12 January 2008

Cold Day in Hell


It snowed in Baghdad, lacy flakes that came down white and turned almost immediately into gray puddles. The residents were stunned with the wonder of the heavens, since the white ephemeral lace fell on Sunni and Shia and Coaltion troops and contractors alike.

You could have knocked me over with a feather, since I always figured it would be a cold day in Hell when that happened. Baghdad has cooled off a bit in the last year, but it is still hotter than a two-dollar pistol most of the time. But you know the weather these days.

I collapsed into my brown chair late yesterday to watch the snow come down on Lambeau Field in Green Bay, and a thoroughly old-school battle between the Packers and the Seahawks. At one point in the third quarter, it was difficult to see the field.

It made me feel young again, and remember playing one high school game in nearly a foot of snow.

I thought it would be a cold day again before I was drawn back into the confined blue waters of the Strait of Hormuz, and it is not particularly cold at Big Pink. It is temperate for the date, and we are past the nadir of the winter. At least I tell myself that. Whether the arctic breath returns or not, the azaleas will be back in six weeks.

I'll take the cold comfort of that, as I imagine the Candidates will. The River of the Forever Campaign has swept down the rapids through a state that has more pigs than people, and one that could as easily be a part of Quebec.

Now the activity is more defused, spread across the nation, Michigan to Florida, and all the spots between. We don't know the consequences of the clustering of all the primaries so early in the year might be. There was a time when the party conventions actually meant something, but not in my political lifetime.

The results will be in long before that, and the chosen ones will have a chance to savage one another to the extent that I doubt any can survive. Does that mean someone on the sidelines will have to be called to the rescue at the last moment? Could Mr. Gore be polishing his Nobel Medal with quiet anticipation?

The last time the candidate motorcades are likely to run into one another could be in Michigan. It has been an odd winter there. Plenty of snow, though the January thaw has been unseasonably warm, and the limos and buses are throwing salty rooster-tails behind them, crusting the vehicles in corrosion.

Remember Citizens Band radios? The drivers of the buses still use them, since they are an efficient tool for open communication on the road. We all had them in our cars in the days when the Federal Government lowered the speed limit on our mighty interstate highways to an achingly slow 55 miles an hour. The personal short-range radio became a guerilla weapon against the police speed traps, and the airwaves were filled with strange self-dubbed crusaders on Channel 19, the highway common frequency.

The early adopters of the technology were the long-haul truckers, who considered themselves the paladins of the pavement. For them, the radios were both a safety device and a means to pass the stultifying time behind the wheel. A click of the mike enabled the driver to communicate with all other receivers within line of sight.

“Smokey and the Bandit” was a Hollywood attempt to capture the cultural moment.

The movement- for that is what it was in the middle 1970s- had its zenith and a long nadir, in which cell phones and other wireless technologies rose to prominence. Those devices though are point-to-point, rather than broadcast, and therein lies the reason CB is still around.

What killed it was popularity. Far too many idiots had the radios, and all sorts of weird voices began to propagate on the airwaves, some raving, some obscene, some just irritating clutter. It killed the medium, and it eventually returned to the truckers and the motorcades, Channel 19 once again serving the function for which it had been reserved.

Something like Channel 19 exists on other especially reserved parts of the spectrum. In the air, it is the “Guard” emergency frequencies all pilots are supposed to monitor for common situational awareness. The frequencies are 121.5 megahertz for civilians and 243.0 MHz for military. Anything that happens aloft can be shared instantly with all traffic; the criticality of this common communication and the fact that the FAA is listening and capable of issuing flight violations leads to strict radio discipline.

The ships at sea have a similar frequency in the spectral band reserved for them. 156.8 MHz is designated as Channel 16, for emergency and haling purposes. All ships and shore traffic stations are supposed to monitor the frequency, particularly in highly congested choke-points. The Straight of Hormuz is one of those, a narrow body of water with an incredible array of commercial traffic headed up into the Arabian Sea form the Indian Ocean.

It is not only the commercial tankers and fishermen that need to stay constantly alert. Warships come and go as well, and the people that own the shoreline are constantly watching.

The doctrine of “innocent passage” is critical to good order on the high seas and the narrow passages between them. The call-and-response between and among the ships and shore are carried out on Channel 16 all around the world.

“I am a Coalition Warship conducting operations in international waters” is one of the things you might hear on Channel 16, but that it not the only thing.

Of late, there has been a voice in heavily accented English that is saying some of the irritating things that used to be heard on the Citizens Band. Grating, insulting and sometimes obscene things. Mariners who have operating around the Strait of Hormuz over the last decade have called one of the voices “The Filipino Monkey,” a disparaging ethnic slur to characterize a thoroughly irritating voice with an intensely obnoxious habit.

It is unclear if the Monkey is one person, or a sequence of irritating people with the same obnoxious habit. Female radio operators have been subject to particular invective through the years, and there is nothing that can be done about it; the voice is omni-directional and the possible points of origin are many. There is no equivalent to the FAA to censure the culprit, and it is an annoyance that must be endured.

It would not be worth much comment, except of late, with the regrettable rise in tensions between the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the United States of America, which has important business at the head of the Arabian Sea.

The Iranians are well within their rights to protect their coast, and the United States is well within its rights to peacefully transit the international waterway. Things get a little more complex when one party dispatches armed speedboats to race around the gray ships of another.

The actions could be misinterpreted, and since there is a right to self-defense that is inherent on the world ocean, a response to a perceived threat could cause regrettable consequences.

That nearly happened last week. The Revolutionary Guard equivalent of the Iranian Coast Guard dispatched a formation of high-speed boats to demonstrate their resolve to defend their sovereignty against the innocent transit of US Navy ships. It was a demonstration of asymmetric capability; the speed-boats present a challenging target solution to the large warships, and under peacetime rules of engagement, could get close enough to do real damage.

The videos of the confrontation last week include sound. In the midst of the swarming small boats a grating voice on Channel 16 says: “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes.”

At least, that is what was heard on the radio, and which was widely reported and wildly hyped. In retrospect, it appears that there might have been some confusion. The voice may not have originated from the speedboats; it could possibly have been the Filipino Monkey, having a laugh at the expense of the Guard and the Gray Ships.

Or perhaps not. In the heat of the moment, you never can tell what might happen. One thing might very well lead to another. It certainly has in the past. It would be a shame if incivility on the radio led to a bunch of people getting blown to smithereens.

The consequences were not nearly so sever, back when I had the CB on the dashboard, but that is one of the reasons I stopped using it when the driving around Michigan years ago. The ships do not have that option.

It would be nice if everyone would just chill a little bit, and the Iranians could just let the Great Satan do what it needs to do. But of course, they think of themselves as a great power, too.

It will be a cold day in hell when this is resolved to anyone's satisfaction, except possibly The Monkey.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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