Quotulatiousness

July 17, 2011

Saudi Arabia upgrades their armoured forces

Filed under: Germany, Middle East, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

Saudi Arabia will add a few hundred of the most up-to-date panzers to their defence forces:

Saudi Arabia is buying 244 Leopard 2A7+ tanks from Germany. Saudi Arabia is believed to have already ordered 44, and now has increased that order. It was only a year ago that German tank manufacturer KMW has revealed this, the latest version of its Leopard 2.

Two years ago, the German Army announced that it was going to upgrade 150 of its Leopard 2A6 tanks to the A7 standard. That would include more armor on the sides and rear (especially to protect against RPGs), more external cameras (so the crew inside could see anything in any direction, day or night), a remote control machine-gun station on top of the turret, better fire control and combat control computers and displays, more powerful auxiliary power unit and better air conditioning, and numerous other minor improvements. This would increase the weight of the tank to nearly 70 tons.

[. . .]

Saudi Arabia is concerned about Iran, which has a force of 1,500 much older tanks (most of them Russian T-72s and T-54/55s). Saudi Arabia has 1,300 tanks, most of them older American M-60s and French AMX-30s. But the Saudis also have 370 U.S. M-1s and 150 Russian T-90s. The 244 Leopards will increase the Saudi edge. The Saudis also have the money to buy spare parts for their modern tanks, and Western instructors to provide the best training. But the Iranians are better soldiers, so they might have an edge there.

June 15, 2011

The “Amina Arraf” hoax

Filed under: Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

Brendan O’Neill on how easily the hoaxer’s blog became “a go-to place for liberal hacks, bloggers and tweeters who wanted to know ‘the truth’ about life in Syria.”

The revelation that the Gay Girl in Damascus is actually a stubbly bloke in Edinburgh has sent shockwaves through the media. ‘How could he have done this?’, journalists are demanding of Tom MacMaster, the American self-confessed nerd based in Scotland who for six months pretended to be a dissident dyke in Syria. ‘Doesn’t he know the damage he has done to gay people in the Middle East and to the reputation of political blogging?’

These are the wrong questions. Because the most striking thing about this blogging hoax is not its potential impact over there, but what it reveals about culture, politics and journalism over here. The thing that ought to cause jaws to drop and eyebrows to rise is not Mr MacMaster’s deceitfulness — he isn’t the first mundane man to masquerade as something sexier on the world wide web — but rather the ease with which he planted himself in the cultural consciousness. It is the manipulability of the modern media, their wide-eyed openness to unchecked foreign stories that seem to confirm their prejudices, which should really be in the spotlight.

[. . .]

The media’s current focus on the clever nature of the gay-girl hoax (‘it is an elaborate hoax’, says a track-covering Guardian), overlooks what is easily the most important dynamic in this story: not MacMaster’s alleged powers of persuasion, but the media’s susceptibility to delusion. However well-written or seemingly authentic MacMaster’s blog was — and as it happens, some Syrians have said it was unconvincing — the fact is that it was just a blog; just a self-started website with various bits of personal writing and nothing to suggest that any of it was accurate or authoritative. Those complaining about being duped, Scooby Doo-style, by the apparent master of disguise that is Tom MacMaster need to have a word with themselves: it was their openness to being duped, their embrace of the seemingly made-in-heaven ‘gay girl in Damascus’ narrative with its achingly right-on contrast between a morally sensitive LGBT gal and a male-dominated regime, which really blew this blog out of all proportion.

June 11, 2011

QotD: OPEC’s 50-year fishing trip

Filed under: Economics, Government, Middle East, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

The petroleum-exporting countries have kept America as a gigantic fish on a steel line for nearly 50 years, reeling it in slowly, and letting it out (relaxing oil prices), when the United States made purposeful noises about raising domestic production, cutting consumption, and going to alternate sources. As soon as OPEC fine-tuned the fishing reel, the great fish went with the docility of the addicted consumer back to its default position mainlining on foreign oil at steadily increasing prices and in ever larger quantities. Every president starting with Richard Nixon warned of the danger in this addiction, but none has done anything useful about it. There must be an emphasis on cheap and plentiful natural gas, more nuclear (with maximum safety standards), more off-shore drilling (with maximum environmental-protection arrangements), and higher gasoline taxes to raise revenues and restrain use. All of this will bring down the international price and reduce the amount of money available for the Iranians, Saudis, Venezuelans, and others to finance terrorism around the world, and will ultimately reduce U.S. defense costs. None of this has been done, though the need for it has been obvious for decades.

Conrad Black, “Why America is suffering”, National Post, 2011-06-11

June 8, 2011

“RAF’s new superfighter was thrashed in the very type of combat it is supposed to be best at by a 1970s-era plane”

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Middle East, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:24

Lewis Page talks about claims from a Pakistani Air Force fighter pilot that their F-16s had “shot down” Royal Air Force Typhoons in three separate air training exercises in Turkey.

The RAF Typhoon, formerly known as the Eurofighter, should nonetheless have been vastly superior in air-to-air combat whether BVR or close in within visual range (WVR). The cripplingly expensive, long-delayed Eurofighter was specifically designed to address the defects of its predecessor the Tornado F3 — famously almost useless in close-in, dogfighting-style air combat. The Typhoon was meant to see off such deadly in-close threats as Soviet “Fulcrums” and “Flankers” using short-range missiles fired using helmet-mounted sight systems: such planes were thought well able to beat not just Tornados but F-16s in close fighting, and this expectation was borne out after the Cold War when the Luftwaffe inherited some from the East German air force and tried them out in exercises.

Thus it is that huge emphasis was placed on manoeuvring capability and dogfighting in the design of the Eurofighter. The expensive Euro-jet was initially designed, in fact, as a pure fighter with no ground attack options at all — bomber capability has had to be retrofitted subsequently at still more expense. Despite lacking various modern technologies such as Stealth and thrust-vectoring the resulting Typhoon is generally touted as being one of the best air-to-air combat planes in the world right now. Certainly it is meant to be good in close fighting: it is armed with the Advanced Short Range Air to Air Missile (ASRAAM) which as its name suggests is intended for the close WVR fight.

Perhaps the account above is simply a lie, or anyway a bit of a fighter pilot tall story. But the pilot quoted will be easily identifiable inside his community if not to the outside world, and he could expect a lot of flak for telling a lie on such a matter in public. It seems likelier that the story is the truth as he perceived it: that the RAF’s new superfighter was thrashed in the very type of combat it is supposed to be best at by a 1970s-era plane, albeit much modernised.

June 5, 2011

Surely this “cure” is worse than the “disease”?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

John Perry Barlow retweeted a link to this Kuwait Times post:

A female political activist and former parliamentary candidate has recommended the introduction of legislation to legalize the provision of enslaved female concubines for Muslim men in Kuwait in a bid, she says, to protect those men from committing adultery or corruption.

The activist, Salwa Al-Mutairi, suggested apparently seriously in a video broadcast online that she had been informed by some clerics that affluent Muslim men who fear being seduced or tempted into immoral behavior by the beauty of their female servants, or even of those servants ‘casting spells’ on them, would be better to purchase women from an ‘enslaved maid’ agency for sexual purposes.

She suggested that special offices could be set up to provide concubines in the same way as domestic staff recruitment agencies currently provide housemaids.

May 22, 2011

Obama clarifies his last Middle East speech

Filed under: Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

Drew M. points out that President Obama is merely doing what every other President since Jimmy Carter has done:

There was a lot of confusion on Thursday about whether Obama’s reference to “67 borders with mutually agreed upon swaps” was news or not. A lot of pro-Israel folks on Twitter (but granted not all) didn’t seem to think it was a big deal at the time. I think two things played into the reaction.

One, the left, led by the New York Times, played this is up as a big change and that an American President was finally standing up to Israel.

Second, the language choices Obama made and the fact that no one doubts in his heart of hearts Obama would throw Israel under the bus if he could. The fact is, Presidents don’t always have full freedom of action. It’s like there are checks and balances or something (thank God).

Now, he’s walked back or clarified his stance (depending on your point of view). The anti-Israeli left will say “the Jews got to him”. Many on the right will say, “Bibi got him”.

I think the fact is, reality got him.

Obama is simply doing what many other Presidents (Carter, Bush, Clinton and even G.W. Bush gave it a shot) have done…try and build a legacy by solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He’ll fail just like the rest simply because the Palestinians don’t want to solve it by any means other than the destruction of Israel. Until that changes, this will always be a Siren’s Song that winds up with everyone crashing on the rocks.

That last little nugget is the real reason I always feel depressed when yet another attempt to “resolve” the Middle East crisis gets underway: without Palestinians accepting the right of Israel to exist, there will be no actual progress regardless of the number meetings, declarations, conferences, and so on. One side has the bedrock value that the other side must die — as long as that value remains, no peaceful settlement is possible.

April 27, 2011

Syrian update

Filed under: Liberty, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:43

With attention focused on Libya, the Syrian situation is still highly volatile:

Bashir Assad clings to power by manipulating the fear within the many factions supporting him that they would have to flee the country, to avoid death or prison, if the current government fell. Then there is the threat that the security forces would use extreme violence to suppress the demonstrations. This, however, could enrage the general population and trigger a bloody civil war. The only thing everyone can agree on is a desire for peaceful resolution of the crises. But Assad and his cronies don’t want to give up power, and they may have to risk everything to find out how far most Syrians are willing to go to force big changes.

Five weeks of escalating violence have left over 200 dead, and over a thousand arrested (and hundreds later released). While nearly all the dead are protestors, more security forces personnel are getting killed. The government is using armed militias (from the groups that have always supported the Assad dictatorship) as well as the police and “special” (secret) police to try and control or terrorize the growing number of demonstrators. There are also said to be small numbers (hundreds) of “security specialists” from Iran. Some Hezbollah gunmen are believed involved as well, and Syrians are accusing these “foreigners” for many of the killings. While most of the leadership posts in the police and army are held by minorities (like the Alawite sect the Assads belong to), most of the troops are majority Sunni Arab. Thus Assad controls management, but has to be careful with the rank and file.

If enough civilians hit the streets, there won’t be enough security forces to confront them, and the entire structure of the Assad police state will start coming apart. Iran might try to stop it, with a massive transfer (by air) of security personnel, and many more from Hezbollah entering by land. Hezbollah loses a lot if it no longer has those land supply routes from Syria. Meanwhile, each Friday (the Moslem Sunday), the demonstrations get larger. The way things have been going, it won’t be many more Fridays before Assad and his crew are gone, or the country is getting blown apart by civil war. It’s unclear if democracy or a new dictatorship will replace the old government. There are many tribes and factions in Syria, and predicting how they will all shake out is not possible.

Update: Just so you don’t forget, at the same time the Syrian government is attempting to suppress the demonstrations, it is running (unopposed) for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council.

April 20, 2011

Logic, consistency not strong points for this would-be terror gang

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:30

A group of would-be terrorists were discovered before they could put their plans into action partly because of their disdain for “infidel” technology:

Recently, a British Moslem (Rajib Karim) was sentenced to 30 years for attempting to use his job at British Airways to help plan, coordinate and carry out terrorist attacks. One reason Karim was caught was the refusal of his terrorist cohorts in Yemen and Bangladesh to use modern cryptography for their communications. The reason was that the modern stuff was all invented by infidels (non-Moslems). Instead the group was forced to use ancient (over 2,000 year old) single letter substitution codes. The group’s implementation of this was accomplished using a spreadsheet. Unlike modern ciphers, like PGP and AES, the ancient substitution methods are easy to crack with modern decryption techniques.

A major shortcoming of Islamic radicalism is its disdain for modern, particularly non-Moslem (Western) technology. This often causes problems, like the one Karim (a computer specialist with British Airways) had with his less educated fellow terrorists in Yemen and Bangladesh. But what Karim encountered was another major problem for Islamic radicals, the fact that these groups tend to attract a disproportionate number of poorly educated recruits. The Islamic world, in general, is less educated and literate than the West, thus giving Islamic radical groups a poorly educated pool of potential recruits to begin with.

The disdain is highly selective, unless spreadsheets were also part of the Arabic cultural heritage.

April 12, 2011

Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defence system in action

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Strategy Page discusses the first use of the new Israeli anti-missile system to defend civilian targets last week:

Israel has deployed two batteries of its Iron Dome anti-missile system near the Gaza border. One is near the town of Beer Sheva (the largest town in the Negev desert) and another near the coastal city Ashdod (the largest city within range of 122mm rockets fired from Gaza). On April 7th, a 122mm rocket was intercepted near Ashkelon, which is south of Ashdod. This deployment was prompted by an increase in rockets fired from Gaza, and the growing use of longer range (20 kilometers) 122mm rockets. Iron Dome proved that it could work under combat conditions, preventing the longer range, factory made, rockets from landing in populated areas.

This is a big turnaround for this system. Four months ago, the Israeli military revealed that its new Iron Dome anti-rocket system was not meant for defending towns and villages, but military bases. For years, politicians touted Iron Dome as a means of defending civilians living close to rockets fired from Gaza in the south and Lebanon in the north. But it turns out that it takes about 15 seconds for Iron Dome to detect, identify and fire its missiles. But most of the civilian targets currently under fire from Gaza are so close to the border (within 13 kilometers) that the rockets are fired and land in less than 15 seconds. This means that the town of Sderot, the closest Israeli urban area to Gaza, cannot be helped by Iron Dome.

[. . .]

Iron Dome uses two radars to quickly calculate the trajectory of the incoming rocket (Palestinian Kassams from Gaza, or Russian and Iranian designs favored by Hezbollah in Lebanon) and do nothing if the rocket trajectory indicates it is going to land in an uninhabited area. But if the computers predict a rocket coming down in an inhabited area, a $40,000 guided missile is fired to intercept the rocket. This makes the system cost-effective. That’s because Hezbollah fired 4,000 rockets in 2006, and Palestinian terrorists in Gaza have fired over six thousand Kassam rockets in the past eight years, and the Israelis know where each of them landed. Over 90 percent of these rockets landed in uninhabited areas, and few of those that did caused few casualties. Still, a thousand interceptor missiles would cost $40 million. But that would save large quantities of military equipment and avoid many dead and injured troops. Israel already has a radar system in place that gives some warning of approaching rockets. Iron Dome will use that system, in addition to another, more specialized radar in southern Israel.

April 7, 2011

Briefly noted – The Crimean War by Orlando Figes

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:24

I just picked this up last night at the “World’s Biggest Bookstore” in Toronto. I’m quite enjoying it, as it discusses much more than just the war itself: about 50 pages in, I think I’ve learned far more about middle eastern history and Russia’s geostrategic problems.

The various books and articles I’ve read on this conflict have pretty uniformly concentrated on the purely military aspects, and generally just on the battles involving British and French troops. One reason for the relative obscurity of such a major conflict is that the background is essential to understand just why Britain and France were fighting Russia on the Black Sea coast. Without that background, the war appears totally senseless and this is heightened by the well-worn tales of military incompetence (the Charge of the Light Brigade), brief moments of heroism (the “Thin Red Line”), and criminally awful medical and sanitary situation (Florence Nightingale).

If the remaining 450 pages are as good as the first 50, this will be one of my candidates for book of the year.

March 21, 2011

Colby Cosh: “is it quite all right for a news agency to have its own army?”

Filed under: Africa, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:55

I was surprised to find that al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Egyptian uprising was of much higher quality than that of more traditional western news sources. Colby Cosh also thought al-Jazeera far exceeded the efforts of CNN and Fox News, among others:

. . . al-Jazeera seemed, for a moment, to be living up to its promise as a bridge between the Arab world and the West — if not transcending that promise and becoming something greater; a tribune of the Arab peoples and their neighbours; an influential, omnipresent witness of precisely the sort that the students in Tiananmen Square lacked; and, perhaps, one of the world’s essential institutions of news.

That potential is still there. The world is certainly a very much better place with al-Jazeera than without; it would be better still with five al-Jazeeras. But the time has come to raise a abstruse, nitpicky ethical point that reflects back on some of the Western journalists who have gone to work for al-Jazeera, and some of the Western leaders who have praised it so effusively. It’s this: is it quite all right for a news agency to have its own army?

I ask because it is a little difficult to disentangle al-Jazeera, which is owned by the Qatar Media Corporation, from the autocratic Qatari state. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani is as nice as absolute dictators get — a man arguably in the tradition of the enlightened despots of Europe’s quite recent past, who shared outstanding personal qualities, a common commitment to education and equality, and a dedication to advancing liberal ideals, albeit by undemocratic means. It’s traditional, in enlightened autocracies, for the required oppression to officially be deemed temporary, and for this pretence of temporariness to be kept up at all costs. Official U.S. sources, keen on avoiding offence to an important ally, advance Qatar’s claim to already be a “constitutional monarchy”.

March 18, 2011

Tim Harford: The management lessons from the war in Iraq

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

March 7, 2011

UN shows true colours again on eve of International Women’s Day

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

As a self-parody, the UN can’t possibly go much lower than this, can they?

On the eve of International Women’s Day, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on March 8, the United Nations has delivered a serious insult to women around the world: On March 4, the UN appointed Iran to its Commission for the Status of Women.

Iran has an abysmal record on women’s rights. Its police can arrest women for getting a suntan, wearing too much makeup, or dressing “immodestly.” One of its religious leaders made headlines around the world last year when he blamed women’s immodesty for causing a series of earthquakes. In 2003, Iranian state thugs raped, tortured and killed Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi because she photographed a Tehran prison.

As a sign of its relative unimportance, I only just realized that I didn’t even have a tag for the UN. That’s a pretty strong indication that they’ve lapsed from view.

March 4, 2011

Israel’s largest defence company moving toward privatization

Filed under: Economics, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:43

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) is a state-owned company with a great reputation for quality and innovation. The Economist looks at their moves toward going into private control:

When Mr Shamir, an important figure in Israel’s booming high-technology business, took on the job of sorting out his country’s biggest industrial company in 2005, state-owned IAI was in a wretched condition.

For one thing, it had never quite got over the blow to its self-confidence when the Lavi, an advanced dual-role combat aircraft, was cancelled by the government headed by Mr Shamir senior in 1987. Although the Lavi was on course to meet all its performance targets, the cost of the project and American concern that it was helping to finance a rival to its F-16 and F-18 fighters killed it. For IAI, it meant that it would never again try to make a fast jet on its own.

For another, despite recovering much of its technological élan, IAI was an organisational and financial mess. Executives say it had gone three years without a formal chairman and two years without a signed financial statement. Banks had seized some of its financial assets and its chief executive of 20 years, Moshe Keret, was facing bribery allegations (he denied these and the case was dropped for lack of evidence). The firm was also in the grip of the Histadrut union federation, which fought all attempts to slim a bloated workforce and introduce merit-based remuneration.

March 1, 2011

Iran already threatening 2012 Olympic boycott

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

They’ve suddenly realized that the truth was staring them right in the face the whole time:

The 2012 London Olympics are more than a year away, but Iran already is threatening to boycott them. According to Bahram Afsharzadeh, secretary general of Iran’s National Olympic Committee, the 2012 Olympic logo secretly spells out the word “Zion,” which makes it “racist.” The Iranians also claim that use of the logo “is a disgracing action and against the Olympics’ valuable mottos.”

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