In the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on Syria on Wednesday, numerous reports claimed that the target of the strike was a convoy carrying SA-17 missiles approaching the Lebanese border. The Syrian government, however, claimed that the target was a research facility north west of Damascus.

Russian SA-17

The New York Times reported:

American officials said Israel hit a convoy before dawn on Wednesday that was ferrying sophisticated SA-17 antiaircraft missiles to Lebanon. The Syrians and their allies said the target was a research facility in the Damascus suburb of Jamraya.

Haaretz even published a map showing the two locations:

As I noted at the time, whether Israel was trying to destroy a moving or a stationary target was significant because if the target turned out to be stationary, then the timing of the strike was most likely determined as much by the Israelis as by the circumstances.

The idea that highly sophisticated Russian-made missile systems were just about to slip across the Lebanese border and into the hands of Hezbollah, was clearly intended to convey Israel’s sense of urgency.

But now Syrian TV has broadcast footage of what is claimed to be the aftermath of the strike: damage to the research facility at Jamraya outside Damascus.

The Times of Israel reports:

The video also shows what appears to be a destroyed mobile carrier for an SA-17 anti-aircraft missile battery.

But on the contrary, what the video shows is the remains of an SA-8 missile battery, an air defense system that has been in service for over 40 years.

Syrian SA-8 missile launcher apparently destroyed in Israeli air strike.

SA-8 missile launcher.

The New York Times now reports:

A senior United States military official, asked about reports that the research center had been damaged, said, “My sense is that the buildings were destroyed due to the bombs which targeted the vehicles” carrying the antiaircraft weapons, and from “the secondary explosions from the missiles.”

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence reports, said that “the Israelis had a small strike package,” meaning that a relatively few fighter aircraft slipped past Syria’s air defenses and that targeting both the missiles and the research center “would risk doing just a little damage to either.”

“They clearly went after the air defense weapons on the transport trucks,” the official said.

Based on the evidence available at this time, the claim that SA-17s were targeted, appears to be baseless. Neither is there any evidence that the SA-8s that were destroyed were heading for Lebanon. Indeed, as the New York Times report suggests — perhaps unintentionally — the SA-8s may well have not been going anywhere. They may have been intended to defend the facility next to which they were positioned*:

By hitting the research center, part of a military complex that is supposed to be protected by Russian-made antiaircraft defenses, Israel made it clear it was willing to risk direct intervention to keep weapons and missiles out of Hezbollah’s hands.

The report goes on to say:

The strike also appeared to be a signal to the Iranians that Israel would be willing to conduct a similar attack on aboveground nuclear facilities if it seemed that Iran was near achieving nuclear weapons capability. But Iran would be a far harder target — much farther away from Israel, much better defended, and with facilities much more difficult to damage. The nuclear enrichment center that worries Israel and Western governments the most is nearly 300 feet under a mountain outside Qum, largely invulnerable to the weapons that Israel is seemed to have used in last week’s raid.

The decision of the Syrian government to reveal the results of the Israeli attack was no doubt intended to serve multiple purposes, but it’s hard to imagine that what looks like an ill-conceived operation will have provoked much fear in Iran.

Was Netanyahu sending a message to Tehran to demonstrate Israel’s strong will, or was he sending a message to Washington about Israel’s limited capabilities?

* In the final paragraph of today’s New York Times report, it does refer to the fact that the missile launchers in the video are SA-8s, but then quotes an Israeli journalist, Amir Rapaport, claiming that the SA-8s were planted at the scene. “Maybe it’s sort of a trick of the Syrians,” Rapaport said. Maybe. But frankly, neither the Americans nor Israelis have a lot of credibility at this point. The existence and destruction of SA-17s in this story is mere hearsay.

Last week, Ali Akbar Velayati, an aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that an “attack on Syria is considered attack on Iran.”

Yesterday, in a dangerous act of brinkmanship, Israel called Iran’s bluff.

But Israel doesn’t want to be perceived as risking provoking a war and so it portrayed its air strike on Syria as an imperative act of self defense necessitated by Syria’s alleged attempt to transport Russian-made SA-17 missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Syria denies that a convoy carrying such missiles was struck and even though the word of the Syrian government carries little weight these days, there are several reasons to doubt the narrative that U.S. officials have been disseminating.

Soon after Operation Orchard, an Israeli strike on a nuclear facility in Syria on September 6, 2007, U.S. officials told the New York Times that “the most likely targets of the raid were weapons caches that Israel’s government believes Iran has been sending the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah through Syria.” It was weeks later before details of the carefully planned operation became clear.

And here’s the all-important point: the timing of a strike on a convoy is going to be determined by the commanders of the convoy. Israel gets word that missiles are on the move and thus is left with “no choice” but to intervene.

But if the attack is on a stationary facility, then the timing of an attack is much more in Israel’s control.

This week there were multiple indications that Israel was preparing for military action:

• On Sunday, Israel warned that it could launch a pre-emptive strike to stop Syria’s chemical weapons from reaching Hezbollah.
• Iron Dome air defense batteries were moved into northern Israel earlier in the week.
• IDF intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi travelled to Washington for consultations with American officials.
• Benjamin Netanyahu sent his National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror to Moscow.
• And Netanyahu phoned President Obama on Monday, after a meeting on Sunday with US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro.

So what are we supposed to believe? That in spite of the warnings, Syrian officials decided to try their luck and send a missile-carrying convoy on its way with the slim hope that it might evade attack?

Or, that Israel knew that the target of its choice, a research facility in the area of Jamraya, northwest of Damascus, could be struck at a time of Israel’s choosing and by striking now, Iran’s earlier pledge to defend Syria would be shown as empty — or, if Iran does actually follow through, then a pretext may have been created for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

For Netanyahu, soon to lead a government that will probably be less inclined to support military muscle flexing, this week may have looked like the ideal time to place a wager that he thinks he cannot lose.

The Olokun Head discovered in Nigeria in 1910 and initially regarded by European scholars as too great a masterpiece to have originated from Africa.

One of the conceits of Western societies is that our museums and galleries and private collections represent our appreciation of culture. Indeed, our appreciation of culture is supposedly so refined that we have often asserted the right or even duty to become self-appointed custodians of artifacts whose protection demanded, we claimed, that they be removed from their place of origin.

It is reasonable to assume that in the coming months and years, artifacts from Timbuktu will find their way into the hands of art collectors who rationalize their actions with the idea that only individuals with the finest taste recognize the real value of such rare treasures.

What those who either buy such artifacts or merely view them while wandering around museums are inclined to believe is that culture and its material expressions are one and the same.

Even so, such objects only become artifacts as culture falls apart. Our museums serve less to preserve human genius and function more as cultural graveyards.

In cultures that no longer sustain oral tradition, we have forgotten that the written word was not intended to subordinate the value of the spoken word — it merely expands the voice’s reach. Language’s rhythmical structure serves first to allow thought to be housed in memory before being left to reside on the page.

Yes, it will be an immense loss if Timbuktu’s manuscript collections have been decimated, but there as elsewhere, the real cultural loss long preceded the effort to breath life into dead remains.

The culture most in jeopardy and most in need of protection lives in what Wade Davis calls the planet’s “ethnosphere”: the cultural web of life which is the “sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.”

This is culture which no museum can house and no collector can buy because it exists solely through its ability to animate human life.

That might sound like a mangled version of the aphorism: you are what you eat — something surely worth remembering when industrially-produced toxins are now so pervasive they can be found in unborn babies.

What I am alluding to, however, is actually a question of self-identity as illuminated not by the external sources of our food but by our advancing understanding of the human microbiome.

The human body is made up of 10 trillion cells, while our gut hosts 100 trillion bacteria — microscopic organisms performing a vast array of functions far beyond their widely understood role in digestion. They don’t just break down food but also regulate the immune system, produce vitamins and hormones and even appear to affect the way our brain works. When our gut flora thrive, we thrive.

For that reason, one of the most promising recent advances in medicine has been in the use of fecal transplants — the transfer of gut flora from a healthy donor to someone with intestinal disease.

If that’s something you’d rather not visualize, it gets even worse. The most effective way of performing such a transplant is via a nasogastric tube. That’s right: down the nose and through the stomach to the top end of the small intestine.

Treatment of Clostridium difficile, an intestinal disease that kills 14,000 Americans annually, has had over a 90% success rate for patients given a fecal transplant, a procedure whose use was first documented in 1958.

The use of this treatment would likely already be far more commonplace and diverse in its application were it not for two reasons: Firstly, as a treatment that involves no drugs and makes less effective drug treatments redundant, the use of fecal transplants does not serve the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. Secondly, and perhaps just as importantly, the very idea of such a treatment is something that many people will find repulsive. It represents a kind of invasion and defilement of who and what we take ourselves to be. It involves an exchange of bodily fluids that transgresses most people’s notion of what might be desirable, amounting to the filthiest kind of intimacy one could imagine.

If, however, we set aside the taboos that condition our perceptions of the human body and think about this in a more abstract way, gut flora — whether they be native or transplanted — invite us to think about not just what contributes to good health but also what shapes who or what we are.

In as much as we are inclined to view the world as a complex of systems, we tend to view most systems as hierarchies. At the top sits the executive — God, president, CEO, general, brain — and below reside a multitude of individually expendable subordinates — person, citizen, worker, soldier, cell.

Identity becomes glued to the executive yet dissolves in the amorphous mass over which he (it is almost invariably he) rules.

Picture, for instance, the way in which a company like Apple, with over 70,000 employees, became synonymous with Steve Jobs. Or, the way American power is supposedly embodied in the individual of the president — so-called leader of the free world.

In the hierarchical conception of such systems, power extends from the top, downwards and outwards. In reality, power flows the opposite way. It flows up from the bottom, most of the time without question yet always with the possibility of suspension. The workers could walk out; the citizens could rebel. At such moments, the real structure of power becomes manifest.

So, consider again ones body and think of it as New York. It sounds like a fanciful song we might sing in our head where we can be number one, yet the actual city is not its landmarks — standing or fallen — or its skyline, or its shows, or words sung by Frank Sinatra. It is millions of people — a pulsating mass of organisms, moving through vessels underground, walking, driving, riding, endlessly scattering and aggregating in a process that cannot be reduced to any of its parts — a process which constitutes the life of a city, or if you will, the percolation of the gut flora of New York. A few New Yorkers might harbor the conceit that they keep the city running, but however they might aggrandize themselves, none turns out to be indispensable.

Still, as we each tell ourselves who we are, we locate meaning in a larger sphere. For instance, in our noblest moments we rise above our fears and show we have guts — but that expression, it turns out, is much more telling than we could have imagined.

What we take to be our own courage (or lack of it) may actually say less about the narrative construct we call character and more about our physical gut and the activity of trillions of bacteria such as Lactobacillus rhamnosus.

Mice fed a broth rich in this particular microorganism become more adventurous and show fewer signs of stress. The bacteria don’t just give them a healthier gut but also a healthier brain, an indication that who we are is intimately shaped by what lives inside our body. Such findings also suggest that the enteric nervous system, our “second brain,” may have as much influence over our behavior as does the stuff up top.

Given that the human microbiome is at this point a vast yet mostly uncharted territory, the fact that this is territory in which medicine — through the use of antibiotics — has engaged in open warfare for much of the last century, is all the more reason to think about our nature. In a rampage to kill our enemies we have also been destroying our selves.

At the New York Times, Robert F Worth writes: As the uprising closed in around him, the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi warned that if he fell, chaos and holy war would overtake North Africa. “Bin Laden’s people would come to impose ransoms by land and sea,” he told reporters. “We will go back to the time of Redbeard, of pirates, of Ottomans imposing ransoms on boats.”

In recent days, that unhinged prophecy has acquired a grim new currency. In Mali, French paratroopers arrived this month to battle an advancing force of jihadi fighters who already control an area twice the size of Germany. In Algeria, a one-eyed Islamist bandit organized the brazen takeover of an international gas facility, taking hostages that included more than 40 Americans and Europeans.

Coming just four months after an American ambassador was killed by jihadists in Libya, those assaults have contributed to a sense that North Africa — long a dormant backwater for Al Qaeda — is turning into another zone of dangerous instability, much like Syria, site of an increasingly bloody civil war. The mayhem in this vast desert region has many roots, but it is also a sobering reminder that the euphoric toppling of dictators in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt has come at a price.

“It’s one of the darker sides of the Arab uprisings,” said Robert Malley, the Middle East and North Africa director at the International Crisis Group. “Their peaceful nature may have damaged Al Qaeda and its allies ideologically, but logistically, in terms of the new porousness of borders, the expansion of ungoverned areas, the proliferation of weapons, the disorganization of police and security services in all these countries — it’s been a real boon to jihadists.”

Last year, Malley wrote: The US cooperated with Gulf Arab monarchies and sheikhdoms in deposing Qaddafi yesterday and in opposing Assad today. It says it must be on the right side of history. Yet those regimes do not respect at home the rights they piously pursue abroad. Their purpose is neither democracy nor open societies. They are engaged in a struggle for regional domination. What, other than treasure, can proponents of a self-styled democratic uprising find in countries whose own system of governance is anathema to the democratic project they allegedly promote?

The new system of alliances hinges on too many false assumptions and masks too many deep incongruities. It is not healthy because it cannot be real. Something is wrong. Something is unnatural. It cannot end well.

This may indeed not end well but I question the idea that either the Arab Spring or NATO intervention in Libya should be viewed as the starting point.

I would go back to the Vietnam War. That was when American power suffered its first major blow. Less than a decade later, the Soviet Union had stepped into its own quagmire in Afghanistan leading to an even greater defeat and soon the end of the Cold War.

Though the U.S. claimed victory, there was no knockout punch — its opponent had staggered out of the ring leaving the American world champion to indulge in unipolar global power and the short-lived “end of history.”

History rebegan on 9/11, an attack perceived in much of the world and especially the Middle East, less as being emblematic of a diabolical threat from Islamic extremism and more as the United States receiving a well-deserved punch in the nose.

That a nation so powerful could so easily be brought to its knees by so few people was instructive, for this was the power that propped up so many of the Middle East’s authoritarian regimes and was the guarantor of the status quo.

9/11 did not just signal that a small band of terrorists were willing to go to extreme lengths in pursuit of an impossible goal; more importantly, it showed that American power was brittle and that those who depended on that power were similarly vulnerable.

America’s efforts to reestablish its power through wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had the opposite effect and confirmed that the era of seemingly invincible American power was over. This is what opened the doors to the Arab Spring.

Viewed most broadly, the emerging trend is one in which there is an ever widening arc of dwindling state power.

The stability of the West seems to derive mostly from its control of resources — it’s hard to claim that we enjoy the benefits of representative government.

Libertarians and survivalists might welcome or think they are prepared for the collapse of state power, but to those of us who regard climate change as the most urgent issue we must tackle, the idea that this can happen without the instruments of government and law seems like sheer fantasy.

Our failed states might never resemble those in Africa; lawlessness is less likely to appear in the guise of militias than through the expansion of the power of the deep transnational state — corporate interests whose sole guiding principle is the pursuit of profit.

Fast food, instant messaging, plug and play, push-button publishing, drive-thru weddings, drive-thru funerals — have it all, and have it now.

We have made time our enemy.

Waiting, patience, endurance, persistence — anything that takes time, supposedly wastes time, if you believe that time must be grasped.

What this mentality expresses is a form of time deprivation — a sense that however much we do and however fast we do it, we will never have enough time. We are all time-poor and can afford to give very little of it away. Time given is time lost.

Learning how to experience time in a different way can sometimes mean having to live in a different world. For me, that opportunity came a few decades ago while living in India, where a trip to the bank could take a couple of hours, buying a train ticket most of a day, and making an international phone call might take more than a day. In such circumstances you either surrender or go insane.

There are however ways in which some people experience a much more expansive sense of time — time not even bound by one life but stretching back many generations.

Toumani Diabaté is a Malian kora player and a griot. A kora is a West African harp and a griot is a custodian of oral tradition — in Diabaté’s case by belonging to a lineage of musicians in which father taught son, one after another for 71 generations.

In the video below, Diabaté gives a solo performance demonstrating the kora’s exquisite delicacy and range, while interspersed in the music are clips from an interview in which he talks about Malian history and the role of music in the Manden Empire.

For those of us from cultures spellbound by the power of the written word, it’s difficult to appreciate the significance and value of oral traditions. The idea that knowledge could only be spoken and passed along from hand to hand — the idea that knowledge resides in the whole person and that it can only be passed on when people come in physical contact — might seem like a constraint and a deficit, restricted to people who lack more portable and reproducible mediums of communication. In contrast, we have come to believe that knowledge can be embedded in inanimate devices and that the acquisition of knowledge depends above all on access to those devices.

Most of us have not experienced apprenticeship or learned the ways in which knowledge often resides in the smallest details. This is the knowledge of craft which builds in increments through patient repetition. And as Diabaté demonstrates, knowledge acquired in this way goes far beyond the talent of an individual, becoming an aggregation of learning that spans centuries. One man becomes the vessel containing the wisdom of all his ancestors. His actions are not his alone as hands, long gone, animate those that live now.