SEEING RED: Wars, dots and the distant mirror of history

SEEING RED is an irregular column on Fremantle Shipping News by Barry Healy*. In this piece, Barry seeks the join the dots of what’s happening in the Mideast just now as well as look back for lessons in history.

Clever salespeople “sell the sizzle, not the sausage”. They sell customers the illusion of the satisfaction they will receive if they buy the product. As West Asian countries face ruination due to the illegal attack on Iran it is time to assess the promise and the reality of US hegemony. As the dots get connected we find Australia may have lessons to learn.

Dots, dots and more dots

In September 2025, Cornell University published a research paper entitled Why Language Models Hallucinate. On 28 February 2026, the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran was destroyed during the school day. One hundred and sixty-eight people, mostly girls between the ages of 7 and 12 were killed.

What joins these dots?

Within the first few days of US/Israeli bombing campaign, two advanced US radar systems, the AN/FPS-132 in Qatar and the AN/TPS-59 in Bahrain were obliterated. Other AN/TPY-2 Surveillance Transportable Radar systems have been destroyed in various locations, incapacitating anti-missile defences. On 7 March, US forces bombed a freshwater desalination plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island. Gulf states, which are 90% dependent on desalination for water are now potentially defenceless if Iran chooses to respond in kind to the US attack.

In early February, Alcoa was required to pay AUD$55 million for wilful damage it caused in the Northern Jarrah Forest between 2019 and 2025. Despite having breached its operational requirements, it has been allowed to continue under new national interests (read security) provisions.

How do these isolated incidents become one whole?

Finally, this is not the first time that there has been conflict involving Iran and military coalitions cobbled together opposing it. What do the Aegean islands of Delos, Naxos and Thamos have to do with Australia? If we gaze into the mirror of time, what reflection do we see of ourselves?

Death and Large Scale Language Models

Large Scale Language Models (LLMs) are the computing backbones behind Artificial Intelligence (AI). We are all familiar with asking a question of Chat GPT or some other AI version and receiving a quick, apparently credible, answer – which is incorrect. It is called an hallucination.

In this latest war against Iran there were over 2,000 strikes in just the first couple of days. How could target lists be so quickly developed and ranked?

According to the 4 March Washington Post, advanced AI technology “is identifying targets in Iran and quickly prioritizing them, supporting the massive military operations carried out by U.S. and Israeli forces.”

The Post says the US military’s Maven Smart System, “which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations.” Maven works in concert with Anthropic’s AI tool, called Claude, in producing precise coordinates for the munitions.

This is all marvellous until you realise that Artificial Intelligence does not exist, the term is a marketing sizzle obscuring the fact that these systems simply skim existing data, summarising, categorising and sorting what they find. At the beginning of computing science the expression GIGO, meaning “Garbage In, Garbage Out” was coined to highlight the major failing of computing systems: they are dumb.

As researchers Adam Tauman Kalai, Ofir Nachum, Santosh S. Vempala and Edwin Zhang explain in their Cornell University paper: “Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty.”

The AI business model comes with a hidden cost: what human beings call honesty. An article in the Silicon Valley industry newsletter, TechCrunch reports that OpenAI’s o1 model hallucinates 16% of the time, the more powerful o3 model fabricates data at double that rate (33%). Shockingly, their newest o4-mini is wrong nearly half the time (48%). As these models get “smarter,” they actually become less reliable. Other AI brands are no better.

In the case of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, it was built on land that had once formed part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base. According to the New York Times, in 2013 the school area was separated from the base, with a wall dividing the two. The Times reporters use publicly available satellite photos showing the construction of play areas and sports facilities.

Any human being could see that this was a school. But not AI. Maven and Claude hallucinated and the girls died. As icing on the cake there was a double tap attack: as rescuers arrived a missile dropped on them.

Just before the US attack on Iran began, Donald Trump banned the US military from using Anthropic’s tools, giving six months for a phase out. This was not because their deranged products might result in massacres of innocents. The Washington Post says the ban “came after a bitter fight between the company and the military over control of using the tools in mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.” Anthropic resisted such usage.

Carnaby Cockatoos and death metal

For six years Alcoa merrily rampaged through the Northern Jarrah Forest, violating the provisions of its licence to mine. It has entered into an Enforceable Undertaking with regulators, costing it AUD$55 million, and promised to rehabilitate its mess. According to the Biodiversity Council, this effectively rewards Alcoa. The AUD$55 million is probably cheaper than the amount that they should have been spending over those years.

Moreover, Alcoa has won a strategic assessment agreement with the government to cover future mining operations until 2045 and has gained a national interest exemption from national environmental law for 18 months, allowing them to continue clearing.

What “national interest” does Australia have in the destruction of its remaining native forests? The short answer is that we don’t, but the US military does.

The radar installations that have been destroyed by Iranian fire are not only massively expensive (starting price is over US$1 billion) their replacement also requires large amounts of Gallium. Production of that “rare earth” is overwhelmingly controlled by China. However, the Northern Jarrah Forest is also a significant source and Anthony Albanese has promised it to the USA.

So, elephantine, ineffective US war apparatuses get smashed in an illegal war and Carnaby Cockatoos lose their habitat.

In what manner does Australia gain in these transactions?

Surely, our great and powerful ally, the USA will defend us if its war mongering spills over to our shores? After all, isn’t this what AUKUS is all about?

Ancient Greece and long-forgotten lessons

Centuries ago, there was conflict between the Persian and European civilisations. Eerily, there are echoes today.

After the first Greco-Persian war, Athens, in 478 BCE approached the hundreds of smaller Greek island states with a deal. If they contributed a yearly payment into a treasury situated on the island of Delos, Athens would build an unbeatable navy and protect the members of what came to be called the Delian League.

View of Acropolis of Athens with Parthenon and Erechtheion from Filopappou hill. Credit Constantinos Kollias with Unsplash

Pretty quickly the Athenians started using the treasury to pay for more than naval ships. They beautified Athens with statues and temples and strengthened its walls. Thus, the glory that is Athens was built. After a couple of decades, the Athenians simply moved the treasury to Athens, to more easily pillage it.

When Naxos complained about this, the Athenians smashed their city state as an example to the others. When the people of Thamos took action because their mining resources were being taken over by the Athenians, their city was similarly destroyed. Thus was the Athenian Empire constructed.

When we gaze upon the brutal opportunism that is the US Empire under Donald Trump, should we consider those experiences from ancient Greece?

Dangerous kangaroos

The United States of America is a great, lumbering and dangerous animal in world affairs and it is led by an individual who has kangaroos loose in the top paddock. As shown by the examples of Venezuela, Iran and (as Trump now says) next Cuba, it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States.

However, the Gulf states now demonstrate the cost of believing the promise of US military protection, the “sizzle” of its alliance marketing. US technology simply isn’t up to much and now that the “sausage” of war has arrived the customers are friendless.

Do Australians actually need to look in the mirror of history to see what is right in front of our eyes?

By Barry Healy

* Barry Healy is a life-long Marxist who first came to Perth in the 1970s to establish the Resistance young socialist group. He was a founder of the Green Left and currently edits the Culture section of the Red Spark website.

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