They're waiting for you Gordon... - by faetal
faetal on 21/3/2012 at 15:40
Quote Posted by Al_B
Yes - but the most sinister part of it for me is that "Farrokh" possibly didn't realise that anything was wrong until it was too late. I'm happy for someone who knows more about this than I do but from the sketchy knowledge I have picked up the virus was designed to infect the controllers and continually spin up and spin down the equipment in a way that would damage it but it would continue to report that it was operating normally.
I'm a little dubious because anyone who has worked with any mechanical equipment soon learns to listen to it (even if it's just to change gear in your car) and the idea of globally releasing a virus in order to target something as specific as a model of PLC controller seems very scatter-gun. Even if that was the plan, singling out that specific target would probably have an adverse affect as it would inspire a backlash so even if it set things back a year the long term repercussions would probably be much worse.
Anyway - I've now retreated to a safe distance from Bedford. Not for any other reason that it's the most sensible course of action to take even if there's no danger.
I work with centrifuges a lot and if they were constantly spinning up and down, you'd know about it. They produce a very continuous background noise and as soon as one does anything other than maintain the continual tone of being at the set speed, you notice immediately, either with relief because your run has finished, or annoyance because it is acting up. That said, I obviously don't know anything about the exact centrifuges in question, so it may not apply.
Getting as far from Bedford as possible is a wise course of action - this place is a hole. Thankfully I only have to be here for 6 more weeks.
Shug on 22/3/2012 at 03:22
Quote Posted by demagogue
It's just interesting stuff going on I've been thinking about.)
What I don't grasp about the situation is Iran's mentality. Surely they're aware they'll be crushed by the US and Israel when push comes to shove?
Is it just that the leadership is insane?
demagogue on 22/3/2012 at 05:42
As I understand it, the principal source of pressure is domestic. I mean it's a theocracy, so the source of its domestic legitimacy (historically) has to be holding the line against Israel & the US, and being part of the nuclear club is part of that ... otherwise how do they justify blatantly rigging the last election & beating down all those protesters? And there are lots of cases in history where countries got barreled into wars they didn't really want. (The one that comes to my mind in this region is the 6 Day War. Nasser really wasn't keen on war with Israel, but had to build forces on the border for domestic legitimacy, esp to its "Syrian side" which kept needling on the issue (Egypt & Syria had combined into the United Arab Rep), part of the whole pan-Arab thing, a bit exploitative too since Syria got the raw end of the deal & elements of it were actively trying to sabotage Nasser. I believe Israel even understood what was going on, but they launched a preemptive attack anyway just because they couldn't just sit and wait it out. Really interesting how these things play out, although of course all wars are awful things.)
But more to your point, one of the punchlines of that article I posted was the war games are predicting that a war with Iran would be a total slogfest and that the US might take much worse losses than the public is probably ready for, worse than Iraq. I wasn't clear exactly all the reasons why though. They're probably also thinking the US still has Middle East War fatigue and will for quite a while, not a bad bet actually.
Pyrian on 23/3/2012 at 18:08
Quote Posted by Shug
What I don't grasp about the situation is Iran's mentality. Surely they're aware they'll be crushed by the US and Israel when push comes to shove?
Look at Iraq for a second. What did they get for disarming and proving it and neither having nor pursuing weapons of mass destruction? They got crushed.
faetal on 23/3/2012 at 18:30
Likewise, look at N. Korea. They obtained nukes and are pretty much allowed to go about their business. If I was Iran, I'd damn well want nukes as quickly as possible.
There's also a huge amount of hypocrisy in the furore in their attempts to develop them. Not that I favour anyone developing nukes per se, but the fact that Israel were allowed to develop a nuclear arsenal without so much as a slap on the wrist to show for it, is outrageous.
demagogue on 23/3/2012 at 19:36
Well the difference to Israel is that elements in Iran are on record wanting to use nuclear weapons for strategic reasons (not just defense), and their government is already invested in destabilizing the Arab regimes surrounding it, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria... Give Iran nuclear weapons and it's going to squash the Arab Spring before it even gets a chance to blossom. Every country in the Middle East except Iran is going to disagree with your assessment that Iran having nukes is no worse than Israel, and don't make them shit bricks by even hinting at it. (Also N. Korea has bombarded a S. Korean island and shot ballistic missiles over Japanese waters in the recent past, and remember Seoul is less than 10 miles from the border. It's also unacceptable for them to have nukes, and we'd definitely know if they had them already because they would have demonstrated them first chance they get.)
As for Iraq, of course Saddam kept making public and private claims that he wasn't going to disarm at all, he wanted to keep his nuclear program, and he restricted & kicked out nuclear inspectors precisely to give the impression the program was still alive. He was lying of course. It's like the Nasser situation; he had to advertise that he was still in the nuclear business for domestic reasons, and hoping that the US wouldn't call him on it. The US of course should have known better and it made an awful policy decision going ahead with invasion anyway.
faetal on 23/3/2012 at 20:04
Israel is one of the most gratuitously violent nations on the planet - my gf is from Beirut, so I've heard first hand as well as having read about their repeated sledgehammer vs. walnut punitive military sojourns, so I'm not sure the fact that they are not hostile to OUR countries makes them an ok candidate for owning nukes. Also, the point is that they were just allowed to amass an arsenal - no checks, no balances, no UN intervention, no conditions, just "we're Israel, let us do as we please or we'll label you anti-semitic at best, or bomb your civilian infrastructure back to the stone age at worst". It's a pretty big exception to make for any country, whether we consider them good or bad, especially one which is as truculent as Israel.
As for North Korea: (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction)
They could be bluffing, sure, but what the world sees is a rogue nation, which no one seems to want to touch with barge pole. Now bear in mind that I wish no countries had nuclear weapons. None. But the way that the US and Israel rattle sabres around Iran, I don't think anyone could blame them for wanting the deterrent effect that N. Korea seems to emanate. Again, that doesn't mean I think it is good or right, I just think it's a tad biased to say Israel = ok and Iran = mental tyrants, when Israel has spent most of the last 50 years breaking international law in its various disproportionate actions against its neighbours.
demagogue on 23/3/2012 at 21:18
I'm well aware of Israel's breaches, the wall, the Gaza siege, the inhuman conditions in the occupied territories with no realistic plan to extricate itself and give Palestinians statehood (nevermind they're so deadset against a single multinational state which in any other part of the world would have been the no-brain solution from the start). But I was thinking about what's in the region's best interest. I took a course on this and the consistent signals from the other Arab countries is they need Israel as a buffer against Iran (except when they're talking to their own public), because Iran is the actual expansionist threat. Israel is a serious threat to its own occupied territories, but it's not like they want to occupy other states (speaking about the current situation, with normalized relations with its neighbors) or destabilize the region, and it has no reason to use its nuclear weapons. Iran would love nothing more than Islamist governments in every other Arab state and proxy-rule/occupation over those governments (It basically proxy-occupies south Lebanon & Beirut through Hezbollah as it is now), and it never misses a chance to intervene in the affairs of the Arab states and destabilize them internally (cf. Iraq, Egypt...), and it has already made public statements that it wants to use a nuclear arsenal. Now that the Arab Spring has opened the door to Islamist political parties (still the right thing to do), the threat from Iran influence is an even bigger issue, since it'll have an open door straight in parliaments.
I understand your emotional sentiments, but you need to keep the apples and oranges separate and take responsibility for your decisions and the best interests of the region. Yes we need Israel to stop its humiliating treatment of the Palestinian population, get out of the occupied territory, stop its laughably shameful overpowered military responses, and give the Palestinians their state (and preferably have a single multinational state if having a just outcome meant anything to them). But we need them to serve as a deterrent to Iran too. Iran with nukes is a disaster for everyone, first of all the other Arab countries. Is your girlfriend happy that huge slices of her country are basically an Iranian proxy state? They almost went to civil war over this in 2008; give Iran nukes and how stable is Lebanon now? (Yes I understand the south was once occupied by Israel too in the 80s, which I'd agree is just as bad, but that did cause an internal crisis in Israel too and they pulled out. When do you think Hezbollah plans on leaving or disarming?)
Anyway my usual tactic in situations like this is to be clear what I personally think the just outcome just to keep things in perspective, and that would be a secular & democratic government in Iran, a single democratic, peaceful multinational Israeli/Palestinian state, total disarmament and a nuclear free zone in the entire Middle East, the withering away of Hezbollah and other militant groups, and the downfall of the remaining secular military regimes to democratic governments (Syria, Saudi Arabia...). I'm not in favor of fixing the game to any other outcome short of that, within the boundaries of what's politically possible (still better to have real normalization & democratization than an impossible utopia), so it's clear where my preferences are.
faetal on 23/3/2012 at 21:37
I'm saying (albeit with a perhaps unnecessary tangent down "Israel is a big old douche" avenue) that the best way to persuade Iran not to work as fast as possible to get their foot in the nuclear door is not to back away from North Korea the moment they claim to have developed nukes (one of George Bush's first actions in his presidency was to roll back some of Clinton's nuclear stand down and once again have nukes pointing at N.K., which likely didn't help maintain calm), and not to totally overlook Israel having their own gigantic arsenal and generally treat Israel like their favourite kid.
What incentive do Iran have to back the fuck up? We promise we won't invade you? Iraq /Hussein was an ally of the US and it looks to the world at large that the US knew all along that there was no serious nuclear threat coming out of there. The US, from an axis perspective isn't to be trusted, not just from direct threat (there has been more than one occasional of "not ruling out military action" against Iran from the US), but also from it's junior partner Israel. Even if direct threats or even indirect threats don't come, then the fact that the US is bound to Israel and sends it billions in aid every year, is bound to make anyone in the region feel nervous, particularly when this artificial inflation of their economy (they have one of the most egalitarian economies in the world, thanks to all of that US dough) has allowed them to develop such disproportionate military might. Granted, they, as you say, are only interested in staying put (which intrinsically also means keeping land which isn't theirs according to international law - imagine e.g. Canada using this excuse over Alaska or whatever), but it's destabilising to have a belligerent, chauvinistic nation funded by the world's only super power bombing adjacent countries with gay abandon.
I've done it again. Sorry, I just find the Israel thing so fucking abysmal. They're one of the only countries in the world which is held up by the foremost Western nations as being some kind of good guys, who are trying to force a state with has racial and religious prejudice in its core principles. Can anyone imagine if the US decided it was just for white Christians and started oppressing all non-Christian minorities?
Fuck, I've done it again :/
Anyway, yeah, so I agree that Iran are making everyone nervous - but seriously, if they develop nukes, how are they going to use them tactically? Israel will always have more nukes and are itching for a reason to send a few into Iran, so I can't see how it coule end up as anything other than a MAD deterrent.
june gloom on 23/3/2012 at 22:27
You're assuming that Iran is run by rational thinkers who don't operate on a religion that encourages martyrdom. The prospect of getting nuked is not a deterrent, just so long as they can wipe those unbeliever Zionists off the map, and maybe some of those dirty non-Persian Arabs too. As far as majority-Shiite Iran is concerned, those majority-Sunni Arab countries are all infidels.
Everyone has good reason to fear a nuclear-armed Iran, and just because Israel isn't the Jewish Utopia it's made out to be doesn't invalidate a damn thing about Iran. If Iran had nukes, it's fucking game over for the entire region.
