Tag Archives: middle-east

The Human Shields of West Palm Beach

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

The New York Times ran an article the other day that’s notable both for how ordinary and how extraordinary it is. The facts are extraordinary, the attitudes taken to it predictably complacent. It’s yet another addition to my running series here on the use of “Human Shields,” not in Gaza or Southern Lebanon, but right here at home. “The U.S. Start-Up Making Low-Cost Interceptors for the Iran War,” it’s called, describing a military start-up based in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida. Here’s the beginning:

For Florida-based Powerus, becoming a global supplier of counterdrone technology has meant involving the Trumps, a golf course and a new way of doing business. 

In a small warehouse in the United Arab Emirates, workers spend up to 12 hours a day snapping together 3-D printed components to make interceptors capable of knocking Iranian drones out of the sky at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour.

The facility, which came online last month, is being used by Powerus, a start-up in West Palm Beach, Fla., to make inexpensive interceptors.

The factory is the company’s first foray into the Middle East, and part of its plan to become a global supplier. Factories affiliated with Powerus make roughly 3,000 drone interceptors a month, a spokesman said, and the company is trying to establish a network of factories that will increase production to 15,000 a month worldwide by mid-2027. It would not publicly disclose the identities of its customers or contract manufacturer in the Emirates.

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Masters of the Universe

Posted on by under Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

The Times “Covers” the Iran War
Here’s The New York Times describing recent developments in the US-Israeli war against Iran and Lebanon:

The June memorandum of understanding was widely seen as a boon for Iran, granting the regime badly needed sanctions relief even as talks over tough concessions like nuclear enrichment were postponed for later. But Iranian leaders opted to escalate again rather than consolidate their gains from the deal, according to Nate Swanson, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group.

Ships could move through the Strait of Hormuz freely before the war. Iran’s insistence that the deal’s vague language on the issue gave it control over the waterway led to the deal falling apart. Iran began firing on ships that transited in channels outside Iranian waters, and American forces retaliated by bombing southern Iran, prompting a cycle of attacks and counterattacks across the Middle East.

In other words, according to the Times, “expert” opinion tells us that the failure of the ceasefire is to be chalked up to Iranian belligerence and irrationality. In fact, what it actually tells us is that the “experts” are full of shit. Every claim made in this passage is factually challenged nonsense. 

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“Iran’s Fractured Leadership”

Posted on by under moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Princeton University, War with Iran

I wrote the post below the line back in April, but got pulled into other things, and never posted it. But I feel pretty vindicated: since late March, the Times’s narrative has turned 180 degrees. In March, they were quoting officials quite sure that Iran’s leadership was too “fractured” to act in a unified way. By July 29, the narrative became: “Trump Encounters a More Determined Iran as War Widens.” By August 1, it was: “In Iran, the U.S. Appears Headed for Strategic Defeat, Allies Fear.”

Good call, NYT, but how the fuck did that happen? How did Iran go from being all fractured and confused to achieving victory over the supposedly unified and all-powerful United States in four months? One possibility is that though “fractured,” Iran had the capacity to heal its “fractures” pretty fast. The other is that Iran was never all that fractured in the first place. In the first case, we’ve gotten no account from the Times of the transition from the one thing to the other; in the other, we’ve gotten no acknowledgement of its false assessment of Iranian dysfunction. Either way, the question arises: how much do these journalistic “experts” really know, anyway? To the extent that they know anything, how much of their knowledge is ultimately neutralized by the desire to generate nationalist propaganda? Continue reading →

Hayek and Hormuz

Posted on by under Hayek, War with Iran

The core idea of Hayek’s famous “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is the claim that prices act as signals that compress vast amounts of dispersed, rapidly-changing information into something that ground-level decisions-makers can use without knowing the underlying details. You don’t have to know anything about oil or gas production to know how much gasoline you can afford to put in your car, or how much driving you should do between paychecks, etc. Likewise, a gas station manager doesn’t have to know anything about geopolitics or warfare strategy or the Strait of Hormuz to know that a shortage is coming, and that he has to up the price of gas at his tank. The resulting reduction in epistemic burdens is supposed to be the great virtue of the free market pricing system. Continue reading →

I’m Rooting for Iran

Posted on by under activism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, War with Iran

As the United States continues to lose the war to Iran, expect American journalists to employ increasingly bizarre but instructive circumlocutions to misdescribe obvious but unpalatable realities. This piece in The Wall Street Journal is a classic in the genre. “Iran uses asymmetric warfare to inflict pain from a weakened position.” Translation: “Iran is using asymmetric warfare to win the war.” Continue reading →

Dire Strait

Posted on by under War with Iran

Consider one of the antinomies, or self-contradictions, of international relations.

For decades now, the conventional wisdom in international relations has held that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was a low probability event, and that if it happened, it could very likely be dealt with by the U.S. Navy. For documentation and a literature review, see Caitlin Talmadge’s paper, “Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz,” International Security, vol. 33:1 (Summer 2008), pp. 82-117. Continue reading →

Malley and Wertheim on Iranian “Responsibility”

Posted on by under Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, War with Iran

When people commit crimes, they often invent elaborate rationalizations to conceal or dilute the moral turpitude of the offense. Rapists notoriously claim that their victims asked to be raped, or enjoyed it during the act. Murderers cite the imperatives of retributive justice. Etc. When it comes to ordinary crimes, most people can see the gaslighting involved for the deception it is. Unfortunately, this tends not to be true of crimes by nation-states. A nation-state can commit an obvious, egregious crime in the plain light of day, lie about it in an obvious way, and be believed by millions of people. Continue reading →

This Be the Hearse

Posted on by under activism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, War with Iran

David French on the “legal and moral justifications for war” against Iran:

There is little question that we have many legal and moral justifications for war. When Trump spoke about Americans killed by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, that struck home for me. We lost men in my own unit to Iranian-backed militias using Iranian-supplied munitions. I knew those men, and I will never forget the terrible days when they fell.

In other words, twenty years ago, the United States initiated a war of aggression against Iraq premised on florid, systematic lies. The victims fought back, killing some of the aggressors. In answer to those acts of self-defense, we’re now obliged to initiate yet another war of aggression, this time against Iran, eliciting yet another round of defensive attacks by the successors of yesteryear’s victims. Continue reading →

When Self-Defense Is “Terror”

Posted on by under Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, War with Iran

A recent article in The New York Times by its so-called “national security correspondent” is an indication of how incompetent mainstream journalists are, and how unreflectively eager they are to do the bidding of the national security establishment they supposedly cover. The article is “Iran Could Direct Proxies to Attack U.S. Targets Abroad, Officials Warn,” by Eric Schmitt. Nothing in it is newsworthy or news. All of the work in it is done by its brainless and tendentious reliance on the term “terrorism.” Continue reading →

Loyalty and Academic Freedom

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, Fatwas, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

The case of Jonathan A. C. Brown
A friend is circulating an Open Letter to Interim President Robert Groves of Georgetown University in defense of Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilisation in the School of Foreign Service. Apparently, during the recent US-Israel-Iran war, Brown made this comment on X:

“I’m not an expert, but I assume Iran could still get a bomb easily. I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops,” Brown wrote on X.

Brown has tenure and a chaired professorship at Georgetown, but apparently the comment was regarded as frightening enough to call for his suspension. The President forced Brown to delete the tweet, and he’s now been suspended. He’s also been removed as chair of his department, which I believe was intended as punishment. Continue reading →