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Comment by doughnutstracks | Hacker News Reader

Lots of shady missile deals went down in West Asia/North Africa in the 60/70s. Somewhat related: Israel was collaborating with Iran on missile projects but allegedly planned to deceive them by providing outdated missiles while using Iranian funds to develop superior versions for themselves [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project_Flower

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I read from somewhere that Italy, Libya and some South America country were developing missile programs together, too. Probably from a book about Fiat I think.

The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya was part of a century long power struggle between France and Italy over influence of Libya. Italy had a good relationship with Gaddafi, to the detriment of French influence. Europeans and the US understood the motivation behind France's push to intervene and were reticent to get involved (because of the internecine spat, not out of concern for Libya), but France got the UK on their side by appealing to anger over the Lockerbie bombing. Combined with France making it explicitly clear they were demanding it be a NATO operation (France had only just recently joined NATO and were expecting a quid pro quo), the rest of NATO acquiesced, under protest by Italy, of course.

I've always found it so interesting that the history of France's colonial imperialism in Africa and Asia seems so underappreciated in comparison to how absolutely detrimental it has been to the world.

Yeah. I first learned about France's ongoing imperialist ambitions in Africa reading the famous book on the Rwandan genocide, and ever since then French military involvement in seemingly random places in Africa stands out. I don't think any European country (except maybe Russia), or even the US, has maintained such a broad, cohesive, continuous imperial policy. Maybe it's well known to French people, and Europeans who follow politics, but I think for the rest of the world it's completely hidden.

France's actions in Africa were horrendous, but let's also not forget Asia. The Vietnam War was born out of the French Indochina War and France used anticommunist rhetoric to gain US support for its war against the Viet Minh.

While it would be unfair to say that America's actions in Vietnam were the fault of the French, there was certainly French encouragement if not outright manipulation.

Somebody here on HN told me once that France is the stupidest colonial power, because even though they had the most powerful army and one of the most powerful navies in Europe for a long time, they haven't been able to utilize them optimally, and have only lost more than they gained in their colonial ventures.

I tend to agree. Even now the French can't maintain a cohesive relationship with their client states, which is why they've lost influence severely in the Sahel. They just didn't know when to be cohesive and how to be extractive.

Colonial powers are almost always purely extractive and in the case of the European colonial powers, especially the French, they had an inherent belief in their cultural superiority, which was justification for their brutality.

Eh, it depends. Portugal and Spain were more integrating than the rest (Portugal literally shifted the government to Brazil during Pedro I, while the Spanish were intermarrying and handing out Spanish dukedoms to Native American monarchs).

France was dumb because they barely did any extraction while they exploited the natives.

> Portugal and Spain were more integrating than the rest...

I'm sorry but your characterization is very strange given the history. Portugal and Spain were just as brutal as the French.

Yeah, I realized that when going down the rabbit hole. In a certain respect, the French were the least asshole-ish of the lot, simply because they didn't know how to colonize and extract properly.

They were all despicably brutal beyond redemption. Some things simply can't be rationalized, justified or compared.

>but France got the UK on their side by appealing to anger over the Lockerbie bombing.

I don't believe anyone still gave a shit at that point or expected ghadaffi to redo after he paid for it. I think it might be better to look at the deals of BP and such in the area.

What, you mean the thing Microsoft did to IBM with DOS? Say it isn't so!

... DOS or OS/2? lol

I do suppose there are some analogies to be had if we talk about OS/2...

i.e. that was supposed to be more of a partnership versus a normal vendor agreement...

However my understanding is that there was a lot more org cultural friction; A big one being IBM's insistence on early versions of OS/2 supporting the 286 (as well as similar rigid bureaucratic support requirements) on top of the way IBM did 'Process Management' on developers as far as using LOC to measure productivity.

While I am a huge proponent of .NET, I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft...

But I've also worked at orgs that have run the gamut between 'too conservative' and 'a little bold/reckless' in engineering practices. Microsoft was able to iterate way faster and decided to tackle backward compatibility in different ways. They got tired of the bureaucracy of IBM, and I'll use Raymond Chen's story of a coffee maker to example the type of bureaucracy and how ironically simple it was to avoid; https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=10...

Where's the part about deceiving in the link? Aren't you conflating Iran-Contra that happened after the revolution?

It's in the last paragraph.

>While Pahlavi's authorities were happy with this project and its advancement away from the eyes of the US in their view, Israel had carefully duped Pahlavi to secure its interests. According to Israel's plan, during this project, contrary to what Iran's top officials think, Iran would only achieve obsolete technology.

and in the original source [0]:

>A very senior source in the Israeli Ministry of Defense reveals that the weapons deal with Iran was fraudulent. With each of the six joint proj-ects, the Israelis planned to deceive the Iranians by providing them only an outdated version of the weapon in question, while using Iranian money to build a new generation for Israel's exclusive use.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=NkxZcHL1xdYC&pg=PA6&redir_...

When I buy a laptop from Apple, they used my money to build the next generation of laptops… which inevitably come out within a year. I wouldn’t necessarily believe Iran was deceived without more.

This comment is clearly not in good faith but one can clearly understand that the current generation is out outdated.

Not sure what's the historical validity for that one source saying it was fraudulent, but this sure reads like anachronism. As someone that tries to defend him being part of selling ballistic missiles to Iran a very short time before it turning into a theocracy.

I am not completely inclined to believe Bergman because of me personally knowing one case where he published something completely wrong, and also this doesn't align with the cooperation Israel had with pre-revolution Iran.

In any case, it's theoretically possible, I guess

... and when you ship in laptop for repair, you'll get a worse torn out one back. /s

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