Iran, Space Monkeys and The Pixies

I wanted to try something a little different with this post.  Perhaps it is the result of a few years spent as a DJ, but a lot of times when I see a story in the news, a song will pop into my head, a song that is usually related to the story in some odd way.  That was the case when I read this report about Iran's nascent space program and their successful attempt to launch a monkey into space. The song this conjured up was, of course, The Pixies “Monkey Gone To Heaven”.  So the idea of this post is to talk a little about the story and then a little about the song.

Space, The Final Frontier

With news from and about Iran dominated by that country's nuclear research program, the story of their space launch came as a bit of a surprise.  But Iran has ambitions to become a space-faring nation in their own right.  In 2009, Iran launched their first home-built satellite into orbit.  The Iranian government has stated that their goal is to launch a man into space by 2019, using domestically designed and produced equipment.

By comparison, the mission announced this past Sunday was quite modest – a capsule carrying a single monkey as a passenger was carried aloft by a Pishgam (or “Pilgrim”) missile to an altitude of 75 miles before returning to Earth.  In a good sign for Iran's future astronauts, their monkey passenger apparently survived the flight unharmed.

Though modest in scope – both the US and Soviet Union were doing this sort of thing more than 50 years ago - this mission passed a couple of important milestones for Iran: they crossed the threshold of space (typically defined as any altitude above 62 miles) and managed the G-forces encountered in descent well enough for their primate passenger to survive.  Since man too is a primate, the monkey's survival is indication that Iran has solved some of the basic technological problems associated with returning a manned-capsule safely to Earth.

But there was likely a subtext for Iran's monkey mission.  A rocket that can carry a capsule into space is also capable of carrying a warhead thousands of miles to an enemy's territory.  The United States slipped into a full-blown panic in 1957 after the Soviet Union successfully orbited the Sputnik satellite – not only had US pride been hurt by being beaten into space by the “Reds”, but it was also a clear indication that the Soviet Union now possessed ICBMs capable of reaching the United States.  In this time of high tensions with the US and Israel, a similar message could be drawn from this weekend's Iranian journey into space.

 

Monkey Gone To Heaven

 

From the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, The Pixies would become one of the bands that defined the college radio/alternative sound, at least before the genre was largely consumed by the Grunge scene out of Seattle, though The Pixies would influence that genre as well. They were a band that specialized in the sound that Nirvana's Kurt Cobain would describe as “quiet, then loud”.  The Pixies were aided in this expression by the smooth lead vocals of singer Black Francis (later Frank Black), with backing vocals by guitarist Kim Deal. They layered lyrics that often trended towards the bizarre over music that could range from light and melodic to crashing walls of sound – sometimes within the same song.

“Monkey Gone To Heaven” is an apt expression of this songwriting formula.  From the album Doolittle, the track is an example of The Pixies at their highest point as a band.  The lyrics of “Monkey Gone To Heaven” go off on explorations of environmentalism, religion and man's relationship with the divine - a relationship that Francis seems to believe the divine will get the worst of.  Early on, the song talks about Neptune, Roman god of the seas, being “killed by 10 million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey” (and as someone who grew up in NJ, I can totally see that happening).  In this respect, the conceit of the “monkey gone to heaven” is an indication of man's diminishment of the divine through the elevation of a primate - and keep in mind that man too is a primate – to the realm of the gods.

You have to wonder what Iran's ayatollahs would make of that?

Taliban Takes Stand In Favor Of Polio

According to news reports out of Pakistan, groups affiliated with the Taliban have killed several medical professionals working in remote villages on a vaccination program designed to eradicate polio. The Taliban countered that the vaccination program was actually a Western-designed plot to make their children sick, rather than to prevent illness, and that the whole medical effort was really a cover for covert military operations in these remote areas.

These are the exact same arguments made by the Taliban a few years earlier when they murdered other Pakistani medical professionals to halt an earlier polio eradication effort in 2006, an event outlined in Dominic Streatfeild’s book A History of the World Since 9/11.  In justifying their earlier attacks, the Taliban said that if a few children got ill or died from polio, it was “God's will” and a small price to pay to keep their region free of evil Western influences like, apparently, modern medical procedures.

But there is something more sinister at play here than merely the Taliban's religious-inspired paranoia, the vaccination efforts in these remote mountain villages are the last links in a chain of efforts to end polio, not just in Pakistan, but everywhere on the globe, forever. As explained in A History of the World Since 9/11, diseases can be wiped out if everyone carries an immunity to them – without new hosts, the diseases die. But for an eradication effort to work, everyone must get the vaccine.  Diseases have a stubborn tendency to hide out in remote corners of the world and humans have an annoying habit of not staying put. So, remote corners of the globe, like the AfPak border can be just the right place for a disease like polio to wait out a global eradication effort.

The Taliban's murder of the first group of medical professionals in 2006 meant that the first attempt to end polio failed; if these Taliban villages can't be vaccinated now, this latest effort will fail as well.

Of course the United States hasn't helped matters by using an earlier vaccination program as cover for an intelligence gathering operation around Abbottabad, the hiding place of Osama bin Laden, thus somewhat validating the Taliban's paranoia, and casting a pall over efforts like the current polio eradication program.

Red Dawn Redux: A Shaky Parable For Our Times

The Guardian has taken a first look at the trailer for the remake of the 1980's-vintage action flick Red Dawn, and it raises a few questions much deeper than you'd expect from a movie this vapid.

Just in case you're not up on your late Cold War cinema, the original Red Dawn was the story of a bunch of high school pals in rural Colorado turned guerrilla fighters after the Soviet Union, with an assist from Cuba, decided for some reason to invade the United States in 1985.  The 2012 remake pretty much sticks to the original script, swapping rural Washington state for Colorado and China for the now-defunct Soviet Union in the role of the antagonist.

Or maybe it is North Korea? As I wrote when the Red Dawn remake first went into production, the film's creative team pulled back from the logical substitution of China for the Soviet Union – possibly fearing a political backlash, a loss of Chinese distribution rights, or both – and instead substituted North Korea as the resident bad guys. Though the producers seem to have later decided that the idea North Korea, a nation of 25 million that struggles just to feed its own citizens, could stage a large-scale invasion of the United States stretches credibility too far even for a Hollywood action film (though Hollywood also recently decided that a movie version of Manimal is somehow credible), so now, according to The Guardian, the antagonists are from a “unidentified Asian” country.

Near the end of The Guardian's demolishing of the Red Dawn trailer, writer Stuart Heritage raises a good point: the original Red Dawn was released in the mid-1980s, at a time when the United States was offering moral and material support to the mujahadeen of Afghanistan as they tried to repel the mighty Red Army of the Soviet Union.  The original Red Dawn offered up a kinship to be drawn then between our plucky band of Colorado high schoolers and the scruffy Afghanis, who each took to the hills to fight the foreigners who invaded their lands.

Fast forward 27 years though and America's perception of Afghan insurgents has morphed from the heroic mujahadeen into the dastardly Taliban jihadi; the foreigners they fight are no longer the evil Soviets, but rather good red-blooded American boys and girls in uniform.  So while the new Red Dawn is still making the same visceral appeal to the audience to identify with the tragically over-matched band of fighters who want only to free their homeland from an invading foreign military force, the underlying role of the United States in the world has flipped – rather than supporting the insurgents on the sly as we did in the 1980s, we have become the invading heavies in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  In reality, Red Dawn is now asking us to emotionally identify with the very people fighting against American troops today. (If the producers of Red Dawn wanted to keep the emotional and subtextual consistency of the original, then instead of fighting, the high school kids in RD:Redux would join a local reconstruction team headed up by a government official from the unnamed Asian nation that might be North Korea).

It does beg the question of what exactly the producers of the Red Dawn remake were thinking in dredging up this largely forgotten bit of 80s pop culture? Why ask an American audience to identify with a band of local insurgents fighting against a vastly superior military power, when at that very same moment American troops are being attacked a half a world away by bands of local insurgents fighting against a vastly superior military power, which, in this case, just happens to be the United States.

Or maybe I am giving the Red Dawn producers too much credit for being able to make these intellectual connections in the first place. After all, their choice to play the All-American lead in this film was Chris Hemsworth, a British actor best known for playing a Norse god. 

Britain's Prince Harry, or Russia's Next Czar?

As the youngest son of the heir to the British throne, Prince Harry's prospects for ever becoming king are pretty remote, so if he's seeking the top title, Harry may want to consider exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky's proposal.  In one of the crazier political notions to come along in awhile, Berezovsky is, apparently seriously, suggesting that Harry be crowned the next Czar of Russia.

It is part of the platform of Berezovsky's new political party for Russia, the Resurrection Movement.  Among the Movement's other goals are the liberalization of Russia's immigration laws, reform of the legal system and transformation of Russia into a confederation of states.  And then there's the Prince (or Czar) Harry thing... Berezovsky explains that: “returning the monarchy to the throne will reinstate an interrupted chain of time and become a symbol of the rebirth of Russia,” while noting that Harry “has more Russian blood than the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II.”  Prince Harry's great grandmother was a member of Russia's Romanov dynasty – pictures from the era show that Czar Nicholas II shared an amazing likeness with Britain's King George V, his cousin.

Needless to say, this bizarre, amusing proposal will sadly never happen.   Berezovsky, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, said he will not even attempt to register the Resurrection Movement as an official political party in Russia so long as Putin is running the government.  Berezovsky himself relocated to London after getting on the wrong side of Putin.

Is Zimbabwe's Mugabe Dying?

According to a report in Monday's The Australian newspaper, Zimbabwe's controversial President Robert Mugabe may be dying in a hospital in Singapore from an undisclosed illness.  The paper goes on to suggest that the illness may be cancer, which has spread throughout his body.  According to one of the many diplomatic documents unearthed in the WikiLeaks data dump, Mugabe had previously battled prostate cancer in 2008.

The 88-year old leader was allegedly in Singapore to oversee his daughter's enrollment in a post-graduate program.  Again, according to The Australian, members of Mugabe's family have rushed to be at his bedside.

Zimbabwe has not known another leader since gaining its independence from Great Britain in 1980.  That leads analysts to predict that Zimbabwe may likely fall into chaos should Mugabe die, since he has not groomed a successor to take either the presidency or leadership of his ZANU-PF party.  Currently Mugabe's ZANU-PF is locked in an uneasy power-sharing agreement with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which was forged in the wake of the violently-contested 2008 presidential election.  After Mugabe lost the first round of voting to Tsvangirai, Mugabe's supporters launched a campaign of violence against the MDC that drove Tsvangirai out of the run-off election.  International pressure eventually forced the two men to share power.

In a troubling sign of what could happen following the death of Robert Mugabe, there are reports that he has tapped Defense Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa to fill-in for him should he die.  Mnangagwa has been loyal to Mugabe since the struggle to drive out the British.  Over the years Mnangagwa has earned a fearsome reputation and is believed to have been the leader behind the campaign of violence directed against MDC supporters in 2008.

Stalin: The Notebook

Apparently there's a new bestseller in Russian bookstores.  No, it's not a Russian knock-off of the Hunger Games series, but rather a humble school notebook with the image of former Soviet leader Josef Stalin emblazoned on the cover.  The book is part of a series called “Great Russians” meant to expose schoolchildren to noteworthy figures from Russia's history: Czars, composers, scientists and, apparently, Joe Stalin.

There is, of course, a controversy surrounding the notebook.  There are some who say that the heroic image of Stalin, dressed in a sharp military uniform with a chest full of medals, is nothing short of propaganda aimed at impressionable children and that it totally ignores the fact that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens; the creation of the gulag system and of a culture of fear that persisted after his death.  In response to numerous complaints, Russia's Education Minister Andrei Fursenko said that while he disapproves of the notebooks, he can't legally block their sale.

The counter-argument is that Stalin was a great leader, who managed, against all odds, to lead the Soviet Union through the Second World War (or Great Patriotic War as it is known in Russia) and oversaw the defeat of Nazi Germany.  Many Russians still regard Stalin's reign as the high-water mark for the power and prestige of the Soviet Union – which, perhaps, explains why most of the notebook sales are said to be to adults.  Artyom Belan, art director of the publishing house that put out the Great Russians series makes a point Stalin supporters often do: "If we do a series of great Russians, should we strike the 20th century from the list altogether?" Belan asked in an interview published by USA Today, in other words, since we can't ignore the fact that Stalin existed, we may as well celebrate his accomplishments.

But I can think of a better reason though not to include Josef Stalin in a series on “Great Russians”: he wasn't Russian.  Stalin was actually born in the Soviet republic of Georgia.

So Why Can't Iran Have The Bomb?

Let's cut to the chase on the whole mess surrounding Iran.  It is looking like a conflict in the Persian Gulf this spring/summer is becoming more of a possibility; the “crippling sanctions” the United States is trying to impose on Iran are leaky enough not to be “crippling”.  India, China and Turkey are all balking at joining in on the isolation, which means that Iran is unlikely to just give up on their nuclear research program.  That kicks the ball back into the court of the US/Israel, both of whom have insisted that Iran not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, and leaves US and Israeli leaders with two options: back down or follow through on their threats of military action.

 
The spectre of Iran with a nuclear weapon is driving the march to war, but what does Iran having a nuclear weapon really mean?  So far there are several arguments as to why this is such a terrible idea that war would be necessary to prevent it, but taking a look at each argument shows that they are all fairly weak.  Here they are, in no particular order:

A nuclear Iran is a threat to the United States.  Not really.  Consider that if Iran were to tomorrow announce that they had successfully built a nuclear bomb, the US arsenal would outmatch theirs by a factor of about 3,000-1.  Even if Iran would decide to use this weapon and could deliver it to the United States (a big if), it would be a devastating attack, but not one that would destroy the country, not even close.  Of course it would ensure a retaliatory strike that would destroy Iran.  No country is suicidal, therefore this is not a real threat.

Iran might give the bomb to terrorists!  It is an idea that makes for a great spy thriller, but one that makes no sense in real life.  Do we really think Iran would spend billions of dollars, decades of research and turn themselves into a “rogue state” (at least according to the US) in pursuit of a nuclear bomb, only to give it to a terrorist?  It makes no sense.  Besides, if you want to worry about terrorists getting a bomb, then worry about them stealing one from Pakistan, where nuclear security is particularly weak, or buying one outright from North Korea.

The nuclear dominoes will fall.  Saudi Arabia has said publicly that if Iran gets the bomb, they may be compelled to embark on their own nuclear weapons program.  Of course the Saudis say a lot of things and in the past have threatened to start working on a bomb in response to Israel's nuclear arsenal, but never have.  And even if the Saudis do start work on their own bomb, who will that be a threat to besides Iran?

A nuclear Iran is a threat to Israel.  We're at least getting to the semi-plausible reasons here.  Israel is a much smaller country that the United States, so a much smaller nuclear strike could be devastating to them.  But the Israelis are keenly aware of this and will have prepared a second-strike capability (the ability to retaliate if hit without warning).  Israel's nuclear arsenal is somewhere between 200-400 weapons, meaning that they could likely hurt Iran a lot worse than Iran could hurt them, which makes an Iranian first strike highly unlikely.

That leaves us with something I'll call the Yom Kippur Scenario.  In 1973 Israel fought its last great war when a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.  Part of the Arab motivation was revenge for the solid defeat they had suffered in 1967 during the Six-Day War.  The Yom Kippur War started badly for the Israelis, for awhile it seemed as though the Arab forces might be victorious, before Israel rallied and pushed the Arabs back crossing into both Egypt and Syria in the process.

Israel has never forgotten this lesson.  The Israeli nuclear arsenal is to ensure that such a scenario does not again occur.  Basically, if there were to be a repeat of the Yom Kippur War, and if this time Israel were about to be defeated by a coalition of Arab states, they could use their nuclear arsenal to devastate the lands of their attackers, giving the Arabs a true Pyrrhic Victory.  Israel has made this intention clear to their Arab neighbors, and it is an effective deterrent - so long as no one else in the neighborhood has their own nuclear arsenal.  Iranian bombs, and the ability to deliver them, changes this equation, and robs Israel of this deterrent.

Of course a second Yom Kippur War is highly unlikely.  Israel has had calm, if not cordial, relationships with their neighbors for 40 years now.  The Israeli military is by far the most powerful and most capable in the region, since the militaries of most of their neighbors are designed to suppress domestic unrest rather than to campaign beyond their borders.  Yet this is the real motivation for the current standoff with Iran: to prevent a challenge to Israel's military hegemony in the region.

But is this justification for a conflict that will cause upheaval across the region and be a severe blow to an already shaky global economy?  That is the question that we should be discussing. 

Putin's Judo Tumble

When you think about it, it is amazing how the most mundane events can lead to a regime's downfall.  For example, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not to mention the start of World War I, came about when the car carrying Archduke Ferdinand made a wrong turn.  It's just as possible that one day the end of the regime of Vladimir Putin in Russia will be traced to his mundane decision to attend a mixed martial arts event in Moscow last autumn.

That is part of the takeaway from this piece by the website Russiaprofile on Putin's reelection strategy ahead of March's presidential elections.  The article talks about the “Olympiysky Effect,” which refers to the MMA match in question.  Putin, whose love of martial arts is well-known, decided to talk to the winning Russian fighter in the ring following the end of the main event at Moscow's Olympiysky Arena.  Russia's state-run television dutifully covered the Boss speaking from the center of the ring, what no one expected were the cascade of boos that came down from the 20,000 in attendance.  In one fell swoop the mystique of Putin as the beloved alpha-male/man of the people had been shattered.  The Kremlin later tried to spin the boos, which went out live to a national audience, as being directed at the defeated American fighter Jeff Monson, who they said chose Putin's speech as the time to make his off-camera exit from the ring.  Web-savvy Russians responded by flooding Monson's Facebook page with messages of support and saying that no, the boos were in fact directed at Putin.

It is hard to imagine that without this public puncturing of the Putin popularity balloon the massive street protests following the apparently fixed December parliamentary elections would have occurred, or even if they had, that they would have drawn the tens of thousands of protesters from across the demographic spectrum that they did, rather than just the few hundred leftist intellectuals such protests previously drew.  According to Russian polling firm VtiSOM, Putin is now the choice of just 48% of Russians in March's presidential elections.  If these numbers were to hold, that would mean Putin would likely have to face Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Communist Party, and current number two candidate in a runoff election; quite a step down for a man whose popularity regularly measured in the 70%'s not too long ago.  

It is likely that, by hook or by crook, Putin will once again be Russia’s President, it is just as unlikely now, that Putin will spend the next twelve years in office filling out his constitutionally-approved two additional terms in office as was once the plan, and it all started with some booing one night in Moscow.

Shepherds and Settlements

Humble shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem play an important role in the Christmas story.  But ask one of the remaining Christian shepherds tending their flocks in modern-day Israel the line from the famous Christmas carol about what they see and the reply is likely to be not a star, but a settlement wall.

The BBC reports this holiday season, that the shepherds tending their flocks near Bethlehem are saying their age-old way of life could soon be coming to an end, thanks to the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.  Israel has been expanding their massive housing developments - illegally built on Palestinian land, the BBC notes - in recent years.  But security walls surrounding the settlements have cut shepherds off from many of their prime grazing lands, while the settlements themselves draw massive amounts of water from already marginal reserves in the arid region, leaving little behind for the shepherd's flocks of sheep.  The result is that many of the current generation of shepherds are likely to be the last – their children don't want to go into an already difficult line of work, work now made nearly impossible thanks to the Israeli settlements.

Consider this – Israeli policies towards the West Bank and Gaza are staunchly supported by Conservative Christians in America, yet those very policies are now working to end a traditional way of life for a group of Christians that dates directly back to the time of Jesus.  As Homer Simpson once said: “think about the irony...”

Bald Man's Comb Redux

The brief 1981 war between Great Britain and Argentina over possession of the Falkland Islands, a pair of rocky, windswept pieces of land in the stormy South Atlantic that are home to more sheep than humans, was once famously compared to two bald men fighting over a comb.  It seems like at least one of the bald men is up to his old tricks again.

Earlier this month, Argentine patrol vessels boarded and detained 12 Spanish fishing vessels off the Falklands as part of what Argentina contends is a “legal” blockade of their islands (Las Malvinas, to the Argentines), which are currently being illegally occupied by the British, stating that the Falklands, along with the even more remote South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands are a “integral part of Argentine territory.”.  The Spanish replied by saying that they had legally-issued fishing permits from the government of the Falklands and contested the legality of Argentina's boarding.

Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner though is unbowed, slamming the British for “occupying” Las Malvinas, and recently calling Great Britain a “crude colonial power in decline.”  Her comments and the boarding of the Spanish vessels have brought a stinging rebuke from British foreign policy analyst, and frequent American TV pundit Nile Gardiner.  Nile typically provides a hawkish, right-wing point-of-view (no surprise since he is also the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center at the Heritage Foundation), so perhaps it’s no surprise that his suggested reply to Pres. Kirchner is for Great Britain to go in guns a-blazing.  Gardiner says that the boarding of the Spanish vessels, licensed by the government of the Falklands to fish in their waters, should be regarded as “an act of war” and that the British should dispatch an infantry brigade, Typhoon warplanes and an attack submarine to the Falklands immediately, lest Argentina “strangle the Islands economically.”

Argentina raises the issue of sovereignty over the Falklands/Malvinas periodically; critics have charged that Pres. Kirchner uses the nationalistic fervor over the Islands to drown out critics of her domestic policies, particularly her economic ones.  Complicated the matter at the moment though is the fact that Prince William is due to be stationed in the Falklands next year as part of his tour of duty with the Royal Air Force – it is hard to imagine that the Brits would want to send the likely savior of the royal family into harms way, of course not sending him could send a message to Kirchner that maybe the British aren't all that serious about the Falklands after all...  Still, it is hard to imagine that Kirchner would want to do anything to put her country in a position of actually getting into another shooting war with Great Britain, considering how badly Argentina lost the first one and that the Argentine military really hasn't gotten much better since.

 

The whole sovereignty issue is a murky one since neither Great Britain nor Argentina have a particularly strong claim to the Falklands/Malvinas.  Typically, the preferred way a case like this would be solved is with a referendum among the disputed territory's residents, allowing them the right of self-determination.  But Argentina has steadfastly opposed this option since almost all of the Falklands 3,000 residents are of British ancestry and would surely vote for union with Queen and country, thus losing the Falklands as a nationalistic talking point for Argentine politicians for good. 

British PM Backs Key Aide

It has all the makings of a juicy political scandal – accusations that a key member of the prime minister's staff is neglecting his duties to cavort with a member of the opposite sex; while the PM issues a statement in support of his aide and their history of service.  This little scenario is actually happening right now in Great Britain.  Of course what makes this story odd is that the aide in question is a cat.

Larry, a four-year old cat rescued from a London animal shelter is the official cat of Prime Minister David Cameron's number 10 Downing Street residence.  Downing Street actually has a long history of having cats-in-residence to deal with any rodents who might happen into the PM's residence.  Larry himself was brought in four months ago after a rat could be seen scurrying in the background during a stand-up shot outside Downing Street during a press briefing Cameron held.  But according to the GlobalPost, after racking up three mouse kills in the early days of his residency, Larry's interest in mousing has fallen off, just as, according to the infamous “unnamed aides” always cited in pieces like these, his interest in a neighboring female tabby has increased.

On Monday a Downing Street spokesperson ruled out returning Larry to the pound saying that “Larry brings a lot of pleasure to a lot of people.” 

Which Way To Mars?

Shooting a rocket across 100 million miles of empty space is about as daunting a task as it sounds, a fact the Russian space program is once again learning.  Russia's first interplanetary space mission in over a decade is currently stuck in orbit around Earth, with its prospects of heading off to Mars looking increasingly dim.

Phobos-Grunt is an audacious mission, a decade in planning.  If all goes according to plan, the Russians will land a probe not on Mars itself, but on one of Mars' two moons, Phobos.  There it will scoop up a sample of soil (“grunt” in Russian) which it will return to Earth.  For good measure, a small Chinese satellite is also hitching a ride, to spend two years orbiting the Red Planet.  That is if all goes according to plan, which sadly so far it is not.  Phobos-Grunt lifted off perfectly from Kazakhstan on Tuesday, but problems started about 11 minutes into the mission when the main rocket that would propel the mission to Mars failed to ignite, leaving Phobos-Grunt circling the wrong planet.  One theory is that the probe failed to detect the stars it would use to align itself for Mars, and rather than rocketing off into space, the probe went into a safe mode. 

Russian controllers are currently scrambling to get Phobos-Grunt pointed towards Mars to fire off its engine before the rocket's batteries die, which could occur in a few days.  The task is not impossible, but it does require the controllers to remotely override Phobos-Grunt's programming and get the rocket pointed in the right direction.  If they can't accomplish their task, Phobos-Grunt will go down as another in a long string of failed Martian missions that includes Mars 96, Russia's last interplanetary mission, and a NASA mission that slammed into Mars when NASA controllers failed to convert a key command from miles to kilometers.  And, according to former NASA scientist and space analyst James Oberg on MSNBC, if Russian controllers fail to send Phobos-Grunt to Mars, it could also become the most  dangerous piece of space junk ever.  The booster rocket currently contains seven tons of toxic fuel, which could survive Phobos-Grunt's re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

Ironic since Phobos is Latin for “fear”.  

Libya's Tuna Poachers

It seems like there's an unexpected casualty in the Libyan civil war: bluefin tuna.  According to a report by the BBC, fishing fleets allegedly took advantage of the months of chaotic fighting that led up to the fall of the Gadhafi regime to plunder tuna stocks within Libyan waters.  Bluefin tuna are a critically-threatened species, and the Mediterranean Sea is one of their spawning grounds, so catches of wild tuna are strictly regulated.  But plotting data from ICCAT - the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (yes, there is such a group) - shows that an unusually large number of fishing trawlers sailed into Libyan waters during the spring and summer of this year.  Normally Libya's navy would patrol their waters and keep out any poachers, but the Libyan navy was blockaded in port by NATO naval forces, leaving Libyan waters otherwise unprotected.

There's a strange irony at work here.  Many of the feared pirates of Somalia claim to have once been honest fishermen.  But, they say, that industrial fishing fleets from Europe and Asia took advantage of the collapse of Somalia's national government in 1991to scouring the fishing grounds off the Somali coast, leaving little for the largely subsistence-level Somali fishermen to catch.  Some of the pirates have even said that they consider themselves to be Somalia's de facto coast guard, seizing ships that are illegally operating in Somali waters since there is no federal government to enforce the law.  Just to bring this full circle, it is also worth noting that the United States' first foreign military campaign was fighting the pirates of the Barbary Coast (which includes present-day Libya) who preyed on American merchant ships at the dawn of the 19^th century.

Of course it is doubtful that Libya will sink into a Somali-like state of lawlessness that would allow for a new generation of Barbary pirates, but the tuna-poaching shows that securing their territorial waters will be yet another unexpected challenge for Libya's new rulers.

Iran And The Bomb

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is set to release a report that supposedly will show that Iran is much farther along in their pursuit of an atomic weapon than previously believed. Add to that the noticeable increase in anti-Iranian rhetoric in the op-ed pages, rumors of a mock Israeli attack on a NATO base as part of training for a long-range bombing mission and last month's botched (and highly suspicious) assassination attempt by Iranian agents against the Saudi ambassador in Washington DC and you can see that the war drums are clearly starting to beat for Iran.

For their part, the official Iranian line is that they have no active nuclear weapons program. According to details from the IAEA report, this may be technically true. The “smoking gun” in the IAEA report is a claim that Iran has designed and perhaps tested an explosive (though non-nuclear) triggering device necessary for an atomic weapon to work. It seems then, while not actually trying to build a bomb per se, the Iranians are trying to design and build all the parts so that if at a point in the future they wanted a nuke, they could quickly pull one together.

You have to ask though, why wouldn't Iran try to build their own nuclear bomb? Let's look at some of the major foreign policy actions of the new millennium: the United States assembled a coalition in 2003 to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, while this year a US/NATO coalition used a proxy force of Libyan rebels to depose (and ultimately murder) Moammar Gadhafi. Meanwhile, Kim Jong-il continues to rule North Korea despite defying numerous sanctions from the United Nations and “international community” and after launching several outright military attacks against his South Korean neighbors; yet no one seriously talks about putting together a coalition to oust the Kim regime. What's the biggest difference between Kim, Hussein and Gadhafi? Kim has nukes, while the other two did not.

It's become clear that the best way to keep the international community out of your business is to set off a test nuclear device or two. Now look at Iran. They are almost completely surrounded by neighbors who host either large numbers of US troops, major American military installations or both: Afghanistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iraq (though that one, at least, will change by year's end). And the Iranians remember, even if Americans do not, that the United States overthrew their democratically-chosen government in 1953 and reinstalled the Shah, whose brutal regime the US then helped to keep in power for the next 26 years. So, if your country is nearly surrounded by armed forces from the country who once overthrew your leader to install a regime more friendly to their interests – why wouldn't you take every step imaginable to protect yourself, including trying to make, or at least gain the knowledge to make, a nuclear weapon, when that device has proven to be the one thing that will stop this foreign power from meddling in your internal affairs?

Something to think about as the war drums beat.

America and 9/11

In my latest post over at The Mantle, I take a look at America's reaction to the 9/11 attacks ten years later. You often hear it said that the attacks “changed everything”, but did they really? And do Americans have an unhealthy obsession with wallowing in the tragedy of the attacks? Surf on over to The Mantle to read my views.

A Libyan Von Steuben?

The speed of the Libyan rebels charge into Tripoli on Sunday seemed to take even them by surprise. On Saturday rebel spokesmen announced that with the capital surrounded on three sides and with their forces less than 20 miles from the city center, a final assault would begin within days. Less than a day later, rebel forces were in Green Square, the plaza at the center of Tripoli that Moammar Gadhafi had used for so many photo-ops. Two of Gadhafi's sons had been captured by rebel forces, though The Man himself was still at-large as of Monday morning. It's difficult to imagine a Libya without Gadhafi, the strange Colonel has been the leader of Libya my entire life, and then some. But it is impossible to imagine him clinging to power now – rumors are circulating that he has already fled the country, perhaps to neighboring Algeria or Chad.

It has been quite a reversal for Gadhafi and for the Libyan rebels as well, who until recently, quite frankly, were a fairly inept fighting force, often winning ground one day and losing it the next. That's not meant to be an insult to the rebel fighters, but more a nod to the fact that they were not professional soldiers, but rather students, office workers and tradesmen who found themselves thrown into a war. It reminded me of another collection of citizen-soldiers, the American Colonial Army. Like the Libyans, they were a collection of average men who found themselves thrown into combat, and like the Libyans, they were initially awful at it. That is until a man named Friedrich von Steuben showed up at the American encampment at Valley Forge. While largely forgotten to history, and overshadowed by Revolution-era icons like George Washington, Von Steuben deserves at least some of the credit for winning the American Revolution.

Von Steuben presented himself to the Colonial leadership as a Prussian nobleman. He almost certainly oversold his own credentials, but Von Steuben had been trained by the Prussian military, one of the finest fighting forces in Europe. Von Steuben set about teaching the ragtag collection of farmers and merchants gathered at Valley Forge the basics of soldiering, drilling basic military concepts into them during the course of the winter. A proper Colonial Army would emerge from Valley Forge, one capable of finally standing up in battle against the British, thanks to the efforts of Von Steuben.

The sudden recent success of the Libyan rebels makes me think that they had their own Von Steuben somewhere; perhaps it was thanks to the efforts of NATO advisers, or officers who defected from Gadhafi's military, perhaps we'll never know. But somehow the Libyan rebels were able to turn themselves from a collection of amateur into an effective fighting force, and now the reign of one of the world's longest-ruling dictators appears to be at an end.

The Maestro?

With the twin economic events of the S&P credit downgrade and Monday's stock market plunge dominating the news, it seems like every financial analyst, economics professor and business journalist able to put together a coherent sentence has appeared on some television channel during these past few days. So it should be no surprise that the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, joined the televised economic chorus. What is surprising though is what he offered by way of commentary. Greenspan contends that the S&P downgrade of America's creditworthiness was not necessary since America would never default on its debt obligations because the country can always “print more money”.

What Greenspan said is technically true, the government can just keep the printing presses at the Mint running 24/7, and this is a great financial strategy – if you want to end up like Zimbabwe. In modern global economics, currency is not back by tangible assets like gold and silver, but rather by perceptions of its worth. A US dollar is worth a dollar because that is what people perceive its buying power to be. If you follow Greenspan's advice and just print more dollars, you're not doing anything to intrinsically increase the dollar's worth, you're just putting more of them out there. And a fundamental law of economics is that when supply increases, the value of a given commodity drops. So if the guy at the corner deli knows you suddenly have more money in your pocket because the government has magically made more currency, that one dollar pack of gum will quickly become a two dollar pack of gum. Your buying power as a consumer has not increased because you have more money in your pocket, it has actually decreased.

This was the situation faced by folks in Zimbabwe. The government of Robert Mugabe reacted to a financial crisis by printing more Zimbabwean dollars. The market reacted by immediately devaluing those dollars, which prompted a response by the government to simply print more dollars, and so on and so on until you wound up with this:



Despite all the zeros, at the height of Zimbabwe's financial crisis, that bill wouldn't even cover your bus fare across Harare. Again, it is simple economics, which is why it was so disturbing to hear the man who once had so much control over the nation's economy that he was dubbed “The Maestro” put forward such a dumb economic idea. Though on second thought, perhaps it helps to explain the mess that we currently find ourselves in...

Nixon's Unmade Speech

In case you were unaware, today happens to be the 42nd anniversary of men landing on the moon. Human history changed forever once Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on our celestial neighbor, but despite a decade of planning, training and testing there were no guarantees that the mission would be a success. In fact, there was more than a little concern that the engine on the lunar module might fail to ignite – after all, blasting men off from the surface of another world was something that had never been tried before – marooning Armstrong and Aldrin forever. The possibility was considered so real that a speech was prepared for just such an occurrence for President Nixon to read to the nation. “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace...” went the first line of the speech Nixon thankfully never had to give. The Los Angeles Times has the rest of the text of the speech and more about this forgotten bit of American history over at their website today.

Secret Pirate Island

Just when I was thinking that I hadn't written about the Somali pirates in awhile, two news stories cross the wires and that all changes.

The first is a detailed account from Reuters that pirates from Somalia are taking advantage of the chaos surrounding the months-long ongoing revolution in Yemen to turn an island off their coast into a secret pirate lair. It shouldn't be a surprise: The island of Socotra – smack in the middle of the Gulf of Aden and on the sea-lane approaches to the Red Sea and Suez Canal – has for centuries been a hideout for Arab pirates plying these waters; for their part, Somali pirates have become masters at exploiting holes in security to enable their operations. According to Reuters, Somali pirates have turned Socotra into a refueling depot for their missions, taking advantage of the Yemeni military's being distracted by the unrest roiling their country as people continue to protest in an effort to unseat the very unpopular President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is currently recovering from an assassination attempt in Saudi Arabia. In fact, there are some indications that Somali pirates are simply bribing the Yemeni garrison on Socotra to look the other way while they conduct their pirate missions.

The use of Socotra is part of a shift in tactics by the Somalis. When the world first started paying attention to the problem of Somali piracy, many of the attacks occurred near the coast of Somalia. But as a loose coalition of the world's navies started patrolling off the coast and merchant ships started sailing further out to sea, the pirates too adapted. Most attacks now come not from small motorboats sailing from the Somali coast, but rather from speedboats launched from “motherships” - typically a captured fishing trawler or small freighter. But ships of this size burn a lot more fuel than a speedboat, which appears to be how Socotra fits into the picture. By refueling at Socotra, 150 miles out to sea, the pirates' range is drastically increased, allowing them to attack ships far out in the Indian Ocean.

And speaking of burning, that brings us to pirate story #2. Bloomberg is reporting that a large oil tanker is now burning off the coast of Yemen, thanks to a failed pirate attack. The 900-foot, China-bound Brillante Virtuoso was reported adrift and ablaze on Wednesday following an apparently failed pirate attack. The tanker was not said to be at risk of sinking, exploding or leaking since the fire was located in the accommodation block – the building-like structure on deck where the crew lives. The fire did force the crew to abandon ship, they were later rescued by a UN Navy destroyer and the Brillante Virtuoso put under tow, headed for Yemen. It is unclear at this point whether the ship accidentally caught fire during the attack or if the pirates deliberately set the ship ablaze when it appeared that they would not be able to capture it.

According to the London-based International Maritime Bureau, the average ransom payment paid out for the release of a captured ship last year was $5.4 million, making piracy a very lucrative business.

Sister Sarah's Stalinist Supporters

By now you've probably heard about Sarah Palin's recent gaff regarding Paul Revere. During her family trip across the eastern United States, complete with campaign-style bus and media phalanx, Palin alleged that the famous midnight ride of Paul Revere was to warn the British not to try to take away our guns, rather than the actual purpose of warning his fellow rebellious colonists about the landing of British troops. Whether this was a sly attempt to pander to Nativist and Second Amendment advocates within her political base or simply an example of her stunning lack of knowledge of American history, we'll never know; but being Sarah Palin means never having to say you're wrong, in the following days Palin asserted her word salad version of history was the correct one.

So too did her online supporters, and here's where the irony kicks in. Palin supporters went onto the publicly-editable online dictionary Wikipedia and attempted to change the entry on Paul Revere to comport with the facts of Palin's story. It's ironic since Palin is quick to invoke charges of “Socialism” against the Obama administration for practically any policy move she disagrees with, yet the adjustment of history to support the political situation of the present was a hallmark of the one-time leader of the Socialist world, the Soviet Union. And no one practiced this tactic better than Josef Stalin.

Stalin started his own modification of the past early, blending photos to produce an image of him with the Father of the Soviet Revolution, V. I. Lenin as a way to polish his bona fides shortly after taking power. The tactic would continue on for decades: generals, ministers and cosmonauts who fell out of favor would quickly be edited out of official photographs, even ones that had been reproduced many times in the Soviet media. Sergei? Sergei who? There's no Sergei in this photo... Palin's supporters tried the same tactic with Wikipedia, attempting to edit the Paul Revere entry to state that he did ride to tell the Brits to keep their hands off our guns. And in a move that would make today's last Stalinist leader, North Korea's Kim Jong-il blush, they linked back to media reports of Palin making her Paul Revere statement as “proof” of its own historical accuracy.

It's a disturbing story on a few levels: first that Palin has such hubris she can't admit that she misspoke and move on, two that there are people who so value personality above someone who actually knows what their talking about that their willing to overlook any historical gaffes to support this person to be the leader of the nation, and finally that an online resource that has become the go-to site for many for historical reference can be so easily manipulated to fit the political will of the day. Maybe its time to go back to the old-fashioned bound sets of encyclopedias, and actually learning facts...