Blog

As I continue plowing my way through Silk Roads, I’ve made minimal mark-ups in the text. Starting during Hitler’s reign in Germany we have the following:

Hitler

Hitler lucked out during the Blitz. He had freaked out during it and was trying to call it off, but his message wasn’t reaching generals who were forging ahead, and it worked. The problem was you needed to keep feeding this war machine with oil. That meant going east.

Similarly with his attack on Russia, he was mistaken believing that German forces could feed themselves off the Russian land, but Russians destroyed everything — those that weren’t killed — as they left. Winter came and soon the food shortages were hitting. Russians died by the millions from starvation. Even the German population back home was impacted with recorded lowered caloric intakes.

Lack of food ultimately became the trigger Hitler needed to go ahead and start the Holocaust. Obviously, he had no love of Jews, but the “final solution” to this food problem was simply mass execution.

The failure of the land to genrate wheat in the anticipated quantities was a direct cause of the Holocaust.

…

Having attacked the Soviet Union with thoughts of surplus zones, thoughts now revolved around surplus populations.

…

The name given to the conclusions reached on the frosty morning of 20 January 1942 sends shivers down teh spine. In the eyes of its makers, the genocide of the Jews was simply a response to a problem. The Holocaust was the “Final Solution”.

p. 379, Silk Roads

One takeaway is that Hitler’s major disasters and crimes started off as incompetence. The problem with a national leader and incompetence is that they are not the ones directly impacted by disillusioned decisions.

Europe

This was typified by the European Union being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012: how wonderful that Europe, which had been responsible for almost continuous warfare not just in its own continent but across the world for centuries, had managed to avoid confluct for several decades.

p. 383, Silk Roads

Nuclear Holocaust vs. Communism

Many were persuaded by an ideal that promised a harmoney in sharp contrast to the horrors of a war that had culminated in two atomic boms being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

…

Communism was a logical reaction to a political system that had proved itself to be flawed and dangerous. It was a new system that accentuated similarities rather than differences, that replaced hierarchies with equality. It was not just an attractive vision, in other words, but a viable alternative.

p. 391, Silk Roads

The Cold War and Oil in the Middle East

Due to local leaders standing up to world powers, including the United States, and refusing to be ripped off for their natural resource of oil, a power shift occured.

In 1949, for example, the U.S. Treasury collected $43 million in taxes from Aramco, a consortium of western oil companies, while Saudi Arabia received $39 million in revenues. Two years later, after changing the system of tax credits whereby businesses could offset their expenses, the business was paying $6 million in the United States by $110 million to the Saudis. There was a domino effect as other consessions in Saudi, as well as in Kuwait, Iraq and elsewhere, reset their terms in favour of local rulers and governments.

Some historians have spoken of this moment of reworking the flows of currency as being as momentous as the transfer of power from London for India and Pakistan. But its impact was most similar to the discovery of the Americas and the redistribution of global wealth that followed.

…

The spider’s web of pipelines that criss-crossed the region and connected east with west marked a new chapter in the history of this region and connected east with west marked a new chapter in the history of this region. The time, it was not spices or silks, slaves or silver that traversed the globe, but oil.

p. 396-7, Silk Roads

The CIA, Iran, and Regime Change

by the end of 1952 the British were no longer so confident that the tactic of using sanctions would pay off [in Iran]. An approach was therefore made to the recently established Central Intelligence Agency to support a plan “of joint political action to remove [Iran’s] Prime Minister Mossadegh”—in other words, to stage a coup. Not for the last time, regime change in this part of the world seemed the answer to the problem.

p. 399, Silk Roads

What’s wrong with Iran?

People like Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger professed bafflement that a country like Iran would want an energy source like nuclear power when they have all of that oil — which will eventually run out. But people like that make those kinds of statements out of convenience.

in 1975, when a $15 billion trade deal was agreed between the two countries, which included provision for Iran to purchase eight reactors from the United States at a fixed price of $6.4 billion. The following year, President Ford approved a deal that allowed Iran to buy and operate a U.S.-built system that included a reprocessing facility that could extract plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel, and therefore enable Teheran to operate a “nuclear fuel cycle.” President Ford’s Chief of Staff had no hesitation in approving this sale: in the 1970s, Dick Cheney did not find it difficult to “figure out” what Iran’s motivations were.

p. 436, Silk Roads

I found it amusing that one of the German companies in involved in developing reactors in Iran was named Kraftwerk Union AG. Did the krautrock band of the same name get it from this company? Or just a coincidence? The author doesn’t say. Out of scope, unfortunately.

Now just because Iran had the reasonable desire for nuclear power, that didn’t stop the Shah from declaring

that Iran would develop weapons capability “without a doubt, and sooner than one would think.” … One CIA report written in 1974 assessing proliferation genrally concluded that while Iran was at an early stage of development, it was likely that the Shah would achieve this goal in the mid-1980s—“if he is alive.”

p. 436, Silk Roads

So, is there concern that Iran would like to develop nuclear weapons? Yes. For those who can’t “figure out” why, it has something to do with the precedent set that countries with nuclear weapons do not get invaded. This is my conclusion not one expressed in the book.

After Khomeini had taken power, he immediately shut down the U.S. intelligence facilities located in Iran that served as early-warning systems for Soviet nuclear attacks, and as a listening posts monitoring missile-launch tests in Central Asia.

…

A “real gap” had emerged in U.S. intelligence collection as a result of events in Iran, noted Robert Gates, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the USSR (and later Director of the agency, as well as Secretary of Defense) . “Exceptionally sensitive” efforts were therefore made to build new alliances elsehwere that would fill the void. These included high-level discussions with the Chinese leadership about building replacement facilities in western China, which led to a secret visit by Admiral Turner and Gates to Beijing in the winter of 1980-81, a trip that was only revealed to have taken place many yeaers later (albeit with precious little detail)…Close co-operation between United States and Chinese military and intelligence was a by-product of the fall of the Shah.

p. 445, Silk Roads