Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 14 December 2004
Busy day. Taped interview with BBC radio's "The World Tonight" over lunch. That was set to run in the 1700 hour EST (listening to it now as I type late at night via web). I was, oddly enough, in very rare form considering I haven't done a phone interview in a while. Sometimes I can start incredibly choppy and disjointedly, but this time I was rapid fire from stem to stern.
Then I got a call from Aaron Brown's show on CNN, from a producer perusing the book in rapid order (clearly a result of the Ignatius piece). I was supposed to do a quick phone interview with her around dinner time to scope out the possibility of appearing on Brown's show in the near term, but we did not link up.
The afternoon was lost to a workshop I facilitated at the war college, an "innovation forum" where we brought in a lot of private-sector heavies to discuss future pathways for the world. That seemed to go well.
After the workshop, I rushed home for daughter Emily's 13th birthday celebration. We now have a teenager in the house. Enough said on that one.
Then back to the college and the Officers' Club to give a short presentation to a local group of retired military officers and college profs. I got home around 10:30 p.m., feeling like I was falling victim to the flu that's already hit three of the kids and now seems to have its claws in me.
Rewinding to the start, the day really began for me when I read David Ignatius' most excellent op-ed around 7am this morning. Here's the piece in full, and you can click here for the original
Washington Post
December 14, 2004
Pg. 27
Winning A War For The Disconnected
By David Ignatius
It hasn't been reviewed by the New York Times or The Post, and it's little known outside the military. But the red-hot book among the nation's admirals and generals this holiday season is a work of strategy by Thomas P.M. Barnett called "The Pentagon's New Map."
Imagine a combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Karl von Clausewitz on war and you begin to get an idea of where Barnett is coming from. His book tries to rethink strategy for a post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 world caught between order and anarchy, self-satisfaction and rage, prosperity and ruin.
Barnett's central thesis is that today's world is divided into two categories: the "Functioning Core" of nations connected to the global economy and prospering as never before, and the "Non-Integrating Gap" of nations disconnected from the matrix of wealth and progress and therefore spinning toward chaos. Most of America's military interventions in recent years have been in the Gap, notes Barnett, but we have failed to understand that we face a common enemy there.
The enemy "is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (the Middle East), but a condition -- disconnectedness," writes Barnett. "If disconnectedness is the real enemy, then the combatants we target in this war are those who promote it, enforce it and terrorize those who seek to overcome it by reaching out to the larger world." It's hard to think of a better definition of the cleavages that underlie the war in Iraq or the battle against al Qaeda.
Barnett doesn't see America's role as a neo-imperialist global centurion. Instead, he argues, the U.S. goal must be to promote "rule sets" that are shared by Core and Gap alike. "All we can offer is choice, the connectivity to escape isolation, and the safety within which freedom finds practical expression," he writes. "None of this can be imposed, only offered. Globalization does not come with a ruler, but with rules."
Barnett has been tinkering with these ideas since the late 1990s, but they came into focus, not surprisingly, after Sept. 11, 2001. Three months later, he was giving the first versions of a briefing that has now been heard by hundreds of senior military officers. His concepts have spread so fast among the military brass that when I was in Bahrain two weeks ago, I heard a Barnett-style briefing from the commander of U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, Vice Adm. David Nichols. He outlined a strategy of encouraging countries in the Middle East to move toward "connected" economies, orderly "rule sets" and democratic political reform.
Barnett's ideas have been taken up by other military commands that must reckon with disorder in the Gap, including those responsible for the Pacific and Latin America. The Air Force has asked him to brief every new roster of one-star generals, and the Navy has him lecture each year at the Naval War College. And Barnett was the featured speaker last week at a meeting of the Pentagon's high-level technology group, the Highlands Forum. With so many officers buying books, "The Pentagon's New Map" has managed to sell more than 50,000 copies.
So what does Barnett's strategy imply for the vexing problems of today, such as Iraq and Iran? Barnett argued in his book that linking Iraq to the Core is job No. 1. "Show me an Iraq that is as globally connected as an Israel in 10 years and I will show you a Middle East that can never go back to what it has been these past two decades -- overwhelmingly disconnected, populated with dispirited youth, and enraged beyond our capacity for understanding." Barnett would still like to see such an Iraq emerge as a stabilizing local pillar, but he told me this week that the U.S. occupation there has been so "totally snafu-ed" that Iraq may not be able to play that role.
Barnett sees Iran as the potential bridge between Core and Gap in the Middle East. He will argue in an article in the next issue of Esquire that the United States should try to make Iran its local security partner in the region, accepting its hegemony over a future Shiite-led Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The alternative is a new Yalta-style fault line between East and West -- one that could divide the West from emerging Core countries such as India and China.
Visiting Iraq, as I did this month, you can see that the United States has gotten itself into a heck of a mess in that part of the world. Reading Barnett's book gave me a rare moment of hope that perhaps we can still think ourselves out of these problems, rather than just shoot our way out.
COMMENTARY: I don't think a more perfect 783-word description of the book and its impact is possible—right down to his retelling of the story he told at the Highlands Forum about the Central Command briefing by Adm. Nichols to the combatant commander Gen. John Abizaid. What's more impressive to me are the quotes Ignatius uses. Frankly, they are my favorite lines in the book, including the one I used with the BBC today: "None of this can be imposed, only offered. Globalization does not come with a ruler, but with rules." His mentioning of there being no reviews in either the Post or Times is very gratifying, because it labels PNM as a cult hit inside the Pentagon that needs to be read more widely. In all, Ignatius did me one helluva turn here, and I couldn't be more pleased. Especially since I never asked anything from him, despite his comments at the Highlands Forum (in fact, we never spoke one-on-one at the event). So this was his decision, based on his experiences at CENTCOM and his reading of the book. The fact that he ends with a sentence highlighting the "hope" he found in PNM . . . well, that is just icing on this fabulous cake. With a piece like this, it gets harder for people around here to argue that I don't do good things for the military with my writings—even as so many disagree with my vision.
Here's today's catch:
■ The need to create local security partners on Iraq