Patrick Cockburn has written a very important essay on Syria in the London Review of Books (attached below). The essay is aptly titled but has only a few oblique, albeit important, references to Sykes – Picot Agreement, a document some readers may not familiar with. Let's begin with a little background.
The Sykes-Picot agreement (it was a secret agreement concocted by two bureaucrats) is one of the most cynical documents in the creation of the modern Middle East.
The Encylopaedia Britannica describes it accurately as follows:
It was a … “secret convention made during World War I (1916) between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes
MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., June 3, 2013 – About 100 people are hard at work at the U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters here on a new plan that will operationalize the way the command provides manpower and capability in support of the new defense strategic guidance.
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The plan, due to the Joint Staff in late August, is part of the Special Operations Command 2020 vision Navy Adm. William H. McRaven introduced shortly after taking the helm as Socom commander in 2011.The building of a global network of special operations forces, as well as U.S. government partners and partner nations, is a major component of Socom 2020, McRaven explained during the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Tampa, Fla., earlier this month.
McRaven’s Socom 2020 vision calls for a globally networked force of special operations forces, interagency representatives, allies and partners, with aligned structures processes and authorities to enable its operations. Globally networked forces, he said, will provide geographic combatant commanders and chiefs of mission with an unprecedented unity of effort and an enhance ability to respond to regional contingencies and threats to stability.
McRaven noted his own experience working with the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan. “It has been interesting to work in a network like that, and we do that very, very well on the direct action side,” he said. “We need to figure out — and it is part of the Socom plan — how do we take that network, and be able to extend that out to the theater special operations commands,” down to special operations forward elements and forces assigned to them.
For those of you that don't know, the US doesn't spend much time/energy/effort on military strategy and theory. They do spend money on political scientists and engineers to provide a substitute. Regardless, this deficit means the US continually falls victim to strategic errors due to stale military theory.
The big one we recently fell victim to?
The US unilaterally launched an arms race in autonomous weapons (for more on this read my article; Pandora Smiled).
NOTE: In fact, in all of the work I've done for the national security system (CIA, NSA, DoD, JCS, DNI, etc.), I've never run across a true military theorist. They don't exist in the 2 m plus person bureaucracy, despite trillions in spending based on those theories. Go figure?!? It's like building a Large Hadron Collidor without a physicist.
Well, that arms race is starting to bite us back, but not in the way our lazy national security strategists expected. There's a pretty good article in Vanity Fair about cyberwarfare and Iran by Michael Joseph Gross that details how.
It starts with a nice kick at the start, like Brave New War (on its fifth printing), but for cyberware:
The data on three-quarters of the machines on the main computer network of Saudi aramco had been destroyed. Hackers who identified themselves as Islamic and called themselves the Cutting Sword of Justice executed a full wipe of the hard drives of 30,000 aramco personal computers. For good measure, as a kind of calling card, the hackers lit up the screen of each machine they wiped with a single image, of an American flag on fire.
As you can see, if you like my stuff, it's worth the click to read the entire thing. Here's one of the payoffs:
In the U.S., the escalating bug-and-exploit trade has created a strange relationship between government and industry. The U.S. government now spends significant amounts of time and money developing or acquiring the ability to exploit weaknesses in the products of some of America’s own leading technology companies, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In other words: to sabotage American enemies, the U.S. is, in a sense, sabotaging its own companies.
Here's another one from a bug developer:
“You don’t have to be a nation-state to do this,” he says. “You just have to be really smart.”
BTW: the lead graphic is close to an article I did for Wired in 2007, When Bots Attack. From the Vanity Fair article:
It reminded me of this graphic from my Wired article that I thought you would enjoy:
Brazil: The largest anti-government demonstrations in 20 years, according to news analysts, have continued for five days in Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and eight other cities. News reports said 65,000 people demonstrated in Sao Paulo and over 100,000 marched in Rio. Social networking enabled coordinated marches in Sao Paulo, Rio and Belo Horizonte. Most of the demonstrations have been peaceful.
President Dilma Rousseff said in a brief statement, “Peaceful demonstrations are legitimate and part of democracy. It is natural for young people to demonstrate.”
No deaths have been reported. About 200 people have been injured around the country.
Comment: An increase in the cost of public transportation in Sao Paulo sparked the first demonstrations, which flash mob tactics swelled. As the demonstrations spread, demonstrators said they were protesting government corruption, poor economic conditions, criminal violence and lack of public safety, official spending for the Olympics in 2016 and the World Cup in 2014 and rising prices.
The government response has been much more restrained than that of the Turkish government and the violence has been much less. Nevertheless, the phenomenology looks very similar.
The police said they would not intervene to stop the demonstrations provided they did not result in property destructions. A small group of protestors in Rio set a car on fire. The car fire prompted the clash with police, which dominated international media coverage and misrepresented the peaceful nature of the demonstrations.
If I did write a near future, CGI thriller about drones, here's my back of the envelope sketch of the plot. It's definitely a movie plot, and not real. That means it is meant to be over the top.
If you aren't interested in an autonomous weapons disaster story, please disregard.
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Start. An Israeli drone hunter/killer op, run out of a converted trailer in the desert. Drone IDs a target in urban area. At risk of losing target, the drone “tags” target (microdots). Target disappears inside building, and begins to into large, sprawling tenement, doesn't emerge. Call in “mother hen” delivery system full of “chick” ground drones for search and destroy mission inside the complex. They are flown in, inserted, and enter the complex. Target is IDed several floors/walls away but appears to be on the run and deploying counter-measures to spoof ground drones.
Syria: Reports from Aleppo indicate fighting continues and the opposition has lost ground in outlying areas. The reports also indicate the main government offensive push has not yet begun.
North Korea-Syria: According to South Korean press, on 14 June, a “well-informed diplomatic source” said that “North Korea has dispatched chemical weapon technicians to Syria since the mid 1990s and transferred chemical agent synthesis methods and technology to manufacture warheads for chemical weapon delivery.”
Comment: Last week an unidentified source in a Saudi news outlet said that North Korean chemical warfare officers are assisting the government. There is no confirmation that North Korean advisors are assisting Syrian forces in the current fighting, but North Korea has sold arms, missiles, chemical weapons and nuclear technology to Syria since at least the mid-1980s.
In light of the US decision to arm rebels because it says Syria used chemical weapons, Syria would seem to have little reason to not use chemical weapons more freely, as tactical situations require. The North Koreans could help with that. Plus, North Korea has sent pilots and air defense units in past Middle East conflicts, invariably aiding the side that was fighting against the US and its proxies.
Iran-Syria: The British newspaper The Independent reported on Sunday that its sources said that Iran made a military decision to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support Syrian government forces. The unidentified sources stated the decision was made before the outcome of the presidential election.
Comment: The Independent's report has not been corroborated, but it has gone viral on the Web. If confirmed, it would represent an Iranian escalation move in retaliation for the US decision to arm the Sunni rebels.
Egypt: For the record. President Mursi announced on the 15th, “We decided today to entirely break off relations with Syria and with the current Syrian regime.” He also said he had decided to close down the Syrian Embassy in Cairo. He also called for an end to Hezbollah's presence in Syria.
Quality information on the Rivers Of The Fertile Cresent tends to be dense and technical, but there are occasional bits of political dynamite, such as this quote. The Fig. 1 mentioned is the above map of the Jordan & Litani river basins.
On the other hand, it is worthy to note that while analyzing the Lebanese part of the Jordan River Basin, no connection between the Litani River Basin and the Jordan River Basin was found in terms of surface flow, even though both basins lie close to each other (Fig. 1). The Litani basin was found to lie entirely in Lebanon. This result removes any ambiguity pertaining to the inclusion of the waters of the Litani River in any future water allocation scheme for the Jordan River Basin. As it was mentioned in the Johnston Plan and the Israeli “Cotton Plan”, some Israeli negotiators wished to include the Litani River in the Jordan River Basin plan (Amery 1998). Today, the inclusion of the Litani River is still present in the opinion of some politicians but these arguments are not credible since hydrological connections between the Litani and Jordan River Basin have not been proven (Medzini and Wolf 2004; Zeitoun et al. 2012).
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Water has been a pressing concern for the region, driving the dispute between Arabs and Jews since Israel’s inception. This quote from a 1982 Christian Science monitor article reveals the entanglement of aquifers and state boundaries.
Two aquifers provide almost all of the groundwater for Northern and Central Israel, both arising in the West Bank. The shallower sandstone aquifer is recharged partly from runoff and percolation of rainwater falling on the former Jordanian lands. The deeper and more copious limestone aquifer is recharged largely or, possibly, entirely by rainwater from the West Bank.
The Litani River of Lebanon from 1993 is the best overview I have found regarding this situation and it notes interest in transferring a portion of the flow of the Litani to the south has existed for over a century. The web page looks to be the sort of thing that might vanish, so I preserved a copy of the content in Scribd.
