The Perils of Adventure 1

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John Nicholson (1822-1857) was the son of a Scotch-Irish Protestant doctor.  He went to a boarding school whose motto was “Perseverando” (Persevere, Winners Never Quit and Quitters Never Win).  Nicholson learned that part of the lesson, but he had an awful temper: he flipped-out when opposed by anyone and often became violent.  Now, he would be on meds.  Then, in 1839, his family got rid of the boy by getting him appointed as an officer in the “Indian Army”–a force defending the British East India Company’s possessions.  Indian troops under British officers.  He fought in the disastrous First Afghan War (1839-1842).  Here he came to the attention of Henry Lawrence, who was building a British Empire in India, regardless of what the clowns in London wanted.  Lawrence gave Nicholson command of a district in Afghanistan.  First the local Afghans hated him: he was a foreigner, not a Muslim, he was brutal and oppressive, and violent when crossed.  Then the Afghans loved him: although he was not a Muslim, he was brutal and oppressive, and violent when crossed.  Just like them.  He once chased a horse-thief for a week through hostile country while being shot at from hill-tops along the way, killed the thief and his companions, then stabled his horse in the dining room of a local inn that had earlier refused him a room, pulled the thatch off the roof to feed his horse, and then set fire to the place when he left.  He kept this up for a while.

When the Indian Mutiny broke out he left Afghanistan.  Many tribesmen followed him because they wanted to share in the plunder and, besides what would happen later if Nicholson decided you weren’t there because you didn’t like him?  He was killed storming the rebel city of Delhi.  For half a century afterward Afghan tribesmen built shrines to the local god “Nikal Seyn.”

William Stephen Raikes Hodson (1821-1858) was the son of an Anglican clergyman in Gloucestershire.  He got a good education and decided not to put it to any use.  All his life Hodson was aggressive and self-confident to an obnoxious degree.  Modern human relations staff would probably fire him for being a disruptive presence in the organization.  However, the British were building an empire, not holding a bake sale.  He became an officer in the “Indian Army.”

Hodson fought—bravely, ruthlessly–in the First (1845-1846) and Second (1848-1849) Sikh Wars.  Powerful men took a shine to Hodson, thinking “yeah, that’s the ticket.”  However, peace did not agree with Hodson so well as did war.  He was snotty to just about everyone above or below him, and he didn’t pay attention to his paperwork.  Between wars he sat around drinking brandy and fuming under the tropical sun.  This did nothing to improve his temperament.  Many people couldn’t stand him.  In 1854 and 1858 he was wrongfully accused of fraud.

“In case of emergency, break class and pull lever.”  When the “Indian Mutiny” broke out in 1857 Hodson played an important role in its bloody suppression.  In September 1857 he arrested the last of the Mogul emperors, Bahadur Shah II, the figurehead leader of the rebellion.  The rebels had talked much of creating a united India under the Mughals.  This was mostly talk, rather than reality.  However, Hodson was a soldier, not a historian.  The next day he arrested two of the emperor’s sons, then personally shot them, and a grandson as well.  In March 1858 he was shot storming the rebel city of Lucknow.  It was his thirty-seventh birthday.  He died the next day.

The Origins of al Qaeda

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In the beginning all Muslims were supposed to belong to one community, not to many communities, and there was to be no division between politics and religion.  By the start of the Twentieth Century the Ottoman Empire expressed these unities.  At the same time, the Ottoman Empire—called the “Sick Man of Europe”—fell farther and farther behind Western countries, while the Turks bullied the Arabs inside the empire.

Then secular (non-religious) nationalism (which divided Muslims into Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, Saudi Arabians, etc.) created the first countries in the Muslim world.  Secularism and nationalism were Western ideas, so this amounted to Westernization.  Turkey provided the example here after the First World War.  Many other countries followed it after the Second World War.  Unfortunately, many of these governments did not serve the interests of their people.  The early nationalist leaders held on to power in ways that looked like dictatorship.  Economic development and the opportunity to make a better life did not keep pace with population growth.  Countries often seemed to cringe before the Western countries.

The dissatisfaction with secular nationalist governments made their religious critics the natural alternative in the eyes of many people.  Religious feeling became increasingly strong throughout the Muslim world.  However, the emergence of leaders with a strong religious motivation did not begin in the Arab world.  Rather, the movement which overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1978-1979 put power into the hands of religious leaders.  Subsequently, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 sparked a rebellion by Afghans which drew in many Muslims from all over the Middle East to wage “jihad” against the Russians.  Among them was a Saudi Arabian soccer enthusiast named Osama bin Laden.  ObL’s father was rich, but he wasn’t.  He fought some, but mostly he organized people to fight and raised money to give people the weapons with which to fight.  In 1989 the Afghans succeeded in driving out the Russkies.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia ObL suggested that the “Afghan Arabs” who had defeated the Soviets should now fight the Iraqis.  The Saudis preferred to put their faith in the Americans.  Enraged by allowing these “unbelievers” into Islam’s holy land, bin Laden turned his attention to the “far enemy”—America.  Again he served as an organizer/fund-raiser.  (A National Endowment for Inhumanity.)

First, he based himself in Sudan.  When that got too hot, he moved to Afghanistan.  The Taliban, a movement of Muslim fundamentalists which had gained control of Afghanistan, protected ObL.  From these bases he organized the simultaneous bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanganyika, then the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, an American warship visiting Yemen.  Then he agreed to support the “planes operation,” which had been pitched to him—purportedly—by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.  This—purportedly–involved hijacking a bunch of planes in America and crashing them into buildings and hijacking a bunch of planes over the Pacific and crashing them into the ocean.  The second part of the plan had to be abandoned because the CIA snagged a bunch of the Pacific Ocean plotters in the Philippines.  Bin Laden concentrated on the American part of the operation.

On 9/11/2001 the attack came off as planned.  The Americans then invaded Afghanistan.  ObL fled to the lawless border regions of Pakistan.  Then the US invaded Iraq in 2003.  Eventually the Americans killed ObL.  The war in Afghanistan goes on to prevent the Taliban from coming back.

Yemen and Nomen

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The Christmas Day 2009 “Underwear Bomber” brought attention to a little-known, impoverished, physically desolate, ill-governed, violent corner of the world.  No not Detroit.  Yemen, on the southwestern tip of the Arabian peninsula.

Conditions in Yemen are miserable.  Yemen consists of mountains and deserts and tribes.  Furthermore, there are fewer than thirty million Yemenis, but they own sixty million guns.  Then, the economy is dead: about half the population lives in poverty and over a third of the work force is unemployed.  What little oil there is won’t last much longer.  There is a shortage of water that will only get worse.  Yemeni women have an average of six children, so the population is rising rapidly.

Political conditions make this dire situation even worse.  First, the recetn President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was seen as a crook and a tyrant.  After two successive presidents had been assassinated, the army put him into power in 1978.  He quickly entrenched himself.  Then, in 1990 his government managed to get control of the southern region, which is home to the oil resources of the country.  Since then it has bled the region of the oil revenue while starving it of resources.  So there is an insurgency underway.  Then, in the north there are Shi’a Muslims who dislike being ruled by a Sunni government.  So there is an insurgency under way.  Then, because the economy is in poor shape, unemployed young men tend to have a lot of time to kill.  Fundamentalist religious preachers abound, usually spewing stuff about Islam establishing its world predominance through struggle. One of these preachers was the Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who was in touch via internet with Major Nidal Hasan before he killed thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood in November 2009, and he met with the “underwear bomber” before his mission in December 2009.  Guy appeared to be in a rut.

So, it is a natural environment for Al Qaeda.  The first Al Qaeda people showed up as early as 1992.  In 2000 Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole when it was entering port in Yemen.  Later on, Yemeni jihadists went to fight the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Many of the survivors of those adventures have returned home over the years.  When the Saudi Arabian government stomped down on jihadists sympathizers after 9/11, many of them fled to Yemen.  Right now it is estimated that anywhere from 300 to 500 committed Al Qaeda fighters are somewhere in Yemen.  (For obvious reasons, it’s a little tricky to go door to door doing a proper census.)  More recently the British and American embassies in the capital city of Sanaa were attacked.  Most recently, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian Muslim studying in Yemen, was recruited as the “Underwear bomber.”  So, the place is a pain-in-the-neck for the United States.

Generally, Yemenis don’t like the United States as an abstract concept.  The government is less anti-American than are the people generally, but people don’t like the government either.  If the government co-operates too openly with the United States in opposing Al Qaeda, it will become even less popular than it is now.  The result may be that it will be over-thrown by people who are pro-Al Qaeda.  So, we can let the situation sort of fester in hopes that nothing worse will appear, or we can push for action against Al Qaeda and make that worse situation appear.  I suppose we could invade the place to bring them hope and change, just like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.  “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for you?”

“Terrorism’s new hideout,” The Week, 22 January 2010, p. 11.

The Perils of Seafaring 1

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The Portuguese had pioneered the sea voyages to the Indian Ocean.  Along the way they had constructed fortified trading posts on the coasts of Africa and on the key entrances to thee Indian Ocean (Straits of Hormuz, Malacca).  This gave them control of the spice trade.  (See: “We’ll be rich as Nazis!”—Montgomery Burns.)

In the 17th Century the Dutch desired to challenge the Portuguese for control of this trade.  They short-circuited the Portuguese control of the sea lanes by building ships that need never touch land before they reached the East and by selecting routes that took them well out of the established shipping lanes.  The course followed by their ships ran down the central Atlantic, then ran east across the lower end of the Indian Ocean, in the belt of high winds known as the “Roaring Forties.”  They were many months out of sight of land.  (See: green drinking water; see: biscuits with weevils; see: stir-crazy.)  With their advanced navigation systems, the Dutch East Indiamen were the 17th Century equivalent of the space shuttle.  Still, as with the space shuttle, accidents do happen.  (See: Insurance, origins of.)

In 1629 the ship “Batavia” left Holland for the East Indies, carrying a rich cargo and over 300 passengers and crew.  While qualified officers operated the ship on a day-to-day basis, the ship was commanded by Francisco Pelsaert, a merchant.  His chief assistant was Jeronimus Cornelisz, a psychopathic pharmacist.  (See: CVS.)  On the long voyage eastward he plotted a mutiny.  He hoped to seize the ship and turn pirate.  (See: any little boy.)  However, one night the ship struck a reef off the western coast of Australia.  Once daylight came, about 200 passengers were ferried to a little island nearby.  Pelsaert and some others soon set off in the ship’s boat to try to reach the Dutch colony in Java.  Pelsaert left Cornelisz in charge of the shipwrecked passengers.

It took Pelsaert a month to reach the port of Batavia in Java, 2,000 miles away over uncharted open seas.  (That works out to 2.5 miles per hour, with no iPod or PS2.)  It took another month for a ship to rescue the survivors.  In the meantime, the demented Cornelisz established a reign of terror on the little island that they had come to call “Batavia’s Graveyard.”  He and the followers he had recruited for the mutiny they had planned before the shipwreck killed off 125 of the 208 surviving passengers.  Their intention seems rather like building a cult: people had to identify with the group in order to stay alive; once they had participated in a killing they had no choice but to continue supporting Cornelisz.  (See: fraternity/sorority.)  His plan was to capture the rescue ship and turn to piracy.  In the meantime, they would reduce the number of mouths that had to be supported from the limited supplies of food and water.  (See: Darwin.)

When the rescue ship finally arrived, a few of the survivors managed to warn the crew about Cornelisz.  He and the ring-leaders were arrested, tried, and hanged.  (First they chopped off Cornelisz’s hands with a hammer and chisel.)

You can read about this story in Mike Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History’s Bloodiest Mutiny. (New York: Three Rivers Press. 2003.)

Somalia a little while ago.

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Richard Burton, the explorer not the actor, went to Somalia in the 1850s.  He got a spear through his face for his trouble.  Things aren’t much different now.  The British claimed the territory as part of their drive to protect the “lifeline to India” that ran through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.  They never managed to turn its tribes and regions into a coherent country before granting it independence.  The country disintegrated in 1991, with two regions (Somaliland, Puntland) seceding and the rest of the country falling prey to robber bands.  The economy fell apart and over a million people fled their homes to escape danger or starvation.  Nobody in the outside world cared very much about this catastrophe.  However, international television journalists discovered the place and broadcast the human suffering all over the world.  In 1992 President George H. W. Bush sent in some troops to try to restore some order.  Then an international peace-keeping force came in.  In 1993, under President Clinton, “mission creep” appeared as the Americans tried to batter the local war-lords into line.  This ended in the “Blackhawk Down” disaster.  Americans became very shy about intervening in tropical hell-holes.

Eventually, many people turned to radical Islamists who didn’t approve of robbers and had the guns to do something about it.  The Islamic Courts Union established control of most of the country by 2005.  However, in the wake of 9/11 the US had developed a strong dislike for radical Islamists.  The intervention the 1990s hadn’t gone too well and American forces were busy with other wars (Iraq, Afghanistan).  So, in 2006 the US encouraged Ethiopia, which had its own territorial ambitions, to invade Somalia and toss out the Islamic Courts government.  Before pulling out its troops in January 2009 Ethiopia didn’t entirely succeed in getting rid of the Islamic Courts, but it did enough to wreck any the progress that had been made.  Somalia is ungoverned and attracts anti-Western radical Islamists.  A third of Somalis live from internationally-supplied food rations.  A million people are in refugee camps or wandering around dazed.

Under these conditions, many Somalis living near the coast turned to piracy.  The original British motivation to occupying Somalia arose from the important shipping route between the Persian Gulf-Indian Ocean and the Red Sea-Suez Canal.  The British Empire is gone, but shipping still uses the route.  Somalia is awash in weapons.  Put merchants ship and automatic weapons together with poor people who know small boats, place in a law-less environment, and you get instant piracy.  By early 2009 the pirates were seizing three ships a week and they made an estimated $100 million in ransom in 2008.

“Somalia: A state of failure,” The Week, 22 May 2009, p. 11.

Zarqawi

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Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (30 October 1966-7 June 2006) was born in Zarqa, Jordan.  He sprang from a Bedouin family which had settled down in Jordan’s one factory town.  Something went wrong early in life.  He drank a lot and had a great deal of “contact” with the police.  At some point, he got religion and shaped up his life.  A passport photo shows him clean-shaven, with a white shirt and tie—and a sad, mean look.  At some point, he took the alias “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” which means “the father of Musab” and “From Zarka.”

In 1989 he followed the well-worn Young Islamist pathway to Afghanistan.  Here he met Osama bin Laden, may have received basic military training in one of the numerous camps, and wrote some stuff for an Islamist newsletter.  By 1992 he was back in Jordan conspiring to overthrow the monarchy, for which he did five years in prison (1994-1999).  In prison he came under the influence of the Jordanian Islamist writer Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi.  No sooner did he get out than he tried to blow up a tourist hotel in Amman (1999).  This didn’t work out any better than his earlier plot.  From 1999 to 2002 he moved to Afghanistan (where OBL fronted him $200,000 to start a Jordanian franchise of Al Qaeda and the Americans almost killed him in a bombing), then to Iraq by way of Iran.  He may have been recovering from an injury in Baghdad for a while.  In summer 2002 he moved into northern Iraq, where he joined an Islamist group that was waging jihad by cutting pictures of women off ads.

More serious work tugged at him.  He helped plot the assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan (October 2002); organized the bombing of the UN’s HQ in Baghdad (August 2003); organized attacks on Shi’ite shrines in Karbala and Baghdad (March 2004); planned a huge abortive chemical weapons attack on the offices of the prime minister and the intelligence service of Jordan and on the American embassy (April 2004); beheaded a captured American civilian (May 2004), then posted the film on the internet; sent terrorists on an abortive attack on a NATO meeting in Turkey (June 2004); beheaded another captured American civilian (September 2004), then posted the film on the internet; organized the bombing of three hotels in Amman (November 2005); and organized the attack on the Al Askari mosque in Samarra (February 2006).  These attacks are only the most spectacular of his operations.

Having been organizing in Iraq from before the Second Gulf War, he had the weapons and explosive, the local contacts, the hideouts, and the local knowledge for insurgent war.  What he needed were fighters.  These began to flow to him in the form of the many Islamist foreign fighters who entered the country from 2003 on.  Without local contacts, Zarqawi became their controller.  He probably organized many of the hundreds of suicide bombings that battered Iraq from 2003 to 2006.

Zarqawi had been on American and Jordanian “Most Wanted” lists since early 2002.  In January 2003, the CIA had proposed killing Zarqawi at a camp they had identified in Kurdistan.  The proposal was rejected, possibly out of fear that an attack would release toxic clouds from chemicals stored in the camp.  Once the US invaded Iraq, Special Forces groups hunted Zarqawi with mounting intensity.  Several of these raids came close to capturing him, but always fell short.  (One time they found eggs cooking, but not yet burning, on the stove of his empty hide-out.)  However, the raids did capture some of his associates.  One of these was interrogated—humanely—by an Air Force interrogator who uses the pseudonym “Matthew Alexander.”  Zarqawi had a great many hiding places, but “Alexander” learned the location of one in a village near Baqubah.  It took six weeks of watching before he came in sight.  On the night of 7 June 2006, two precision guided bombs destroyed the house, Zarqawi, and his wife and child–Musab.

The GWOT If Israel was in Charge.

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What if Israel ran the Global War on Terror (GWOT)?

On the wall of his office Meir Dagan had an old black-and-white photograph of his grandfather about to be shot by a German in Russia during the Second World War.  Must be some German soldier’s snap-shot, something he could keep as a trophy or send home to his girlfriend.  I don’t know where Dagan got it.  Probably did a lot of looking through the picture collection at Yad Vashem.  This may not be psychologically healthy.  Perhaps he should consider grief counseling.  On the other hand, Dagan was the head of the Israeli foreign intelligence service, the Mossad.  He can look at it anytime he wants during the day while he tries to figure out how to deal with Israel’s enemies.

One of the units under Dagan’s command is called “Kidon.”  That’s the Hebrew word for bayonet.  (Actually, it probably means “dagger” or “six inches of honed bronze” because Hebrew is a language from the many days ago before Bayonne even existed.)  You go to Barnes and Noble, you’ll find a bunch of books about American snipers with 500 “kills” or sumshit like that.  Kind of FPSy if you ask me.  I don’t think I’ve run across books about sticking a blade in somebody, feeling it grate on a rib, inhaling the coppery smell of blood, hearing the guy gasping for breath like it’s sex.  Nothing FPS about that.  Kidon typifies Israel’s response to terrorism.

After the 1972 Munich Olympics, Kidon launched “Operation Wrath of God.”  (See: “Munich.”)  The Israelis killed eleven PLO terrorists believed to have been involved in the attack.  It took seven years.  Apparently, they’re tenacious and patient.

At least once, in Lillehamer, Norway, they killed a complete innocent.  In front of his pregnant wife.  Apparently, they don’t get thrown off-track by remorse over errors.

After Hamas rose to power in the Gaza Strip in 1993, it sent many suicide bombers into Israel.  The Israelis didn’t take this lying down.  In 1996 they palmed off a “burner” filled with explosives on Yahya Ayyash, the really talented chief bomb maker for Hamas; in 1997 they tried to kill Khaled Meshal, a Hamas leader, by injecting poison into his ear; in 2004 they killed the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, with an Apache gunship; in 2008 they put a bomb in the headrest of a Hamas leader’s car in Damascus.  In January 2010 they suffocated the chief contact between Hamas and Iran in his luxury hotel room in Dubai.  Apparently, they focus on the enemy leadership.

When Hamas took full control of Gaza in 2007, it fired thousands of rockets into Israel.  Israel responded by blockading Gaza: it will not allow in cement, steel, cars, computers, and lots of ordinary food; its navy will not let fishing boats proceed more than three miles from shore; it will not allow any Palestinians out of Gaza.  From December 2008 to January 2009 Israeli forces bombarded the Gaza Strip.  Anything big (police stations, factories, government buildings, schools, hospitals) got blown up; 1,300 people got killed; tens of thousands got “dishoused”—as the RAF used to describe the result of the area bombing of German cities.  Apparently, they don’t care much about making a bad impression on world opinion.

At the same time, Israeli leaders have begun to talk about doing a deal with Syria for the return of the Golan Heights.  Syria is the chief supporter of Hamas.  Probably, the price of the Golan for Syria would include helping eliminate the ability of Hamas to engage in attacks on Israel—before the Syrians get back the Golan. (See: Michael Collins.)  Apparently, they adapt to changing circumstances and will talk to their enemies.

So, tenacity, patience, focus, a thick hide to criticism, and adaptability are keys traits.  The enemy hasn’t gone away, but neither have the Israelis.  They live with a long struggle.

The Majestic Blue

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I say “tuna” and you think “little cans of cat food.”  Not true: blue-fin tuna is light years better than yellow-fin or albacore or skipjack tuna.  Those other kinds end up in tuna-noodle casserole with little bits of potato chip crumbled on top and baked in the oven.  (Or so says Tom Tuttle from Tacoma.)  Blue-fin tuna can grow to be 12 feet long and weigh in at as much as 1500 pounds, although mostly they don’t.  The underbelly on blue-fin yields this yummy meat known as “toro.”  The Japanese use “toro” from blue-fin tuna to make sushi.

I say “sushi” and you think “it’s like eating live bait.”  Not true: sushi consists of fish, vinegared rice, and vegetables.  You can think of it as a rice-and-fish sandwich.  It started out in south Asia, was introduced to south China, and was borrowed by Japan.  In Japan sushi began out as a fast-food sold on the streets.  People going to the theater in the Edo Period often bought sushi from a stall to take to the theater with them.  A sushi-chef (which is different from a sous-chef) made sushi from whatever fish were caught locally.  The main tuna fisheries were off Honshu and Okinawa.  After the Second World War, those clever Americans figured out how to freeze-dry new-caught tuna.  It didn’t lose its flavor sitting on layers of ice in the hold of a fishing boat for weeks before it got back to Japan.[1]  “Toro” became the mainstay of sushi.  Japanese sushi-eaters went wild.

By about 1975 sushi started to become popular in certain quarters of the United States.  OK, you won’t find it on the menu at Appleby’s and you can’t get a McSushi (yet).  But the very sophisticated Don Rumsfeld took General Tommy Franks out for dinner to a sushi place in DC before we invaded Iraq.  It was Rumsfeld’s idea of making nice with the guy he had ordered to invade another country on a sketchy—as you young people say—justification.  Take the Japanese sushi market and add in the American “I-wanna-be-sophisticated” market, you end up with a HUGE demand for tuna.  Now, a big blue-fin fresh offa da boat can be worth $100,000.

I say “tuna” and you think “guppies with a thyroid condition.”  Not true: they’re big fighting fish.  Drag you out of the chair on the back of a 25-foot Bartram sports-fisher if you aren’t strapped in.  It’s OK with the fish if you drown in the Gulf Stream and what’s left of you washes up months later in Plymouth, England.  (It’s kind of like casting for pit-bulls from the back of an F-150 in North Philly.)  So, fishermen started seining for them with big nets.  In 1953, a refugee from Croatia named Mario Puratic[2] invented an improved system for setting and hauling purse seine nets.  (It’s called the “Power Block.”)  Seining fish, including blue-fin, became much easier.  There used to be a lot of blue-fin tuna.  In the 1940s there were 20 times as many Atlantic and Mediterranean tuna as today.  Also, now they’re runty when they get caught.  Tuna caught in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are only about half the weight of tuna caught in “the old days.”  Pretty soon, no more Atlantic blue-fin tuna.  (Pacific blue-fin stocks seem to be holding up alright for the moment.)  Once they go, there will need to be 12-step programs to help people suffering from sushi-withdrawal.  What do the Japanese think of 12-step programs?

[1] Also, the Americans stopped testing atomic weapons on Pacific atolls, so the fishing boats didn’t have to pass through clouds of radiation on their way home with their holds full of irradiated fish.  See: “Fishzilla.”

[2] Puratic was born in 1917 on the incredibly cute little island of Brac.  If you retired to the town of Supetar on Brac you could sit under the grape arbor beside your old stone house in the afternoon, sipping wine and watching the ferry from Split arrive.  A developer near Dallas is building a resort modeled on Supetar.  The signs at the garbage dump will be in Croatian.  Puratic left in 1938 and wound up working as a fisherman in San Pedro, California.

The Gun That Made the Nineties Roar

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The story of the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle can stand in for the history of the Soviet Union more generally.  First, there is the story of its designer.  Timofey Kalashnikov was a “kulak” (one of the well-off peasants who had profited from the pre-revolutionary regime’s “wager on the sober and the strong”).  In 1919 Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was born.  His parents nurtured him through the Russian Civil War.  In 1921 the Bolshevik Revolution ran up against the resistance to “common ownership of the means of production” by the peasant-proprietors like Timofey Kalashnikov.  The Bolsheviks settled for control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, while allowing peasants and shopkeepers to retain possession of their property.  They didn’t like doing this, but they recognized reality.  Then Stalin came to power.  In 1928 he launched the transition to real Communism.  He ordered the “collectivization” of agriculture, by seizing the lands of the kulaks, and by plowing resources into building industry.  The Kalashnikov family had their farm seized, then were deported to Siberia.  Old Pa Kalashnikov soon died.  An older brother mouthed off and got slammed into the Gulag.  So Mikhail Kalashnikov grew up in fear and hardship.  In 1938 Kalashnikov got drafted and learned to drive a tank; in June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union; in October 1941 Kalashnikov was badly wounded.  While in hospital he became interested in weapons design and managed to get transferred to a design unit for the rest of the war.  No Stalingrad for him.  At the end of the war the Allies captured a bunch of German designers.  The US got the great rocket scientist Werner von Braun; the Russkies got the great arms designer Hugo Schmeisser.  Taken to Russia, Schmeisser “helped” design the AK-47, which—oddly—bears a marked resemblance to his own earlier design for the Wehrmacht’s “Sturmgewehr” assault rifle.  So, what did Mikhail Kalashnikov add?

That question brings us to our second theme, the Soviet system of industrial production.  There was a Soviet-era joke that ran: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”  Even the best-rewarded Soviet workers weren’t always delighted with their situations.  A lot of people did sloppy, crude work, chipping at the vodka bottle during the work day.  As a result, the AK-47 is garbage by Western engineering standards.  It isn’t very accurate: it has an effective range of only 200-300 yards.  It is crudely made, rather than engineered so that the pieces fit tightly together.  Perversely, herein lies one of its virtues.  You can get it dirty; you can forget to oil it; and you can blaze away at something without cleaning out the carbon build-up: it still fires.  Then, it is stubby, especially with the butt-stock folded forward, and light, only about ten pounds.  Herein lies a second virtue.  Short and light made it the weapon-of-choice for both child-soldiers and terrorists.  Short, light, and reliable made untrained, even moronic, soldiers a deadly enemy.  In sum, it is a weapon perfectly adapted for war in the Third World.

Third, there is the story of the Communism versus Capitalism.  Colt only manufactured as many M-16s as the market demanded.  The Soviets manufactured stuff to keep their workers employed, without any regard for what the market wanted.  As a result, there are 10 million M-16s, but there may be 100 million AK-47s.  The Soviets gave the surplus arms away to “movements of national liberation” all around the globe during the Cold War.  Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are awash in these things.

As for Kalashnikov, he had all the rewards and special privileges reserved for a “Hero of the Soviet Union” heaped upon him: he was rich enough to buy a vacuum cleaner, a refrigerator, and even a car.  All were built on the same lines as the AK-47.  No wonder the place folded up.

See: C.J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

Avast me Hearties!

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Piracy is a story about the importance of policing in crime suppression.  Piracy abounded when there were rich cargoes afloat, but no one to protect them or pursue the criminals.  Piracy withered when the navies of imperial powers (British, French, American, Dutch) went around making the world safe for peaceful commerce.  “Blackbeard” famously ended up with his head nailed onto the bowsprit of a British warship.  Still, piracy never ended in some parts of the world, notably in parts of East Africa and Southeast Asia.  After the end of the Second World War, the retreat of the European navies from “Eastern Waters” began to take the lid off of piracy.  Post-colonial governments were just as ill-equipped to fight piracy as to do anything else.

Consequently, piracy has increased from fewer than one hundred reported attacks on ships in 1997 to two hundred reported attacks in 2007.  In such attacks during 2006 15 seamen were killed and 188 taken captive; $15 billion in lost goods is a fair estimate of the material cost.  “Reported” is key here: lots of shipping companies would rather not report the attacks because it will only drive up their insurance costs without getting the generally dysfunctional governments of the countries from which the pirates operate to solve the problem.  The same goes for fighting back against a pirate attack.  Kill one of the sea-borne bastards and the pirates-in-suits ashore will be slapping injunctions all over you at your next port of call.

So, who becomes a pirate these days?  Pretty much the same people who became pirates in the Caribbean in the 17th Century: local poor people who know something about boats.  Dockworkers, fishermen, and beached merchant sailors provide much of the crew for pirate attacks.  Occasionally they are government coast guard units run amuck.  Many of these pirates call Indonesia or Somalia home because shipping must pass through narrow straits, rather than being able to stand well-out to sea.  Oddly enough, there is a “pirate season”: the Indian Ocean is tossed by great monsoon storms in early Fall and early Spring, so pirates tend to stay ashore during these seasons, chewing khat and bothering the wife.  Only when the seas calm do they return to their trade.

Rather than sailing the Seven Seas under the Jolly Roger, however, they operate in speedboats from ashore.  Photographs taken from merchant ships under attack often show the pirates driving high-powered outboard boats and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and grenade launchers.

Somalia is the Promised Land of modern piracy.  There hasn’t been a real government in twenty years; everybody has guns and is dirt-poor; and oil tankers from the Persian Gulf pass by on their way to the Suez Canal.  In April 2010 Somali pirates captured the “Samho Dream,” a South Korean supertanker.  In November 2010 the owners paid a LeBron Jamesian $10 million to get the ship, cargo, and crew back.  Each pirate got $150,000, minus whatever the pirate-boss had fronted him for rice and beans during the intervening seven months of gastro-intestinal catastrophe.

Lest anyone see this as a silver-lining-to-a-black-cloud story about impoverished Third World villagers getting together to cut through the red tape accompanying foreign aid, the pirate crews appear to be operating at the behest of local crime lords.  In places like Somalia, the pirate-bosses use the ransom money to buy weapons so that they can set up as local war lords.  Having hijacked ships, they’re now thinking about hijacking countries.  (See: Normans.)  Then some Paki scientist probably will sell them nukes.