Negotiations

I commented back in March that the IRGC in Iran was probably going to be in the final state in Iran unless we were willing to go all out with boots on the ground (or the big bombs, I suppose).

I didn't think about what shape agreements would take. The Strait open goes without saying. The question is what about the uranium?

I don't see the IRGC being willing to publicly give it up. Supposing a faction had the power to do so, offering to would be an invitation for another faction to denounce and attack them, grabbing their territory and control of the uranium.

So face-saving would be built into the agreement. They'd agree to something lesser that in practice (and in secret) amounts to giving it up.

Except for weaseling. They would fake the records ("A GBU-57 ate my homework") and offer up half the uranium.

We'd have to rely a lot on intel, and by this time I'm not sure how many useful assets remain.

And, of course, nobody will explain what's really going on, leaving lots of room for nasty politicking.

Iranian agents

For decades I have heard dark warnings that Iran has sleeper cells in the USA waiting for the word to do something.(*) I guess now we find out how many are ready. Or perhaps, how many are prepared to act before they discover whether their erstwhile paymasters are still in business.

(*) Not with hard evidence, just with "It's obvious that they would." And it is obvious that they'd want to try, but I'm not expert on how supply, command, and control would work on a decades-long insertion. It's probably way cheaper to fund existing networks than to create your own; though you lose the "control" part.

Iran

IIRC the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were involved in a lot of sections of the economy. I suspect that it won't be as easy as we hope for the Iranians to chuck the mullahs--a lot of Iranians are invested in the way things are.

I'm not keen on our default system of allowing a president to start a war without Congress, though I understand there can be a need for speed. In this case, there've been hostilities for years without official declarations, with a bit of plausible deniability. There's never been doubt about their ultimate goal, though. I wonder how the powers-that-be classify that kind of war-without-declaration. Words matter less than actions, and they figure that going head to head with armies isn't going to work, but having puppets lob stuff at us saves their forces. It still seems like war.

I'm guessing dirty bomb at some point. That was probably in the cards anyhow.

Iran deal

I worry about the Iran deal, but not as though it were a bad idea in itself.

What friends do we have in the area? Among the people, just the Israelis and the Kurds. The Saudi royal family is more or less friendly, but the population is hostile--when the house of Saud goes away you'll see the difference.

Among the Sunnis elite you can find a number of allies of convenience, and sometimes even of temperament, but not so much on the ground. Insofar as people care about us, they don't care for us. I described why, with suggestions, some years ago.

My takeaway is that the MidEast is full of divisions, some of which are religious and some tribal. The largest attacks against us have come from the largest religious group: the Sunnis.

It makes sense to keep in touch with all the major parties, so that you can play one against the others when possible. Iran was going to get nukes unless somebody used force--the Saudis already bought theirs via Pakistan.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to trumpet this sort of bargaining, though. You always want the biggest pressures to be applied quietly, because in a couple of years you may be trying to wheedle favors and you don't want too much public shame to get in the way.

And this kind of tribe vs tribe diplomacy isn't something the US is used to. We tend to like nice black and white conflicts and don't have a lot of patience for the Great Game. I think our leaders and administrators often suffer from the same tendency.

The real problem is that Obama is provably incompetent in international affairs; and arguably almost as dishonest as incompetent. The only thread of hope I have in this agreement is that the French signed off on it, and they've tended to have a sharp eye for French interests, which while they don't overlap with American ones, probably aren't served by nukes flying about.

Several people have claimed that this treaty guarantees war. So it does: X implies "there will be war in the MidEast" is a true statement for all values of X short of "sun goes supernova."

Iranian Schindler

If the news and pop "news" the past week has left a bad taste, refresh yourself with the BBC's story about Abdol-Hossein Sardari. A sample:

The story he spinned to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes.

However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "Djuguten," were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer's skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis' ideology to gain special treatment for the "Djuguten", as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari's new book shows.

High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not.

The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

I love that last sentence, btw.

Stuxnet

The Ancient and Noble Order of the Masters of IT works an esoteric ritual known as "backup." I do not doubt that the Iranian branch still performs this traditional rite.

Granted, the government's interest in secrecy may keep the number of backups small, but I'd guess that restoring the main systems is no more than a few days, and restoring the auxilliary systems no more than a couple of weeks. All the PCs with important information will have to have their disks combed in a clean environment, and that demands some expert time (and user time) to retrieve the vital stuff, but all is quite doable.

Work will have been lost, but it isn't a catastrophe or a showstopper. Probably pretty much everything the media has said about it is either a mistake or a lie.

What is going on?

• It could be a coincidence. Stranger things have happened.
• It could be a test weapon that got away before it was ready to be used.
• It could be a feint: for example to focus Iranian intelligence on computing at the nuclear plants rather than personnel at the airports. Anybody else notice that several high ranking Iranians died in air crashes in the last few years?
• It could be meant to panic them into buying new network gear to isolate the control systems, gear that somebody has put backdoors into.
• It could be a coverup to keep attention away from real spies in their nuclear facilities.
• It could be meant to panic them into a spy-hunt in their facilities, which could tie things up worse than a worm.
• It could be a probe to find out who's really in charge of some division.

One thing I'm pretty sure of: the announcement of a name in the code that might link to the book of Esther was meant to mislead. That's a pretty far-fetched link, and did you see the code? Me neither.