Robert Kagan says that whether Israel deserved a tongue-lashing from Barack Obama or not, it can console itself by observing  that it is in good company on the outs. Britain, France, India, Poland, the Czech Republic and Japan are all huddled under the bus along with it. That’s not to mention the occasionally abandoned, like the Iranian dissidents or the Dalai Lama, who had to come through the door where they take out the trash to talk to the press. Israel is where all the other allies have been at one time or the other. What’s instructive, Kagan says, is who’s remained inside the bus and not crushed under the wheels.

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Jerusalem was the scene of Palestinian riots expressing outrage over the reopening of a synagogue which had been destroyed by Jordanian forces in 1948 war and in the aftermath of a US rebuke of Israel for building settlements in East Jerusalem. The incidents were “part of a ‘Day of Rage’ called for by Palestinian leaders in response to the recent reopening of a historic synagogue in the Old City.”

Though the U.S. had been engaged in a high-profile dispute with the Israel government over a proposed 1,600-unit housing settlement in a disputed neighborhood of Jerusalem, the protests in recent days have stemmed from the reopening of the Hurva synagogue, which was destroyed by Jordanian forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

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VOA quotes a top military official who says that US troops will be brought under NATO command. “U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates ordered the reorganization before traveling to Kabul last week.”

In another significant shift, NATO’s top commander, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, said he has brought most U.S. Special Operations forces in the country under his direct command.

Afghan officials have complained that Special Operations troops are responsible for a large number of civilian casualties, and they have pressed McChrystal to restrict their night-time combat missions.

Human rights advocates have accused Special Forces units of being out of control and a law unto themselves. “Meanwhile, officials say Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. President Barack Obama held a video conference to discuss prospects of peace with the Taliban.” The conversation lasted for more than an hour. Special Operations have been a political sore point.

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Suppose you could watch something — or someone — by observing its doppelganger. Not the thing in itself, but its shadow. Ridiculous? Maybe not. According to the Guardian Lockheed Martin filed a patent application for a quantum radar system which operates on precisely that principle. The Guardian writes:

In theory entangled particles could be used to reveal details of objects they have never interacted with. If one particle bumped into an aircraft its twin would react in the same way, even if it never left the laboratory. Work out a way to read that behaviour, and an image could be built up, even with no information being directly transmitted from the target.

The patent application itself suggests that by entangling waves of different characteristics the radar can decipher one by observing the other. In this way the frequency which cannot travel far can pass on the information to the frequency which can. It is a kind of information relay race  in which the baton started by things which can look through walls, see IEDs emplaced underground and past stealthy coatings can be passed to something which can reach the radar receiver. The saying that you can run but can’t hide may be truer than ever.

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The recent exchange of testy words between Washington and Israel over the approval of new construction in East Jerusalem is ostensibly over the fate of the “peace process” now being shepherded by the US. VOA says that “for decades he United States has tried to act as a bridge between Israelis and Arabs. President Barack Obama, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, is looking for ways to end hostilities and bring about a long-elusive peace.”

The announcement of the East Jerusalem construction was said to have undermined Vice President Joe Biden’s diplomatic efforts. “This was supposed to be a period of heightened U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, with U.S. envoy George Mitchell named as a go-between in indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians, and Vice President Joe Biden making a high-profile trip this week to Jerusalem.” But what were the odds that Biden’s efforts were actually going anywhere? And if not, then why?

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Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University says the remarkable thing about the recent clashes between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria is that they are not remarkable. In a process largely unnoticed in the West, billions of people in Asia and Africa have swapped out their indigenous faiths for either Christianity or Islam. And to an even greater astonishment of Western intellectuals most have chosen Christianity. Now the equalization of numbers has caused a fault line to appear through the Third World at about the tenth degree of latitude where the two aggregations face each other “at daggers drawn”.

The word “Christian”, associated in the 19th and 20th centuries with the missionary enterprises of Europe, has now come to mean something different in political terms. Today Christianity is a religion of the Third World. Europeans have largely converted to some soft and watered-down variation of  the West’s only indigenous creed, Marxism, as represented by John Lennon’s “Imagine” song. Christianity can no longer be associated largely with the West.  Ex oriente lux a phrase which once described the belief that all great world religions rose in the East is now truer than ever. With Marxism shrinking to the margins of the Guardian, the monotheisms have reclaimed the field at least in raw numbers.

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Robert Kaplan describes how in the process of muddling along through intractable situations, the US military has become the master of the possible, simply because they have had to be. Kaplan predicts they may succeed in Afghanistan yet again and that very success will become a poisoned pawn.

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A Washington Post article about banning laptops in the classroom claims that professors have found themselves losing to the “cone of distraction” generated by these devices. It’s ironic because the universities themselves exerted strenuous efforts to ensure that every student had a laptop only to find them a nuisance. They mandated them only to ban them.

A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen. But during the past decade, it has evolved into a powerful distraction. Wireless Internet connections tempt students away from note-typing to e-mail, blogs, YouTube videos, sports scores, even online gaming — all the diversions of a home computer beamed into the classroom to compete with the professor for the student’s attention.

But although the Washington Post has cast the problem in terms of distraction these devices pose, the underlying difficulty may be more basic. The computer has become cybernetically part of many people. For many people, “you” no longer means just “you”. It means you and your computer. And how can a person attend class with an essential part of himself removed?

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The campaign against the IED threat in Iraq resembled in some respects the Battle of the Atlantic. Starting from nearly nothing in 2003 the “improvised explosive device” lurking under the roadbed, embedded in a concrete curb, in a dead dog or a garbage can — or sometimes taking the form of a long string of artillery shells wired to each other — became a major cause of Coalition casualties. Like the U-boats their success rose a crescendo and then faded away under a cocktail of countermeasures. The “Happy Time” for the IED bombers was the summer of 2007.

The conceptual similarities between the fight against the U-boat and the IED were that the victors evolved better detection technology, surveillance techniques and adaptive routing than their opponents, who were also evolving. The parallels between mine detection technology and sonar; electronic intelligence and Huff-duff, between road surveillance systems and long range air patrols are obvious. And the really killing blow in both cases — what spelled the end of the wolfpack and the road bombers was also identical: getting “left of the boom”. A Washington Post article from 2007 described how military analysts understood from the start the:

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The Daily Mail tells the story of how a far flung bunch of strangers, including Michael Yon, created a temporary, self-organized network to get a British soldier an artificial lung he needed to survive until he could be flown to a specialist facility for treatment. The soldier was shot accidentally on his own base. What happened next shows when “can do” meets modern comms.

The respected American journalist Michael Yon, himself a former US special forces soldier, reported on his blog that he heard the shot and saw a flurry of activity and a medical evacuation helicopter taking Soldier X away. … Soldier X had been shot in the abdomen and chest, losing his right lung and damaging his liver … He was alive – but only just. … He needed a portable, low-pressure artificial lung and the Americans offered to help. But the bureaucracy of moving from the British to the American military system meant that valuable time was being lost. … Contacted by a quick-thinking British doctor at Camp Bastion, Mr Yon sent an urgent email to a group of American civilian volunteers called Soldiers’ Angels near Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where most American casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan are initially sent.

The volunteers, founded by the great-niece of General George S. Patton, alerted the US Army’s nearby Landstuhl Regional Medical Center’s Acute Lung Rescue Team, which specialises in going straight to the aid of soldiers with severe lung problems.

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