The Arab world on both the Asian and the North African sides of the Red Sea, and Iran, and Pakistan, are heating up internally to the point of explosion.

Lebanon

On Wednesday last, January 12, 2010, the rickety “unity government” of Lebanon collapsed when the 10 Hezbollah members (out of 30 members in all) left it.

Why? Hezbollah fears the indictments soon to be issued by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, sitting at the Hague, for the murder in 2005 of then Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a truck-bombing in Beirut, in which 22 others were also killed. The tribunal has hard evidence that Hezbollah was responsible for it.

This terrorist organization – “The Party of God” is what its name means – is backed (which is to say is manipulated; is subject to the orders of) Syria and – chiefly – Iran. President Assad of Syria may be indicted too, so he’s as frightened of the tribunal as is the Hezbollah leadership. And now there are rumors that the mighty Ayatollah Khamenei – Iran’s head of state – may also be on the indictment list.

The Hezbollah members of the government demanded that the present prime minister, Saad Hariri, the murdered Rafik’s son, should declare that his government rejected whatever the findings of the Tribunal might be, now, before the indictments are issued.

Saad Hariri refused, so the Hezbollah members walked out and the government fell.

Hezbollah is very likely to try to deflect attention from the crisis within Lebanon by attacking Israel. Israel is prepared for the onslaught if and when it comes.

Tunisia

In Tunisia, the explosion came this week. A popular uprising erupted – the Arabs call it an intifada – which unseated the dictator Zine al-Abideen Bin Ali. He fled the country with wife Laila Tarabulsi. The couple have been in power, luxuriating in corruption, for 24 years.

Reaction among influential Arab commentators has been enthusiastically on the side of the revolutionaries. They hope the idea of violent rebellion will spread and unseat other despots, such as those who rule over Morocco and Libya.

The despots themselves are frightened. Some moved quickly to placate their populations.

Jordan

The King of Jordan, reacting to demonstrations in his own country, and spurred on by the events in Tunisia, hoped to subdue discontent by hastily setting controls on food prices.

Algeria

The repressive Algerian government, experiencing the same sort of internal unrest as Jordan – but worse -, and seriously disturbed by the Tunisian upheaval, took similar measures to keep prices down. But there it may be too late; the regime may fall.

Egypt

President Mubarak is ill and may die soon. There is a huge amount of political unrest in his country. He has harshly suppressed his chief opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood (action which, taken on its own, the rest of the world should probably be grateful for). Recent violent attacks on the persecuted Coptic Christians gave rise to demonstrations and have intensified the crisis. Chaos threatens.

Gaza

Hamas has warned that the leadership in the West Bank – headed by Abou Abbas – should expect the same fate as Bin Ali of Tunis. But Hamas itself could soon be at war if the region is ignited by a Hezbollah attack on Israel.

Iraq

On January 5, the Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr, a close ally of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, returned from Iran to Iraq. On the same day, the Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi arrived on an official visit to Baghdad. Civil war could break out at any time between the Shias and Sunnis of Iraq.

Saudi Arabia

The Saudi regime is constantly targeted by al-Qaeda. In this conflict, two brands of Islamic fundamentalism are pitted against each other. But more than al-Qaeda, the Saudis fear a nuclear-armed Iran.

Iran

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hold on power is increasingly precarious. He is protected at present by the head of state, Ayatollah Khamenei. But as we noted under the heading of Lebanon, Khamenei’s own position may not be secure.

Pakistan

As Pakistan has nuclear weapons, the prospect of a take-over of power by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, both of which are constantly and violently trying to topple the government, is extremely threatening not just to the region but to the world.

*

What does all this instability, revolution, and threat of war mean for the United States?

Is there any chance that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have an answer to that question?

On the eve of the new year, this is our Picture of the Year 2010.

At a US airport, a Muslim searches a nun for hidden weapons.

Nuns have been attempting to blow up planes.

One tried to light explosive material in her shoe, another in her underwear, while flying to America from Europe.

A nun put a bomb into a plane that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Nuns started hijacking aircraft and holding crews and passengers hostage in the late 1970s.

Never forget that 19 nuns hijacked four planes on 9/11, flew two of them into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon, and crashed another, killing some 3,000 people, in the name of their Holy Trinity.

And those are only a few examples of a long list of their violent attacks, carried out or planned, in recent years.

Christians in general are waging a holy war against the rest of the world, using the method of terrorism.

Muslims are doing everything they can to defend their fellow human beings from this relentless onslaught.

Iran’s nuclear program is stuck.

Maybe because of the Stuxnet worm? (Just a suggestion.)

This report inspires the thought:

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Strategic Affairs, Gen (ret.) Moshe Yaalon, told a radio interviewer that Iran was not currently able to manufacture a nuclear bomb because of technical difficulties but he estimated it would attain this capability within three years. …

His estimate represented the first official Israel evaluation of the scale of the destruction and havoc the Stuxnet malworm has wrought to Iran’s most secret nuclear weaponization facilities. Up until now, only the nuclear reactor at Bushehr and the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz had been admitted to have been affected by the invasive virus.

Three years delay, then. That is, if Israel knows anything at all about the worm and what it can do.

At the very least we have the pleasure of seeing egg on Ahmadinejad’s face. And a lot can happen in three years. It’s even possible that the deferring of the Iranian threat could lead to its being permanently averted.

More WikiLeaks information that it’s good for us to know:

On Iran and North Korea here.

The release of confidential diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks (and the pending release of thousands more) has undoubtedly done damage to our ability to win the trust of informants, foreign officials, and intelligence services. [We doubt it – JB.] There is ample reason to be angry over this scandal, but there is also reason to be encouraged. The content of the documents shows the roof is collapsing on the Iranian and North Korean regimes and that a coalition has formed to support regime change for both.

The begging among the Arabs for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program has been widely covered, but their appetite to go even further and support regime change has not been. …

The cables also show optimism about the prospects for a policy of regime change. The chief of Kuwait’s military intelligence comments on the instability in Iran, and says that an event like the arrest of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi could spark an uprising that ends the regime. President Aliyev of Azerbaijan is documented as having “viewed the situation as very tense within Iran and believed it could erupt at any time.”

The U.S. is also pressured by Meir Dagan, the director of Israel’s legendary Mossad intelligence service, to make moves to support regime change by supporting minorities like the Azeris, Baluchis, and Kurds, as well as the student democracy movement. Dagan is recorded as being “sure” that the regime could be toppled with U.S. support. That comes from a cable in August 2007, well before the uprising in the summer of 2009 following Ahmadinejad’s so-called “re-election.” Dagan’s confidence in fomenting regime change has surely been strengthened since then.

A cable from June 2009 reports that several Iranian contacts say that there is a “surge in Baluchi violence in the border area” so severe that the government may be losing control of the region. Violent clashes by Baluchis and other minorities have grown markedly since then. The Obama administration has put distance between the U.S. and the Baluchi militants, condemning their attacks and listing the Jundullah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, as was previously done to the Free Life Party of Kurdistan.

Another document shows that a rare opportunity to undermine the regime will come soon. A source was told by former President Rafsanjani in 2009 that Ayatollah Khamenei was in the last stages of his life and could die from cancer within months. Once the supreme leader dies, the regime will face its biggest fracture since 1979 as the battle over his successor ensues.

Altogether, the cables give good reason to believe that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, and Lebanon would all support military action and even a strategy of regime change towards Iran. Yemen, Oman, Algeria, Morocco, and other countries can also be expected to quietly back it. …

Europe can also be counted on to support such a strategy. A cable from September 2009 records a French diplomat as saying: “The current Iranian regime is effectively a fascist state and the time has come to decide on next steps.” …

The cables also report on the Iranians’ failures in Iraq. …

The WikiLeaks disclosures also paint a disturbing picture for the North Korean regime. The cables show that South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Chun Yung-woo was told by two senior Chinese officials that the leadership of their country was increasingly supportive of a united Korea with Seoul as the capital. … [and] after the story broke, Chinese officials in Europe anonymously said that their country supported a united Korea “in the long term.” …

The WikiLeaks document dump, though its negative affects overshadow anything positive [do they?– JB], shows that the West does not have to accept the Iranian and North Korean regimes. If they survive over the long-term, it will be because the U.S. allowed it.

On the climate change scam here.

Just a year ago, the Climategate … files’ release probably led to the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference — to which the Obama administration had committed no little amount of political capital — and certainly contributed to the public’s increasing skepticism about the supposed consensus of climate science. …

Almost exactly a year later, Julius Assange and the WikiLeaks website revealed another collection … [this time of] cable traffic among American diplomats all over the world …

On December 3rd, the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom published one of a series of stories based on the cables, this one titled “WikiLeaks cables reveal how U.S. manipulated climate accord.” The United States really was applying considerable political and diplomatic pressure on other players; the scientific “consensus” had long since been subsumed by the pressure to score a political win. As the Guardian put it:

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage. … bribes ….. no mean amount of money … [of] tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. …

This pressure, however, wasn’t limited to financial transactions: the United States was developing intelligence on the other participants in the conferences. …

The lesson of the WikiLeaks climate cables turns out to be very much like the lesson of the Climategate files last year. The most surprising aspect of this story is how thoroughly the cables confirm the dark suspicions of climate skeptics.

On Iran and Latin America here.

The WikiLeaks sabotage campaign against the US gave us a first person account of the magnitude of Ahmadinejad’s electoral fraud.

In a cable from the US Embassy in Turkmenistan dated 15 June 2009, or three days after Ahmadinejad stole the Iranian presidential elections, the embassy reported a conversation with an Iranian source regarding the true election results. The Iranian source referred to the poll as a “coup d’etat.”

The regime declared Ahmadinejad the winner with 63% of the vote. According to the Iranian source, he received less than a tenth of that amount. As the cable put it, “based on calculations from [opponent Mir Hossain] Mousavi’s campaign observers who were present at polling stations around the country and who witnessed the vote counts, Mousavi received approximately 26 million (or 61%) of the 42 million votes cast in Friday’s election, followed by Mehdi Karroubi (10-12 million)…. Ahmadinejad received ‘a maximum of 4-5 million votes,’ with the remainder going to Mohsen Rezai.” …

In April 2009 US President Barack Obama sat through a 50-minute anti-American rant by [Daniel] Ortega [Nicaragua’s Sandinista president] at the Summit of the Americas. He then sought out Chavez for a photo-op. In his own address Obama distanced himself from US history, saying, “We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations.”

Unfortunately, Obama’s attempted appeasement hasn’t done any good. Nicaragua invaded neighboring Costa Rica last month along the San Juan River. Ortega’s forces are dredging the river as part of an Iranian-sponsored project to build a canal along the Isthmus of Nicaragua that will rival the Panama Canal.

Even Obama’s ambassador in Managua admits that Ortega remains deeply hostile to the US. In a cable from February illicitly published by WikiLeaks, Ambassador Robert Callahan argued that Ortega’s charm offensive towards the US was “unlikely to portend a new, friendly Ortega with whom we can work in the long-term.”

A wealth of vital information poured out for us through the conduit of WikiLeaks!

And we’re still waiting to hear of a single specific instance of any real harm being done to an individual anywhere, or convincingly to the United States as a whole, as a result of WikiLeaks’ “scandalous” operation.

These are a few of the WikiLeaks revelations that are exciting much comment on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Middle East, and that we find helpful to know:

The release of Magrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, from a Scottish prison, was done for cowardly motives that had nothing to do with justice or compassion, just as we always thought. (See the Telegraph here and here, and the Scotsman here.)

Contrary to Obama’s assumptions, the Arab States are much more interested in stopping Iran developing a nuclear capability than they are in the Israel-Palestinian “peace process”, and they confer directly with Israel about this crisis, having lost patience with Obama. (See the Jerusalem Post here and Front Page here.)

Ireland impeded US arms transfers to Israel. (See the Jerusalem Post here.)

In the vain desire to empty Guantanamo, the US administration used questionable inducements to persuade foreign governments to accept prisoners – with little success. (See PowerLine here.)

The Saudi Arabian rulers – under whose strictly “moral” Wahhabi regime young girls were pushed back into a burning school because they ran out with their faces uncovered – entertain themselves in extravagant orgies, with every kind of sexual indulgence and drugs, with music they forbid their subjects to listen to.  [Note it is their hypocrisy and cruelty we find morally repulsive, not their choices of entertainment,  except when they involve the exploitation and corruption of children – which, to our certain knowledge, they frequently do, especially homosexual exploitation.] (See the Guardian here.)

These revelations underline the message that many others convey, such as those concerning the Obama administration’s mishandling of relations with and between North Korea, Iran and China. (See our posts Thanks to WikiLeaks? December 3, 2010, and More on WikiLeaks December 4, 2010).

If WikiLeaks, which did not steal the documents but published them, is guilty of a crime – what crime we are waiting to be told – then are not the newspapers that publish them, such as the New York Times, equally guilty?

Attorney General Eric Holder, no master of understanding or expression, will name the crime eventually perhaps. So far he has only told us that the WikiLeaks publication of the documents was “not helpful”. To whom? For what? They’re certainly helpful in proving, inter alia, that the State Department is an institution which does not serve the interests of the country. Or, to be a little less delicate, that it’s a malignant tumor on the body politic.

In a DebkaFile report on the unlikely yet apparently thriving Saudi-Israeli co-operation in the face of the Iranian threat, a clue may be found as to just who is directing operations againt Iran’s nuclear program, and most probably sent it the Stuxnet worm:

Riyadh has signaled its intention for the secret Saudi-Israeli meetings on Iran taking place for more than a year to continue after the changing of the guard at the Mossad… This was one of the first messages Tamir Pardo found on his desk as head of Israel’s external spy agency when he took over from Meir Dagan this week. The Saudis were clearly not put off by any possible awkwardness from the WikiLeaks disclosure that they had been pressing the US to attack Iran’s nuclear sites before it developed a weapon.

The meetings between Saudi General Intelligence Director Prince Muqrin bin Abdaziz and Meir Dagan, most of which were held in the Jordanian capital Amman, dealt extensively with clandestine cooperation between the two agencies and plans for attacking Iran. Arab and Western sources reported that they reached agreement in the course of the year for Israeli fighter-bombers to transit Saudi air space on their way to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Saudis were even willing to build a new landing strip in the desert with refueling facilities for the use of the warplanes en route to their mission.

Western intelligence experts on Saudi Arabia found special significance in the publication by the Saudi Arab News site of Monday, Nov. 29 of a long report on Meir Dagan and his retirement after eight years as head of Israel’s external espionage agency. The Saudi official media never, ever report on Israeli military or intelligence affairs. …

Still more out of character was the tone of the Arab News report [which admiringly describes] the outgoing Mossad chief … as … “widely seen as responsible for a wave of covert actions including the sabotage of Iranian nuclear projects.”

Western sources found a connection between this comment and the attack 24 hours earlier in the heart of Tehran on two senior Iranian nuclear scientists, killing Prof. Majid Shahriari on the spot and leaving Prof. Feredoun Abbassi-Davani critically injured. …

Pardo’s job is termed “at the heart of Israel’s secret war against Iran.”…

The WikiLeaks disclosure, which also showed the Obama administration rejecting the Gulf Arab rulers’ demand for military action against Iran, may even have spurred the Saudis to insist on carrying on with their backdoor meetings with Israel so as to underline their abiding conviction that Iran’s nuclear program must be wiped out.

And we understand that Meir Dagan did not bow to King Abdullah. In a manner of speaking, the obeisance is being paid the other way about.

Many of our readers are as fascinated by the Stuxnet worm as we are, and as happy that it is sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program.

For those who would like to know more about what it does and how it does it, Ed Barnes at Fox News goes into some detail. Here are quotations from his report:

The target was seemingly impenetrable; for security reasons, it lay several stories underground and was not connected to the World Wide Web. And that meant Stuxnet had to act as sort of a computer cruise missile: As it made its passage through a set of unconnected computers, it had to grow and adapt to security measures and other changes until it reached one that could bring it into the nuclear facility.

When it ultimately found its target, it would have to secretly manipulate it until it was so compromised it ceased normal functions.

Barnes explains more about how it works, and comes to this:

Masking itself from the plant’s security and other systems, the worm then ordered the centrifuges to rotate extremely fast, and then to slow down precipitously. This damaged the converter, the centrifuges and the bearings, and it corrupted the uranium in the tubes. It also left Iranian nuclear engineers wondering what was wrong, as computer checks showed no malfunctions in the operating system.

Time passed, the Iranian nuclear engineers and computer experts continued to be baffled, and the worm grew stronger and stronger, proliferated, and became ever more effective.

Estimates are that this went on for more than a year, leaving the Iranian program in chaos. And as it did, the worm grew and adapted throughout the system. As new worms entered the system, they would meet and adapt and become increasingly sophisticated.

Servers were traced to two unexpected places:

During this time the worms reported back to two servers that had to be run by intelligence agencies, one in Denmark and one in Malaysia. The servers monitored the worms and were shut down once the worm had infiltrated Natanz. Efforts to find those servers since then have yielded no results.

This went on until June of last year, when a Belarusan company working on the Iranian power plant in Beshehr discovered it in one of its machines. It quickly put out a notice on a Web network monitored by computer security experts around the world. Ordinarily these experts would immediately begin tracing the worm and dissecting it, looking for clues about its origin and other details.

But that didn’t happen, because within minutes all the alert sites came under attack and were inoperative for 24 hours.

The Iranian technicians labor on in an atmosphere of dread, fearing for their very lives which have become “a living hell“.

As Iranians struggled with the setbacks, they began searching for signs of sabotage. From inside Iran there have been unconfirmed reports that the head of the plant was fired shortly after the worm wended its way into the system and began creating technical problems, and that some scientists who were suspected of espionage disappeared or were executed. And counter intelligence agents began monitoring all communications between scientists at the site, creating a climate of fear and paranoia.

Even harder to find, and perfectly invulnerable, is the nameless Mind that made the Worm and sent it to do its work.

All praise to it!

Now Stuxnet, the invisible, terrible, and mighty worm, is sending deceptive signals to the Iranian airforce through radar.

Airmen scrambled to intercept an attack by aircraft that were not there.

Here’s the report:

Stuxnet is also in the process of raiding Iran’s military systems, sowing damage and disorder in its wake.

On Nov. 17, in the middle of a massive air defense exercise, Iranian military sources reported six foreign aircraft had intruded the airspace over the practice sites and were put to flight by Iranian fighters. The next day, a different set of military sources claimed a misunderstanding; there had been no intrusions. Iranian fighters had simulated an enemy raid which too had been repulsed. …

There was no “misunderstanding.” The foreign intruders had shown up on the exercise’s radar screens, but when the fighter jets scrambled to intercept them, they found an empty sky, meaning the radar instruments had lied.

The military command accordingly decided to give up on using the exercise as a stage for unveiling new and highly sophisticated weaponry, including a homemade radar system, for fear that they too may have been infected by the ubiquitous Stuxnet worm.

Postscript: The fact that Stuxnet is not (or not yet) being used against North Korea suggests that it was not dispatched to Iran by the United States.

Abraham H. Miller, professor emeritus of political science, has an article at PajamasMedia that we applaud, because he succinctly endorses our own opinion of Obama’s treacherous and catastrophic pro-Islam policy – which we suspect springs from deep emotional ties to that cruel, totalitarian, and deathly religion.

Sharing Professor Miller’s indignation, we cannot resist quoting a fair chunk of his commentary, and hope you will go here to read all of it:

You’re about to be groped, X-rayed, and generally humiliated in the airport. The Islamic Fiqh Council, however, has issued a fatwa prohibiting Muslims from going through an X-ray machine. Separately, CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) is advising Muslim women to avoid pat-downs beyond the head and neck. Our culturally sensitive administration will undoubtedly acquiesce. You, however, will be groped and X-rayed, unless of course you show up at the airport dressed in a tent. …

After stooping and genuflecting to the Islamic world and cutting Israel off at the knees, President Barack Obama has had such a positive impact on the Muslim street that its attitudes toward America were slightly better during Bush’s last year.

Cultural sensitivity has fared no better in Afghanistan, where the rules of engagement put the lives of our soldiers at greater risk in an effort to reduce civilian casualties. The administration has decided to trade American deaths for Afghan lives. The Afghan people, however, seem to have engaged in the rational calculus that it is better to side with those who will be there, the Taliban, than those who have announced their intention to leave. …

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is still unable to utter the words “Islamist terrorist,” preferring to engage in Newspeak about “man-made disasters.” The real man-made disasters are the multi-ethnic states of Iraq and Afghanistan, lines on the map encompassing diverse people who have found familiarity breeds contempt and contempt breeds irrational violence. But more irrational is our hubris, thinking that we can suddenly transform seventh century societies into modern democracies amid the most virulent and transformative ideology on the planet, radical Islam.

The wars persist. Victory is as elusive as it is undefined. The spilling of blood and treasure goes on. We cannot kill our way to victory, and we cannot reshape the foundation of these cultures.

Our status in the world diminishes. …

And the Obama administration, having disengaged from Israel, has decided, in an act of consummate recklessness, to create a Saudi hegemony, to balance Iran, with the largest arms deal in the history of our nation, sixty billion dollars. Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. This was the policy of prior administrations with regard to the shah of Iran, who was supposed to be the hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf, offsetting then Soviet interests in that region. And we all saw how well that turned out.

So now we are banking on an aging royal family with the legitimacy of Weimar standing in the headwinds of rising fundamentalism, a family that has walked the tightrope of dealing with the West while exporting its own brand of Islamic fundamentalism to undermine Western traditions and institutions. We are afraid to confront them, for in our multicultural mindset one culture is as good as another. …

Our influence in the world declines along with the value of our currency. We elected a president whom the world’s leaders do not take seriously. We are saddled with large unemployment in an economy that exports jobs faster than it creates them. We are becoming Britain of the post-World War II era, but now there is no America in the West to step into the power vacuum.

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.