ADAMANT

Persian Counsels

Late last year, I took the Vice  President's Classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, since honored with the National Medal Of the Humanities along with such worthies as Louis Auchincloss,  to task for  an echt-Neocon National Review Online piece expressing the view that ,in my words

"the National Intelligence Estimate shows that Iran's inability to realize its nuclear ambitions is but one of the many fruits of our wise invasion of Mesopotamia. As presumably is Libya's failure to send a manned mission to Mars. The scholarly world awaits Hanson's magisterial essay demonstrating that Xerxes turned tail on learning of Athens threat to weaponize Democritus' atomic theory."

I am now reduced to cognitive dissonance by belatedly  reading his far more balanced, indeed Classical take on matters Oriental --

July 21, 2007
Bad Persians
Myth and reality in wars between East and West
by Victor Davis Hanson
Times Literary Supplement

The principal cause of my chagrin is his reminder that  the Ionian  seat of pre-Socratic thought , including the the physics of Anaxamiter  and Democritus  languished under Persian satrapy  even as the Parthenon was being erected. So I sincerely  hope  ( one can dream ) that  they read this issue of the TLS at the White House, because it  is way above NR's current pay grade.

Hit Or Myth

Top 10 Historical Figures Britons regard as Myths

1. Richard the Lionheart  – 47%
2. Winston Churchill – 23%
3. Florence Nightingale – 23%
4. General  Montgomery – 6%
5. Queen Boudicca - 5%
6. Sir Walter Raleigh – 4%
7. The Duke of Wellington - 4%
8. Cleopatra - 4%
9. Mahatma Gandhi – 3%
10 Charles Dickens - 3%

Top 10 Fictional  Characters Britons consider Real

• 1) King Arthur – 65%
• 2) Sherlock Holmes – 58%
• 3) Robin Hood – 51%
• 4) Eleanor Rigby – 47%
• 5) Sir Edmund Blackadder 37%
• 6) Dick Turpin – 34%
• 7) Captain Biggles  – 33%
• 8) The Three Musketeers – 17%
• 9) Lady Godiva – 12%
• 10) Robinson Crusoe- 5%

In addition, a 2001 BBC  poll found some two million people in the UK believed  Adolf Hitler  to be the  British Prime Minister who led the nation to victory in World War II, while ten million thought Oliver Cromwell was defeated at The Battle Of Hastings

Hearts And Minds

In November 2005 , a public opinion survey was conducted in Pakistan by Terror Free Tomorrow, with fieldwork by the leading Pakistani pollster, ACNielsen Pakistan. The poll surveyed 1,450 Pakistani adults with a margin of error of 2.6%. it found

• 73% of Pakistanis surveyed in November 2005  believed suicide terrorist attacks are never justified, an improvement over  46%  of those polled in May 2005
• Support for Osama Bin Laden also declined from 51% favorable in May 2005 to  33% in November), while the percentage  opposing  him rose over the same period from 23% to 41%. In the same year, US favorability among Pakistanis  doubled from 23% in May to more than 46%in November
• In November 2005, for the first time since 9/11, more Pakistanis had a  favorable view of  the United States than unfavorable.
• 78% of Pakistanis had a more favorable opinion of the United States because of the American response to the earthquake, with the strongest support among those under 35. and  even 79% of those with confidence in Bin Laden admitted  a more favorable view of the US because of American aid following the disastrous  earthquake that October
• 81% said that earthquake relief was important for them in forming their overall opinion of the United States , but nonetheless 64% of pakistanis pronounced themselves opposed to US efforts against terrorism .

Today the same organization announced the  results of random interviews this August with 1,044 Pakistanis across 105 urban and rural sampling points in all four provinces

It found bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating , higher than President Musharraf's  38 percent, while  President Bush's  approval rating is 9 percent. Only 4 percent approved of US motives in the War on Terror, with  74% opposed to  U.S. military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan.

After American relief efforts following the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan's Kashmir region, 46 percent of Pakistanis had a positive opinion of the United States, according to the poll. But as of last month, only 19 percent reported a favorable opinion.

 

Britain's Baliwood Bombers

Entropy and Growth At  Al Qaeda, Inc.

9-11 has proved a hard act to follow, as, it would seem, have the past bombings in  Bali, London and Madrid. The spectacular failure of the attack on Glasgow, and the foiled hit on one of London's largest multi-ethnic hot spots may say more about the perps ineptitude than Osama Bin Laden's future intentions.

The two-car fiasco in London at once reflects the Bali Bombing , and the success of the measures taken to prevent its repetition.  Nobody waltzes into a four-story  West End dance club (let alone  Annabels or Harry's Bar)  wearing a back-back anymore, obviating the  horrifically successful stratagem of using a small indoor explosion to drive a crowd into range of a vehicle bomb  waiting to explode outside. Two VBIED's might  defeat vigilant inspection on  club entry, but London's nightmare traffic makes pre-parking car bombs a risky business for the bombers. Both sides get points for Lessons Learned on this occasion, and  night club patrons a reminder that , witness the Coconut Grove fire  and the indoor fireworks holocaust in Rhode Island, their favored hangouts are often fire traps

Glasgow was something else. Having written at length on the technology of terror , I'm  struck by  the wrote ineptitude with which the Glasgow Airport attack was carried out. Hollywood deserves a lot of the blame for equating fireballs with wholesale carnage in the popular imagination, but while confinement  by building, bus or train car walls renders  exploding gas tanks lethal , out of doors  they are mostly  a spectacular nuisance.  Apart from one self-immolated perpetrator, Glasgow's only serious casualty was a broken leg inflicted by the careening SUV. The concrete bollards at the terminal entrance saved the day.

Bollywood may deserve a little backhanded credit  for universalizing the confusion of special effects and the praxis of terror. But beware distraction-- a slapstick warm-up customarily precedes a class act.

It takes years to train a structural engineer able to deconstruct something the size of the WTC. OBL's talent agency has had six in which to produce a successor to the late Dpl. Ing. Muhammad Al Atta.

Once Upon A Time In Kazakhstan

To most Americans , Central Asia means the Kazakh Never Never Land  of Sascha Cohen's alter ego. But Borat was shot on location in  Romania, while once upon a time , the real Kazakhstan was the Wild West of the Soviet Union-- vast, horsey, dusty, and above all heavily armed.  The Evil Empire ran its strategic  weapons programs  and its nuclear gulag side by side in Kazakh badlands , once home to literally thousands of tons of plutonium and weapons grade uranium.

But then, so were Nevada, New Mexico and Texas- so what ?.

The answer is that while the US government is still very much in charge of the former--and present-- nuclear weapons facilities in our none too wild west, The Kremlin cut loose  Kazakhstan and the half dozen other 'Stans hosting its arsenals  a generation ago. Much of the dangerously weaponizable content  of those far flung facilities were rounded up with considerable derring-do  in the first few years after the Soviet collapse.

Unfortunately , some few tons were not, for the Nunn-Lugar program that was supposed to amply fund the final clean-up petered out a decade ago.

So nobody really knows what was left behind on the reservation- in fact a collection of rust belt industrial complexes  , some heavily contaminated with nuclear waste, some of it weaponizable.  Nobody much cared  until recently-  and nobody seems to know  what the indigenous Islamic culture might dredge up if  the heavy money  that never materialized were to come out of Al Qaeda's still deep pockets instead of  ours. This is the subject of  formidable ex-CIA analyst Robert Scheuer's new essay If  enough people read it , it may not come true. 

This means you. Because unlike the producers of  24 , Scheuer has been in Bauer's  uncomfortable shoes. Neos who elect  to reject his message on Iraq because it appears  in The American Conservative will find no comfort in Foreign Affairs, just more on how our distraction from Afghanistan has brought undeserved comfort to Al Qaeda , and chaos to Islamabad.

The Prince Of The Marshes

Rory Stewart has changed his mind about Iraq

When I conversed with him last month here , shortly after his arrival in the States , he was still sanguine as to the effect of America "staying the course" - a sentiment that bore weight because of the depth of his British foreign service experience in Afghanistan, in 2002, and two years as Deputy Governor of the largely UK occupied area upstream of Basra - the province where the Marsh Arabs had been brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein .

He's still sanguine about Afghanistan, though our mutual friends in Medicins Sans Frontieres warn  French commandos working in collaboration with American special forces in Afghanistan since  2002 have retired the field , their commanders expressing concern that  things are drifting toward an  Iraq style debacle. They doubt Sarkozy will overrule them . Now, after a month here , and first hand encounters with the administration's friends and foes in Washington and elsewhere, Rory seems aligned with Gordon Brown's position- I suspect indeed that he may have helped redefine it.  Expect him to go far in British politics .

The Places In Between

Al Qaeda In Pakistan : Pharaoh's Children

Hearing Rory Stewart speak at Harvard's Eliot House library of his tribulations as British administrator of the  Iraq marshlands near Basra , and his  earlier travels in Afghanistan reminds me that President Pervez Musharraf's policy approach towards tackling the growing Afghan insurgent sanctuary in Pakistan's remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is faltering.  Rory wrote presciently of this in The Places In Between, his account of a walk across Afghanistan in 2002 accompanied only by his rather formidable dog.

The current Afghan border strategy oscillates between launching military operations and trying to engage pro-Taliban militants in the Tribal  Areas. Stewart observes that this seems to have needlessly amplified the tribes' mistrust of the central government's motives and increased their sense of alienation from Kabul.  Jane's April 2nd Foreign Report - http://frp.janes.com seems to confirm his judgement.

 

One reason is that “Jihadis returning from Iraq are far more capable than the mujahedeen who fought the Soviets ever were,” says  Robert Richer, CIA  associate director of operations from  2004  to 2005 . “They have been fighting the best military in the world, with the best technology and tactics.”

Al Qaeda's new  international stars include an Egyptian known as Abu Jihad al-Masri , Libyan explosives expert Atiyah Abd al-Rahman , Moroccan  Khalid Habib, and Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi,  a Kurd who served in Saddam Hussein’s

The Beginning Of His Tether

DARPA  R&D chief Tony Tether

Rarely speaks, lest the Other Side's soothsayers extract too much truth about what is over the black horizon waiting to whack them as the near future dawns.

Noah Schactman of Wired has thus done us a service by extracting an interview with the defense high tech development guru. I urge all to Read It  on his new Wired Danger Room blog

IN FROM THE WARM

The Nuclear Winter Meltdown, (see below) has given rise to a warm exchange with Eric Hundman of the Center for Defense Information : http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003108.html

When I have finished reading the second of the  new studies by Robock et al.  dealing with the injection of 5 teragrams or so of soot into model atmospheres  I may  draft a formal response to submit to the peer reviewed literature  in which they appeared. Right now, I'm waiting for the Harvard library system to awake from its customary two-week  Yuletide nap to review the refernces in the first.

It is no small irony that if one takes these papers , er, interesting, assumptions about the lifetime of and distribution of stratospheric aerosols to heart, one must take Paul Crutzen's proposal for using sulfate precursors to intervene in climate change very seriously indeed. On the other hand, in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm , Carl Sagan  predicted a global climatic impact from multiteragram soot emissions from the Kuwaiti petroleum fires on ABC News  Nightline. Sagan said smoke from the sooty holocaust would loft into the upper atmosphere and  disrupt the monsoons , creating a disasterous Asian famine. Others objected that instead of being  lofted by solar heating, the soot would be be washed out of the atmosphere by rainfall. Three days later, black rain began falling over Iran and a normal  monsoon season followed. Instead of a global catastophe, as modeled in 1983, and by Robock et al.

The image above  is the record of the limited spread of the real world smoke from the Kuwait holocaust : click to enlarge

Is there an Engineer in the House ?

At last count, Congress Assembled contains two physicists, two chemists, two biologists, one geologist, 234 lawyers and an astronaut, putting  the lawyers within striking distance of an absolute majority . No other profession approaches this 43.5% plurality, and under quorum rules only lawyers can construe, for they wrote them themselves, it usually constitutes a de facto majority.

Science has  a fierce anthropological identity, and like the law, a pecking order of its own. Lawyers did not invent Physics Envy --ask around academe and you will find any geologist worth his salt considers himself the equal of any 10 of his colleagues, and each of them will assert  that any oilfield hand is twice as good as a physics whiz, for without geophysics, physicists wouldn't have a planet to stand on.

Physicists in turn sniff that they are universally acknowledged to be worth 11 chemists each, for such was the ratio in the Manhattan Project. This cuts no mustard with biologists, who