When power lies naked

In the long winter darkness we experience in Britain right now (“the year’s midnight” as John Donne put it), the world can seem particularly murky. Even more than at other times, understanding what’s going on seems hard. We look through a glass darkly at evasion, omission and the products of false memory.

But now and then you may sense you’re glancing right into the heart of what’s going on. The flash of imagined understanding can be sparked by a single sentence (for example, that Israel’s “only option” is to wage unrelenting war that “sears deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people" – Israeli chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon) or it can be a short article in a newspaper like two of those that appear in newspapers of the US establishment this week.

On 10 December, The New York Times reported that the US government is paying Halliburton more than twice what it is paying others, to transport fuel into Iraq (High Payments to Halliburton for Fuel in Iraq). The figures are an average of $2.64 a gallon for Halliburton, 96 cents for Somo (Iraqi’s state oil company), and $1.08 to $1.19 for Pentagon’s Defense Energy Support Center.

Phil Verleger, an oil economist, told the NYT: “I have never seen anything like this in my life…That’s a monopoly premium … Every logistical firm or oil subsidiary in the United States and Europe would salivate to have that sort of contract.”

In March 2003, Halliburton was awarded a no-competition contract to repair Iraq’s oil industry, and it has already received more than $1.4 billion in work. Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, is Halliburton’s former chief executive officer.

We are, of course, entreated not to join the dots by a Halliburton spokesperson whose heroic efforts on her employer’s behalf could make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.

Another flash of illumination appeared in the Washington Post on 6 December. At least 38 surface-to-surface rockets with radiological payloads have disappeared from the separatist enclave of Trans-dniester in Moldava (Dirty Bomb Warheads Disappear). The Alazan, a small rocket designed in the Soviet period for weather experiments, has already been adapted by fighters in the Caucasus to lob conventional explosives into cities.

Such delivery systems, with radiological payloads, fired into – say – the centre of a large city would probably not kill many people, especially if they did not have proximity fuses that allowed them to explode above their targets rather than after burying themselves in soon-to-be-rubble.

What they could do, however, is heighten a climate of uncertainty and inflict significant economic damage, as evacuation and clean up could be protracted and costly. As a British security professional in Baghdad told Mark Danner shortly after a conventional rocket of another type nearly took out the US deputy secretary of defense (Paul Wolfowitz) at the Rasheed Hotel: “They don’t need to be sophisticated. They need to be effective.”

These vanishing trans-dniestrian rockets, which even the likes of Victor Bout (a Russian arms dealer – for details see here and here) may demur from trading, look like one more small step across a changing tactical landscape. They are way-markers on a widening highway to more equal access to violence by non-state actors, and the globalisation of a form of power mostly controlled hitherto by sovereign states.