It's all in the work units

ArmsControlWonk discusses estimates that Iran is years away from the nuclear bomb. The calculations raise questions about how estimates are made. Regardless, we shall proceed with some of his cited numbers.

Overall, Iran is probably a little less than a decade away from developing a nuclear weapon...
Each of Iran’s centrifuges has an output between 2-3 SWU/year...
Iran probably only has about 700 centrifuges, as well as components for another 1,000 or so...
So, the real question, however, is how quickly Iran could assemble and operate 1,500 centrifuges in a crash program to make enough HEU for one bomb (say 15-20 kg).

It seems key to such estimates as to how efficient Iran's centrifuge technology is. The estimate of 2-3 SWU/year appears to be low. By contrast, the Wisconsin Project estimates a higher SWU, as well as noting that there may be smaller enrichment facilities in existence besides Natanz.

Rather than the Iranian estimate of about six or seven separative work units (SWU) per centrifuge per year, the IAEA estimated that the throughput of Iran's centrifuges could be as high as 12 to 14 SWU per machine per year, according to the media report.

Taking low end of the Iranian estimate, that would result in half the production time required for a crash nuclear program. With the lower bound IAEA estimate, that would result in a quarter of the time. SWU efficiency is key. Why are the estimates so high?

GlobalSecurity has further numbers for comparison.

A single centrifuge might produce about 30 grams of HEU per year, about the equivalent of five Separative Work Unit (SWU). As as a general rule of thumb, a cascade of 850 to 1,000 centrifuges, each 1.5 meters long, operating continuously at 400 m/sec, would be able to produce about 20-25 kilograms of HEU in a year, enough for one weapon. One such bomb would require about 6,000 SWU.
With current technology, a single gas centrifuge is capable of about 4 separative work unit [SWU] annually, while advanced gas centrifuge machines can operate at a level of up to perhaps 40 SWUs annually.

The higher Iranian and IAEA estimates, assuming they are sound, indicate that Iran's centrifuge technology is more advanced than the single gas centrifuge, due to cascading. Assuming an estimated 700 assembled centrifuges are kept operational at the level of performance claimed by Iran, with the spares being used to replace worn parts, they would be able to produce 4,200 SWU per year, yielding enough material for a single weapon in approximately 1.5 years. IAEA estimates would result in this time being reduced to under 9 months. Weaponization would take longer.

Business deals as psychological operations

Bush recently warned that blocking the DP World ports takeover deal would send a "terrible message".

"I think it sends a terrible signal to friends around the world that it's OK for a company from one country to manage the port, but not a country that plays by the rules and has got a good track record from another part of the world can't manage the port," Bush said.

Al Jazeera's article takes the view that Americans’ rejection of Dubai-U.S. Ports deal is racist.

Opposing handing over the ports management to the UAE will only send a message to the people of the UAE and the Arab world that “they will always be considered by the U.S. as terror suspects.”

Based on Jessica Stern's article, I conclude that the West has to weigh the impact of humiliation in public business dealings.

Several possible root causes [of terrorism] have been identified... I've been interviewing terrorists around the world over the past five years. Those I interviewed cite many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause of terrorism. But the variable that came up most frequently was ... perceived humiliation. Humiliation emerged at every level of the terrorist groups I studied — leaders and followers.
The "New World Order" is a source of humiliation for Muslims. And for the youth of Islam, it is better to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to this humiliation. Part of the mission of jihad is to restore Muslims' pride in the face of humiliation. Violence, in other words, restores the dignity of humiliated youth. Its target audience is not necessarily the victims and their sympathizers, but the perpetrators and their sympathizers. Violence is a way to strengthen support for the organization and the movement it represents.

The depth of perceived humilation is evident in the recent furor over cartoons depicting Mohammed.

Desert watch

In this recent report on Friday's failed militant attack on Saudi oil facilities, there was an interesting, almost parenthetical comment regarding security measures.

Friday's assault suggested the militants were adopting the tactics of insurgents in neighboring Iraq, who have repeatedly targeted the oil industry. The Saudis have installed image-recognition devices along their desert border with Iraq to prevent miliants from crossing.

I presume that the image-recognition devices are equipped with infrared in order to detect night crossing attempts.

Neighborhood watch

China may move into mass biometric scanning, as it has recently approved a multi-camera face recognition system

The invention, developed by Su Guangda, an Electronic Engineering Department professor with Beijing-based Tsinghua University, has been approved by a panel of experts from the Ministry of Public Security...
Excelling at capturing moving facial images and featuring a multi-camera technology to lower the error for mismatching, the system will be used in public places, such as airports, post offices, customs entrances and even residential communities, in the near future...
"It has a superior advantage compared with fingerprint identification because the country doesn't have a fingerprint database for the general public," said Su.

Residential communities?

Ports of concern

Congress is up in arms over the acquisition of six US port operations by a Dubai company, fearing homeland security could be compromised.

Lawmakers are upset that [Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation], which runs 100 ports in 19 countries, is being purchased by [Dubai Ports] World with the approval of the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a 12-member panel chaired by Treasury Secretary John Snow and comprised of members of the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Commerce and Homeland Security.
P&O currently runs commercial operations in the ports of New York, New Jersey, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Miami.

I can't help wondering if they've even caught wind of a planned spaceport in the UAE.

The commercial spaceport would be based in Ras Al-Khaimah near the southern end of the Persian Gulf, and the UAE government has made an initial investment of $30 million, the Arlington, Virginia-based company [Space Adventures] said in a statement...
The agreement between Space Adventures and the Texas-based venture capital firm Prodea would help finance suborbital vehicles being designed and built by the Russian aerospace firm Myasishchev Design Bureau.

Expect more negative political ad campaigns

Researchers declare that fear and guilt motivate better than hope.

"Smoking pot may not kill you, but it will kill your mother," says an ad from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. In the first empirical work to examine both stated intentions and actual behavior, researchers argue that this sort of negative message – evoking both fear and guilt – is a far more effective deterrent to potentially harmful behavior than positive hopeful or feel-good messages.
"Making people feel good is less important than making people feel accountable when it comes to making wise decisions about self-protection," explain Kirsten A. Passyn (Salisbury University) and Mita Sujan (Tulane University) in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research...
... good intentions can be elicited by a variety of appeals. However, getting people to actually follow through on these intentions and change their behavior requires appeals combining fear and an emotion high in self-accountability, such as regret, guilt or challenge.

If this holds, then the popularity of negative ad campaigns is due to their effectiveness in motivating people to vote. Expect more in the future.

Iranian neocons

In November 2004, two different sources pegged some Iranian leaders as neoconservatives. An article in New Internationalist likens some Iranian officials to neocons.

... the generation that led the 1979 Islamic Revolution is a spent force, tainted by corruption and discredited by its ideological straitjacket. The new generation of neocons blends the strict religious intolerance and despotism of the older generation with a more pragmatic interest in efficiency and, in some cases at least, an openness to liberal pro-market economic views. For the moment they are less marked by corruption. They are largely uninterested in the Revolution’s somewhat hollow calls for social justice. They have risen to prominence due to the failures of democratic reform and the disqualification of large numbers of popular reformers, whom the Guardians successfully prevented from running in the most recent national elections...
Some of the more prominent [neocons] have close connections to the Revolutionary Guards – the enforcers of the Islamic Revolution and the shock troops in the attacks on student and pro-democracy demonstrations over the past few years.

This Eurasianet article of the same month draws the same analogy.

The conservative movement in Iran is not monolithic, as it encompasses an assortment of interest groups. Conservatives can be broken down into two broad categories – traditionalists, including a significant portion of the clerical establishment, and neo-conservatives, who tend to be younger and newer participants in the political process. In addition, the neo-cons appear willing to embrace radical methods in pursuit of their conservative vision...
The neo-cons shot to the forefront of the conservative movement following the February parliamentary elections. The neo-con parliamentary faction has acted aggressively in trying to seize control of the country’s legislative agenda. Neo-cons tend to have strong ties with Iran’s security establishment, in particular the Revolutionary Guards, which has seen a marked rise in its power and status lately.

And now, to top things off, as a demonstration of quasi-patriotic religious fervor, Iran has declared the equivalent of "freedom fries".

Bakeries across the [Iranian] capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners' union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.
"Given the insults by Danish newspapers against the prophet, as of now the name of Danish pastries will give way to 'Rose of Muhammad' pastries," the union said in its order.

On a Jungian note, perhaps America is Iran's Shadow (A.K.A. the Great Satan), and Iranian leaders fear America so much that they are blind to how much they emulate that which they fear. Last month, Iran beat out the United States for most troublesome country in the world.

Iran is the country most widely viewed as having a negative influence in the world, with the US in second place, a new poll for the BBC suggests.

It is troubling that they are seeking nuclear power, given that they have a apocalyptic counterpart to Armageddon.

Just call the new messiah "hotline." Or log on to Bright Future News Agency to get the latest religious readout - all part of the effort by freshly rejuvenated true believers in Iran to spread their message of the imminent return of the Mahdi, the 12th Imam who is expected to return to impose justice and spread peace.
Paving the way is a renewed commitment to "Mahdaviat" beliefs by the ultraconservative government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
These ideologues see the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and efforts to rekindle its revolutionary ideals, as critical to paving the way for the Mahdi's return.
They say that return - which they believe will happen soon - will prompt a global battle between good and evil (not unlike biblical "Armageddon" interpretations), and herald an era of justice, peace, and the ultimate triumph of Shiite Islam.

The long war

In 2004, ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer warned in a BBC interview:

Mr Scheuer said US policies risked "an extraordinarily long and bloody war" against al-Qaeda.

It seems he was unintentionally prescient. The Pentagon recently embraced the term "long war". No longer merely a war on terror, a term criticized as merely an attack upon a technique, the scope has expanded to a global scale of indefinite duration.

US commanders envisage a war unlimited in time and space against global Islamist extremism. "The struggle ... may well be fought in dozens of other countries simultaneously and for many years to come," the report says. The emphasis switches from large-scale, conventional military operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, towards a rapid deployment of highly mobile, often covert, counter-terrorist forces...
Briefing reporters in Washington, Ryan Henry, a Pentagon policy official, said: "When we refer to the long war, that is the war against terrorist extremists and the ideology that feeds it, and that is something that we do see going on for decades."

They're going to have to innovate further with regard to ideological warfare. The USSR ultimately collapsed because it could not economically sustain its military-industrial complex. Such restrictions do not directly apply to transnational 4GW threats.

Further in the piece:

The Pentagon planners who drew up the long war strategy had a host of experts to draw on for inspiration. But they credit only one in the report: Lawrence of Arabia.
The authors anticipate US forces being engaged in irregular warfare around the world. They advocate "an indirect approach", building and working with others, and seeking "to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.

That's asymmetric warfare by another name. Psychological unbalancing also hints at Boyd's strategy.

An effective pilot explodes his rival's comfortable view of the universe. With his familiar clues hopelessly scrambled, a rival under pressure will usually try to interpret the mess from his accustomed perspective. While the confused rival struggles ... the savvy pilot quickly executes yet another set of maneuvers, once more scrambling the parts and further feeding his opponent's confusion. Ultimately, Boyd wrote, the winner "collapses his [adversary's] ability to carry on." You win the competition by destroying your opponent's frame of reference.

That being said, how does one collapse the reference frame of global Islamist extremist, a transcendant ideology due to its religious basis? In contrast, communism was merely a materialist ideology, and thus directly subject to falsification via the scientific method.

A social network analysis angle to FEMA's failure

Back in July 2005, a major reorganization of FEMA was announced, apparently resulting in a more complicated structure with regard to coordination.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was announcing Wednesday a controversial plan to split the Federal Emergency Management Agency in half as part of a major restructuring of his department, just over two years after it was first stood up in the largest and most complicated reorganization of the federal government for half a century...
... the department's Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate is being dismantled. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that currently makes up the bulk of the directorate, will return to being a stand-alone entity within the department, with a director, rather than the current undersecretary, reporting to straight to Chertoff.
But in a move that is likely to draw howls of protest from state and local emergency managers and FEMA's allies on Capitol Hill, the agency is being stripped of its preparedness functions, to concentrate on what some in the department see as its core competencies -- disaster response and recovery.
... said one former FEMA official who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivities of his current employer. "It's difficult enough (to plan responses to major disasters) when both those functions are in one place.
"It's unclear how separating them will bring them into better sync."

I recently noted this report regarding the role of middle management hadn't come out earlier.

Companies that cut middle managers jeopardize their productivity more than save costs, a study from McMaster University suggests.
"Middle managers are the front line communicators with employees," says Rick Hackett, Canada Research Chair in Organizational Behaviour and Human Performance at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University. "One-on-one social exchanges between bosses and their workers have a real impact on employee productivity, behaviour and commitment, and when you cut middle-management, often you lose that interaction."

From such a structural basis alone, it seems reasonable to conclude that such a dramatic reorganization of FEMA could hamper effectiveness until such internal trust and lines of communications could be rebuilt. Furthermore, new procedures were still being drafted, meaning the rules of interaction were in flux; perfectly bad timing made the situation worse.

Once Katrina came ashore, the newly completed National Response Plan spectacularly failed its first test. Chertoff neglected to activate it until the day after landfall, and Brown resisted the secretary's efforts to name him the principal federal official. And the 426-page plan proved to be mostly irrelevant once local responders were unable to participate; FEMA had not finalized the "Catastrophic Annex" that was supposed to guide that situation.

Spin doctoring from conservative Danish imams

Confirmation of my previous hypothesis. Via The Guardian (UK), the Danish newspaper claims to have been smeared with disinfo in the form of additional offensive cartoons:

At this point a group of ultra-conservative Danish imams decided to take matters into their own hands, setting off on an ambitious tour of Saudi Arabia and Egypt with a dossier containing the inflammatory cartoons.
According to Jyllands-Posten, the imams from the organisation Islamisk Trossamfund took three other mysteriously unsourced drawings as well, showing Muhammad with the face of a pig; a dog sodomising a praying Muslim; and Muhammad as a paedophile. "This was pure disinformation. We never published them," Lund complained. But the campaign worked. Outwardly the row appeared to be calming down. But in Muslim cyber-chatrooms, on blogs, and across the internet, outrage was building fast.
From Denmark, the pictures were being pinged by SMS from Kuwait to Palestine. Then last week came the diplomatic explosion. Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Denmark for consultations, Libya shut its embassy.

According to a piece in The Daily Telegraph (UK), the pieces were not advertised as being from the newspaper, but added in to spin doctor the impression.

They carried with them a 43 page dossier, containing not 12, but 15 images of the Prophet Mohammed. The three extras were far more obscene, depicting Mohammed with a pig's snout and labeling him a paedophile, and showing a praying Muslim being raped by a dog.
The Muslim delegates insisted they made clear the three extra cartoons were not from "Jyllands-Posten", but were included to show the level of racism faced by Danish Muslims. They say the images came from hate mail sent, anonymously, to Danish Muslims.

Assuming for the moment that their claim is genuine, it is unfair to expect a newspaper, let alone an entire national government, to take responsibility for anonymous cartoons allegedly sent by unaffiliated xenophobes at some indeterminate amount of time in the past. The timing and juxtaposition was deliberate. Thus, the primary purpose of including the cartoons could only have been to incite and ensure outrage against the nation of Denmark, by increasing the overall level of outrage at the combined set of cartoons.

Religious smartmobs apparently go global

The religious smartmob has apparently come of age. Associate editor Najla Al Rostamani of gulfnews.com opines:

I had first come to realise that the Danish cartoons debacle would snowball into a controversy when my mobile phone beeped with the first SMS message on the issue. This was followed by a second and a third and a fourth beep. Almost all of them carried the same message which read as follows: "Voice your protest to the blasphemous attack on the Prophet (PBUH) and respond by sending a letter of complaint to Jyllands-Posten."
The message also facilitated a URL link to the website of the newspaper in question...
Technology brings about instant reactions. Whether what it carries is true or false, accurate or inaccurate is besides the point.

Mind you, I can't rule out the possibility that certain religious and national government organizations deliberately spread the message as a mass psyop in order to intimidate the EU.

The forgotten impact of bird flu

Though people may panic and try to stockpile Tamiflu, a mundane and nontheoretical impact of avian flu is sometimes overlooked.

Because the virus attacks poultry, in effect, it attacks economies by wiping out the foodstocks of affected nations. Both the poultry and tourism industries in China and other Southeast Asian countries where the virus has been detected already have been disrupted by outbreaks of bird flu.
And in today's global marketplace, such disruptions could have broader, more long-lasting consequences, as economic ripple effects could impact other countries as well.

Demonizing Americans in Turkey

I ran across a piece adapted and carried across AP about a recent Turkish movie which demonizes Americans.

In the most expensive Turkish film ever made, American soldiers in Iraq gatecrash a wedding and shoot a little boy in front of his mother.
They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shoot the groom in the head and drag those left alive to Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, starring Hollywood actor Billy Zane as an American army officer, feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many Turks harbour toward their longtime NATO allies - the Americans.

Keep in mind that Bush has pressured the EU to accept Turkey's application for entrance, and has done so consistently for years, a stance which has provoked complaints from France.

Anti-Americanism aside, there is something more deeply disturbing to the Turkish movie. It feeds into existing receptivity for antisemitism and conspiracy theory in Arab media.

Heard the truth about Saddam Hussein? He's a CIA agent, whose invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was intended to provide a pretext for crushing Iraq, the Arab country most threatening to Israel. And Monica Lewinsky? A Jewess guided by Israel to create a sex scandal for President Clinton, who was pressuring Israel to accept a Palestinian state.
Such accounts should be immediately dismissed as ludicrous, anti-Semitic fabrications. Not in much of the Arab world, however. From Rabat to Baghdad, these and similar tales are widely accepted as fact among the poorly educated populace as well as by many officials, diplomats, academics, journalists and others who should know better.
While the rest of the world is busy trying to understand how best to deal with extremism of all kinds — whether from Muslims or xenophobic Westerners — many Arabs seem locked in a never-never land where conspiracy theories, usually featuring a sinister Jewish hand and scarcely a scrap of evidence, neatly explain everything there is to know about a complex world. The West has its share of people who believe in kooky ideas, of course, but in the Middle East they are not on the loony fringe...
While not all Arab conspiracy theories involve Jews, a disturbing upsurge in anti-Semitism is nonetheless apparent. It shows itself not only in tabloid media, but in the naked hatred against Jews displayed in mainstream government-controlled newspapers. Last week, Al Akhbar, Egypt's second-largest daily, reported that Israelis were removing the organs of Palestinians killed in recent fighting and providing them to Jews in need of transplants.

Compare that with the role of the Jewish-American doctor in the movie. The role is blatantly antisemitic, yet this was not commented on directly in the Western media report. It would appear the being anti-American is the bigger offense.

I had to turn a report in India's New Kerala to learn that the role was that of a Jewish-American doctor, not a Jewish doctor and am presuming that this is accurate.

Gary Busey appears in the film as a Jewish-American doctor who carries out organ transplants on unwitting Iraqi casualties, sending the organs off to Israel and the United States.

Curiously, London is left out of that report as a destination site for organs. It is interesting to note the differing slants in reporting.