Iran now admits that its nuclear program is in trouble, but insists that the Stuxnet worm has nothing to do with it.

Thousands of centrifuges (5,084 according to “a former top IAEA official”) have been shut down, but nobody can say why. The Iranians and the IAEA are totally flummoxed.

Only thing they’re certain of is it’s definitely, definitely, not Stuxnet that’s doing it, and so keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

The Washington Post reports:

Iran’s nuclear program has experienced serious problems, including unexplained fluctuations in the performance of the thousands of centrifuges enriching uranium, leading to a rare but temporary shutdown, international inspectors are expected to reveal Tuesday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. unit that monitors nuclear programs, will provide no explanation of the problems. But speculation immediately centered on the Stuxnet worm, a computer virus that some researchers say appears to have been designed specifically to target Iran’s centrifuge machines so that they spin out of control.

Iran denies the worm caused any problems.

No country has claimed responsibility for developing the virus, although suspicion has focused primarily on Israel and the United States.

But what does it matter who’s responsible for it, since it’s causing no problems? No problems at all. Not to Iran, anyway. Absolutely not.

General Petraeus has claimed counterinsurgency success in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. But if this Washington Post report provides a true picture of what success amounts to, it makes failure hard to define.

Helmand is the place with the highest concentration of American troops, and the site of the first major operation under the new military strategy, when U.S. Marines in February retook the Taliban-held town of Marja. Coalition commander Gen. David H. Petraeus now points to parts of Helmand, such as Nawa, as examples of counterinsurgency success.

But the Helmand refugees living in this squalid camp, known as Charahi Qambar, offer a bleaker assessment. They blame insecurity on the presence of U.S. and British troops, and despite official claims of emerging stability, these Afghans believe their villages are still too dangerous to risk returning.

“Where is security? The Americans are just making life worse and worse, and they’re destroying our country,” said Barigul, a 22-year-old opium farmer from the Musa Qala district of Helmand … “If they were building our country, why would I leave my home town and come here?” …

The camp has since grown to more than 1,000 families, making it the largest of some 30 informal settlements around Kabul. …

The residents say they are mostly farmers who brought their bundles by bus and taxi to live in these mud hovels or under scraps of tarp. It is a place of wailing children and dirt-caked faces, where husbands search for menial labor and wives burn heaps of trash to cook their daily gruel. …

Ahunzada, a 35-year-old mullah, gets by on meager donations from other refugees, given to him as payment for teaching Islamic classes and leading the daily prayers in a low-ceilinged makeshift mosque built from mud. Two years ago, he left his opium fields in Sangin, one of the most violent parts of Helmand, which British troops recently handed over to U.S. Marines after taking casualties for four years.

“Every day, fighting is going on there. The more infidels who come to our country, the more Afghans die, and the less safe we become,” he said.

Ahunzada has little affection for the Taliban. His father, Mohammad Gul Agha, and his brother, Abdul Zahir, both died when a fireball engulfed their car on the road to the provincial capital. The insurgents, he said, had planted the bomb to target a passing U.S. military convoy.

“We are not happy from either side, but I believe the British and American troops are more cruel than the Taliban,” he said. “I have seen it happen: The Taliban come on motorbikes, they open fire, then they leave. Then the Americans just come and kill us, they bomb us, they open fire on us, they kill the children and innocent people.” …

He makes this claim although “U.S. commanders say they have made reducing civilian casualties a top priority, and they say their soldiers accept more risk in order to minimize collateral damage” – a deplorable fact we know to be true.

Barigul [the 22-year-old opium farmer mentioned above] and his family left Helmand last month. He said the decision was the culmination of long-running harassment from American troops and their insurgent enemies. He has been detained, he said, accused of planting bombs, searched at checkpoints, and slapped in the face by foreign troops. Outside the Musa Qala district center, where American troops are dominant, the Taliban patrol the villages, block children from attending school and kill Afghans accused of collaborating with foreigners.

“If we grew our beards, the Americans arrested us and put us in jail saying we were Taliban. If we shaved, the Taliban gave us a hard time,” he said. “What are we supposed to do, shave half of our beard?” …

These camp residents – refugees though they are, who have sought protection in the camp from the Taliban – have decided that the Taliban is after all the lesser of two evils. They “clearly want foreign troops to depart”.

They blame the Americans for bombing them out of their homes:

“Who are the Taliban? They are our brothers, our cousins, our relatives. The problem is the Americans,” said Lala Jan, 25, also from Musa Qala. “If somebody attacks from one house, the Americans bomb the whole place. If the Taliban come inside, during the night the Americans come and raid the house. That’s the problem.”

As the number of foreign troops has risen – there are now about 140,000 U.S. and allied NATO soldiers on the ground – the population of those who have been displaced from their homes and have moved elsewhere in Afghanistan has also grown. …

Mohammad, a 36-year-old imam, said that during the Marine operation in Marja, his family hid in a hole, covered by boards, for 12 days as the Taliban fought Americans from house to house. This spring his mother-in-law’s home in Marja was obliterated by an American bomb, he said, killing six of his relatives.

“It was impossible to stay,” he said. “The house had collapsed. “If I go back to Marja, I will have to pick a side,” he said. “If I support the foreign forces, the Taliban will behead me. If I join the Taliban, I will also get killed.” …

For many, the lure to return remains strong. The rain seeps into Ahunzada’s hovel. … He lies on the floor at night and yearns to return to Helmand.

“I keep thinking I should go back to my village, either to cultivate opium or to stand alongside the Taliban. Then at least I will have money. I could send it to my wife and son,” he said. “I think about this every night.”

Yet he is not quite ready.

“When the infidels leave our province, on the next day I will go home.”

Where in this calamitous story does an Afghan army come in, well trained, effective, competently commanded, and seriously willing to take on the Taliban without foreign assistance?  Is it even remotely in prospect?

Without such a thing – and who at this stage can seriously believe in it? – whenever the infidel forces withdraw, whether in 2011 or in 2014 (dates that have been named) or in any unspecified year beyond that,  the Taliban will have won.

General Sir David Richards, Chief of the British Armed Forces, commander of  NATO forces in Afghanistan since 2006, “subscribes to the notion that such an ideologically-driven adversary [as al-Qaeda] cannot be defeated in the traditional sense, and to attempt to do so could be a mistake”, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

Sir David says “War” is the correct term for describing the conflict between the West and al-Qaeda and other Islamic militant groups.

It might not be the stereotypical view of war, he insists, in the sense of massed armies attempting to outmanoeuvre their opponents but it needs to be viewed in the same way. But this war – unlike those of the past – could last up to 30 years.

Why 30? We are not told. The war he describes has no conceivable end:

We are engaged in a global struggle against a pernicious form of ideologically distorted form of Islamic fundamentalism. …

A war against an ideology, he accepts, has to be fought differently from a war against an enemy nation; and whereas “in conventional war, defeat and victory is very clear cut and is symbolised by troops marching into another nation’s capital” , there can be no such moment of clear victory in this “global struggle” against a “form of Islamic fundamentalism”.

The general is all for fighting such a war, even though there can there never be  a “clear cut victory”.

What is more, he thinks no such victory is “necessary”.

You have to ask: “do we need to defeat it (Islamist militancy)?”  in the sense of a clear cut victory, and I would argue that it is unnecessary and would never be achieved.

It is true that the West is engaged in a war with Islam, which makes war because it is ideologically committed to making war, and the general almost says as much. Perhaps he hopes to be understood to mean as much. But he doesn’t exactly say so. He doesn’t say that what we are up against is Islam, or the ideology of Islam. He removes accusation as far from Islam as he can. We are, he says, under attack by  “a pernicious form“, [an] “ideologically distorted form“,  of “Islamic fundamentalism”. Not even Islamic fundamentalism itself, but a pernicious, distorted form of it.

Seen in those terms, the enemy can only be a bunch of deluded fanatics. In the general’s view there will always be such aberrant types who stupidly misunderstand the teaching of their own religion, and of course we must do what we can to protect ourselves from them. “The national security of the UK and our allies is, in my judgement, at stake,” he says.

And he hastens to add that, despite the indefeatable nature of the enemy, the war in Afghanistan is not futile. The deluded fanatics must be fought in any and every state where they establish themselves.

“Make no mistake,”  he states with added emphasis, “the global threat from al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates is an enduring one and one which, if we let it, will rear its head in states particularly those that are unstable. …

“Our men and women in Afghanistan are fighting to prevent this [pernicious, ideologically distorted form of Islamic fundamentalism] from spreading.”

But in the long run, what will best overcome it, even if never permanently and decisively, is something other than the weapons of war:

Education, prosperity, understanding and democracy, he argues passionately, are the weapons that would ultimately turn people away from terrorism.

Has he not been informed that most of the Islamic terrorists who have murdered thousands in the West are educated and prosperous, and grew up in the democracies they attacked? What is it that they failed to understand which could make all the difference?

The general is right that the enemies are Muslim, use terrorism, are ideologically driven, and are not defeatable by conventional warfare. He is wrong that they are an ignorant, impoverished, desperate, deluded atypical minority who have misunderstood the teaching of Islam.

The truth is that Islam commands jihad. Jihad is continual war against non-Muslims until Islam rules the whole world. The Taliban, the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the mass murderers of 9/11, all those who have carried out the 16,384 (tally to this date) violent attacks in the name of Islam, understand perfectly what Muhammad taught and are obedient to the ideology of their faith.

Islam needs to be countered by persistent criticism and argument of all sorts, including derision. That is what Islam fears most – argument against it, critical examination, debunking – which is why the Islamic states are trying to make it illegal to say anything against Islam, hoping to achieve protection from reason by means of a United Nations resolution.

If by “education” General Sir David Richards meant continual teaching against Islam, he’d be right.

After the Second World War, the Germans were made to undergo a process of “denazification”. It was a program of education for all Germans to rid them of belief in the ideology of Nazism. Whether it actually cleaned out the minds of true believers or not, it did make it hard for anyone to speak publicly in defense of what the Nazis and the Third Reich had stood for, by making it shameful to do so. (The defeat itself more than anything else convinced Germany that the Nazis had been wrong.)

Ideally, the same should be done with Islam: a de-Islamization program wherever it could be put into effect.

Of course that will not happen. The West upholds freedom of religion, Islam calls itself a religion, so Islam will be left free to spread its malevolent practices: women mutilated, assaulted, enslaved; non-Muslims killed if they will not submit; legal execution carried out by stoning, burning, crucifixion, punishment by the amputation of hands and feet; and the world at large subjected to perpetual warfare until it accepts unquestioningly forever the law and morals of a cruel illiterate bandit of the Dark Ages.

At least we can and must argue against Islam. Learn about it, spread the truth about it, expose it, denounce it. Resist its advance in every way. No footbaths. No same-sex swimming sessions in public pools. No removal of pigs or their effigies from public places. No taxi drivers exempted from carrying dogs and alcohol. No time off work for prayer. No mosque at Ground Zero. No sharia-compliant financial deals. No legitimized sharia courts, enforcement of their rulings, or deference by judges to Muslim custom.

The West has the intellectual resources to defeat Islam. What it lacks is the will.

In Flanders Fields

composed in the trenches by John McCrae, May 1915

***

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

*

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

*

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Rarely in history has any society been as supine as modern Britain in the face of a mortal threat.

So says Leo McKinstry in his column in the Daily Express.

We applaud him. We thought the day would never come when some Briton with a public platform would speak out with this degree of bitter fierceness against the Islamic invaders of his country, and upbraid his own people – those once courageous, hardy, proud, patriotic, powerful islanders – for lying down and whimpering instead of fighting them off.

Here’s more of what McKinstry has to say:

The fabric of our civilisation is now at risk from militant Islam which aims to destroy our way of life. Yet instead of showing resolve in the face of this challenge, the political establishment vacillates between collusion and denial.

His welcome outburst was occasioned by events at a Muslim woman terrorist’s trial. Roshonara Choudhry was convicted of trying to kill a Member of Parliament, Stephen Timms, by stabbing him.

Her deed, which led to a jail sentence of 15 years, was sickening enough. What was just as offensive was the enfeebled police response to the gang of Muslim demonstrators who gathered at the court to cheer Choudhry and denounce the verdict.

“British soldiers must die”, was one their poisonous slogans. “Stephen Timms – go to hell” was another. But the police, standing nearby, took no action … paralysed by fashionable multi-cultural dogma which holds that ethnic minorities always have to be treated as victims. …

Perhaps the most nauseating feature of this Islamic demonstration is the fact that the British taxpayer was forced to subsidise it.

For nearly all the protestors are benefit claimants sponging off the rest of us. They are hypocrites as well as parasites, since they are happy to grab cash from a society they claim to despise. … It is the height of lunacy that we should be compelled, through our taxes, to provide comfortable lifestyles to our sworn enemies.

Effectively we are paying for our own demise. … Tragically, this is the pattern of modern Britain. It has emerged that the state is now paying for more work on the expensive west London home of the notorious Islamist hate preacher Abu Hamza, currently serving seven years in Belmarsh prison for incitement to murder and racial hatred.

Last week, in another example of the establishment’s pusillanimity, a Special Immigration Commission decided that this brute should be allowed to keep his British citizenship. Abu Hamza is already estimated to have cost the taxpayer an incredible £3.5million through welfare payouts, home improvements, prison and legal bills.

Only a sick political system would think it right to lavish millions on the family of a monster whose entire existence is predicated on our obliteration … This is the hallmark of Britain’s relationship with Islam, where fear is dressed up as tolerance. …

We are dealing with a dangerous, aggressive ideology, not some minor fringe problem. “Islam will dominate the world” read one of the placards at last week’s democracy. Unless we wake up, this will become a terrifying reality.

Read it all here.

The Club-K system is not a new facility for social networking. It is a weapon that can be launched from a standard 40-foot shipping container. (See the Telegraph report here.)

It seems that Russia still regards the US as its enemy, despite Hillary Clinton’s jolly little game with the reset button.

As in the Cold War, it plans to use weaker states as proxies to fight for it.

Ryan Mauro gave warning, in May this year, of the sinister new weapon that Russia is planning to deploy and how devastatingly it can be delivered:

The Russian company Concern Morinformsystem-Agat is marketing a deadly new weapon, one that can allow a rogue state to overcome the technological superiority of Western militaries. …

The system allows a weak nation to strike the land and sea targets of a superior force by placing cruise missiles into any type of 40 foot container. …

The West normally relies upon advanced surveillance to detect and monitor such pads so that prior notice of a launch can be achieved, allowing for the site to be destroyed before the missile takes off or the missile to be intercepted. This warning allows for preparations for impact to be undertaken and retaliatory measures to be evaluated. By concealing and launching the missiles from cargo containers, there is absolutely minimal time to react, as effective surveillance would require following every truck, train or ship.

In addition, these vehicles can cross borders, making it more difficult to identify the perpetrator of an attack and impossible to predict where an attack might come from. The missiles might from a shipping vessel off the coast or a truck that crossed via the Mexican border. With a range of 220 kilometers, or about 136 miles, they can either be fired from a safe distance from the border or the distance can be minimized by getting close to the target by being hidden.

The affect of such an attack would be devastating. Military targets like aircraft carriers could be destroyed, or a key piece of infrastructure could be disabled. The U.S. would have to begin checking all the ship cargo entering via the ports and the trucks entering the country, dramatically slowing down commerce while leaving open the possibility for further attacks. This weapon is just as much a psychological and economic weapon as it is military.

It is clear that the weapon is meant for anti-American clients. … The words of a spokeswoman for the Russian company make it obvious that the Club-K system was made with enemies of the U.S. in mind.

“…not every country can afford expensive toys…But nobody has the right to deprive these countries of the opportunity to have the power of sovereignty…

The company maintains that the system is designed to be one of the “effective countermeasures against state terrorism.” The company can only be referring to the United States and Israel. …

Concern has been voiced that the weapon could fall into the hands of terrorists. The missiles use satellites for their precision targeting, so the idea that Al-Qaeda or another terrorist not acting as a saboteur on behalf of a state could use them is far-fetched. However, that does not mean that a rogue state couldn’t use such terrorists as proxies and use their own satellites to guide the missiles. …

This wordless video illustrates Mauro’s frightening information.

The Ayatollah Khomeini was Supreme Leader of Iran when the American hostages were held in Tehran from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981.

Mohammed Elibiary, founder of the Islamic Freedom and Justice Foundation in Texas, thinks he was great.

Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Secretary, has appointed Mohammed Elibiary to the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

Daniel Greenfield, aka Sultan Knish, writes a passionate though entirely rational essay evoking memories of 9/11, and condemning the psychological sadism of Imam Rauf’s plan – defended by the unprincipled mainstream media – to build a mosque at Ground Zero.

The essay deserves to be read in full. Here is part of it:

Just the Facts, Imam. Here 3,000 Americans were murdered. For working in offices or visiting them. For being members of the NYPD or the PAPD or the FDNY. For putting on a uniform or a suit. For living their lives. And then the walls and floors and furniture around them burned. The papers in their hands burned. Their bodies burned. The ashes drifted down narrow streets. Streets where George Washington and his men once passed to visit Fraunces Tavern and toward Broadway where the Iranian hostages rode back in a ticker tape parade on their return.

Now the money that nourished their killers, will help erect a mosque. A temple of death by the ashes of the dead. And the media is outraged that we won’t allow it. That we won’t stand for it. The same media that stood and grinned while Muslims burned synagogues, churches and temples. That tells us that the Muslim terrorists who try to kill us are not really Muslims. Just going through a midlife crisis, picked up some PTSD from some bad coffee or was just having a bad day. Because we are not equal. On their farm, some animals are more equal than others. Some have the right to kill, others only have the right to be killed. Some have the right to build houses of worship, others have the right to build and to burn what others labor to build. Some have the right to be offensive, others only the right to be silent.

The dead of 9/11 are silent now. Or rather they have been silenced. As countless millions have before them were silenced. With flame and sword. In mass graves and at spearpoint. Tortured and mutilated. Torn apart with bombs. The dead cannot speak out against their murderers, but we can. The dead cannot protest, but we can. It is our duty to stand up and speak out. This is our place. Our land and our city. These are the streets where they tried to kill us. These are the streets where they will try again. To speak out is to defy those who would kill us and claim our cities as their own. Who would build monuments to their own victory over the ashes of our dead.

First they bomb. Now they occupy. We have lived through the bombing. And now we rise to defy the occupation.

George Soros works to destroy the free market liberalism which allowed him to make the colossal fortune he uses to work for its destruction. He does it through a string of organizations, chiefly his Open Society Institute, whose name is Orwellian: it aims to close the open society and establish totalitarian state control.

He has done, and continues to do, much harm in and to America.

He has also done, and continues to do, much harm in and to Europe.

His ambition stretches further yet.

“His goal is a new global imperium … that will be truly totalitarian,”  Srdja Trifkovic said in an address he gave to the H. L. Mencken Club in Baltimore on October 23, 2010.

Trifkovic deplored Soros’s lavish funding for campaigns to legalize cannabis, promote euthanasia, further abortion rights, impose gun control, and abolish the death penalty; and his support for radical feminism, gay activism, and same-sex marriage.

We agree with Trifkovic that Soros has had “an enormous and hideously destructive impact” on the societies he has targeted.

But we strongly disagree with him on how Western civilization could and should be defended.

Trifkovic said:

Soros’s vision is hostile even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. … His hatred of religion is the key. He promotes an education system that will neutralize any lingering spiritual yearnings of the young, and promote the loss of a sense of place and history already experienced by millions of Westerners, whether they are aware of that loss or not. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, millions of Westerners are already on the path of alienation that demands every imaginable form of self-indulgence, or else leads to drugs, or suicide, or conversion to Islam or some other cult.

To understand Soros it is necessary to understand globalization as a revolutionary, radical project. In the triumph of liberal capitalism, the enemies of civilization such as Soros have found the seeds of future victory for their paradigm that seeks to eradicate all traditional structures capable of resistance. The revolutionary character of the Open Society project is revealed in its relentless adherence to the mantra of Race, Gender and Sexuality. …

Religion itself is no longer, if it ever was, a “traditional structure capable of resistance” to the post-national totalitarian nightmare envisioned by Soros and the left. The left despises Western religion but promotes Islam in its human-and-civil-rights guise because it helps undermine Western freedoms born of free market liberalism. If Trifkovic believes traditional religion can defend civilization, he is wrong.

Christianity or Judaism offer nothing to counter the zeitgeist of ever-loosening social constraints. “Spirituality” is a commodity marketed variously even within the traditional religions. The last bastion of civilization – of voluntary collective polities, democracies of free people in pursuit of happiness under law – is the nation-state, constitutionally protecting the individual, regardless of his identity with any race, gender, or sexuality, against being subsumed by collective (“human”) rights and privileges.

It might be that: the legalization of pot means greater numbers of children and adults will be stuck on stupid more often than they currently are; the legalization of homosexual marriage means greater numbers have (non-procreative) sex; the legalization of abortion may result in many more dead babies, but fewer dead women. All that may disgust the very traditionally faithful, but restoring the social stigma attached to it, let alone the legal proscription, is not going to happen.

All those are individual decisions. They do not jeopardize civilization. What will bring civilization down are the post-national leftist choice architects, the people who decide carbon dioxide is a pollutant, that you must have government health care, but forfeit it if you’re fat, that international human rights preempt justice and self-defense, that governments own everything and must distribute proportionally to collectives’ demands.

The globalization of welfare government – that is the dream of the left and Soros. Insofar as traditional religions preserve the ideas of the morality of institutionalized compassion and the compulsion of individual conduct they are easily coopted by the forces of darkness. In the coming Universal State, Muslims will be allowed to continue honor-killings as a collective right, but the right of an individual – to kill in self-defense, to expect justice, to start and mind his own business, to allocate his resources as he pleases, to provide for himself and his family, to have children and to raise them, and to say what he likes to whomever he wishes – will be regulated out of existence. “Civilization” will have been redefined as “acceptable choices”. Enlightened self-interest will be knowing the difference between private (cholesterol levels) and public (carbon usage) virtue. Religion can do nothing whatsoever to stop this, only a resurgence of belief in individual liberty and the free market can. Good luck with that.

C. Gee  October 28, 2010