The First Thing

I was going to write this morning about Sedna, the new quasi-planet that is so far out there that it comes from the cloud of ice. The first thing I heard about it was that it was a new planet, or at least that if Pluto is a planet, then Sedna is a planet.

You may know Sedna by it’s more formal name, “2003 VB12.” The astronomers are trying to paste the name Sedna on it. It is romantic, and we need some of that these days. Sedna was an Inuit Eskimo woman who was throw from a kayak by her father. Her fingers became seals, and she became the spirit of the sea and all its creatures. She is so remote as to be invisible, and not a target for anything but telescopes. That is a useful thing these days.

The first thing you hear is always wrong. That is why I like the news. It is always surprising and always subject to revision. In the details, anyway. If you look at the bigger canvas the brushstrokes blend to give a more cohesive truth.

I remember the time in 1988 Chairman of the Joint Chief, jolly old Admiral Crowe explaining how we shot an Iranian airliner down in the southern Persian Gulf. 290 civilians died in the incident. I was just headed out the door for the Caribbean, and was interested because I was in line to be in the same place.

We weren’t supposed to call it the “Persian Gulf.” That name was supposed to empower the Iranians. But the term “Arabian Gulf” never caught on, any more than the story the an F-14 fighter was tucked under the airliner’s wing, and was inbound to shoot the cruiser.

Bodies were recovered for days in the warm salt water of the Straits of Hormuz.

It was a huge embarrassment for the United States. I won’t re-fight the battle. There is plenty of blame to go around. The skipper of the USS Vincennes had been under a lot of stress, and he had been fighting a run-and-gun battle with Iranian speedboats all through the day. The Iranians probably should not have decided to play with guns against the gray warship, and they should have recognized that it would be better to route the airliner somewhere else, or cancel the flight pending resolution of the disturbance.

There should have been more time for the Captain to think about the information he was presented, and the scenario he thought he was reacting to was plausible, if incorrect.

Shoot, we probably should not have sold the latest technology to Iran to begin with, but there was the Russian plan to expand to the warm waters of the Gulf where ice never stopped navigation and all that oil and gas from the Soviet republics they needed to move.

So the whole thing was about navigation and news, both things we feel strongly about. Every time I have been close to a story that managed to gain the attention of the news machine, some part of the story was flat wrong. Like the word from Spain on the bombings.

The commentators are wallowing in the policy implication of the election that came three days after 200 were murdered in Madrid. We have such a short attention span. The election is portrayed as a referendum on unilateral American action in the Gulf, and the conservatives the lap-dogs of imperialism as they tried to depict Tony Blair.

But there is a lot of baggage. Columbus set out from the bustling harbor of Puerto in southwestern Spain in 1492 to claim enclaves in mystic India. He didn’t get it quite right, but the navigators of the Iberian Peninsula opened the world ocean to exploration and trade. In fact, it was only twenty years later, 1521, that Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines, where he made such an impression that he was killed by the locals the following month.

The Moors had only been thrown out of Spain a few years before Columbus left Spain. It is important to recognize that part of the story, and the astonishing tale of the rise of their empire in the Americas and the East.

That is part of the Iberian Peninsula’s contribution to the domination of the West, even if we don’t care to put it in context this week. We have recast Spain as a new democracy, which it is, and yet it has its baggage. It still rules the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the North African coast, which the Islamists view as Christian colonies on Muslim soil.

They are still smarting over the expulsion of the True Faith, which is why it is so difficult for us all to get on the same sheet of music and argue over the same thing.

The story this morning is that it is six Moroccans are responsible for the bombing. I don’t know what happened to the two Indians they talked about in the initial press release- that was the first thing we heard. They have connections to the bombings in Casablanca which included Spanish targets. The old government tried to cover the tragedy with the evil that they knew, the bitter few domestic Basques of the Euskadi ta Azkatasuna (ETA) who are still protesting their conquest by the Spanish. So their first story was wrong and the people were angry at the apparent deception.

History is funny. Most of the sailors and navigators of the old empire were Basque.

There is both more and less to all this than is apparent. The Moroccans, if they are the ones who did it, may only be loosely associated with the Sunni radicals who flocked to Osama’s Jihadist banner. The International Institute of Strategic Studies in London says that global recruitment for the jihad is rising and that many small, decentralized groups have sprung up. They are hard to identify and neutralize, and have local grievances that are profound. They may have only general encouragement from other radicals.

We don’t understand the nature and relationship of the Islamist terrorists. That is why we do cartoons of them. Last year the Institute says there were 98 suicide attacks around the world, a modern record. They were only partly angry about the same things.

The new Spanish Prime Minister says he will pull out his troops unless they transition to United Nations control.

That is a significant word, “unless.” The election campaign is over and now the governance must begin.

You can ask Paul Bremer about the governance thing. Last I heard, he was struggling to find a way to do exactly the same thing. And that isn’t the first thing I heard.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra