Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 19 March 2005
Watched movies late last night with kids, after taking them to diner and having decent dinner. We then went to Barnes and Noble on the island. Em got a bunch of manga books and Kevin got three Mad Magazines and a couple of Archie digests. I bought a "Pride and Prejudice" for myself for down times on planes and in airports.
Today it was all about getting the big family room up and ready for the painter, so lots of work before 0800. Escape with kids for the day in Providence at the big mall, shopping here and there (got "Mansfield Park" to complete my Austen quartet of DVDs) and seeing a movie ("Robots"--okay). Feeling pretty bad, sinus and allergy-wise.
During movie, started thinking more about something Mark cut from Chapter 1 that I wanted back in. When we got back, I put a wee bit of it back in, leaving the rest of his cut intact. Also added a couple of short bits on the Quadrennial Defense Review and the 2006 budget. Chapter 1 is the only chapter where such current issues will play, as the rest of the book projects into the future. Just covering my ass, I guess, from the predictably pinheaded academic reviews ("Sadly, Barnett chose to ignore the 2006 budget and the obviously historic change embodied in the QDR!").
Getting nervous now over chapter 2. Fear Mark is going to really push to kill entire first section. Either that or he's working a severe edit. But he does have a point on avoiding repetition, plus he argues that everyone and anyone has already done Iraq occupation post-mortems, so why should I? Shouldn't I stick to exactly what I do best?
Ah, but you worry about the review: "Strangely, Barnett chose not to have even a single section of his book explore the failures of the Iraq occupation in a dedicated fashion! Yes, he mentioned it 5,000 times throughout the text, but clearly he was afraid to deal with the issue head-on . . . "
Can you tell I read a bad review recently?
Mark always tells me to skip reviews why I'm working, but this one came in the mail and it was especially pinheaded and academic: guy writing for Defense Intelligence Journal very upset with my characterization of "Pentagon strategists" in the 1990s, and gives scathing review of book as result. Then he launches into review of various books written in 1990s and articles written in various war college reviews, proving that my comments about the Pentagon were all wrong! Except, of course, he doesn't. He doesn't deal with my comments on the Pentagon whatsoever. He's just really pissed that I didn't cite a wide range of really mediocre military writings from all over the Defense Department's academic centers in my book, and that I'm now the equivalent of a "national security rock star." Weird, straw-man sort of review. I criticize the Pentagon and actually mean the Pentagon, not the hinterlands, and he comes back at me all hurt and prideful because he feels the hinterlands got shortshrift in my book. My god! The academic ego on display . . .
Oh, and just to make it clear, this colonel's bio at the end of the piece points out he's currently a head academic down at the Air Command and Staff College and that, before that position, he edited an academic military journal. Ouch! He must have really loved the response my brief received down there in AL last November from his college's entire class!
I'll review the review at some point in the future, but I will need plenty of time to type up the very long text, since it's not online.
Still, reading it reminded me of why it was a VERY GOOD THING to leave the DoD academic world.
Only article I want to cite today is by Robin Wright, pretty much always good for the Washington Post: "In Mideast, Shiites May Be Unlikely U.S. Allies," 16 March, p. A16.
Point of this is simply to point out that the Big Bang most likely means that biggest agents for positive change in region will be Shiites, a group we have had trouble dealing with for ever so long. As one Iranian-born expert (Shaul Bakhash) at George Mason puts it: "America is going to have to deal with newly empowered groups in the region for whom religion clearly has much greater centrality than for the Sunni elites with whom the U.S. has been dealing up to now. It's a turning point in the sense that [the Bush administration] recognizes the realities in the region."
Why is this so stunning? Because Shiites make up big chunks of the populations in three countries where our stakes are highest, Wright argues: Iraq, Iran, Lebanon. Shiites are only 10-15 percent of Muslims worldwide, but half the Muslims in the patch stretching from Lebanon through Iraq through Iran to Pakistan.
Bigger point: as the minorities long suppressed, Shiites are our natural allies in reform:
Given current opportunities, some [Shiite communities] fall naturally into the role of agents of change. "For over 1,000 years, Shiites have been critical of political affairs in Muslim states," [Iraqi Shiite Laith] Kubba said. "The Shiites have been encouraged recently to speak up and spell out injustices. They've now become really vocal about it."
People say I don't understand Iran's theocracy? Hah! People gotta be a lot more realistic about who's really likely to help us secure lasting change in the Middle East. You may not like the mullahs, but you better find a way to get at that Shiite population through them, whether you like them or not.
