day 8 (13. 240)

Oil refineries in Basra operated by US defence contractor Halliburton have been struck. As the Gulf states of the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia suffer fresh attacks and bombardments continue in Lebanon and Iran, independent reporting speculates that supplies of both ballistics and countermeasures are beginning to dwindle, with the US claiming that firepower on Tehran was to surge dramatically in the coming days and Trump saying there would be no further negotiations and would only accept unconditional surrender, the world still guessing about his endgame. An Iranian frigate was sunk outside of the theatre of war, returning from training manoeuvres off the coast of Sri Lanka by American naval forces, the first such expansion since WWII. Russian intelligence is supplying Iran with telemetry on US targets in the region.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Silla Smile (with synchronopticæ) plus assorted links to revisit

thirteen years ago: historical monetary unions 

fourteen years ago: human-robot collaborations 

fifteen years ago: cooking by substitiution 

day five (13. 230)

Though there are disputed claims about the breadth of the US-Israeli dominance of the region with Iran stating it retains control of the Strait of Hormuz and Trump saying there are no enemy vessels in the waters, their naval power obliterated and offering US carriers as escorts for tankers, the belligerent spectacle seems beyond reproach with double the shock-and-awe campaign of the opening volleys of the 2003 Iraq war, hitting some two-thousand targets in Iran with over fifty thousand troops deployed and two hundred aerial assets launched from two carrier groups. Bombing continues in Beirut as Iranian missiles hit the Qatari Al Udeid base, the largest American presence in the Middle East. France is also sending its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier from the Baltics to the Mediterranean to safeguard its interests. Meanwhile the casus belli is still unclear with regime change being walked back and Trump expressing a desire to install some one from the current government into a leadership role—as with Venezuela—though admitting that they have killed most of the line of succession and there’s less emphasis for popular revolution and the narrative shifting from preemptive attacks under pressure by Israel to defensive countermeasures that Iran was going to fire the first shot, the inimical fog of war recently cited in attacks on trawlers in the Caribbean. Though most of Iran’s missiles and drones have been intercepted, Kiev offering to send its effective anti-drone nets to the region, markets and economies are yet in turmoil with no end in sight.  Airstrikes continue on Tehran as preparations are made for the late Ayatollah’s funeral and the expert assembly readies to appoint his son, Mojtaba Khameni, as the new Supreme Leader—Israeli avowing to assassinate whomever is put into the role.

synchronoptica

one year ago: US vice president Rufus DeVane King (with synchronopticæ) plus more on the Triadic Ballet

twelve years ago: world time zones diverging from true solar time 

thirteen years ago: over-apostrophisation 

that often happens in war (13. 224)

Hours after the assassination was proclaimed both by Trump and Netanyahu after destroying the Tehran compound of Khamenei, officials and domestic news sources denying the claim saying he was elsewhere or outside of the country, Iranian state news announced that the Supreme Leader had in fact been killed along with four members of his family and several other key leaders, including former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others in the Ayatollah’s line of succession, a handpicked group in case of his death, and decreed forty days of mourning via a VHF radio broadcast as most of the country has had no internet connectivity since the height of the protests and in conjunction with crippling cyberattacks to aimed at digital infrastructure and handicapping Iran’s own skilled hackers. Assaults by belligerents on both sides have continued unabated with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian surrogate groups like the Houthis hindering Red Sea shipments and Kurdish separatists attempting to storm the US Iraqi Green Zone. Despite having to deflect a barrage of missiles for hosting US bases, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar stand to gain by ridding the region of an antagonist, an prospect too fraught and potentially costly to undertake themselves, but having found a far cheaper alternative with bribing Trump and his family, the used luxury jetliner and two-billion dollar consulting to fee to son-in-law Jared Kushner, this discount regime change undertaken by America and Israel is likely to result in disaster and certainly not lead to democratic reforms, perhaps reinstating the Shah and an royal autocracy that the other Gulf states find social acceptable for not calling out their hypocrisy and corruption with hyper-clericalism. The death toll continues to rise, with the bombing of a girls’ school in Minab adjacent to a barracks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and three US service members were killed in the line of duty. As Joe Biden once said if Israel didn’t exist then the US “would have to invent one.”

i believe it’s god’s job to sit in judgment—my job is to defend america (12. 466)

Just returned from his first major foreign trip of his second term, treated with with imperial pomp and lavishing in the Regional Car Dealership Rococo lifestyle and gold-plate decor that he so admires, Trump’s agenda of deal-making—though overshadowed by a luxury jet offered by Qatar to replace Air Force One—was revealing about his priorities and “none of our business approach” to foreign policy. In parallel to multi-million dollar contracts favourable to American business interests secured without any of the bothersome talks of human rights issues, democracy, transparency, press freedoms or regional diplomacy—no mention of the suppression of dissent, sportswashing, the war in Gaza or even recent past postures to his hosts on supporting terrorist groups, Trump’s team of negotiators have been fronting at least the appearance of frenetic negotiations that included a ceasefire with the Houthis, lifting sanctions on Syria and renegotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, although the Persian Gulf will henceforth be known as the Arabian Gulf.  This collusion of contrasting, contradictory events, capitalism to paper over conflicts, may be coincidental and incidental to the administration’s penchant for flooding the zone but is very telling of what Trump wants and how he might be played.

i mean, i could be a stupid person saying—no, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane (12. 455)

Never a fan of Air Force One and bemoaning the delay that defence contractors like Boeing have presented since commissioning a new presidential fleet during his first term, Trump’s first major foreign trip, an itinerary that returns to the Persian Gulf—which America re-flags as the Arabian, retracing the agenda of his first-term, rife with business deals is overshadowed by coverage that the Qatari royals have offered Trump a deluxe airplane. An uncontested violation of the emoluments clause of the US constitution, Trump says that they four-hundred million dollar flying palace would be registered as a gift to the military—tasked with outfitting the aircraft up to standard, never mind the cost of these security upgrades or symbolism associated—and then donated to his Presidential Library and not for personal use after his presidency. Prompting assurances to the press that the president was unconcerned about what Qatar might ask for in return, Democrat lawmakers are threatening an embargo on any country that might further enrich the Trump family through their largess.

wort des jahres (10. 374)

The Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache in Wiesbaden (previously) has announced its Word of the Year for 2022, Zeitenwende—the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, for among other things real and feared declines in German leadership and influence economically, in industry, armaments and Fußball and for the return to war in Europe, and other terms and neologisms in the running. Rounding out the top ten were: Krieg um Frieden—war for peace, Gaspreisbremse—price controls for utilities, Inflations-schmerz—inflation pains, Klimakleber—for the Last Generation protesters glueing themselves to artwork, Doppel-Wumms—a double-boon for the electro-auto tax credit in the US “Inflation Reduction Act” that skews heavily in favour of American manufacturing at the expense of other markets, neue Normalität, das 9-Euro-Ticket, Glühwein-WM—for the fact that the Qatari World Cup wasn’t held in July but rather during Weihnachtszeit, and lastly Waschlappentipps—that is, government-issued suggestions on energy conservation in the shower.

drawbridge

Emboldened by geopolitics elsewhere, Saudi Arabia, we learn via Super Punch, is entertaining bids to terraform its escalating, long-standing tensions with neighbouring Qatar (previously) by turning the peninsula the country occupies into an island in the Gulf of Bahrain. The Saudi government plans to dig a two hundred metre wide moat along its sixty kilometre border, at an estimated cost of three-quarters of a billion dollars.

over a barrel

Arguably emboldened by Dear Leader’s strange and strained whistle-stop tour of the centres of faith of the Abrahamic religions that unanimously positioned US policy and patronage squarely behind regimes that he didn’t come to lecture—code for not wanting to address the hypocrisies of diplomacy based solely on business interest and drag down negotiations with more rarefied talk, Saudi Arabia led others in the region in suspending relations and closing borders with Qatar.
The top US diplomat and former swaggering oil-man himself, despite the fact Qatar is host to the largest US military installation in the Middle East, assesses that this action will have little to no impact on the global war on terror. Tensions already existed between the Saudis and the Qataris over their allegiance with rebellious elements and Iran, whose oil reserves are seen as a match for the kingdom’s, but the timing seems pretty suspect after Dear Leader stomped all over a sectarian hornets’ nest—praising those Sunni majority nations willing to be franchisees of his brand and condemning Shi’a countries, though most perpetrators of terror to include the Cosplay Caliphate have had Saudi associations and have been of the Sunni persuasion—and the simultaneous decision to sell stock to Western investors in the kingdom’s national oil-drilling operation for the first time. Though Dear Leader’s attempt to discredit the world’s commitment to not destroy itself is a fitting failure, one wonders if that too wasn’t decided in concert somehow—in his mind only, as conspirators are not dolts, with a bit of insider-knowledge, which has now been elevated to a crime against humanity.