George vs. Mahmoud

Ever since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the president of Iran, I have been watching the sand-box struggle between him and George Bush.  Mahmoud has really been tweaking George's nose, which makes George rattle his yellow plastic shovel in rage.  I am not taking this fight lightly - I am terrified by the prospect of war, official or otherwise, between the two countries.  But I am astonished that both men - leaders of countries with large populations that they ostensibly represent - act in public like schoolboys with no responsibility for those populations, or for anything else on God's Earth besides their own egos.

Mahmoud is the better actor.  He has decided to fight George by acting like him.  If Iran is evil, then so is the United States.  If George can wear Jesus on his sleeve, Mahmoud will wear Muhammad.  Any friend of George's is an enemy of Mahmoud's.  And so on.  Interestingly, Mahmoud seems to be fumbling his domestic agenda like George, too, and is beginning to see a similar decline in public support.  Probably, as with George, this will not influence his behavior one whit.

Mahmoud is also probably the better tactician.  George has not shown much taste for the subtleties of diplomacy, rendered a fine art in Iran over thousands of years of history.  Here's a good example.  The US Administration has been going on and on recently about Iran's "meddling" in Iraq, hinting darkly (but without much real evidence) that Iran is aiding the Shia counter-insurgency and threatening US troops. This past weekend, Iran's ambassador, Hassan Qumi, announced Iran's plan to officially meddle in Iraq, by helping with reconstruction, opening a bank, and assisting with security training.  This is a lovely counter to George's finger-pointing:  Iran's plans appear benevolent, and either Iraq is really a democracy, like George says, and is thus free to open and expand relations with whomever it wishes, or the US is really running Iraq, and George is a liar.  Further, Qumi couldn't resist pointing out that Iran was prepared to succeed in Iraq where the US had perhaps not been as successful as it could have been.  Nose tweaked.

There is a lot of fear in this country, probably justified, that such brinkmanship will lead to a military confrontation, or that a confrontation is already planned and inevitable.  There is also a desire, in other quarters, for just such a confrontation, as if Iran were just another Iraq.  I think Mahmoud is betting on no confrontation, or maybe something minor, like a missile strike, which would do little real damage and actually strengthen Iran diplomatically.  The US is too mired in Iraq to actually invade, and Iran is too large and strong.  George might even be planning a proxy attack, using Israel, but I hope the Israelis are too smart for that.  Their little dust-up with Hezbollah in Lebanon this past summer certainly made them look like chumps.  Still, George has a lot of warmongering pals giving him advice.

What got me thinking about George and Mahmoud was a news analysis written by Michael Slackman for the New York Times, published almost two weeks ago.  He describes the Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq, and explains, with appropriate alarm, how it is spreading across the Middle East.  Of course, for many of us, this is not news.  The conflict itself is centuries old.  The Sunni Al Qaeda has made it clear that as soon as it gets the US out of the Middle East, the Shiites are next.  In Iraq, the US Administration prefers the labels insurgency-counterinsurgency, which does nothing to hide what appears to be a Sunni-Shia civil war, a war that could easily spread.  In fact, not so long ago, George seemed to not know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis, or maybe saw the difference as trivial.  I'm afraid, though, that George does know the difference now, and is planning on exploiting that difference.

Shia and Sunni Islam parted over a millennium ago, in disagreement about the true line of spiritual descent from the Prophet Muhammad.  There are other sects and denominations of Islam as well, including fundamentalists, and in this regard Islam resembles sectarian Christianity.  Iran considers itself the protector of Shia Islam, whose spiritual homeland is in southern Iraq, and this explains a lot about the relationship between Iran and Iraq, and between Iran and the rest of the Middle East, where Shiites are outnumbered by Sunnis about eight to one.  Mahmoud is making clear that Iran is a long-time player in the region, not just an opportunistic meddler, which might better describe the US.

It would be the height of cynical exploitation to purposefully pit the two sects against each other with the goal of weakening both, but I think this is exactly what George has in mind.  It was his father, after all, whose job it was to oversee the Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties, ensuring that neither side gain the upper hand, but that both sides fight until exhausted, economically, militarily, and politically.  This may be why the so-called surge of US troops is much smaller than originally called for.  The goal would not be security, but a continuously "controlled" civil war.  For a while, the Sunnis had the upper hand, but now it is the Shiites who need to be held in check.  With any luck, we can get the two sides to fight each other instead of us.  So part of controlling the Shiites in Iraq involves scaring Iran away from thinking they are in control.  And Iran can be controlled by scaring the predominantly Sunni states into believing that Iran has designs on all of the Middle East.  If this starts a regional sectarian conflict, then fine, because we can control the whole region if that happens.

This is an ancient strategy, of course - distract your enemy with a more hated enemy.  It makes for a bloody and protracted mess.  Sometimes you can get a temporary stability, but these hatreds can fester for generations.  Look at what happened to Yugoslavia after Tito died.  In the end, you can't really control the conflict, let alone make it disappear.  We made Saddam Hussein into even more of a monster by manipulating him during the war with Iran.  He turned on us, perhaps justifiably, and we've been fighting him, one way or another, for almost two decades.  Even now that he's dead, we're fighting him.

England tried the same strategy centuries ago in Northern Ireland, "cleansing" it of ethnic Catholics, repopulating it with Protestant Scots, and then eventually pitting them against each other.  How well did England control that situation?  And for how long, and at what cost, to themselves and the inhabitants?

BC

Ambergris

I'm sure by now you've all read the whale vomit story, about the lady who gave her sister a grotesque lump of God-knows-what as a gift.  That's actually the best part of the story - the lady had found the lump on the beach, and had kept it for decades as a conversation piece on her knick-knack table before deciding that her sister needed it.

How the ambergris theory arose, I don't know.  What its new owner has is a big crazy-looking waxy green blob that certainly doesn't look like ambergris.  If it were ambergris, it probably would have stunk up that lady's living room with a scent either strangely alluring or downright revolting.  So it's probably not ambergris, and not the pension she is hoping for, but just the worst gift from a relative ever.

I also don't know how ambergris came to be called whale vomit either, though it probably accounts for a lot of the popularity of the story.  Ambergris is no more whale vomit than an owl pellet is owl vomit.  Ambergris is much much weirder, and even more disgusting than whale vomit.  It's a fatty, smelly deposit related to the kind of stuff that comes out of a gall bladder, secreted into a sperm whale's intestine, perhaps to isolate and help pass an indigestible obstruction.  It exits the whale (probably not at the mouth end, as is often said, since it forms in the intestine) and floats around in the ocean until it beaches and some lady finds it.

Until people knew it came from whales, people did look for it on beaches.  Once they realized it came from whales, they harvested it right from the source, which is why it's illegal to sell ambergris now.  Its presence in a whale is a sign of a problem, like the way a pearl indicates trouble in an oyster.

Ambergris is valuable because it is rare and is considered delectable; it is used both as a scent and a flavoring.  This just proves that humans have probably tried to eat everything imaginable, and maybe it's why I'm fascinated with this story.  One of my all-time favorite quotes is:  "He was a bold man that first ate an oyster." (Jonathan Swift)

The first food that came to mind as I read about ambergris was durian.  Durian is a fruit grown in Southeast Asia which, when ripe, has a famously disgusting odor resembling sewage.  Only when it is ripe do the creamy insides offer the flavor that is apparently addictively delicious.  So who first figured that out?  Durian is not valuable, however, because it can be grown in quantity, and the odor does dissuade people from eating it.  And it's not weird when a fruit turns out to be edible, since many are.  But ambergris is another story.

Even civet cat coffee isn't quite as odd as ambergris.  Civet cats are weasel-like mammals who produce a musk used in perfumery, much like ambergris.  In parts of Asia some civets like to eat coffee berries.  Their stomachs digest the berry part, and the bean passes through in their poop.  These beans are gathered, presumably cleaned off, and then roasted for brewing coffee.  It's expensive, but still, it's coffee and tastes like coffee.

Raw ambergris is not obviously attractive.  The smell is apparently a little funky, and I'm not sure what would lead you to try eating it.  Its taste is said to resemble chocolate (unsweetened, I assume).  The odor improves as it lingers, which it does for a long time, a characteristic vital for perfume.  Even then, no one says it smells wonderful; intriguing, peculiar, velvety, there's a lot of room for interpretation; again, a characteristic vital for perfume.

At first, because no one knew where ambergris was from, it could be imagined to have a mysterious and wonderful origin, as was the case with the Biblical manna (thought now to be an insect excretion).  The mystery must have added to the allure.  And once its value was established, there was status attached to the use of ambergris apart from its qualities, not unlike the fad of sprinkling gold powder into a beverage to prove that you can afford such a thing.

The value of ambergris made searching for it on beaches a reasonable venture.  If you had no actual experience with ambergris, and you'd been thinking that you could do with a little extra cash, your imagination could lead you to believe that any unidentifiable lump found on a beach must be the fabled ambergris.  The odds would be way against you, but it would make a great story.

BC

Here's a wonderful first-hand account about ambergris, from a 1933 edition of Natural History.