Dreams Into Lightning 2

Rise of the Far Right in the EU

Via Meadia: 'We already have 1930s style economic problems in much of Europe; is fascism next?

If the current Hungarian government gets its way, maybe so. The government of Hungary, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party, is pushing the country away from democracy and toward authoritarian nationalist rule with anti-Semitic undertones. ...'

Iraq Bombing Toll Hits 65

CNN:

Baghdad (CNN) -- A wave of explosions across Baghdad killed dozens of people Thursday and spread fears that Iraq's government could collapse in the wake of the U.S. military's departure.

At least 65 people were killed and at least 196 were wounded in 20 explosions just days after the final U.S. troops withdrew, police said.

The attacks targeted civilians across all walks of life. One took place at a market. Another, at a school as children were arriving. A third was at a coffee shop. ...

Full article, with video, at the link.

Long War Journal: 'See the Institute for the Study of War's analysis on the impact of the US withdrawal on the political situation in Iraq. I concur with Ramzy Mardani that "the U.S. military's presence still served a peacekeeping and pacifying role in Iraq," and their "premature removal" has removed a crucial buffer from Iraq's fractious political process. ... The worst-case scenario would be a true civil war in Iraq, in which established military, police, and government institutions fracture along political/sectarian lines and battle each other (I'm of the opinion that Iraq was in the midst of a violent insurgency from 2004-2008, not a civil war). This is by no means guaranteed; Iraq's political actors still have time to step back from the brink and repair the rift.'

Read ISW analysis here.

Meanwhile, Iraq's Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi has said Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is to blame for a sudden surge of violence in the country.

Morning Report: 2011-12-19

After Kim Jong-il. BBC:

North Korea runs a famously tight ship and is adept at putting on a good show. But behind the mask of unity lurk bitter rivalries and tough choices. These are of at least four kinds.

First, personalities. Kim Jong-un's elder half-brother Kim Jong-nam was passed over for the succession. He lives in China, which means he has Beijing's protection.

In case Jong-un is not up to the job, his big brother - a known reformer - might yet have a role to play. And in Pyongyang itself there are further personal and family rivalries, though details are murky.

Second, there are institutional rivalries. ...

Read the rest at the link. Mark Fitzpatrick at IISS: 'Since Kim Jong Un’s appointment in October 2010 there have been no visible cracks in the system. If there was any discontent over the succession it has been carefully masked. Now, however, it is more likely that institutional rivalries between the party, the army and the cabinet will emerge, and with them policy conflicts between technocrats and those determined to continue Kim Jong Il’s ‘Military First’ line. ...' Finally, here's Walter Russell Mead:

On my trip to northeastern China last fall, I had the chance to meet with some of that country’s top North Korea experts, people who between them have visited Beijing’s frustrating neighbor scores of times in recent years. Their unanimous verdict: the North Korean regime is here to stay. They are tough, they are organized, they are focused on the task of regime survival and they will do what it takes to stay in the saddle. This wasn’t said in sympathy; on a human level Chinese scholars seem to find this regime about as weird and repellant as we do — more repellant, perhaps, since many Chinese scholars suffered under the Cultural Revolution in their youth. ...

Arrest warrant for Iraqi VP. BBC: 'An Iraqi judicial committee has issued an arrest warrant for the country's Sunni Arab Vice-President, Tariq al-Hashemi, security officials say.' His bodyguards accused him of terrorist connections. Hashemi's party, the Sunni 'Iraqiya' bloc, had recently pulled out of parliament. AFP via the West Australian has more.

UN General Assembly condemns Syria. NOW Lebanon: 'The UN General Assembly on Monday passed a resolution condemning human rights in Syria, where a government crackdown on protests has left more than 5,000 dead, according to UN estimates.'

FBI: American violent crime continues decline. So, here's your daily ration of good news: 'Murders, rapes and other violent crimes dropped sharply in the United States in the first six months of 2011, continuing a downward trend that has lasted 4 1/2 years, the FBI reported on Monday. ...' Not only that, but property crimes and arson also dropped.

Commentary. Jamie M. Fly on Vaclav Havel:

Vaclav Havel’s death caps a year in which we’ve seen Tunisians, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Yemenis, Libyans, Syrians, and others in the Arab world take to the streets en masse to protest for their freedoms. What we see unfolding in the world today, from the Middle East to Moscow, is the unstoppable tidal wave of freedom that Havel helped shepherd more than 20 years ago in his native Czechoslovakia. As British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote, he was “at once director, playwright, stage-manager and leading actor in this, his greatest play.”

Havel brought to the revolution a sense of moral responsibility that some in the comfortable, privileged West, lacked. ...

Much as I would like to believe that it's so, I'm skeptical as to whether the recent revolutions in the Arab world are really an 'unstoppable tidal wave of freedom'. The key ingredient of "moral responsibility" that Fly rightly cites with respect to Havel, seems to be in short supply in places where an unstoppable tidal wave ends up sweeping the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis to power.

Kim Jong-Il dies

In a few days we lost Christopher Hitchens, Cesaria Evora, and Vaclav Havel. Now here's one obituary that won't bring a single tear to my eyes ...

BBC:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has died at the age of 69, state-run television has announced.

Mr Kim, who has led the communist nation since the death of his father in 1994, died on a train while visiting an area outside the capital, the announcement said. ...

"The roads are getting safer, not more dangerous."

Mona Charen at the Washington Examiner:

The number of car accident fatalities has been dropping steadily for decades. In 1990, 44,599 people lost their lives in crashes.

In 2010, 32,885 were killed -- a decrease that is even more significant considering the rise in the total number of licensed drivers and cars on the road. According to the NHTSA, there were 1.7 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven in 1994, but only 1.14 in 2009, the lowest level in 60 years.

Alcohol related fatalities are also down. In 1999, 22,587 people died in crashes in which alcohol was a factor. By 2004, again, despite the increase in cars and drivers, the number was 16,694.

But here's an arresting statistic: In both years, men were almost three times as likely as women to be drunk drivers. Shall we ban men behind the wheel?

The NHTSA is panicking about cell phones. Yet another report from the NHTSA (there are so many) issued earlier this month found that only five percent of drivers have been observed holding cell phones to their ears while driving, and only .9 percent were seen to be "manipulating" a hand-held device. ...

Read it all at the link.

Iran's US Drone Capture: Pilot Error?

Flying a top-secret military drone is a unique job. It's the only job I can think of where you can get in trouble for NOT crashing the plane.

According to Swiss-based Offiziere,

For starters, the engineer questions how the Iranians could possess a mostly undamaged Sentinel, when all large U.S. drones are equipped with multiple self-destruct systems. “On the X-45A and C, we went to considerable lengths to have that capability — both commanded and autonomous. On the X-45A it was executed by blowing the wings off. This was mainly a consideration for flying at Edwards [Air Force Base in California] as that was the preferred method there, as opposed to simply making a hole in the ground.”

“In the X-45C there would be two systems, but both resulted in the aircraft flying as vertically down as possible to minimize collateral damage and to maximize the G forces on the aircraft,” the engineer continues. “Operationally and away from Edwards there was demand for less risk in dealing with explosive bolts — or whatever means you would need to have to blow the wings off — so simply screwing into the ground was going to be the [standard procedure].”

Go to the article for the rest; it's a comforting read if you'd prefer to think the captured drone shown on Iranian TV is a fake.

Unfortunately, though, the reality may be otherwise. PhysOrg excerpts an interview with an Iranian engineer who alleges

that their experts used their technology savvy to trick the drone into landing where the drone thought was its actual base in Afghanistan but instead they made it land in Iran. They used reverse engineering techniques that they had developed after exploring less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years. They were able to figure how to exploit a navigational weakness in the drone’s system. "The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the newspaper.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off the communications link by jamming on the communications. The engineer said that they forced the drone into autopilot. That state is where “the bird loses its brain." The Iranians reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates and they used precise latitudinal and longitudinal data to force the drone to land on its own. In doing so the Iranian team did not have to bother about cracking remote control signals and communications from a control center in the U.S., and the RQ170 suffered only minimal damage, according to the report. ...

Wired has more:

Iranian feats of technological excellence deserve skepticism. (See the Taiwanese animation above for that.) But GPS spoofing is certainly doable. And if it’s true, it builds on a recent history of security flaws with the drones, from their unencrypted video feeds to their vulnerability to malware.

It’s possible to spoof unencrypted civilian GPS systems. But military GPS receivers, such as the one likely installed on the missing drone, use the encrypted P(Y)-code to communicate with satellites. The notion that Iran could have cracked through the encryption “sounds like a made-for-TV movie” says John Pike, a satellite expert and president of Globalsecurity.org. ”If they could overcome the sorts of of crypto systems that would protect this drone, they would not waste their time on surveillance drones. They would be breaking into banks.”

But Iran might not have had to break the encryption on the P(Y) code in order to bring down a drone. According to Richard Langley, a GPS expert at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, it’s theoretically possible to take control of a drone by jamming the P(Y) code and forcing a GPS receiver to use the unencrypted, more easily spoofable C/A code to to get its directions from navigational satellites.

“GPS satellites transmit on two legacy radio frequencies,” Langley explains. The unencrypted C/A code used by most civilian GPS unit “is transmitted only on the L1 frequency. The encrypted P code for so-called authorized military users is transmitted on both the L1 and L2 frequency.”

Translated: If the Iranians could selectively jam the encrypted military code on the L1 and L2 frequencies — and that’s a big “if” — the drone’s GPS receiver might reach out to use the less-secure C/A code in a last ditch attempt to get directions. Without the extra protection of encryption, it would be relatively simple for Iran to spoof the receiver using the C/A code and fool the drone into thinking it was back home in Afghanistan.

Now, Reuters is reporting:

While exactly what went wrong with the aircraft is not publicly known, it is now becoming clear that its operators could have crashed the plane and destroyed it if they had taken action while it was still at a higher altitude, according to a source familiar with the aircraft and its operation.

Instead, the stealthy drone built by Lockheed Martin Corp broke up into several large pieces, allowing Iran to reassemble the plane and possibly share some of its technological secrets with China, Russia or other U.S. competitors.

Once the plane, built by Lockheed Martin Corp, dropped to a low enough altitude, its aerodynamic design made a catastrophic crash impossible, said one person familiar with the plane's design and operating procedures.

Pilot error has not been confirmed, but it is one of the causes under examination, according to the two officials.

As usual, Debka has an entirely different version of events: 'Since Saturday, Dec. 4, when the news broke of the Iranian RQ-170 capture, Western and Middle East intelligence circles have stopped contradicting the Iranian version of a cyber attack and are indeed coming around to the conviction that this attack extended beyond the drone. Some suggest that the Iranians not only cracked the Sentinel's secret software but also penetrated the command and control center running the drones from CIA Headquarters at Langley in McClean, Virginia and delved into the satellite connection between Langley and the drone.'

Morning Report: 2011-12-18

Hezbollah leader Musa Ali Daqduq transferred to Iraqi custody. Long War Journal:

Musa Ali Daqduq, the senior Hezbollah commander who was tasked by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to establish Shia terror groups into a Hezbollah-like entity, was transferred to Iraqi custody today, White House National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told Reuters. Daqduq was the last prisoner in Iraq who was in US custody. Vietor told Reuters that Iraq assured the US that it would prosecute Daqduq.

US officials fear that the Iraqi government will be pressured by Iran and Shia political parties to release Daqduq.

The US Department of Justice had planned to prosecute Daqduq in a US court, but Republican Senators opposed the transfer of the terrorist to US soil for prosecution. Some wanted Daqduq to be tried by a military court at Guantanamo Bay. ...

Stratfor on Iranian geography. 'Iran’s population is concentrated in its mountains, not in its lowlands, as with other countries. That’s because its lowlands, with the exception of the southwest and the southeast (regions populated by non-Persians), are uninhabitable. Iran is a nation of 70 million mountain dwellers. Even its biggest city, Tehran, is in the foothills of towering mountains. Its population is in a belt stretching through the Zagros and Elbroz mountains on a line running from the eastern shore of the Caspian to the Strait of Hormuz. There is a secondary concentration of people to the northeast, centered on Mashhad. The rest of the country is lightly inhabited and almost impassable because of the salt-mud flats. ...'

Vaclav Havel dies. Cato: 'Vaclav Havel, the playwright who led the Velvet Revolution that ended communism in Czechoslovakia, has died at 75. At a conference in Prague in 1995, Cato research fellow Stanley Kober drew on Havel’s writings to discuss civil society, the spirit of humility, and the case for limited government.' Read the rest at the link.

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens has died. There's nothing I can add to what has already been written about him, except that his passing is a great loss to all of us. (I remember, when my mother was alive, discussing with her the implications of Hitch's departure from The Nation.)

Here is my friend Michael Totten on Christopher Hitchens.

We're Lucky They Let Us Drive

Frank J. Fleming at the New York Post on our last dangerous freedom:

Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety. They had different equations related to human life then: We could lose 10,000 men in a single battle in a war and call it a victory.

We’re talking foolhardy people who eventually sent men to the moon strapped to a giant rocket that had less computational power than it takes to calculate the trajectory of an Angry Bird. Their kids dangled from jungle gyms over pavement.

Face it: We’re just not those people anymore. We don’t do dangerous things where lots of people could be hurt . . . even if they’re really cool and fun ideas. You can say we value human life more now, but it’s probably more apt to say we’re much sissier.

That’s why we have to be careful with driving, as it’s one of the last really dangerous freedoms we have. Anyone with a car can decide to head out the door and drive cross-country. That’s an extreme freedom our ancestors couldn’t even imagine, and don’t bet it will last. ...

Brilliant piece, and deservedly an instant classic. Go to the link to read the whole thing.