avoid blame for major errors of judgment.

As to the first, well, maybe he should have used a little help.  The book is riddled with cliches and unwieldy syntax. It is poorly organized and gives us little of Blair’s political or personal philosophy.   As to the second, the bare- it-all candidness can get a bit much, particularly when Blair intimates his penchant for spending time alone on the loo.

But a third  reason – and an  important one to laud this new memoir – is Blair’s insistence on the centrality of the Trans-Atlantic Alliance to the future of Western civilization.  Blair has understood, much like all his post- War predecessors and every American president since Franklin Roosevelt, that the very concept of  “the West”  as a civilization, would only survive if  the two nations which enshrined its values would continue to cooperate as partners in the greatest of human enterprises – the preservation of freedom and the willingness to fight to defend it.

The personal relationships between the leaders of the two countries – Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and  John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – shepherded the West through the grave crises represented by Nazism and Communism.  The Blair- Bush relationship was just as important in its ultimate recognition of and confrontation to the third great challenge to the West in our lifetime -  the scourge of terrorism and the rise of fundamentalist Islam.  The Trans-Atlantic alliance was undeniably strengthened during the first decade of this century by the development of a warm cooperation between these two men.

More than any European  leader in this century, Blair understood the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 as an assault on the West itself and that an immediate and forceful response would be needed.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as controversial as they now seem, will one day be viewed by history as the West’s defiant statement that it would be neither cowed, nor intimidated by tin pot dictators or highly financed terrorist leaders.

His cooperation with Bush in toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein was exactly the kind of cooperation missing in 1956 when  Egypt’s  president Abdul Gamal Nasser bestrode the Middle East as a puffed up Arab potentate, vowing to deliver a humiliating blow to ” the Western imperialists”.  When he nationalized the Suez Canal in August, 1956,  threatening world trade, the United States and the United Kingdom would have been in their rights to launch an international force to dislodge him.  That did not happen.  Anthony Eden’s government, sensing American reticence and indifference, colluded with France and Israel to seize the canal.  The action took the Eisenhower Administration by complete surprise and in an act of pique,  it threatened to condemn the actions in the U.N.  Security Council, resulting in a humiliating retreat by all three powers.  The damage to the West was incalcuable  and led to Eden’s immediate resignation, the eventual collapse of France’s Fourth Republic and the empowerment of Nasser, who eleven years later would launch the Six Day War and continue as a the bane of the West for another 14 years.

The absence of a personal relationship between the British prime minister and the American president was telling in those circumstances.  And so may it be today.  Neither David Cameron nor Barack Obama have evinced much interest in the Trans-Atlantic Alliance and the idea that the two nations must band together to defend the West and its values, is given short shrift.   Neither seems to be display a keen awareness of the threats posed by the multicultural revolution sweeping through the West; Neither has drawn at all upon the memory of Munich, as nearly every American and British  post – War leader has done, as a policy guide for confronting challenges to freedom and liberty.

Reports have indicated that Tony Blair, in conducting his book tour, must travel in an armed guard for fear of being assaulted.  He is seen in Britain today as largely a failure.   The reviews by his contemporaries of his book have been scathing, painting the former prime minister as a stooge in thrall to American imperialism.

History will inevitably be much kinder to Tony Blair, just as it will be to Bush.  It may sadly reveal that these two pragmatic men were the last of their line of great leaders who took hard, unpopular decisions they felt necessary to protect their populations.  That they understood this and acted in unison, may  be the last gasp of  recognition, among our political leaders at least, of the joint destiny of the English speaking peoples.

In Defense of British Petroluem

Is it any wonder that the oil conglomerate British Petroleum is not winning any popularity contests lately?  After all, this is the moment that our chattering classes have been eagerly anticipating for decades  – the whale-like oil companies finally surfacing and exposing a vulnerable flank to a host of upraised harpoons.  So successful has the media mauling and demonization of the corporate giant been, that you would think the company is the very re-incarnation of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, determined to blacken our seas and stain our sands with its slimy, viscous poison.

So anyone trying to build a case for the London-based multinational during its agonizing and protracted auto de fé, does not have an enviable task.  After all, who really wants to speak a good word about a company that has facilitated the worst oil spill of the past 40 years –  an episode that may be on its way to becoming the most calamitous man made environmental disaster in history?

Well, frankly, I do.

Because British Petroleum, whether appreciated today or not, has been one of the singularly great success stories of the world’s entrepreneurial classes, building an almost unparalleled  record of success as a spearhead of Western civilization.  It has brought wealth and prosperity, not simply to the West, but to those countries where it has located its operations and created models for how corporations can overcome institutional obstacles.  It has shown how an indomitable spirit , accompanied by bold vision can achieve results that those who complain endlessly about corporate rapaciousness, only dream about.

From its founding in 1901 by William Knox D’Arcy, and then through the skilful leadership of Charles Greenway and his successor John Cadmon, the Anglo- Persian Oil Company, (renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935 and then again British Petroleum in 1953) has undertaken exploration of a vital world energy source in countries largely hostile to either exploration or development.

We shouldn’t forget that the discovery of oil in Persia in the early years of the 20^th Century did not occur after some Oriental counterpart of Jed Clampett, shooting buck skin on a desert sand dune, inexplicably struck it rich.  It took nearly a decade of painstaking and often fruitless exploration  before oil was discovered – and with those efforts  initially producing only pitiful returns.   That it eventually succeeded so well, is testament not just to the vision and acumen of corporate leaders, but the drive of the West to expand. For with that expansion was carried a value system that came to dominate the world and  spread the bounty and promise of Western civilization.

Of course even the mere mention of the name of “Anglo Persian Oil” can arouse the most acerbic vitriol from the left, who regard the fact that Europeans once sought to develop and exploit the Persian oil fields, as a badge of colonial shame.  Yet, whatever you want to say about the men who greedily eyed profits in the Persian Gulf, there can be no question that their undertakings had a transformative impact on the world, raising living standards wherever they went and making possible important advances in health, transportation and communications.

Oil’s less benevolent impact on our world  –  the mark of environmental degradation- might stand as its deepest indictment.  But the industry, it should be remembered, did not produce the demand itself; it simply responded to it.  As Western technology developed and prosperity accelerated, oil, replacing coal, became a vital piece in achieving progress in almost all fields of human endeavor.  That our society has now identified oil as a major pollutant and as a threat to our long term survival, should not be thrown in the faces of companies such as BP.  They are not responsible for inventing our luxuries.  They only help to make them move.

Does any of this excuse BP from its responsibilities to facilitate the containment and clean up of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?.  Of course not.  But the company does not deserve to stand accused as a scourge of humanity, to be hounded out of business for the obscene presumption of seeking to take advantage of our desperate need for a reliable source of energy.

Perhaps President Obama, in his apparently insatiable need to lacerate and lecture BP, should then consider something pertinent about his own past:  Neither Kenya , Indonesia nor Hawaii, all places that figure prominently in his curriculum vitae, would have produced societies capable of giving either him or his father the education and opportunities they had, without the  participation and even leadership of companies such as BP.

Lets hope that the endless gushing in the Gulf ends soon.  But lets also hope that the same endless anti-corporate gushing in Washington, offering a different, but no less contaminating level of pollution, ends even sooner.

Greetings from the Land of Smiles

In case you haven’t noticed, that resplendent locus of calm, the land of the King and I and the world destination for millions of tourists seeking cheap sex and drugs – the Land of Smiles, is fast becoming the land of billowing smoke .   Those who once visited Thailand would have a hard time envisioning what is happening there today.

Bangkok  is under siege – an apparent  war zone where thousands of poorer citizens – many of them farmers and itinerant workers – have staged a rebellion ( it is far too early to call it a  civil war) against the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, claiming that his ouster of the corrupt former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra years ago, was illegal.  Not exactly without precedent, these rebels have adopted red as their color of protest.  There are many demands about the redistribution of wealth and the eights of the poor.  Hence,  we are seeing a new “red ” insurgency taking on again a governing power.

Where have we seen this before?

Try the French Revolution and the uprising of the Sans Culottes and their participation in the September Massacre of 1792.   Or the murderous Paris Commune of 1871; the rampages of the Bolsheviks through the streets of Moscow of  1917 or the attack of the Khmer Rouge on Phnom Phen in 1975.     To some extent they were all Red Shirts with much the same agenda- to remove by force a governing regime and install a “people’s” government, which would strip away the privilege of rule from the country’s  upper classes.

We also know where it all leads.   Not only will shirts be red, but the streets will run red with the blood of thousands who are regarded as enemies of the state.  The movement to unseat a governing power,  that owes its origins to rural discontent, never ends peacefully and in  fact guarantees a level insecurity and instability for years into the future.

The crack down by the Thai military – even if , as at least reports, it has resulted in the death of eight protesters, and much as it might be reminiscent of the crackdown in  Beijing’s  Tianamen Square in 1989, should not be regarded as the reflex of an oppressive dictatorial regime.  It should be seen for what it really is -the necessary measures of a democracy to restore order before unrest spreads to the entire country and anarchy sets in.

Let us then be spared then the unhappy editorials in the New York Times and  the Washington Post, bewailing the frightful loss of  life.  The Red Shirts of history have demonstrated that they can wreak far greater destruction of life and property if appeased.  Returning the smile to the Land of Smiles may not involve the most felicitous of measures.   But at least it will bring a semblance of stability back to a once famously stable nation.