On Invading Iran

   Recently, there has been much talk about invading Iran.  Well, it's self defense, so the advocates say.  President Ahmadinejad is a kook, and he is threatening the US with nuclear weapons, right?  And we promise to implement an Iranian version of the Marshall plan, so that we can rebuild a pro-American state when we are all done.  So let us aid the pro-American forces in Iran that are seeking revolution, and overthrow the Iranian government!  
      Here are some of my thoughts on this matter.  First, the main power in Iran rests with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini, not the President.  There is in fact enormous opposition to Ahmadinejad, as many of the people don't like him.  The problem is that much of the opposition is driven by religious fundamentalism.  There are no major pro-US political factions in Iran.    The 99% in Iran?  That's the percentage that hates the US. 
     

Ayatollah Khameini is the true leader of Iran, not President Ahmadinejad.   The Ayatollah has talked of dismantling the presidency and increasing the power of religious fundamentalism.   But that does not make him a friend to the West!  (photo:  Al-Jazeera)



      Second, Iran is a threat to be create havoc with the global oil supply, but we can do more damage to them than they can do to us.  There is only one petroleum refinery in the entire country, and one bombing raid would destroy their economy.  Iran is not a military threat to the US. 
    Third, chaos is good business in Iran.  As pointed out many times by the Village Elliot, every time Iran acts crazy, the global oil price increases.  Right now they are in a giant pissing contest over nuclear inspections, and as a result, oil prices have gone up by about ten bucks per barrel.  Iran exports some 2.5 million barrels per day, and so they are rewarded by 25 million dollars per day for acting crazy.  The main problem is that this game needs to be played very well, and a miscalculation is very dangerous.  
   Fourth, weapons of mass destruction are real, and a Muslim nation with an eccentric government poses a real threat to the region, and to the rest of the world down the road.  However, those weapons of mass destruction are owned by Pakistan, not Iran.  So going to war in Iran does not solve that problem.  So far, from what we are told in the media, Iran is carrying out enrichment studies on nuclear fuel, and they are deliberately obfuscating what they are doing.  In the past, the US totally overestimated the capabilities of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and now we are getting ready to do the same foolish thing in Iran.  
   This is not to say that the US should not respond if it has bona fide intelligence that a real threat exists, and at some point down the road, a future American President may be faced with the option of tolerating capabilities to create nuclear weapons by countries hostile to the US or removing those capabilities with a surgical air strike, as the Israelis did with the Osiris nuclear reactor facilty in Iraq some 30 years ago (the Israeli's, needless to say, had no illusions about taking over the country and rebuilding it to be a pro-Israeli state!  They just blew it up and weathered the PR storm that ensued).  But in Iran, that time is not now.  The press has been filled with tales about Iranian nuclear capabilities, but in fact what they have done is to produce a fuel element for a nuclear reactor.  Fuel elements are not nuclear bombs, and it is an enormous leap to be able to produce nuclear material for weapons.  We have not been presented with any evidence that the Iranians are anywhere close to producing a weapon, and even if they were, that calls for a surgical airstrike rather than an occupying force. 
   There is no course of action which results in a stable pro-US, peaceful Iran.  For the next several generations they are going to hate the US.  There are no good ideas about what to do about Iran.  However, going to war and taking over Iran would be the worst of all alternatives.  

For additional Reading:

Iran: The garrison state conducts a parliamentary election ,  Al Jazeera, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/20122208387572989.html 

The CIA factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2176rank.html

Operation Opera:  The Israeli Raid on the Osirak Nuclear Reactor (June 7, 1981)  http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Osirak.html .

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/ron-paul-vindicated-on-iran-unfortunately/ 

 

Discovering New Life in Antarctica?

   I wrote this blog last month, but I'm happy to add an update that the Russian team has succeeded in drilling through the ice in Antarctica to find the freshwater Lake Vostok, a lake thought to be the size of Lake Ontario which has been frozen over for millions of years and is now buried under miles of ice.  

  President Putin was given a small flask with some water in it from Lake Vostok, though the date on it was from December 2011, meaning that it was probably an ice core rather than water from the lake. 

   We have not heard whether there are bacteria in the water yet.  Just their existence would be enormously important.  Later it will be interesting to learn whether there are microscopic bacteria that might not have been seen in the rest of the world for millions of years.  





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Life on other worlds! A time machine!  That's what I think of, at the news that scientists from Russian are seeking to drill through two miles of ice in order to gain access to Lake Vostok in Antarctica,  a freshwater lake that has been cut off from the rest of the world for millions of years.  At the same time, scientists with the British Antarctic Survey are seeking to drill carry out a similar operation over Lake Ellsworth, a somewhat smaller lake.



     Unlike the Arctic, which has a thin ice cap of only about 8 feet (and thus easy access to the water underneath), the Antarctic ice shelf rests on land--the continent of Antarctica.  The ice has built up for millions of years, and it is literally two and a half  miles  thick.  Hence drilling is no easy task, especially given the amazingly harsh conditions that researchers face.     
 
     As a minimum there may be new micro-organisms in the water, perhaps forms of life that evolved separately over millions and millions of year.  Also it could be that there are large creatures present to feed off those microorganisms.  To me it is terribly exciting, almost like visiting a freshwater lake on another plant (say Europa, a moon of Jupiter that we know has water oceans, covered by ice).  NASA was love to fly a probe up to Europa some day, drill through its ice cap and start taking pictures of whatever is down there. No doubt NASA will use the Lake Ellsworth experience when the time comes to visit the icy moons of Jupiter and their oceans underneath the ice.

     It's not impossible that there might be a "living fossil" or two that have survived somehow, just as certain fish have adapted to living in caves, completely shut off from sunlight.  The difference, however, is that the under-ice lakes in Antarctica have been sealed off for millions of years.  Also, cave creatures might still be fed from organisms that originate at the surface of the earth, and then drain into the cave somehow.  But what kind of food would be present underneath 2.5 miles of ice, and  could living creatures really cope with the pressure?
    Because of the harsh conditions in Antarctica, it has taken decades to reach this point.  Later this winter (or summertime in Antarctica) we may have some answers, and possibly a few surprises.  

 Probably they will find bacteria in Lake Ellsworth and Lake Vostok, but there might just be something a bit larger as well.

The Tiahuanaco Mystery

  Is Tiahuanaco the oldest city in the world?  

 The temple at Tiahuanaco is an engineering marvel.  I doubt that many structures made in America will prove to be as durable. 

    I first  became interested in Tiahuanaco because of a TV show on Discover Network by rengegade historian Graham Hancock.  Hancock suggests  that ancient humans developed a very advanced civilization which collapsed due to climate change around 10,500 BC, which happens to be about the end of the Ice Age (and also one of the dates preferred by quack mentalist Edgar Cayce).  

     Hancock has had his share  of screwball ideas over the years.  Namely, that intelligent beings created a face on Mars to tanatalize Earth people with; and that Atlantis might have been located on Antarctica (despite the fact that we know darn well that the ice sheet is millions of years old).

     But irrespective of Hancock's failure to pass basic sanity checks, Tiahuanaco is a fascinating place.  It is incredibly intricate, with astonishingly well constructed blocks of stone.  the entire place   The building is aligned with the summer solstice, and various theorists have suggested that the solstice alignment is a better match to the position of the solstice as it was several thousand years ago.  However, most conventional historians date the site to a few hundred years after the birth of Christ. 
 

 Kalasasaya Temple at Tiahunaco. 

 

Gateway to the Sun.

  Mostly, the fringe historians including Hancock have asserted (without a lot of proof, as far as I can see) that there is a better match of the alignment of the temple to a date of 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, but I am not aware of numbers that prove that that is true. 
    Arthur Posnansky made this argument in Tiahuanaco: The Cradle of American Man (1945). He claimed that the alignment of Kalasasaya was consistent with the earth's alignment in 15,000 B.C.E. 
      The temple, moreover, was claimed to be based on the Temple of Karnak, in Egypt.
     The stones at Tiahuanaco are fitted and joined with similar construction methods used by the ancient Egyptians.  
   Another amazing coincidence is that surgeons in Tiahuanaco used the same technique as their counterparts in Egypt for performing a form of skull surgery know as trepanning, in which holes were made in the skull, probably to allow evil spirits to be evicted. They used similar tools for these operations. It's not that this surgery was so effective, but it seems hard to believe that two societies could develop such idiosyncratic medicine unless they were connected. 
     Though not an archeologist, I don't know how much importance should be attached to a single way to date the site.  Hancock is fascinated about the use of radiocarbon dating, but unfortunately this is best used to date organic carbon, because the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 is different in the atmosphere and for living organisms, whereas underground the ratio is different.  But for inorganic rock, I don't see how this method is all that useful. 
      Hence, I would be inclined to put away the argument about the dating of the site, at least for the time being.  Perhaps a better question is whether there are connections between ancient civilizations on the other side of the Atlantic?  When I was in college, it was considered absolutely foolish to believe that any Europeans set foot in North America prior to the Vikings in the 11th century.  But the fringe historians have gotten some traction on this point, as archeological evidence is starting to suggest that common technologies were used in North America and Spain thousands of years before the Vikings.  

      The Clovis civilization (named after an archeological site near Clovis New Mexico) was until recently thought to be the oldest human civilization in North America.  It appeared some 10,000 years ago, or roughly the time of the ending of the last Ice Age.  The theory was that people came from Asia, across a land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska.  Said land bridge no longer exists (I guess they had Climate Change in prehistory, too).   

     Nowadays, however, archeologists have identified sites in North America that are thousands of years older than the Clovis civilization.  In addition, tools found at pre-Clovis sites are similar to tools made in France and Spain some 20,000 years ago. In addition, construction techniques used at Tiahuanaco were also used in Egypt.  This includes the method of joining stones.

   At Tiahuanaco, I-shaped copper clamps were used to joing stone blocks.  The same technique was used by the Egyptians and the Greeks.  

 

Molten metal was poured into these depressions in order to form metal clamps that held monolithic blocks together.  On the left is an example from Egypt, and on the right is an example from South America.  It's very tough to imagine this technology emerged independently at both locations.  See http://davidpratt.info/andes2.htm for a discussion of similarities between South American stonemasonry and that of the Egyptians and Greeks.  




   Our stone age ancestors did not know how to read and write, but that does not mean that they were dumb. Anatomically modern humans have been around for many thousands of years, so there is not an inherent reason why societies might have risen and fallen several times before our own civilization finally took hold (I guess--sometimes when I pick up a newspaper I have my doubts).   
   In particular, our ancestors may have been excellent navigators and masons.  In a future blog, I will address how stone age navigators might have been able to carry out trans-oceanic voyages.  There are some low-tech methods that I believe might have been overlooked by mainstream historians.