David Bennett

Iran And Afghanistan In The Last Days Of The Trump Administration

Reported in The Week in its issue of 28 November 2020 is this

President Trump’s foreign policy doctrine — a mixture of isolationism and occasional violent interventions — has never made much sense, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. And it’s becoming no more coherent in the dying days of his administration. Last week, Trump reportedly asked senior advisers about options for attacking Iran’s main nuclear site at Natanz. Yet at the same time, he also ordered the return of more than half the US troops in Afghanistan, reducing their number from 4,500 to 2,500. The order left analysts “mystified”, said Frog Kaplan on Slate.

President Trump’s behaviour is not ‘mystifying’ if you link Iran and Afghanistan by their geography. If the US were to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, then what about the thousands of US troops in Afghanistan, a country that is right next door on the eastern border of Iran? So which way does the wind blow?

It would make a lot of sense to get those troops out of Afghanistan before attacking Iran. Of course, if there was a cloud of radioactivity that spread, he would have to put up with international complaints about injuries to the innocent civilian population in Iran and Afghanistan. With troops safe, he could argue that he saved the world from a greater threat of a nuclear Iran. But to add injury to American troops to that mix would seal his fate.

Birds and Lead Shot

How many pheasants and partridges do you think are shot in the UK every year? The number might surprise you.

Animal Aid says that every year, around sixty million pheasants and partridges are bred to be shot.

WildJustice says that 43 million pheasants and 9 million Red-legged partridges are raised and released to be shot.

The pheasant shooting season in Great Britain runs from the 1st October – 1st February, and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 1st February.

The pheasant shooting season in Northern Ireland runs from the 1st October – 31st January and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 31st January.

Let’s approximate and say there are equal numbers shot in Britain and Ireland. The numbers are probably not the same, but let’s split the difference and say the season overall runs from 15 September to 31 January – that’s 138 days.

Let’s say that all the birds raised are shot and that an equal number are shot each day during the season – so that’s 430,000 birds shot per day.

Is that number accurate? Let’s see approach it from another direction, starting with how many people shoot pheasants.

The Game Shooting Census and Shoot Owner Census is run by GunsOnPegs and Strutt & Parker. For their report in 2018 they surveyed 652 shoot across the UK. From that they extrapolated to the total number of shoots and arrived at 9,000 shoots and 1,724 birds shot per shoot. So they did it for us and it’s an easy calculation:

Fifteen-and-a-half million birds shot each year during the 138 days of the shooting season.

Isn’t that incredible? People paying to line up and have pheasants and partridges herded towards them, and then shooting them when the birds take the air. I mean, if you could hear all the shoots over the UK, the sound of guns must be almost continuous for 138 days.

Lead Shot

Moving on from the shooting, let’s look at the amount of lead shot that is used.

Let’s suppose that every shot bags a bird. It’s unlikely, but let’s go with that.

GunsOnPegs quotes the recommendations from ElyHawk cartridge maker. For a 12 bore shotgun they recommend the 30g No.6 and the 32g No.5.

A pellet of No.6 weighs 1.6 g. So in 30g there are 18 or 19 pellets. Let’s say 18. A pellet of No.7 weighs 1.28g. So in 32g there are 25 pellets.

Let’s assume that the shooters use 30g No. 6 and 32g No. 7 equally, and split the difference between 18.5 and 25, and say 22.

So with 15,500,000 birds, that’s 341 million pellets of lead, some of which land up in the pheasants and partridges and a lot of it that ends up on the ground.

When lead comes in contact with moist air it becomes reactive. And especially so when the soil is acidic, as most farmland soil is. And even a moment’s thought will show the danger, because lead is forbidden to be used in water pipes.

Each year, more lead lies on the ground to be absorbed into the ground and the ground water, to be absorbed by birds, animals, and humans.

Lead is a cumulative poison that affects the neurological system. Children absorb a larger amount of lead per unit body weight and are more susceptible to lead poisoning than adults. Lead causes a lower IQ, behavioural changes and concentration disorders

Under A Spreading Chestnut Tree

Ah, under a spreading chestnut tree. The line comes from a popular music hall song with the tune a variation an old English tune called ‘Go no more a-rushing’.

The lyrics carried a saucy innuendo of what happens under the spreading chestnut tree.

And ‘under a spreading chestnut-tree’ is also the opening line of a poem, The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published in 1840. Note that he hyphenates chestnut-tree.

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
⁠ The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands

It’s not the most etherial of openings. The words and the rhyming are pretty obvious and clunky. But then there is this, the penultimate verse.

Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
     Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
     Has earned a night’s repose.

Of course, I don’t know how much the average village blacksmith valued or respected his work. What was life like for a person like that in the 1800s in Longfellow’s day? Perhaps the blacksmith went home each day and collapsed exhausted and hated everything about his life.

Or perhaps he learned a lot about the materials he worked with, and grew to love the things he discovered in the materials and the challenge of working with them.

Perhaps when he was young he contemplated his future and tried to imagine how he was going to become successful. Perhaps he chose a profession where he had the best chance of acquiring the success he wanted. 

One could see how he would attach himself to anything that furthered that goal. He would turn like a weathervane, attracted to the next chance to advance.

If, on the other hand, he thought of what inspired him and of the work he wanted to accomplish, then the focus would be on the work. That is something honest and worthwhile about which he could feel good. He would not be divorced from the world. Rather he would be attached to it and feel good as a servant of it, with progress and setbacks. Both progress and setbacks would become melded into something whole.

It depends on the eyes through which he saw. if the world before his eyes was all he saw, then it would come and go, and who would or could attach any meaning to it. But if through his eyes he saw something more, a deeper world, another world, then he could work with that greater vision.

So what decides what a man will be, what is it that a man chooses to grasp, that separates one man from another?

[Note: For he and him read also she and her.]

Over A Million Barrels Of Oil In A Rusting Hulk In The Red Sea Since 1988

Remember the Exxon Valdez that ruptured when it hit a reef off the coast of Alaska?

The oil tanker owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989.

It caused the world’s biggest maritime environmental disaster.

In terms of volume of oil released it is second to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but in terms of damage it is the worst by far. Despite a clean-up that went on for years, less than 10% of the oil was recovered.

Now fast forward to today, and just so we are sure we are comparing apples with apples, that was 11 million gallons of crude oil that leaked out of the Exxon Valdez.

In the oil industry, a barrel is defined as 42 US gallons, or 35 imperial gallons.

Well, the Floating Storage And Offloading Vessel Safer (yes, that’s its name) has 1.2 million barrels of crude oil in its tanks. That’s 50.4 million US gallons of oil, or more than four times the amount on the Exxon Valdez.

The FSO Safer lies 15° 07.0′ N, 042° 36.0′ E at the Ras Isa Marine Terminal (YERAI) and it has been there since 1988, rusting and abandoned.

And since 2015 a pawn in a game of chicken between Iranian-back Houthi rebels and just about everyone else.

The Houthis want payment for the oil. The UN wants to avoid an ecological disaster.

Here is a general map of the region, with the FSO Safer marked with a red dot, and again in the close-up map.

Apart from the ecological damage at stake, to the south is the narrow Bab-El-Mandeb Strait (‘The Gate of Lamentations’ in Arabic) that gives out into the Gulf of Aden. Via the Suez Canal it is the shortest trade route between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the rest of East Asia. So not surprisingly it is one of the world’s major trade routes.

So how is this going to play out? The Houthis agreed to let UN inspectors in, and then changed their minds. And meanwhile the hulk rusts.

A general map of the region of the Horn of Africa, with the SFO Safer marked with a red dot.
A close-upl map 15° 07.0′ N, 042° 36.0′ E at the Ras Isa Marine Terminal (YERAI), with the SFO Safer marked with a red dot.

Update 16 August

The Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Aswat reported on 16th August on a seminar held by The Yemen Coalition of Independent Women. One item caught my eye, which is the claim that Iranian-backed Houthi militias are smuggling of Thorium from Yemen to Iran.

Update 18 August

Sea News reports that the IMO (an agency of the United Nations responsible for regulating shipping) is putting a plan in place to try to make the SFO Safer safe or to deal with a leak if there is one. I don’t know whether that is any advance on the news we have already, but one thing that caught my eye is that there are “recent reports of water entering the engine room”. 

April 2022

It reads like a bad dream. How could this be going on for so long. The Security Council Report for April reads:

There has been progress towards resolving the threat posed by the FSO Safer, the vessel moored off the Houthi-held port of Ras Issa in the Red Sea that is at risk of a major oil spill or explosion. On 5 March, the UN signed a memorandum of understanding with the Houthis and the Fahem Group (one of Yemen’s largest import companies) to transfer the oil on the Safer to a vessel that would replace the ageing tanker. The memorandum notes that the plan is contingent on donor funding and could entail an interim ship to hold the oil until a suitable replacement vessel for the Safer is acquired.