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Comment by thinkingemote | Hacker News Reader

In neal stephensons 1996 classic wired article Mother Earth Mother Board theres a bit in there about why cables are not attacked.

"There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn’t going to happen. “Cutting a submarine cable,” Barnes says, “is like starting a nuclear war. It’s easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate."

This rule was broken last year and it will happen again with more and more frequency.

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https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/purposes-and-prin... : "prohibits the threat or use of force and calls on all Members to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other States".

The post-WW2 peace structure was built around a prohibition on aggressive war and sub-war violations of the integrity of other states. This hasn't always held, and once we get into a situation where there are state-power-but-not-a-state actors involved (who are by definition not part of the UN!) things get messy.

I do think the US breach of this principle by invading Iraq did a colossal amount of damage to this principle, both morally and practically in that the collapse of the (repressive) Iraqi state caused the rise of non-state groups which destabilized Syria. The collapse of Yemen has been going on for a while with very little caring from outside, and now it's a venue for the proxy war between Iran and everyone else in the area (mostly Israel, but also Saudi).

It's also an easy mistake to blame everything on the US and Israel; there are a lot of different groups looking to seize various sorts of power in various places at gunpoint, with varying outside backers with varying levels of control.

There was even at one point indirect cooperation between the US and Iran to defeat the only group that was an even worse influence on the stability of the region than either of them: ISIS. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/us-iran-forced...

> the only group that was an even worse influence on the stability of the region than either of them: ISIS

To be clear, ISIS is great for stability. It's not the stability we want, but they do definitely provide stability. We may not like them, but there are reasons that people living in chaos or extreme poverty choose to support them over alternatives. The Taliban didn't triumph in Afghanistan without it's fans.

ISIS filled the power vacuum of a larger regional instability caused by the (botched) US invasion and provided several (fleeting) local maxima of stability.

I thought ISIS gained power in Syria first, taking advantage of the Syrian civil war which the US explicitly did NOT participate in.

The US invasion of Iraq was twenty years ago. Toppling the dictator Saddam and then failing (largely by self-sabotage) to capture the Iraqi state institutions intact was what created the power vacuum which made ISIS possible. Yet, it took a decade for it to really get going.

As I remember the story, the US funded, trained, and armed ISIS to fight Assad, then it backfired.

Huh it's the first time I am hearing that. Do you have any citations?

I remember reading about Al Qaeda / Bin Laden who was funded by CIA to fights Russians.

Unfortunately not off the top of my head, but I know scott horton has discussed it at length, "Enough already" probably has the sauce. I wasnt trying to correct anyone, thats just how I remember the events and was curious if anyone had any input.

Never heard of this before, but what we both say can be true at the same time.

Well the bit about bin laden and alqueda is certainly true to my knowledge. The government will only admit to funding the Taliban, not alqueda, but they are on record contributing quite a bit to one of the highest ranking members in alqueda, and its hard to imagine things don't get messy when you start delivering weapons to guerillas.

Bin laden is certainly true - it is documented properly and no one denies it. Funding ISIS seems to be a hoax though. Will be happy to be corrected.

> I thought ISIS gained power in Syria first, taking advantage of the Syrian civil war which the US explicitly did NOT participate in.

The US absolutely participated (and continues to participate in) the SCW.

ISIS is very much a creation and result of the US invasion of Iraq, John Kerry admitted to that. The CIA funding link is also relatively well established.

The almighty Cia that can't even win anywhere ever. That agency putting it all on tech and constantly loosing it's recruits due to mass discovery by third world countries. Get out of here with those horrorstories grandpa..

The post WWII peace structure was based on an agreement between the US and other countries: we pay you money, we patrol the shipping lanes with our navy which is the only one left, and you side with us against the Soviet Union.

Once the Soviet Union imploded, there was little reason for this to be maintained and, sure enough, here we are.

The USSR was never the only threat in the world, as we can see here. There's an awful lot of neutral shipping going through the Suez canal as well.

The US has been striking a very awkward balance between "we want our allies to spend more on their military and do more of their own defence" versus "but not enough to be an independent power". Resulting in odd things like the UK "independent" nuclear deterrent that has to be returned to the US for servicing, or the JSDF "helicopter carrier" (definitely NOT an aircraft carrier, despite the big long flat deck, because that would be prohibited under treaty).

The Iraq War removed the biggest counter to Iranian influence. In a way it was a brutal revenge on a geostrategic level to the sunni-wahabi faction. "Here is your worst enemy unleashed, have fun killing each other in civil wars"

All those old empires disguising as anti-imperialist, and the US is selfimolating they want to play another great game.

> I do think the US breach of this principle by invading Iraq did a colossal amount of damage

The US has done many many breaches of international law since post-WW2

Sure, but the Iraq invasion was the gift that really kept on giving.

There are a couple of differences:

1. the sheer number of cables today makes an individual - or even several - cuts far less dramatic.

2. there's likely still a perceived difference between a nation-state being seen to openly take responsibility for cutting cables, and terrorist groups doing so.

It's still an interesting chang (and everyone should read Mother Earth Mother Board), and you're probably still right it will happen more often, and things could escalate very quickly.

3 is a nuisance, but the Red Sea route cuts thousands of miles and according latency between Europe and South Asia - Africa is big and both the African and direct Eastbound overland routes have all kinds of "challenges". If more of them are cut, expect a drastic escalation.

It already happens a lot. The cables around Matsu keep getting mysteriously cut definitely not by China[0], and there's nothing anybody can really do due to plausible deniability.

I think the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline has shown that even when a blatant act of sabotage occurs under the sea, as long as nobody claims responsibility, the debate will rage on for years about who it might have been. I'm not sure if we can really differentiate between state actors and terrorists any more when it comes to this kind of operation. Perhaps it's more a question of did anyone take responsibility, or did no one?

[0] https://apnews.com/article/matsu-taiwan-internet-cables-cut-...

There is rarely an incentive to claim responsibility. And in the case of finding a smoking gun held by some national, the geopolitical consequences of pointing a finger are consequential. Nations must decide if those consequences are in their favor. For Nord Stream, pointing their finger either at Russia or Ukraine would result in consequences that are not in Nato's favor.

Re 2: The Houthis hold enough territory to be considered a nation-state (or at least a pseudo-nation-state) rather than just a terrorist group.

And it's not just Houthi (i.e. Ansar Allah), they have a government of sorts that is a coalition of more parties. We should probably accept the reality that they are just the same as the old North Yemen.

Wouldn’t it be almost impossible to assign blame? The ocean is big and submarines are not easy to find. Maybe if you had other evidence like SIGINT?

All it takes is a ship "forgetting" to raise the anchor and running it over the cable, snapping it.

Might have happened outside Finland last year [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/estonia-says-chinese-sh...

Also happened in Anguilla (Caribbean Sea) last year—some rich person's yacht ran over the ECFS cable [0]. Google went in afterwards and tested one of their moonshot projects—free-space laser communications [1]—as a temporary backhaul.

[0] https://theanguillian.com/2023/02/rapid-response-from-flow-r...

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231101666271/en/Lib...

Helpfully, the Houthis threatened to do this before it happened. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68231945

Perhaps not quite enough for a conviction in a court of law, but definitely a balance of probabilities.

People will assign blame whether or not they have proof. E.g. the threshold for blaming the Houthi's like the article does is near zero since "everyone" already see them as a threat in the area, so assigning blame or not is down to how much force Western powers will use, not whether or not they use it.

> Wouldn’t it be almost impossible to assign blame?

That didn't stop governments trying with nordstream.

It’s not like a nuclear war because it’s easy to blame it on a dragging ship Anker or whatever.

That's gotta be a might large battery.

(psst the weight the hangs from ships is "anchor")

I'm assuming that was autocorrect because it was capitalized too.

Subliminal advertising. Businesses pay people or have bots that use brand names in conversations where they could conceivably be a typo.

(Making that up, but seems plausible and simple enough).

Dual language keyboard - German. And Anker in German is anchor so didn’t register that it’s wrong psychological

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