Free Sex, Bombs and Burgers by Peter Nowak Page A

everyintellectual and technological measure. In Iran, the former seat of the once-powerful Persian Empire, literacy rates are well below that of the Western world. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the current centres of conflict, barely 40 percent of the population can read. Internet use is well behind the developed world, and where people are actually surfing the web, censorship is rampant. While the blocking of pornographic sites isn’t too surprising in Muslim countries, the definition of “questionable” content also extends to political and free-speech websites and tools. During Iran’s election turmoil in 2009, the popular messaging service Twitter was blocked to prevent details of uprisings from spreading. Spending on science and technology in the region stands at a woeful 17 percent of the global average, ranking not just behind the West, but also behind some of the poorest countries in Africa and Asia. 2
    Technological advances have occurred in the Middle East in recent years, but perversely, they’ve been deployed by Western militaries. Since the early nineties, the United States and its allies have used the area as a sort of a laboratory for a vast array of new technologies, testing out their capabilities to see what works, what doesn’t work and what can be improved. The impetus behind all new war technology, the military tells us, is to save lives, but as we’ve already seen, there’s also the important by-product of technological spinoff into the mainstream, which is a key driver of Western economies. The recent conflicts in the Middle East are perhaps the best example to date of this terrible duality of military technology: while new war tools and weapons inflict tremendous pain, suffering and hardship on one group of people, they also create prosperity, convenience and comfort for others.
    Another Green Revolution
    Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 sparked a new wave of Western technological development. The ensuing liberation through Operation Desert Storm was of course motivated by oil interests, but it also provided an opportunity for the American military to field-test new technologies, some of which had been sitting on the shelf from as far back as the Vietnam War.
    Smart bombs, or precision-guided munitions, were the natural opposite of dumb bombs which, when dropped from a plane, simply used gravity to find their target. Smart bombs were developed during the Vietnam War and used lasers to find their mark—the target was illuminated by a beam that the bomb homed in on. The new weapons promised two key advantages over their precursors: they could improve the efficiency of bombing missions by decreasing the number of munitions needed, thus saving on costs and maximizing damage, and they could lower so-called “collateral damage,” or the destruction of non-military targets and civilian deaths. American forces used such bombs in small numbers in Vietnam, as did the British military during the Falklands War of 1982, but they proved to be of limited use in poor weather. It wasn’t until the Gulf War that they were improved and deployed on a large scale.
    General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander of the coalition forces, set the tone of the war in January 1991 when he dazzled reporters with a videotape of a smart bomb zooming through the doors of an Iraqi bunker to blow up a multi-storey command centre. The early stages of the war were going exactly as expected, Schwarzkopf announced, thanks largely to the incredibly accurate bombs being used. “We probably have a more accurate picture of what’s going on ... than I haveever had before in the early hours of a battle,” said the veteran general, who began his military service way back in 1956. 3 Like radar back in the Second World War, smart bombs were hailed by an impressed media as a “miracle weapon” that pounded the Iraqi military into a sorry state, making the ensuing ground war short and easy. Only 7 percent of the munitions dropped on