While attention is fixated on Iraq and Afghanistan, the possibility of a number of other wars clearly emerged in the past few days, three in particular.
Starting January 30, a total of five undersea telecom cables have been mysteriously cut in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East area. This is no accident, comrades. Someone has been slicing them. Someone with submarines to do the slicing. Who could that be? And what would be their target?
90% of all internet traffic is handled by undersea cables. So take a look at the Internet Traffic Report for Asia (current as of this writing 2/7). Take a look at the only orange box with a fat zero of traffic and a packet loss of 100%.
Iran has been taken down.
Now gander at this story in Monday's (2/4) Jerusalem Post: US Anti-Missile Ship Docks in Haifa. It notes that the Aegis system on the USS San Jacinto can protect Israel from a missile attack from Iran.
Only our navy and Israel's has subs that could have cut the cables. Is this a prelude to an attack by either us or Israel on Iran, or is it a big time intimidation shot across Iran's bow? It's not clear - but it is clear that's it's one or the other, and either way, there are a lot of very nervous mullahs in Tehran right now.
ping
Wasn’t this a Clive Cussler book? Or was it Tom Clancy??
Where’s Dirk Pitt and Jack Ryan when you need them?!?
Good analysis.
A shot across their bow? Perhaps. But the Persians were never a maritime power and wouldn’t recognize it as such.
BTTT.
This is the biggest news story of the week, sliding past everyone’s radar.
It’s not about us attacking Iran; it’s about us tracking down the physical location of the sender of attack signals to distributed terror cells.
When the 2nd internet cable was cut, you can find my post here on FR where I stated that more cuts would follow as net traffic was narrowed down further and further to limit the potential areas where a command originated.
Now 5 cables have been cut.
Had this been a prelude to an actual attack on Iran, the cables would have been cut less than an hour before missiles were in the air.
ping
BTTT
Ping
Or it could’ve been a wayward anchor-
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/08/internet.outage/index.html?eref=rss_tech
That’s a lot less fun, though.
In recent days a lot of major corporations have been wondering about the “wisdom” of exporting their call centers to a suddenly incommunicado India. Popcorn, front and center.
It can be grappled for, deliberately, from the surface. Cable repair ships retrieve the cables in that manner.
With enough ship & horsepower available, I bet I could find and break one, there in the shallow Persian Gulf waters. It would be pretty easy, actually.
I once saw an old [and then defunct] phone cable at the stern of the boat, draped over a trawl door --- and that was dragging it up out of 400+ fathoms of water! Someone had been there before we had, though, had snagged it, broke it, and left a bunch laying where it would be caught. I saw a kink in the cable...right near the door. Can't quite remember precisely how we got free of it, but we did, somehow.
DU experts? I think I see the problem...
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Only our navy and Israel’s has subs that could have cut the cables. Is this a prelude to an attack by either us or Israel on Iran, or is it a big time intimidation shot across Iran’s bow? It’s not clear - but it is clear that’s it’s one or the other, and either way, there are a lot of very nervous mullahs in Tehran right now.
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The first fault will be repaired within days. This theory only has a short time left if it is valid based on where these faults are.
Israel has the subs, diesel-electrics sold to them by Germany if I remember correctly. If these faults are a signal from someone, they are an ambiguous signal because a lot of cable users other than Iran were affected as well. I will believe it is a “signal” directed at Iran when the damage is more focused on them alone.
Iran's paranoid strategic - they would spot changes leading to an attack. If you're right, taking down the cables would give limited time - enough for a surprise attack - that is if they don't have satellite phones... who knows?
Well, actually any country with armed submarines can “cut” undersea cables. At this point the damage hasn’t been pinpointed publicly.
A torpedo will “cut” a cable quite nicely, thank you.
Actually, Iran has the most to gain from the loss of Internet access.
Mark
February 2008 On February 4, the Iranian Cabinet approved the creation of the oil bourse in two stages - first a raw oil exchange and secondly an oil byproducts exchange. The Ministry of Finance and Economics, the Oil Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Central Bank of Iran are required to create a workgroup to coordinate the project, and the Iran Commodities Bourse Company is given the task of carrying out the project. The communique from the Cabinet states that the "Ministry of Finance and Economics is required to take measures in making the petrochemical byproducts bourse operational by the end of February 2008." [20]