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On one side we've got talking-points Condi keeping to her script and that bold, visionary leader Colin Powell who now says he wouldn't be afraid to call Iraq a "civil war" if he was still SECSTATE (ooh! another classic example of Powell throwing all caution to the wind!). I guess if you give him a big enough speaking fee he gives you his real opinion as opposed to whatever he peddled as SECSTATE.
On the other side we've got Ahmadinejad and his letters (quick, somebody get Bernard Lewis to check the historical calendar!) that are too goofy for Bush to answer (apparently) but somehow end up kicking our ass in the propaganda war.
On one side we've got Steven Hadley leaking bad-mouthing memos on Iraq's PM just as Bush gets ready to summit with him. Nice.
On the other side we've got Sadr pulling his support from the government at just the right movement to scuttle tonight's planned meeting between Bush and Maliki.
Man, has this administration fallen and it can't get up?
And yeah, I'm talking about the Bushies, not Maliki's government.
No wonder Al Gore's getting so pissed off! This is just embarrassing.
Kerry had a great line tonight on Larry King: "I blew a joke, but these guys blew a war."
Seriously, how could a Kerry Administration possibly have done a worse job over the past two years?
ARTICLE: "Doctor Hopes Spinal Therapy Gets China Trial," by Mei Fong and Nicholas Zamiska, Wall Street Journal, 28 November 2006, p. B1.The first story amplifies the post I had recently on Novartis' decision to go long on pharma R&D in China. You want to take more risks? China and the New Core in general are the places to go: volatile mix of rising talent, huge need, and looser legal rule sets.ARTICLE: "How China's 3G Telecom Initiative Could Work Against Western Firms," by Li Yuan, Wall Street Journal, 28 November 2006, p. C1.
ARTICLE: "Wal-Mart to Enter India in Venture: Bharti Deal Gives Retailer Access to Consumer Frenzy As U.S. Sales Growth Slows," by Eric Bellman and Kris Hudson, Wall Street Journal, 28 November 2006, p. A3.
That alone is a new rule set, suggesting new possibilities that America can feed and benefit from but cannot exactly control.
Naturally, China sees competitive advantages in this trajectory, so what we see the Chinese trying to do in 3G cellphone technology is something we'll see time and time again. Leapfrogging technology just isn't about speeding things up. It's also a chance to move up dramatically in the race.
But yes, Western corporations will keep entering such New Core markets, because, as the India story's subtitle suggests, there's just too much of a potential profit delta to ignore. I mean, you want some of that "consumer frenzy" or do you want to try to squeeze it all out of America alone?
The Borders. Was nice to see so many in the store. It was in the "store best sellers" section.
Clerk (four years in Army) said he really loved it, which was an added treat.
ARTICLE: "Kremlin Inc. Gobbles Up Industries: Critics say the Russian government uses takeover to do its political business," by Peter Finn, The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 27 November-3 December 2006, p. 17.J.P. Morgan, the Wall Street titan who dominated the nation's financial markets in the late 19th century, believed that unbridled competition between companies in "rising America" was hobbling its economic growth. He was a huge believer in rules and wanted a more orderly market dominated by large corporate behemoths.
So Morgan bought up, in one example, lots of small railroad companies in order to create a big one. He repeated this pattern many times. This brutal rolling-up process was known in those years as "Morganizing" an industry.
Morgan's justifications remind me of those we hear coming out of Putin's Kremlin. We are told that Russia needs big companies in key industries, otherwise it won't be able to compete globally.
Part of Putin's justifications include, as the story argues, a need to self-correct the sort of goofy-ass privatization process that Russia suffered in the early 1990s. Every Russian I knew felt it was a huge rip-off, enriching the new boyars and doing little to make life better in Russia. The shift to the gangster-style capitalism was also extremely disorienting for a public long used to something far more orderly (the Soviet Union is the only country where I've ever come close to being arrested: once for jaywalking and once for frisbee).
I buy the latter justification to a certain extent, but I really think the Morganizing rationale is closer to the mark. I think Putin and the power guys feel like Russia needs to catch up big-time to a globalization process that favors the largest corporations with the most global reach, and are working to Putinize various prized industries to create just such a roster.
The problem, of course, is the heavy state involvement in these entities, leading to a pol-biz overlap of the sort that eventually collapsed in the U.S. across a series of panics and scandals and other skullduggery that eventually led to the social reform movement that peaked with TR's presidency, only to be revived again and again (always in more muted forms) as the 20th century progressed.
Not a fun trajectory to watch, but one easily predicted. Not a hard call. When faced with the competitive landscape of Globalization IV, Russia decided to come back as fast as possible using methods that have worked for others in history, taking advantage of what was there on the table to get the ball rolling. Beyond that, the Kremlin uses its existing relationships around the world to keep itself relevant diplomatically, but no attempts at a military profile beyond its accepted boundaries (the "near abroad" that no other great power particularly wants to run).
I expect this process to go on for quite some time. A significant period of stability and income growth will be required before the questions get asked, much less the reforms begin.
Meanwhile, do I still include Russia in the Core? Yes. My underlying argument on Core v. Gap is: Can I imagine America intervening within its borders any time soon under any un-fantastic circumstances? And the answer is, No.
Russia may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's not a geo-strategic or military problem for the U.S. anymore, unlike the long period of the Cold War.
WASHINGTON WHISPERS: "Two Onetime Arkansans for '08?" by Dan Gilgoff, U.S. News & World Report, 4 December 2006, p. 16.Word from Little Rock is that the Clintonites discuss the possibility of Wes Clark as VP for Hillary: she has the celebrity and he has the national security credentials she needs.
This is the part of the entry that caught my eye:
The former NATO commander has been promoting a federal "Department of Failed States" or "Department of Preventive Diplomacy" to head off "impending conflict" around the globe and make friends abroad. "Respect is the starting point for all human interaction."Hmmmmmmmm.
Expressed desire to publish PNM exactly as is, with no cuts.
Assuming this actually happens, I am spared the compromise.
Obvious next question is, who is this mysterious China mainland publishing house?
ARTICLE: Pope Backs Turkey’s Bid to Join European Union, By IAN FISHER and SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times, November 29, 2006A John Paul-sort of stroke that recognizes and leverages the Papacy's primary strength.
Yes, the position-reversal will be interpreted by some as a means of dampening recent Islamic blowback at his attempts at dialogue, but that's the whole purpose of such strategic conversation: give-and-take designed to move the pile.
Benedict is learning how to be the right man at the right time and place, so this is encouraging.
Call from agency today saying Peking U Press is deciding they won't publish PNM even with the more extensive cuts. Still too hot, they say.
Magically, within hours, news arrives that another publishing house in China wants to publish PNM. New advance, same print run of 5k, not sure yet on whether PUP's original translation can be transferred or what the cuts will be with this new publisher, about which little is known.
I was expecting this outcome based on my past two trips to Beijing, and welcome the development. Once this is finally settled and I've scored the second great CBL edition (character-based language), I expect some movement on Blueprint.
Strangely enough, despite all the interest in my work from the South Korean media, no real offers to do a Korean version, which is sad. I'm getting the "C" and I've already got the "J" of CJK (the three great CBLs), but I don't believe I'll ever get that "K."
Got a nice email from guy about "Loving Big Brother" column and he asks what will protect us here in the States from all this surveillance.
I answer innocently enough, "rule of law." You know, that whole Constitution thing.
So he comes back in another email with slavery and asks where we'd be if the South had all these sensors way back when. They would have been able to track slaves ubiquitously, thus preserving the scourge of slavery to this day!
Hmmmmm.
So I replied back, "And what if Hitler had possessed an army of invisible robots? Then where would we be today?"
There is just no pleasing some people.
Comment from irate lady at Capitol Hill Blue posting of last week's column on the Democrats has her accusing me of just "believing" that globalization has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in recent decades. Of course, I might cite the World Bank's stats, but everyone knows they--like me--are just a tool of the Cheney-ites who want to strip the world's resources for the gain of the rich few.
She also includes in her tirade that I probably never have even dared to vote Democrat!
I'd like to give her a shhhhmoke and a pancake ....
Just finished this week's column and submitted. It is about the folly of the Iran-centric policy still being pursued by the Bush-Cheney team.
Damn Cheney-ites like me are always turning on their masters!
BOOK: Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions, By Jane Stromseth et al., Cambridge University Press, September 2006.An amazing treatise of an argument that masquerades as a book introduction/sales job. So well written I must buy this book.
If this argument doesn't fit the notion that idealism is just impatient realism, then I don't know what does. The authors see long-term inevitabilities and strive to deal with them pro-actively, instead of sitting back and letting history come to them at its own pace--the essence of realism.
Whether you're interested in buying the book, read this interesting (and brutally honest in its depiction of how the book was shaped by recent events) book description.
Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this in.
POST: The 751 No-Go Zones of France, Daniel Pipes' Weblog, November 14, 2006Both unreal and prosaic. After all, America has several hundred such "lost control" areas within its own borders. We just call them Native American reservations.
The unreal part would seem to be France apparently giving up on integrating Muslims--at least in a geographic sense.
One foresees a France of multiple citizenships.
One thing for an abstraction called the "United States." Another thing for the homeland of the French.
Thanks to Dan Hare for sending this in.
ARTICLE: Velvet Revolution in Iran?, by Martin Beck Matuštík, Logos JournalGood piece. Worth reading.
We only get downside coverage of Iran, much like with the old USSR, which was why its collapse was so surprising.
I like the piece's comparison to late Soviet history. There is the showy totalitarianism of Stalin and then there was the tired authoritarianism of Brezhnev. Iran is clearly on the backside of that trajectory, but we play it like it's on the upside, despite all of the regime's sad failures at both home and abroad.
Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this in.
ARTICLE: Why the U.S. Loses ‘Small Wars’, By Larry Kahaner, History News Network, 11-27-06Well written.
I especially like the USMC's Small Wars Center of Excellence's calling for simpler weapons and more complex soldiers.
But I think the author's only looking at the post-colonial backside in his summary judgment. Truth is, the West has done plenty well on small wars, so long as the goal is political/economic integration.
Wasn't the American West won by a simple weapon?
Or did that gun just do the killing and was the real victory found in the subsequent integration?
What have we integrated in Iraq? Not much. So what should we expect to win?
Not much.
Thanks to Michael Alatorre for sending this in.
[Editor's note: Mark's linking this article, too.]
SPECIAL REPORT: "Who Lost Iraq? Success Has Many Fathers. The Mess in Baghdad Has a Lot More," by Chitra Ragavan, U.S. News & World Report, 27 November 2006, p. 38.The U.S. News report is a great one, and the star of the piece is who it should be: Condi Rice. She is essentially identified as the weak link in the process, but for the wrong reasons.OP-ED: "Right Vision, Wrong Policy," by Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 20-26 November 2006, p. 5.
Rice is said to be too close to Bush. Granted.
Rice is said to have been too much in favor of the war so as to abdicate her "impartial broker" role. Bullshit.
Again, we see the problem of calling everything "the war."
Rice's support for the war wasn't the problem. It just reflected her general inability to think outside her boss' box.
The real problem with Rice is that she came from the Brent Scowcroft school of realism and national security advising. After Iran-Contra, the Brent Scowcroft school of national security advising came into vogue: the national security adviser and the NSC staff became super-apolitical. Instead of being the government-wide advocator of national security policy and an active player in its own right, the NSC and its boss became foreign policy super-clerk to the president, the main job being protecting POTUS's ass from any blame.
This is essentially the Scowcroft model, and it reflected his realist take on things: no advocacy and no idealism from the NSC. It doesn't lead, it merely coordinates.
That became the preferred mode post-Iran-Contra, and it survived the Bush 41 administration nicely, segueing into the emasculated NSC of the Clinton years, when the NEC (national economic council) was actually more powerful because Rubin at Treasury topped any of the unmemorables at Defense.
When Rice came in with George, the NSC embraced the Scowcroft "we're-just-here-on-background" model. The staff I interacted with were all the same. I called them the "Joe Fridays." They'd come, they'd take notes, and that was it. They had no ideology to speak of. They were responsible for nothing. They just coordinated.
We won in Iraq--the war, that is.
What we continue to lose in Iraq in the peace. That loss occurs primarily because we're under-allied and under-coordinated interagency-wise. You place that blame on State and NSC. Rice ran NSC through the disastrous "lost year" following the invasion's successful conclusion (when Saddam's regime fell). Rice has been in charge of State for the last two years, during which our under-allied approach has proven quite isolating for us and quite invigorating for the insurgency and now sectarian warriors.
How so?
A big allied presence says to all, "This thing is happening. It's inevitable. Get used to it."
A narrow, U.S.-heavy presence says, "Just kill enough people and especially American troops to drive off the weak-willed U.S. Government."
Rice was in charge of the interagency process when it could make or break our effort. And it was broken on her watch.
Rice has been in charge (following perhaps the biggest do-nothing SECSTATE we've ever had in Colin Powell) of State and the alliance process during the past two years and all we've got to show for it is this unimaginative strategy of trying to isolate Iran--that's it. We're losing allies, adding no new ones, and picking new fights and bolstering old enemies in the very region we're now--out of desperation and incompetence in our nation-building effort in Iraq--trying to stabilize.
And more than anyone else in this administration we've got Rice and her minimalistic take on her jobs to thank for this mess. Just-the-facts-ma'am at NSC followed by talking-points diplomacy and (gasp!) yet another axis of evil member to isolate and contain (Why not take such a realist tack? Look what the original Realist approach on Iraq has gotten us over the years: build him up vis-a-vis Iran, then kick him out of Kuwait but don't finish the job so we can isolate him with no-flies and sanctions, only to finally go in again and get stuck with a mess that--of course--only the Realists can save us from today!).
I am being serious in this charge. Blaming Rummy for being Rummy or Wolfowitz and Feith for being Neocons is basically a cop-out. Yes, Powell was weak at SECSTATE, but the great balancer then was supposed to be Rice and the great balancer today is supposed to be Rice (her minion runs NSC in her wake). Blaming the strong for the performances of the weak is great commentary if you can get it on TV, but it adds nothing to knowledge.
But in the end, Rice was completely inconsequential. She was perfect for the job at NSC because she wouldn't do anything but coordinate, leaving the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis to dominate, and Bush defers to Cheney on foreign policy.
I know, I know. It's easy to pin it all on Cheney, but it's a good place to start. And it's not that I dislike Cheney's thinking much, because his realism is just realism on speed (he sees the inevitable and wants it done today!). He's the realist who's been mugged and decided that if it takes that long, he'll be an idealist in the short run.
I don't mind Cheney so much. I just wish he hadn't been elected POTUS as far as our foreign policy is concerned.
The Realist school of limited regrets is what got us the Middle East we have today, and their solution will be to simply recreate the same dynamics that worked so well in the past: Sunni dictators + isolate Iran + push for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Gosh, that's all worked so well in the past that I'm sure it'll do the trick this time.
I love Hoagland's acerbic take on it all:
History's seemingly unlimited store of irony now makes Bush 43 the evident instrument of the resurgence of the "realist" school of foreign policy so beloved of Bush 41 and so regularly scorned by this president--until he turned to it for salvation in Iraq and elsewhere.Oh no, we have a Plan B. It's called try-the-same-WMD-track-with-Iran. This is Condi Rice's big accomplishment as SECSTATE and it rivals her incompetence as national security adviser.Many will revel in this turn, and there is rough familial justice at work: Only the incompetence and discord of the past three years could cause reasonable people to welcome back with applause policymakers who failed to anticipate and then opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union; who were not realistic enough to see, much less prevent, the Balkans from plunging into flames; and who "coddled dictators from Beijing to Baghdad," as the Democrats once accurately described the handiwork of Brent Scowcroft, Bob Gates and Jim Baker under Bush 41.
So hold the champagne and cheers for the return of "realism," a word that has even less meaning than most of the labels that politicians, journalists and academics attach to schools of foreign policy. It is too often a euphemism for cynicism, for playing for time and for passing up big opportunities that carry high risks and potentially great rewards. Bush 43 took such a risk in Iraq and now pays the price for failing to develop anything resembling a Plan B.
Rice is Scowcroft's protegee all right and she's got his lack of strategic imagination down pat.
But the good news is that what Baker and Hamilton will likely offer should fit the bill rather nicely. According to Hoagland:
Baker-Hamilton will certainly recommend that the United States urgently develop the regional and international structures to guide change that Bush has neglected, and the president must act on that advice.But here's where Hoagland really nails it:
But Bush's going on the defensive does not mean that the radical positive changes he had hoped for cannot come about on their own, even if on a different timetable and with much greater costs than he ever imagined. True realism lies in recognizing that his diagnosis of a crumbling order in the Middle East was sound, even if his prescriptions were not.I would just amend the last sentence to read, "even if his execution was not."
And again, for that we have the great protege of the uber-realist most to thank.
Realism is just idealism stretched over time. In the end, Bush will be judged as a very realistic president, just one surrounded by weak talent.
Tom got this email and wanted to pass it on to you:
REMINDER ...11 days from today, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sale calls.[Update] Uh, can I have that one back ;-)YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS
To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222 . It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years.
You must call from the cell phone number you are wanting to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number. HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS OR GO TO: www.donotcall.gov
Flurry of email and comments (well, 3 so far), that inform me that this is an urban legend. Heck, the linked website itself even debunks it. And an FTC page that quotes the very email we posted.
Thanks to Eric Allison, Keith Mitchell, Al Wilson, and those of you yet to come ;-)
+ China Law Blog linked Novartis to China: simply brilliant.
+ Garrick Van Buren linked Connect to freedom or not?
+ So did Austin Centrist.
+ Outside the Beltway linked Don't let this change pass without notice.
+ ZenPundit linked today's column Will Democrats build bridges or walls?
+ Global Cop linked "Find your friends".
Will Democrats build bridges or walls?Read on at KnoxNews.Globalization is more domestic policy than foreign policy because, when America connects to the world outside, that outside world inevitably penetrates our communities, our workplaces, our homes. This recent election had a lot to do with modulating America's connectivity to the world, whether we're talking immigration, trade or Iraq.
The question for ruling Democrats is: Will they build bridges or will they build walls?
There are really two types of people in this world - those who believe there are two types of people in this world and those who do not. I fall into the former category.
ARTICLE: China Filling Void Left by West in U.N., By Colum Lynch, Washington Post, November 24, 2006; Page A12Slowly but surely, China rises up the ranks of the world's peacekeepers. The biggest numbers of bodies have historically come from countries with the largest populations, so the anomaly of Pakistan and Bangladesh supplying so many.
My prediction: within a generation China consistently provides more peacekeepers globally than any nation in the world.
Locate labor where the problem is, I say, which is why I prefer to deal in inevitabilities rather than possibilities. Just follow the money, and the energy, and the demographics, and the security, and spotting logical future pathways for the planet isn't all that hard, with the big questions being speed of technology and strength of will.
OPINION: On negotiating with Tehran, by Henry A. Kissinger, International Herald Tribune, November 23, 2006Pretty decent starter piece by Kissinger that gets everyone a bit closer to realistic expectations on Iran, which is sort of in its Khrushchevian "we will bury you" (at least in the Shiite belt) bragging phase. To a great extent, all the talks need to do is buy us time and a forum for starting what will inevitably be a long-term forum for regional security discussion, much like the OSCE forum was in Europe.
No, this forum won't magically make our rapid departure from Iraq possible, and no, it won't stop Iran from getting the bomb. Keep those two realities firmly in your head: we won't be leaving Iraq (even though our role and numbers will change) and Iran will be getting the bomb.
The regional forum concept is not designed for magical outcomes, but slowly building the collective will for permanent security regimes to arise in the region that settle the endemic conflicts and allow enough political stability for economic connectivity to ensue, which in turn will fuel social change already underway and political change that seethes just below the surface (the great fears of the despots).
In many ways, the Big Bang strategy continues to work by playing a forcing function: forcing the emergence of negotiations, deals, fora, etc. that are required for any sort of security advance in the region. If Iraq had gone well, dictators quaking in their boots would have moved in this direction out of fear. As Iraq goes badly, dictators quaking in their boots are moving in this direction out of fear. At this minimum, the Big Bang was always going to work: the only question was how much pain was going to be involved and what threat that pain would pose to America's will to continue (which, for now, holds up incredibly well--unless I'm missing the mass demonstrations in the streets and the constitutional crisis in DC).
Realism is just idealism stretched over time. It is a belief in inevitabilities that prefers inaction to action and cynicism to morality. But such delays do not constitute diversions much less defeats.
Remember what Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution and decide which side of history you want to be on: those who connect to freedom or those who disconnect to achieve tyranny.
To me, the outcome will never be in doubt, just the timing.
Thanks to TurcoPundit for sending this in.
ARTICLE: Indian Schools Help Students Connect With Their Culture: Tradition, Not Assimilation, A Growing Trend Across U.S., By Robert Gutsche Jr., Washington Post, November 23, 2006; Page A03People, especially journalists, always want to make everything binary, as in integration v. disintegration, tradition v. assimilation.
In the right political mix, which America approximates better than anybody, you always see plenty of both, especially when we're processing a high amount of recent immigrants.
As for this story, obviously tilted for the holidays, I see a lot to be grateful for: coming to America has never meant abandoning tradition. But it's always been a place that's proven the reality that tradition never stands still and is constantly remade by new generations (like the Chinese getting all jacked in China over Halloween and St. Valentine's Day.
Bottom line being: in an increasingly individualistic world, everyone's looking for any excuse for communal experiences.
Does that desire threaten anybody's social fabric?
Not if freedom of religion exists, meaning you go from or stay with religion as you choose. So long as that rule set remains strong, then access to and freedom from tradition--as desired--remains solid and the main social fabric (that social sense that this is a great place to live) remains in tact.
Just enough freedom yielding just enough tradition yielding just enough social cohesion--a rule set worth defending and remembering today.
MEDIA SEGMENT: Peace Corps with guns, Anderson Cooper, 360 tonite, Nov. 22, 06.I believe I called it a "pistol packin' Peace Corps" in BFA.
Crazy then, more plausible now.
Thanks to Dan Hare for sending this in.
Enmeshed with family. Everyone feeling good. Life and work have never been better, and one cannot say that every year, but this one has been incredibly special in so many ways.
Thanks so much for all the comments and advice. This blog has become such a super-empowering tool for me, making all of you part of this effort that has come to define my career and--by extension--my fantastic partnership with Steve DeAngelis and Enterra.
When life is this good, you need to give thanks, and you all have mine for all the amazing effort you--the readers--have put into this discussion space.
Enjoy the day and your families.
SPECIAL REPORT: Germany's place in the world: Merkel as a world star, The Economist, November 16th, 2006PRTs [Provincial Reconstruction Teams] are the best Core prototype out there, with precursors found in our Vietnam experiences (CORDS) and the Brits in Malay (those were originally called "ferret teams" if I remember correctly).
Thanks to Maany Peyvan for sending this in.
The more I listen to XM in the car, the more I tune in "World" music and thus the more I listen to French artists who mash up various styles very nicely with a bent toward techno (a weakness of mine going back to early Kraftwerk--everybody's Daddy, including Madonna's).
Plus, French is hard to beat as a lyric delivery method.
Plus, quite frankly, as my first foreign affair (before Romanian, German and Russian), it reminds me of my youth in a harmless fashion--you know, before I read "mode" and only thought "ice cream."
ARTICLE: Flaws Cited in Effort To Train Iraqi Forces: U.S. Officers Roundly Criticize Program, By Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, November 21, 2006; Page A01Ricks' piece is one of his best in recent months which is saying a lot.
The two Yingling quotes sum up the piece (and the problem) nicely:
Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, a staff officer with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 who worked with Iraqi units, came away thinking that the Army fundamentally is not geared to the task of helping the advisory effort.Again, all these moves and reports and reviews and lessons learned and commissions and quotes from officers on the ground point to the same undeniable reality: the SysAdmin is coming because the pain is building."The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host-nation institutions," he told the interviewers, "yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations: combat operations."
...
"Don't train on finding the enemy," he said. "Train on finding your friends, and they will help you find your enemy. . . . Once you find your friends, finding the enemy is easy."
ARTICLE: What Makes a Muslim Radical?, by John L. Esposito, Dalia Mogahed, Foreign Policy Web ExclusiveAnother good myth-busting piece that shows Foreign Policy is on top of its game.
And yet it misleads by focusing so much on foot soldiers and acting as though decoding their enlistment decision reveals all.
I mean, would similar analysis of our soldiers tell you everything you'd need to know about what's right and wrong with America?
Frankly, we learn more about this struggle by how they fight than why they fight--much less who fights.
Still, the anaysis (based on polls) hits it on the head regarding motivation: this is all about fear of losing control and--conversely--the perceived ceding of control to others.
So yeah, as globalization encroaches on these traditional societies and as--in natural, yin-yang response--"globalised Islam" (Olivier Roy's apt term) encroaches upon the Core (especially freaking-out Europe), each side fears--in mirror-image fashion--a loss of control, which at its root constitutes the far more dreaded fear of loss of identity (meaning Fukuyama's "wars of the spirit" still explains far more than Huntington's simplistic "clash").
Thanks to Joseph for sending this in.
ARTICLE: Jihadis and whores, by Spengler, Asia Times OnlineBrilliant insight and stunningly clear analysis--until Spengler turns on himself and relativizes Iran's obvious despair to why advanced societies have fewer children, for then he starts sounding like that pathetic cultural crybaby Mark Steyn.
I also wholly disagree with Spengler's summary (and logically disconnected) conclusion that Iran's national self-suicide rules out either negotiation or the follow-on soft kill strategy.
Instead, I say cue up Roberta Flack and let's get Iran back to having--and wanting--their babies.
And the song we use is connectivity, just like we killed the USSR softly.
Remember when I wrote about drunkenly crying myself to sleep one darkless summer night in Leningrad in 1985?
Well, this was the great downer vibe I picked up from both old (drinking and smoking themselves quite knowingly to death) and young (that desperate female desire to catch a man who would take them away from all this going-nowhere-ness that I encountered in my depressed and isolated rural hometown growing up was nothing compared to the sad hunger you saw in the eyes of Russian girls who so desperately wanted some American student to fall in love with them tonight so that the fabled dream of escape might come true).
Spengler thus conflates his own fears with Iran's, confusing the Core's vitality and optimism with the Gap's fear and loathing.
We are not the disease but the cure.
Still, one of the most amazingly good columns I've ever read. Seriously, I've never read so much good stuff as I have in the last six months. Out of our fears, new imagination is born (now if we can only get that into the White House).
Compare that to what's coming out of Iran...
Thanks to TM Lutas for sending this in.
ARTICLE: Army gives Rumsfeld Doctrine a rewrite, By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2006.This may seem like an obvious and perfunctory change, but it is neither.
Frankly, it was the main pretext for writing The Pentagon's New Map.
So don't let this change pass without notice. Don't let it seem blase or "too little, too late."
For it is a sea change that many have fought against their entire careers--and continue to fight vociferously to this day.
But so many lives depend on this change--some ours but countless more theirs.
And if we want that sort of shrink-the-Gap peace, these must become our new calculations and our renewed sense of love for our fellow humans.
Thanks to James Miller and Ben Meier for sending this in.
+ Chicago Daily Southtown picked up Tom's column again this week and titled it Big Brother watching you? It wouldn't be all bad.
+ Capitol Hill Blue published it as Learning to love Big Brother...and fight terrorism.
+ Rocklin and Roseville Today (CA) published it as Loving Big Brother.
+ And Huntington News (WV) picked it up also as Loving Big Brother, but they included Tom's original (Police-referencing title) 'Every breath you take, every move you make ... can be watched all right.'
A good notion and perhaps an apt description by a commenter below.
At least, it matches my feeling...
So what does that tell me?
Time to reinvent. Books to peruse by year's end and then start working the Vol. III proposal over winter.
Today I was describing Vol. III to a Russian Orthodox nun after she took me on a tour of her chapel-in-the-woods. I said PNM was about how the world must change, that BFA was about how nations must change, and that Vol. III will be about how people must change (many fruitful long discussions with brother Jerome on that this weekend).
So I guess I will change in order to write Vol. III, and the blog will change too.
Lately I grow weary of blogging articles, feeling it all gets too repetitious. Instead I find reading history more interesting--especially U.S. history.
And I find myself wandering more in the posts, like they've become one giant pre-writing exercise.
But rather than get the blahs about it (everything else in my life is ab fab, with the core of the core [marriage] feeling more fantastic than ever--so how to complain?), I see for what it is: the great retreat and big think before the next explosion.
And no, I do not assume the next big explosion has to look anything like the last--a bad assumption to make.
The BFA brief still goes over like a bombshell, but I am getting a bit bored with it. No, bored is the wrong word. I'm getting too comfortable with it. At Harvard last week I found myself staring out the windows too much when I spoke--always a bad sign.
This is why I am excited about all these wargaming offers as of late, especially those involving flags. Can we pursue them all while working Enterra's steep trajectory?
Probably not.
And yet Steve and I take all these ideas and concepts and alliances and product offerings so seriously that we want to do our best possible effort in as many directions as possible. (No fear on losing focus, and the profit-motive clarifies the mind just enough by focusing us on results that matter--so no vague appeal to just the "marketplace of ideas," please.
These are the days to make such efforts, and we're at exactly the age to make such a push.
So Steve works his book and now I need to think a bit harder on mine. I need to stop bouncing rubble, heed the inner voice, and dig within.
Or maybe I'm just feeling very nostalgic, given a weekend that combined a trip to both the birthplace (Green Bay is my surrogate birthplace as little Chilton sits close by) and my hometown (Boscobel, where I picked up an old desk from my youth, one where I spent innumerable hours plotting my world-changing career--like that kid in the old Loony Tunes cartoons who constantly daydreams Mitty-like of ruling the world in many guises).
I drive away from Boscobel, as I have so many times before, and I feel that personally historic sense of re-entering my life yet again.
Where will it go this time?
It feels like a very long journey lies ahead, like I'm gone for good this time.
ARTICLE: The Forgotten Battleground, By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, November 27, 2006Great piece by Zakaria on point I love to make and often do: we've never been a world more at peace and growing faster or more globally than we are now.
Our main challenge isn't war, but spreading peace through economic connectivity leading to sustainable development, applying force judiciously to enable that spread by removing the biggest security roadblocks in the way.
Our resources are far greater than we realize and our enemies far less powerful than credited.
The question isn't, Can we still win if we "lose" Iraq for some period (as we'll lose countries routinely as they descend from fakeness to realness--e.g., pretend Iraq evolves into the three elements that may someday become a real Iraq or end up separating for far longer, coming back together only in some larger, more logically connected Gulf region), because there's never been any question we'll win the Long War. The only question is, How quickly do we recognize this new global correlation of forces, exploiting it for all it's worth while reconnecting our employment of military power to an enunciated grand strategy that the Core as a whole can sign up to?
We need to see the Core as a whole, not just recognizing the old traditional West as our only option. On a global level, all the long-term trends favor us. All we really have to do is not screw things up in the short term and build the logical alliances over the mid-term.
Yes, Bush is wasting precious time and global goodwill, but elements within our government and nation--as well as throughout the Core--actively plan America's rehabilitation following Bush's departure.
The Baker effort is just the tip of the iceberg.
Why will this happen?
Best and most trustworthy reason: simply too much money to be made.
Thanks to Thomas Mull for sending this in.
POST: Feingold on the Long WarMakes me more optimistic that Feingold will have a good impact on the 2008 election.
Thanks to Jim Zellmer (the author) for sending this in.
That was just painful to watch in person.
Favre was just old and hurt to play (he stunk up the place, missing receivers by wide margins), then got knocked out for the whole second half.
It felt most definitely like the beginning of the end.
EDITORIAL: The Army We Need, New York Times, November 19, 2006Despite a lot of bad news about the operational force (the one over there, operating), there's recently been a lot of great news and developments surrounding the institutional force back home (the one that "generates" the operational force).
Yes, I know that sounds both esooteric and slow, but in generational terms it's moving at some real speed.
No fun to hear (especially as we all worry about loved ones still over there or getting sent back), but Iraq is getting us the force we need.
The consensus builds. The SysAdmin is coming.
Thanks to Daniel Adkins for sending this to Tom and Clive W for sending it to Sean.
+ Let's give pride of place this week to the Web 3.0 discussion. Asia Logistics Wrap linked Steve on Web 3.0 and so did tdaxp.
+ tdaxp also linked Tom as a top-notch blogger.
+ China Law Blog linked The taming of China proceeds on many fronts...
+ PurpleSlog linked North Viet Nam has won the war, and Saigon the peace!
+ So did tdaxp.
+ field notes linked Tough for Rummy, just beginning for Rice.
+ Shrink Wrapped linked The charges of selling-out already arise with Baker on Iraq.
+ The D-Ring linked Tom as A book and a blog you must read.
ARTICLE: "A novel prescription: A big western company moves into China, but not for the usual reasons," The Economist, 11 November 2006, p. 72.A theme I 've harped on so much it's my signature slogan for my second book: New Core sets the new rules.
Novartis sinks a $100m research facility in Shanghai, despite China not being a global center for Big Pharma R&D and a weak environment for IP protection, and Shanghai offering no costs savings as a location.
Why?
China's got a lot of rising healthcare issues, especially cancer given all that pollution and smoking, so "China offers a huge pool of subjects for study and a promising market for any resulting treatments."
The New Core is most incentivized to push newer and riskier technologies because it's facing the most change over the shortest timeframe and thus experiences the most damaging churn--along with all that wealth creation.
Locate labor where the problems are greatest.
Every time I go on C-SPAN, we pick up a cluster of ranters who flock to the site, spouting angry, accusatory and often incomprehensible arguments that the vast bulk of our readers find distracting, dull and demeaning to the site as a whole.
Sean (my webmaster) and I can spot them a mile away. When they comment, their posts are often openly criticized or summarily dissed by other commenters (which they typically thrive upon). But the problem for these types is that, over time, most people just tune them out as spammish background noise. That truly pisses them off, typically pushing them to new lows in attempts to regain attention.
Our challenge is that if we let them go on long enough, they demean the discourse like so much garbage piled up in the streets--in effect people stop wanting to drop by because the ambience has been so degraded. In the past, this is why I killed the comments function completely. When I decided to open them up a while back ago, I asked my webmaster (then Critt, now Sean) to review each comment and when people crossed our sense of the line, first we warn while deleting the offending column and then we ban the person outright if the behavior persists. Do something egregious enough and we just ban you straight off, but that's gotta be some truly weird behavior and frankly, that doesn't come out of the blue, so when it happens, it's typically that last-straw -type thing.
Recently, we've encountered such a problem with the commenter who goes by pseudonym "PenGun," whose comments have gotten weirder and more antagonistic over time.
Well, a couple of days ago he tried to post a comment in which he accused me of sending law enforcement officers with guns drawn to his house in some attempt to silence him (all claimed to be captured on his surveillance cameras, as he wasn't home). It's a weird, rather incoherent post that makes PenGun sound like he's living on some planet different from the rest of us. He ends the post by vaguely threatening retaliation against me/the site.
Sean asked me what to do. As this is about the 100th case I've encountered of truly off-the-deep-end behavior (and yes, they always start with threats of cyber retaliation, sometimes elevating to direct threats against me and/or my family), I told Sean to inform PenGun that his posting days are over.
PenGun sent his proposed comment directly to me. I did not respond. Early on (say, the first 50 or so), I would have responded directly to this guy, but I've found that if you engage, these types simply ratchet up the threats and bizarre language, so it goes nowhere and just drags it out. So now I just endure the threatening emails (sometimes phone calls) and make the necessary calls to police.
Obviously, one needs to take such threats seriously, because you never know which person will try whatever against your site--much less your spouse or kids.
Do I take a lot of precautions in this regard? You bet. And there's no need to make blustery threats beyond that.
But do I give in to such threats by allowing somebody back in the comments because he threatens--as PenGun does in tonight's follow-on email--to send me a photo of my house (apparently to strike fear in my heart that he can access my kids or wife and harm them at some time of his choosing---something he claims he did to one "Den Beste," scaring him immediately into closing his site) if I dare ignore him?
No, I do not.
For now, PenGun's threats are just words. Perhaps he will seek to crash this site. Perhaps he will try to intimidate me as he has threatened to do). If he does, I'll take the appropriate steps and contact the relevant authorities and proceed from that point. For now we document everything and hope it doesn't come to that, but as I noted before, this ain't my first time around the block on such threats and--clearly--once PenGun insinuates a capacity to harm my children, he certainly gets special attention.
What PenGun doesn't get, though, is my website as a venue for whatever paranoid delusions he may suffer--certainly not on the basis of terroristic threats against my loved ones.
PenGun claims to be out in the open, claiming his site to be "crushthe.us."
[Editor's note: PenGun also links to http://carnagepro.com, copyrighted by C Carson.]
Also, if anyone wants to offer any advice on how to handle situations and threats like this, please do the same. Naturally, I'd like to learn more about all of this so I can take any additional steps necessary to protect my family while hopefully defusing the situation as reasonably as possible.
Yes, it's a sad way to spend a Saturday night, but such are the perverted tactics of our latest online bully.
Again, not the first and definitely won't be the last.
Every breath, every move can be watchedRead on at KnoxNews.George Orwell had it completely wrong: ubiquitous sensing technology won’t be the dictator’s tool for enslaving ordinary citizens. Rather, it’ll give open societies the capacity for serious resilience in an increasingly connected world where danger knows no boundaries.
We’re standing on the edge of a technological revolution that will provide us with everything we need to defeat transnational terrorism in this so-called Long War, and no, it won’t be some secret “government project.” Instead, this revolution in capabilities will be driven primarily by the private sector’s response to the growing desire of average citizens for hyper-connected lives.
ARTICLE: "Iraq's new blueprint" by Greg Grant, Army Times, October 23rd, 2006, page 26Got this article which discusses some of the finding of the Iraq Study Group sent in by a Second Lieutenant Battalion Intell Officer who thought the following excerpt sounded familiar:
The solution could leave the services divided into two armies - one with troops trained for high-intensity warfare and another for irregular warfare.
ARTICLE: "DOD, State Dept. Eye Joint 'Hub' For Stability Operations, Irregular War", By Sebastian Sprenger, Inside The Pentagon, November 16, 2006Some representative excerpts:
Defense and State department officials are seeking funds for a [Center for Complex Operations] charged with synchronizing military and civilian efforts to rebuild troubled states and fight unconventional wars...Tom's comments:The U.S. Agency for International Development also could commit funds for the center...
The new organization would implement the recommendation of two Pentagon policy documents -- Directive 3000 on stability operations and the classified 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review execution roadmap on irregular warfare -- to stand up centers of excellence for these mission areas.
The Center for Complex Operations would be a “hub” for integrating existing training, education, research and lessons-learned efforts throughout a stability operations and irregular warfare “consortium”...
Last November, [Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon] England, who at the time was acting deputy defense secretary, issued Directive 3000, which says stability operations are just as important as traditional combat missions. The guidance document assigned a wide range of responsibilities across DOD to bolster the military’s ability to establish and maintain order in troubled regions and to support other government agencies in rebuilding war-torn countries (ITP, Dec. 8, 2005, p3; Oct. 27, 2005, p3; and July 7, 2005, p1)...
In particular, “severe shortcomings” persist in DOD’s stability operations “capacity” and its planning, information sharing and intelligence capabilities...
Also, civilian agencies have made little progress in bolstering their capabilities to conduct such operations, leaving a “huge gap in essential skills and resources for years, if not decades, to come”
Encouraging news. Money is small, but fact that all three D's (defense, diplomacy, development) involved is an indicator of future evolution. Also good is notion that home would be neutral party like USIP. I can see buddy Patrick Cronin being its first director.All in all, a sign of the SysAdmin's bureaucratic emergence, though I assume "false pregnancies" are inevitable.
Still, do you think this place would be interested in exploring Development-in-a-Box?
Thanks to the USTRANSCOM officer who sent this in.
POST: MAINSTREAMING THE GOSPEL OF RESILIENCEMark, as always, provides some great, big-picture context, to Esquire's profile of Steve. Worth reading.
ARTICLE: "For Incoming Democrats, Populism Trumps Ideology: New Class Promises End to Partisan Tone," by Robin Toner and Kate Zernike, New York Times, 12 November 2006, p. A1.Historically, as Benjamin Friedman points out in his Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, whenever Americans perceive a slow-down in economic growth, especially among lower and middle classes, our politics tends to get very nasty, as in very trade protectionist and anti-immigrant.COLUMN: "The Economic Perception Gap," by Jane Bryant Quinn, Newsweek, 20 November 2006, p. 59.
POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "China-Bashing Could Flourish Under Pelosi: New Speaker Has Long Fiercely Criticized Beijing's Human-Rights and Trade Practices," by Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 16 November 2006, p. A4.
ARTICLE: "A Setback For Vietnam Trade Bill," by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 14 November 2006, p. C1.
WIRE REPORT: "President Bush seeks to reassure Asian allies," Associated Press, 16 November 2006.
ARTICLE: "Citigroup Is Preferred Bidder for China Bank: As Beijing Curbs Direct Ownership Of Its Firms, Foreigners Are Given More Control in How They Are Run," by Kate Linebaugh and James T. Areddy, Wall Street Journal 16 November 2006, p. C1.
ARTICLE: "Leveling the Indian Playing Field? Some See Positive Societal Benefits in Western-Style Supermarkets," by Anand Giridharadas, New York Times, 14 November 2006, p. C3.
ARTICLE: "Islamic-Bond Market Becomes Global By Attracting Non-Muslim Borrowers," by Karen Lane, Wall Street Journal, 16 November 2006, p. C1.
ARTICLE: "Boy's Death at China Hospital Spurs Riot Over Care and Fees," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 13 November 2006, p. A6.
BOOK REVIEW: "Old World Order: This prescription for foreign policy sees advantage in America's cold-war era prudence and realism," by James Traub (Ethical Realism by Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman), New York Times Book Review, 12 November 2006, p. 50.
So when I see the new "non-ideology" of populism trumpeted, I get visions of Lou Dobbs ushering in the next wave of Democrats-as-self-destructive know-nothings on economics and trade, which ends up damaging our nation's political and military connectivity with the rest of the world by emphasizing an America-first mindset that's just socio-economic unilateralism displacing a previous wave of pol-mil unilateralism.
In reality, the former has far greater potential to harm globalization's advance than the latter, because the overzealous Leviathan is a known problem that can be balanced by the rest of the Core, whereas the protectionist America can easily trigger an every-nation-for-itself free-for-all that introduces great uncertainty (not to mention massive inefficiency) in the global economy.
People are simply feeling more exposed on an individual basis, as author Jacob Hacker argues in his The Great Risk Shift, so like anybody who's scared, they want to socialize the problem by pushing it back on the government to solve. On certain issues this makes sense, but when the mindset takes hold, it usually extends itself to illogical extremes, or basically making all this uncertainty and perceived rising risk the fault of "those people" (usually outsiders who've snuck in and "unfair" trade partners who "need to be taught a lesson" of the Smoot-Hawley sort--or is it of the Schumer-Graham sort?).
Pelosi could be a real disaster in this regard. As soon as I see her saying she'll represent the nation and not just her district, I feel like she's spinning me. I don't think she'll change her partisan ways whatsoever. None of the previous other speakers since the Cold War's end have done anything but treat the job as their own personal platform, so why should I suspect a life-long politician (bred from birth) to be any different?
Yes, yes, let's let San Fran's Chinatown run our policy with China. Gotta be better than Taipei, right?
So we get early signs on what the Dems will be like on trade. Vietnam's MFN slam dunk? Why move on that when we can send Bush to Asia looking goofy without this treaty in hand? I mean, score any point you can whenever you can.
Clearly, there's no sense that more economic connectivity is doing God's work for us around the planet, opening up previously disconnected economies and introducing economic efficiencies that present previously economically disenfranchised populations with new opportunities for the sort of social changes that actually get you pluralism in the end, ending the restrictive caste systems of the past.
China lets Western banks drive the process of financial reform in their own economy. Think a 27-percent tarrif on Chinese imports would do a better job?
India's new grocery stores (Western-style) drive profound change in their ag sector. Think keeping U.S. ag subsidies high in the Doha Round will get us the world we want?
Hell, when U.S. businesses find better debt financing abroad with Islamic bonds, do you feel like we're "funding both sides in this terror war" or do you see some larger process of connectivity at work?
And yes, when the domestic political change is triggered overseas, it will often look quite ugly at first: typically a tragedy leading to some new law. But look back over our own history and tell me it was much different.
The necons' push for democracy is now seen as too much too fast for the Gap, but what is proposed in its place? A "great capitalist peace"? You mean we let economic connectivity come first and expect political change to follow?
Good God! Sounds like the Chinese model yielding the American model. What a thought!
So how about a "populism" that's more than just taking care of our own while pretending that's building a better world or crafting a more resilient and capable America down the road. We wouldn't have to call it "globalism" or "realism" or anything really. Maybe we'd just call it Maslow's hierarchy of needs and let it go at that.
ARTICLE: "A Decline in Foreign Students Is Reversed: More Are Coming to U.S.; More Americans Are Going Abroad," by Karen W. Arenson, New York Times, 13 November 2006, p. A19.Yes, yes, the damage to America's standing caused by Bush's poor waging of the Long War will set back our relations with the world for decades... or maybe it will recover after a couple two-three years.ARTICLE: "A Tongan War Dance Enlivens Football In Euless, Texas: High-School Players' Ritual Jazzes Local Polynesians; Everybody Does the Haka," by J. Lynn Lunsford, Wall Street Journal, 16 November 2006, p. A1.
How can America keep defying the odds and the cultural biases that plague so many countries as they seek to assimilate new cultures? Just keep it a meritocracy, I guess.
You come, you play hard, and if you can teach some old dog a new trick? Then hell, step to the front of the line and lead the cheer yourself!
And don't be telling Muslims don't play football...
ARTICLE: "Many Nations' Forests Regrow, Study Finds: A ray of hope for the reversal of an ominous trend," by Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times, 14 November 2006, p. A3.The opening sentence:
A large and growing number of countries are reversing the long-standing trend toward destruction of their forests...Does the next sentence sound--yet again--like a perfect example of doom-and-gloomers going overboard on silly straight-line projections?
Twenty years ago most scientists believed that deforestation was an inexorable result of industrialization and that the earth would soon be virtually denuded of trees.Well, I guess that goes to show you what the average scientist knows about economics and business.
The scientists of this new study say "their study suggests that environmental damage can be reversed with a combination of policy and luck."
Yes, that seems like a wise prescription: government regulation and "luck."
Here's the better and less naive reason why forests recover, as the authors of this study admit:
The reversal is partly a result of social changes that occur as countries develop and become wealthier. For example, as rural dwellers move to the cities there are fewer people in the countryside to cut down trees for uses like heating and building.The policy stuff involves governments like those in China and India pushing less clear-cutting and promoting more planting and more efficient farming.
But ask yourself: do you think any such policies arise in countries where economies are not expanding? So which seems more likely: governments taking advantage of rising tides to better deal with externalities or somehow environmental policies triggering economic growth?
When people are hungry and cold, they do what they want to the environment. When they're not, they begin to care about stuff besides survival, like the quality and length of their lives.
And no, giving these people environmentally-friendly micro-economies that have them making trinkets and souvenirs and lots of other little stuff doesn't answer the mail. You get widespread social changes of this sort with serious development that triggers rural to urban migrations of the sort I wrote about in BFA in describing the journey from the Gap to the Core.
ARTICLE: "Cuba's Military Puts Business On Front Lines: Under Castro's Brother, Army Built Joint-Venture Empire; From Hotels to Dophins; Required Reading: Tom Peters," by Jose De Cordoba, Wall Street Journal, 15 November 2006, p. A1.Cuba's military controls as much as 60% of the national economy, according to U of Miami watchers, and as their boss, Raul, is set to take over once terminally-ill Fidel croaks, we should expect a Gorby-like tweaking of this system that rapidly gets out of control and swamps the military's ability to control it's political repercussions (like Gorby, I don't think Raul will have a clue about what he's getting into).POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "Why One Cuba Blueprint Gets Tough on Subsidies," by Bob Davis, Wall Street Journal, 15 November 2006, p. A9.
Raul "has shown a deep interest in free-market experiments in the past," using his military as a lab many times.
Yes, Raul will try to replicate the Chinese model of economic first, politics last, but China doesn't have an ex-pat population gunning for it like Cuba does:
It's far from clear that a Raul Castro government could accomplish a Chinese-style tranformation. For one thing, China isn't located just 90 miles from the U.S. and a wealthy community of exiles looking to reshape their home country along American lines.But it does seem apparent that Raul will give it a good try, and I say, God bless him for trying, because it will be a Gorby-like-be-careful-what-you-wish-for outcome that will play into our hands nicely.
The Cuban collection at the IMF already have their post-Soviet-style-economic-rehab plan ready to roll on Cuba, and it sounds good: no big anti-Castro purge planned and a willingness to work with Raul-as-Cuban-Deng. That sort of strategic patience is called for, because a looting of the place by greedy Miami Cubans would be a Yeltsin-like disaster that just gets you a Cuban Putin down the road. Better to let this thing play out semi-slowly, because with all the close-by pressure exerted by U.S. Cubans, the pace of triggered political change in this "Chinese model" will be blistering compared to the original. Cuba is tiny and presents no serious domestic market of weight to develop, so a rapid globalization of its economy will do the democracy work for us. Simply put, the Chinese model is not a small-state model.
ARTICLE: "For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is 'God's Foreign Policy,'" by David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, 14 November 2006, p. A1.Some serious testing of the U.S.-Israeli relationship is at hand, with Bush '43 in the middle. Hitler analogies abound, and Baker is seen for what he is: a pragmatist who will put America's needs before Israel's desire for a zero-deductible policy on Iran's nuclear threat.ARTICLE: "Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Maintain Tough Front on Iran," by Jum Rutenberg, New York Times, 14 November 2006, p. A6.
ARTICLE: "Blair Urges Strategy Change In Mideast, Spotlighting Iran," by Alan Cowell, New York Times 14 November 2006, p. A11.
ARTICLE: "Iraqi Premier and U.S. General Discuss Syria and Iran," by Sabrina Tavernise and Qais Mizher, New York Times, 14 November 2006, p. A11.
I mean, when you get James Dobson talking about "covenant land," Sam Harris' stuff starts looking a whole lot more reasonable.
In my opinion, we simply owe it to the people of Iraq and our troops there to salvage what we can of the Bush Big Bang strategy of fostering change in the region, and given where we are today in Iraq, a regionalization of the security agenda makes the most sense. Hell, Iran's reach for the bomb basically mandates it.
But Israel will naturally fight this approach, because it calls into question the zero-deductible strategic security guarantee from the U.S., which basically requires us to keep Israel as the sole nuclear power in the region with fully committed back-up from the United States.
We will have no great movement toward stability in the region with that approach, because it's simply so lop-sided in our favor that it naturally generates balancing against our interests within the region and depresses the desires of other Core powers to come into the region on our side (why bulk up the already dominant hand whose recent behavior and choices makes you more nervous about your nation's ability to access the region's energy in a secure fashion over coming years?). It also naturally incentivizes Iran's reach for the bomb and Iran's and Syria's active support of violence inside Iraq, not to mention both nations' use of proxy war against Israel.
So we're effectively being painted into a corner here: defend Israel at all costs against all comers and--by doing so--resurrect and recast in concrete all the negative regional security dynamics (not to mention the realist strategy of supporting dictators) that got us Al Qaeda and 9/11 in the first place (thus totally negating all sacrifice rendered to date in pursuit of the Big Bang) or secure what we can for now on the Big Bang (Iraq) and build the multilateral security dialogue that puts everything on the table and gets us back to a soft-kill connectivity strategy on Syria and Iran and puts us back in the business of pushing economic connectivity between the region and the outside world.
"Staying the course" or reverting back to old patterns of behavior vis-a-vis Israel will put America squarely in the camp of accepting the region's current lack of economic connectivity with the outside world and encouraging the Salafi jihadist movement to seek to depress that minimal connectivity even further with regime destabilizing terrorism.
Whether Bush recognizes this or not (and I suspect he does not), he himself is becoming the biggest threat to the Big Bang strategy by allowing an irrational defense of Israel's security desires to again resurface (something his father and Baker never did).
When Israel hunkers down and refuses to engage regionally, the terrorism simply comes to it, and the same will happen to a United States that apes this misguided approach.
ARTICLE: The world is better off thanks to George Bush, By Larry Stirling, San Diego Daily Transcript, Wednesday, November 15, 2006Always interesting to see my work employed with such a partisan tone, but Stirling makes his case for Reagan's global legacy as well as anyone.
As much as I disliked Reagan while I spent his entire administration(s) in college, I've come to realize as I've gotten older that it's a terrible thing--as well as a terrible mistake--to bet against optimism, progress or America. Reagan represented all those things well, and that means something historically.
After Deng in China, and Nixon in the U.S., he is arguably the next most important and influential actor on the global stage in the second half of the 20th century.
Thanks to Dan Hare for sending this in.
Japanese.
You've got your Pokemon, your Inuyasha, your Speed Racer, your DragonBall Z, your Full Metal Alchemist, your Naruto ... The list is endless.
DATELINE: Epcot, 15 November 2006
Xmas shopping!
Want to see what Tom looks like as a Martian? First shot I've seen of him with the new glasses. Check out