Iran's New Toys: Missile Silos!

  The Middle East sure is a fun zone these days. At least for those of us who derive a certain schadenfreude from watching the world burn. "The best laid plans of mice and men..." and all that jazz. But apart from the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria which are all Sunni Arab based, we tend to forget about that old faultline in Islam that Iran represents; the Shia. Iran, as the champion of this particular branch of skygod worship, wants to become a regional force in the Middle East and why wouldn't they? They're sitting on an ocean of oil and natural gas and have a population of 72 million. Tehran has tree lined boulevards and it's an hours drive to ski resorts from downtown. Mobile phone ownership per capita is higher than some euro countries. Problem is, the country is a theocracy run by a doomsday religious cult. And they're losing a war against their own young people which makes them extra twitchy.


 There's nothing this Iranian theocracy likes more, other than attempting to attain regional theater parity with the Israelis on the nuke front, than trolling the same Israelis and the US with the possibility that they might have some new toys to play around with in their sandbox. Sure, the toys they'd really like to have would be some actual nukes or, barring those, a few batteries of the Russian S-300 missile system that would make any US/Israeli air campaign against Natanz orders of magnitude more difficult. But the Iranians already did have a bunch of S-300s bought and paid for until the Israelis found out about the deal last year and shat all over it before the system was delivered, scuttling the Iranian's defense gasm with some diplomatic pressure and a snarly phone call to the Russians from Hillary Clinton. The Russians just shrugged and kept the money which sure pissed the Iranians off mightily. But that's par for the course in the sleazy world of international arms deals these days. I still wonder what kind of pressure the Israelis put on the Russians not to sell the Iranians that SAM system but then again, Israel has a sizable Russian population, so I'm sure there were plenty of phone numbers to speed dial in Mossad's little black book.

   The first Iranian nuke underground test is still years away. The US and Israel made sure of that when they deployed the Stuxnet computer worm against Iran's shitty computer system earlier this year. That sure was a kick in the nuts to Iran's nuclear ambitions and has delayed them by at least an extra year and barring a North Korean document dump, it'll be at least 2015 before there's a Shia nuke and the "big red button of win" ends up on the Ayatollah's desk. As I've said before, an Israeli air strike on Iran's nuke facilities would be the ultimate popcorn war but the Israelis found a cheaper way to delay that program. They basically hacked the Matrix and 'uploaded a virus' into the Iranian's 'Pentium II" that blue screened them hard and now they have to go and buy a whole new computer non Windows based system. This plan sure worked out a lot cheaper for everyone than a bombing mission.

   But the Iranians are still pissed.

   And looking for ways to piss off the West.

   It looks like they found a new way this week. The State News Agency just reported on 10 days of Iranian war games called ''Great Prophet 6" (apparently the first 5 prophets were just mediocre) and splashed some dick waving pics of their brand new 'missile silos', large holes in the desert that can withstand an airburst and chuck a Shahab 3 (range 1200 miles) back at Israel or US bases in the Gulf in the event of an  air strike on Iran. Thing is, missile silos, while nice and all, are primarily defensive weapons that hark back to the '80s and the heady days of the Cold War and Defcon 5. Obsolete in some ways, a lot of silos in the US have been converted into post apocalyptic survival shelters where rich Wall Street types can buy a berth and sit back after civilization implodes (any day now surely) while the rest of us plebs massacre each other for the last can of chicken soup in the looted Seven Eleven. Some Iranian colonel went on Iranian State TV and stated that the silos "function as a swift reaction unit" meaning the missiles are always in a vertical position with the co-ordinates of Tel Aviv locked in. That is, of course, if Stuxnet hasn't fucked with them too and makes the Kebab 3s U turn back to Tehran soon after launch.


   But that right there is the purpose of these missile silos. To show the US and Israel that if Iran gets bombed, no matter what, we Iranians are going to get to launch at least one reciprocal strike and you don't know where those missiles will go. Could be Tel Aviv. Could be Saudi Oil terminals. Could be US bases. The point is they can make an attack on Iran costly and the outcomes unpredictable. Not least for the global economy which is basically the "oil" economy.

   Right now, the location of these silos is obviously secret (Abriz and Khorramabad in northwest Iran) but I'm sure any prospective US air attack on Iran will first involve a quick Pentagon scan of Google Earth to find them. In a world where you've got satellites that can read your golf ball from space, hiding stuff these days is tricky. Still, this is an advance from an Iranian point of view. Previous iterations of the Shahab 3, a liquid fueled piece of Iranian tech that can hit Tel Aviv, were all mounted atop dodgy looking mobile platforms with dozens of wheels that looked like something from Gerry Anderson's '60s era kids TV series "Thunderbirds". Another unidentified Iranian officer told state television that “only a few countries in the world possess the technology to construct underground missile silos. The technology required for that is no less complicated than building the missile itself.” That's a bit of a fucking stretch. I mean any country with a decent subway system is already half way there and that just leaves a few technical issues like venting the propellant gasses, rolling open the blast doors and on which floor to stash Dr Strangelove's wheelchair.  

  

May or may not be a pic of Iran's silo loaded with a Shish Kebab 3

   

   The Iranians really would like to up the ante as a regional player in the Middle East. It really pissed them off in April when the Saudis marched into Bahrain with tanks and started slapping around the Shia protestors there because they make up 60% of the population and suddenly wondered why they can't vote. That's a legitimate beef but went largely unreported in Western countries where it pays to keep your mouth shut about the Saudi's incase they tighten the nozzle on the oil wells to remind everyone whose boss. That would hamper the "economic recovery". Those Sunni Arabs sure do suck up to the Zionists and the US from an Iranian point of view.  The nut job theocracy in Iran wishes for the days when Babylon had Hanging Gardens and streetlighting and everyone feared their elite unit, the Immortals. The only way the Iranians feel they are gonna get some respect these days is if they can slap a nuke together, nukes being the modern elite unit. It's pretty funny the way they keep denying they want one, conducting numerous "talks" to stall the Euros and Turks and Russians with bullshit while sending a bunch of dipshit diplomats to act innocent in front of the world's TV cameras and swear on their momma's burka that they have absolutely no interest in the 'big one' but instead just want a little taste of nuclear fission for electricity generation and 'medical purposes'.

   Still, you could forgive Iran for wanting a nuke.

   The Iranians have noticed that when you get named a member country of the "Axis of Evil" possibly the best way to maintain sovereignty is to fast track some uranium into something blowable. It worked for North Korea. Iran figures, since it's surrounded on all sides by Americans, maybe the only route to autonomy and stopping the Americans grabbing your oil is a nuke. Another thing a Persian big one will do, is stop the Sunni's acting against Iranian proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria (assuming Assad manages to massacre enough people to stay in power). Pulling those under an Iranian nuke umbrella would sure tip the balance of power in the Mid East to the Shia and have the Saudi's racing to get their own centrifuges churning.

Iran: For some reason, being surrounded by US "democracy" doesn't make them feel good.

   The IAEA said a few weeks back they had evidence that the Iranians were working on 'nuclear triggers', you know, those complex devices that fit in suitcases and usually make an appearance as McGuffins, important plot points in Bond and Bourne type spy movies. The report said it had asked Iran about evidence of “experiments involving the explosive compression of uranium deuteride to produce a short burst of neutrons” — the speeding particles that split atoms in two in a surge of nuclear energy. The Iranians apparently just nodded sheepishly and promised to get back to them on that one.

   The I.A.E.A.’s last comprehensive report, issued in February, listed seven outstanding questions about work Iran had conducted on warhead design. The documents in the hands of the agency raise questions about work on how to turn uranium into bomb fuel, how to cast conventional explosives in a shape that can trigger a nuclear blast, how to make detonators, generate neutrons to spur a chain reaction, measure detonation waves and make nose-cones for missiles. Obviously, Iranian scientists have been googling this shit like crazy for ages but so far the jury is out on how much they do know and how long it'll take before they can translate that shit from the North Korean. It seems the blue screen of death Stuxnet worm has run its course with reports out of Iran's main facility at Natanz saying it's enriching uranium at a slightly faster rate than before Israel forced them to buy a whole new computer.

   Of course, if all this doesn't work out, the Iranians are busy working on their next dastardly plan sure to piss off the US and Israel next month. Tehran just announced its intention to fire into space in early July a Kavoshgar 5 rocket piloted by a monkey. I shit you not.

   The first Iranian monkey in space is sure to piss off the capitalist pigs.

   Lucky little bastard.

Yemen and History: Middle East civil war by the usual rules?

   There's about to be another civil war in the Middle East.

   This time in Yemen.

   Don't expect 24/7 news coverage of this war either. I mean, who really gives a shit about Yemen anyway? Nobody. Yemen has no significant oil, gold or diamonds which means they're safe from anybody caring what goes down in their tribal desert shit hole at the ass end of Arabia. Yemen doesn't even benefit from a useful bit of strategic geography where someone might want to park an aircraft carrier or stash a secret rendition site. And after Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, Western nations and their media are pretty much burned out on the Middle East by this stage of 2011. Even the Chinese, who are busy recycling their US treasury notes on an African buying spree, don't seem much interested in this desolate chunk of Middle East real estate.

   Desolate places are still no guarantee that foreign governments won't take an interest in your little corner of the world. But the tiny puddle of oil that Yemen's economy is currently running on is expected to be sucked dry by 2017. They do have significant natural gas deposits but so do a lot of other places less knee deep in shit and there's currently a glut of methane on the world market right now, which, unlike global oil production, hasn't already peaked. Yemen's gas just isn't worth the hassle for the global corporate elite since outside the capital, Sana'a, the country is a medieval feudal hellhole where the idea of law and order is some shitty Islamic Sharia version of justice where it's cool to bang twelve year olds and stealing an apple is worth a left hand.

   Yemen is really just a wayward chunk of Africa but the strategic energy chess game being played out worldwide right now means that global power players lump Yemen into the wider narrative of the Middle East. Energy and resource wars are gonna be big this century. That'd normally mean Yemen would get ignored. But Yemen just happens to make up the southern border of the real energy prize a few hundred miles north. The Saudi oil state is what makes Yemen's civil war interesting. Their shitty little war might actually matter in the grand scheme of things if it manages to spill over into the Saudi oil prize. Of course, the Saudi monarchs will do everything to make sure this doesn't happen just like they did in Bahrain; nobody gave a shit there when they sent tanks to slap around the Shia majority in that country just to warn their own Shia not to get any fancy ideas about 'democracy'. Truth is, the Saudis see democratic contagion everywhere and fear its spread into their medieval petro kingdom.

  The reason the US cares about Yemen and bothers to deploy CIA, special forces and Predator drones and toss some cash at the Yemeni authorities is yet again the threat of 'terror'. All that barren wasteland combined with illiterate Islamic tribesmen scares the shit out of politicians in the US who see every empty bit of desert in the Middle East as a haven for al-Qaeda. The current Yemeni leader, President Ali Abdullah Saleh (more on him later), likes to play the 'al-Qaeda card' whenever things are going bad for him politically so he can extort some extra cash and weaponry out of a jittery US. The 21st century has truly marked the death of 'American badassery'. At least the WWII McAuliffe kind of badass that scribbled "nuts" on a note to the Wehrmacht at Bastogne. That type of Yank badass is long dead when you consider the pussies who run the US today get scared shitless by a group of Iron Age tribal desert dwellers who shit in outhouses and do that monkey bar training thing the news networks play everytime they want you to be scared of bad guys in some foreign desert. When was the last time fools like that got to challenge an empire anyway? Probably not since a bunch of testicle waving Germanic forest men sacked Rome in 410.

   For a desolate place, Yemen sure has some interesting history.

   This is mainly due to the fact that Yemen wasn't always such a desolate place. It was once home to a whole bunch of ancient civilisations that controlled lucrative trade and spice routes. Yemen's history stretches back to the 12th century BCE when it was a wealthy place, so much so that Roman historian Ptolemy referred to it as "Arabia Felix" (Happy Arabia) in the second century AD. The kingdom made a fortune exporting spices and aromatics to the Mediterranean, India and Mesopotamia when sweet smelling stuff like that could make bad food taste good and dead bodies smell less rank, qualities greatly prized by just about every culture in antiquity. Unlike today, agriculture flourished in Yemen due to an advanced irrigation system that included water tunnels through mountains and the impressive 'dam of Ma'rib', built 700 years before the Romans nailed Christ to a bunch of two by fours.

   After centuries of prosperity, around 600 AD, a serial bigamist and itinerant sheep herder started a religion that spread across Arabia and soon Yemen became one more province in the growing Islamic empire. Hardcore religion brought with it all the usual strife and soon the once proud kingdom became the tribal desert shithole of battling local Imams that it still is today. All those irrigation tunnels and dams were reduced to dust as the locals killed each other over whose version of 'what happens after you're dead' was the correct one. Religion tends to have that effect on people. It justifies war and makes killing profitable. Not least because those who die in battle get hoodwinked into believing that they don't really die. They go to a 'better place'. Yemen proved no less susceptible to this mind virus as anywhere else on this sad planet.

   The Ottomans swept into this divided land in the 1500s and conquered it easily. But for the next 400 years the Ottomans didn't seem much interested in the place, it being a constant war zone of unruly battling tribes and power hungry holy men. The Turks just couldn't figure out what to do with their bit of desert so they elected to retain control of a few coastal territories they thought might be useful to park some ships in if shit ever hit the fan on the southern flank of their empire.

   Next came the British.

   We're talking mid 19th century British here, you know, the ones who were pretty damn good at playing the empire game. To them, Yemen's geography had become strategically interesting, especially for the British East India Company, the prototype of the modern corpo war outfit, a Victorian Halliburton if you will; so the British nabbed the port of Aden just so it could provide a coaling station for ships on route to the jewel in their crown, India. The British around this time had perfected the semi private model of empire building where you invade with the minimum number of state supplied Redcoats to kill enough natives to first establish the colony and then let the East India company and the money men handle the administration and the technical details of dividing and conquering the locals. Once the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the British expanded their Arabian colony further into Yemen as easy access to the Red Sea made them jizz their pants at Aden's new strategic importance.

   In 1904, the colonials drew one of those maps in Yemen that made no sense outside the smoke filled halls of a British officer's club. An arbitrary line drawn across the shifting desert, it divided Yemen into North and South with the Ottomans taking the North and the British gobbling up the South. Lax administration in the border region allowed the mountain tribes room to plunder the desert valleys for gold and pussy. These tribes weren't farmers or sheep herders or merchants yet have always played a big part in the Yemeni economy. They thrive best in chaos and make a living stealing shit, plundering farms and running protection rackets; exploits which basically made administration a nightmare for the British. Facing this administrative nightmare, the sedulous British signed a whole bunch of treaties with these local bandits to try to keep a lid on the cauldron. This resulted in numerous new sheikdoms, emirates and local strongmen that became collectively known as the 'Aden Protecterate', nominally under control of the British. Don't you just love the monikers the colonial pencil pushers come up with to hide the fact that they just stole all the land in some foreign desert? Same shit, different century.

   When the Ottoman empire fell apart in 1918, Northern Yemen fell into the control of a local Imam named Muhammed. Big surprise there. He died in 1962 and his son got deposed after the Egyptians helped finance a revolution that created the Yemen Arab Republic in the north with Sana'a as the capital. The Saudis chucked some cash at royalist forces that opposed the revolutionaries and that started yet another fucking civil war in Yemen and more people died in the desert.

   The British held on to Aden and Southern Yemen until 1967. This had a lot to do with the discovery of oil on the Arabian peninsula in the 1930s. That suddenly made Britain's hodge podge tribal 'Protectorate' a whole lot more valuable. Aden became a 'crown protectorate' (imperial speak for we own the oil) and flourished while the tribal hinterland saw no piece of the action. By the 1960's pan Arab nationalism was pressuring the British to leave. As a counter to Egypt's creation of the United Arab Republic, (a union with Syria and North Yemen aimed at stopping the commies), the British countered by attempting to unite all those divided and conquered sheikdoms and emirates into some kind of shitty confederation called the 'Federation of South Arabia'. Aden was incorporated despite the fact that the people there were quite happy with their oil money and had no interest in sharing it with a bunch of camel jockeys from the desert.

   The temporary closure of the Suez Canal in 1967, rioting in Aden, hundreds of guerrilla attacks, killings of off duty British personnel (what we would today call 'terrorism'  as if 'terror' is some illegitimate  war tactic just because conventional forces find it hard to counter). Let's face it, the dirty little secret of modern war is that 'terrorism' works. It sure helped to finally 'convince' the British to fuck off home with the office furniture and a "congratulations, you're independent" note pinned to the wall of some administration building. The factions in this newly independent "People's Republic of South Yemen" did what most former colonial provinces do once the pasty white men fly home and promptly started massacring each other for a piece of the action.

   Both North and South Yemen spent the next twenty years trying to get their shit together towards unification. The British drawn border was badly defined and militarized and there was oil underneath it. To bag the cash, North and South would have to agree on peace. The current leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh of the then Northern United Arab Republic and Ali Salim al-Baidh (leader of the mess the British left) came to a deal in May 1990 that was ratified by the populace and for the first time in hundreds of years of broken and fractured tribal history, Greater Yemen was politically united.

   Almost.

   There were still the tribal factions unhappy with the deal who, as always, needed chaos to make a living. There was still political infighting and distrust between politicians from both north and south of the old colonial border. In 1994 all this culminated in, you guessed it, yet another fucking civil war in Yemen.  Highlights included a pretty awesome tank battle in Amran near Sana'a and South Yemen bombing Sana'a with a bunch of Soviet era Migs and the North responding by bombing Aden. The South tried to secede but the international community weren't buying it because war is bad for business when foreign oligarchies don't have fingers in the pie. The Saudis gave billions in cash and weapons to the South, as always, fearing a united Yemen and what that might inspire in their own subjects. The North made a push toward Aden, captured the oilfields and that's when the UN tried to call a winner and demanded a ceasefire. That failed and the North marched into Aden while the leaders in the South fled.

A North Yemeni soldier whips out his large weapon in 1994's civil war.

   This victory further consolidated Ali Abdullah Saleh's power.

   This guy is your typical sleazy Middle East 'democratically elected' dictator. Yemen has been paying lip service to the idea that it is a democracy since unification in 1990. But in a place where people vote on tribal, ethnic and religious fault lines, this isn't exactly the place where you are going to run an election campaign to change minds. Like Mubarak, Saleh's been in power so long he doesn't know how to step down. It took an RPG attack on his presidential compound on June 3rd to finally get him medivaced to a Saudi hospital. He's currently down but not out.

    Saleh is a member of the Hashid tribe, the second largest in Yemen, mountain men from the North going back to the first century AD and part of that power block in Yemeni politics that have always thrived on chaos. But even they want him gone now. He's grown too fat on power for too long. As with a lot of these sleazy Mid East leaders, he can be shrewd when it comes to playing his chips in the wider casino of global power politics and also pretty stupid. Just like Mubarak, he collected a paycheck from the US albeit for different reasons. Where Mubarak got tossed two billion a year to keep Suez running smoothly and not fuck with Israel, Saleh likes to play the al-Qaeda card whenever he's short on cash. On the other hand, Yemen under Saleh was the only Arab country to continue to support Saddam Hussein after he annexed Kuwait in 1990. That pissed off a whole bunch of his Arab neighbors not least the Saudis who expelled a million Yemenis and built a border fence to prevent them coming back. He's also pretty friendly with Iran and has supported their nuke program which really pisses off the US. And despite all this, fear of the 'terrorists' on monkey bars in the desert trumps all.

   Saleh is not exactly book smart or a student of history. He became a corporal in the army as a school kid and slowly worked his way up to colonel using political connections. He became a member of parliament and took a strongman governorship of a small province. Like a lot of these leaders in the Middle East, he knows how to play and manipulate people in the internecine warfare of Arab social structures. That's how you get to the top in desert cultures. They respect strongmen. Money helps but if shit hits the fan there's always intimidation and violence to fall back on if shit doesn't go your way.

Saleh playing the al-Qaeda card on Bush for spare cash.

    So why civil war now?

    Tunisia and Egypt are why. The Arab Spring. 65% unemployment among the youth. A satellite dish poking out of every mud hut and apartment block balcony that picks up hundreds of TV stations that collectively depict a better life elsewhere. This civil war is going to be different from all the previous ones. Because this time it's street based and not some politicians pocket war. It started as a genuine protest movement in cities like Taiz, Sana'a and Aden in February. The opposition movement is fractured though and includes students, enterprising tribes like the Houthis who see a chance for profit in chaos, a spectrum of political parties and even some young Hashid who want the tribe to take back power and make some decent bank before the oil runs out.

   On the other hand, soldiers, government officials and the civil service and anybody receiving a steady paycheck held counter demonstrations in support of the government. Saleh appeared on TV promising to leave when the 'time was right' and assured the populace that he'd sign some piece of paper meeting the protesters demands but then failed to show up at the signing three times. This all came to a head on March 18 when Saleh saw that bullshitting his way out of the problem wasn't going to work so he fell back on those tribal desert instincts of his that say there is no problem that can't be solved in Yemen by killing people. Army snipers shot dead 52 protesters in Sana'a.

   This even pissed off his own Hashid tribe who quickly declared their support for the opposition. Street fighting broke out in the northern suburbs of Sana'a that included arty and mortar fire.  Tribesmen attacked power lines resulting in blackouts in the capital. The price of water tripled in Sana'a because there's none left running in the pipes. Not all that surprising for a desert. The capital is a pressure cooker ready to blow.  It's now a lack of water and power that are helping to fuel the protests not just people pissed off because satellite TV showed them they'll never bang Miley Cyrus.

   Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, the recuperating Saleh believes he can ride this out. Seeing Mubarak getting tried for war crimes in Egypt after being tossed out of power doesn't make stepping down look like a fun option. A promise of immunity in the Arab world is about as comforting as a slice of cake from Robespierre. And besides, after 32 years of power politics and with violence spreading across Yemen, he believes that gives him a better seat at the negotiating table. And it probably does. Especially if Yemen becomes a failed state like next door Somalia. Then all those square miles of desert really do become the place for the bad guys to pitch their monkey bars. The US have been conducting drone attacks on these wannabee al-Qaeda groups but they need a stable government in Yemen to continue operations or else it's Black Hawk down all over again. The current US drone attacks serve to piss off the average Yemeni who see the Islamic fundies in the desert as just small local gangs of whack jobs that no one cares about. In fact, with the situation rapidly deteriorating into yet another fucking civil war in Yemen, the average Yemeni views al-Qaeda exactly how the rest of the world views Yemen...

   A bunch of crazy people in some backward desert nobody gives a shit about.

Libya: In search of a NATO victory.

   With nothing decisive happening in Libya, it's understandable that in today's instant gratification crack whore media environment, the news people would move on to the next "big thing", which in the US at the moment is a masturbatory fascination with tornadoes. Don't get me wrong, I love tornadoes. All those human interest stories of grandma getting whipped into the air by cyclonic atmosphere action get me breaking out the popcorn and laughing my ass off. Sure it's fucking terrible and people die but what I love most about tornadoes is the fact that no politician can go on TV and declare a war against them. It's pretty much accepted among us humans that nature is off limits as far as retaliation goes. Apart from chopping down more rain forest or watching 200 species of planetary whatever go extinct every day, there's not much we can do to 'combat the threat' of an existential enemy called 'the biosphere'.

   Human instigated shit is a whole different story though.

   If some sad sack Middle Eastern dude had planted a bomb that killed a few hundred people in Middle America where the tornadoes hit there'd be someone to blame which would make people feel a whole lot better. Just spend a few billion and blow up the the fucker's family and friends and neighbors and call it all square. 'Justice' gets done human style. But with nature the perpetrator every one of us has to admit that dying 'unfairly' is pretty much one of the hazards of being alive in the first place. A CNN reporter on scene as I write just reported that there is the upcoming threat of more 'weather'. Holy shit, is that guy serious? I mean, weather is a real bitch isn't it? It has this sneaky habit of following you everywhere you go!

   Weather talk means that the media have pretty much moved on when there's nothing sexy happening in war zones. For Libya that means Geraldo is back in his river side mansion on the Hudson after dodging bullets paying a visit to the 'Libyan rebels' to give Fox News viewers a heads up when nature isn't the one pulling the trigger. But that focus means you might miss some interesting shit going down in the Middle East. And I'm not even bothered with Syria. That's just a boring internal struggle where the citizenry are up against 57 different varieties of internal security forces. Kind of like the Heinz ketchup of torture and disappearance. The guy on the street doesn't stand a chance and no foreign power is going to get involved because last time I checked, Syria wasn't a major oil exporter.

   One fun bit of news out of Libya this week was that NATO destroyed Gaddafi's 'navy'. That story managed to break into the headlines because it has a positive spin and sounds like victory. But those coastal defense boats were a bunch of sitting ducks with nowhere to hide and I doubt Gaddafi cares too much. He's got bigger problems like dodging Tomahawks. Besides, they were a '"a navy in theory only", kind of like when the Kaiser rolled out his fleet at Jutland in 1916... that fleet was more useful doing nothing in port and being a 'threat' than actually doing any fighting. The problem with that strategy for Gaddafi is that he has no counter to NATO air strikes. No modern radar air defense network and nothing to stop them blowing up his shitty frigates and maritime patrol boats. What he wouldn't do for a few batteries of the Russian S-300 system eh? A few of those would have made this into a true popcorn war.

   One fun thing to emerge from Libya this week was the fact that the Royal Navy are going to launch Apache helos off the deck of the Amphibious Assault Ship HMS Ocean to provide close air support to the rebels. That really shows the weakness of NATO once the US took a 'support role'. You really miss those A-10s. Tornados (not the atmospheric kind) and French Rafales just can't loiter over the battlefield providing close air support. So the British had to come up with a stop gap measure. With the UK's last aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal decommissioned, that's revealed a glaring hole for NATO war planners. Launching ground based Apaches off a ship smacks of desperation but what can you do when you're stuck with a war you can't walk away from and Gaddafi won't die already. The term "mission creep" doesn't get anymore textbook than this.

   The French too are throwing some choppers at the problem. Thing is, choppers suck. They're pretty good 'fast tanks' and give you a high attack value put they're paper defensively. Hell, in 2003, a bunch of Iraqi farmers brought down an Apache with AK fire. The British will probably use all four Apaches (damn military budgets are tight these days outside the US) at high altitude and use their 30mm Gatling guns to fuck up small bunches of Gaddafi's infantry. Like the US were seen doing in the Wikileaks "collateral murder" vid. One wonders if Gaddafi still has a few SA-6 launchers lying around for a sitting duck like a mile high hovering chopper.

   One funny thing I saw used was a French "concrete bomb". I shit you not. I thought it was a joke at first but sure enough the French were dropping laser guided lumps of stone on Gaddafi's tanks. The more I thought about it the more sense it made. No explosive means no collateral damage. A direct hit on a tank is gonna flatten it like in some Loony Tunes cartoon and get sanctimoniously reported in Le Monde so the Frogs can feel how noble they are not killing civilians.

The Loony Toons inspired French 'concrete bomb'.

   NATO has long since put to rest any pretence that murdering a foreign head of state is uncool. When "Odyssey Dawn" got started that was the official position of the US even as the British nailed Gadaffi's compound on the first night. Looks like they had the right idea if they wanted to win this thing quickly. Still, you gotta admire wily old Gaddafi. That guy is a survivor type. Reports are that he's moving constantly and trusting nobody. And his Ukranian nurse has bailed so there's nobody to 'monitor his blood pressure' which sucks for him.

   Like I said before this war will probably come down to economics.

   The rebels, in control of the oilfields and some key refineries on the coast, have proved they can play ball. A number of oil tankers have successfully filled up and bagged the rebels $100 million per load. It's a demonstration like this, not speeding around the desert in junky pick up trucks that truly wins you support in the Western oligarchy. All the humanitarian crises in the world don't warrant intervention unless somewhere along the line there's a chance to turn a profit. The rebels have shown that they can.

   The other question now is how much cash does Gaddafi have to keep Tripoli afloat? It's a pretty big city, full of Gaddafi loyalists. At least so long as the money rolls in. So far, Gaddafi has doubled public sector and army pay. NATO has stepped up attacks on the city and bombed the fuck out of every building that ever housed more than ten soldiers. Still, blitzes like that usually just harden those being bombed London 1940 style. But NATO doesn't have any other good options. Unless they can land a bomb on Gaddafi things are just going to drag on according to the depth of his bank account. He is trying reach out to the international community in an attempt to end this shit. He's feeling the heat. His prime minister Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi is understood to have sent a letter to a number of foreign governments proposing a ceasefire that would be monitored by the African Union and United Nations, unconditional talks with the opposition, the drafting of a new constitution and amnesty for both sides in the fighting. I'm sure a beach side condo somewhere sunny and access to his offshore bank accounts for Gaddafi and the in-laws seems like a pretty good deal right now but I doubt he'll get it. NATO are too pissed off now and anything less than a dead Gaddafi is going to smack of a French and British failure in front of the Americans. That'll sting hard especially after the US successfully iced Bin Laden.


   Of course, things are going to get nastier the longer this goes on. Misurata was ugly. But that would be nothing compared to a sustained siege of Tripoli. I seriously doubt the rebels could mount such an attack on their own but that's probably what the British Apache and 12 French Tiger helos are for. Close air support for an advance into Tripoli. Probably quite a few UK and French "Special Forces" on the ground to direct the attack. You never know how strong the castle is or how resilient its inhabitant are going to be until you try some sort of ''probing attack. Right now, it's not clear if the city would capitulate at the sight of rebels in Green Square. Baghdad fell rather easily despite the hype once the marines made it to the airport. Perhaps NATO are banking on a similar capitulation.

   I wonder if the Euros have the balls to go for it.

   At the very least it'd sure knock tornadoes off the front page.

Osama Bin Laden: Requiem for a NeoCon Dream.

  Osama Bin Laden is finally dead.

  I wasn't really impressed to tell you the truth. Sure, it was some kind of cultural rite of passage when I first heard the news but all the people screaming "USA! USA!" in the bar where I happened to be at the time got me thinking. Was some guy on dialysis in Pakistan really America's worst enemy? For me, since 9/11, America has always been America's own worst enemy. Bin Laden was the Orwellian 'Emmanuel Goldstein' that provided a nation a bogeyman that the corporate oligarchy could rally the plebs around and point to and say - 'that is your enemy, that is the architect of your fear, focus your Twin Tower anger there'. All the fun stuff that made the newly dawned 21st century shit you can trace back to that moment. 'Orange terror alerts', 'anthrax letters', Nigerian 'yellow cake' were all part of a general uncertainty that ramped up the fear. The Madrid and London bombings mid decade heightened the sense that there was an existential enemy of Western civilization out there and ready to blow us up if our vigilance ever slipped. The 21st century took a sudden nosedive just as it dawned. The new century was not going to be the idyllic postmodern 'war free zone' the brochure promised a new century could be just because the Cold War had ended.

   That's not to say that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda weren't a threat. Neither is it to say 9/11 wouldn't have happened without him. But his support for that attack was at best spiritual and certainly not material. That he was clearly an enemy of the United States is true. But the big guy on the playground always spawns haters. I mean, that's basic schoolyard logic. It was America's overblown reaction, or premeditated reaction if you consider the Iraq WMD debacle, that set the tone for the 21st century. Bin Laden helped out with that. He embraced the media attention. 9/11 made him a 'terrorist celebrity' and he seemed eager to play the role of international villain. In a world where you can be whirled into fame on some shitty reality show, he embraced the ultimate show. He accepted worldwide fame and found himself the figurehead of a terrorist franchise called al-Qaeda. That he can be linked to the suicide speedboat attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and the African embassy bombings in 1998 seems clear but arbitrary. Those attacks were small fry in the grand scheme of things and before 9/11 were minor inconveniences on the back of a superpower, like mosquito bites at a garden party.

   Bin Laden was the rogue son of a royal family of Saudi oil providers that have for decades had successive US administrations sucking at the tit of Middle East energy dependence. The wayward son of royalty thing always hinted at something a little more sinister. But the flow of spice always kept the media at bay and the hard questions were never asked. His involvement with the CIA during Soviet Afghanistan in the 1980s is certainly interesting. He was once a 'US man' when Stinger missile launchers were being dished out to the Mujahadeen to bring down Russian Hinds in that Soviet wasteland the US are knee deep in now. But a SEAL bullet in the eye has a tendency to end awkward questions. And a burial at sea cancels debate. A little too neat for me and somewhat unconvincing outside Western media.

   I think the famed military-industrial-complex learned their lesson when they dug Saddam Hussein out of his hole in Tikrit, dressed him up in a suit and put him on trial in an Iraqi court with the world media present. The question of who provided Hussein with the chemical weapons he used against the Kurds, a crime he was ostensibly on trial for, became ancillary and somehow immaterial to the issue at hand and the question was duly struck down by the 'judge'. That was when the trial was revealed to me as a farce. It was pretty funny really. It made me think of that old Judge Roy Bean quote from the Wild West. "First we'll give him a fair trial, then we'll hang him!" And they sure did.

   The people who run this world weren't going to make the same mistake again.

   Osama Bin Laden needed to die. And properly this time.

   In one sense, he had served his purpose and outlived his usefulness in the West's post Cold War need for a new bogeyman after the Soviet Union went belly up. As the ice melted, there was no longer a need for an astronomical military budget and America's war economy was faced with collapse. The corporate oligarchy scrambled for a new enemy but there were no other superpowers left on the block. So the enemy became fear itself and the American people, with a nominal say in how their taxes get spent (that is if you subscribe to the theory that the US is a functioning democracy) became the fertile ground for NeoCon bullshit. Clinton in the 90s was passed off as a blowjob addict while the real power players behind the scenes planned and waited for their time to grab the last untapped oil field in the Middle East.

   But they still needed a patsy.

   Saddam Hussein fit the 'evil dictator' profile and got caught up in the post 9/11 tumult. Over 60% of Americans thought he had something to do with 9/11 at the time of the invasion. Thank's corporate media!

   The timing of Bin Laden's death turns out to be quite fortuitous. The war in Afghanistan is a clusterfuck and everyone knows it cannot be won; whatever winning was ever meant to mean in the graveyard of empires. Even the hardcore zealots that run the military industrial complex know this now and they need an exit strategy that involves calling the figurative and military desert they created 'victory'. General Pyrrhus' old line is as relevant as ever it seems.

    Of course, the exit strategy cannot involve negotiating with "terrorists". Even the numbskulls that watch Fox News know that much. But an opportunity has arisen from Bin Laden's death. The arch Bond villain is gone and now things get suddenly a whole lot easier for those who could have stemmed the bleeding a long time ago. Negotiations with the Taliban now become possible and not just for the US but also for Mohammad Omar, leader of the largest Taliban faction, who can now break his ties with al-Qaeda without losing the support of his own followers. After all, he only promised Bin Laden protection and not the entirety of al-Qaeda.

    This is, of course, assuming that al-Qaeda ever really existed outside of international media and the Pentagon. Sure they existed as a brand and got shitloads of free advertising (I'm still smiling sardonically at the image they released the other day of Bin Laden watching himself on Al-Jazeera remote control in hand... how meta) but al-Qaeda never had any true structure or physical shape; being more like some kind of terrorist McDonalds franchise but without any restaurants or drive thrus. True, ideas run the world today on our media driven dystopian sci fi planet and that is the genius of the corporate oligarchy who run things now. The enemies they create, existential in nature, are without physical shape or location. That's why I always found the idea of al-Qaeda a little too expedient. Non existent in men or material, their power came tailor made for a superpower to wage an ideological turf war, a battle of ideas against the collective mind of its own people. Easy when a few corportions own all the TV channels. Out of the natural rage that followed 9/11, the authorities said the enemy were in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that was good enough for a 'democracy' and a gullible citizenry to wage war.

    It was a winning idea from the start.

    That the 'war on terror' is really a war against the citizens of Western nations by their own governments is certainly an interesting idea. One wonders if it is an idea meant to die with Bin Laden's death. Certainly China never seemed to care about this 'war' beyond the cover it provided when killing a few protesting monks in Tibet. They soon got with the global program and called their enemy 'terrorists' when they saw how effective it could be. A new way of handling the media had emerged. Throw the word 'terrorist' at people you don't like and buy legitamacy. Torture even got a new name, a subtle redefinition and 'enhanced interrogation' was allowed to slide except for token grumbles from the 'far left'.

    The new 21st century paradigm was clear. Fear itself was the enemy and it struck from desert sands where the oil happened to be. Roosevelt warned a shaky nation after Pearl of the real enemy but things have shifted in ways Orwell or Huxley of even Eisenhower's sign off speech couldn't have imagined. There are no nation states anymore and there are no clashes of cultural ideas because we, no matter what country we happen to be in, are subject to the same forces, commodity prices, oil prices, stock market upticks, wayward bankers... a brave new world of international elites and globalized commerce.

    The new paradigm became the promotion of fear itself as a motive force by world governments, something that would sicken Roosevelt but how could he have known the global dystopia that would ensue after America sold its manufacturing base to transnational elites in the decades after WWII? The rise of global communications and corporate power centers united oligarchys across the world and made fools of those who believed in the quaint 20th century idea of nation states. "Good wars" between cultural ideologies like WWII won't exist in the 21st century because we're all bound together through mutual dependencies. Total war as Clauswitz defined it has become unprofitable and obsolete as part of this brave new world. In a post nuclear world, regional war is unthinkable and unprofitable. It's easier to pick up squares on the global chessboard and make quiet moves where you can pick up territorys on the cheap. Economic hitmen are key.

    9/11 was a turning point in the post modern land grab.

    Bin Laden's rag-tag rebel alliance were elevated to celebrity status after the attack. Three thousand people died which is peanuts really when you place it in world military history. 70,000 were flash fried at Hiroshima, the Russians bled 30 million in WWII and even in US history, 23,000 casualties were notched up in a day on American soil at Antietam. Has modern society made us so soft to human suffering? Did we ever think we could escape the history? Apparently so in the public imagination because that imagination was easily hijacked by those who told us who the enemy was after the towers fell. The enemy were towel heads in a foreign desert where the oil is.

    That's probably going to be Bin Laden's legacy in military history, showing that superpowers are not invincible, that empires are never monolithic and set in stone but are malleable and have soft underbellies. Bin Laden showed that civilians in empires, as TE Lawrence described the British in 1915, are "fat" and softened to the 'good life' and therefore easily swayed to a cause against an external enemy when their leaders say 'they did it'. Hell, Göring of all people said it best in this exchange at the Nuremburg trials:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Interviewer: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

It's easy for me to say now but I was never scared of al-Qaeda. That I never even took them seriously. But I do admire the Brits on that front. After the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, I liked the fact that the next day the British were back on the Tube and buses with an attitude of fuck you. But that's true of a lot of people in many countries... they're smarter than their own governments. Somehow that didn't translate so well in the USA. A corn farmer in rural Iowa, an oil engineer in Texas, all were convinced by corporate spokesman Bush when he went on TV and announced the danger from a shadowy group of international 'terrorists' who wanted to kill them.

Let's face it, terrorism worked.

According to Wikipedia, the goals of al-Qaeda were as follows.

1. Provoke the United States into invading a Muslim country.
2. Incite local resistance to occupying forces.
3. Expand the conflict to neighboring countries, and engage the U.S. in a long war of attrition.
4. Convert Al-Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against countries allied with the U.S. until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the 2005 London bombings
5. The U.S. economy will finally collapse under the strain of too many engagements in too many places, similarly to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Arab regimes supported by the U.S. will collapse, and a Wahhabi Caliphate will be installed across the region.

   Four out of five ain't bad for a terrorist franchise. With the collapse of Egypt to "democracy" and all not perfect in the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it looks like the west is running out pet of dictators on payroll. Number five on that list sure has the potential to backfire horribly for the US and for al-Qaeda and give the two biggest and strategic Sunni Arab countries something they haven't tasted since before the oil age; self determination. That kind of thing makes the corporate and royal families on all sides shit bricks.

   Whoever is responsible for unleashing the "War on Terror", it doesn't seem to matter anymore. Surely the mission has been accomplished in Western nations and in the US. They have become a voluntary surveillance society beyond INGSOC's dreams. The US has the stake in Iraq's oil it wanted on the global chessboard but neither it nor Bin Laden could have bargained for the fall of Middle East power structures and the for-hire Western employed dictators that were toppled by Arab youth.

   It seems the result of this war was equally unpredictable on the Arab side. Bin Laden could never have imagined himself obsolete, but a new wave of protest suggests that he is, in Tunisia, in Egypt, Yemen and Syria, perhaps even in Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown of Western oil policy. The Arab youth of today want a piece of the action they see on Facebook and Twitter. To them, that's freedom. And maybe it is. At least in comparison to the Wahhabi 'Muslim paradise' Bin Laden was selling. It certainly is a better deal. 21st century Arab kids don't want his brand of international pariah speaking for them. Perhaps he really was just an old man with a TV remote control in his hand hoping for a glimpse of himself in the 'reality show' the world has become.

  For Bin Laden, growing old and unnecessary was far more painful then the headshot.

The 'Taiwan Liberator' Shi Lang: China's new aircraft carrier.

    Seems like China has its first aircraft carrier ready for sea trials.

   You can't really call it a 'new' carrier though. A Chinese businessman bought the hull with no engines, steering or fittings from Ukraine in 1998 for a mere $20 million and towed the rusty pile of metal around Africa's Cape of Good Hope in a pretty desperate attempt to get it back to China. Ostensibly, the Soviet "Varyag" was destined to be an "entertainment center" which is code speak these days for casino. Somewhere along the line though, the People's Liberation Army snapped it up and the Chinese have been refitting it for military service ever since.

   Probably the most fun thing about this ship is what the Chinese are calling it, the "Shi Lang". Yeah, that meant nothing to me either. But a quick googling reveals Shi Lang was a Chinese admiral in the 17th century who conquered Taiwan in 1681. And that right there is a pretty clear broadside aimed squarely at the US Navy. It's pretty funny really. The Chinese just can't seem to let Taiwan go. The island has been independent since 1949, the refuge of the Nationalists and followers of Chiang Kai-shek who fled the mainland after losing power to Mao and the Communists. Why the Chinese think they might need a carrier to attack an island that's a mere 100 miles off the coast is any body's guess but as with most things concerning China, they're playing the 'long game' here. 5000 years of Chinese history affords them a lot of patience as they climb inexorably to superpower status.

   Still, I doubt the US Navy is too worried.

   For one thing, carriers are pretty useless on their own and need large support fleets to operate with any degree of effectiveness. They're also big fat targets for every kind of anti-ship missile on the planet. The Chinese themselves have just developed their own new Anti Ship Ballistic Missile, the Dong Feng-21D. Yeah, that's D for Dong right up a USN carrier's tailpipe. If this system works, and preliminary testing hints that it does, then it's a pretty serious threat to the US Navy. Launched from land based launchers and travelling at Mach 5 or more (high hypersonic) and with a range of 2000 miles, the DF-21D will be aimed and guided to blue water targets by Chinese satellites. Even the USN War College has admitted that when this system is fully operational it pretty much takes US naval dominance off the table for the first time since World War II.

   The fun thing is though, in any prospective US war with China, target number one is going to be each other's spy satellites. The US is still way ahead in space war technology and the first day of this war will involve some pretty fireworks in the night sky. China would lose. Rendered blind they'd be unable to guide the Dong Feng to blue water carrier groups offshore using space tech alone. That'd mean they'd have to sneak a sub up to a carrier group for targetting intel and that's never easy. Still, the Chinese did manage to surface an old diesel powered sub in the midst of a USN war exercise off Taiwan a few years back that had the Navy brass scratching their heads.

   Still, even if carriers are rendered pretty obsolete by today's missile technology, it's still interesting to speculate why China thinks she needs one. China is pretty touchy about her shipping lanes and her dependence on oil imports from the Middle East and Africa. You can see how throwing a few carriers at the problem would make her feel a little better about this. The British are currently bankrupting themselves building the new Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales carriers which just this week may increase in price, from $8.7 to $11.7 billion all because of a minor design tweak so they can accommodate the new F-35C Lightning IIs; aircraft which themselves cost $156 million each!

   Another reason why you might want a floating airport with a big fat bulls eye painted on the flight deck is for prestige. Good old, my dick is bigger than your dick bullshit; demented human reasoning probably around since the first caveman crafted his first spear and the other guys around the campfire got jealous. Power projection is something they can do and carriers have made the NATO job off the Libyan coast easier I suppose. But all that only works when you go after a pushover military with no advanced missile technology.

Shipping oil is a pain in the ass. Better be able to defend your imports as that resource dries up!

   In 2002, the Pentagon tried to suppress the findings of a huge US war game called "Millennium Challenge" where the US Navy (Blue Force) was pitted against a "hypothetical rogue state" (Red Force) in the Persian Gulf region. Red Force was led by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a total bad ass, whose job was basically to play the role of the butt raped lesser nation at the hands of the mighty technology of the all powerful US Navy. Instead of following the script, this Van Riper guy went off reservation and went all asymmetrical on Blue Force's ass, an ass which consisted of a full US Navy carrier group.

   Though the rules stated both commanders could use any rule in the book, the brass didn't expect the shit Van Riper pulled. Once the war game was up and running Van Riper's force disappeared off radar. He relied on couriers instead of radio to stay in touch with his field officers. The US navy cryptographers were rendered useless in a single blow. He employed novel tactics such as coded signals broadcast from the minarets of mosques during the Muslim call to prayer, a tactic weirdly reminiscent of Paul Revere and the shot heard round the world. He even used carrier pigeons to deliver messages to some of his commanders. God I love this guy! He then launched a daring attack against the US Blue Force carrier group by hundreds of kamikaze speedboats some of which were armed with Chinese Silkworm anti ship missiles. I shit you not. The result was a carrier and two helo carriers sunk along with 13 other assorted ships, the worst defeat of the US Navy since Pearl. The Pentagon had a shit fit and scrubbed the whole exercise, dismissed Van Riper and replayed the whole thing this time making Blue Force 'win'. Basically, the navy brass pretended it never happened. Lunatics in speedboats apparently don't count and are considered 'cheats'.

   The US Navy brass like carriers because of the sleazy defense contracting business and the way the US military budget works. You've got to gobble up all the cash you can in a given year and not save anything otherwise you end up losing those savings in next year's allocation. The Navy and Air Force do this with fat expensive carriers and the F-22 Raptor, projects sure to soak up billions and have juicy cost over runs that keep tax payer money flooding Congressional Districts with campaign cash.

The ramp suggests V/STOL aircraft will be in order.

   Another thing the Chinese don't have yet are aircraft that can serve on a carrier. Beijing recently 'leaked' info on their J-15 Flying Shark which has the folding wings and bulked up landing gear needed for carrier operations. They are still at the testing stage and again, I doubt if the US Navy is too worried. It'll be years before a Chinese carrier group is operational. In fact, there's probably nothing more the US Navy brass would like to see than China sink a few hundred billion into carrier fleets. With 11 active carriers of their own costing billions a year to operate, they more than anybody know what a dubious return on investment carriers can be.

Operation Compass: Think today's war in Libya is a mess? In 1940's Libya, the Italian North African Campaign was a total disaster.

    Paying attention to the Libyan mess over the last few months got me thinking of a far 'better war' that once played out on that highway the Italians built between Tripoli and Benghazi back when Libya was an Italian colony in the early 20th century. Of course back in 1912, after snatching the territory from the fading Ottomans, the Italians were a bit too late to the colonial table as far as the European habit of carving up pieces of Africa for fun and profit went. But turn of the century Italians had this hard on for their own ancient history and the memory of Rome, a time when Italy was 'somebody' on the world stage and not just a bunch of recently unified city states, freshly unfragmented and beat up on by foreigners for 1500 years.

    Let's face it, modern Italians don't do imperialism very well.

   That gene went recessive on the peninsula's chromosome somewhere in the 2000 years it took to get from Caesar to Mussolini. By the time Mussolini took charge in 1921 and adopted good old Fascismo, a philosophy he based on an ancient bundle of Roman sticks which symbolized authority, it was an idea in political science whose time seemed to have come tailor made for the 20th century. Hell, today's corporate oligarchical sci fi novel that we're all living in is just the latest version with 'bread and circuses' swapped out for 'McDonalds and advertising' to keep the plebs in check. For Italians in the 1920s under Mussolini, Libya became Italy's "Fourth Shore" and the 'New America' with 110,000 Italians emigrating there and making up 12% of the population by 1939.

   That highway between Tripoli and Benghazi that we've all been watching Gadaffi's tanks burning on and which connects strategic oil towns like Brega and Ras Lanuf was built as part of Mussolini's public works program in '20s and '30s Libya. Of course this didn't go down so well with the natives, especially the nomadic Bedouin tribes who preferred camel power. So the Italians did what all the Euro colonial powers have done when faced with native opposition in Africa; they wiped out half the Bedouin population either through direct action like hanging or starvation in camps. Of course, this was a time before the term 'concentration' became fashionable when describing 'camps'. The British under Kitchener had done the same to the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the century and nobody had seemed to give a shit. Except, ironically, the Germans.

   When the shooting started in 1939, Mussolini saw his chance to expand that 'Fourth Shore' of his into British held Egypt. Egypt has always been a sweet prize for foreign powers going back to Roman times. The Caesars used Egypt as a kind of ancient Wal Mart for growing grain on the cheap which they dished out to the plebs back home to keep the mob pacified. Napoleon wanted to use it as a base of operations to steam roll through the Levant until Nelson destroyed his fleet off the coast at Aboukir Bay. When the canal was completed in the 19th century Egypt suddenly became the 'Highway to India' and vital to British interests. Even to just last February, the West was paying 2 billion a year to their pet Egyptian dictator Mubarak just to keep Suez open and not mess with Israel. That's 2000 years of strategic Egyptian history not including the 3000 years before that of Pharaohs and pyramids. It's the sort of time span that makes you feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

   And let's face it, we are.

   Mussolini wanted to launch his offensive from Libya in August 1940 under the idea that the British would be tied down defending against Operation Sealion, the German invasion of England that never happened. Right from the start the Italians royally fucked things up. Remember that missing Italian imperialist gene I mentioned earlier? Add to that the gene for being good at warfare. I mean, apart from a Venetian coalition that defeated the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571, the Italians hadn't done anything to write home about warfare wise since Marcus Aurelius mopped up the German tribes in the second century AD.

   Mussolini sent his friend and heir apparent Italo Balbo to Libya to do the job. He was a hardcore Blackshirt and the former governor of Libya who, among other things, had built up the Italian air force from scratch in the 1920s and '30s and made transatlantic flights that gained him hero status among Italians but  didn't make the news in Anglo countries because everyone was crying over Lindbergh and his kidnapped baby. Balbo had even dined with Roosevelt and portrayed fascism as cool at a time when the New Deal was struggling to offset the Depression. Balbo was seen as the man who could pull off the attack, though he himself  had doubts about the whole enterprise. He noted that the Italian forces in Libya were heavy on infantry but lacked modern armor (the Italians fielded shitty L3/35 tanks which were basically two man machine gun carriers with paper thin armor), had obsolete artillery with shells that sometimes exploded and sometimes didn't, dodgy anti tank guns good against everything except armored plate and, worst of all, they suffered from a shortage of transport for all that infantry. Still, thanks to Balbo, the Italians had significant air power on hand (300 aircraft of various types including 4 bomber wings) and if anyone could pull off this attack, it was going to be Balbo.

The Italian L3/35 tankette. More suitable for duty as farm machinery?

   Everything about this plan was awesome up until the moment when Balbo tried to hook up with his own forces in Tobruk. This was the moment when some dumb fuck trigger happy Italian AA gunner shot down Balbo's plane while it was trying to land at the Italian airfield in Tobruk. Seriously. Balbo hadn't even arrived in theater and he was already KIA at the hands of the mighty Italian military. Scratch the whole plan right there and chalk up a kill for the Italians, right? A raving Mussolini quickly put a new guy in charge, Rodolfo Graziani, and ordered him to launch his attack against the British in Egypt immediately. Graziani had similar doubts about how an infantry heavy but largely unmechanized force such as the one the Italians were fielding could pull off this attack even if against the numerically inferior British, who fielded only 36,000 troops against a theoretical force of 250,000 Italians. The British game plan of course was to defend the canal at all costs. That sea route was as vital to the British then as it is to the US today though for different reasons. Instead of salt tax cash and tea profits, today it's oil flow and US Navy rapid access to the Persian Gulf.

   Though well supplied thanks to Royal Navy control of the Eastern Mediterranean, the British only fielded the 4th Indian Infantry Division and the understrength 7th Armored Division (the famed Desert Rats) to hold the canal and fortified the bulk of these forces at the town of Mersa Matruh; a town just west of the canal and through which any Italian canal grab must pass. The British planned to use light mobile screening forces to harass the Italian advance and seem numerically superior by dredging up sand, firing the odd bit of arty here and there and making lots of noise, hopefully causing the inexperienced Italians to panic a bit.

   The Italians began the attack in early September with an air campaign after Mussolini threatened Graziani with demotion if he didn't get the ball rolling. Anxious to show Hitler that the Italian military wasn't as shitty as everyone suspected and flush with amazement at the Wehrmacht's humiliation of the French, Mussolini needed a win. Both sides dropped some bombs with obsolete bombers protected by obsolete fighters; the Italians hoping to soften up the main choke points on the coastal route into Egypt while the British used a bunch of Blenheim bombers to mess with the Italian staging area at Tobruk.

   The Italian plan was to advance along the coast with their main infantry force and use their two Libyan divisions, good native desert fighters but mainly infantry and using camel power (kind of like the Islamic rebel Shabab in Libya right now only with camels instead of Toyota pickup trucks) as screeners. Further south, the bulk of the Italian tanks and mechanized infantry (meaning they had a bunch of dodgy Italian trucks) had been rolled into the "Maletti Group" which planned to swing around in a pincer attack from the south if the infantry in the north got bogged down by opposition. The British defensive plan was pretty similar with light screening brigades in the north messing with the Italian infantry advance and elements of the 7th armored in the south waiting to pincer around from the south if the opportunity presented itself.

   The Italian ground assault on Egypt began on the 9th of September 1940.

   Right from the start, the Italians made a complete and utter balls of it. I mean, quite apart from von Moltke's old military maxim of no plan surviving contact with the enemy, the Italians didn't even get that far. No, the night before the ground assault some dumb fuck Italian radio operator broadcast the whole plan for all the world to hear over the wireless uncoded. The British, who knew the attack was coming anyway got a heads up on where to place their harassing force and laughed their asses off. Next up, the "Maletti Group" which contained the bulk of the Italian "armor" got lost in the Libyan desert before it even reached the Egyptian border and fell behind the main force. Because of this and other fuck ups, it took another four days for the Italian invasion of Egypt to actually reach Egypt.  

   Once "in country", the Italians made slow progress. Slowed by embarrassingly small amounts of British forces, the Italians were liable to stop, unmount their artillery and shell a ridge where some guy with binoculars thought he saw some British guy acting suspiciously like an enemy soldier. Wasting ammo, moving painfully slow and always attempting overzealous 'pincer movements' with their tankettes, the Italians failed to successfully engage the British screening forces who invariably retreated laughing their asses off and dropping mines as they went.

   The Italians managed to capture a few inconsequential British airfields and advance 65 miles into Egypt before the invasion ground to a halt. Graziani cited supply problems and the fact that most of his divisions were on foot in full kit in the middle of a boiling desert. Mussolini went apeshit. There was nothing left now but to dig in and pretend that that 65 miles of barren desert was all the Italians really wanted in the first place while letting the answering machine deal with Hitler. The Italians created a bunch of fortified strong points beyond the town of Sidi Barrani and awaited reinforcements, resupply and an authority figure with a clue what to do next. None of which were forthcoming. The Italian positions proved weak. They were too dispersed to provide mutual support and do much of anything except act as big fat targets for the inevitable British counter attack.

   That attack, Operation Compass, came on the night of December 7th 1940, exactly a year before Pearl. It was led by Major General Richard O' Connor, maybe my favourite British general of the entire war. This guy was a total bad ass. Born in India, and son of a major in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, he'd seen action in World War I at Arras and Bullecourt and fought with the Italians at the River Piave in November 1917. Serving with the Italians sure gave him a certain edge when it came to knowing how the Italians fought. Or didn't fight for that matter. He come out of that war medal heavy including a DSO but then peace came and like all badass soldiers in 1918, he had to make up the inter war years doing office work and teaching at military academies while waiting for the unfinished business of the Great War to boot back up again. Assigned to Egypt as commander of the 7th Division in 1939, he was given command of the Western Desert Force in November 1940 by General Wavell and tasked with pushing the Italians out of the 65 miles of Egypt which they held on a broad but scattered front.

General Richard Nugent O' Connor KT, GCB, DSO & Bar, MC, ADC. And badass.

   The British were interested in a limited counter attack, one that probed the Italians without risking too much. Holding the canal was sacrosanct. Wavell, commander of British forces in the Middle East, gave O'Connor about 30,000 men, 275 tanks (including the newer British Matilda IIs which were probably the best British made and designed tanks of the war) and around 100 artillery pieces including some of the new at the time '25 pounders' that were to serve the British well into the 1960s. There was also a contingent of Royal Navy gunboats off the coast which were to provide valuable indirect fire on the Italian strong points once the ball got rolling.

  O'Connor began the attack with a diversionary artillery barrage at '0 five hundred' on the Nibeiwa camp where the "mechanized" Maletti Group were holed up. They'd dug in at a fortified position using their armor as basically static pillboxes. (Never a good use of armor). O'Connor's forces exploited a hole in the Maletti defense ring and came barging through at dawn with 48 Matilda IIs and totally wasted the whole division, even killing Maletti himself in the fray. The Italians were screwed and began retreating en masse into Libya. The British pursued as the retreating Italians, bunched onto the coast road from Sidi Barrani made easy targets for the RN gunboats. The "Battle of the Camps" was a total victory for the British who killed or captured 38,000 Italians in five days for the loss of 133 men.

  O'Connor wanted to continue his attack into Libya at least as far as Benghazi. Wavell however withdrew the Indian 4th Infantry Division to take part in an offensive against the Italians in Ethiopia and replaced them with a green Australian Division who were missing their tanks. O'Connor, after a brief pause for Christmas pressed on anyway. The Italians were now holed up in the port of Bardia, licking their wounds and fighting amongst themselves. The port had good natural defenses including an 18 mile anti-tank ditch and concrete pill boxes. Mussolini sent a message to the 40,000 men holed up there and let them know of his confidence that they would "defend Bardia to the last man". Obviously, the troops had other ideas because on January 3rd 1941, O'Connor's sappers blew the pillboxes and filled in a section of the anti-tank ditch allowing 23 Matildas to break into the fortress, capture the whole deal and take 8000 prisoners. Tobruk and Derna fell next and pretty soon the whole Italian colony of Libya looked like it was going down to O'Connors thirty thousand men.

   By February 1941, the Allied forces had captured 130,000 Libyan and Italian prisoners for the loss of 500 men. Probably the most badass campaign of WWII that nobody ever talks about. That's probably because it was merely the prelude to the main act which was the arrival of Rommel and the Afrika Korps; in to bail out an Italian clusterfuck and not the first time in the war. Months later, Barbarossa had to be postponed six weeks so the Germans could rescue the Italians yet again; this time from the a bunch of barefoot Greeks in the mountains after Mussolini's abortive attack on Greece.

    Still, the Axis threat to Suez wouldn't be over until Tripoli fell. O'Connor wanted to continue the attack but Churchill ordered a halt. O'Connor was given a knighthood and posted back in Cairo. By mid February, Rommel and the Afrika Korps had arrived in theater and the real war was about to begin. O'Connor himself was captured by the Germans in April and spent the next two and a half years as a POW at a castle in Italy. He escaped in true badass fashion and went on to command the VIII Corps at Normandy and Market Garden.

   What careers there were for military men in centuries past! Now there are just a bunch of shitty asymmetrical proxy wars and nothing for a real general to sink his teeth into. I suppose that's the way it has to be in a post nuclear world. It's all subtle geopolitics with quiet moves on the grand chessboard with small oil grabs here and there these days. Today, global corporations link the big countries in ways that make wars between nation states unprofitable. Far better to feed the plebs bullshit adverts on TV to make them buy stuff they don't need with money they don't have. It's far easier to keep the cash rolling in that way.

   It is certainly a safer game.

   Weimar Republics and economic crashes have a time worn habit of  just delivering new Hitlers.

   My fear today is that I remain unconvinced humanity is beyond such games.