Steven Joniak – the Blog

I’m trying something even more different today – a personal opinion piece.

Those who know me well know that I can be a wealth of seemingly useless information. Somehow, my mind acts like a sponge and absorbs the information without me even knowing or instinctually know where to look to find another piece of a puzzle, almost as if it were putting it together way back and deep in my mind until its ready to come running to the front like an 8 year old with their latest crayon masterpiece and yell ‘Look what I did!’

Today was one of those ‘Look!’ moments as some stories and info I’ve come across the last few days caused me to pause. What I am referring to is the news that today a third of three high capacity fiber optic cables running across the floor of the sea in the Middle East and linking Europe and India were severed resulting in a lost internet capacity of over 75% to India and the surrounding key Asian areas [link here and here]. What’s odd is the cables had been severed, within three days, and the fact that each one failed in such a short time span is suspect.

Now add to the mix a book written by Richard A. Clarke called Breakpoint. Mr Clarke was the former chief counter-terrorism advisor during the Bill Clinton presidency and continued his role but was not recognized as much once George W Bush took over. In his memoirs, ‘Against All Enemies‘ along along testimony during the 9/11 Commission hearing, Clarke was highly critical of the Bush’s administration lack of effort and ignored warnings of the 9/11 Al Quaeda threat (read more in-depth here).

Since that time, Clarke has written two more novels, both of which deal with potential fictional scenarios of how the next major wars would break out and all the seemingly unconnected events come together to form the ultimate ‘call to arms’ for the US to go into yet another war for securing oil (See first novel, The Scorpion’s Gate for more info) or the more poignant recent book entitled Breakpoint (2007, see more here and here) which a brief plot synopsis (courtesy of Wikipedia) reads:

PLOT: A Series of explosions occur at seemingly unimportant sites in the United States. These sites happen to be the locations where transatlantic cables from Europe and Asia reach the U.S. essentially cutting the U.S. off from the world, at least via the internet. The attacks are immediately blamed on the Chinese. Two investigators are sent to investigate the incidents, with this assumption in mind. The investigators soon uncover an underground science of genomics and nanotech working on human-computer integration.The similarity concerned me enough to delve deeper into how this could coincide with what is happening in the world today. Here it goes…

First point: the US economy is in trouble with a very probable recession on the horizon which is already causing world markets to fluctuate the last few weeks. The current subprime mortgages financial crisis along with the BILLIONS of dollars in debt from the war in Iraq has cast a dark shadow of doubt and uncertainty over the economy as a whole, which then drives the markets down. Any further indications of problems would only make matters worse.

Second point: the three severed cable are the main links between Europe and India - where most of the world’s technological services are outsourced such as call centers, programming, network management, and all else in between. With over 75% of their capacity now down, they have to re-route their traffic through more traditional, slower and less reliable routes significantly increasing traffic congestion in some areas where the internet becomes just too slow to use effectively.

Third point: There has been a lot of war mongering in the US media the last year, led by Fox which is very reminiscent of the same call to arms they poured onto the airwaves before the Iraq invasion (see this video for comparison). Its is well believed (albeit not proved, just seemingly obvious) that Fox is in bed with the Whitehouse and are always the first to support their decisions and deride and silence their critics.

Forth point: The very public tension between Iran and the US has been escalated throughout 2007 with much ado about nuclear weaponry and threats to each other nations. Further to the point, the tag-team anti-US posturing between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, both of whom control the third (Iran) and seventh (Venezuela) largest oil reserves in the world, which combined amount to over 216 billion barrels of oil – over 10x more then the US (Canada in comparison is second only to Saudi Arabia with 179 billions barrels in reserves *source OPEC reserve data 2007). In fact out of the top 12 countries, half would not be considered a US ally but makes up more then 2/3 rds the world oil supply. If all the Arab states all followed the leadership (or threat) of Iran, then the US will be left with only Canada and Mexico and possibly Russia as its sources – or roughly 1/4.

Still awake? So what does this all mean…

Let’s take a page from Clarke’s book, and imagine what impact severing the 3 fiber optic cables would mean today. Well with India and key part of Asia running at 1/4 its capacity over slow and fragile networks, it won’t be business as usual. The US stock markets, already grumpy with the looming recession and mortgages crisis now have one more reason for a big drop in the stock markets and praise doom and gloom to the American public and consumer confidence in general. The US dollar is already weak around the world and being smacked hard by the Euro, which is becoming the new OPEC consideration as the pricing standard – a move greatly being pushed by both the Iranian and Venezuelan Presidents. The US dollar would fall in value, oil prices will keep rising and the US economy will surely crash hard from the turmoil.

The Bush administration won’t allow this happen but how can they stop it? If 9/11 was a means to start the War on Terror and invade Iraq, then the possibility of an Iranian threat on attacking America’s freedom’s and commerce could be the lead in to invade Iran. Imagine an intelligence report is conveniently ‘leaked’ to Fox News that a secret Iranian plan to cut off vital telecommunications connections was only a test in preparation for a much broader plan to exploit a much larger attack on major telecommunication lines to the US and other Western allies that would seriously undermine the commerce of all nations. They may even possibly go as far and cite that the disruptions would be done with nuclear explosions which would invoke a vastly greater magnitude of fear in the psyche of a people who are only now beginning to question the idea of the war on terror. No one thought that terrorists would fly into the World Trade Center towers (actually they did, so did they, and the French too), so of course the general public will believe and fear a much more potent nuclear threat as being a very plausible terrorist threat, right?

This will then begin the guise for the media to ramp up their pro-war sentiments and ‘uncover’ more hints of nuclear weapon existence and eventually lead to an Iranian invasion.But if you dare to go even a bit further, you will see another similarity to Iraq. As part of the outcome of the Iraqi war was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the US and thus the duly named Homeland of Security Act, whereby granting “federal law enforcement agencies broad powers to monitor citizens.” Fast forward to this Iran based scenario and telecommunications – what has been the one driving source of defiance against the Bush administration and their interests to date? The internet. The freedom of information put out through Bloggers, YouTube videos, international news sites, and even the soldiers themselves own non-flattering and sometimes shameful blogs, photos and videos. All this utlimately undermines the US message and mission to a fight its ‘war on terror’.If the US government developed an Act and Department to essentially spy on its own people witho complete disregard of the law or privacy, then a telecommunications threat could allow them the opportunity to control the flow of information itself. Block countries and sites of question or critical of the government. Bloggers nolonger viewed as legitimate (ie controlled) media sources. Censoring of videos in lieu of growing copyright infringements. All in all, the US fulfills its vision to become another step closer to the Orwellian state as depicted in his classic book ‘1984‘.

So I know this is all a lot to take in and understand, and again, this is only been a theory and opinion developing in my head for some time that I needed to get out. Humanity as a whole, I would like to think will always opt for the positive outcome and avoid going down anywhere near this path.

But then again, Bush had decalred the war in Iraq went so well – mission accomplished. So what’s one more dictator then? I’ll let you decide who the real dictator is.