I’ve been watching the news about the Stuxnet worm, as a lot people have. On the one hand, it seemed to have been a really fine design, say some. But others said it was full of flaws, when you really examine it closely. You would expect the AV vendors to support the former, but we can’t ignore some of the trustworthy folks who say it was junk.
Then we get this big splashy exposé from the New York Times, of all places, admitting it was the nasty but crafty work of the US and Israel black ops agencies. That part was no surprise, but since when did the NYT ever actually tell the truth? Obviously, whenever the NYT says something which approaches the truth, the intent was to hide something even worse.
Sure enough, today I spotted this:
What was the point of the New York Times article at all, aside from the obvious entertainment value? Certainly co-author David Sanger has a rep as being one of the primary conduits for and conjurers of war propaganda in making the case for an attack on Iran — similar to the role Michael Gordon played in the lead up to Iraq, largely by presenting unsourced and unverified claims from unnamed officials about threats posed by enemy states.
But while you might think that Sanger has the desire to sell a possible war with Iran to the general public, this story seems to undermine the possibility of such a war, if, as the article claims, the Iranian nuclear program has been set back years as a result of Stuxnet. It seems to put the brakes on a narrative that has been animating nearly all Sanger’s reporting for the past four years, and I’ve found myself puzzled again trying to discern the article’s political intent. Could this article be a signal by someone in the Obama administration that a war is not coming anytime soon? It seems to at least be a possiblity that the Stuxnet story could indeed present an opportunity to cover a retreat from that option with a claim of success that, as some pro-Israeli sources have suggested, is the equivalent of a military attack….
My conclusion is that the authors’ purpose was simply to craft a fantastic and fawning patriotic narrative, overstating joint American and Israeli power in light of less than stellar results, a caricaturized timeline to suggest a much longer and greater degree of sophistication, planning and strategic capacity in the Stuxnet effort than the actual chronology of events reveal, and a possible means of backing away from a war that may be off the table now, by writing up a self-congratulatory victory fable.
Please note the long article offers a chart which shows the worm had no real apparent effect on the production of Low Enriched Uranium. So our black ops folks aren’t as sharp as they would like us to believe?
No. It’s the same thing I’ve said before: The psychopaths who rule this world are in the minority, and they range all up and down the normal human scale of intelligence and talent. Getting large numbers of really talented folks to work for you requires being even smarter than they are, and the only reason real geniuses ever accept a government paycheck is it’s the only way they’ll ever get to explore things no one else will fund. And they’ll hate the politics of government’s deadly bureaucracy all the way through. To get folks who willingly serve them, the psychopaths have to embrace a lot of idiots, or at least folks who are rated poorly enough to fail at getting a real job. Not everyone in government service is utterly brain dead, but my personal experience shows me promotions beyond some minimal level do not happen unless you are really missing some intelligence. Being really bright and really evil is extremely rare, and you won’t serve long in the US government security agencies unless you manage to swallow a lot of evil.
