Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

The prisons we build: the company we keep

In a famous experiment on sensory deprivation conducted years ago, a researcher sewed shut a newborn kitten's eye. Weeks later, when the scientist exposed the same eye, it was found to be useless. The profound lack of visual stimulation had permanently turned off that portion of the feline's brain.
Humans conduct such cruel experiments on one another all the time. Most of the horror stories we hear involve parents who abuse their children systematically over years, leaving them socially and mentally retarded in the worst way.

Such torture of innocents is easy to condemn, but when states engage in egregious acts in the name of security, rationalizations are a whole lot easier to come by.

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

Early column sighting: The Press of Atlantic City

+ My favorite link this week is a wicked-cool blogroll-as-periodic-table with Tom as 'Tm'.
+ Dreaming 5GW linked My own personal 5GW dream.
And referenced Tom re: 5GWarriors.
+ God is a Beer Drinker linked The readiness canard.
+ Joshua Foust continues to disagree with and link Tom.
+ Evolutionary Awareness linked Tom's definition of the Functioning Core.
+ Room 204 is a weblog for a class that's using PNM as one of their books.
+ James McCormick references Tom in a discussion of how long our people can serve in Iraq.
+ In the near future calls PNM 'new-age Manifest Destiny'.
+ Pennypack Post wonders, linking to last week's column, if Tom's committed to a blueprint for action or to Obama. [Answer: the former, and they're not mutually exclusive, anyhow ;-)]
+ Cheat Seeking Missiles references Tom while talking about globalization and Indian farmer suicides.
And a Tom-inspired post called Barbie Vs. The Mullahs.
+ NonParty Politics linked History will say on postwar Iraq...
+ Midwatch Cowboy is reading BFA, listening to Hugh's series with Tom, and linking the Brief on YouTube.
+ TM Lutas asks what role virtue plays in membership in the Core and Gap.
+ Economic Freedom linked The USG hedge fund for emerging markets.
+ Critt's doing more work combining Tom with Grazr, this time Amplifying Blueprint for Action.
+ Burgh Diaspora continues to integrate Tom's thoughts on globalization with his own distributed Pittsburgh project.
+ Someone posted the PNM Esquire article on a Spurs bulletin board. (?)
+ Keith from Indy left a comment that Tom's linked on Wikipedia's entry for Civilian Reserve Corps.
+ Giuliani for 2008 calls Tom 'an optimistic technocrat'.
+ Right Truth linked The side I've always been on (but it might have been an April Fool's joke).
+ China Law Blog linked What China will do with its money is what all people do with their money: use it to make them richer.
And also linked 6 reasons not to worry about all those Chinese men.
+ Asia Logistics Wrap linked Connectivity creates wealth opportunities but threatens homogeneity: it’s as simple as that and Go west, young Chinese!
+ There is no Second Place linked On Iranian seizure of UK troops.
+ So did Simulated Laughter.
+ Hidden Unities (with a new design, including a tagline inspired by Tom) linked Tom in reference to the SysAdmin.

Got this nice email from a participant at the recent Security Cooperation conference that I keynoted at Central Command. Very gratifying feedback to receive.

We concluded our conference this afternoon after a long week of numerous late nights. We developed country specific security cooperation plans which support our overall theater security cooperation strategy. I have been to two previous SC conferences and this was by far the most productive. What I found fascinating about this conference was how often your brief was cited. I talked to people and observed other briefings from the SAOs, the Military Departments, DOS, and USAID among others. Many of them referenced the Gap, the SysAdmin, and the DOEE just to name a few.

Your briefing helped establish a common vocabulary among the participants and I believe it provided a framework and a focus as we worked toward a truly synchronized strategy for building partner capacity throughout the theater. As you know, building partner capacity is the latest term for assisting countries, primarily in the Gap, with developing the ability to secure all of their sovereign territory and prevent the rise of violent extremists within their borders. Building partner capacity is equivalent to your concept of exporting security. We have operationalized the concept since the publication of the last QDR which coined the term. However, this is the first time I have participated in an event where building partner capacity was discussed within the context of "everything else". In our working groups we differentiated between countries with too much government and those with too little. We talked about the need to establish security as a precursor to attracting foreign investment and using CA and HA programs to improve basic services in order to improve quality of life and mitigate the factors which give rise to violent extremists. Of course, none of these are new concepts for us. What was new was that the discussions took place with a view toward "shrinking the Gap." You gave us what every good military planner needs: an End State.

In addition, at previous conferences, agencies like USAID, DTRA, and the
Surgeon's Office all briefed in plenary sessions, but few stayed for the working groups where SC activities are programmed. This year, all were there throughout due to the common belief that we must look beyond traditional security cooperation activities like exercises, FMS, JCETs, and IMET. These new players broadened the scope of SC and brought us closer to a comprehensive approach to building partner capacity. Your brief helped open all of our eyes to the possibilities these players represent.

Once again, I would personally like to thank you for taking the time to speak to us. I honestly believe that your participation set the tone for the whole conference and brought us one step closer to "a future worth creating."

It's gets a bit much when every other post or column gets interpreted as some grubby plea for attention from Dem candidates.

And it's even more laughable considering my only F2Fs have been on the Republican side!

Seriously, my expectations have always been that no Dem president could stand much of what I argue for and that only a centrist Republican (much like my man Steve) would find me palatable.

People are misinterpreting my praise for the Dems tying Bush's hands. I expect the Dems to be what they are: the opposition. I do not expect them to come up with better plans. That's not how our system works or has ever really worked. I expect Bush to come up with a better plan on the basis on the effective resistance from the opposition. I don't expect Congress to determine U.S. foreign policy.

What's so frustrating right now is that Bush was told by the Iraq Study Group what the logical way ahead should look like, and despite the showy bits here and there, he's continued to blow off their recommendations completely. I find that deeply troubling after the beating he took in the midterms, especially since the GOP hierarchy stacked the ISG deck just to make it easier.

So despite all the domestic resistance (average people are not stupid, they just know a losing hand when they see one) and the manufactured "out," Bush basically soldiers on, losing more allies along the way.

I just don't see that as sustainable. I think it puts everything good Bush has done at risk by making his entire time in office seem like an out-of-control experience (Clinton's foreign policy looks positively logical in comparison, and he used the military a huge amount, surpassed only by Bush in the last several decades).

I think that if public and the Dem opposition don't make it clear that they want Bush to fix what he's broken (Iraq) before moving on to new targets (Iran) that Bush and Cheney would move to conflate one disaster with another, and that that second disaster would achieve a tipping point globally that the first one could not--in large part because it would be viewed as America fundamentally out of control instead of playing "control" (in a gaming sense) to the global security wargame that is the Long War. Bush the Father gave off that vibe, and frankly, so did Clinton. Bush the Younger does not, and that is dangerous. As I wrote in PNM, sometimes America is called upon by history to change the rules, but that bold stroke needs to be followed by something more than just further idiosyncratic behavior. Done right, like Bush the Elder kicking Saddam out of Kuwait (unfortunately, not finishing the job), the demonstration effect can be huge (inter-state war of the classic land-grab style basically goes away. Done with a system-level appreciation, like Clinton and Co. did in the Balkans, we can give the world a huge glimpse of the necessary rule set (my A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt states is basically born from that experience). Bush the Younger likewise signaled a sense of history with his arguments for reshaping the Middle East with Saddam's toppling, but as I have argued many times, then the strategic imagination stalled. Kerry could not have done worse. I'm not sure anybody could have done worse. That's why history will judge Bush the Younger's re-election as a real disaster. Bushes are apparently good for just one term (although I have real hopes for Jeb, the one Bush who probably does have what it takes to be a good, full-service president).

So yeah, I do hope things will temporize as much as possible and that little will change between now and Jan 2009. I think anyone other than McCain who gets elected will represent a sea change and offer America a host of new opportunities to right our foreign policy quite rapidly, and I look forward to that.

But I don't write to attract that sort of attention, because I don't want that kind of job. Getting sucked back into the DC bureaucracy where your fab title really boils down to managing a whopping two or three big existing programs where you get to turn a few dials during your time . . . I interact with those people all the time and have for years, and I don't want that job.

As for trailing the great man in some White House position, I just don't have the ego for that, nor the mindset.

Having me around all the time isn't a good idea--for me or the person in question. I just don't function well in situations like that, and so nobody uses me like that--not even Steve.

So please, let's stay on topic. There's definitely a strain of people who liked me and my stuff much better when I approved of Bush's choices more, and there's definitely a strain of people who like me and my stuff much better when I disapprove of Bush's choices more now.

But for someone who's on his third presidency as a professional in this business, I'm not particularly surprised that this president wears out his welcome near the end. They all do. The guys who got them elected tend to bail about 2-3 years in, that's just the nature of the grind. Then they get people who are less connected to what got the person elected in the first place, and coordination tends to suffer. Near the end, it comes off as every man for himself, and so the criticism gets a whole lot easier because the performance tends to get a whole lot worse.

I can't cite blog entries from late Clinton or late 41 because I didn't keep all those memos and emails, so this blog gets to see this sort of stuff from me for the first time. Unpatriotic to some because we're at "war," except I don't view it that way, meaning neither unpatriotic nor really at war. That's why I spend a lot of time giving talks on trying to disaggregate war from peace, and why I argue so much for a rules perspective in this blog.

Then there's just the personal reality that I'm gearing up for another book, and the rejectionist in one's self naturally emerges in this time ("They're all wrong and thus I MUST write this book!").

Then there's just the larger reality that we're all moving on beyond Bush much earlier than anticipated, as his second term has seen him become as authority-crippled as Nixon near the end or Carter near the end.

But my optimism in the future suffers no drop due to Bush's plight. I live in the greatest country in the world, during this planet's best, deepest, and most sustained economic boom in history. But because I know what this country is capable of when our leadership in admired (like Clinton was globally), I prefer to anticipate that resumption of history in about 20 months more than to spend my days defending people and choices I no longer think represent the best we can muster.

So I'll take obstructionism for now and do my best to prepare my usual audience for the possibilities that lie ahead.

And no, I don't want to work for any commands either. I like interacting with them all.

ARTICLE: "As Its Brands Lag at Home, Unilever Makes a Risky Bet: CEO Shifts Resources To Poorer Countries; The Making of 'Cubitos,'" by Deborah Ball, Wall Street Journal, 22 March 2007, p. A1.

Great piece right out of the playbook of Prahalad.

This CEO isn't just talking China and India, but Africa and Latin America--the whole Gap.

Key line:

Unilever figures that 1.2 billion consumers will buy packaged goods for the first time by 2010--most of them in the developing world.

Each week 40k people in Asia use a washing machine for the first time.

As one section puts it, it's all about "getting there first."

Shrinking the Gap will be a private-sector-led affair. The roll of the military is to buy time, create stability and security, and help money flow.

ARTICLEL: "Silent Districts Speak Volumes On Sunnis' Fall: Insurgents Sever Area's Access to Life Basics," by Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times, 26 March 2007, p. A1.

We all know that Kurdistan is stable and flourishing (the good). Most of us know the not-so-bad story of the Shiites:

The contrast with Shiite neighborhoods is sharp. Markets there are in full swing, community projects are under way, and while electricity is scarce throughout the city, there is less trouble finding fuel for generators in those areas. When the government cannot provide services, civilian arms of the Shiite militias step in to try to fill the gap.

The implied contrast, of course, is to the ugly, or the Sunni areas:

The city-scape of Iraq's capital tells a stark story of the toll the past four years have taken on Iraq's once powerful Sunni Arabs.

Theirs is the world of ruined buildings, damaged mosques, streets pitted by mortar shells and so little electricity that many people have abandoned using refrigerators altogether.

We have successfully liberated Kurdistan, and if we weren't so bent out of shape on Iran, we could argue easily that our liberation of Shiite Iraq has also gone reasonably well.

Where we failed was in Sunni Iraq, and that failure was--in many ways--preordained.

Glass-half-full says we claim our victories where we find them by pulling most of our ground troops to safe Kurdistan, continue to hunt AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) with special ops throughout Iraq, and advise the central government on how to put down the insurgency based in Sunni areas (letting the Shiite militias do their thing as necessary).

You add that up and that's not a bad showing, despite all the pointless losses on our side due to poor planning, not enough numbers and poor resourcing and execution.

But we're so binary we can't accept any partial win, and we fret incessantly that Iran "wins" when it's really Riyadh that does (and stabs us in the back rhetorically at the worst moments--thank you King-I-Am!). So we fight Iranian presence in Shiite Iraq, for all the good that will do us and for all the harm such interaction would eventually do to the mullahs back in Tehran (just watch who changes whom more, as freedom tends to infect and spread by example). And we continue to act like the insurgency is our cross to bear and ours alone (thank you again, House of Saud, for your kind words).

McCain is very right in one aspect: resistance at home is all about casualties. Lower the casualties and no matter how nasty the fight, America will be happy.

Meanwhile, we focus on locking in our gains and limiting our future burdens by getting the locals to share more responsibility.

I know, I know, that's too risky. But again, do you think Americans dying in Iraq is going to foment necessary change in Riyadh and Tehran, or is forcing both capitals to put up or shut up on Iraq going to move those balls forward faster?

There is nothing sadder than watching a superpower make a war that's not its own become its own.

We won the war in Iraq in 2003. Our ownership of the postwar mess eluded our grasp a while ago. The ISG recognized this and suggested some of the logical remedies. America, in its binary mindset, either wants the "win" or wants to admit the "loss."

Neither makes sense at this point.

OP-ED: "Many Plans, No News: Back to the past in the Middle East," by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 30 March 2007, p. A23.

This piece, showcasing Friedman's strongest skills as a regional expert, echoes a lot of my frustration with Bush:

In the Middle East today, home of the invention of algebra, a new math seems to have taken over. It is subtraction by addition. It goes like this: Add more trips to the region by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice--who doesn't seem to have any coherent strategy--to an emotionally stale, restated Saudi peace overture to Israel, and combine it with a cynical Hamas-Fatah cease-fire accord and an Israeli prime minister so unpopular his poll ratings are now lower than the margin of error, and you'll find that we're actually going backward--way back, back to the pre-Oslo era.

Only the bad guys make history in the Middle East today. Only the bad guys have imagination and resolve. Arab, Palestinian and Israeli "moderates" are just watching. Their leaders have never been weak, and America has never been more feckless in framing clear choices to spur them to action.

We could be and should be doing better.

Then Friedman does the unthinkable: comparing Bush so unfavorably to Clinton, whose foreign policy looks better with each passing year.

Ouch! It's so good it hurts!

Killer ending:

The Bush team reminds me of someone who buys a rundown house that comes with remodeling plans by Frank Lloyd Wright, but insists instead on using drawings by the next-door neighbors. You get what you pay for. Or what you don't pay for.

Awesome piece.

ARTICLE: "In Aceh, New Governor Works To Draw Investment to Province," by Tom Wright, Wall Street Journal, 29 March 2007, p. A10.

Aceh and the Christmas Tsunamis remain the best SysAdmin effort of late.

Irwandi Yusuf was in jail when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis struck Aceh. Today, he is trying to stimulate foreign investment and establish a model government in the Indonesia province.

After escaping from his cell when the wave hit, the former reber strategist was elected Aceh's governor in December. The elections were possible after Indonesia's national government in 2005 signed a peace accord that ended a 30-year guerrilla war for independence, granting Aceh a large degree of autonomy.

Best CPX (command post exercise) I ever did was with Pacific Command in the mid-1990s on a humanitarian relief op focused on Aceh that simultaneously dealt with the difficulties of a separatist movement (yeah, the very same one!). It went nowhere as well as the real op went, and yet, it's that kind of training and planning that allowed PACOM to be ready when it needed to be, so I feel a tiny pride in being a small cog in that enormous wheel (a huge command, a huge exercise).

What's so fascinating here is how our military played such a crucial up-front role and how quickly and well the whole scenario got to what really matters: attracting FDI. That the former rebel strategist is now governor is just too cool for words. Beating your enemy is one thing, but co-opting him is much better. Better for you, better for him, better for business.

ARTICLE: "In Iraq, an Army Officer Battles to Open a Bank: Military Shifts Fight to Local Politics; Gunfire Outside Hall," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal 29 March 2007, p. A1.

Another stellar piece by Jaffe, who I--in my complete bias--consider the best reporter out there on military change.

Killer bit on "war within the context of war" yielding to "war within the context of everything else":

For decades, the U.S. military has defined warfare as separate from politics. When politics failed, war was necessary and the military took the lead. The attitude was one of the after-effects of the Vietnam War, in which the Army told itself that it had lost because politicians prevented the general from fighting the war they longed to fight.

"After Vietnam, we redefined officers as nothing but warrior-trainers," focused on teaching soldiers how to operate increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, says Lt. Col. Dough Ollivant, an Army strategist in Baghdad who has helped shape the current surge strategy. "We had a very restricted view of warfare."

The story itself revolves around a colonel's persistent effort to reopen a bank branch in a bad part of town.

Like I said in BFA: the Iraq war changes nothing in the U.S. military, but the Iraq postwar changes everything.

ARTICLE: Yemeni women sign up to fight terror, By Ginny Hill, BBC News, 2 April 2007

From another friend in CENTCOM: a description of successful security cooperation.

The kicker? Adding women to the mix was the Yemenis' idea.

A real problem when you create Africom: you split the Red Sea community when, in that part of the world, water connects rather than divides.

ARTICLE: DoD Removes Six Countries From Imminent Danger Pay List, By Jim Garamone, American Forces Press Service, March 30, 2007

A sign of integration toward the Core. Imagine--if you're anyone but John McCain--how far we remain from this goal in Iraq.

ARTICLE: The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion, By CHRIS SUELLENTROP, New York Times Magazine, December 24, 2006

Point taken: some politicians are willing to deal with the tough subject of prison/incarceration reform.

Thanks to Eddie for sending this.

Why shouldn't Congress have a foreign policy of its own?

Hell, Bush doesn't have any.

I myself have pursued my own since Katrina.

So I say to Nancy on her road to Damascus: "you go girl!"

Hilarious to hear Cheney decry the "self-described strategists on the Hill."

If we had any real ones in this administration, he'd never hear a peep out of any of those guys and gals.

Ahmadinejad gets "dumb" and cuts a deal with London, and he may have just tossed away his chance to get Bush impeached and out of office before he is.

I think back to the depths of Clinton's administration and I was never this embarrassed over our standing in the world. That was just nonsense. This is just pathetic.

And it's such a waste of historic opportunities. That's what gets me the most.

Bush seems unable to define a victory, so he leaves it to the Dems to define a loss. As I said earlier, neither judgment makes sense, but such is the state of our leadership.

My kingdom for triangulation!

That was never in question.

The real question is, Will it last at all beyond where we concentrate troops?

All the concentration of troops does is approximate the actual desired peacekeeping presence we should have had there all along.

But it's like the light antibiotics coming late, when only the chemo will work. It's almost just enough, and it's way too late.

The ISG report was a gift from the gods to Bush and he didn't even bother to look that horse in the mouth.

ARTICLE: "Poorest Nations Will Bear Brunt As World Warms: Preparation Disparities; Wealthy Countries Spend Billions on Themselves, Millions on Others," by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, 1 April 2007, p. A1.

The non-surprise is--of course--that the equatorially-centric Gap will suffer far more than the temperate-heavy Core (both north and south).

Best quote:

"Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic. A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We'll see the same phenomenon with global warming."

So says Henry I. Miller, from Hoover.

The subtitle on the jump page is too obvious for words:

Those responsible for carbon buildup are best able to adapt.

Duh! It's called development, and it beats poverty across the board: in good times, in marginal times, in bad times.

Obvious answer? Develop the Gap.

Best "flow" argument yet:

Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale focused on climate, said that in the face of warming, it might be necessary to abandon the long-standing notion that all places might someday feed themselves. Poor regions reliant on unpredictable rainfall, he said, should be encouraged to shift people out of farming and into urban areas and import their food from northern countries.

Big trick, of course, is that urban migration typically triggered when rising ag productivity pushes people off rural lands.

One thing is for sure: our classic definitions of resilience will change.

EDITORIAL: "The China Tariffs: Another too-clever-by-half protectionist gambit," Wall Street Journal, 2 April 2007, p. A16.

We're now saying China's economy is "evolved" to the point where tariffs make sense because we can track government influence in a way that we can't with true nonmarket economies.

True enough.

More true: this is a job for the WTO, where our complaints should be pursued, not in some unilateralist Congressional move.

Shame on the Dems for this one. And shame on Bush for repeating the same nonsensical thinking that led, as this editorial points out, to the pointless 2002 steel tariffs.

All we accomplish by such acts is to weaken the Doha Round talks.

Some of our favorite sites linked to Tom's recent post, The side I've always been on. I'm going to run them down now instead of waiting until Sunday.

+ tdaxp: Iran is worthless and The Falklands War, Reloaded
+ New Yorker in DC: The side we should always be on
+ ZenPundit: Recommended Reading
+ et alli: So Fine I wish this essay were mine

Also, that post has drawn 18 comments so far. So if you haven't checked them out yet, you should.

ARTICLE: US helps fight against Abu Sayyaf, By Nick Meo, BBC, 2 April 2007

A good example of reducing the future battlespace. Best sort of pre-emption.

Now, Robert Kaplan would call this all special ops, but it's a more distinct breakdown between the secret stuff done by serious SOF and the civic action done by largely reservists which gets characterized as SOF because of institutional affiliation but in truth is classic, non-classified and out-in-the-open SysAdmin.

Despite assumptions, the two tend to be kept quite isolated from one another for a lot of obvious reasons.

Thanks to Pete Johnson for sending this.

ARTICLE: Biometric cash machines bring joy, By Amarnath Tewary, BBC, 3 April 2007

Maany Peyvan writes:

Speeding transactions to the poor while eliminating wage skimming by corrupt
contractors. No word on how fingerprints are used, other than ID. You've
mentioned this many times; first I'd heard of it in print.

This was and is an easy breakthrough that speaks to the utility of any connectivity technology that gets past literacy as a requirement.

ARTICLE: The Unlikely Frontrunner: Is the GOP in for a Rudy awakening?, by Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard, 04/09/2007, Volume 012, Issue 29

Foreign policy excerpt:

The question of temperament is particularly pertinent given the great stress Giuliani's supporters place on his possible leadership in the war on terror. Every activist I spoke with at CPAC who supported Giuliani told me they did so because of their certainty that when it comes to America's jihadist enemies, the former mayor will, in the words of one eager young CPAC delegate, "kick butt and take names." And kill them, too, presumably. It would be a great irony--and perfectly in keeping with the traditional illogic of Republican electoral strategies--if Republicans determined that foreign policy was the premiere issue in the 2008 election and then nominated a candidate who, like Giuliani, has no official foreign policy experience at all.

Giuliani spends a good deal of every stump speech stressing the need for America "to stay on offense" in the war on terror. His precise conception of that war, and his approach to foreign affairs in general, is harder to pin down. To the extent that he's amplified his view of the terror war, it seems much closer to the economic determinism of the moderate realist school than to the notorious butt-kicking strategy of the neoconservative warrior class. Indeed, he says the "war on terror" is itself a misnomer; he prefers the term "the terrorists' war on us," which does sound rather more defensive.

"Americans hate war," he recently told the Churchill Club, a gathering of Silicon Valley executives. "We're at war because they want to come here and kill us, not because we want to go there and kill them. We want to do business with them. We would love to have them all wired and part of the Internet buying American products, and then we'll buy their products. And then we'll have the kind of issues we have with China and India, like we used to have with Japan. But those are good issues to have. That's America, that's what America is about."

In the end, he says, victory in the terror war may come down to commerce. "Technology has transformed the world," he told the executives. "Part of the way we're ultimately going to win the war on terror is through that technology. We're going to win the war on terror because, yes, we have to be militarily strong, we have to consider defending ourselves, but ultimately we overcome terrorism when those parts of the world that haven't connected yet connect to the global economy."

Consider China, he said. "China has plugged in. It's still a dictatorship, and they have to overcome that. But they've plugged into the global economy. If you think of where the terrorists are coming from, those are places that haven't plugged in. Ultimately economic freedom pushes you to political freedom. . . . We need to be strong, we need to be determined, but we also need to connect as many of these [Middle Eastern] countries as possible to doing business with us, to being connected to the Internet with us."

Kick butt, take names, and then make sure they have hotmail accounts.

I sort of like the description of Rudy's foreign policy vision being from the economic determinist wing of the realist school. I've never considered this sort of vision to be anything other than highly realistic.

Thanks to Patrick Brogan for sending this.

ARTICLE: N Korea envoys 'keeping children', BBC, 3 April 2007

Hmmm. Makes you wonder about what else is escaping Kim's control right now in the DPRK.

I do think Kim's end will be like Ceausescu's--sudden and swift.

Thanks to Michael Griffin for sending this.

Tehran makes its point, gets its attention, and now seems reasonable and merciful in comparison to the West and local crazies.

In the end, a pure PR exercise and another example of Iran's proxy warfare against our proxies--just like last August.

No harm, no fouls, no progress.

Just more disrespect for the post-presidency of Bush.

ARTICLE: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, by Steven Pinker

Nice article on a point I've been making in my brief going back to 1996: the further you go back in history, the more per capita violence you find--pure and simple.

This is a good examination of that grand historical trend. I'm not sure I buy the notion that we soft scientists needed some biologist to clue us in. After all, Pinker's conclusions are based on data from "soft" fields like poli sci that have been compiled for decades. People just like absolute numbers more than relative ones.

Still, every bit helps when you fight the hype.

Thanks to Nathan Machula for sending this.

OP-ED: In Fear Of Chinese Democracy, By Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, April 4, 2007; Page A13

A wonderfully pinheaded piece by Meyerson, who hasn't written anything good in years. In it, he displays the typical American manner of defining freedom purely in political terms while ignoring its economic roots. Plus, like most Americans, he wants his revolution now, despite the 750-million or so still living in poverty.

Pick up the pace China! Rich Americans don't see enough chop-chop!

Ask your average American their definition of freedom and they'll pick Starbucks over political pundits any day.

Thanks to Roland Dobbins for sending this.

I'm giving the brief at U Alaska. Believe it is open to the public.

ARTICLE: BORROWED IDEAS: Malaysia Transforms Rules For Finance Under Islam: In a Lesson to Arabs, Asian Bankers Mix Religion, Modernity, By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV, Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2007; Page A1

I wrote about this in BFA (or maybe it was PNM). Malaysia's pioneering Islamic finance in a very cool way.

Thanks to Ian Rhodes for sending this.

Juneau, on a beautiful day. If you like mountains and shoreline, this place is Maine on steroids.

Juneau, capital of Alaska, accessible only by air.

Ad in Juneau paper.

OP-ED: Jobs and Immigrants, April 4, 2007; Page A14

More solid evidence of how immigration serves our economic development.

Thanks to Tyler Durden for sending this.

... was my Mom's cousin, once-removed (or my cousin, twice removed), Michael J. Heney.

He built the first trans-Alaskan railroad, and his feat inspired several books and one Hollywood movie, according to his Wikipedia entry.

Here's the bio from the White Pass & Yukon Route historical cite (which cites his birthplace incorrectly).

Cool beans is the fact that both a glacier (Heney Glacier) and a mountain range (Heney Mountains) are named for him in Alaska. I flew over the mountain range this morning, going from Anchorage to Juneau.

Inside the family he was known simply as "M.J."

Not to be outdone, his cousin and my grandfather, Green Bay Packer Hall of Fame inductee Gerald Clifford, now also has his own Wikipedia entry.

Just to finish the trifecta, here's the one for my other famous cousin, twice-removed (paternal grandfather's cousin), Maj. Gen. George Barnett, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. We've got a beautifully framed, color copy of his official USMC portrait in our formal living room, along with a sketch of his famous DC socialite wife in our dining room. His cermonial rifle, a Winchester 03, given to him by the Corps upon retirement, hangs in our kitchen in a glass box.

I'm all bragged out.

ARTICLE: Iraq's economy: The Kurdish region seeks more foreign investment, the Economist, Apr 4th 2007

No need to add to Keir's analysis:

Excellent article from the economist of Kurdistan. Highlights while things are still not great they are getting better. Reads like the analysis of many developing countries: booming construction, weak infrastructure, underdeveloped financial markets. Good sign about the good in Iraq. Westerners can travel unaccompanied, compare that to Baghdad!

Keir Lauritzen

Except to note that one of our biggest challenges in this Long War will be learning to accept that almost all of our victories will be partial ones. If we weren't so damn binary as a society in our approach to strategic issues, life would be a lot easier.

Suffice to say, the grand strategist learns to love ambiguity. It's written into the DNA code of any real visionary. As Art Cebrowski liked to say: "Plant the flag downrange and then turn your forces loose. Don't tell them how, just give them the vector."

Looks like Tom will be speaking in Anchorage tonight.

The preview article headline annoys me: Hawk rethinks the war in Iraq: BARNETT: Former U.S. military strategist to speak at UAA.

After that, the article's actually pretty good, with some good usage of the weblog (which I always like).

The author says he tried to interview Tom by phone this week (Tom?) and that Tom teaches at the University of Tennessee (not precisely), but otherwise, it's pretty good. I'll copy it for you below.

Four years ago, former Defense Department strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett -- who'll lecture on global affairs tonight at UAA -- heartily endorsed Bush administration plans to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein.

His reasons for doing so had less in common with Bush's originally stated purpose for the invasion -- to seize Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and disrupt its purported ties with the terrorist group al-Qaida -- than with the president's later rationale of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

As Barnett argued in an influential March 2003 Esquire magazine article ("Let me tell you why military engagement with Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable but good"), it wasn't the most powerful nations in the world that America had to fear; it was some of the most dispossessed. It wasn't Russia or China; it was the "disconnected" Third World nations that weren't part of the global economy and refused to play by global rules.

And if they had leaders, such as Hussein in Iraq or Kim Jong-il in North Korea, who were preventing their citizens from joining the "functioning core" majority of nations in the

West, those leaders needed to be removed -- by us if by no one else. He warned that it wouldn't be easy.

"As baby-sitting jobs go, this one will be a doozy, making our lengthy efforts in postwar Germany and Japan look simple in retrospect," Barnett wrote in his article, which he later expanded into a book, "The Pentagon's New Map" (2004), that became popular with military leaders. "But it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it."

Four years and $600 billion in U.S. war spending later, with more than 3,200 dead American soldiers, even former supporters of the Bush doctrine of waging "pre-emptive wars" are beginning to wonder: Is the U.S. Treasury really such a bottomless well? Aren't their limits to America's all-volunteer Army?

In his subsequent book, "Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating," published in fall 2005 -- 2 1/2 years into the war -- Barnett criticized the Bush administration for bungling the peace in Iraq (by cutting expenses and failing to send in more troops, among other things), though he still saw other opportunities around the world for "core" nation-building, ideally this time with more multilateral support.

A review of that second book in Publishers Weekly, however, described it as "an unconvincing brief" for more U.S. interventionism, wherein "American and allied troops -- a 'pistol-packing Peace Corps' -- could, he contends, undertake an ambitious schedule of regime change, stabilization and reconstruction in Islamic countries and as far afield as North Korea and Venezuela."

Responding in his blog, Barnett dismissed the critique as "a truly pinheaded review" that missed his central point -- that we now live in a post-9/11 world that forces us to cope with new exigencies.

"I have to get used to this sort of review, which is essentially the anti-Bush doctrine/anti-neocon/anti-Iraq review," he wrote then. (Efforts to interview Barnett by telephone this week weren't successful.)

But in his most recent blog postings, Barnett -- who now teaches at the University of Tennessee and writes a nationally syndicated column -- seems to have evolved as well.

"On second thought," he wrote Monday, writing in support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's scheduled trip to Syria, "why shouldn't Congress have a foreign policy of its own? Hell, Bush doesn't have any. ... So I say to Nancy on her road to Damascus: 'You go, girl!' Hilarious to hear Cheney decry the 'self-described strategists on the Hill.' If we had any real ones in this administration, he'd never hear a peep out of any of those guys and gals.

"I think back to the depths of Clinton's administration, and I was never this embarrassed over our standing in the world."

Daily News reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com.

LECTURE: Thomas P.M. Barnett will speak at 7 tonight in Room 101 of Rasmuson Hall at UAA. It's free and open to the public.

OP-ED: Mahmoud's 'Gift': The right way to exploit any fissures in the Tehran regime, Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2007

This is an ahistorical argument.

Countries we talk to and open up with trade have been changed--even radically transformed--by that process (USSR, China), while countries that we sanction and isolate and do not talk to remain strong in their authoritarianism (Cuba, North Korea).

Connectedness works. Just ask Vietnam.

But hardliners, despite such evidence, love to argue otherwise.

When Iran has a moderate president, the WSJ says, "don't negotiate anything." Ditto for when it has a hardliner president.

But Nixon did go to China, over the WSJ's harshest protests, and look what it did for our side.

If engagement worked with the most significant sponsor of international terrorism ever (the Sovs), then why is it so amazingly uncalled for with the Iranians?

Ah yes, I forget, now we remember the Sovs as all reasonable thugs, even cuddly, rather bumbling bears.

China's an even better case in point at the time when Nixon decides to go: complete nuthouse (Cultural Revolution just wrapping up) and a whacked-out leader (Mao) who said nuclear war would be cleansing, so bring it on you paper tiger!

Funny how history works like that.
We remember none of the positive changes when it comes to hyping the current threat.

I see people's lips moving here but hear Tel Aviv and Riyadh doing the talking.

I believe in wars of choice. I just like to make the decisions for myself.

Like Dave Petraeus heading into Iraq in 2003, I have to ask, "Tell me how this ends?"

Because if it does not end in jaw-jaw, then it ends in war-war.

ARTICLE: NECC Establishes Maritime Civil Affairs Group, By Kieshia Savage, Fleet Public Affairs Center Atlantic, 4/3/2007

A nice sign. One thing I learned in Africa, to my amazement, is how much of civil affairs stuff is naturally maritime in developing countries.

Thanks to Bill MIllan for sending this.

Goofy title that misses the entire thrust of my work.

Journalist never bothered to talk to me, despite my several attempts to set up a phonecall. One thing I learned early in my career: never underestimate the laziness of journalists. But frankly, it was like pulling teeth with this guy.

As for the content of the piece, hmmmm. How about I read the review on Amazon and maybe yesterday's post and call it a day?

Seriously, I don't rethink the war, I rethink the postwar. If I predicted several months before the war (remember, I write PNM the article in December 2002) that the postwar in Iraq is a going to be a doozy, and far harder than mega-jobs in Japan and Germany, how does this guy interpret that I "rethink the war"?

Such precision in language only matters if you want to further understandings instead of just agendas.

No one inside the defense community calls me a "hawk"--just the opposite in fact. Typically, I find such casual misidentifications with a certain whimsy, but you have to get off your ass and actually talk to me to gain such a pass. Yes, this guy's "attempts" were unsuccessful, but it wasn't because I was hard to reach, it's because he just didn't make the effort. If he had offered parenthically, "I just didn't put in the effort to actually talk to this guy, so I'm stitching bits and pieces that fit my predisposed opinion of him from his site," then I would have said, honesty in advertising.

Update: Editor's note: But, hey, they've got that article at the top of their Life page today, with a link here to the weblog, so that's a good thing. Welcome Alaskans!

Other interview was some Juneau teenager (junior) who had used my work in her school project and just wanted to chat on the phone. Since she put in a bit more effort than our professional journalist from Anchorage, she got 50 minutes (good warm-up for me last night), because that's how seriously I treat such inquiries.

Spoke at the University of Alaska-Anchorage in a really nice auditorium-style classroom. AV was solid, and great crowd of over 100. A bookseller was moving both books (paper) out front, so I signed a bunch before heading in and setting up.

I was a little tired and a little out of sorts (I'm speaking at 2300 my time, remember), but you can always feel an audience's desire for the material, and this one had it (far more than the laid-back Juneau crowd the night before), so they just pull the energy out of you and whenever you feel your effort flagging, you lock you eyes on somebody you can tell is really into your delivery and they just keep you strong. Simply put, if you want it good, you get it good, no matter how I'm feeling. You just cannot disrespect an audience that's making that effort to remain focused and engaged.

The only trick was that I really needed to project in this room, so the throat got a good workout, but unlike in Juneau the day earlier, I didn't speak that much earlier in the day, so my voice didn't falter.

Went long on slides (almost 60), because I just had that inkling beforehand that these guys would desire more, so I talked a solid 1:45.

Then the questions flowed and we went another solid hour, which was a bit surprising given the lateness of the hour (after 9pm). But, save for one protest statement that was a bit off-topic (autism), they were really thoughtful and well-delivered and pushed me quite a bit.

I notice two burly guys in work clothes that break in on the place about 20 minutes in. You could just sense these two had driven a long way to get there and had rushed the entire way.

As soon as they sat down on my far left, I was immediately drawn to them. You just sense the intensity of the listening.

Well, they had driven for hours at high speeds to make the talk, one of them being a 31-year special operations naval vet who had participated in Desert One with Pete Schoomaker. This guy also recently just lost a son in Iraq.

Following the talk, which included two very solid questions from these guys that indicated they've read me intensely and get on a truly high plane, we end up talking for a while outside (they're threatening to drive to Fairbanks today to see the show all over again tonight), I was carrying a signed map poster (thanks to old friend Steff, I have about 280 of them now in my bedroom closet, so I've been bringing them to talks and giving them away like it's my command coin or something) and because the expected retired flag big-name didn't show up, I gave it to this vet who was really thrilled to get it.

It was a nice ending to one of my best nights of talking ever.

Lunch yesterday with senior players from the Insititute of the North and the Denali Commission. Fascinating problems (the relocation of tens of thousands of indigenous people who live on the coast up north) and fascinating possibilities (the opening up of the artic circle will make Anchorage an amazingly well-placed hub in the global economy [like that mythical town where the guys got stuck in "O Brother Where Are Thou?" Anchorage is a geographical oddity that seems to be 9 hours by air from every major city in the world]). To that end, done right, Alaska can become a model for adjustment to climate change. People up here sense that possibility and want to make it happen.

Me? Definitely a column, maybe more.

Tom got these questions by email and answers them here (in bold):

Hello Dr. Barnett,

I heard you for the first time on the Hugh Hewitt show. I listened to the series of interviews you did and I am currently reading The Pentagon?s New Map. I am really taken by your positive view of the future. I am also currently looking at getting my masters degree and making a career change. I am particularly interested in grand strategy and working to shrink the gap. I was wondering if you could answer a few questions?

What makes a good grand strategist?

You have to find almost anything interesting and worthy of study. You need to be a horizontal thinker by nature.

What kind of educational credentials are most useful?

Study languages. Do a small amount in a number of languages as opposed to a long time in any one. Most grand strategy involves arbitraging concepts between domains, so translation skills are essential. You want to be able to master new languages at high speeds.

Where do you think the most exciting jobs expanding the core will be in the next few years?

Translating between technology and policy.

What is the most important piece of advice you have to give?

If you're not someone who loves anticipating events as opposed to experiencing them first-hand, don't go into this business. Also, get married and have kids.

And never turn down a chance at public speaking.

Thanks for your time,
AE
Champlin, MN

POST: Not, Decidedly, a 20th Century Arms Race

Good blog post by Wiggins on rising small-ship, littoral capacity development in Asia.

Like my PNM story on the Indian Fleet Review, any serious survey of global naval developments comes to the same conclusion: no one is building a Leviathan) blue-water navy and everyone (including us, in secondary sense) is building a SysAdmin-style close-in littoral capacity.

Our ability to steer and influence this trend is huge (we stay hub, they work spokes), if we pursue mil-mil training as much as we can.

ARTICLE: Dutch Soldiers Stress Restraint in Afghanistan, By C. J. CHIVERS, New York Times, April 6, 2007

Good piece by Chivers, who's former military-gone-journalism and who occasionally writes for Esquire (Warren thinks he's a water-walker). Restraint is everything in peace-keeping for two reasons: 1) to want to create local capacity, not do it for them, and 2) your real goal is the overall reduction of violence, even at the costs of increased risks to your own guys and maybe not going kinetic on every bad guy out there (remember, they will grow them faster than you can kill them).

Dutch, like the Brits are super solid on this. I got a chance to chat some up just exiting Afghanistan while in Crete (they go there for R&R). Like the Brits and Canadians and Aussies, these guys are very impressive, very smart, very talented officers.

They can teach us much.

Thanks to motoole125 for sending this.

In many ways, Volume III should be subtitled "The Pentagon's New Man," because that's the aim of creating the next generation of grand strategists.

Got that idea from reader Brian Hertzer.

Tom got this nice email from a recent attender:

Dr. Barnett- Read the blog on the Anchorage lecture. Very accurate - I did want more and totally "got it". Amazing PowerPoint. As a teacher, I can appreciate the tiring aspect of public speaking but you did well (I'm feeling it myself today). Well done in handling the lone off-topic question. I learned quite a bit and truly appreciate you coming up here. The war college never should have fired you :) All the best to you and your family.

It was at Fairbanks, at the university.

After flying up Friday morning from Anchorage on Alaska, I spent rest of day having great lunch with senior academics (former Vietnam SOF and former Naval submariner), then working out, then going two hours with host Mike Sfraga's geography seminar class, which read PNM and had a lot of good questions. Talking it through with the students, I realized--yet again--how crucial it was for me to finish and complete PNM with BFA. Everything that was missing in PNM gets explained in Blueprint.

Talk last night was to about 250 in a big, beautiful auditorium. I went about 110 on the brief and then did a lengthy Q&A that I enjoyed a lot.

Then I signed books outside the hall. Then a cocktail with a small group of university leaders and two of their kids. Then to bed at 0030 to get up at 0430 and begin the long march home.

People are very nice up here and very appreciative of your making the trip, so I was very glad I came.

I look forward to further dialogue with locals on what Enterra can do on port security in places like Anchorage. I think Alaska has a huge amount of future economic potential in this globalizing world, and I'd love to be part of making that happen.

ARTICLE: "Piracy Move On China Seen as NearPiracy Move On China Seen as Near," by Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times, 7 April 2007, p. B1.

Unlike the previous threat of tariffs, this time the administration speaks of lodging a formal complaint with the WTO on China's continued piracy of stuff like DVDs.

Fair and fine and it should be pursued vigorously.

ARTICLE: "As Africa Hungers, U.S. Policy Slows the Delivery of Food Aid," by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 7 April 2007, p. A1.

I've written before about this Congress-protected iron triangle of food producers, food transporters and aid groups.

This story just makes you want to scream at the greed of it all.

For two years Bush and Co. try to change this insane law that says only food grown by Americans and shipped by American vessels with American crews and distributed by American charities can be used for foreign food aid.

So despite the people going hungry right now in Zambia and USAID being more than happy to buy food aid locally--as in, right in Zambia when the harvest was bountiful this year--USAID cannot do so because of this law.

Also because of this law, our food aid will likely be held up in terms of delivery for as long as six months. So people will die needlessly, according to Oxfam. Maybe 50,000 in the next half year alone.

The Bush administration says American taxpayers could feed an additional million more Africans if Congress just changes this idiotic law.

But Bush's efforts to change the law the last two years were thwarted quietly by Congress and the iron triangle's lobbyists.

Tom Lantos is a key villian, calling any attempt to change the law "beyond insane," because it will kill domestic support for food aid by harming our farmers.

Move beyond your lies, Mr. Lantos.

James Kunder, acting USAID deputy is quoted in the piece as saying less than one-half of one percent of US ag exports would be affected by the law being changed.

Sound like it might be worth it to feed one milliion and prevent 50k deaths in Africa in the next six months?

And don't even get me started on how this insane law retards agricultural markets in Africa and ensures steady death tolls over the years.

Guess who gets to die first, Mr. Lantos? The orphans of AIDS victims.

Please, somebody get Willie Nelson to wail on that one.

This is Lantos and others caving in to lobbying from Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge and Cal Western, which sell "more than half the $2.2 billion in food for Food for Peace, the largest food aid program, and two smaller programs," according to USDA.

Bush should go on national TV to shame Lantos and his fat-cat ag biz allies and the greedy American shipping companies and the scummy nonprofit aid groups who are all in cahoots on this moneymaker.

This is all so amazingly dishonest and immoral, it just makes me sick.

And the bit