Why The MSM Is Sometimes Still Worth Reading...

This post on, of all places, the Boston Globe's web site, is an excellent overview of what is at stake with Iran: it is a slow, slow unfolding of a nuclear crisis.

What is different between the Cuban crisis and this one is the difference between someone yelling and taunting you directly (Krushschev) and a Kuang Grade Mark Eleven (the impenetrable and shadowy Iranian administration for outsiders).

Kuang Grade Mark Eleven?


If you don't know what that means, let me take you on a slight exegis. But NOT into the world of Gibson, where the Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is an anti-ICE program, a slow virus.

But rather here.

You see, the Kuang is a real tool in attempting to take over a computer system that doesn't work with holes in the system, but rather, as SU-Kuang, finds mistakes in the protection configuration. It is an attack-oriented tool that exploits how security people, those in charge of ensuring that no unauthorized users gain access to a system, make mistakes in how they give authorized access to the computer, enabling the SU-Kuang to acquire superuser rights (hence SU for superuser).

And acquiring superuser rights is simple: it's a procedure to achieve a true state for the rules of the system. It's the procedure by which to achieve goals you set subgoals, where a rule is evaluated to achive a subgoal that leads to the final goal. It's the classic salami tactics of regime destabilization, of taking power very slowly, one single small step at a time, consolidating only to move on to the next step.

To express it another way, in order to implement a Kuang you create a list of groups accessible to the attacker and the target goal. The SU-Kuang then examines how the targets are protected and compiles then a lost of way that target goals can be achieved from the initial state.A goal-tree is built from an empirically derived set of rules of how to gain control. Once the blueprint, the goal-tree, is establised, then sequences of steps can be worked out of hot to get from A to B.


This is what we are facing: not an in-your-face Soviet challenge (although there are some aspects of this as wlel), but more fundamentally a slow and deliberate destabilization according to Iran's interests. Hence the completely deniable but clearly present interference of Iran in Iraq; hence the completely deniable yet clearly present financing of Hamas, with the destabilization of Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza as the direct corrolary. Why would Iran be interested in this destabilization? Because it doesn't allow its enemies to have their own borders be stable and points to the supposed role of Israel as being disruptive to the peace of the region.

Am I making the Iranians too sophisticated, too clever?


Not at all: they are not dumb. According to our standards, they're stone bonkered crazy, but they aren't dumb. It would be a major, major error to assume that.