Ariel Dorfmann: for 17 years we in Chile were under a dictatorship that deployed surveillance to create fear, crush courage.
— Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) November 15, 2013
Apparently an ongoing thing, happening, as I started writing this post, about 20 blocks away, at the Fordham Law campus, where Dorfman was speaking on a panel together with James Bamford, Bruce Schneier, and Glenn Greenwald (presumably on video, he doesn't believe it's safe for him to come to the US, right?) on the topic They're Watching Us: So What?
The case of the busted bunker busters may turn out to be a case of that fascinating but elusive animal, the Political Observer's Paradox, in which the way you choose to observe a particular political phenomenon—whether you focus on its position at a particular point in time, or its velocity as it works its way through a particular set of spatial coordinates—can affect the way it comes out. But it's a pretty complicated matter, and we'll have to go into some background first.
The GBU-28 (Guided Bomb Unit 28), improperly known as "Deep Throat", and originally created by Texas Instruments and Lockheed but now manufactured by Raytheon, is a bunker buster: a hard-target laser-guided bomb developed during the First Gulf War in 1991 to penetrate the underground concrete bunkers in which the Iraqi command was thought to be hiding from Operation Desert Storm, 19 feet long and stuffed with something that makes it incredibly heavy, 5000 pounds.
It works, according to HowStuffWorks,
like a gigantic nail shot from the gigantic nail gun of a B-52 or
F-111, plummeting nose first toward its target and piercing through 100
feet of soil or 20 [jump]
Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.
So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.
There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]
While our president was going around last May making nice about all those Arab revolutionaries bringing their governments down, guess what the Pentagon was up to? According to closely reasoned and evidenced reporting from Nick Turse at TomDispatch,
[a]s state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic
dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on
training missions to allied militaries there. During more than 40 such
operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes
lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern
security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit
tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations -- skills
crucial to defeating popular uprisings...
Now, what exactly is up with that? Should we be applying our standard left-paranoid analysis to this? I.e., (1) the interests of our ruling class, the 1% if you like, are aligned with those of the familiar dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak and so on; (2) the U.S. government, as the "management committee of the bourgeoisie" or agency for carrying out ruling class interests, inevitably opposes the democratic revolutions; and (3) Obama does his job of expressing the natural pro-revolutionary sentiments of the 99% to distract us from what is really happening.
But I'd like to sketch out an alternative way of looking at it that might be a little less boring and a little smarter, and still "of the left"--and indeed the seeds of a whole bigfat theory of democracy and power.
Benevolent dictator Wotan figures it out: God can't give people free will, they have to take it. But won't that make trouble for the government? Hey, kid, why do you think they call it Götterdämmerung?
