Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

DATELINE: US Airways flight from Reagan to Indy, 30 November 2006

Blur of two days.

Up very early Wednesday for one-way rental drive to Oak Ridge and great meeting with Steve DeAngelis and Shane Deichman and number of senior Lab officials to discuss future collaborations. ORNL is amazingly talented at getting federal money because they've got such a super reputation for on-time and under-budget work. What we're cooking up next will make the Esquire storyline seem small in comparison, not that the December issue didn't attract some serious attention from players in NYC...

But that's another trip.

Then a flight to DC, where I veg out at hotel, blogging as best I could.

Then this morn I'm up for 90-min brief at GAO's HQ, where I've never been before, to three defense/int'l security units totaling over 100 people. Great crowd, good interaction, solid questions.

Then to McLean for afternoon with Native Alaskan-owned IT firm that's found itself improbably wiring up the Green Zone and the Iraqi gov these past three-plus years. Solid 2 hours with them on brief and Q&A. Definitely see good possibilities there.

Then check voicemail from "Kudlow & Co.," but got it too late to accept invite, meaning I called back at 1500 and they had booked up already. Too bad because I was plenty warm.

Nice email from Sean showing that last weekend's column on Dems picked up more than any to date, with many of the pubs being ones that now plug me in each week, so that seems to be going well enough.

Also finalizing deal right now on piece for Fast Company that should be a lot of fun. That's a spin-off from Pop!Tech. Will write week after next, methinks.

Jenn, my colleague and master of my sked, says she's combining the Alaska university junket with the Hawaii trip for the international special ops conference. The Alaska university hosts don't want me coming in February, as they worry the weather will be too iffy (already 21 below in some places). That will be a more interesting trip now, getting HI and AK in the same journey!

Also landed invite for return address to student body at Leavenworth next fall, which is gratifying. Hoping Petraeus will still be there.

Story blurb catches my eye in USA Today: in written responses to senators ("Gates to push for postwar planning"), SECDEF nominee promises "to improve the department's capabilities in this area."

Very nice to hear that Gates has both an agenda and some real ambition for his two years. If aggressive, he can still accomplish a lot. Nothing like the tail-end of a second term to load up on bureaucratic changes. Seriously, I see it happening.

Last bit from David Gallula's classic (published by old Harvard haunt, the Center for International Affairs, where Kissinger and Brzezinski both cut their academic teeth), Counterinsurgency Warfare (a book Petraeus makes everyone at Leavenworth read), where one is reminded that the Chinese communists originally devised the calculation that "revolutionary war is 20 per cent military action and 80 per cent political."

Here's the best part from Gallula himself:

It seems natural that the counterinsurgent's forces should be organized into two types of units, the mobile ones fighting in a rather conventional fashion, and the static ones staying with the population in order to protect it and to supplement the political efforts.

So even with the classic COIN volume, the Leviathan-SysAdmin logic surfaces.

If Gallula is mainstream, then how far off can I be?

ARTICLE: "Fujian: Digging for victory; A Chinese province woos Taiwan for the sake of its own economy," The Economist, 25 November 2006, p. 39.

You can try a little tenderness, or you can buy a little tenderness...

ARTICLE: "Hezbollah Helps Iraq Shiite Army, U.S. Official Says: Iran Seen as Facilitator," by Michael R. Gordon and Dexter Filkins, New York Times, 28 November 2006, p. A1.

Iran is the one country standing between Bush and peace in the Middle East. Bush can't solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without its say-so, because the mullahs are the biggest potential spoilers in the region. They fund the terrorist groups that can effectively veto peace efforts in both Jerusalem and Baghdad. Iran is the one regional power that can still menace the Gulf militarily. Everyone else there operates in Tehran's shadows

Well, that was interesting.

We maxed out our host, and everything pretty well broke. All of the posts are still there. Everything linked from the home page is there. But most of the tweaks, customizations, etc. are not there. I can re-import all of the almost 4000 posts. The comments should still be there.

Not to be too Pollyanna, but I'm actually looking forward to the comparatively blank slate. I noticed already that the StyleCatcher Plugin that I could never get to work is now working. Maybe I can jazz things up around here and even get other plugins to work.

My current plan is to hold off on opening comments back up and importing the old posts. I want to tweak some things first and figure out how they're all going to work together.

Your patience is appreciated.

ARTICLE: U.S. Army Battling To Save Equipment: Gear Piles Up at Depots, Awaiting Repair, By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, December 5, 2006; Page A01

And that's not right, given the obvious strain on our ground forces, as indicated by this story.

My weekend column, BTW, speaks exactly to this issue with the incoming SECDEF.

The Movable Type StyleCatcher plugin, which is finally working, gives me a lot more power to change the look of the weblog instantly.

Trying this one out. No comments yet. Email me (webmaster@thomaspmbarnett.com) if you have a pertinent comment ;-)

We are also testing a different look for the home (index) page which may or may not be replicated over here.

WEBSITE: Kiva: loans that change lives

Thanks to Peter Kay for sending this in.

ARTICLE: Offering Video, Israel Answers Critics on War, By GREG MYRE, New York Times, December 5, 2006

ARTICLE: U.S. Troops in Iraq Shifting to Advisory Roles, By THOM SHANKER and EDWARD WONG, New York Times, December 5, 2006

I mean, of course Hezbollah played "dirty." That's what underdogs do.

Recent news stories indicate Israel is rethinking tactics and training following Lebanon. This is good.

Also good to see the U.S. Army finally making the embedded advisory effort more prominent.

ARTICLE: Censorship fears rise as Iran blocks access to top websites, by Robert Tait, The Guardian, December 4, 2006

Vonne's a frickin' Beautiful Mind on such things, and IMDB is where all her superiority is daily confirmed.

Is this not the sad sort of tired authoritarianism we once witnessed in the on-its-last-legs Brezhnevian USSR? I mean, really. Any doubts who wins this "Titanic" struggle?

Thanks to Michal Shapiro for sending this in.

Great factoid:

Indian Wars participants received 426 Medals of Honor. The only wars that attracted more were the Civil War (1,522) and WWII (464).

Korea, Vietnam and WWI collectively garnered approximately 500.

I welcome the blog's problems forcing both Sean's big clean-up (cheap bastard that I am, I don't mind him working a bit more for that Xmas bonus he's already earned!) and a down-time from posting for me.

I wanted the break and am glad all that past voluminous output finally forced.

Just needed the break, especially Enterra's trajectory offers no let-up.

That family holiday looms, and I find myself moving toward the light...

ARTICLE: “Israel revamps its training after Hezbollah conflict: General says tough fight in Lebanon showed need for improvements,” by Yaakov Katz, USA Today, 4 December 2006, p. 15A.

Started getting USA home delivered because I like it, even as former newspaper editor spouse declares it almost unreadable.

Still, I’ve learned to like it so much on the road…

Good story here on how Israel’s already learning from Lebanon’s and Hezbollah’s splendid little war-not-designed-to-be-won.

Art Cebrowski liked to say that the Sovs sized our forces (Leviathan) during the Cold War, so the logical question today is, “Who’s sizing our emerging SysAdmin force?”

One would assume the best candidate is the best operating version out there on the web today: Hezbollah.

So if Hezbollah isn’t sizing our SysAdmin function somewhat (and I use the term “sizing” very loosely here to mean a lot of things), then we just ain’t paying attention.

Israel, on the other hand, is like our Marines: too small and too often surrounded to not pay attention to everything, especially those teachable moment of loss.

Israel lost almost as many soldiers (119) as we did in Iraq during the first phase (estimated at 137). The length of each conflict was roughly the same (roughly a month).

Israel claims to have killed 500-700 Hezbollah, not that that mattered whatsoever.

Like the U.S. military, then, Israel’s military “is overhauling its training and expanding a guerrilla warfare school in response to problems the army had in fighting Hezbollah militants in Lebanon this summer.” New items include a Hezbollah-style “red unit” (opposing training force) and a new urban ops training center.

All of this is back to the future for Israel, and it’s a fairly short and familiar jaunt.

Part of the blame for this poor display? Israel’s long-term focus inside the West Bank and Gaza. Too much occupation and not enough guerrilla work, apparently, along with a growing unfamiliarity among many troops with more high-end items like tanks.

Even within a military as SysAdmin-oriented as Israel’s, spanning the breadth of skills from high-intensity to the more mundane policing is difficult. Again, the similarity to our Marines shows.

ARTICLE: “Asia Finding Rich Partners In Mideast,” by Heather Timmons, New York Times 1 December 2006, p. C1.

Fascinating bit showing how Asia’s increasing resource pull on the region is changing everything. Still our blood, but now both their oil and their petrodollar recycling.

Nothing speaks to the reordering of the global economy more than this, because it shows how the rise of the New Core has effectively shoved it between the oil-rich states and their usual target for petrodollar recycling--the Old Core West.

What was traditionally shopped around in London and New York in terms of public offerings of Chinese companies is now quite often offered up exclusively to the Saudis and other Middle Eastern investors. It starts, this relationship, at the top:

While China has long sought to cultivate closer ties with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries because of its need for oil, a tour of China, India and other Asian countries this year by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a state visit to Riyadh by President Hu Jintao in April have done much to encourage nonoil financial transactions between the countries.

HSBC calls this new flow “east-east” transactions, or from “mid” to “far,” I say.

So now the oil-rich Middle East recycles through the New Core East and the New Core East, in turn, recycles its trade surplus with the Old Core West.

In short, we’ve been disintermediated. Not a bad thing. In fact, a rather nifty expression of the “economic reformation” dynamic I described in BFA (plus a Knoxville column way back when; plus a staple slide in my current brief) that links the “lead geese” in Islamic Asia to the local replicators in the Middle East (one thinks naturally of Qatar, starring in the role of “Singapore”).

It is estimated that the Middle East will buy upwards of $20-30 billion dollars of Asian assets next year, compared to just $3.2B of U.S. assets this year (excluding the “nefarious” private equity firms).

Quick, somebody tell Michael Moore his soda-straw view of global energy finance is now both wrong and hopelessly outdated!

What’s interesting it that this east-east stuff is actually increasing Western banks’ profile in both ends of this dyad: they want to be more present in the Middle East to get in the way of this money flow and in the Far East to do . . . well . . . the same:

… bankers who work in the Middle East and Asia say they are looking at a promising pipeline of pending mergers, and negotiations are just beginning on dozens of others.

“We’re definitely seeing a big jump in terms of deal flow between the Middle East and Asia, and Southeast Asia and China in particular,” said Georges Makhoul, president at Morgan Stanley for the Middle East and North Africa.

No secret as to why this flow picks up:

The Middle East’s oil and gas is vital for China, Japan and all the fast-growing markets in the Asia-Pacific region. And the Middle East’s capital and liquidity generated by all that oil wealth is searching for investments with high returns, rather than low-return government bonds like United States Treasury securities.

Quick! Somebody tell Tom Friedman that China is funding both sides of the war on terror!

“Yes,” says the Chinese magnate years later, “your point is both true and completely irrelevant.”

I say again, lock in China at today’s prices.

In the end, this growing connectivity between Asia and the Gap Middle East is good and welcome and inevitable. The thicker the ties, the better the connectivity.

A number of countries in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf Cooperation Council have developed an Asia strategy that looks far beyond energy trade, noted the former OPEC director of research, Adnan Shihab-Eldin, in a report prepared for an International Monetary Fund meeting in Singapore this September. Already there are several free trade agreements pending between the gulf council and China, India and other Asia countries. They are expected to be signed long before a free trade agreement between the gulf and the European Union, he said.

Trade between the Middle East and Asia more than doubled from 2000 to 2005, reaching $240 billion last year. That number reflects rising oil consumption and prices, but it also includes a tripling of exports from China, India and Pakistan to the gulf.

Asian countries, particularly China and India, have made their own strategic plans clear in the Middle East as well …

As I have said many times before, the U.S. alone cannot possibly hope to connect the Middle East to the world, even as the Big Bang strategy of shaking things up grabs most of the headlines and--yes--even pushes it a bit as our aggressive approach in the region surely drives the Chinese toward closer ties to what they consider to be the most stable regimes in the region.

So yeah, the Middle East is joining the world, and the more it interacts with Muslim emerging markets in Asia, the better the positive influence these “lead geese” have on the region’s evolution.

ARTICLE: Iraqi Premier Moves to Plan Regional Talks, By EDWARD WONG and HELENE COOPER, New York Times, December 6, 2006

Good move by Maliki. Establishes his independence a bit more. Logical move. Makes him seem responsive to ISG.

By doing so, Maliki further builds the momentum toward the regional accommodation so long resisted by Bush but now apparently in the works via State.

But we need to be realistic here: the likely prices demanded by Damascus and Tehran will be substantial, rendering somewhat silly any attempted good cop (State), bad cop (White House) routine. So I would expect Ahmadinejad to continue his mocking of the Bush-administration-that-cannot-quite-bring-itself-to-admit-it-is-officially-talking-to-Iran-even-as-it-opens-channels-to-negotiate-with-Iran. PR-wise, this can easily end up looking worse than simply and openly and officially talking to Tehran by making our shame self-evident.

Then again, why should such obvious security setbacks abroad and such obvious political setbacks at home dent the hubris whatsoever?

POST: What to Expect from Bob Gates, By Blake Hounshell, Carolyn O'Hara

How Gates views China, says strategic planner Thomas P.M. Barnett, is “the most important question one can ask of him.” The job of the secretary of defense is to “translate policy choices into budgets,” notes Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies—and China policy plays a leading role in shaping budget and procurement choices in the United States. Taiwan has been neglecting its own defense recently, says Cordesman, even as China is growing stronger militarily and economically. Gates testified privately last week that China “seeks to integrate Taiwan peacefully if possible.” Nevertheless, he affirmed the Bush administration’s policy of maintaining “capabilities to resist China’s use of force or coercion against Taiwan.” No shift in China policy would mean “no significant shift of resources from the Big War crowd to the much-stressed Army and Marines,” says Barnett.

ARTICLE: From Victory to Success: Can Iran and the United States Bridge the Gulf?, By George Perkovich, Foreign Policy

I went through Harvard's Russian Research Center's MA program with George, one of the most intensely thoughtful guys I've ever met (plus a very nice guy). He's made a career since in studying nuclear proliferation in the Indian Ocean rimlands, so he's to be taken seriously.

This is a short, mind-expanding piece, but well worth reading.

My favorite bit: Tehran and Washington are the two most despised and disruptive forces in the Gulf region right now, so getting the intentions of each more out in the open would be an end to itself.

Very sensible stuff, very coolly delivered.

ARTICLE: Disappointed for different reasons, By Mark Arsenault, Providence Journal, December 7, 2006

War protester Stephany Kern, who lost her son to a car bomb in Iraq, laments the lack of "quick action" in the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, which were made public yesterday after weeks of speculation and leaks.

On the far other end of American politics, military strategist and author Thomas Barnett — a former professor at the Naval War College in Newport who penned articles advocating a war with Iraq — dismissed the recommendations as "not too bold."

Their politics could not be further apart, yet in interviews yesterday the protester and the military consultant agreed that the Iraq Study Group offered less than the hype would have suggested.

Actually, their politics COULD be further apart, but we'll give him a pass on that one ;-)

Barnett is the author of The Pentagon's New Map, and worked after the 9/11 attacks in the secretary of defense's Office of Force Transformation. Before the Iraq war, Barnett wrote articles in support of overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein.

The study group proposals are "not too bold," Barnett said. "The whole thing is getting a lot more positive press than the proposal would justify in my mind."

The diplomacy component of the recommendations includes direct talks with Iran and Syria, "which [President] Bush has already said he won't do," Barnett said. And the troop withdrawal proposals are "far enough into the future to be almost a non-deadline.

"And they're advocating something that has already begun inside the U.S. effort there, which is to put more people into embedded advisory roles within the Iraqi military. Nothing that they proposed, given the Bush administration's unwillingness to deal directly with Iran or Syria, is going to dramatically improve the situation. To me it's not the salvation it's being presented as in the press, and it has not justified the anticipation."

What should happen?

"I think we should have a regional security dialogue to put the Iraq situation and Israel and Palestine into a larger discussion," he said.

"I think it's crucial we accept the fact that because of our failures inside of Iraq, Syria and Iran are off the hook for now," he said. "Any change is not on the agenda. And we're going to have to pay a fairly steep price with Iran [for help with Iraq], which this administration is simply not willing to do. We'd have to back off on Iran's nuclear development question, and basically make enough of a security guarantee that we're not going after the regime. And then we'll have to accept that their definition of help in Iraq is not going to be making Iraq the place we want it to be, but making Iraq the place they want it to be.

"That's the price for getting somebody else to take ownership of your problem, which we've so far screwed up because we didn't take advantage in the first year after the war to accomplish what needed to be accomplished."

Barnett predicts the administration will approach Iraq "like doing Vietnam backwards," he said. In Vietnam, "we started with an advisory role and went to direct action. Here, we started with direct action and we're going to go to advisory."

POST: The fog of the “new cold war”, Economist.com, Dec 7th 2006

I don't dispute the facts here, nor the trajectory. I also agree this was easily forecast, as I noted in a recent post (Look who comes out of the Soviet experience most adept at moving ahead? Cops and criminals).

But trying to elevate Europe's task ahead (maturing both Russia and its relationship with it--a generational task at least) into a geo-strategic challenge on par with the Cold War is--as the preamble admits--risking the charge of absurdity.

Is there a serious bleed into security affairs? No.

Does the U.S. want any ownership of such a resurrected stand-off? Much less pick up the "near abroad" to boot? No way.

Do these concerns trump the clear requirement to focus on building more important relations and alliance with China (to include its maturation)? Hardly, and I'd say the same for India to boot (Hell, wouldn't even prioritize it over Brazil.)

Does the upside (alliance and resources tapped) on Russia potentially outrank that trio on the Long War? Maybe with serious effort, Russia ties India for long-term importance, but I think I get 95 percent of that help from Moscow with no effort beyond what the Europeans will need to do anyway, so why make the effort in a busy world?

In sum, I stipulate the backsliding (nothing is linear--not even America's membership under Bush!) but cannot summon the argument for recasting America's approach, Russia's membership in the Core (which isn't about democracy, as I've always argued), or Russia's relative importance in the Long War (again, why pick fights I don't need to divert resources I can't spare).

I'm an ideologue about markets, not democracy, and I suffer managed markets before I take on security burdens that time will heal on its own. My idealism, as I note in BFA, is long-term. My realism is short-term. That's how I think we hold a Shrink the Gap strategy together over the long haul, just like we did containment.

Thanks to Eric Hansen for sending this in.

Iraq Study Group Report, p. 93

RECOMMENDATION 75: For the longer term, the United States government needs to improve how its constituent agencies—Defense, State, Agency for International Development, Treasury, Justice, the intelligence community, and others— respond to a complex stability operation like that represented by this decade’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the previous decade’s operations in the Balkans. They need to train for, and conduct, joint operations across agency boundaries, following the Goldwater-Nichols model that has proved so successful in the U.S. armed services.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for sending this in.

NEWS: Students Cry Out for Freedom in Large Demonstration at Tehran University

Indeed, that's why I titled the original section in the Feb 05 article in Esquire: "Nixon Goes to Tehran."

Going on the offensive in the Long War ain't always about going kinetic, but it's always about shaking things up and putting the other guy on his heels.

You know what happens when I'm losing? Getting embarrassed? Running out of options?

I crank up the confidence even higher and try another path, another window, another door.

And I do so with maximum offense in mind.

My regime is sound. Iran's is not.

My economy's humming. Iran's is not.

My military is world class. Iran's is not.

My future is bright. Iran's is not.

Bush wastes our swagger and confidence on the worst things, like "stay the course," when our options are many and our strengths profound.

Our biggest boots-on-the-ground asset is staring us in the face--the Iranian people.

If only Bush would cowboy up when it matters and where it matters, it'd be wheels down in Tehran later today.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for sending this in.

ARTICLE: "NASA Plans Permanent Base For Exploration on the Moon," by Warren E. Leary, New York Times, 5 December 2006, p. A1.

I mean, imagine how bad our commercial airline industry would still be if we had put the government in charge ... say ... in 1910.

As I have always told my kids: I have but one personal dream for my old age: I want to die off this planet.

So this is somewhat good news, even as I fully expect to do it at some outer-space Hilton instead of any NASA facility.

ARTICLE: "U.S. Offers North Korea Aid For Dropping Nuclear Plans," by Helene Cooper and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 6 December 2006, p. A11.

An enabling dysfunctional relationship before, and destined to be one again.

This only shows how much Iraq has sabotaged this administration's entire national security strategy in the second term.

EDITORIAL: "The Iraq Muddle Group," Wall Street Journal, 7 December 2006, p.A18.

OP-ED: "No Way to Win a War," by Eliot Cohen, Wall Street Journal, 7 December 2006, p. A18.

The pullback argument is fine, but early 2008 doesn't exactly change anybody's debating points.

Wanting more advisers is good, but reports say this is already happening, so it basically ratifies something that perhaps the impending ISG report prompted, or maybe it would have happened anyway?

But that dynamic gets to the real purpose of such commissions, which is to provide political cover for changes truly worked out behind the scenes,and on what I consider to be the most important proposal here (the regional peace initiative and direct talks with Iran and Syria, both ideas being ridiculed here as essentially being too painful due to implied costs and perceived humiliation), but just the opposite seems to be the case here. Instead of providing cover for a serious change of course, Bush 43 seems to have suffered this public intervention by 41's minions only to appear that he's considered alternatives, when in reality it appears W. (and Cheney) have not. Otherwise Zellikow (and his 80 percent, or screw-the-Sunnis approach that I both support and have made myself going back to Feb 05) wouldn't be leaving..

The upshot?

Despite disavowing the tripartite path of acknowledging fake state Iraq is falling apart, that situation is indeed happening, quite probably with Maliki playing a very purposeful role on behalf of fellow Shiia. You can call it bad. You can pretend that "option" ain't on the table. But it's basically happening and if you don't want it to happen, you might want to take your lumps vis-a-vis Iran and Syria because ... buddy ... that's the price for screwing up Iraq.

Any hanging out the "regional war" bugaboo is similarly cynical: that's just the follow-on dynamic following the splitting-up of Iraq that we're letting happen because we screwed the postwar and now are being unrealistic about what results quite naturally from that failure.

In sum, I don't see W. changing course here. I think the Baker Commission was a complete charade, not in execution but in intent--primarily because the White House made it so.

EDITORIAL: "Long-awaited Iraq report offers 79 ways to 'cut and stay,'" USA Today, 7 December 2006, p.12A .

But it's realistic: it's really "pullback," not "pullout," because this is all about U.S. casualties.

Yes, we hear all about caring for Iraqi deaths, but let's be honest: Americans don't care about that and never did.

When American casualties go down, Iraqi ones will rise even more, and the same people who long castigated Rummy on too few troops can summarily ignore the results of this new , more drastic "tough love" version of the same.

And I'm sure way too few troops will accomplish what too few troops couldn't.

Wish Bush had been smart enough to bring enough of the right (i.e., New Core ) allies instead of too few of the wrong kind (the fragile, glass-jawed Old Core)? We all do.

Think we would have had to "give up" or "offer too much"?

Care to recalculate those costs today?

Yep, we're on a new server system. And tonight at 11:30 PST they'll be doing some work. You shouldn't notice it, but, if you do, that's why.

POST: Ayatollah’s health fails as Iran power struggle grows, by Michael Ledeen

Iran seems more ripe for co-optation than ever: the second cultural revolution bumping into 1989.

I was stunned by the move to shorten Ahmadinejad's term. I know, I know, a bureaucratic move to save money, but pleazzzzzzzze!

Ne slychaino! As the Sovs (and Russians to this day) liked to say...

Thanks to David Braun for sending this in.

ARTICLE: Waging Peace in the Philippines: With innovative tactics, U.S. forces make headway in the "war on terror", By Eliza Griswold

The trick about the Special Ops guys is that there are the true nasty trigger pullers (numbering in the dozens) and then there's all the MacGyvers who can do the direct stuff more than ably (still world class, actually) but really are the all-around guys who are like SysAdm-in-a-can (or pair of pants). Then there are the dedicated support and the more classic civil affairs personnel.

You can't call all of SOCOM SysAdmin, because of the work of that kernel group, but you clearly wouldn't call 'em all Leviathan either (people got in my face a lot when I tried that early on!).

So I make the rather simplistic split in the brief (trigger pullers to Leviathan and "rest" to SysAdmin) and let it go at that, because there's no point in getting too anal at 30,000-feet.

Now, Robert Kaplan, that romantic fellow, will sell you SOF as all the SysAdmin you'll ever need throughout the bulk of the Gap, but to me, that's too Powell Doctrine-ish in its tenor of limited regret (just enough to keep the place quiet but no serious long-term integration (sort of like keeping the patient on so many pain killers so that recovery is constantly put off)).

Having said that, there's clearly the argument that size matters in some situations (not just "go big" when needed but also "go small" when it makes sense), and it's the latter situations that have always kept these guys busy as hell.

All this said simply to note that it's always a complex argument about expanding SOCOM (like I did early in BFA) because the temptation is always to outsource all of the Long War to SOCOM and basically be done with it, as far as the rest of the force is concerned. Me? I don't think that's feasible, because it won't be enough, plus the rest of the mil will then retreat into its Leviathan shell, dismiss the SysAdmin's requirements and then find itself marginalized in way too many Gap scenarios (why wage war if the peace will be totally screwed?). So that's my base fear in romanticizing too much the SOF capability.

Nevertheless, as Kaplan so ably describes in "Imperial Grunts," there are amazing capabilities within this crowd, many of which I want to see popularized in the wider SysAdmin function, within which this story's personnel and their mission obviously belong.

Do you ruin these approaches by expanding them? I think the Gap's many scenarios demand we make the effort.

To me, the key thing to remember, even with a story this cool and hopeful, is that it describes a wedge of opportunity that has to be followed up with the "everything else" that--over time--locks the Philippines into the Core (an eminently do-able proposition, but one--that I note in BFA--will happen in concert with basically all of SE Asia being commensurately recognized in a series of fell swoops that result in--one day years from now--people in my business realizing that "we never seem to scenarioize war scenarios for those guys anymore" and it's basically a done deal and you move on).

So, to sum: a great story, a great indicator of where we need to go, but not something to fall in love with to the extent of believing it gets us off the hook.

Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this in.

ARTICLE: Llamas Enlisted to Thwart Biological Weapons, Charles Q. Choi, Dec 6, 2006

Cool story from a very sexy source. What I like about it is that it says we're not exactly out of ingenuity, now are we?

The resilience assets we'll uncover in this century of biological advances will be stunning, more than amply keeping us ahead of bad guys. How so? Aging of the population, all that associated wealth, and the universal desire to extend life. Most of these security-enhancing discoveries will be accidental, as in, scientists find them when they're looking for something else.

But that's why 9/11, in the big picture, was a gift from history, because now we know better, now we look, and now we take advantage of every chance we get.

No excuses now, just opportunities--and new markets--to capitalize.

Thanks to Vonne Barnett for sending this in.

ARTICLE: Dueling Views Pit Baker Against Rice, By DAVID E. SANGER, New York Times, December 8, 2006

The real struggle here remains between a serious worldview in Bush-Cheney and a realist's sense of what needs to get done right now to improve our global situation (Baker). The fit is there (as I note), but the willingness is not (on the administration's side).

ARTICLE: Bush Appears Cool to Key Points Of Report on Iraq: President Talks of Forming 'New Strategy', By Peter Baker and Robin Wright, Washington Post, December 8, 2006; Page A01

More proof that there was a profound White House-ISG disconnect. The myth of 41's people taking over seems to have been just that--a good media cover story and little else.

ARTICLE: "U.S. Commanders Advance Plan To Beef Up Training of Iraqi Army," by Greg Jaffe and Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 8 December 2006, p. A1.

No surprise on plan (been rolling out, PR-wise for days.

Also no surprise on timing (designed to appear responsive to ISG report--and it is).

No big deal on 250 percent increase.

But stunning is fact that 3.5 years into postwar, only 4K out of 140K U.S. troops in Iraq actually involved in training Iraqi Army.

Please!

ARTICLE: "Rice to press harder for revival of Mideast talsk," by Barbara Slavin, USA Today, 8 December 2006, p. 8A.

Errand-girl Condi sent to revive the Israeli-Palestinian talks, but don't expect a "tremendous amount of energy" to likewise be applied toward any dialogue with Syria and Iran.

This is very clever by Bush-Cheney: appear to work the region diplomatically and fail valiantly while letting Israel's supporters in Congress shoot down any talk of talk with Tehran.

Talk about a non-response to the ISG. It cannot get any more blatant than this.

ARTICLE: "The Persistently Poor: An Internal Report Criticizes World Bank's Efforts on Poverty," by Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post, 8 December 2006, p. D1.

Looking at 25 Gap/poor countries over the past decade, ones that received substantial aid, and the WB finds that "only" 11 experienced reductions in poverty.

Meanwhile, the global economy is growing like never before, so what to think?

First, 14 out of 25 ain't that bad, given the complexity of the task.

Second, remember the pool: you've gotta already be awfully sick to qualify for this doc.

That's not to say the aid delivered might suck, because it probably does.

But also ask yourself if the key to rural poverty reduction is rural development or urban industrial development.

I mean, is your goal to keep them on the farm or reduce the number on the farm?

If you develop the ag, then yes, you may push migration to cities, but if no jobs in cities, then you've just shifted poverty.

Granted, no development in the rural areas can accomplish the same thing, only giving you two problem populations instead of one.

But maybe the focus needs to be on raising the urban job draw to reduce the population trying to make do on the land. I mean, absent that, I'm not sure what aid really accomplishes in these countries.

And frankly the WB does get criticized for pushing such austerity and privatization efforts, and so if that effort is somewhat being made, then I'm back to my original caveats

ARTICLE: "U.S.-Bound Cargo to Be Screened at Six Ports," by Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post, 8 December 2006, p. A8.

In February the Department of Homeland Security will begin such a program at six, including a UK port run by the same Dubai-based operations manager that Congress scared off from picking up any work over here last year.

Dems have talked of wanting such capacity at all U.S. -bound ports, which I agree with.

I'd also like chem and bio scanning added.

Chertoff rejects the idea of 100 percent scanning, saying 30 percent would be a reasonable goal, positing that the other 70 percent could be done here in the states.

Time to start talking to NYC about those Verrazano Bridge sensors, me thinks!

ARTICLE: "Iraqis Near Deal on Distribution of Oil Revenues by Population," by Edward Wong, New York Times, 9 December 2006.

Previous deal said central gov got all revenue to distribute from existing fields, but future ones left to individual groups (Kurds, Sunnis, Shiia). That had the Kurds pushing hard to attract their own FDI into the industry. Yes, it would have come, but it will come much faster if outside companies feel like they're not walking into a Balkans-like situation (we seem to be doing the Balkans backwards--as in, take down the dictator and then let the genocidal clashes begin that complete the separation).

But this law could hold Iraq together just enough for the natural splitting up of the nation along sectarian lines to both unfold and yet not prove fatal to the state.

BAGHDAD, Dec. 8 — Iraqi officials are near agreement on a national oil law that would give the central government the power to distribute current and future oil revenues to the provinces or regions, based on their population, Iraqi and American officials say.

If enacted, the measure, drafted by a committee of politicians and ministers, could help resolve a highly divisive issue that has consistently blocked efforts to reconcile the country’s feuding ethnic and sectarian factions. Sunni Arabs, who lead the insurgency, have opposed the idea of regional autonomy for fear that they would be deprived of a fair share of the country’s oil wealth, which is concentrated in the Shiite south and Kurdish north.

The Iraq Study Group report stressed that an oil law guaranteeing an equitable distribution of revenues was crucial to the process of national reconciliation, and thus to ending the war.

Without such a law, it would also be impossible for Iraq to attract the foreign investment it desperately needs to bolster its oil industry.

So long as the sectarian violence flares, there will be a natural tendency for the three groups to pull apart, especially the two stable ones (Kurds, Shiia) from the one unstable one (Sunni triangle). But this law may just be enough to help give the central government just enough reason to remain relevant in the meantime that, as things settle down over time, Iraq can survive the inevitable bloodletting that comes after you take the dictator down who had held the nation together through institutionalized violence.

My wife and I have already bought/"loaned" several livestock animals for families spread across several Gap states.

Vonne made the arrangements and registered the transfers in my Dad's memory.

We really believe in this sort of thing, having "adopted" several Indian girls over the past few years.

Small stuff, but it keeps it real, and it just goes to show that anyone can shrink the Gap if they want and that we possess--in aggregate--more than enough resources to pull it off.

Wait, or just act.

ARTICLE: "China, Shy Giant, Shows Signs of Shedding Its False Modesty," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 9 December 2006.

This is important stuff, tracking nicely with my call in BFA that we need to look at China like the Brits looked at us in the beginning of the 20th century--you know, the "speak softly and carry a big stick" time of TR (actually an African saying he picked up on one of his many safaris there where he used his fire stick aplenty).

The Chinese are plenty aware of the historical comparisons, thus the study noted here:

BEIJING, Dec. 8 — China’s Communist Party has a new agenda: it is encouraging people to discuss what it means to be a major world power and has largely stopped denying that China intends to become one soon.

In the past several weeks China Central Television has broadcast a 12-part series describing the reasons nine nations rose to become great powers. The series was based on research by a team of elite Chinese historians, who also briefed the ruling Politburo about their findings.

Until recently China’s rising power remained a delicate topic, and largely unspoken, inside China. Beijing has long followed a dictum laid down by Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who died in 1997: “tao guang yang hui,” literally to hide its ambitions and disguise its claws.

The prescription was generally taken to mean that China needed to devote its energy to developing economically and should not seek to play a leadership role abroad.

President Hu Jintao set off an internal squabble two years ago when he began using the term “peaceful rise” to describe his foreign policy goals. He dropped the term in favor of the tamer-sounding “peaceful development.”

His use of “rise” risked stoking fears of a “China threat,” especially in Japan and the United States, people told about the high-level debate said. Rise implies that others must decline, at least in a relative sense, while development suggests that China’s advance can bring others along.

Yet this tradition of modesty has begun to fade, replaced by a growing confidence that China’s rise is not fleeting and that the country needs to do more to define its objectives.

I've had the privilege of meeting the scholars behind this program, and they impressed the hell out of me. Instead of being told by Europeans galore how shrink-the-Gap just wasn't something they'd be interested in, here I am talking to strategists who see it as both inevitable and understand the strategic interests shared by the U.S. and China in making it happen.

When I spent time with PLA think tankers last time, I told them they needed to come up with a new grand myth for their military and that the "revolutionary war" one was hopelessly out of date for their current and future purposes. TR had his San Juan Hill and America had its Spanish-American war as some easy, early-on expressions of "rising America" (not toooo threatening). Then TR did his stint in settling the Russo-Japanese War (getting the Nobel Peace Prize--the only sitting U.S. president ever to do so). Then there was our rescue of Europe in WWI, repeated in WWII.

America entered the 20th century with little sense of its place in the world, with a military that had little sense of its role beyond its borders. But by 1950 we were this giant astride the planet, a mindset we've retained since.

We need to bring China along on such a ride, creating careful and easy opportunities. The tsunamis should have been one (as I noted in BFA), but we did not take advantage (nor did the Chinese).

But have no doubt, the recasting of the PLA from "revolutionary war" myth to stabilizing great power military is being calculated as I write.

And I, possessing my own foreign policy now (and PNM soon in Chinese "as is," mind you), will do everything in my power to make sure it goes well.

Why?

Best deal strategically possible for the U.S. across the 21st century. Keeps us safest. Makes the Long War a predetermined win. Puts us in the best position to make the most money within the Core and in making markets throughout the Gap.

This ain't about making nice or being naive. This is about getting what we want at the best possible price while trusting the Chinese to be Chinese--and nothing else.

Put that your realist's pipe and smoke it!

DATELINE: Indy, 9 December 2006

A blur to surpass most blurs ... with photos to be stuck in by Sean when he gets the chance.

Monday I got up feeling awfully bad from the night before (fear it was some seafood), but had to get my ass through the day, which mostly involved getting down to the Florida panhandle (Pensacola to be exact).

So a couple of flights (through Atlanta), during which I penned the weekend column (editing it over the next day). I get to the Gulf-side resort (place smacked of being a spring break hangout--you just got that "shining" of lots of college-age sexapades: "Come play with us, Daaanny!") and conk out about midnight, after a nice workout.

This is sunrise on Gulf Coast from vantage point of my hotel balcony at Fort Walton Beach near Hurlburt AFB where I keynoted NATO conference on PSYOPS Tuesday morn.

Up really early on Tuesday, I work out again (the high point of my discipline for the week) and then drive to Hurlburt Field, where the US Air Force's special ops command is, as is Joint Special Ops University, where I spent the morning keynoting a NATO conference of PYSOPs experts/practitioners.

Then jump in car and dash back to Pensacola airport for two flights up to LaGuardia. Cab into town and have spectacular dinner with Mark Warren and Steve DeAngelis, where we plot various lines concerning Steve's book proposal. We knock off at 1030 and then Steve pilots us back to Yardley PA in his car. I hit the hay at 0100.

Escape from New York with Steve after late dinner. The tree at Rockefeller Tues night from the street as we pass by.

Up early on Wednesday for meeting with biz dev guy from Brooklyn Polytechnic (actually, just known as Polytechnic U now), and then some office work.

Then Steve and I drive to DC, expecting a meeting at the National Intelligence Council, but that falls apart to--no surprise--the ISG report coming out and triggering this and that across the various bureaucracies.

So I swim and workout and take a dinner with Steve. Then we do a board meeting phone conference call that goes deep into the night.

After going to bed late yet again and getting up early yet again, Thursday begins with a visit to some Intelligence Community seniors at Bolling AFB. That went well.

Then Steve and I check out some office space for Enterra's Washington ops center, because we're growing out of our current space.

After Mexican lunch, we bolt in Steve's car to Bethesda for meeting with 15 or so of Lockheed Martin's corporate HQ strategic planners. I give them a quick brief and the conversation takes off with Development-in-a-Box. By the time Steve's done explaining Enterra, the top guy in the room has designated four lines of future potential collaboration. That meeting felt good from top to bottom.

Another workout and I try to hit a movie but can't find one (Steve's got yet another dinner), so I wander into the Pentagon Centre Borders and sign a bunch of paperbacks. Then dinner in my room.

Up way early on Friday for meeting at Accenture's HQ. Then a quick all-hands at Enterra's Washington office. Then a dinner to get a hugely important new employee to ink the deal on his employment (we wanted this guy so bad, I pushed back my flight to make this lunch happen). On the way out of town, I push another target (over my cell) into finally inking his deal as well. Both guys are huge talents leaving the government after many years in, so nabbing both in the same day felt great.

Fly home to Indy and then immediately get on a conference call with Enterra's board and Steve. That goes to about 8pm.

Then Tombstone, "Pirates of the Caribbean 2" with the kids in the home theater, and I collapse.

Today is a race involving hair cuts for all, a birthday celebration in Terre Haute, and racing back here for early Mass tomorrow (we've got duties). Then I crank the next column early so I can start on the Fast Company piece I gotta finish the first draft of by mid-week.

Somewhere, in the distance, a family vacation in Hawaii looms, but I have few details. Must be on a need-to-know basis. I'm assuming Jenn and my spouse have worked everything out in advance...

Ok, this weblog mess has got me really behind. So, for all of the links I have stored up, I'm just going to list the weblog linked to the post that links to Tom.

But, had you noticed I turned on Trackbacks to see how it went? Seems to be going ok so far. So let's list the posts that trackbacked to Tom first:

+ The Castle Argghhh
+ The Moderate Voice (1)
+ The Moderate Voice (2)
+ The American Mind

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program ;-)

+ China Law Blog
+ Strategy Unit
+ The Moderate Voice (again)
+ Asia Logistics Wrap
+ ZenPundit
+ The Glittering Eye
+ Transitioning from Ship to Ship
+ futuramb blog
+ new turcopundit
+ The Moderate Voice (4)
+ et alli.
+ PurpleSlog
+ Ernest
+ Dreaming 5GW
+ Outside the Beltway
+ COCKALORUM
+ Wake up Americans

Thanks to one and all, especially The Moderate Voice ;-)

update: I found these links squirreled away, too.

+ Indistinct Union
+ New World Notes (Second Life)
+ Boing Boing (picking up the New World Notes post)
+ Global Cop
+ JP
+ Looking Both Ways with Tobias Stone
+ Reason
+ Congressman John Hall (got this link from Reason)
+ Fester's Place
+ We've got bigger problems than a butter shortage

Now I'm done for real ;-)

Nation building on our plate

Incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declares one of his goals will be improving our military's performance in postwar environments. It's tempting to assume any pullback from Iraq signals the end of messy nation-building efforts, but recent history says otherwise, making Gates' commitment vitally important.

During the Cold War, America engaged in nation building once every decade, but since then it's been closer to once every couple of years, especially when you consider the inevitable splintering of fragile states.

Read on at KnoxNews
Read on at Scripps Howard

Also seen on:
+ Capitol Hill Blue

Note: for some reason Knoxville cut my column down considerably, erasing virtually every aside, many of which were quite important to the story's meaning.

Why? I have no idea, especially since I turned in the usual 720.

Go to Scripps if you want to read the full text, which I consider to be a much better version.

ARTICLE: Backstory: To help Cambodians is Bernie's law: Whether it's red tape or red carpet, former Newsweek foreign correspondent Bernie Krisher will stomp on it to get his way, By Tibor Krausz, The Christian Science Monitor, November 30, 2006

Pretty neat example of another guy with his own foreign policy!

Thanks to Eddie for sending this in.

ARTICLE: For Iraq's Sunnis, Conflict Closes In: Mixed Neighborhoods Unravel as Shiite Militiamen Expand Violence, By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, December 11, 2006; Page A01

And once Sunniland becomes the playground for the jihadists,then the Big Bang would be restarted, with "moderate" Sunni dictatorships on the chopping block.

How many map lines get redrawn then?

Problem is, Bush can't decide to fix Sunni and accept Shiia revival regionally. He wants to have his cake and barf it too.

SOURCE: Department of Energy's International Energy Outlook 2006, found online at http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/oil.html

The IEO is always to be taken with a grain of salt, especially the long projections into the future. What is more interesting is how the numbers in current years and in the deep out-years change by issue. For example, until recently, both North America (basically the U.S.) and Asia took larger percentages of the Persian Gulf's oil (closer to two-thirds for Asia and closer to one-fifth for North America). Now each is down quite a bit (Asia takes just over 50% and North America a mere 11%). Who's picking up the slack?

Non-OECD ROW, which translates roughly as the oil-importing Gap (Non-Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development Rest-of-World). The oil-importing Gap accounted for a whopping 26% of Persian Gulf exports in 2003 (the year of last measure; or 5.9 of 22.5mbd), but will see that percentage drop to about 22% in 2030 (7.4 of 34.3mbd), due largely to Asia's growth.

The key numbers as I cull them:

-->North America takes 11% of PG's oil in 2003 (2.5 of 22.5mbd, or millions of barrels a day) and will take 10% in 2030 (3.5 of 34.3mbd)

-->Asia, both OECD and developing, took 50 percent of PG oil in 2003 (11.4 of 22.5mbd), and will take 58% in 2030 (20 of 34.3mbd)

-->Viewed from the perspective of the importer, the PG accounts for 19% of North America's imports in 2003 (2.5 of 13.5mbd), and in 2030 the PG will account for 18% (3.5 of 19.4mbd)

-->The PG accounts for 63% of Asian imports (and 32% of China's mere 2.8mbd) in 2003 (11.4 of 18mbd) and will account for the same percentage in 2030 (20 of 31.5). The percentage of China's imports from the PG will rise dramatically from 32% in 2003 (0.9 of 2.8mbd) to 53% in 2030 (5.8 of 10.9mbd). And yes, that means China's imports will more than triple between 2003 and 2030.

-->Africa OPEC (west and north) exports 1.7mbd to North America in 2003 and will export the same absolute number in 2030. China's total 0.3mbd in 2003 will rise to 1.6mbd in 2030, or basically our equal. In 2003 China and North America both get about 12% of their imports from Africa. In 2030, the projection says that share will drop to about 8% for North America, but rise to 15% for China.

-->The PG accounts for 43% of world trade in 2003 (22.5 of 52.8mbd), and that share is predicted to rise to just 44% in 2030 (34.3 of 77.3mbd).

-->Non-OECD (New Core + Gap) sucked down 20.4mbd in 2003, but will see that amount rise to 37.3mbd by 2030, a jump from 39% of global imports to 48%. In absolute terms, an increase of 83%. Developing Asia, viewed alone, accounts for most of that growth, jumping from 9.9mbd to 22.3 (or from 19% of the world's imports to 29%).

What does this say?

Europe and America together take about 20% of the PG's oil today, whereas Asia takes half and the ROW gets 30%. In 2030 the West proper will take about the same 20%, while Asia takes out almost 60% and the ROW makes do on about 20%.

Europe is more dependent on the PG than the U.S. is. In 2003 it accounted for 25% of Europe's imports and in 2030 that percentage will rise to 28%. North America will sit steady at just under 20% of its imports from the Middle East (with the true U.S. percent closer to about 15%, according to other sources.)

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that for 2005, total U.S. oil supply broke down as follows: 55% from North America and 12% from South America. Another 14% from Africa and 4% from Europe/Russia. The Middle East accounted for 15%.

Looking at it this way, I would say about 70% of U.S. oil comes from pretty stable places (I know, Chavez talks, but he still sells), with only 30 percent coming from the Middle East and Africa. Judging by these projections, that percentage will stay roughly the same in the future.

Meanwhile, you could say China's imports are over 40% dependent on the Middle East and Africa today (43%), with that percentage rising to almost 70% dependent (68%) in 2030.

So to sum up, U.S. dependency on foreign oil is about 70-30 safe-to-unsafe today, and that will likely remain stable in coming years. China's, however, is about 60-40 safe-to-unsafe today, reversing to about 70-30 unsafe-to-safe in 2030.

I like a nice 70-30 split, you know, like the Chinese like to grade Mao and Stalin--as in, 70 percent good, 30 percent bad.

Here ends my data diddling. Gotta start the Fast Company piece.

POST: Ahmadinejad May Be Heading for His First Major Political Defeat, by Amir Taheri, Arab News

TM has been tracking this election with a lot of concern, saying it could portend much about Iran's future. He was right, but his pessimism seems--as both of us are glad to note now--unfounded (knock on wood!).

Ahmadinejad is like Iran's Gingrich: very exciting trajectory but unlikely to last long.

TM, originator (for me at least) of the phrase soft-kill, is now feeling more optimistic.

Let that be a lesson for him and others in the same way the USSR's rapid collapse was for this (still) recovering Soviet scholar.

There are many ways to skin the cat--or the Gap, for that matter.

I think we're not anticipating success effectively enough with Iran. We may be under the delusion that our hard stance is holding sway, but it's really the Iranian people themselves delivering the change (no pretense on direct electoral power, but read between the lines and note how the mullahs do note the social signals from below), thus they remain the essential target of the soft-kill strategy (which works already far more than we realize, so cut off from Iran are we!).

Thanks to TM for sending this in.

ARTICLE: Experts Advise Bush Not to Reduce Troops: President Looking Beyond Study Group's Plan, By Michael A. Fletcher and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, December 12, 2006; Page A01

ARTICLE: To Stem Iraqi Violence, U.S. Aims to Create Jobs, By Josh White and Griff Witte, Washington Post, December 12, 2006; Page A01

You might think the "more bodies" argument from the military experts should hold sway, but instead read the far more stunning article that says our personnel in Iraq are finally going to prioritize job creation like crazy. Be amazed to read about the 200 factories the CPA closed, helping create a 70 percent unemployment rate that fuels the insurgency and sectarian strife today. Listen to Pete Chiarelli, who cracked this code on infrastructure and utilities during his first tour, say that more jobs beats more soldiers right now.

I wrote this so long ago I can't even tell you which book it appeared in: "Jobs are the exit strategy in Iraq."

Flabbergasting to think how little priority this goal has received up to now. Few things describe the crux of our postwar occupation better.

Day lost to 4K on the Fast Company piece.

Warren's threatening to command a piece for him as penance for my treachery!

I'm happy with the piece so far, meaning it feels like I'm stretching arguments in new ways and into new territory.

ARTICLE: Americans Say U.S. Is Losing War: Public, Politicians Split on Iraq Panel's Ideas, By Peter Baker and Jon Cohen, Washington Post, December 13, 2006; Page A01

Truth is, as ugly as the Balkans were, that's "victory"--plain and real. And no, it doesn't look like V-E or V-J day. In fact, victory comes years after the last acts of mass violence have ended (during which time countless scores are settled on an individual basis--either legally or extra-legally).

But Americans define victory in this context as one thing: our deaths end and we leave. Done fast, it's victory, no matter how meaningless the outcome. Done slow, it's a loss no matter what good is achieved.

Is that unrealistic? Sure. But we like our wars like our movies: clear winners and clear losers and all wrapped up within our 24-hour media cycle.

ARTICLE: Army, Marine Corps To Ask for More Troops, By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, December 13, 2006; Page A01

If Gates can go easy on China (following reports that he will go the way of mentor Scowcroft versus what one might imagine are his spook tendencies) then all shifts are possible. If not, then you'll hear the "blip" argument on Iraq (Iraq is just a blip, strategically speaking--as in, something you recover from later but do not permanently adjust to, thus the odd bit where China hawks align themselves with defeatist-pullout arguments), then the ground-pounders continue to be screwed.

ARTICLES: Saudis Say They Might Back Sunnis if U.S. Leaves Iraq, By HELENE COOPER, New York Times, December 13, 2006

As far as I'm concerned, nothing re-energizes the Big Bang better right now that calling in the Saudis' bluff/promise on Sunniland support. They refuse to fix (so far those pricks only build a fence on their border), so let's help them step up to the plate and fight Iran for us.

Better to socialize locally, and get Al Qaeda's real target far more in the game.

ARTICLE: The Global Poor Are Getting Richer, Faster, By James Peron, TCS Daily, 13 Dec 2006

Great write up of report. What I can't tell is what their definition of "developing" is. If China and India included, numbers encourage less.

Still, it shows the Gap can be brought up, so long as we continue to grow the Core.

May use this report on an upcoming article, so thanks a lot Nathan Machula.

Finished the Fast Company first draft today at 6k.

ARTICLE: Somalia’s Islamists and Ethiopia Gird for a War, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times, December 14, 2006

The news on Somalia and Ethiopia gearing up for some old school state-on-state action reminds us of the tasks ahead with Africa, which are substantial.

Then again, if you're in the war business, this is the emergent market.

ARTICLE: Joint Chiefs Advise Change In War Strategy: Leaders Seek No Major Troop Increase, Urge Shift in Focus to Support of Iraqi Army, By Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, December 14, 2006; Page A01

On the Joint Chiefs' recommendation, I don't see much difference from the ISG. In sum, it also says pullback from combat, train up Iraqis and support them, and... Oh yeah... always hunt terrorists.

I think we have a consensus, but since the Chiefs won't comment on dialogue with Syria or Iran (foreign policy turf), this way Bush can say he's listening to his generals while he blows off the ISG's call for a regional security/diplomatic initiative.

That, my friends, is some military cover.

...Is too short, but the next destination is too much fun to delay: Hawaii with the family to finally mark my 20th anniversary with Vonne.

Quick question (email me): what's the drill with TSA if you've got serious hardware inside your body? This will be son Kevin's first time through airport security...

Another week, another blur, mostly because every spare moment sees my head buried in my laptop on the Fast Company piece.

Tuesday I fly commuter to Philly and spend the night pitching potential investors with Steve in the basement of a neurologist. That was fascinatiing and so quintessentially American. Really stunning to think Steve's done this non-stop for three-plus years (all angel investors for us to date), and I was really honored that he now trusts me enough for this high-pressure, high-risk/reward venue. I haven't met an audience yet I can't handle in 16 years and yet, no question this one was uniquely challenging. No fools, so no money easily parted. Still, way cool to be pitching with the money thing so close at hand. Usually more distance in my line of work (like the fabled "out years" in a Fed budget).

Wednesday Steve and I drive up to NYC and lunch with former Under Secretary of Navy Jerry Hultin (Clinton), who's now president of Brooklyn Polytechnic. We're trying, among many things, to get those sensors actually slapped up on the bottom of the Verrazano Bridge!

UN tower as Steve and I pass by in NYC on Wednesday.

General Assembly building

Wednesday night I fly to Knoxville on two commuters out of LGA and have a drink with Enterra's man in Oak Ridge, Shane Deichman.

Up way early on Thurs for Thought Leadership meeting at 0700 at the lab, followed by five-hour monthly "huddle" of the National Security Directorate there, which is always interesting and lively.

Some interviews squeezed in along the way: 1) career advice to a Harvard grad in international relations (always must do), 2) taped-over-phone with NPR's Laurie Sydell on my "appearance" in Second Life" way back when (before it became cool for people like Arianna Huffington to show up), 3) Steve Hedges of the Chicago Trib on Rumsfeld, 4) some NC State student reporter doing profile on alum Gen. Tom Metz, and 5) research interview with CSIS demographer Neil Howe on global impact of aging trends (you may remember me citing his work on the echo-boomers near the end of BFA).

Editing the Fast Company piece now and getting some Enterra paperwork out door before packing my gear for vacation. Have ton of articles collected for blog, but will probably spend flights working Xmas eve column in advance and since I don't like to work too much on vacations, don't expect to hear much outta me until after Xmas...

ARTICLE: Pentagon calls for new African command, By PAULINE JELINEK, Houston Chronicle, Dec. 14, 2006

The whole package as I predicted, with the rationales as predicted: fight heads south and we better get there before China gets too influential!

Thanks to Seth Benge for sending this in.

ARTICLE: Rice rejects talks with Iran, Syria on Iraq, CNN, December 15, 2006

ARTICLE: Rice Rejects Overture To Iran And Syria, By Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, Washington Post Staff, December 15, 2006; Page A01

Quelle surprise!

Talking-point Condi's been trotted out to point out what we've known all along: Dick Cheney won't talk to Syria or Iran, no matter what his former bureaucratic nemesis James Baker may propose. God damn it! Dick's president now!

Meanwhile, W. remains only a heartbeat away...

Thanks to an anonymous official person and my wife, Vonne, for sending these in.

OP-ED: Run Now, Obama, By George F. Will, Washington Post, December 14, 2006; Page A31

Will's analysis is more tactical than what I offered a while back in my column, but, as usual, when George puts aside his partisan his analysis is quite sound.

I think, listening to Barack on C-SPAN in NH, that the decision has already been made, and I think it's a good one. This way, if Hillary wins the nom, it'll be for good reasons. If not, also for good reasons. Either way, the Dems get a better nom race.

Plus, the specter of debating whether America is more ready for an African-American (albeit only half of one, because his mom was white) or for a woman will energize the Dem's race (neither choice exists for the GOP, and please, spare me the Condi talk). History says the latter (look at governors and Congress and you'll see far more women than blacks), but Barack's got that JFK-like mojo running, as he's the only post-Ike boomer out there running.

So it's win-win, as far as I can see, for the Dems and the American political system alike.

Thanks to my wife, Vonne, for sending this.

ARTICLE: Military Considers Sending as Many as 35,000 More U.S. Troops to Iraq, McCain Says, By JOHN F. BURNS, New York Times, December 15, 2006

1) Bush rejects the timetable

2) Rice is trotted out to reject on Iran and Syria

3) the military is poised to push the "go big" option and Bush is poised to "submit" to the generals (oh yeah!).

The only bright spot is one everyone had agreed upon earlier and which was in the works for months: more trainers.

But it is stunning when you think of the elections and what Americans said through them: Bush is basically blowing it all off.

On the "go big," I'm not pissed. I get the logic and it beats the "go small" and hope for better, but it can't be sustained and the training shift (or what I call "Vietnam backwards") won't constitute the tipping point the generals are hoping rather wishfully for.

The failure of this track will be linked back to two things: 1) the failure to engage the neighbors and 2) the failure to generate the preconditions of a true exit strategy--aka, jobs (Chiarelli's swan song).

14 bags, eight checked.

Long haul to Phoenix, and then to LAX. Free flights from Southwest.

Then enough time in LAX to board for Honolulu. We sleep there tonight.

I am much grateful for the portable DVD players.

Meanwhile I struggle through next week's column, which centers on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

POST: From Globalization to Localization, By Stephen S. Roach, December 14, 2006

Good piece by Roach. I do think we're in a generalized period of "caboose breaking" on globalization for a number of reasons:

1) We've just gone through a period of rapid expansion of the global economy and any expansion (esp. that big) begets some pullback and--here--political "profit-taking" of the Lou Dobbs sort.

2) the global economy is growing very nicely and very broadly, so many leaders will hold back on big global agreements, prefering localism and regionalism in the meantime (easier to achieve, and a collective form of caboose braking against the dangers of "them"--outsiders). We'll see this in Europe in spades. Typically, you get the big, risk-taking global deals when the economy is slow, and politicians are desperate to restart growth. But only the ignorant position regionalism as the binary alternative to global accords, when they're historically necessay stepping stones--as in, first you crawl and then...

3) Rural unrest in New Core pillars (where I first encountered the dynamics that led to my caboose braking notion) will add to some of this slow-down as well. That's both natural and good.

4) The mood in the world's largest economy is one of withdrawal from the world, due first and foremost to Iraq, so that encourages slowness on globalization too.

But it's wrong to read a slowdown and localization as the "demise" of globalization (or the much-feared ideology of "globalism"), because that's like saying a recession should push you to rejects markets and capitalism. Sure, some of the more frightened and politically-opportunistic will certainly go down that path. They always do, but market optimism always returns, as do competitive pressures.

What's different today about globalization (which, after all, is just a fancy name for global markets) is that companies within national economies all end up feeling like they have to scour the world to access cheap labor, raw materials, intellectual talent/property, production capacity and R&D.

And that won't change with a slowing of globalization sentiments in some markets. It'll just be delayed.

Beware of fantastic standards being imposed--as in, "globalization must sweep the planet in a few short years, binding all the world's peoples in everlasting peace, or it's doomed!"

That sort of bullshit got you socialism and fascism in the past and now the global jihadist movement, and it'll beget even dumber, more fantasically impatient ideologies in the future.

Meanwhile, global markets and the resulting integration will continue to win out over the long haul. But no, almost none of this stuff happens without some violence (that's why I called it the Pentagon's new map) and predictions based on, or their opposing straw-man arguments requiring, linear projections always prove false.

It's just not a straight line world.

Thanks to Hans Suter for sending this in.

POST: The Persian Abyss: "Fear and loathing" in the I.R.I

When I speak of Iran reminding me of late Brezhnevian USSR, people always ask me for examples.

Besides the huge and relatively efficient black market, this story presents my second favorite example.

Seriously, I had to quit smoking and almost enter rehab after a summer in Leningrad. It was like "Animal House" every night out.

Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this in.

Menagerie of animals at the resort.

Waikiki

Quick! Call Crockett &Tubbs!

H-3, heading into tunnel, on Oahu.

POST: Report: China weighs covert ops to overthrow North Korea's Kim

More intriguing intell on China considering "Kill Kim, Vol. I, II & III".

Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this.

China's next set of leaders, America's next challenges

Incoming congressional Democrat leaders signal they'll get tough on China over both trade and human rights. While stipulating that Beijing must progress on both fronts, let me tell you why this myopic focus may ruin a historic opportunity.

China is on the verge of a generational leadership change that will profoundly shape its emergence as a global power over the next decade. Approached strategically, America should take advantage of this new cohort's eagerness for China to play an actively constructive role in international affairs.

To understand this future, you must know what's come previously.

Read on at KnoxNews
Read on at Scripps Howard

Also sighted at:

Perfect example of how connectivity drives code: all those Hawaiian laws against bringing in biologicals (plants, animals, etc.) that could prove invasive. As a tourist destination and travel hub, they are nuts about that here.

And they should be.

You connect, and all nodes get codes.

I'm seeing wire reports that say Ahmadinejad's nets are doing poorly in both local elections and one for "college of cardinals"-type body expected to pick current ailing ayatollah's successor, where supposedly the ex-pres (must be Rafsanjani)) is leading the vote.

If all that end's up being true, that's stunning. Imagine John Kerry winning a national election in 2006 to be the new Supreme Court Chief Justice.

So to me, this is like Ahmadinejad suffering a very humbling mid-term election.

Be clear on this point too: what's unfolding in the clerics' council isn't the will of anybody but the mullahs on top, who want Ahmadinejad reined him for all his elaborate foolishness that clouds their truly seriously pursuit of a nuclear shield against U.S. Military attack.

A while back TM Lutas said this election would signal Ahmadinejad's power, and I countered that it would really show the desire of his opponents to stop him. I thought that was a good comeback at the time (TM brings this out in me), but at the time I feared TM was far closer to the truth. I am greatly pleased to find otherwise.

To me, this election offers Bush a huge opportunity, so well-timed by the ISG report, to push the Mideast pile very differently, vis-a-vis Iran, and I mean a once-in-lifetime chance to reshape a region (his original dream going in).

And that's--more than anything--what saddens me about this administration: it started that amazing Big Bang, getting so much going (and so confounding the experts in the process) and THEN Bush-Cheney went braindead on Iran, rerunning the whole WMD dynamic, apparently because it worked so well the first time with Iraq.

But here fate intervenes more than Bush deserves, by delivering unto us a leader whose exceeding (and unthinking) brashness now rivals Bush's own exceeding (and unthinking) stubbornness.

All good things to optimists who wait.

As so often is the case in this business, just when someone declares the "end," it ends up just being the beginning.

On the Big Island.

Where the lava meets the road...

Last night, after touring South Point (the southernmost part of the U.S.), we trekked to where the lava flows into the sea (volcano national park here), getting within a few miles to watch remotely at sunset. Wasn't going too far on foot on jagged lava flows using only flashlights to guide. Had that angle covered today, anyway. Still, pretty amazing to watch the red fire even from a distance at night. So amazingly dark down there, except for that: black lava ground, black sky, black ocean.

Today we get up and go snorkeling in the two nicest bays here on the island for that purpose. That was pretty amazing. Swimming with sea turtles and all those fish and checking out the coral. A bit otherworldly to be in the fish tank, especially given my fear of water. But it was a blast. I could have done it all day.

Then we took a helicopter tour of the island, which was beyond unreal. Three best parts: 1) flying over the active volcano from which all that lava flows and looking inside the crater to see a lot of action going on; 2) checking out the lava flows as they enter the ocean (really hard to see except from sea), and 3) the later half of the 2.5-hour tour that had us going into remote valleys and seeing a number of fantastic waterfalls (the biggest was 2,400-feet, which is "Lord of the Rings" fantastic).

Beat now, but sneaking off for 20th anniversary dinner with wife. The resort we're staying at it is almost Disneyesque in sheer scope. Have to take a monorail to our rooms!

Naturally, this all runs up a nice bill, but how how many 20-anniversaries do you celebrate in one's life? And how cool is it to snorkel with your kids among coral reefs?

I learned a long time ago: vacations are when you spend money. It's the rest of the year when you're a tightwad.

Tomorrow? Different form of flight and different form of undersea.

As always, we'll really need a vacation AFTER our vacation. Someday I'll figure out how to actually take one where I rest, but I guess it's just not in my nature.

Went parasailing this morning. Younger son and wife went 800, while elder son and I do 1200. Got the long-sleeved souvenir crew shirts.

Also got word that Fast Company will publish my latest in the April issue. So feeling good on that.

ARTICLE: Iran President Facing Revival of Students’ Ire, By NAZILA FATHI, New York Times, December 21, 2006

Thanks to Dan Hare for sending this.

Update: The student revival is definitely on my 2007 wish list (next weekend's column I'm writing on way home from Hawaii).

ARTICLE: Va. Lawmaker's Remarks on Muslims Criticized: Republican Had Decried the Use of the Koran for Congressman's Oath of Office, By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Washington Post December 21, 2006; Page A11

We should be ecstatic we've got a Muslim congressman and OF COURSE he should be sworn in on the Koran if that's what he wants.

The GOP leadership should rein this jackass in pronto, and Pelosi should be speaking out clearly on the subject.

Maybe both are happening and I'm just unaware out here in HI, but I'm glimpsing too much hyperbolic coverage to believe otherwise.

ARTICLE: President Wants to Increase Size of Armed Forces, By THOM SHANKER and JIM RUTENBERG, New York Times, December 20, 2006

Good first step is increasing ground troops, but real change is shifting funds from air to ground and from smart weapons to smarter soldiers.

We shall see.

ARTICLE: China Tightens Adoption Rules for Foreigners, By PAM BELLUCK and JIM YARDLEY, New York Times, December 20, 2006

China's moves were long predicted. Reality is, the flow of unwanted girls will dwindle down dramatically in coming years, so restrictions will skyrocket for healthy ones.

But that's just great news for the unhealthy ones...

POST: Worse than bread riots

Another great sign in Iran.

Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this.

ARTICLE: "Mesa Air to be first U.S. Carrier in China: Flights in time for Beijing Olympics," by Barbara De Lollis, USA Today, 22 December 2006, p. 4B.

A process we'll witness again and again.

Mesa wants into China's booming domestic air travel market and is smart enough to know you better be low-cost if you want to compete there (all of China's airlines are similar to Southwest in their frugality and no-fuss efficiency, thus I was completely at home flying there).

To get in, Mesa must agree to a joint venture with Shenzen Airlines.

My prediction: five years from now a merged Mesa-Shenzen will be flying in China, in the U.S., and elsewhere.

Power all over da' pyramid.

And yes, it will shock the hell out of some Americans to find themselves flying a partial Chinese airline some time down the road.

But it will happen. Predicted to me by a Southwest pilot in US Air Force reserve (one star), who said the same "flags of convenience" process we saw shipping go through years ago would inevitably be repeated in airlines. Why? Sheer routinization of the business. Once established, it ain't rocket science, and the most efficient global platforms will inevitably rise in the biggest markets.

ARTICLE: "Thai Debacle Shows How Asia Has Changed: Financial Crisis of a Decade Ago Isn't Likely Today as Less Debt, Stronger Currencies Protect Region," by James Hookway, Wall Street Journal, 20 December 2006, p.C1 .

Source note for my Fast Company piece.

Good reminder for us as we encounter the ever-present stream of predictions about globalization's demise due to increasing "fragility."

Drill-down artists are a dime a dozen. Horizontal thinkers are rare.

ARTICLE: "A Reagan Strategy for Iran and Syria," by Abraham D. Sofaer, Wall Street Journal, 20 December 2006, p. A18.

You want a realistic description of how we could talk to Iran and Syria, this is it, from George Shultz's legal adviser under Reagan.

Very intelligent piece.

POST: Globalization vs. Protectionism

Great piece by Steve, in the vein of Martin Wolf's defense of globalization. Lotta myths out there, and a lot of amazing navel-gazing in America, where we seem to think globalization lives or dies with our choices. Truth is, globalization is so much bigger and more resilient than just the U.S.

ARTICLE: Shiites Remake Baghdad in Their Image, By SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times, December 23, 2006

Impossible?

Happens here all the time in the States silently and slowly over time, as races self-segregate in neighborhoods. Likely to be with some real violence in Iraq, but try and stop it. This is just the immaturity and the fakeness of "Iraq" being revealed.

Condition need not be permanent, but the necessary devolution-leading-to-future-reintegration-on-the-basis-of-economic-logic is impossible to obviate in this case, given recent past history.

Some unthinkable possibilities

Quick! Name the country we turn into a parking lot the next time al-Qaida's network pulls off a 9/11. If your knee jerks toward Pakistan instead of Iran, your instincts are sound because conditions are falling into place for that scary scenario to unfold.

No, we won't be toppling a regime - much less nation building - anytime soon in a country of 170 million Muslims (eight times the size of Iraq). But the United States could readily find itself unleashing the "gravest possible consequences" (remember that spooky Cold War phrase?) inside Pakistan's borders - specifically the federally administered tribal areas that border Afghanistan.

This swath of remote mountain ranges has never been effectively governed by distant Islamabad, but it's where the Taliban have - according to The New York Times - recently set up a virtual mini-state. The tribal areas are also where most terrorism experts believe Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida's senior leaders operate openly in secure sanctuary.

This mini-state grew out of a series of peace deals that Pakistan's government felt it had no choice but to offer to thousands of Taliban fighters who've taken up permanent residence in the tribal areas since fleeing Afghanistan. The accords offered the warriors respite from the Pakistani military in exchange for a cessation of cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

But the net result has been even more frequent incursions, plus the Taliban have used brutal terrorist tactics to subdue any opposition from the indigenous tribes, executing dozens of local leaders who dared stand up to them.

Worse, as the Taliban's grip grows stronger, the mini-state becomes a regional magnet for jihadists eager to get a crack at the 40,000 American and NATO troops operating next door. That means Afghanistan gets far bloodier in 2007, just as Iraq's civil war hits its stride.

Here's the scary scenario: We pull back our troops from combat in Iraq, which means we let the sectarian violence run to its logical conclusion. The downside? Lots of ethnic cleansing forces a de facto partitioning of that fake state. The upside? Iraq stops serving as the central front in the long war on radical extremism because: (a) foreign fighters are driven out by the locals and (b) American military personnel are increasingly off-shored on naval vessels.

Then imagine rising domestic pressure here for a similar pullback in Afghanistan. At that point, we've granted the global jihadist movement the same truce that Pakistan offered the Taliban. Naturally, the Taliban would interpret that standoff as a sign of weakness and eventually its embedded ally, al-Qaida, resumes plotting offensive actions against the American homeland.

This scenario would come close to restoring the pre-9/11 status quo between America and radical Islam, swapping out Iraq for Iran as the Persian Gulf rogue slated for containment.

Now imagine some al-Qaida affiliate lights off a nuclear device inside the United States. While our intelligence agencies can't quite pin down Tehran as the ultimate source (or North Korea, for that matter), we're once again burying thousands of corpses in some major American city. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden publicly praises Allah from his lair in northwest Pakistan.

Then think about what a sitting U.S. president feels compelled to do next.

Americans, madder than hell, want al-Qaida to know that we're just not going to take it anymore. But they're also convinced that invading large Muslim states get us nothing but thousands more casualties and radicalized regimes.

With John McCain or Rudy Giuliani, the tough-guy approach would be clear: Going nuclear gets you nuclear in return. But don't assume it would be any different for Hillary Clinton as she reaches for Margaret Thatcher's mantle or Barack Obama as he stretches for his own JFK-like mystique.

Sound incredible?

Let me remind you that America's the only government in human history to employ nuclear weapons against an enemy state, and with the Taliban back in the mini-state-sponsoring saddle, a politically correct target now exists.

I neither advocate this possible response nor condemn it. I just think it's essential we know what path we're on in this long war because, under the right conditions, nothing remains unthinkable.

ARTICLE: Saudi Lawyer Takes On Religious Court System: Rights Cases Used To Press for Change, By Faiza Saleh Ambah, Washington Post, December 23, 2006; Page A01

This Saudi human rights lawyer is the kind of person I would pick for a Nobel Peace Prize. Somebody who risks life and limb daily to reform an unjust system that routinely spins off the Osamas of this world is doing God's work. He's a Lech Walesa of the Arab world, and he deserves recognition and support. I assume Amnesty Int'l is on his case, one of the reasons why my wife gets away with giving away so much of my income behind my back (I tend to find these things on my credit cards after the fact).

Finally saw the DVD last week (before leaving for Hawaii) and it was really good. Gore's presentation, while not wowing me on delivery (low-key, with minimal timing), did dazzle me in terms of the AV set-up (immediately jealous).

And it got to me enough that I made the effort to find compact fluorescent 65-w (equivalent) flood lights to go along with the 60 and 100-w (equiv) "spiral bulbs" I've been installing throughout the house.

Traversing all over the Big Island also made similar impressions, both for the pristine beauty and the places of obvious environmental devastation (primarily caused by the volcanoes).

One more week of just linking the posts that link to Tom without commentary. Then I'll shoot for better next week:

+ Wake up America
+ ZenPundit [2] [3] [4]
+ Purpleslog
+ souldrift
+ Shrillblog [2]
+ The Moderate Voice
+ Dreaming 5GW
+ Draconian Observations
+ Brad DeLong
+ I, Hans
+ Ernesto5
+ Opposed Systems Design
+ Humoud
+ We've got bigger problems than a butter shortage
+ Albert 's Blog
+ The Naked Underground
+ The Red Fox Club
+ bitterlemons-international.org
+ Dave Porter weblog [2] [3]

Got to watch my eldest son serve midnight Mass last night, which was great.

Today, on this horribly rainy day, wii're playing tennis, golf, baseball and boxing each other in bloody death matches.

Hope everyone is finding fun things to do and nice ways to celebrate the day.

+ The MetroWest Daily News
+ The Daily News Tribune
+ The Milford Daily News
+ Kerry Fox Live!

The first three "column sightings" identify me as a "syndicated columnist," which I still believe is technically untrue, and yet, I'm not sure the distinction I place on being "distributed" via Howard Scripps versus . . . whatever it would take to call me syndicated matters whatsoever to these local papers (I feel like if I were truly syndicated, the papers would have a spot automatically reserved for me X times a week versus having the choice to pick me up or not).

It's an intriguing concept, especially when entertained over a holiday, to think about just blogging, writing columns, penning pieces for magazines and cranking a book every two years. Do the speeches, yes, because they pay nicely. But just let it go at that.

But I find myself pulling back from that scenario at this time in my life. I don't just want to be a commentator, with the excitement factor being TV time (which I feel is ultimately self-destructive to systematic reasoning). I like being a practitioner more. I like the direct influence, attached to choices, as opposed to the indirect influence, attached to descriptions.

Plus, DeAngelis is a machine, a pure driving force of nature. He gives a strong vector and serious immediacy to everything. Introduce Steve to the right people with the right problems, and they don't just walk away with my vision, they walk away with solutions. I'm visionary-as-conceptualizer, but Steve's visionary-as-applied-scientist. It would just seem stupid not to combine our strengths at this point in our lives (we're roughly the same age), especially since we both entertain the notion of influencing political developments over time (Steve, from center-right, me from center-left).

Plus, while I know there will come a time when I slow down this cruel pace of travel and work, two things need to be in place for that to work: 1) secure income and 2) secure access. Right now, no one helps me move toward either better than Steve and Enterra.

Confronting self doubts? Always.

Testing waters mentally? Of course.

The end of the year naturally pushes such thinking. Your current set-up should always be your best option, otherwise you should be swapping out--then and there, with no apologies. That's just the individual version of the market dynamics we trust to improve our lives in the macro.

First place goes to a "The Departed" poster signed by DiCaprio, Nicholson, Damon, Wahlberg, Baldwin, Firestone and Scorsese himself!

Runner up is Taft 1912 ribbon/medal from campaign.

And she cooks too!

Folks, my wife.

Trying to unkink my back from all the bags. Too little Bowflex in advance left me vulnerable. Time to get back into shape!

ARTICLE: Commanders Bound for Iraq Tailor Strategies to a Fragmented Nation, By Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, December, 26, 2006

Ryan Schieffer wrote:

Dr. Barnett, Greg Jaffe had a piece you may have seen this morning about Marines applying the new COIN strategy and focusing on economics (microlending) and utilities (sewers) in place of traditional concerns. It was "more of the same" in terms of a sysadmin example, but one of the clearest recent ones, and on the front page.

A couple representative quotes:

In recent weeks, the Marines preparing to go to al Anbar have brought in economic-development experts to talk with them about microlending as a means of jump-starting small businesses. Microlenders provide small loans to would-be entrepreneurs who can't secure traditional financing. Loan recipients typically open shops or craft businesses, helping to bolster the local economy...

The Marines' focus on economic development in al Anbar reflects the Army and Marine Corps' new counterinsurgency doctrine, which stresses that in such wars 80% of the effort should be along political and economic lines and only 20% should be military.

Tom says:

Further evolution of the SysAdmin force and function. As expected, a product of desperation over previous failures.

Check it out:

You don't have to know Turkish to figure out they're calling it The Pentagon's New Map - 2.

Order it yourself at Hepsiburada.com.

Here's my main gift to missus: original icon painting on wood board in floating frame. Iconographer is Fr. Theodore of Russian orthodox monastery located in hometown of Boscobel WI.

Hung in corner myself, because icons that big get their own corner, by tradition.

DATELINE: On the island, Indy, 27 December 2006

My scheduler, Jenn, constantly berates me for giving away too much on the blog.

And she's right. I do give away too much.

When you start selling your time, you're selling privileged access, and the blog is basically the same thing for me--like watching the feature about making the movie while the movie's being made.

So I do catch myself now and then stopping blog posts. In fact, I'd say the last three columns (including my upcoming "top ten foreign policy wish list for 2007") were all ones that I got about three paras into on MovableType, only to pull them off and dump them into a Word file for later employment in the column.

I'm also starting to do that in conversation. Last night talking to my Mom, I made a point about types of thinkers (no, not my favorite horizontal v. vertical, which I was thinking about heavily last night as I drifted off to sleep [not before writing everything down on Fortran cards and stuffing them under an antique phone I use as a paper weight in my office--I know that's sooooo 20th century] after watching the "Davinci Code" disc 2 features, right after watching "Little Miss Sunshine"; and if you can't spot the connection between those two movies, you'll need to wait for Volume III) and I blurted out, "That would make a great column!" Well, I forgot the point, called my Mom this a.m., who also forgot the point, and then had it reawakened when I read the WAPO summary sent to my Treo. Bingo! 7 Jan column teed up.

Then I was just starting a post on Putin only to pull that one back. 14 Jan teed up.

Then I remembered a brief I got last month in Oak Ridge. There's 21 Jan teed up.

And then I'm thinking . . . twice a week would be pretty easy, come to think of it.

Here's the funny thing I notice: column ideas come to me much easier at home than on the road. You'd think it would be the opposite: being on the road gives me such exposure to stuff. But when I'm on the road, I'm drilling down constantly, thinking very male, being very vertical. When I'm home, I've got all these damn kids hanging on me, that gorgeous woman constantly hovering just out of eyesight, etc. I'm far more open to scanning the horizon, seeing the connections, being more female, going more horizontal (ooh, pun intended!).

I think I'm beginning to get Ron White's riff on everybody being "a little bit gay."

And that's why the horizontal thinking comes off as a bit too sensitive for some. They want national security planning to be all about the verticals, the kinetics, the direct stuff.

But the systemic resilience that Steve's been talking about for years is far more about the horizontals, the non-kinetics, the indirect stuff. It's the pre-emptive workarounds, shutting down your enemy's attack vectors in advance. It's what I instinctively reached for when I made getting better at handling System Perturbations the first of my three grand strategy prongs after 9/11 (the others being the discrete firewalling of the Core from the Gap's worst exports and shrinking the Gap with a combination of kinetics [Leviathan] and non-kinetics [SysAdmin]). And when you see John Robb's new book (selling quite nicely over 4 months in advance, which says good things about his chances to score a bestseller) basically pushing the same solution set (what he's calling "deep resilience"), you begin to see the confluence of thinking.

And yes, I realize that last sentence may trigger John to once again claim I'm stealing his new book, but I would caution him to put down that brick and shut the door on that glass house of his, cause Steve's already TM'd all the relevant "resilience" phrases years ago. Truth is, we're more than happy to see others use the term, because it bolsters our work and our company. But more to the basic point, it reinforces what we honestly believe in, and so we welcome someone of John's impressive caliber in helping to explain concepts we hold so very dear. Yes, I understand the mechanics of book selling, and the constant re-packaging of the "next X article" that explains all, but Time's point of "Person of the Year" (You) is a valid one. We don't live in a world where there can be one "X article." What was once the purview of a dozen or so white guys largely from New England (or the prep schools therein) is now subject to the wisdom of the crowd (John's basic point in his great Fast Company piece, "Power to the People," so yeah, John's been working the resilience concept on his own for some time as well).

So absolutely, the more the merrier, even as we understand the difficulties of keeping egos in check. Because this elephant needs a whole lotta blind men working the form, giving us descriptions from more angles than any one person can easily imagine. I naturally approach it top-down, being a systemic big-picture guy, hence my focus on System Perturbations and shrinking the Gap (the ultimate source of systemic instabilities). Steve, as a lifelong entrepreneur and business-builder, naturally approaches it more at the level of nation-states and large organizations, hence his focus on Development-in-a-Box and Enterprise Resilience Management (TM!). John, given his life experience, approaches it more at the level of individuals, hence his focus on Global Guerrillas and Societal Resilience. Naturally, we all claim our visions to be universe-spanning and the cornerstone of the future ("secure my venue and secure it all!"), but I suspect the future will require many cornerstones at many levels. So, nothing wrong with another brick in the wall, so long as we're all working the same wall.

Yes, there'll be all sorts of how-many-angels-dance-on-the-head-of-this-pin arguments about the details, but the essential solution set stares us in the face: we get stronger from within, we master that strength, we export it to others, expanding the resilient nets that define our world. Most of that change will be sold via fear, but most should be bought via hope, and a desire to improve ourselves both security-wise and economically (DeAngelis' big point, described glancingly in the Esquire "Best and Brightest" profile).

But back to my basic point: women hope, men fear. You want the diagnosis? Listen to the man. You want the solution? Listen to the woman (or your inner chick, he added, subtly distancing himself from the perceived gay-ness of that statement).

And you know what? You do see that ability to shift between those perspectives so much more easily among the Echo Boomers (hence, the generic use of the word "gay" now to mean essentially what "sensitive" or "nerd" did when I was young), which gives me a lot of hope. The diversity they can handle (race, sexual orientation, religion, thinking style) is somewhat stunning when I compare it to the world I grew up in as a child (basically, the 1960s). But coming of age in the 1970s, when so much broke open (the great myth of the 60s is that the change happened then, when in reality, it mostly came to fruition in the 1970s), I'm just open enough to sense it (the basic gist of my column a while back about Obama running). Thus, the web-based notion of "the One" (inspired by "The Matrix") arising politically is first seen perhaps in Barack's candidacy in 2008, and that would be a generational shift far more important, in my self-congratulatory mind, than the shift from WWII to the Boomers (Bush 41 to Clinton, which led to the counter-revolution that was Bush and his minders).

Then again, why get in touch with your feminine side when you can have the real thing? Thus I suspect Obama will run a very smart campaign designed to make his candidacy look as strong as possible while leaving open the opportunity to become Hillary's veep. To me, that's the stunning ticket that will make anything the GOP puts forward look awfully stale.

Hmmm, I know there's a post I was planning to write somewhere here on the island . . .

Must have saved it for the column.

Actually, gotta go check out an elliptical trainer I'm considering to replace the treadmill. I'm past worrying about whether these jeans make me look fat. I just wanna get into them without having to become Houdini!

ARTICLE: Military considers recruiting foreigners: Expedited citizenship would be an incentive, By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, December 26, 2006

Scary to some, but this is internationalizing the SysAdmin force on the sly. Afraid to recruit nations, recruit individuals instead.

Thanks to Dan Hare for sending this.

ARTICLE: "For eBay, It's About Political Connections in China," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 22 December 2006, p. C1.

ARTICLE: "Home Depot to Buy Protege Retailer in China," by Michale Barbaro, New York Times, 14 December 2006, p. C2.

eBay closes its web site in China and instead takes a 49 percent stake in a joint venture with a Chinese company. Rather than try to build its own, it's paying the price of building the Chinese version first. What emerges down the road is probably what eBay will end up owning or sharing. It will be bigger than what eBay could grow on its own. It will tap the Chinese and larger Asian market better than what eBay could grow on its own. Later on, it will give eBay opportunities elsewhere at the bottom of the pyramid better than it could create on its own.

Home Depot already made this lap. Ten years ago it began "training executives at a small Chinese retailer, called HomeWay, on how to sell screwdrivers and shower heads."

Today?

Now, Home Depot is buying its retail protege in a move that will give the giant American chain its first stores in the fast-growing Chinese market.

So it goes to the head of the line....

With the acquisition, Home Depot will become the latest American big-box chain to enter China, a country that, despite its size and growing middle class, remains largely untapped by foreign merchants.

Wal-Mart agreed in October to purchase Trust-Mart, a Chinese retailed with 100 stores, people briefed on the matter said. And Best Buy said in May it had bought a stake in the Jiangsu Five Star Appliance Company, an appliance and electronics chain.

Sooner than you think, Chinese salesmen wearing orange smocks will be selling screwdrivers in Gap countries you'd never believe would ever need them, much less have the disposable income for home improvement.

As my younger son likes to say, "That's what I talking about!"

ARTICLE: "In Raising the World's I.Q., the Secret's in the Salt," by Donald G. McNeil, Jr., New York Times, 16 December 2006, p. A1.

A third of the globe, roughly 2 billion, don't get enough iodine (available in iodized salt), so 10-15 I.Q. points are shaved off, on average. Having enough during pregnancy is the best way to avoid mental retardation.

Hundreds of millions in India and China alone suffer this fate, but other than India, all of the other "severe to moderate deficiency" states are located--no surprise--in the Gap.

But things can be fixed. Russia's parliament recently decides to make iodized salt mandatory. China's ten-year effort raises the percentage of people using iodized salt to over 90 percent.

Africa's fate is typical: no shortage of iodized salt because Kenya and South Africa export it, and yet half of the nations are mild to severe in the deficiency.

Update: Steve also posted on this article recently: Iodine and Intelligence

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "How Trade Barriers Keep Africans Adrift: West's Farm Subsidies Drive Ghanians Out of Rice Market, Fueling Poverty and Migration," by Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck, Wall Street Journal, 27 December 2006, p. A5.

Our ag subsidies are destroying agriculture in Africa, scattering farm families. The myth that ag subsidies protect the "family farm" here in America is absurd beyond words. Those farms, to the extent they still exist, receive only a tiny fraction of such subsidies, the vast bulk of which go to huge farms and ag corps.

The family farms we destroy systematically are found overwhelmingly in the Gap. As the president of Ghana's Peasant Farmers Association says, "Our family are scattering. It's not surprising people are getting angry against the West."

Our rice costs $240per ton. We subsidize the cost internationally down to $205. It costs $230 in Ghana to raise the same ton, but they lost out on the market shares as a result of our trade distortion. One American business consultant puts it this way:

U.S. farmers have gotten too greedy. Until there is some change in this, you'll have a huge part of the population in poor countries trying to leave and raising hell."

This is why the Doha round matters so much. We can Sun Tzu 'em today, or Clausewitz 'em years from now.

Arherring from Dreaming 5GW wrote in to Tom to connect some of what their doing with Tom's thought (specifically jumping off of the SysAd-volution post). Arherring writes:

This sort of approach to counter-insurgency (and its inclusion into the Sysadmin) is exactly the sort of concept that we at Dreaming 5GW have been exploring. As the emerging Sysadmin evolves Fifth Generation capability to combat Fourth Generation opponents it will have to continue to include an increasing number approaches that are economic, social and political, as well as military. In discussions at Dreaming 5GW, attempting to define 5GW, we have explored the concept that in 5GW effects come from several directions at once and at a systemic level. In other words, the effects may be several times removed from the 5GW action, but the multiple domains 5GW works through causes those effects to have significant reach. The trick is to make those effects cause a targeted group to act in a certain way that works toward a larger 5GW goal.

In this particular case of Marines in Al-Anbar the 5GW context is that it isn't about bringing in businesses, but creating and environment where businesses can succeed (security, investment and infrastructure).

Tom responds:

My own sense is that 5GW will be all about fait accomplis and the illusion of choice, and that the real nature of debates will be purposefully disguised until relevant players (always tricky to define, because many will self-select, but few will be "chosen") have steered outcomes toward desired ends. In that sense, it's a form of corporatism (a specific poli sci term) on a global scale until such time as institutions arise for greater global pluralism (connectivity typically predates code, which is driven by scandals revealed in their "due course").

It is the ultimate in horizontal global positioning ("conflict" suggesting too much kinetics) designed to stave off system-disrupting vertical perturbations/attacks.

This is where I think John has it backwards: it's 4GW, not globalization, that spawns its own self-limitations/destruction (parasites never seek system destruction, hence their limits of influence). 5GWers will, for many useful reasons, declare the terrorists to be "in charge of the world," but that will only serve as the primary obfuscation in global security affairs. Others are already well in use in other sectors (like "peak oil" in energy).

In short, tracking 4GW will get you the smoke, but understanding 5GW will get you the fire.

Every generation of war, like every generation of energy/politics/economics/etc., is declared the "ultimate" by its adherents, but they're more additive than transcendent. The best and most advanced simply move onward and upward, with the next generation representing the latest and greatest method of moving the total pile with the least energy and most gain for the manipulators in question.

That's why your site (Dreaming 5GW) is so cool: you're exploring what comes next, not what's maturing right now.

And for driving some of my thinking, I thank you all.

OP-ED; "What's Going On in Somalia?" by Jonathan Stevenson, Wall Street Journal, 27 December 2006, p. A8.

Somalia, especially to the south, is virtually all Muslim. Ethiopia is predominantly Christian, and "vigorously opposed to Islamism."

Eritrea, no friend to former parent Ethiopia, supports separatist Muslim elements in southern Somalia. Ethiopia, no stranger to crushing terrorist camps in that part of Somalia, gears up for some more of the same and deploys up to 20k troops in Somalia to achieve those ends.

So just look at how our self-deterrence works:

The volatile situation in Somalia presents the West with a thorny and immediate problem. To quell geostrategic tensions created by Ethiopia and Eritrea's intervention, a U.N.-sanctioned force would have to be led by a major power [read, America]. yet even if such a power could afford the troops and materiel, the insertion of a significant number of Western-led troops would run the risk of attracting (as in Iraq) still more foreign jihadists to Somalia and inspiring terrorist attacks worldwide.

Still think Iraq is a one-off?

This fight heads south.

ARTICLE: "South Korean Films Hit Records at Home, Despite Relaxed Quotas," by Lina Yoon, Wall Street Journal, 27 December 2006, p. B2.

Earlier this year, South Korea relaxes the quotas that for decades decreed that the bulk of screens showed mostly Korean films. The fear was that U.S. films would swamp all, like it was Canada or something.

So like, all of South Korean cinema was, like, reduced to two guys in plaid swilling beers and going on aboot hockey and moose, eh?

Not exactly a Second City parody yet.

Instead, new box office records for Korean language films and more local productions than ever.

Of course, more time is required, but South Korea's government was right to show some confidence in the economy's growing media content clout. South Korean culture is very hot right now in Asia. The spillover effect from all those videogame producers is being felt, as special FX films are hitting their stride in the local market, exploiting the locals' still strong taste for monster movies (Americans moved on to slasher films a long time ago).

Yes, foreign films account for roughly 40% of the total box office receipts, but frankly, the case in most of the world, with America as a non-too-strange exception (after all, we basically made the industry in its modern form, reinventing it many times along the way). But even here, Hollywood has come to recognize that global markets are roughly half its markets, so we're seeing--almost like a McDonald's altering its menu country by country--U.S. films increasingly tailored more and more for global audiences vice simply American ones. So again, as the South Korean spokesman for a theater chain said in the piece, that "what matters most is what the audience wants."

ARTICLE: "French Candidates Try Softer Touch to Woo Minorities," by Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, 14 December 2006, p. A4.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right candidate, tries to live down his role in suppressing the Paris riots last year, courting the same people he labeled as "scum" back then.

Telegenic (no kidding!) Segolene Royal (wasn't she in "Davinci"?) pushes "inclusiveness."

Even Jean-Marie Le Pen's got a poster with minorities marching alongside him into the future (imagine George Wallace's conversion). Le Pen's still all law and order. He's just admitting that appearing too white French on that score isn't enough to be credible as a candidate.

In sum:

With France's presidential election four months away, Mr. Sarkozy and the other leading candidates are campaigning hard to seduce the country's alienated and disadvantaged ethnic populations.

One French sociologist describes the shift as such:

Five years ago, immigration and integration were not campaign issues of the mainstream parties. This time, the French are questioning the failure of integration and asking themselves about their capacity to integrate new foreigners. The debate has changed.

Royal goes so far as to declare minorities to be "the future of France," deciding the "question of survival" for France in globalization's competitive markets.'

I know, I know. Europe will never adjust to its Muslim minority. These people will become an endless source of instability there and threats over here, due to our connectivity to Europe. No real change is possible, or at least not possible in our lifetimes, certainly not with such unregenerates as Le Pen. Instead, it's all cultural suicide from here on out.

Or mebbe not.

Merkel in Germany, Royal surging and Sarkozy looking vulnerable in France, and Hillary the leading Dem candidate in a U.S. tired of GOP leadership.

What would it be like to have Germany, France and America all led by women at the same time?

This day will come faster than expected, so the male tendency to sell by fear will have to give a bit, one imagines.

And I think this would be a very good thing, making many more good things quite possible.

Bush can't sell Chirac and Schroeder on a host of issues, but would Hillary have the same problems with Royal and Merkel? I think not.

I'm not talking less competitive. I'm talking less binary.

Royal markets herself as the mother-protector of France in the age of globalization.

Think about that. I would expect more SysAdmin, less Leviathan.

And I think that would be a very good thing.

Gunnar Peterson wrote in to say:

Happy holidays Tom,

Thought you would enjoy this one by sci fi writer Cory Doctorow (think Generation X version of Bruce Sterling) called "When Sys Admins Ruled the Earth"

The story resolves... after a series of horrific events

"Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he¹d go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?

It was what he did. He was a sysadmin."

Online here: When Sys Admins Ruled the Earth

Funny stuff.

Doctorow was the first author to speak in Second Life. I was the second.

Harlan Piper wrote to Tom:

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the Euro recently surpassing the $ in total circulation value, and the UAE's announcement that it will join Chile in starting to switch over to Euro reserves? Are these central banks "voting" for new global leadership?

Tom says:

Natural and good thing. Euro becomes the second great global currency. Some merging of Asian currencies will become the third someday.

It's a good development for economies that want to hedge their bets some, but it doesn't equate so easily to global leadership. Europe, for example, won't be using its currency's reserve capacity globally to finance a military superpower, but rather probably to fund its old-age pension.

Remember, it's bucks AND bodies.

Watched "Forbidden Planet" (50th anniversary edition) tonight and then spooled through a host of trailers for films of that era (early fifties) and they were all about the end of the world by various tragedies, typically unleashed by (gasp!) NUUUUUUUUUCLEAR POWER!

Biblical prophecies fulfilled! Man's worst nightmares unleashed! The seeds of our own destruction ... what were we thinking?

Just goes to remind you that when we enter an era of new rule sets, like that ushered in--in many people's minds--by 9/11, we endure a long silly season of such prognostications.

To point out that fact is to be--of course--horrifically naive or, worse, tragically afflicted by man's hubris! And if you cite the fallacies of the fifties, then your opponents will retreat to other ages and you're quickly into hypotheticals of the most amazing, Fox-TV sort. But people have such a strong internal need for the "end times." You can't reason them out of it, and the secular versions are just as strong, always invoking man's arrogance instead of his usual venal sins.

I can't remember how many documentary films I sat through at Immaculate Conception that said way back when that we'd all succumb by now to disease, or bugs, or pollution, or the widely predicted ice age.

Then there was the ozone hole we could never fix, except we did.

The environment is the usual lead example today, with predictions of millions upon millions of deaths being possible, and so all sorts of dramatic changes are proposed at huge costs, when, of course, for pennies a year we could save the same numbers from all sorts of early childhood diseases or make all sorts of advances in combating this or that affliction right here and now.

But we never seem attracted by those pennies-on-the-dollar arguments for real lives today. Instead, we're always pining for those mythically vast numbers deep into the future, using frightening images of the worst vertical shocks to justify the most extreme horizontal scenarios of change. The same rotten kids who don't deserve the world we've given them today are equally undeserving of the horrible world we're leaving them in the future.

Some things never change.

But it is always a competition for attention, is it not? In a perfect world, all risk is balanced equally and with similar vigor. It's just that we all seem to value different things. Today's sacrifices are typically viewed cynically, while tomorrow's carry the greatest nobility imaginable (much like yesteryear's, back when all wars were "honorable"--an epithet far more easily bestowed by history than by current news coverage, as I remember a Cold War that was complete bullshit right up to the point where it ended well, and then it was suddenly a noble cause that rang true for the entire run, did it not?). So we were always up to past challenges, but never up to today's challenges, hence the natural inclination to retreat into hypothesized futures both terrible and terrific. That our past victories fixed all those past problems is soon forgotten, and assumptions about our sudden stupidity abound ("Complexity! Complexity I tell you!").

My favorite line from one trailer ("The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!") has the scientist warning the military officer not to miss with the next shot, as he notes, "This is the last isotope of its kind this side of Oak Ridge!"

I'll be sure to let my colleagues in Tennessee know they better gear up some new ones for the next round of monsters to be slain.

None of this is to make light of the real challenges we face, which--as always--are great and varied.

It's just to remind people that there's a reason why humans dominate this planet, one I consider both divine and devilishly mundane.

So don't surrender the future just yet (always tempting as these end of the year recollections remind you of all the tragedies that beset us over the past twelve month; why? because they're news man!).

We've never had a smaller percentage of humanity involved in organized violence than we do today.

We've never had a more robust or deeply integrated global economy than we do today, nor one growing so steadily and broadly.

We've never had more new scientific knowledge accumulating or smart people being put against tough tasks.

And we've never been more spiritual (outside of Europe, of course).

Humanity will top out at 50% more people than we have today within the next four decades. How we treat these four decades will determine much about the future of our species, but I see that challenge as our best one yet.

Not to be feared but to be relished. Not used to inspire fear but to build confidence. Not avoided but created.

ARTICLE: "Asian Quake's Telecom Disruption Exposes Global Networks Fragility," by Jason Dean, Wall Street Journal, 28 December 2006, p. A1.

Asia is more tied economically and network-wise to North America than can be supported by its telecom connectivity--when quakes strike, that is.

A quake off of Taiwan late Tuesday doesn't seem to kill anyone or destroy anything (at least, no one bothered to mention any such details in this piece), but it does damage as many as eight undersea cables, a good example of a system perturbation whose primary impact is disconnectedness.

And in this day and age, that which would be a tertiary effect in importance is now the primary. International phone service disrupted, financial data flows interrupted, etc., all showing that telecoms in the region are not keeping up with the connectivity growth of recent years:

With more and more multinational companies relying on distant regions of the world for outsourcing and component manufacturing, the stability of communications has become a primary concern.

Asia pulls in tons of FDI, but given its earthquake-prone status, apparently has low-balled the number of undersea cables and back-up systems in comparison to the U.S.-European bonds. Factor in the growth and we have rule sets out of whack, now exposed, with few real costs, by this quake.

The question is, how does Asia respond?

As indicated by the absence of the Asian NATO, we see a region with stunted region-wide cooperation on matters of shared vulnerability. This was exposed by SARS, which led to new cooperation that's handled avian flu far better. But on the quakes/disaster relief & recovery stuff in general, we don't yet see the rule sets on sharing and backing each other up that we see well-established ... say... in the American southeast over the past several decades on hurricanes.

(Update: Steve writes today in Rebuilding the Gulf Coast that coop there is revealed to be weaker than that of Atlantic Ocean-fronting SE states.)

A competitive advantage was seen in this quake for those companies that found workarounds, typically by buying services from telecoms with sufficiently redundant cables and satellite back-ups. As a whole, stock markets were "unfazed."

But scrambling did occur, like what happens with a crash on a major commuter route during rush hour, the side-streets got jammed with activity.

So the crash, as one expert notes, "raises the question of whether there needs to be a new wave of investment" in these cables.

And there you have the money opportunity, as in, go long on telecoms able to meet this expected investment surge.

Increasingly, investors carefully monitor stuff like quakes simply to foresee such investment shifts like the one called for here. This is why the most important function of system perturbations, besides calls for new regulation/reforms/rules to address the rule-set gaps unveiled, is the signalling to markets for where investments should flow next.

I learned this drill in the economic security workshops I ran with Cantor Fitzgerald atop the World Trade Center in 2000-2001: whenever we presented our combined flag-CEO-spooks audience with a scenario of disruption, the national-security types got all spooked by these events, wondering what would happen if some nation or bad actor was able to pull off a similar stunt, but the investor looked at these events primarily as churn, as in, "I make money now on dealing with the revealed deficiency." Locals are incentivized to pay up for the new capabilities. Why? If they don't, they lose the competitive advantage.

In some ways, this gap revealed stems from a previous boom-and-bust investment wave, the telecom boom of the 1990s. So much capacity built in wasn't quickly met by a rising demand, so many companies went belly-up. Meanwhile, though, in Asia the demand skyrocketed over the past decade and the telecoms apparently weren't there to make it happen. So now, apparently, it's time for the Pacific bonds between Asia and North America to catch up to the gold-standard Atlantic bonds between Europe and North America, where, for example, Verizon has a "mesh" of cables so that shifting flows from damaged to undamaged cables is routinely achieved.

ARTICLE: "Carter View Of Israeli 'Apartheid' Stirs Furor," by Julie Bosman, New York Times, 14 December 2006, p. B1.

OP-ED: "Jimmy Carter's Book: An Israeli View ... the former president has a religious problem with Israel," by Michael B. Oren, Wall Street Journal, 26 December 2006, p. A12.

OP-ED: "... And a Palestinian One: Mr. Carter has done this nation an enormous service," by Ali Abunimah, Wall Street Journal, 26 December 2006, p. A12.

Interesting to read the two op-eds: the pro-Israeli one is all full of history and makes no bones about accusing Carter of basically being anti-Semitic, while the Palestinian one is all about what's going on today. I guess when your behavior today is hard to defend, you talk about the past instead.

Carter himself, in the book and in all his speeches and articles over the years, has always been very careful to avoid criticizing what Israel does within Israel proper, even though there is a huge amount of discrimination against non-Jews in that country (after all, the country was created for Jews only, was it not?). Instead, his criticism in the book focuses on Israeli policies in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

But what really gets the Israelis and their supporters mad is the word "apartheid," not merely because it resurrects the old South African model (Israel, as fellow pariah, routinely cooperated with the white-rule government over the years on a host of security issues, to include nukes), but because the religious version of this apartheid structure comes close to what the West is currently condemning with regard to radical Islam. Try these two paras from Abunimah on for size and tell me this isn't religious apartheid uncomfortably close to that which the Salafi radicals would impose if given the chance:

A 2003 law stipulates that an Israeli citizen may bring a non-citizen spouse to live in Israel from anywhere in the world, excluding a Palestinian from the occupied territories. A civil rights leader in Israel likened it to the American anti-miscegenation measures from the 1950s, when mixed race couples had to leave the state of Virginia to marry legally.

For Palestinians, the most blatant form of discrimination is Israel's "Law of Return," that allows a Jewish person from any country to settle in Israel. Meanwhile, family members of Palestinian citizens of Israel, living in exile, sometimes in refugee camps just a few miles outside Israel's borders, are not permitted to set foot in the country.

Israel's fears WRT to a loss of cultural identity are just a precusor to that of the Arab world's fears WRT to a loss of cultural identity. Israel feels like a tiny island in a Muslim sea, and Islam feels like an embattered island in a Westernizing sea called globalization. Israel's fears center on demographic trends: unless they discriminate against Arabs, Jews become a minority in their own nation eventually, the real threat of "dismantling the Jewish state." Islam tries to find solace in its own demography, citing numbers, when in reality the youth bulge is the civilization's own worst enemy, given the opportunities of cultural connectivity afforded by globalization's ever deepening penetration. Both cultures reach for apartheid-like defenses, feeling completely justified in that response, because the preservation of cultural identity is crucial in their minds, as in, worth fighting and dying over.

But as we know from globalization, the enforcement of islands of cultural uniformity tend to come at very high prices. That Israel has consistently pulled off its own version of apartheid within a constitutional framework has been nothing less than amazing to watch, because it is a state and government and people with very profound ethical values. And yet, pull it off they do, just like America did for decades with African-Americans and still does with homosexuals in many subtle and non-subtle ways.

The Arab regimes suffer no such guilt, and engage in all sorts of religious oppression with great ease. Thus, in comparison, their condemnation comes much easier for us than confronting the unpleasant policies of the Israelis.

But it's clear that in the end, real peace comes with religious freedom throughout the region--meaning for all states, including Israel. Carter's just pointing that out in his book, and angering a lot of Jews in the process.

Oren's counter is pathetic in this regard:

In his apparent attempt to make American Christians rethink their affection for Israel, Jimmy Carter is clearly departing from time-honored practice. This has not been the legacy of evangelicals alone, but of many religious denominations in the U.S., and not soley the conviction of Mr. Bush, but of generations of American leaders. In the controversial title of his book, Mr. Carter implicitly denounces Israel for its separatist policies, but, by doing so, he isolated himself from centuries of American tradition.

Interesting huh? Not a defense of the separatist policies but a condemnation of Carter for not going along on the subject like so many politicians have in the past. The defense amounts to: You haven't complained in the past, so why now?

Better ending comes from Abunimah:

As other divided socieities, like South Africa, Northern Ireland and indeed our own are painfully learning, only equal rights and esteem for all the people, in the diversity of their identities, can bring lasting peace. This is an even harder discussion than the one President Carter has courageously launched, but ultimately it is one we must confront if peace is to come to Israel-Palestine.

So the question is, do you want to be associated with what's right, or what's been going on for decades?

Bush's decision to lay the Big Bang on the region was a declaration of wanting to do what's right and not merely put up with what's brought stability--at high moral costs--in the past. The question we face on Palestine is whether or not we'll pursue such necessary change for just the Muslim nations of the region, while giving Israel's apartheid policies a pass, or whether our beliefs in such justice are truly universal.

The danger to Israel is no greater than that to any other culture in the region. The state of Israel was created to deal with a danger that has long since passed, much like the United Nations. Israel must move to a post-Zionist cultural identity if peace is ever to be achieved. I seriously doubt Israel can manage that move, and thus I see an inevitable decline in U.S. support as globalization forces accommodation from Islamic cultures in the region that is not matched by Israel's.

I'm not saying this will happen anytime soon, because in all of its imperfections, Israel is a shining beacon of what must occur throughout the region, politically, economically and socially. But Israel is likewise a symptom of what's wrong with the region in its religious exclusionary practices, and since real freedom cannot come to Islamic cultures there without such religious freedom (or what Benedict calls "reciprocity"), our push for democracy in the region, which will inevitably win out thanks more to globalization's forces than our own, will also inevitably put America at odds with Israel's achievement of political freedom coupled with religious apatheid.

As America long proved with its own version of racial apartheid, you can achieve the facade of political and economic freedom overlaying such injustice, but being slick about it doesn't make it right--or sustainable.

I know that agreeing with Carter on this subject opens me up to similar charges, but since I've been so long castigated as both a Jew-lover/tool of Israel and an obvious anti-Semite (I'm an equal-opportunity offender, it seems), depending on which subject I'm discussing, I long ago grew numb to such allegations.

Apparently, Carter has too.

Having said all that, my long-held position has been that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is not a hold-up to neccesary change in the region. To me, that argument is a complete red herring. The real problem with the region is that the political, social and economic structures of these countries (besides highly-globalized Israel, that is) make them unable to adapt themselves to the challenges and the opportunities that globalization demands/offers. Why Israel really burns most of the region is that it represents everything they need to become but have not become.

But on this issue of religious separatism, Carter is right, and here Israel shares the same burden of change as the rest of the region. Recognizing that doesn't make you pro- or anti-Israel. It just makes you honest.

ARTICLE: Islamist Forces in Somali City Vanish, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, December 28, 2006

On the evaporating Islamists in Somalia, you have to wonder if this isn't the same-old, same-old where the insurgents refuse to fight the war and wait for the resulting postwar.

Is this state-on-state? Hardly. Just Ethiopia's military going into Somalia looking for bad guys. Sound familiar?

ARTICLE: After Iraq, a new U.S. military model, By Stanley A. Weiss, International Herald Tribune, December 26, 2006

Pretty good summary piece on: 1) how this fight heads south and 2) why we need that East Asian NATO in place. Although it proclaims neither, it implicitly argues for both.

Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this.

Yesterday got an email from Lt. Col. (civil affairs) who saw me speak at the global civ affairs conference in the summer of 2004 (which I describe in Blueprint). He's got both books, reads the blog and articles, and has been waiting for one of my columns to appear in the local paper, the Abilene something or other.

Well, it did last week, to my complete delight, and now this guy's gearing up for a presentation to his church group, creating new readers.

Then just now I get email from reader in Milford MA, who's long pushed the editor of his local paper to run one of my columns. Amazingly, it finally worked with the Pakistan piece (my darkest piece by far).

So an interesting model: the blog sells the column and hopefully the column's spread creates a virtuous circle on other efforts to spread the thinking/vision, like the upcoming Fast Company piece.

I haven't found the Abilene entry, but here's the Milford one.

Update: I found the Abilene column: Nation building on our plate in Iraq.

Sean and I know it's frustrating to have them off while Sean works his way through the backlog of work created by the shift in our service model created by my writing too damn much (and thus running out of memory in the old system we had with MT).

Please be patient while Sean works through this load and we'll have the comments back up right after New Years.

On the bright side, the weblog sure looks better!

ARTICLE: "My So-Called Second Life: I stepped into this virtual world and found a lot of sex--and a guide named Cristal," by Joel Stein, Time, 25 December 2006-1 January 2007, p. 76.

Funny bit by Stein, who's almost always great, about some time he spent cruising--in that Al Pacino way--in SL (he got a gift penis, which was cool). The upshot? Despite all the visual weirdness, he pretty much behaved like he always did, and found that the people he interacted with did so as well. Sure, lotsa flavor surrounding the dating scene, but people are people in the end.

When I gave the interview to NPR on the subject (the story's surely run by now, and if anyone can find it...), I was surprised to find myself saying that the experience wasn't that different from any other speaking gig: being rushed in by handlers, with a certain amount of fumbling (mostly mine, in terms of movement), that awkward moment on stage when you're setting up under the gaze of an assembling audience, the slow start by me, getting into the groove while trying not to get distratcted by people in the crowd, and then a Q&A that was surprisingly above par (perhaps having to type a question makes it come off better, because I'm sure the same was true with my answers). On the far side, there was the sudden pull of my schedule: in the real world it's always about running out to catch a plane (I'm surprised I don't have nightmares on the subject, since I engage in that tense chase every week in some strange city--thus my great love of GPS), but here in SL it was my kids getting home from school and suddenly jumping all over me (my "office" at that point was about 10 square feet just inside the apartment door, so I took "meetings" with my kids frequently and resorted to doing radio interviews in the bathroom).

What appearances by people like Arianna Huffington and Joel Stein tell me is that SL is now pretty much established, which made being talked into appearing in it way back when ('05? or early this year? [Editor's note: October 2005]) kinda cool in retrospect.

OP-ED: "Hearts, Minds ... and Schools: War isn't the best route to democracy," by Lawrence E. Harrison, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 25 December 2006-7 January 2007, p. 23.

ARTICLE: "The alternative to war: A landmark in the peace process," The Economist, 16 December 2006, p. 40.

ARTICLE: "The alternative to voting: A slide back into all-out war," The Economist, 16 December 2006, p. 40.

ON LANGUAGE: "Realism: The comeback work in foreign policy," by William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 24 December 2006, p. 20.

Good and very thoughtful op-ed by Harrison, that's somewhat obscured by the silly title (Duh! War isn't the best route? WHODATHUNKIT!). In it, Harrison makes a good case--based on a big project of research--that changing culture is the key to creating economic opportunity and successful connectivity with the outside world, and that this is the best route to generating democracy in the long run:

Our goal was to capture the role of culture and cultural change in a society's evolution. We found that Confucian values of education, achievement and merit played a central role in the economic "miracles" in East Asia. Open economic policies and the welcoming of foreign investment triggered several transformations, including in India, Ireland and Spain. Visionary leadership was crucial in the cases of Botswana, Turkey and Quebec. In Ireland, Italy, Spain and Quebec, modernization was also accompanied by decline in the influence of the Catholic Church [mostly on birth control, a concept that make sense as your economy matures--thus putting you at odds with the church--Tom].

We concluded that enlightened policies can, over time, produce cultural change--change that in turn spurs political pluralism and economic development. However, it is extremely difficult to impose such changes from outside; war is not a helpful instrument. Better tools include education that inculcates democratic and entrepreneurial values; improved child-rearing practices; religious reform; and development assistance keyed to cultural change.

Then he goes on to list a number of foci that make sense in assistance, like literacy and getting (and keeping) girls in school.

No arguments from me on that stuff (as these are arguments I've offered myself in PNM and BFA). My only problem with this article is the presumed binary choice between using war as an instrument and avoiding it.

Obviously, you don't want to have to wage war any more than is absolutely necessary, but the definition of necessary is crucial. Some situations (e.g., certain dictatorships, some forms of civil strife) simply won't get better without outside intervention. These are ongoing wars against individuals within countries that will rage on--if allowed--and thus prevent the evolutions in culture that Harrison rightfully advocates. In fact, left to their own course, these situations not only retard such necessary evolution, they can send the societies in question down retrograde paths of dissolution (in many ways, on display in Iraq today and what we saw in ethnic cleansing throughout long-repressed Yugoslavia). Great dysfunction like that often necessitates very violent divorces, which we can trigger (like in Iraq) or stand by and idly observe (Balkans), but which we'll likely be drawn into in some manner because of the inevitably resulting regional instability.

You can say, "We should only take on the easy jobs," but truth be told, the easy jobs will be handled for the most part by the private sector (not a big U.S. military interventionary role in Ireland and India, for example). It's the stinkers that get left to intervening states.

And no, I've never advocated (as some cartoonish reviews of my work surmise) invading every Gap state to bring integration. But in certain cases, intervening is the best route, not for creating democracy, but for removing a key impediment to its eventual emergence. Why? Dictators tend to squelch economic connectivity between the masses and the outside world, because to let that stuff unfold is to lose power progressively over time. And civil strife kills such connectivity simply by making the environment too scary for outsiders to enter (unless they're energy companies protected by private security firms).

So yeah, war isn't the best route to democracy. But in certain cases wars are the only way to get to a postwar in which Harrison's ideas can get their logical play.

But if we're real realists, we're not interested in that postwar, just picking and choosing our wars for specific punitive effect. The problem is, the games really are won in the postwar nowadays, not in the wars. So interventionary wars themselves are not the problem (and indeed, sometimes are the solution), it's our unwillingness to take seriously the challenges of the postwar.

Indonesia's Aceh is mired in intractable conflict for decades, until the perfect, crushingly destructive foreign intervention occurs, known as the tsunami.

The disaster opened the eyes of both the government in Jakarta and the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) to Aceh's war-weariness. A peace deal was struck in August 2005. Since then, events have unfolded more hopefully than anyone could have predicted. Under the supervision of monitors led by the European Union, GAM disarmed and Indonesian troops returned to barracks. A law was passed granting Aceh generous autonomy.

A quasi-separation, achieved peacefully, amidst the massive reconstruction effort following untold destruction and death from a nasty outside force that crushed all in its path.

That's not to wish tsunamis on intractable conflicts. It's simply to note that sometimes something has to intervene from outside to break the deadlock, kill the conflict, stop the shooting and repression.

We made our recovery effort, engaging in nation-building and reconstruction with a far lighter hand and including a nifty array of local partners, and we resurrected a military-to-military relationship with Indonesia's armed forces for our reward.

Compare that effort (which I highlighted in BFA) with Sri Lanka's slide back into war. Yeah, it'd be nice if India took that one on again, but that's unlikely. And given the violence that will once again pervade that society, there's almost no chance that any of Harrison's precepts will be given a chance.

I know, I know. We're all realists now, thanks to our failings in postwar (not in the war) Iraq. But even an able diagnostician of those failures such as George Packer will readily admit that:

At some point events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security--that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils.

Globalization ain't going away, despite all its complications and challenges, and so pretending we'll only take the easy cases when we own the world's largest military just ain't realistic. Because what we don't try to fix (hopefully with plenty of others), others will be forced to fix--however well they can.

The real unrealism of today is the belief that by eschewing difficult efforts, we meet the Hippocratic criteria of "do no harm," when the harm, in virtually every instance you can name, has already been done by ourselves and others, leaving us just to contemplate whether we give a damn at this point or simply want to pass off our problems to those "others," whose efforts will inevitably be cast by national security types as "clear proof" that Country A is trying to reduce our influence by increasing theirs, and thus harming our "national interests," which too often consist of nothing more than our belief that certain regions are ours and ours alone to either ignore or screw around with.

Since Tom wrote an update on the comment situation, let me give you a little more information.

By now maybe you've noticed the new home page design. This project was undertaken by Janet Shellenberger at the behest of Tom's scheduler, Jennifer Posada. Thanks, Janet, for your work.

Integrating the weblog into the new home page was my responsibility. I could not have done it without the assistance of Big Bad John Serrao. Thanks, John.

Since Tom's first 4000 weblog posts are not yet reintegrated into Movable Type, you cannot currently use the 'Search' feature in the sidebar to find anything before the weblog went down around the first part of this month. However, that's what Google's for.

By way of example, Tom was wondering about his appearance in Second Life. For my part, I just went to the Media Appearances page and looked it up.

Using the sidebar search only returns results back to December 9th.

I might have found out even quicker if I'd used Google site search. I see directly in result number 4 that it was October 26th, 2005 from 1130 am to 130 pm.

Why did I take you on this extended travelogue (aside from to show you that I know how to search Tom's site better than anyone ;-)? To show that, if you need to search before I get the posts reintegrated into Movable Type, you should just use Google to search Tom's whole site. The other major advantage is that you can get results from Tom's voluminous material that's on the website but not in the weblog. This is often very useful.

Therefore, I'm going to gin up a separate Search page that will include weblog search, Google site search and the Tom and friends custom search (that I came up with a few weeks back) at a minimum.

As Tom said, I'll be turning comments back on after the first of the year. In the meantime, I have turned on Trackbacks. They haven't returned near as many useful links as I've had to delete Trackback spam, but you might keep one eye open when you're reading posts, especially if some time has passed to gather links. For example, here's the most recent Trackback.

At least one person has complained about the size of the fonts on the new weblog home page. I may make them smaller, but have not decided yet. If you don't prefer this size, I encourage you to resize the text through the View Menu on your web browser or by holding down 'Control' and pressing '+' or '-' in Firefox or Explorer ('0' to return to standard size).

That's all I can think of right now. Feel free to email me with further questions. I'm not really looking for design suggestions at this time. You can put those in the comments when we turn them back on ;-)

Tom wrote yesterday about his appearance back in October 2005 in Second Life: A second look at Second Life.

He didn't have the link to the spot on NPR that included a short interview (at 4:25) with him on his appearance, but our loyal readers took care of that: Visiting the 'Second Life' World: Virtual Hype?

Some pics:

Walking to the gig at the...

... in-world UN

Interior shot

Some audience shots

[note the guy front left being Hiro Protagonist]

The virtual from the real [the real suit is better ;-)]

Tom kicks off

Tom and the Map slide

A-Z Rule Set slide

Taking questions

A list of Tom's posts and other links on his appearance:
+ Thomas P.M. Barnett comes to Second Life in avatar form
+ All typed out
+ Second Life appearance transcript
+ Thomas P.M. Barnett's Second Life Transcript and Slides [this is actually a pretty good presentation of the Brief, with a few slides. I've decided I need to add some of these links to the Brief page...]
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART I
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART II
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART III
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART IV
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART V

Update: Wagner James Au writes in to say that the best link to coverage on Tom's appearance on Second Life is THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT. Thanks, James.

ARTICLE: China Offers Glimpse of Rationale Behind Its Military Policies, By Edward Cody, Washington Post, December 30, 2006; Page A17

The Big War crowd wants to keep overfeeding the Leviathan while starving the SysAdmin, no matter how many ground personnel deaths that takes in Afghanistan, Iraq and everywhere else we go in this Long War. They will tell you the "real war" is going to be with China over Taiwan. Why? The Chinese are--by default now--the second biggest military spender in the world. Our worst-case estimates place total Chinese military spending at roughly what we spend on acquisitions alone, or what we spend on R&D alone, and nowhere near what we're cranking just in Iraq on an annual basis. The vast majority of the stuff they've imported has been from the Russians, and last time I checked, we weren't that impressed with their stuff. According to our own Pentagon, in a generation's time China could be spending roughly half of what we're spending right now.

Think China's going to close any gap that way?

Ah, but the advantage of proximity WRT Taiwan. China "gets" Taiwan and the West falls, does it not? Because it would signal that . . . oh something or other.

But China makes it clear each and every time that the trigger will be Taiwan's actions. So what does America do? We sell Taiwan very sophisticated arms. We bolster our alliance with Japan on this score, inviting Japan into our defense guarantee on Taiwan (yes, that Japan that was the colonial master of Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century and still denies its atrocities vis-a-vis China in Manchuria during WWII). In fact, we bolster our military ties with virtually every country that surrounds China--save Russia--during the Bush administration. Moreover, we cite China consistently to justify high-tech capacities that we continuously purchase in dollar amounts that vastly outweigh China's spending. Between now and 2025, we are likely to spend the Chinese military by $10 trillion dollars.

So what is China guilty of in this last explanation of its vaunted defense build-up?

As a rising economic power they're doing to their military the same thing they've been doing to their economy for years now: swapping out cheap labor (here, ground troops) for high-tech capital (mostly air and naval, aping their model, otherwise known as the U.S. military). Why does the PLA ape the Pentagon? Who else should they logically ape?

And here are the provocative rationales offered by Hu Jintao for China's build-up:

1) danger on the Korean peninsula (hmm, that one's hard to critique);

2) rising U.S.-Japanese military cooperation (given the state of Sino-Japanese relations, that seems fairly plausible, does it not?)

3) rising provocations re: independence from Taiwan (that's really BS, but a standby for the Chinese).

China continues to use Taiwan as a national diversion, with the Party leadership making that the great excuse for a build-up that logically arises from China's rising. Yes, the obsession is real, and it's mind-boggling with the PLA. I have sat in conversations with their military strategists and planners and listened to nonsense after nonsense on this issue. You'd think the whole frickin' universe revolved around this all-important scenario, when--truth be told--this scenarios matters only to military acquisition planners in both Beijing and Washington. Why? Frankly, it's all we have left and for the Chinese, it's a nice cover for what I believe to be the long-term rationale truly at work: China's growing fears over its rising energy dependence, which within years will vastly outweigh ours.

But my God! What kind of nation builds a big military to protect its access to energy around the planet?

Well, actually, that would be us by a huge margin.

But imagine if the Chinese were perceived to move in that direction! This would be an affront to us, would it not? Wouldn't it signal China's trying to cut off our access to energy in the Persian Gulf (Where we get all our oil, right? Or is it China's oil in the main?).

Ah, now I'm confusing myself. All this mirror imaging by China's strategic thinkers, whether it's on Taiwan or energy security, that's got to be something just to confuse us. Surely they cannot be so unimaginative simply to ape our moves, building a naval and air force whose primary design is to prevent our ability to threaten their ability to threaten Taiwan's ability to threaten independence? And beyond that simply to guard sea lines of communication? Surely the Chinese strategic vision is not that narrow, that myopic?

Why the hell not? That's basically our Big War rationale. With China, they're aping #1. But what exactly is our excuse when Marines and Army are dying every day in this Long War we've declared? Why is the Pentagon so intent on having a war with the country that inevitably becomes our biggest economic partner?

I'm not overstating. There are many in the military and especially the Air Force and Navy that just gotta have their conflict with China. Otherwise these guys must contemplate evolutions of their forces that they do not care to contemplate.

Too many Pentagon planners want to make the environment match the force, not the other way around. They'll tell you China spies on us and tries to steal our secrets, constantly trying to make their force more like ours. They'll tell you the big future threat we face is the loss of Taiwan. They simply don't want the war we've got, and if left to their own devices, will continue to build a force that's unprepared for that war--getting our people killed in the process.

This Sino-focused strategic argument is nothing more than the primacy strategy in disguise. It's the notion pushed by the neocons near the end of the elder Bush's administration, which said that now that the Sovs were gone, our #1 goal in military spending should be to remain the world's biggest military power by far. Well, an extra $10 trillion vis-a-vis your #2 competitor strikes me like we're already there. But that's not enough for the primacists, and if it takes a botched Long War effort and thousands upon thousands of U.S. ground troops to achieve, well then that's just too damn bad.

Thanks to Keir Lauritzen for sending this article in.

Saddam Hussein Is Put to Death: Former Iraqi President Hanged Before Dawn in Baghdad to Divided Reaction, By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, December 30, 2006; Page A01

I still believe Saddam should have been put on trial in the International Criminal Court or by some other UN-sanctioned court than by the successor Iraqi government. While I believe he should have been put to death, I really fear we allowed the proceedings to speak to the wrong audiences.

A foreign policy wish list for 2007

I don't see much to celebrate in terms of our country's foreign policy in 2006. As we look to 2007, here's my top-10 wish list, in no particular order of plausibility.

10. A certain Latin American leader passes quietly, with no evidence of American involvement. Not Hugo Chavez, who's rather harmless in his backfiring attempts to resurrect socialism down south but rather Fidel Castro, whose impending death finally sets in motion a political evolution that should generate America's 51st star within a decade.

How's that for a bold prediction to start the column! ;-)

Read on at KnoxNews

Dave Goldberg wrote:

Tom,

What angers me is not critisism of Israeli policies, or accusations of
religous separatism in the state of Israel, but rather Jimmy Carter's
apparant intellectual dishonesty.

Please see What Would Jimmy Do?, Jeffrey Goldberg, Washington Post Book
World, December 10, 2006.

Dave Goldberg (no relation to the author)
Springfield VA

Saw the piece and think it's fine. Doesn't change my post whatsoever though. I don't make a case for Carter's book, but for his basic criticism, which I see as quite sound.

Saying he's somewhat partisan (not emphasizing Arab rejectionism enough, for example) doesn't make the crux of his argument invalid. It just makes his book weaker. I didn't offer a book review, just commentary on the debate and what I liked about where Carter focused his critique. Carter's argument needs to be dealt with head on, not seemingly discredited on the basis of factual errors and interpretations.

But I liked the piece so I'm happy to cite in the blog.

In the end, Israel's biggest long-term problem is that its nationalism is race-specific in a globalizing world where such state-sponsored "affirmative action" comes off as hopelessly discriminatory, whether you're talking Muslims in Tel Aviv or Paris or Los Angeles. By asking the Middle East to integrate itself truly with globalization, we commit them to ending such religious/racial discriminations in their countries. Ultimately, the same gets asked of Israel, and that's where I think U.S. support will falter, because I think the bulk of Israelis remained committed to keeping Israel a fundamentally closed club built to promote the interests of a single race.

I understand that desire, even as I reject the premise philosophically.

Then again, I'm an American.

Don't tell Bret, but we're arguably watching the best ever this afternoon, from the 14th row, 35-yard line, Colts side.

Wife got Manning in white, because she looks hot in white. I got Harrison in blue, cause I was a WR/CB in H.S. Tight little stadium

Peyton and Co. marching.

Peyton ran for one TD and threw one to a defensive lineman for another.

20-15 after 3.

Manning to Harrison for 27-15. Right down our sideline. Double-pump. Very sweet.

Last punt. Miami with ball on 20 with one minute left. Colts 27-22.
Happy New Year to everyone.