We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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In yesterday’s Pentagon Press Briefing, Commander, Nato International Security Assistance Force Gen. Dan McNeill had this interesting comment:
I’m also reminded of the headlines that said there was a resurgent Taliban, there was a coming spring offensive, and they were going to hold sway on the battlefield. And I think a retrospective look at calendar year ’07 says that clearly was not the case. They did very little on the battlefield. They were very successful in staying in the press, and they continue to be, but they have done little on the battlefield.
Do the Taliban have sufficient strength to pull off another Spring News Offensive or have we precluded this by sufficiently weakening the elite al allah al Press Relations over the preceding year?
If you are of a conspiracy orientation, you are going to love this report I just picked up off a network admin mail list:
A fourth submarine cable in the middle east was damaged Sunday between Haloul, Qatar and Das, United Arab Emirates.
This is in addition to the damage affecting FLAG, SAE-ME-WE4, FALCON cables.
After reviewing surveillance video of the area, Egypt’s ministry of maritime transportation is reporting no ships were near the FLAG or SAE-ME-WE4 cables 12-hours before or after the cable damage near Alexandria, Egypt. The reason for outage of the cables has not been identified yet.
Did anyone notice the NSA black-ops sub leaving the area (I should add a smiley here… I think)?
More information can be found here. There has also been a suggestion this report may be an ‘echo’ of a previous report caused by mis-communication across language barriers. I have no idea myself.
We now cue the Secret Squirrel theme and search for our tin hats as ‘The Galloping Beaver’ asks: “Where is the USS Jimmy Carter?”
There was an interesting but infuriating article in The Times by Simon Jenkins today where he describes the current state of affairs in Afghanistan. The shorter Jenkins is that things are not going very well. The crux of the problem is that Nato’s force in Kabul is in shambles with the United States and the United Kingdom in disagreement over their basic strategy, the Canadians having had enough, and the Continental Europeans contributing more trouble then they are worth.
But what really struck my nerve with this article was the praise that Jenkins heaps on the Taleban adversaries. He describes them as the ‘toughest fighters’ on earth. I am admittedly not qualified to pass judgement on that score, but I would have to question the real fighting skill of men who are barely literate, fed or able to maintain basic hygiene. Given the disarray that NATO forces are in, and the difficulties that they are inflicting on themselves, it is no wonder that a numerically larger, motivated and home based insurgency is able to maintain a serious military challenge.
If the challenge posed by the Taleban is to be met by NATO or the government of Afghanistan, then NATO have to take this crisis seriously. The chances of this happening are approximately zero, of course, so the rational thing to do is to look forward to the day when the Taleban regain power in Afghanistan. Given the total bankruptcy of NATO’s military strategy and the weakness of the United States, it is likely that terrorists will regain their safe haven in Central Asia in the medium term.
Such an outcome would be to the total discredit of Western political leadership. Had they committed a serious military effort to Afghanistan, and united behind a common strategy, Afghanistan would have settled down under corrupt but peaceful leadership years ago. But there is no evidence of any politician in the West taking Afghanistan seriously.
Iraq is still in a descent to normalcy according to this DOD report:
Weekly attacks in the Baghdad security districts for the past 15 weeks matched levels last seen consistently in 2005. Bombings increased last week, but remained below the long-term average for the 23rd week in a row, he said. Throughout Iraq, weekly casualties decreased by three percent last week, continuing to remain below the long-term average for the 21st week in a row, Anderson said. Civilian casualties have dropped from 1,700 in January 2007 to 170 this month.
I think I can speak for the rest of the Samizdatistas when I raise my glass and say to our armed forces: “Well done lads!”
The perception of Islamic science, perhaps properly called natural philosophy, has been shaped by Bernard Lewis and his strong programme of senescence instead of renaissance. The development of scientific knowledge follows a pre-ordained path to scientific revolution and those cultures that failed to ignite need to be explained. Is not exceptionalism the oddity? A review in the Times Literary Supplement adds to our understanding:
After all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe, and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity of European history, rather than adduce some kind of Islamic brake or blinker.
→ Continue reading: Islam’s long siesta
In 2004 in this space, Gabriel Syme noted some disturbing revelations from an FBI translater, Sibel Edmonds. It turns out that Edmonds had, in fact, plenty more to say, but had kept her own counsel. Until now.
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.
Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.
She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
The allegations, to say the least, are explosive. The FBI has denied everything, as you might expect. But a disturbing picture is emerging, and given the fairly dodgy reputation of American government officials to start with, it is not hard to believe that Edmonds, if anything, understates the scale of the dirty dealings going on between the United States and various regimes.
Would sharia law be preferable to the regime that our current ruling class has in store for us?
I just do not understand it. When Spain capitulated to attacks from Islamic fascists and elected a socialist government who promptly pulled its troops out of coalition operations… a policy we have been told by many that the USA and UK should follow in order to stop provoking the Islamists… that should have been the end of Spain’s non-Basque terrorist problems. Presumably the nice people from the Al Qaeda Global Franchise were utterly delighted by the developments in Spain and were certain to fulsomely reward this behaviour. After all, we are often assured by writers in both the mainstream media and paleo-conservative/paleo-libertarian circles that this is what governments in the West must do if we are ever to sooth Islamic sensibilities: we leave them alone and they will leave us alone, right?
Yet strangely, far from redirecting their efforts and assets to ply their ‘trade’ against the more active members of the coalition, Islamic militants continue to get arrested in ever so repentant Spain.
Gosh, one might almost think that leaving them alone is not enough! Surely some misunderstanding?
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has been in Tehran talking to the regime there about it’s nuclear program. He asked a few questions about Iran’s intentions. The response? We’ll get back to you- see you next month.
“We will try to solve all the outstanding questions by mid-February before Mohamed ElBaradei presents his report in March to the Board of Governors,” the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation Gholam Reza Aghazadeh told the ISNA news agency.
“We are hoping that all the past and present questions about our dossier will be solved and that we will return to a normal situation,” Mr Aghazadeh said.
If Iran’s intentions are within the parameters set by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, why will it take Iran a month to answer the IAEA’s questions?
The incident reported the other day of Iranian Pasdaran threatening the USN has produced an Iranian rebuttal of the US version of events.
Press TV said the video, released by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a day after the force dismissed the Pentagon video as fake, included a recording of what it said was the exchange between the two sides. Guards Brigadier General Ali Fadavi said Iran’s boats had only approached the US ships to examine the registration numbers as they had been unreadable, Press TV said.
My take on this? The incident probably did happen but from what I have read, unlike the Iranian regular navy and the army, the Pasdaran only has tenuous control over its own people, who are more or less by definition religious nutters. The incident in question may well have horrified the powers-that-be in Iran as much as folks in the west. If I am correct, the possibility of a war due to an incident that neither Tehran nor Washington wants is a very real one. Maybe a good time to have a few Crude Oil call options tucked away if you have some spare cash.
If you are not a regular reader of Michael Totten’s truly outstanding Middle East Journal (and why not?), I recommend his latest offering The Rings on Zarqawi’s Finger.
Michael is going to be able to dine out on this time in the Middle East for a very long time, methinks. Damn, I wish blogs were around in the 1990’s.
The latest antics by the Iranian Pasdaran in the Strait of Hormuz doing their damnedest to get the USN to fire on them has me a tad baffled. In this era of near omnipresent video footage, the chance of this being a questionable ‘Tonkin Gulf’ incident is greatly reduced (so please, if you have Bush Derangement Syndrome, resist the urge to comment), therefore it does seem like this was a real action by the Iranians… so presumably they are doing this for a reason rather than some desire to get themselves shot full of holes just for the hell of it. But what reason is that exactly? Or even approximately?
So what is the upside for Iran in this in military or political terms? This is not a question I have an answer for. If they actually want to start a war, all that will take is a single Silkworm missile launch, so what is this idiocy setting out to achieve? Also whilst the USN clearly showed commendable restraint, I am astonished that they did not fire on the Pasdaran boats given the descriptions of what they did and given recent memories of what happened to the USS Cole.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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