Conrad Theodore Seitz

Questions surrounding the recent nerve gas attack in Syria have come up.  Here are a few brief answers.

Why would Syria’s government attack rebels with nerve gas now, when they supposedly have the upper hand?  First, they may have thought we wouldn’t be paying attention, what with the massacres in Egypt.  Second, they only have the upper hand as long as they are willing to use weapons of overkill: Scud missiles, air strikes, artillery, and nerve gas.  They have used nerve gas in localized attacks over the last year, against rebel front lines that were subsequently over-run.  In the recent attack, gas was used as a small part of an intense attack on civilians who have refused to evacuate rebel-held areas.  The attack may have killed many more than expected because it occurred at night and most victims were sheltering or sleeping in basements where the gas would accumulate.

Why can’t the rebels just as easily procure and use nerve gas?  Because sarin has a short shelf life.  The ingredients have to be prepared, stored, and delivered by units with special training and equipment.  The big news last winter was that the Syrian government was mixing up a fresh batch of sarin, which will probably be good for a year or less.  The Syrians probably don’t have the “binary” capability, in which the gas is actually created when the missile is fired.  Instead, they mix up a batch of gas when they expect to need it in the near future.

Why is any military action by the Western Powers [TM] likely to be insignificant and yet still resented by Arabs everywhere?  First, President Obama has specifically limited the aims of a military strike to deter and degrade the Syrian capability to use nerve gas rather than to tilt the balance on the battlefield.  Second, Arabs have been so ill-treated by Westerners over the years that they are suspicious of any activity that might be construed as interference.

This is an important point, and not understood by most in the West.  The Arabs in general are so suspicious of Westerners that they do not even appreciate the NATO military action in Libya that led to the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi, action that would be characterized by objective observers as a big help in the liberation of the Arab world.  Westerners, and particularly the British and Americans, have abused and occupied  Arab countries for many years, going back to the Crusades a thousand years ago.  The occupation of Afghanistan, first by the Soviets and then by the Americans, followed by the occupation of Iraq, are only the most recent of impositions on Arab sensibilities.  Western support of Israel is seen by Arabs as perfidy.  Iranians have still not forgotten the CIA-sponsored coup in 1953 that deposed an elected government and substituted a monarch beholden to the British and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which was offended by nationalization of its assets in Iran.

Western “interference” in Syria will not be appreciated, at least in public, by any Arab country.  Only private thanks will come from conservative Sunni oligarchies like Saudi Arabia.  If Syria can be deterred from continuing to use nerve gas on its people, some good might come from military action.  This seems unlikely.  Larger massacres might prompt more decisive military action.  Is this what has to happen to stop the atrocities?

Looking back to World War Two, it is a little known fact that the Nazis intended to use nerve gas but apparently never got around to it.  The Nazis produced large quantities of the first nerve gas, tabun, and a small quantity of sarin.  At war’s end, a full-scale production facility for sarin was still under construction, but many tons of tabun had been conveniently installed in artillery shells, ready for use.  Hitler may have been hesitant to use chemical warfare because he had been wounded at the end of WWI in a mustard gas attack, leaving him with nightmares of suffocation.  It is also likely that Hitler did not use chemicals because tabun was so secret that he did not know the Allies only had mustard gas and their retaliation to Nazi use of tabun or sarin would have been ineffective.

It is well to remember that the Nazi philosophy of “might makes right” has not disappeared from the world.

In Egypt over the last few weeks there have begun prosecutions and detentions of individuals who have not had anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood, but have been rounded up arbitrarily.  The military and police intelligence units have been picking up many people suspected of dissent, even if unrelated to the Brotherhood.

Even Mohamed el Baradei is under investigation for his resignation from the government to protest police violence because “there has been a citizen complaint.”  (Do not worry; he has left the country.)  Over the last thirty or forty years, Egypt has become a security state, infiltrated by countless informers, and the military and police have been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood the entire time.

The democracy with which Egypt has been flirting is not American democracy.  The state of emergency which has been in force the last few weeks is closer to the normal state of affairs  for a country that has been more familiar with a police state than with democracy.

There are indications that the entire Middle East is being destabilized.  The big news last week was a sarin gas attack, blamed on the Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad.  The UN was finally given access to the site after five days, and has collected samples from patients.  The three local hospitals most involved reported 3,600 patients and 350 deaths, but some say over a thousand have died.

The news that most people don’t know is that there are over a million Syrians who have left their homes.  Many are in Lebanon and Jordan.  Many more are in Turkey, whose government actively supports those who are rebelling against Assad.  The destabilizing effect of the civil war in Syria cannot be overemphasized; take, for example, the entry of Hezbollah on the side of the Assad government at the same time that hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees are in Lebanon.

Take also, for example, the quiet support of Israel for the Syrian rebels at the same time that al-Nusra, a sworn advocate of al-Qaeda, forms one of the most successful rebel battle groups.  Apparently, Hezbollah is worse in Israeli eyes than al-Qaeda.  Iran, which backs Hezbollah, is Israel’s worst enemy at present, with Iran’s not-so-subtle threat of building a nuclear explosive device and Israel’s none-too-subtle threat of pre-emptive strikes.

Iraq is forming another destabilizing agency now, with Shia acolytes in charge of the government and flights carrying arms for Assad crossing its southern borders.  The frequency of anti-personnel bombs, suicide and otherwise, is a measure of the basic instability of Iraq.

The autocracies and/or oligocracies of the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar, are threatened with overthrow by democratic and theocratic rebellion.  The states that have evolved, like Iran and Iraq, are suffering popular unrest just the same.

In Iran, in 2009, there were popular demonstrations against a fraudulent  presidential election that reached critical proportions but were put down by the government’s security forces.  This period has practically been forgotten in the face of Iran’s current economic problems, caused by the American-led “sanctions” for non-cooperation in nuclear negotiations.  Iran’s government is reeling from these economic blows, while at the same time afraid of its own people, who could rise again at any time.

Another factor unknown to most Americans is that the Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad is heavily defended by Soviet arms, land, sea, and air.  The Russians have recently supplied the most advanced air-defense radars and missiles.  The Syrian navy is well supplied with anti-ship missiles that are deadly against ships as big as aircraft carriers.  Assad’s cavalry is also deep in Soviet-era tanks.  Syria’s defenses make, for example, establishment of a no-fly zone, very costly to accomplish.

The Western attack is likely to come in the form of cruise missiles, which are plentiful and cheap to use.  Guided missile destroyers are stationed with Western naval forces well within range of Syrian government assets.  In my humble opinion, a really large strike would be the best one.  Cruise missiles are not all that impressive by themselves, but when sent in large flocks they do have an effect.

Whether striking Assad’s Syria would further destabilize the Middle East is an open question.  The Administration, and most of our Western allies, feel that punishment for the use of chemical weapons is more important than considering future stability.  My personal opinion is that we should attack Assad with every cruise missile and drone warplane in our inventory, then stand off and wait for the people of Syria to return to their country.  Quantities of food aid and money might also be useful.

The advantage of my “plan” is that we don’t have to arm the rebels if we wipe Assad out with cruise missiles.  It would dramatically shorten the war and demonstrate to other oppressive regimes that they shouldn’t go too far.  The disadvantage?  A lot of casualties, mostly military but some civilian.  Possible release of sarin gas from breaches of containment.   Definite Russian hostility and possible retaliation.

So, it’s likely that any “punishment” of Assad for using sarin on his own people will be limited to a size not likely to provoke Russian retaliation.  Doesn’t that seem unfortunate when you’d rather see a big bang?

Have to say that I stumbled upon this blog called “Meditations Daily” and it is entertaining, liberal (I think), and full of erudition.  I think you should check it out.

Recently, it was publicly announced that the sixteen largest banks in the world have been involved in committing fraud by setting LIBOR (the basic interest rate banks charge each other) at artificially high levels.  When the LIBOR is higher than it should be, people pay more interest on their loans than they should, and banks thereby make more money on their loans.

Hundreds of trillions of dollars in loans, and even more in derivative contracts, have been affected by this fraud.  Since it was discovered by regulators, banks have been rushing to confess their roles in order to reduce their potential civil and criminal liability.  Several banks have already entered into limited immunity deals by offering information on their misdeeds.

What is much worse, however, and the reason behind the banks’ haste to confess, is that fraud in the inducement to sign these loans and derivative contracts would allow victims to void their contracts and claim treble damages and even punitive damages.  Theoretically, attorneys general could indict and prosecute specific people on criminal charges.  If this happened on a large scale, these banks could all be wiped out– completely put out of business.

You can imagine the negative effects that destruction of the sixteen largest banks in the world could cause: complete failure of the world’s financial system.  The resulting depression would make the Great Depression look like the Great Recession.

You can see why the banks are so forthcoming: they need the protection of the government to avoid being wiped out by civil suits and people repudiating their loan contracts.  The most important holders of these fraudulent loan papers and derivatives are city and state governments.  Detroit, which is in bankruptcy court, is directly affected because of derivative contracts that were entered into by city officials administering their pension system.  If they could repudiate those contracts, it would save their pensioners from losing nearly their entire pensions.

Part of the problem is that city and state governments are bought and paid for by large financial institutions.  Campaign contributions that are clearly bribes for favors received are a regular feature of local and state government.  In particular, attorney general associations are simply conduits for money from large interests to candidates for office, in order to obtain cooperation from the officeholders.  The banks know that they can receive good treatment from attorney generals if they can avoid too much public anger over the issues involved.

Therefore, banks are falling over themselves to cooperate and supply information about what they had done, in order to get the best possible treatment from the attorneys general who are responsible for prosecuting them and trying to get back some of the money that they have lost by overpaying interest.

Pay close attention to these developments: you are likely to see banks paying fines of up to a billion dollars each.  You are unlikely to see any individuals prosecuted for what was clearly criminal behavior: operating as a cartel to set interest rates in violation of anti-trust laws.  It is true that there is documentary evidence in the form of embarrassing emails showing criminal behavior by known individuals, but that evidence will never be used because the attorneys general have received large campaign contributions from these same criminals.

Events in Egypt have begun to spiral out of the control of the government or any political party.  On Wednesday, military units clearing out the demonstrators who were sitting in to protest Mr Morsi’s removal as president killed at least 638 people and possibly over a thousand.  Most of these killings were probably unnecessary but the intensity of the demonstrator’s resistance to being removed has not been described.  It is quite likely that the Islamists sitting in tried to provoke lethal violence against themselves by the military.  Whether that involved the use of firearms (technically illegal in Egypt) or simply physical resistance is unknown, but it is likely that the Islamists obtained whatever firearms they were able to lay their hands on.

Trying to resist a fully armed military unit with a few civilian small arms sounds like a suicidal proposition, and that is exactly what it was.  According to Islamic belief, if one is killed fighting in a “jihad” (“holy war”) one immediately goes to Heaven.  Whether a man receives the services of seventy two virgins is controversial and probably an inaccurate translation; it is not recorded what rewards a woman is to receive on ascent to Heaven.

Therefore, the followers, foot soldiers, of the Islamic Brotherhood, are committed to a suicidal policy while their leaders are relatively safe in prison.  The leaders will benefit greatly from the deaths of their followers.  It is an open question whether the massacre will cause the general population of Egypt, the non-Islamists, to turn on the military government.  I think it is unlikely that many other than Mohamed el-Baradei will desert the military.

I am proud of Mr el-Baradei for his resignation from the post of vice president that he had been appointed to less than two weeks ago.  He said, essentially, “Violence only begets more violence” and he could no longer support the military if they engaged in deliberate violence.

Unfortunately, his resignation will have no effect on the situation because the military will now be forced to defend itself against an all-out assault by the Muslim Brotherhood, including propaganda, street violence, and attacks against defenceless minorities like the Coptic Christians.  Many Coptic churches have already been burned in the last few days.  What relationship the Coptics have with the military is completely conjectural; the only possible connection is that the Coptics are members of those minorities that a good government, democratic or otherwise, must protect if it is to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the world.

Coptic Christians have been blamed for the military coup by Islamists but they had nothing to do with it; their only real offence was in not condemning the coup strongly enough to suit the Islamists.  Coptics have been refugees from Egypt for many years; it is likely that even more will emigrate soon, and most will come to the US.

Those remaining in Egypt will become more and more polarized as the Islamists display their fanaticism and the military displays its ability to kill civilians wholesale.  It is difficult to support the present government of Egypt since the massacre, but it is impossible to support the Islamists.  Neither party has displayed democratic inclinations recently.

The Islamists have refused to negotiate at all; their initial demand to come to the table is the reinstallation of Mr Morsi as president, a completely impossible proposition.  If one truly is interested in negotiation, it is impermissible to make demands before sitting down at the table.  The Palestinians until recently have displayed a similar intransigence, refusing to sit down at the negotiating table until all settlement activity has been stopped.  Years have been wasted, with consequent increase in the advantages of the Israelis, who have been building settlements all along and “changing the facts on the ground.”

If the Palestinians were half smart, they would at least sit down at the negotiating table without any preconditions.  The Israelis have offered to negotiate without preconditions, and their recent release of some Palestinian prisoners seems to have helped.  Unfortunately, the settlement activity that the Palestinians want stopped is not completely under the Israeli government’s control; fanatical Zionists have been building illegal settlements and defending them with similar tactics as the Islamists in Cairo.

Ultimately, however, Egypt’s problems are based on their population growth over the last hundred years.  They do not have enough good land to feed themselves, and locally grown wheat is of such poor quality that it has to be mixed with imported wheat to make an edible bread.  Currently, Egypt is bursting with young, educated professionals who cannot find a job.  There just are not enough jobs for the people because the economy is so distorted.

Egypt’s economy was dependent on tourism, but that has collapsed since President Mubarak was deposed.  Tourism will not recover until the civil unrest is over, and that appears to be unlikely over the next two or three years.  Currently, Egypt’s economy is being propped up by donations from other countries, mainly Saudi Arabia and a couple of other rich Sunni Arab states.  The European Union will likely withdraw its aid and Denmark has already done so; fortunately, this aid is mostly symbolic.  The United States is under pressure to suspend aid but we are not the major donor by far; our 1.3 billion a year pales in comparison to Saudi Arabia’s recent offer of eight billion.

Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries who know they have a vested interest in the stability of Egypt.  It is critical to the Saudis to relieve unrest wherever it pops up in the Middle East because unrest breeds jihadis who threaten to attack the Saudi government.  The Saudi government, although it is a highly conservative (Wahabbi) Islamist state, cannot tolerate any significant jihadi activity because it always turns against them.  In addition, the Saudis have a strong interest in supporting the United States, one of its best oil customers.

Unfortunately, the size of the Saudi offer to support Egypt’s government is a reflection of the danger that the Saudis perceive of civil war: they feel it is very likely and needs to be fought against with all available resources.  Thus, the Saudis will be asking us to help as well and they would be disappointed if we were to suspend our aid.

In addition, our aid is essentially a “quid pro quo” to Egypt for not repudiating the peace treaty with Israel that gave Egypt back the Sinai peninsula, and for which Anwar Sadat was martyred.  The fact that the government of Egypt is clearly the result of a military coup is, in our law, to be punished by a mandatory suspension of aid with no presidential review.  Thus, the White House has avoided using the word “coup”, but that doesn’t fool anyone.

The problem is that we can’t, for humanitarian as well as practical reasons, suspend aid to Egypt, regardless of who is running the country.  The law that requires suspension of aid must be rescinded or, at least, ignored.  Loss of aid would only make the situation in Egypt worse.

The only path towards peace involves sitting down to negotiation, and as long as the Islamists refuse to negotiate there will be war between them and the military government that controls Egypt.  The young, secular, democratic, humanist professionals will be caught in the crossfire and will suffer the most.

There is no surprise that the young liberals feel forced to support the military government: there is no alternative but to seek their protection and wait until elections are arranged.  No matter how many Islamists the military kills, most of the young liberals will stick with them for their own protection.  Mohamed el-Baradei’s symbolic resignation only means that he can’t tolerate holding an official position in a military government; it doesn’t mean that he wants to meet with, much less support, the Islamists.  They would kill him.

Today I’m going to do something I don’t think is really quite right.  I’m going to recommend an article in the New York Times Online and even provide a link to it (if I can) without really telling you anything about it except that it’s worth reading.  This will allow you to get around the NYT’s fifteen dollar a month subscription fee.  If you only read twenty articles or less a month, you can access NYT for free.  So, if you don’t care to read NYT on a regular basis, you can just read the article(s) I recommend…

This, somehow, doesn’t seem quite right.  I’m circumventing NYT’s copyright interest in their articles.  I can only get away with it (and have for many years in other circumstances) because hardly anyone reads what I write (or programs I produce, in past instances.)  In fact, I “stole” the AMA’s procedure code list and used it in a code lookup program I wrote that sold about a hundred copies.  The AMA never came after me because they never found out about it.

Oh, the advantages of being obscure.

At any rate, the article is about medical costs and the efforts of a company with only two hundred employees to reduce them.  They were so upset at a 75 percent rate increase (later reduced to 68%) demanded by their medical insurance company that they refused to renew.  First they tried self-insuring, and then they hit on a better solution:  a company that reads their bills line by line and challenges them line by line.  They’ve saved so much money that they’ve been able to add coverage for dental and other ancillary programs without raising rates.

The article is at:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/the-cure-for-the-1000-toothbrush/ …if the link doesn’t work, get creative with it.  You can always use the search function that nytimes includes on every page and look for the $1000 toothbrush.  I will, of course, try it out after I publish it…  OK, so the link doesn’t work.  but if you… never mind.  you know what to do, and if you don’t, you’re computer illiterate and not worth talking to.  Just because you can’t write C++ or FORTRAN.

Well, now it works.  I think.  In fact, I’m pretty sure.  No thanks to the post editor’s “Add Link” function.   Just used Ctrl-C to mark the text on my browser purporting to be the address of the web site I’m looking at.  Then used Ctrl-V to deposit said text in the blog editor without notifying it that it was supposed to be a link.  Two things happened: first, a usable link was created in the document.  Second, the text of the link had the word “http://” added at the beginning; this word was not visible in the copied text before it was added to the document.

The New York Times has another article about “capitalism” and the exciting ways you can make money by controlling industries.  Goldman Sachs has bought an interest in the aluminum industry, namely the warehouses that store the finished metal before it is sent out to manufacturers for use in beer cans, cars, and the like.  By controlling some of the warehouses and some stock in the 1,500 pound aluminum ingots, Goldman Sachs has been able to make a huge profit and raise the price of beer cans by 1/10 cent each (multiplied by 96 billion cans a year.)  The market distortions caused by Goldman’s play on aluminum stocks has caused complaints among aluminum users and some major manufacturers are starting to go around Goldman’s warehouse system.

The problem is caused by an exemption that has been given to financial companies allowing them to buy into other industries.  This exemption is supposed to expire soon, but the Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to allow it to continue due to intense lobbying.  The next target after aluminum will be copper:  JP Morgan has been applying for approval of a plan that would allow a troika of Morgan, Chase, and Black Rock to own 80 percent of the copper on the market.

Here is a quote from the Times that describes the consequences of a financial company taking a controlling interest in a commodity to distort the market:

“Because Metro International charges rent each day for the stored metal, the long queues caused by shifting aluminum among its facilities means larger profits for Goldman. And because storage cost is a major component of the “premium” added to the price of all aluminum sold on the spot market, the delays mean higher prices for nearly everyone, even though most of the metal never passes through one of Goldman’s warehouses.

“Aluminum industry analysts say that the lengthy delays at Metro International since Goldman took over are a major reason the premium on all aluminum sold in the spot market has doubled since 2010. The result is an additional cost of about $2 for the 35 pounds of aluminum used to manufacture 1,000 beverage cans, investment analysts say, and about $12 for the 200 pounds of aluminum in the average American-made car.

“Before Goldman bought Metro International three years ago, warehouse customers used to wait an average of six weeks for their purchases to be located, retrieved by forklift and delivered to factories. But now that Goldman owns the company, the wait has grown more than 20-fold — to more than 16 months, according to industry records.”

This is what unfettered capitalism does to markets.  The Securities and Exchange Commission must promulgate rules and regulations that prevent this kind of speculation that produces profits for nonproductive organizations and interferes with the smooth operation of commodities markets.  Those markets were set up to help companies that produce things, farmers, and others who contribute real things to society.  Banks and financial institutions should not be allowed to get their profits by interfering in markets that are not their business.