The 9/11 Commission Report: a national security self-help guide

A Failure of Imagination

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 23 July 2004

After all the previews and leaks, to actually get the report is naturally a bit anti-climatic. But it's more disappointing than that, in my mind, because it's basically a self-help guide that seems to suggest that what's really broken in this global war on terrorism is the United States itself—or specifically the national intelligence community. I have to admit, this judgment is so easy to make, so pat in content, and so unimportant over the long haul that I cannot consider the commission to be anything less than irrelevant to the real tasks at hand:

1. Understanding the world for what it is in this era of globalization

2. Understanding the threat of terror as a function of that world and the spread of the global economy and all the influences it inflicts upon traditional societies

3. Enunciating a genuinely coherent U.S. grand strategy to deal with that world in a way that terror is reduced as a threat over time—i.e., making globalization truly global in a fair and just manner

4. Reshaping our national defense establishment to meet that challenge—i.e., the bifurcation of the force into a warfighting Leviathan force and a peacewaging Sys Admin force

5. And then letting the Intelligence Community, as well as the Congressional oversight community, reshape themselves in order to both serve and communicate with that increasingly bifurcated military force structure.

In their infinite wisdom, the Commission jumps right to #5 and pretty much ignores the rest—save for a facile swipe at a "grand strategy" of winning hearts and minds among terrorists and would-be terrorists—you know, the usual vague stuff about getting at the "root of the problem."

But guess what? Altering the Intelligence Community's organizational charts won't do that. At best we may understand the world a bit better only to find the IC at greater odds with the Pentagon regarding what needs to be done about it. We are not going to generate a new grand strategy from the IC up (if you want to see how bad such strategies can be, read Anonymous or Richard Clarke), and it sure as hell won't be centered on winning the hearts and minds of would-be terrorists—much less killing them in increasingly clever ways. This is symptom-treating at its worst, but we reach for it because—frankly—it’s the easiest approach for Congress to take: write a bill forcing a certain amount of organizational change and then designate some counter-terrorist center (or better yet, designate a whole slew of them and spread them around numerous congressional districts) and be done with it.

This is America as self-help obsessed: in the end, we decide it was really all our fault, or "a failure of imagination."

Geez! That's a line going all the way back (at least) to the investigations over the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire. Couldn't the Commission at least come up with a new line? Or was that—in itself—a failure of imagination (or more prosaically, a failure of composition).

For now, this whole Commission process reads like a bad Allen Drury novel. I'm just waiting for some blackmailed homosexual to step forward and admit 9/11 happened simply because he mistakenly got into bed with an al Qaeda operative and then gave him all the key-codes lest he be forced out of his closet.

Meanwhile, the process of reorganizing the Intelligence Community will consume gajillions of congressional committee hours and kill millions of trees, but none of it will move us closer to an actionable grand strategy (nor an appropriate national defense establishment to carry it out) that really deals with the world for what it is and not America for what we fear it isn't—meaning safe and secure from the next 9/11.

We will never be safe and secure from the next 9/11, because we will never be safe from "them" until all of "they" are brought inside the "us." When there is no more Non-Integrating Gap, there will only be a stable Functioning Core that is universal, and war as we know it will essentially end for all time.

Yes, there will always be individuals and groups railing against the system, but they will be forced to wage their individual-level wars within a system that is truly all-encompassing, giving up their eternal dream of hijacking some chunk of humanity and taking it permanently off-line from the corrupt, capitalist world system (and here we will really locate Fukuyama's "end of history" and the beginning of the joy that only a Gene Roddenberry might have imagined).

Our increased ability to track incoming terrorists strikes is pretty meaningless against the larger strategic backdrop of the real task at hand: truly connecting the Middle East to the global economy in a broadband fashion faster than the bin Ladens and Zarqawis of that world can disconnect it, or keep it all limited to just oil.

But that is not the easy or even acceptable solution in this self-help obsessed society that is America, so we will focus on what we know and love best—ourselves. We'll rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic that is the Intelligence Community, whose main problem isn't its org chart but its obsessive secrecy. We'll try to make ourselves more attractive to others, hoping that if we send them happy thoughts, their hearts and minds will be won. We'll pretend that somehow fixing the U.S. Government alone will alter the overarching reality of globalization's aggressive onslaught on traditional cultures all over the Gap ("No no no! It's really all about how you perceive us and our policies! Love me! Love me! Love me!").

I've been watching Ken Burns' "Civil War" on DVD as I exercise on the treadmill late at night, after the kids go to bed. Whenever I watch anything on the Civil War, it reminds me that, in many ways, it marked the beginning of the world we now live in. The first great wave of Globalization began soon after its conclusion, and the nature of that war presaged the two world wars that would later be fought around the planet, but primarily within Europe as civil wars themselves.

When I watch the documentary series, I see a Core-North imposing its will and integration upon a Gap-South that prefers to continue with its exclusionary rule sets by which some rule and others are ruled. I see a Core-North with all its frightening mixing of the races and cultures and industries and ideologies bearing down on the bucolic South that seems so pristine in its oneness—albeit bought at the price of slavery. I see southern insurgents fighting. Why? As Shelby Foote puts it (I paraphrase here), "Because you Northerners insist on coming down here and changing our ways." I see the Gap-South's romanticism of the land and its rejection of modernity and change and industrialization. I see the Core-North's ruthlessness as an invading force decried and yet embraced as the necessary "remedy." I see a war that begins as one to save the Union swiftly becoming one to rid the Union of the terrible scourge of slavery—the ultimate in disconnectedness.

And I see many things that resonate in this current struggle: the references to good and evil, the references to "our God" versus "their god," the messianic spirit, the anti-war sentiments, the civil wars that rage on "quietly" inside the Gap/Islam itself, the charges of imperialism and "outsiders" forcing change against "our will," a president who cannot possibly win reelection because he's so badly mishandled this war, and a military suffering "unacceptable losses" and yet still attracting idealistic recruits without any great effort.

Oh, and I see Colin Powell as George McClellan.

I have said many times before that we can see the road ahead simply by looking within ourselves and remembering our past. The vibe I pick up from the Commission's report is that typical sort of can-do Americanism that focuses on "fixing the problem" by rejiggering the system—our system. In reality, the system we must seek to fix is not our own, but the world's.

The real task ahead, if we hope to win a global war on terrorism, is to generate the understanding across the Core as a whole of how we shrink the Gap. That is a huge, multifaceted problem that requires a variety of approaches. Within the security realm, it requires first and foremost a Core-wide A-to-Z rule set on processing politically-bankrupt regimes within the Gap. If we don't deal with that problem set, progress will not be had in the GWOT. We will never generate progress until the Pentagon transforms transformation from its past focus on the front-half, warfighting Leviathan force to the back-half, peacewaging Sys Admin force. That progress will be had first and foremost inside two relatively obscure U.S. military commands: Joint Forces Command in Norfolk VA and Special Operations Command in Tampa FL. As this force is imagined and set in motion in these two laboratories of transformation, it must be put to test by Central Command, also located in Tampa FL. As the success of that restructured force points to new understanding of warfare and the need for new weapons, platforms, and organizational structures, the process of change will permeate the Pentagon itself. As that happens, the Intelligence Community and the Hill will be force to remake themselves in order to support and interact with that changing military. And as that entire process evolves, we will see the White House, the State Department, and the rest of the U.S. Government begin to imagine what it will take to generate the global A-to-Z rule set on processing politically-bankrupt states within the Gap.

The 9/11 Commission is a complete sidelight to this entire process. You will not read anything of importance there regarding this primary task of U.S. national security in the 21st Century. But, as Charles Hill writes in today's Wall Street Journal ("Commissionism," 23 July, p. A12), "the demand for near-perfect certainty is a deeply entrenched delusion," so expect much sturm und drang about this report in coming months. It will, just as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security itself, constitute great sound and fury that in the end will signify almost nothing.

What we are witnessing in this process is one giant, preemptive ass-covering exercise by politicians on both sides of the aisle. All these officials really want you to know is that "next time" it won't be "my fault" because "I told you so."

At this point, if you're read PNM, you gotta be tempted to accuse me of talking out of both sides of my mouth. After all, my three-pronged strategy begins with making the Core resilient in the face of, and resistance to the effects of, 9/11-like System Perturbations. Isn't that all the 9/11 Commission trying to do?

Perfectly reasonable comeback, say I.

No, I don't think it's wrong in and of itself to recommend what the Commission is recommending. I don't think it will harm anything, but neither do I think it will fix much of anything. My real fear is that this grand commission's vision becomes a substitute for further thinking, as in, "Oh yeah, we have a commission and they fixed all that! You know, something about some 'czar' and then winning hearts and minds, or something like that."

Because the Commission stuck its nose into the Iraq War question (links between Saddam and al Qaeda?), and because they've waxed vaguely about a "grand strategy" in the GWOT, I'm afraid that too many people will come to view what should be our real grand strategy through the soda-straw of these awfully narrow recommendations. A GWOT does not come anywhere near a grand strategy, because a grand strategy cannot revolve around some definition of the enemy, but must revolve around some definition of a global future worth creating. Substituting al Qaeda for the near-peer competitor or the old Soviet threat isn’t the answer; understanding the world in all its complexity is. Al Qaeda and the current situation in the Middle East simply defines the current expression of resistance to the spread of globalization. Fixating on that resistance will make us guilty of waging war solely within the context of war and not within the context of everything else. That sort of soda-straw perspective gets you the fantastically narrow answers of a Richard Clarke, an Anonymous, and this Commission, which I might sum up as kill them better, abandon our bad policies in the Middle East, and give me a g.d. intell czar!

None of those approaches will move us in the direction of the strategic goals we seek in the mid- (connecting the Middle East to the world) and long-terms (making globalization truly global). In fact, they are more than likely to be counterproductive to those ends if they constitute the bulk of our approach. In short, these are Gap-containment strategies, not Gap-shrinkage strategies.

They all disappoint me as failures not only of imagination but of empathy. At their roots, they are all America-first strategies that speak to our needs and fears while ignoring those of the Gap's—which I sure as hell don't define in terms of the terrorists and dictators there but the everybody else, or the masses there.

What the Commission does is primarily play to our fears and our natural desires to recoil from the outside world. They want us to be afraid, very afraid of the big bad world outside, over there. And they want to make us safer by increasing our ability to see bad things coming at us earlier, when what our grand strategy really needs to be about is making good things go on over there sooner as opposed to later.

You may say that the Commission is only doing what they were supposed to do, so why am I picking on them so much? Again, if the Commission had stayed in their lane and hadn't taken on Iraq and the entire GWOT as their alleged purview, I would fear the negative impact of this report far less. But because their ambition has outpaced their vision, the capacity for this report to do more harm than good is real. It's real primarily because it speaks more to bad futures to be prevented rather than good ones to be created, and because its targeted audience is the American public when it should be the entire world.

9/11 wasn’t about America, so "fixing" 9/11 has to be about so much more than just America.

PNM's multiple horizontal scenarios continue to unfold

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 22 July 2004

I wrote PNM last August and September. In January I got the final proofs on the dust jacket cover and noticed that Putnam wanted to use my old geocities site as my web address. A long-time fan from the IT sector, Critt Jarvis, says I gotta get a better site and helps me set up this one, cleverly blackmailing me into making him my webmaster. He convinces me I need to write a weblog to accompany the site. So I start one, with Critt's help, in late March. The blog becomes its own presence, and that gets me the last 24 hours:

· Journalist Mark Thompson of Time calls and asks for a quick interview regarding the findings of the 9/11 Commission. He knows I am not in favor of a cabinet-level intell czar. How did he know that? He reads the blog, after he read the book, which he really liked.

· Last night I get an email from Li Haidong, associate professor in the Institute of International Studies in China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. He's just finished the book and has been utilizing my "excellent" website for an article he's writing about my ideas for his institute's journal. So we go back and forth about Wilsonism and how that differs from what I'm talking about.

· This morning I spend an hour on the phone with Hiroyuki Akita, Chief Correspondent of Nikkei Newspaper in Washington DC. Nikkei is the Dow Jones of Tokyo, and the paper is known in Japan as Japan Economic Journal, or Nihon Keizai Shimbun. It is the Wall Street Journal of Japan. Akita says he has become my "student" via the book and the blog, and would like to establish a long-term relationship with me for stories about how defense and national security issues in the U.S. are being transformed. His big interest is the current negotiations between the U.S. and Japan over proposed troop withdrawals there. He is amazed I am willing to go on the record. I say, it's all in the blog anyway, so what's to hide?

· Later in the afternoon I send an email to Yu Keping, Director of both the China Center for Comparative Politics & Economics (CCCPE) and Beijing University's Center for Chinese Government Innovations. Beijing University Press is publishing PNM in China. As my wife and I got our firm travel dates today regarding our adoption trip, I now know on which days Prof. Yu can schedule me at BU for a series of meetings and discussions with Chinese scholars and other officials regarding the ideas in the book and the blog. My posts are available in Mandarin via a Taiwanese website that translates all my posts involving Asia.

A year ago today I was wandering around my house, unable to sleep, eat or speak after a substantial throat surgery. In a daze from the pain killers, I knew only that my agent had just successfully landed me a book deal with G.P. Putnam's Sons. As I contemplated the year ahead, I knew that the Putnam deal was a vertical scenario that would alter my life and generate a host of horizontal scenarios whose myriad of pathways I could only dimly imagine from that vantage point.

As my wife Vonne said at the time: "See, I told you it would be a good idea to finally write a book. A year from now, who knows where this could all lead?"

Indeed.

Time to book some airline tickets!

Today's catch:

Kidnappings: a tool of choice in the Middle East

"Iraqi Insurgents Report Grabbing 6 More Hostages: Beheadings Threatened; Kidnappings Come After Philippines Yielded to an Earlier Seizure," by Ian Fisher, New York Times, 22 July, p. A1.

"For Many Iraqis, A New Daily Fear: Wave of Kidnapping; As Wealthy Pay for Guards, Gangs Target Middle Class; 'It's Only About Money,'" by Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, 22 July, p. A1.

"Head of Gaza Police Kidnapped By Gunmen and Paraded in Streets: Chief Accused of Corruption as Palestinian Fissure Grows," by John Ward Anderson, Washington Post, 17 July, p. A12.

Osama's worse nightmare: American Muslim women with attitude

"Muslim Women Seeking a Place in the Mosque: More Are Challenging Segregated Roles in American Services," by Laurie Goodstein, NYT, 22 July, p. A1.

"Woman's Mosque Protest Brings Furor in the U.S.: Challenging rules and traditions, and paying a price," by Laurie Goodstein, NYT, 22 July, p. A16.

Henry Ford, meet Deng Xiaoping

"Carmakers Profiting From Loans Not Cars: The Action Is In Asia," by Danny Hakim, NYT, 22 July, p. C1.

"China's Buick Infatuation: The Stodgy American Auto Is a Prerevolutionary Icon For Booming Middle Class," by Peter Wonacott, WSJ, 22 July, p. B1.

The life of the party in China: how wealth gets spread

"China's 'It Couple' Builds Sleek Towers And a High Profile: Yuppie Pair Becomes Darling Of the Changing Media; Who Wore What at Party," by Kathy Chen, WSJ, 22 July, p. A1.

"Japan Almost Doubles Forecast for Economic Growth," by Todd Zaun, NYT, 22 July, p. W1.

Kidnappings: a tool of choice in the Middle East

"Iraqi Insurgents Report Grabbing 6 More Hostages: Beheadings Threatened; Kidnappings Come After Philippines Yielded to an Earlier Seizure," by Ian Fisher, New York Times, 22 July, p. A1.

"For Many Iraqis, A New Daily Fear: Wave of Kidnapping; As Wealthy Pay for Guards, Gangs Target Middle Class; 'It's Only About Money,'" by Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, 22 July, p. A1.

"Head of Gaza Police Kidnapped By Gunmen and Paraded in Streets: Chief Accused of Corruption as Palestinian Fissure Grows," by John Ward Anderson, Washington Post, 17 July, p. A12.

No surprise what happens after Philippines so readily gives in to terrorists' demands regarding their one Filipino driver held hostage: six new truck drivers are immediately kidnapped. President Arroyo of the Philippines said she did what she did because every life is sacred. What she meant to say was, "My political career is sacred, to hell with the lives of anybody else who's not Filipino and dies as a result of my act."

The six drivers include 3 Indians, 2 Kenyans and an Egyptian. None of these three countries have troops in Iraq, so the terrorists are demanding that the companies that employ these six all leave Iraq:

"We have warned all the countries, companies, businessmen and truck drivers that those who deal with American cowboy occupiers will be targeted by the fires of the mujahedeen," read a statement given to The Associated Press. "Here you are once again transporting good, weapons and military equipment that backs the United States Army."

Our military and the Pentagon can dress this thing up as much as they want using the buzz phrase "asymmetrical warfare," but the real point of the matter is that we have failed to date in making the peacekeeping or nation-building phase work. The military calls that period following conflict "phase IV," but after the occupations of the past decade it's more like "Phase 0-for . . . " as our batting average in the back half of our recent military interventions is basically .000.

Right now too many lunatics are running the asylum called Iraq, so many in fact that it's not just Westerners who are becoming regular victims of kidnappings, but ordinary Iraqis themselves. After the looting subsided last summer because there was nothing left to steal, criminal gangs inside Iraq simply turned to an age-old form of making money in the region: kidnapping rich people for ransom. After the rich caught on and starting defending themselves, the gangs started targeting the middle class. Pretty soon the whole place starts resembling Colombia it's so bad.

When kidnapping and ransom become a national growth industry, you're probably looking at a completely lawless Gap country or a Seam State where disparities of wealth are great as development kicks in unevenly.

Then again, sometimes you get a real man-bites-dog story like when pissed-off gunmen in the Gaza strip kidnapped the head of the Palestinian Authority's police force as a protest of his alleged embezzlement of $22 million from the PA. He was paraded in the streets strictly for show and then let go:

"We gave three years to the Palestinian Authority to carry out reforms. We waited a long time. But they didn't do anything. We are doing this in our way," Abu Iyad, who was identified as a spokesman for the Jenin Martyrs Brigades, said on al-Jazeera satellite television. "Ghazi Jabali [the police chief] was kidnapped to hold him accountable for his mistakes against our people."

It's enough to almost make you happy we have Senate investigations instead, but that's life in too much of the Gap.

Osama's worse nightmare: American Muslim women with attitude

"Muslim Women Seeking a Place in the Mosque: More Are Challenging Segregated Roles in American Services," by Laurie Goodstein, New York Times, 22 July, p. A1.

"Woman's Mosque Protest Brings Furor in the U.S.: Challenging rules and traditions, and paying a price," by Laurie Goodstein, New York Times, 22 July, p. A16.

Interesting pair of stories about Muslim women inside American mosques chaffing at the traditional restrictions that require them to worship alone and too often play spectators to an all-male show of faith:

Another group of women led by a social worker in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is about to introduce a guide to making mosques more "sister friendly," proposing such measures as creating prayer space that does not exclude women, allowing women access to lectures, bulletin boards and donation boxes, and providing child care during mosque events.

Though they include college students and grandmothers, they represent a new generation of Muslim women raised and educated in North America. They include immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere, as well as African-American and Anglo converts to the faith. Some of the younger women in their 20's and 30's, and their male supporters, identify themselves as "progressive Muslims"—a loose but growing network of activists and writers linked by books, Web sites and listservs.

As one lady put it: "This is part of the war within Islam for how it's defined in the world. Since 9/11, I've seen that if we don't assert ourselves, we're relinquishing our religion to be defined by those who speak the loudest and act the toughest."

Osama bin Laden wanted purposely to lay a system perturbation on the West with 9/11, one that would throw all our rule sets into flux. He got his wish alright, and in the end, he will regret it in more ways than he can count.

Henry Ford, meet Deng Xiaoping

"Carmakers Profiting From Loans Not Cars: The Action Is In Asia," by Danny Hakim, New York Times, 22 July, p. C1.

"China's Buick Infatuation: The Stodgy American Auto Is a Prerevolutionary Icon For Booming Middle Class," by Peter Wonacott, Wall Street Journal, 22 July, p. B1.

U.S. carmakers make more money off loans than actually selling cars, a trick they taught the Japanese automakers. Not surprisingly, where Detroit is making the most money on loans right now in terms of annual percentage growth is in Asia, where lo and behold, their products seem to appeal just fine to the rising middle class in China.

So add Detroit automakers to the list of multinational corporations whose boats are being lifted by the rising tide that is China.

But don't tell Michael Moore there might be more jobs for autoworkers in Michigan if only China is able to keep accessing Persian Gulf oil at reasonable rates because it would spoil his conspiratorial view of world history.

The life of the party in China: how wealth gets spread

"China's 'It Couple' Builds Sleek Towers And a High Profile: Yuppie Pair Becomes Darling Of the Changing Media; Who Wore What at Party," by Kathy Chen, Wall Street Journal, 22 July, p. A1.

"Japan Almost Doubles Forecast for Economic Growth," by Todd Zaun, New York Times, 22 July, p. W1.

China's "It Couple" are a pair of construction tycoons (she in her late 30's and he is his early 40's) who seem to enjoy the limelight like nobody since Donald and Ivana Trump were a pair. That's not as surprising as the fact that they've become real favorites of the masses. As one fan put it: "China has so many people with money. Why do we want to follow them? They don't just have money; they have taste."

Well, that immediately pushes Ms Zhang Xin and Mr. Pan Shiyi beyond the realm of the Donald and Ivana. In some ways, what this couple have become is more like a Martha Stewart of the middle class. As Ms. Zhang declares: "We sort of started the middle-class consciousness of lifestyle. We pay a lot of attention to decorating details."

You may laugh at such things, as though the poor, formerly socialist Chinese are pathetically aping American consumer values, but the growth of consumerism in China is more than an economic and social phenomenon, it signals a much greater potential for long-term stability both within China and around the world. A stable middle class in China bodes well for political reforms there over time, and a huge consumer class in China generates an extra pillar of stability for the global economy that has—for far too long—relied almost solely on the American consumer during hard times.

Already, China's growing consumer society is lifting Japan out of its decade-long recession. As the Times notes, most economists "expect Japan's expansion to decelerate as corporate investment slows and China's torrid economic growth continues to cool. Japan's economy is closely tied to China's, and therefore vulnerable to any slowdown there."

Some kids escape the Gap, others do not

"Close Encounters With a Home Barely Known: Children adopted abroad ask, Which land is my land? Both, the furnishings say," by Jill Brooke, New York Times, 22 July, p. D1.

"Bush Speech On Human Trafficking Target Castro: Remarks at Official Event Are Tailored for Cuban Exiles in Florida and Religious Conservatives," by Dana Milbank, Washington Post 17 July, p. A2.

The Times article is a charmer, suggesting a subtle but profound influence in America from all those kids adopted from overseas in recent years, the biggest number coming from—of course—China. The article appears in the "House & Home" section, not one I usually blog, and details how home furnishings inside households featuring children adopted from abroad are naturally tilted in the direction of the culture from which that child emerged as parents seek to respect those cultural bonds, not sever them whole.

Already, I could walk you past a host of Asian or specifically Chinese items in our house that have appeared in the months since we started the adoption process—a lamp here, a painting there. I just hung some painted tiles last night in my daughter's room, where our Vonne Mei Ling will eventually sleep once she graduates out of mom and dad's room.

I have described our adoption of Vonne Mei Ling as part of my strategy of shrinking the Gap "one child at a time." Vonne Mei hails from one of China's poorer rural areas, which constitute China's internal Non-Integrating Gap, and thanks to the amazing system that is China's orphanages and international adoption agency, Vonne Mei will escape that Gap in a rule-structured process that respects her needs and interests.

Contrast this fate to those suffered by numerous kids throughout the Gap: that of virtual slavery to sex traffickers. Who are the biggest offenders in this regard according to the U.S. State Department? Cuba, North Korea, Burma, Sudan, Venezeula—all Gap states with bad, "Big Man" leaders.

Add that crying need to the very long list of reasons of why the Core needs an A-to-Z rule set on how to process politically-bankrupt states.

The real sons of PNM

A Neat Trio of Posts

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 21 July 2004

The universe seems to be collapsing in on our family schedule as the departure date looms ever larger for our trip to China. I feel like I should be taking the kids to the beach every night between now and early August, because once we are wheels up, we won't see Second Beach until Labor Day—when actually the water is at its warmest up here.

Struggling with my allergies through this long dry spell in Rhode Island (my Monday in Manhattan was a nice respite), I glance foggily toward Beijing and then at my rapidly-filling fall calendar. If I'm not careful, I'm going to be booked for speeches every day from Labor Day through Christmas. I'm going to have to make myself a giant wall calendar so I can keep the dates straight. Staring into my Blackberry just isn't doing it any more.

As I glance over the rest of 2004's calendar, I'm more and more glad I didn't commit myself to quickly dashing off a sequel to PNM, or what I have dubbed in past posts as the "Son of PNM." Between all the speeches (meaning travel) and my editor Mark Warren's growing enthusiasm for turning my decade-old diary of our family's struggle with our firstborn's cancer (The Emily Updates), plus a few other irons in the fire, PLUS a growing advisory relationship with both CENTCOM and SOCOM . . . and I'm feeling ready to pass out simply in anticipation.

What a minute! That would be the allergies talking again. Time to hit the waves and wash off the pollen!

But the real reason why I'm glad I'm not rushing into "Son of PNM" is that I feel like there are plenty of follow-on analysts with their own analysis of PNM that are worthy, ready and engaging. In short, I myself am still learning how to read PNM for all that it's worth.

That may seem like an odd statement for an author to make, but it's been a common theme of my work throughout my career: I am always being told that I'm writing about so much more than I realize. Now, either that makes me a true visionary, or I've been sadly miscast in my own narrative (Don't you wish sometimes they got somebody more talented to play your role in the movie? You know, somebody who really "gets" the role better than you do?).

That reminds me of when my wife said that if they ever made an audio version of my book, we'd have to find somebody really good to read it. I said, "What about me?" And she replied, "I really don't think you could pull off the character."

I almost asked her about a potential porn film based on the book, but then I decided to let that one slide . . ..

Anyway, my foggy brain doesn't really have much to say today, so I've decided to turn today's blogging over to a trio of bloggers who've spent a lot of time and thought on PNM, extending the analysis further.

My short comments follow each post:

Dean Barnett (SoxBlog)

Mark, the ZenPundit

T.M. Lutas, who goes by Flit(tm)

SoxBlog: AL QAEDA VS. PARIS HILTON

1st of 3 blogs which may be The real sons of PNM: A neat trio of posts

Dean Barnett - SoxBlog @ http://dbsoxblog.blogspot.com/#109037279081302892

21 July 2004

AL QAEDA VS. PARIS HILTON

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a review of Thomas Barnett’s brilliant “The Pentagon’s New Map.” As you might recall, PNM splits the world into two different parts. One is the Core which consists of all the countries that you might purchase a good from or take a vacation in. The other is the Gap which consists of countries that produce pretty much no goods for purchasing and that you wouldn’t visit unless you were a contestant on “Fear Factor.” PNM is all about the need, the urgent need, to integrate gap countries into the core and offers itself as something of a how-to manual for the task.

While it's highly unlikely that anyone at Al Qaeda has read PNM (although we're making progress, Kabul has yet to land a Borders), I do think that on some level Al Qaeda senses the Core/Gap dichotomy. And I think they’re aware that even though PNM has yet to officially or publicly become the government’s playbook, America is steadily and inexorably entering the Gap both with our military (Iraq, Afghanistan) and with our soft power (just about everywhere). For Al Qaeda, America’s shrinking of the Gap is a huge problem. Indeed, America’s growing prominence in the Gap threatens to move Al Qaeda’s goals completely out of reach.

To put it simply, Al Qaeda needs the Gap to remain the Gap. It’s not much of an overstatement to say that Wahabbism wants to take the Islamic world back to the 8th century and have the literal dictates of Islam be the law of the land. Obviously if the Arab world becomes economically and culturally westernized, that will be impossible. If a free market of ideas develops in that part of the world, the Fundamentalists don’t have a chance.

To be culturally balanced, Islam isn’t the only religion that has problems with some adherents that desperately want to turn back the clock. The experience of Israel is instructive in this regard. Since its birth, Israel has struggled with an Orthodox population that thinks strict adherence to all aspects of ancient Jewish law should be a defining characteristic of the Jewish state.

The Israeli Orthodox know that the modern western style world is inimical to the goal of practicing religion with 3rd Century B.C. style rigor. They understand that if free to choose, most people will opt for 21st century accoutrements over non-stop prayer and devotion. To take one example from the country’s early days, they knew that if driving on the Sabbath was permitted, eventually driving on the Sabbath would be common. They confronted one of the oldest problems known to man: How do you keep the boy on the farm after he’s seen Paris?

In spite of a half century of concessions to its Orthodox population, Israel today is and always has been a relatively normal Western style state. There’s been a free market of ideas and most Israelis follow an American type model. In other words, in spite of the occasional symbolic victories, the Israeli Orthodox have lost.

Perhaps ironically, the Wahabbis face a similar set of problems. Whether our government follows the dictates of PNM or not, America is coming into the Gap in a big way. Even if our military doesn’t set foot on Arab sand, Coca-Cola will and Microsoft will and a score of others will as well. I’m pretty sure that’s what the whole “soft power” concept is about. In spite of our government’s absence of any formal plan, America is helping develop a free market of ideas in that part of the world. What a disaster for the Wahabbis the internet promises to be! The internet will make keeping the boy on the farm after he’s seen Paris look easy compared to keeping the potential Jihadi in the madras after he’s seen Paris Hilton.

That’s why Al Qaeda feels it has to destroy the United States. Even if our government cowers as a Kerry led government might, our culture will be unstoppable. If there’s a buck to be made in that part of the world, American companies will make the trip. And even if they don’t, how will Al Qaeda prevent Western culture from entering via the internet?

To do that, they’ll have to somehow stop the dissemination of American culture. That’s not going to happen if America is still standing. And that’s why, from Al Qaeda’s perspective, war is their only choice.

As long as we’re going to be free, there will be no negotiated peace with this foe. They sense us coming into the gap. Even if to date we’re not doing it by deliberate design, our advancement is accelerating. Freedom, as ever, is on the march. In a free market of ideas, Wahabbism doesn’t have a chance. This they know.

So here’s the struggle—we’re racing to fill the Gap, they’re racing to destroy us before we do.

COMMENTARY: This is good stuff, by my measure, and it is pointing in the same direction events have been leading me in recent weeks (i.e., recent interactions with Special Operations Command and Central Command). By that I mean I've been instinctively peddling a series of competing timelines whenever I'm sitting down with decision-makers and talking about the Middle East. They are summed up as follows:

1. Globalization timeline in terms of penetrating the Middle East
2. Al Qaeda timeline in terms of hijacking the Middle East
3. U.S. timeline on transforming the Middle East, which speeds up #1
4. Al Qaeda timeline in terms of "waiting out" the oil economy
5. Israel timeline on wall versus Palestinian demographics
6. Iran timeline on WMD versus the bottom-up counterrevolution
7. Saudi timeline on reform versus birds coming home to roost
8. Iraq settling-down timeline versus rising Shiite unrest across region
9. Developing Asia oil and gas demand timeline
10. Global peaking-of-oil-demand timeline
11. Timeline on next generation cars
12. Timeline on where the fundamentalists make their next stand (post-Middle East)
13. Russia timeline on growing role in Middle East
14. India timeline on growing role in Middle East
15. China timeline on growing role in Middle East
16. And so on and so on

Not all of these are as important as others, but you get a sense of the potential scenario dynamics for what we loosely call this Global War on Terrorism. In PNM, I tried to bundle up the whole mess based on two questions (Whither Iraq? Whither Big Bang?) to get the four regional scenarios I laid out there (Black Hawk Down—the Series, Arab Yugoslavia, New Berlin Wall, Persia Engulfed). What Dean does here nicely is highlight one of the key scenario dynamics at work across the entire process.

Next up is Mark the ZenPundit with his take on the PNM's take on China.

ZenPundit: The Globalization Bull in the China Shop

2nd of 3 blogs which may be The real sons of PNM: A neat trio of posts

Mark - ZenPundit @ http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2004/07/globalization-bull-in-china-shop.html

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

THE GLOBALIZATION BULL IN THE CHINA SHOP: PROMISE AND PERIL IN THE PNM STRATEGY

Even before Deng Xiaoping defeated his hard-line Maoist opponents in the late 1970’s to set Beijing on " the capitalist road," China’s potentially bright future has been the topic of investors and statesmen. Richard Nixon foresaw China as the superpower of the 21st century. So did Brooks Adams more than a century ago. So when academics and economists are awed this year by China’s stunning, near 9% GDP growth rate, it appears the long-predicted arrival of China may be finally coming to pass.

Since we are discussing The Pentagon’s New Map it’s of no surprise that China is a critical country in Dr. Barnett’s strategy (which I discussed earlier). Rivaled only by India, China would be the most important part of the "New Core" of states that decided to join the "Old Core" by adopting their rules and engaging with the world instead of isolating themselves from it. Barnett however, quickly identifies the crux of the problem with China's progress ( p. 241):

"Of that New Core group, China is the most worrisome, while India is the most promising … China is most worrisome because the hardest rule-set still needs to be changed—the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party."

This is an aspect that clearly worries the United States government as well. Dr. Barnett has ample descriptions in his book of Pentagon war planners and defense intellectuals envisioning China in a worst-case scenario war for dominance of East Asia. To focus on military might alone—where the increasingly professional PLA is really still not all that impressive next to, say, the IDF much less the U.S. Navy—is a mistake that Dr. Barnett does not make. He's looking at the global parameters of power that an economic surplus is giving—and demanding of—China for the first time since the fall of the Q'ing dynasty:

"Paul Krugman likes to point out that China's central bank is one of the main purchasers of Treasury bills in the world, so—in effect—they finance our trade deficit." (p. 311)

and:

"China has to double its energy consumption in a generation if all that growth it is planning is going to occur. we know where the Chinese have to go for the energy: Russia, Central Asia and the Gulf. That's a lot of new friends to make and one significant past enemy to romance."(p.230)

Overall, Dr. Barnett is betting that the growing complexity of connectivity's interactions as China rewrites its rule sets to accept "the four flows" of globalization is the ultimate hedge against conflict with China, or China lapsing into the disorder that plagues the Gap states.

[ZenPundit] MY COMMENTS:

First, I am not a Sinologist by training and my knowledge of Chinese history lags considerably behind my understanding of say American diplomatic history, Soviet history and a few other topics. On the other hand, the last part of what I'm going to state about China here applies analytically to most societies that would have to make the transition to the "New Core."

While China's current growth rates are amazing we have to keep a few things in mind and try to see some of this PNM scenario through Chinese rather than western eyes.

First, China's cultural values formed during the warring states period and that China was twice unified and given stable government only by the most ruthless application of totalitarian rule. First by the Emperor Shih Huang-ti who followed the tenets of Han Fei-tzu 's Legalist-Realist school and secondly by the equally indomitable Mao Zedong, with his own particular version of Marxism-Leninism. In between the two despots dynasties rose and fell and generally tried to tie together a continent-sized nation with a natural centrifugal tendency to split into unrelated regional economies and eventually warlordism, civil war and dynastic collapse. In short, China's rulers do not take the unity of their country for granted the way the French or the British or post-bellum Americans do. Chinese leaders are crazed about Taiwan because in their minds if Taiwan is ever recognized by the world as an independent state than so can Tibet...and Xinjiang…and perhaps the rich coastal provinces might feel better off without their inland cousins. An authoritarian leadership of already shaky political legitimacy may choose the economically suicidal course if they believe that Taiwan's independence will bring their regime down regardless.

Secondly, in assessing China's might keep in mind the reality of per capita facts. As Brad DeLong conveniently noted the other day hundreds of millions of Chinese remain extremely poor, living on less than a dollar a day. Hundreds of millions more are better off than a generation ago but they still hover not terribly far above subsistence. These people are not, as most suppose, a danger to the regime. Peasants have starved for a millennia without ill political effect and these people are, fortunately, at least eating. What they represent instead is an enormous claim on the economic surplus that China is currently generating—a claim on roads, schools, hospitals, infrastructure, basic comforts—before providing "rich" urban Chinese with internet cafes, dance clubs, imported cars or more missile frigates for the Chinese Navy. These people need exceptionally robust economic growth for decades to see real improvement in living standards.

Thirdly, the inner circle of China's leadership have undergone an important transformation during the end of Deng Xiaoping's tenure as paramount leader. Unlike in the USSR where the Red Army was strictly subordinate to the CPSU, Mao's guerilla war left far greater cohesion between the PLA and the CCP. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping were bona fide military leaders. Zhu De and Lin Biao were also political leaders. PLA generals routinely sat in the Central Committee and higher party cadres did military work. Today, China's generals and politicians are distinct leadership classes with factional interests. The generals have become much more the military professionals and no one mistakes Jiang Zemin for a field marshal. To a certain extent, the politicians are appeasing the military elite while the latter are developing a far more narrow outlook.

Lastly, globalization brings with it to all societies a danger of raising up a countervailing power. For example, in one sense al Qaida's radicalism is merely the culmination of an ideological debate that has been going on within Islam since the Turks retreated from the gates of Vienna in 1689. But in a general sense bin Laden's violent answers only have traction among Muslims because globalization has created enough new "connections" to create economic and social upheaval in very traditional, formerly disconnected, Arab and Central Asian nations.

China's previous experience with opening up to the outside world is not a heartwarming tale. The Ming and Q'ing dynasties, like the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan, had "disconnected" from the world even as the European nations began explosive advances in science, wealth and technology. The world intruded anyway. Japan opted to reconnect via the Meiji Restoration and catch up to the West. China resisted and suffered not only external humiliation at the hands of the West, Russia and Japan but also two internal rebellions—the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxers. The former revolt, fired by half-understood western religious ideas, was warfare of a magnitude not exceeded in scale until the western front in 1914.

China's current rulers have chosen connection but the threat of countervailing power comes not from the still disconnected but from the already connected but discontented. Al Qaida and Hizb ut-Tahrir are not filled with illiterate fanatics but lawyers, engineers, doctors and businessmen who have chosen a radical political program for the goal of Islamist religious reaction. The Nazis appealed most to the lower middle class and unemployed intellectuals who had risen but feared to sink back into the ranks of the workers during the Depression. The Russian peasant who was most helped by Petr Stolypin's land reforms flocked not to support the Tsar but the Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1917. In our own history the Populists and Alliancemen who agitated for cooperative economics and against banks and monopolies in the 1880s were not workers but ex-yeomen turned tenant farmers, commercial farmers with mortgages and deflating prices.

If China's growth sags trouble will come not from the rural areas but from the tens of millions of educated, new middle-class Chinese who have had their expectations raised by cell phones, scooter bikes, refrigerators, internet access and discman players. They will not return to the countryside and nor will they abide a loss of status that Richard Hofstadter once identified as the root of paranoid politics.

That is the tightrope China will be walking for a long time to come.

COMMENTARY: Mark offers a nice rundown of several of the big pressures that China and its leadership are operating under as they seek to modernize and rejoin the world. You can say that China is experiencing several revolutions right now—all at once:

· Shift from rural to urban
· Shift from centrally-planned to market
· Shift from central power to regionalism and localism
· Shift from young society to old
· Shift from fairly immobile society to one that travels
· Shift from isolated nation to one that connects up with world at large
· Shift from overwhelming poor but egalitarian society to one that is far more developed and wealthy but also stratified
· And so on and so on.

You can't have a country undergo so many changes all at once (this is the real "great leap forward" for China) without a lot of tensions being revealed. I see the role of the U.S. and the rest of the Old Core (Japan, EU) in guiding China toward its mature expression of "great power" as the overriding task of the era—far more important than a global war on terrorism, which, quite frankly, is nothing more than dealing with the resistance to globalization's spread on the margins. That's why I keep saying, China's not the problem, it's the prize.

Last up is T.M. Lutas, or Flit(tm).

Flit(tm): Barnett's Implicit Villains

3rd of 3 blogs which may be The real sons of PNM: A neat trio of posts

T.M. Lutas - Flit(tm) @ http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/tmblog/archives/004646.html

July 21, 2004

Barnett's Implicit Villains

In The Pentagon's New Map something always bothered me about the disconnection of the Gap states. They are so weak that unanimous efforts by Core states could never be resisted. The Gap leadership that thrives on disconnection could never maintain that state alone. They had to have something helping them out. The Iraq sanctions regime and subsequent Coalition of the Willing invasion brings the dark secret out into the open. The disconnectors in the Gap have allies in the Core, allies that command power and respect in the highest diplomatic and economic councils.

No Gap country is entirely disconnected. After all, the Great Leader must have access to first class health care, toys and gee gaws that his own society cannot produce, and above all weapons to maintain his security against his own people and his neighbors. That requires trade and with it, connectivity.

But the connectivity threads must be kept spider web thin and must not be a path that just anyone can walk down. No, trade is done in barter, with huge bribes and outlandish commissions, or in unsavory items such as addictive drugs, banned weapons, and human flesh. The people who provide the connectivity must, as much as possible, be unsavory types that will show the worst of the outside world to those who they come in contact with, providing a justification for their country's isolation.

The power brokers who do the major deals and pocket so much money from these spider web connections also know that they are on an impressive gravy train that will continue as long as general connectivity does not come to that society. They must maintain their position in the Core and never actually admit that they are in favor of maintaining disconnectedness but they do and they are.

In Eastern Europe, when the wall came down, whoever had invested in the east bloc countries as the only western presence in their field were largely swept aside. The popular western cigarettes, the popular drinks, all of that market share swiftly disappeared in an avalanche of new competition offering better quality, lower prices, or even just variety.

The same dynamic will happen in every country that is pulled into the Core from the Gap. A certain class of politicians and traders will have their economic interests in the place devastated and they will be tempted to lobby against intervention, against reform, because they only see their short term interests and don't really care about the pathologies that spill out of the Gap.

Update: Iraq now points out how business interests that were highly invested in the old system are still causing mischief where they can.

COMMENTARY: That is a neat extension of the material that I had always wondered about how best to express, but never got around to in PNM. Hard to believe, but even at 150k, I was constantly fretting about how to get out of this G.D. paragraph without triggering another 2k in text! So the PNM's absurd ambition in trying to explain just about everything meant that even at this serious length, the book remains an outline of sorts. The "implicit villains" argument here is one I did not get to in the book, perhaps because I feared sounding too neo-Marxist and once you go down that road you can find yourself turning into Immanuel Wallerstein or worse. But I think T.M. nails the description on the head.

Now I'm waiting for the subsequent nails on the anti-globalization movement within the Core and those Gap-like ghettos that still exist within the Core. The former is what drives a lot of outright rejection of my arguments ("Barnett acts like making globalization safe for corporations to ruin the world is a good thing!"), but the latter is what gets me a lot of interesting emails from mayors, governors, and anyone who deals with inner cities, like one I just got from an academic who said PNM gave him a whole new perspective on the role of historic black colleges in "connecting" the African-American community to economic opportunity in this country.

All in all, a neat trio of posts.

Over the limit

Today’s catch from July 21, 2004

After you’ve read the neat trio of posts from Dean Barnett (SoxBlog), Mark (ZenPundit), and T.M. Lutas (Flit(tm)), here's today's catch:

Martin Wolf defines globalization as connectedness

"Too many countries? Let a splendid new book on globalization be the last for a while: it will not be bettered soon," The Economist, 20-26 July, p. 75.

Greece the Seam State, looking for a little U.S. "glue"

"Pressured by U.S., Greece Will Allow Troops at Olympics," by Raymond Bonner and Anthee Carassava, New York Times, 21 July, p. A1.

Germany's choice on rule-set reset: play down or play up

"East Germany Swallows Billions, and Still Stagnates," by Mark Landler, NYT, 21 July, p. A11.

Philippines to U.S.: "We only do windows!"

"Hostage Is Freed After Philippine Troops Are Withdrawn From Iraq," by James Glanz, NYT, 21 July, p. A12.

UN not ready to shut up or put up regarding Israel's wall

"Remove Wall, Israel Is Told By the U.N.," by Warren Hoge, NYT, 21 July, p. A10.

China backs off on SARS whistle-blower

"China Releases the SARS Whistle-Blower," by Joseph Kahn, NYT, 21 July, p. A6.

Iraq: the healing process ain't even begun on Saddam

"Iraqis Begin Confronting The Burdens of the Past: Millions Persecuted by Hussein May Seek Redress," by Doug Struck, Washington Post, 13 July, p. A11.

Africa: the inevitable final frontier in the GWOT

"Al Qaeda's Growing Sanctuary," by Douglas Farah and Richard Shultz, WP, 14 July, p. A19.

More evidence of advanced Brezhnevism in Iran

"Iranians Get the Last Laugh After Clerics Ban a Comedy," by Karl Vick, WP, 14 July, p. A12.

Another feather in the cap of Colin Powell's amazing career

"Powell Flies In the Face Of Tradition: Secretary Is Least Traveled In Years of State Records," by Glenn Kessler, WP, 14 July, p. A1.

Martin Wolf defines globalization as connectedness

"Too many countries? Let a splendid new book on globalization be the last for a while: it will not be bettered soon," The Economist, 20-26 July, p. 75.

Nice review of Wolf's well-received book, "Why Globalisation Works." Sent to me by my old mentor at the Center for Naval Analysis, stating that the following line was "pure Barnett":

The Sudans and Somalias, he argues, do bear witness to the limits to globalization—but only in the sense that globalization needs to go further. The poorest countries in the world stand mostly outside the global economic system. The challenge for development policy is to connect these countries to the rest of the world.

That does sound like my book, does it not?

Wolf's answer—unfortunately—is heavy on humanitarian aid with no serious treatment of security issues. While his book is a good one, no doubt, the idea that you can comprehensively define globalization in strictly economic terms is ignoring the "everything else" that is security.

In my mind, then, Wolf writes a great book on economic globalization but a very incomplete one on globalization as a whole.

Greece the Seam State, looking for a little U.S. "glue"

"Pressured by U.S., Greece Will Allow Troops at Olympics," by Raymond Bonner and Anthee Carassava, New York Times, 21 July, p. A1.

I know the U.S. flag in charge of overseeing U.S. military support to the Greek games, and I know how persuasive he can be. I'm very glad to see that Greece is willing to let the U.S. help out on security for the Games. To me, this is a smart example of the U.S. defining its interests beyond "homeland security" (that asinine phrase) to encompass Core-wide security as a whole.

Germany's choice on rule-set reset: play down or play up

"East Germany Swallows Billions, and Still Stagnates," by Mark Landler, New York Times, 21 July, p. A11.

Former West Germany has spent a trillion and a half on former East Germany and the latter has little development to show for it. What's the problem? Frankly, the West has asked the East to play down to its own restrictive economic rule set instead of asking the country as a whole to play up to the far more open Core economic rule-set.

Here's the key excerpt:

George Milbradt, the prime minister of Saxony, said that Bavaria was able to reverse an exodus of people during the depressed 1950's by turning Munich into a center for the automotive and computer industries. Mr. Milbradt said the east can prosper only if it shakes off Germany's stifling labor regulations. That would drive down wages here and make the region competitive with its eastern neighbors. The trouble, he concedes, is that this would require the government to overhaul not just its policy toward the east, but its entire economic program.

Milbradt goes on to say that Germany is a "sick man" who knows what the cure must be, but who fears it more than the disease.

Philippines to U.S.: "We only do windows!"

"Hostage Is Freed After Philippine Troops Are Withdrawn From Iraq," by James Glanz, New York Times, 21 July, p. A12.

Old line that a colleague of mine at college, Bradd Hayes, loved to use whenever he talked about the military's reticence to do post-conflict nation-building: the U.S. military doesn't like to "do windows," meaning all the piddling little stuff involved in post-conflict security generation. The Pentagon's line was (and for many, still is): We do smoking holes and nothing else!

Well, the Philippines is saying to the U.S. and the rest of the Core that while they're willing to do windows as a commuting labor force that can rapidly come into bad situations and provide lotsa "shoes on the ground," they aren't willing to do much of anything beyond those "windows." If you want to drive the Filipinos out, all you need do is take one of their people hostage and the entire country will back down immediately—pulling out all of their (admittedly puny) security contingent. And they will do this proudly, as the president rejoices in her one freed Filipino worker even as American troops die by the day keeping the rest of her workers safe there.

But, frankly, that is the realistic limit for the Philippines: while their global commuting workforce can be counted upon to provide labor at a moment's notice anywhere inside the Gap, the U.S. can't expect them to play any serious security role there. Filipinos are therefore logically considered the foot workers, but not the foot soldiers, in any Core-wide strategy to shrink the Gap.

UN not ready to shut up or put up regarding Israel's wall

"Remove Wall, Israel Is Told By the U.N.," by Warren Hoge, New York Times, 21 July, p. A10.

UN is ready and willing to condemn the wall, but isn't willing to do much of anything to secure Israel. The UN is more than happy to internationalize the situation politically, but not security-wise.

Thus left to its own defense, Israel logically puts up the wall and says—in effect—to the world: "If you're so hot to do something about Palestine, then be our guests!"

The UN will never provide security to Israel, and so Israel must forcibly internationalize the security situation by building the wall and letting the UN deal with the consequences.

After the lopsided vote condemning the wall, Israel's UN ambassador said, "Thank God that the fate of Israel and of the Jewish people is not decided in this hall."

Absolutely.

China backs off on SARS whistle-blower

"China Releases the SARS Whistle-Blower," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 21 July, p. A6.

Good move by the Party elite: cracking down on this guy for his comments about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 got them nowhere in the eyes of the world.

Here's the key analysis:

While there is no evidence that senior officials are reconsidering their stance that the crackdown was justified, the decision to detain and then release Dr. Jiang suggests that leaders are conflicted when handling high-level dissent on the issue. That may stimulate hopes that the party will sooner or later apologize for the violent suppression of the Tiananmen protesters.

To me, this apology won't happen until the third-generation leadership, exemplified by Jiang Jemin, remaining head of the military, is finally escorted off the historical stage by the just-put-in-place fourth-generation of leaders, exemplified by Hu Jintao. The 3rd-gen leaders will never admit they were wrong about 1989, because it calls into question their historical legacy as rulers, something Jiang is very keen to protect (the man has a huge ego).

But when that apology does finally come, a real tipping point will have been reached, not just for the 4th-gen leadership group, but for the declining power of the PLA, which inevitably be tainted by this apology.

Iraq: the healing process ain't even begun on Saddam

"Iraqis Begin Confronting The Burdens of the Past: Millions Persecuted by Hussein May Seek Redress," by Doug Struck, Washington Post, 13 July, p. A11.

Saddam Hussein's trial will be a doozy, but only a small part of the national healing involving all his regime's many victims. In the past 14 months, Iraqi officials have generated files of state crimes from families of 200,000 people killed and 40,000 political prisoners. They estimate that these numbers represent just the tip of the iceberg—maybe one-twentieth of the actual numbers that will be inevitably uncovered.

Jesse Helms' used to publicize a list of 131 foreign companies that did business with Saddam's regime, or what he called "Iraq's Foreign Legion." T.M. Lutas' point about "collaborators" in the Core will be amply made when the full story finally emerges.

Africa: the inevitable final frontier in the GWOT

"Al Qaeda's Growing Sanctuary," by Douglas Farah and Richard Shultz, Washington Post, 14 July, p. A19.

Opening para says it all:

With the end of the brutal conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone, West Africa is seldom in the news or on the policy agenda these days. Yet the region is quietly gaining recognition as what it has long been: a haven for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Weak and corrupt governments, vast, virtually stateless stretches awash in weapons, and impoverished, largely Muslim populations make the region as ideal sanctuary.

This is what I said in Rolling Stone last month:

We’re going to end up replicating the struggle again and again. Like spraying the cockroaches in one apartment and scattering them to the next—we’re driving terrorists to the next country over. Sort of like rooting out old Japanese warriors on some isolated Pacific island twenty years after World War II, we’re going to be killing off the last of these guys years from now in deepest, darkest Africa.

I say this every chance I get with military leaders: our success in the Middle East only sets the table for the next stage in Africa—get used to the idea now.

More evidence of advanced Brezhnevism in Iran

"Iranians Get the Last Laugh After Clerics Ban a Comedy," by Karl Vick, Washington Post, 14 July, p. A12.

Funny movie packs 'em in, Tehran: criminal escapes jail by dressing as cleric and then is forced into hilarious fish-outta-water situations out in the real world. "The Lizard" became a cultural phenomenon in Iran, so naturally the mullahs had to shut it down. But here's the info age problem: too many boot-leg videos are already out and about.

Here's the great analysis of the piece:

In 1979, while imposing a severe interpretation of the Koran, the mullahs shuttered every one of Tehran's 74 movie theaters. Today, visitors are directed to black-and-white snapshots of each of them in the Film Museum of Iran, a converted palace that honors the country's widely acclaimed directors, including those whose most famous works are banned here.

The contradictions reflect a shifting reality. After a seven-year effort at reform failed to wrest decisive power from unelected clerics, the population of 70 million has largely retreated, leaving politics to hard-liners yet withholding the legitimacy the conservatives crave.

That is a perfect description of the late Brezhnev period in the now-defunct Soviet Union. Waiting for Gorbachev is the name of the game now, and Khatami does not seem to be the man.

Another feather in the cap of Colin Powell's amazing career

"Powell Flies In the Face Of Tradition: Secretary Is Least Traveled In Years of State Records," by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post 14 July, p. A1.

Powell travels less than any secretary of state of the last three decades. Needs to stay in Washington so he can influence policy debates more, apparently.

And that only makes his complete failure in the interagency process all the more glaring. No successes to show internationally and none to show interagency.

This guy will go down as one of the most missing-in-action secretaries of state we ever had. He'll be the Bill Cohen of SECSTATE's.

Don't know who Bill Cohen was? That's the point.

The personal China connection grows—as does the bias?

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 20 July 2004

Yesterday was a strange sort of immersion in things Chinese. First there was my first direct encounter with the Government of China, in the form of its consulate in New York, where I obtained tourist visas for myself and my wife for our upcoming adoption trip. Second was my brother Jerome's impromptu lecture on the character-driven language of Japanese (he's writing a learner's dictionary), which he described as a "jazzed up version of Chinese" (like Romanian is a jazzed-up version of Italian, and Portuguese a jazzed-up version of Spanish). Third, there was the word from my agent that Beijing University Press has agreed to our advance number, so we've selected them as the publishing house in China for the Pentagon's New Map.

My old Russian teacher at the University of Wisconsin always said good news comes in threes, as does bad news. My good news trio from China would therefore seem to be: 1) we got the visas without a hitch; 2) PNM's to be published there; and 3) we're expecting our travel advisory later today from China regarding the exact date of our adoption appointment at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou in late August.

Just like that I am suddenly all connected to the Middle Kingdom, and so I find myself feeling strangely protective of it. Will such feelings ruin my ability to think about China objectively? Don't think so, otherwise I'd be irrational about Northern Ireland, which I'm not.

No, I think my new personal connections to China will just make my appreciation of what it is and what it is becoming all the more nuanced. Do I trust China per se? My answer is that I trust China to be China, in all its complexity and self-interest, just like I trust America to be America in all its complexity and self-interest.

So when I hear John Kerry bashing China on trade because it's good election-year politics ("China Is Talk of Campaigns: Kerry Seems Tougher Than Bush on Standard Election Topic," by Neil King, Jr. and Michael Schroeder, Wall Street Journal, 20 July, p. A4.), I know it's simply preaching to certain segments of the choir, and doesn't reflect any objective view of what China now represents in terms of America's strategic interests in expanding the Core and shrinking the Gap. Kerry can blow smoke now, just like Clinton did in 1992, but the reality would set in immediately once he entered office. China is simply too big and too important for that sort of partisan nonsense.

That my family has chosen to make China a big part of our lives means only that we're a microcosm of the integrating effort that the world is going through on all things Chinese. Rather than generating a bias, this process simply eliminates an absence that never made any sense anyway—except in the autarkic nonsense that was Maoism.

With the agreement pending on PNM's publication in China, I now have three of the four map categories accounted for (outside of North America, of course): publication in Japan gives me an Old Core state, China now gives me a New Core state, and Turkey gives me a Seam State. What I need next is a true Gap state, and from what I'm hearing from my agency, that may well be Lebanon—of all places. I look forward to the day when I have copies of all these PNMs on my shelf in my office.

Til then, here's today's catch:

New Core power Russia to help U.S. in Iraq?

"Russia: Putin Considers Sending Troops to Iraq," www.stratfor.com, 16 July.

States cursed by oil? Almost all are found inside the Gap—naturally

"Saving Iraq From Its Oil," by Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian, Foreign Affairs, July-Aug 2004, p. 77.

"From Pariah to Belle of the Oil Ball: For Energy Companies, Libya Is Suddenly the Hottest Date Around," by Simon Romero, New York Times, 20 July, p. C1.

What goes around, comes around on terror

"Saudis Facingb Return of Radicals: Young Iraq Veterans Join Underground," by Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, 11 July, p. A1.

"President Says U.S. to Examine Iran-Qaeda Tie: Sept. 11 Terrorists May Have Been Given Aid," by Philip Shenon, NYT, 20 July, p. A1.

No surprise: Sys Admin force is drawn from sys admin jobs back in U.S.

"Governors Tell Of War's Impact on Local Needs: Staff Shortages At Home; Citizen Soldiers Abroad Aren't Available to Aid States in Crisis," by Sarah Kershaw, NYT, 20 July, p. A1.

"Rebuilding Iraq, A Well At A Time: Tiny Projects Succeed and Win Thanks for U.S.," by James Glanz, NYT, 20 July, p. A1.

"Don't Dumb Down the Military," by Nathaniel Fick, NYT, 20 July, p. A23.

Armenia: a classic Gap state that is failing on all fronts

"Armenian Protests Falter Under Authoritarian Rule: President' Hold on Power Contrasts Sharply With 'Rose Revolution' in Neighboring Georgia," by Susan B. Glasser, WP, 11 July, p. A16.

"Exodus Is New Chapter of Loss in Armenia's Sad Story," by Susan B. Glasser, WP, 12 July, p. A1.

The focus on rural poor is an Asia-wide development

"Asia Shifts Focus to Rural Development," by Andrew Browne, WSJ, 20 July, p. A9.

New Core power Russia to help U.S. in Iraq?

"Russia: Putin Considers Sending Troops to Iraq," www.stratfor.com, 16 July.

Many said I was nuts when I proposed in the Washington Post Outlook section in April that the U.S. should seek peacekeeping troops from Russia, India (whom they asked previously) and China. When I was on NPR last month, the Atlantic Monthly's Jack Beatty described that notion as "politically impossible."

I got this reference from Capt. Ryan Boyle (a regular weblog reader) at USMC headquarters in Washington, so my thanks to him.

The gist of the article is that Moscow is seriously considering a request by the Bush Administration to send Russian troops to Iraq or Afghanistan (can you believe it?) this fall, just before the election.

Yes, much will depend on Putin's calculations of Bush's likelihood of victory, but the real point here is that it is: 1) not inconceivable that Russia would say yes and 2) the Bush Administration buys into the logic that New Core powers need to be represented in this Global War on Terrorism.

How many are we talking about? Maybe 40,000. What would that do to the Islamic notion of a "clash of civilizations" with the West? It would blow that myth out of the water. Risky for Putin? You bet, but so is sitting on the sidelines.

For me personally? This article is yet another example of why I have a very thick skin about people telling me—throughout my career—that my strategic forecasting was pie-in-the-sky nonsense. The reason why so many experts and journalists see PNM as a guide book to this administration is not because I have inside dope, it's because I've simply cracked the strategic code under which this administration—and all that follow for decades—will invariably find themselves dealing with, day-in and day-out.

Here's hoping this thing actually pans out, but either way, the logic of cooperation now seems a whole lot more plausible, despite the constant whining of nay-sayers like Beatty.

States cursed by oil? Almost all are found inside the Gap—naturally

"Saving Iraq From Its Oil," by Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian, Foreign Affairs, July-Aug 2004, p. 77.

"From Pariah to Belle of the Oil Ball: For Energy Companies, Libya Is Suddenly the Hottest Date Around," by Simon Romero, New York Times, 20 July, p. C1.

Libya's the new target of oil companies after it came out of the diplomatic cold and rejoined the land of the rule-abiding (if there was ever a case of verify first, trust later, it's Qaddafi). Good thing for the regime, which should bank a lot of money, and generally good for the population, for it should increase levels of connectivity with the outside world. But this development does not bode particularly well for the economy or society as a whole in terms of long-term development. As I've said before, relying on raw materials as the primary export to the global economy is just about the slowest way to grow an economy.

Which brings me to a great article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, which was brought to my attention by Ethan Sprang, another regular weblog reader. Read the article for all the analysis. Here's the main point that hit Ethan: 32 of the 34 countries studied by the two authors as suffering the "resource curse" are found within the Gap: Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Cameroon, Chad, Colombia, DR Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Rep, Libya, Mexico [Core], Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Russia [Core], Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Venezuela and Yemen. Like with U.S. military crisis responses since the end of the Cold War, the Gap concept captures roughly 95% of the "resource curse." How did the authors generate this list? We're talking about the 34 countries for whom oil and gas represent more than 30% of their total export revenue.

What goes around, comes around on terror

"Saudis Facing Return of Radicals: Young Iraq Veterans Join Underground," by Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, 11 July, p. A1.

"President Says U.S. to Examine Iran-Qaeda Tie: Sept. 11 Terrorists May Have Been Given Aid," by Philip Shenon, New York Times, 20 July, p. A1.

More and more evidence that the young men prone to terrorism that Saudi Arabia has been exporting all these years are increasingly returning to the kingdom with violent designs on the House of Saud.

Saudi Arabia is in a tough spot, which is exactly where they should be in a long-term strategy to transform the Middle East political scene. If Iraq continues to boil, all it does is generate more opportunities for Saudis to go there and cut their teeth as terrorists. And when it settles, guess who's coming for dinner?

Like their compatriots in Iraq, cells operating in Saudi Arabia have repeatedly stated that their primary aim is to drive out all "infidels," including more than 100,000 Western expatriates who help run the country's oil industry and whose military and technical support is crucial to the Saudi government.

If the House of Saud is set to get its just desserts, then Iran is also likely to come under increasing fire—from the U.S. With Iraq out of the way, the biggest security issues in the Gulf are: 1) Iran's rather open support for terrorist networks in the region; and 2) their push for nukes. Expect to see the Bush Administration begin seeding the long-term narrative on that confrontation. If Iran pushes hard enough on the WMD and doesn't come clean enough on its long-term support for terrorists, it could easily rise to the top of the heap of either a re-elected Bush Administration or a new Kerry one, giving Kim Jong Il just that much more time for mischief as he awaits his inevitable turn.

No surprise: Sys Admin force is drawn from sys admin jobs back in U.S.

"Governors Tell Of War's Impact on Local Needs: Staff Shortages At Home; Citizen Soldiers Abroad Aren't Available to Aid States in Crisis," by Sarah Kershaw, New York Times, 20 July, p. A1.

"Rebuilding Iraq, A Well At A Time: Tiny Projects Succeed and Win Thanks for U.S.," by James Glanz, NYT, 20 July, p. A1.

"Don't Dumb Down the Military," by Nathaniel Fick, NYT, 20 July, p. A23.

Here's the first few paras of the top story:

With tens of thousands of their citizen soldiers now deployed in Iraq, many of the nation's governors complained on Sunday to senior Pentagon officials that they were facing severe manpower shortages in guarding prisoners, fighting wildfires, preparing for hurricanes and floods and policing the streets.

Concern among the governors about the war's impact at home has been rising for months, but it came into sharp focus this weekend as they gathered for their four-day annual conference here and began comparing the problems they faced from the National Guard's largest callup since World War II. On Sunday, the governors held a closed-door meeting with two top Pentagon officials and voiced their concerns about the impact both on the troops' families and on the states' ability to deal with disasters and crime.

So while the Sys Admin force digs wells throughout Iraq, winning hearts and minds as they improve the infrastructure, they are sorely missed by their erstwhile employers back home who need them to protect our far more complex infrastructure from the daily vagaries of nature.

Some "experts" and more than a few congressmen are calling for the resumption of the draft, but nobody who knows the military wants the return of that force, because both combat and nation-building have simply gotten so complex that we can't field anything less than a well-educated force.

So we're not getting out of restructuring this force into what I call the bifurcated Leviathan/Sys Admin force. We cannot draft our way out of this situation, nor can we continue to rob Peter (the reserve component) to pay Paul (the active duty force). Nothing less is needed than a rebalancing of the entire force and a re-rationalizing of it to account for the obvious bifurcation of roles and missions that this security environment demands out of the Pentagon.

Armenia: a classic Gap state that is failing on all fronts

"Armenian Protests Falter Under Authoritarian Rule: President' Hold on Power Contrasts Sharply With 'Rose Revolution' in Neighboring Georgia," by Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post 11 July, p. A16.

"Exodus Is New Chapter of Loss in Armenia's Sad Story," by Susan B. Glasser, WP, 12 July, p. A1.

Armenia is a sad story. Unlike its neighbor Georgia, where the "rose revolution" swept reformers into power peacefully, there seems no way the masses can drive their dictatorial president Robert Kocharian out of power, even after his highly disputed election last year.

So while Kocharian moves Armenia ever closer to a police state, people are simply voting with their feet—and leaving the country for good. It is estimated that as many as one million have left since Armenia became independent from Soviet rule in the early 1990s, leaving as few as 2-3 million still inside the country. That means maybe as many as one-out-of-every-three people have left in the last decade or so. Imagine if 100 million people left the U.S. over the course of a decade—that's how bad it has become for this classic Gap state.

Armenians are so desperate to connect to a better life that they are leaving their homeland in droves, many to Russia proper. It is estimated by the Russians that Armenians working inside Russia send back to Armenia in remittances a sum more than double the government's entire budget for the nation, proving yet again what a huge pressure valve release is the ability of economic refugees to flow from the Gap to the Core.

The focus on rural poor is an Asia-wide development

"Asia Shifts Focus to Rural Development," by Andrew Browne, Wall Street Journal, 20 July, p. A9.

I've blogged plenty recently about how the return of the Congress Party in India and the rise of the fourth-generation of leadership in China reflect a growing sense in both countries' elite political circles that, even as the cities boom as the countries open themselves up to the global economy, the rural poor are largely being left behind and their needs must be far more addressed in coming years if political stability is to be maintained.

What this article does is simply expand that observation to developing Asia as a whole, citing developments in Thailand, Malaysia and elsewhere, describing rural development as a "pan-Asian development and investment theme."

If you don't want a resurgence of Maoism—or worse, Pol Pot's scary stuff—then you have to bring the rural poor along for the globalization ride. As I've said before, the train can't go any faster than the caboose, no matter how hard the engine is pulling things along.

What if Bush is right? asks Tom Junod of Esquire

Dateline: Café on East 45th between 5th and Lexington, Manhattan, 19 July 2004

Got up this a.m. and caught the subway cross-town to Times Square and then walked about a mile to 12th Avenue to the Chinese Consulate, which sits right across from the Intrepid carrier museum and the Circle Line boat rides dock. The security guy at the front door at first rejected my Rhode Island driver’s license, saying he’d never seen anything like that and that it didn’t look real. I just glared at him and declared that Rhode Island was indeed the smallest state in the union but a state nonetheless and that I didn’t care if he had never seen one of its driver’s licenses before, and that I’d need a better reason than that for his trying to deny me entry.

Then another guard came up and said, “Oh yeah, Rhode Island, that’s legitimate. He can come in.”

Whew! Tough sidewalk.

Got inside and got my queue number. But there was no real waiting. Dropped off the forms and the passports and got a receipt for pick-up after 2pm. Then I walked to my brother’s office at 45th and Lex. Jerome (for whom my youngest boy is named) works as general counsel for Marubeni, an international trading arm loosely associated with the Mitsubishi keiretsu. We chat for a while and then I go kill some time at this café. At noon Jerry is going to take me to where he and a colleague of his at Marubeni’s work every noon hour on a Japanese learner’s dictionary. Apparently there is no good one for Japanese and Jerry and his friend aim to fill that gap. For those of you who’ve studied languages, you know how crucial a learner’s dictionary can be.

I have to admit, I spent some time last weekend listening to a Chinese phrase tape in my car, and Chinese is pretty intimidating compared to my past efforts in French, Romanian, German, and Russian. And yet, I think I’ll give it a go with Vonne Mei. Hell, if I can’t outperform my then 4-year-old daughter (meaning 3 or so years from now), then I might as well give up.

Today’s main blog is almost an ode to the great Esquire writer Tom Junod. I met Tom over breakfast with Mark Warren back in November 2002. Mark took me out to chat me up before I briefed the Esquire staff (this was right after the Best and Brightest December issue hit the stands) and wanted me to meet Junod, a prize-winning writer in his stable (or maybe he wanted Junod to check me out before he suggested I write for Esquire!).

Tom ended up asking me the best question I’ve ever received from an audience: “If your vision of the future pans out, what changes most?” That became my concluding slide in the brief, which I still use, and I recounted the exchange in PNM the book.

Well, Tom and his wife just adopted a baby girl from China, and so he’s been mentoring me via email on what to expect. So it seems fitting that while I’m in town getting our visas, I should blog his most excellent piece in this month’s Esquire, the same one with the letters to the editor about my June article that I blogged recently.

[break in the action: after the lunchtime tutorial on Japanese characters and dictionaries from my brother Jerome (quite fascinating), I walk back across the width of Manhattan to 12th Ave and pick up our visas; I write the rest of this mega-blog on the Amtrak train home. No time on the Nordic track tonight, cause I feel like I power walked about 4 miles today, but it was great, as navigating around Manhattan is always fascinating.]

Tom Junod’s article is entitled, “The Case For George W. Bush,” and it’s his usual scary smart. What I like about Junod so much is that he’s always willing to question himself. Some find that weak; I find it incredibly strong.

Junod’s piece starts out with a little Bush bashing, which is easy, since W. often comes off like such a lightweight frat boy in his public appearances. Comparing that man to Reagan is simply beyond me for that reason alone.

Then Junod starts burrowing in on your conscience by asking “What if he’s right?”:

As easy as it is to say that we can’t abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does, what haunts me is the possibility that we can’t abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.

The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. [Barnett: God! Is that man dead-on or what?] Well, it’s not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he’s not saying it’s gay marriage. [Barnett: so sadly true.] The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it’s easier than conviction.

Those are two of the most powerfully argued paragraphs I’ve read in years, because they get right to the heart of the matter, which is who are we and what do we believe in? Art Cebrowski, my old boss in the Office of the Secretary of Defense likes to say of transformation, that if a new technology makes sense for 20 years from now, then why not seek it today? I feel the same way about terrorism and the Bush Administration’s bold approach to the Middle East: if the only way terrorism is ever going to go away is for the Middle East to end its disconnectedness and join the world, then why wait through decades of terrorism? Why not pursue it now if it will eventually make sense anyway?

In the second section, Junod compares Bush to Lincoln—not in terms of intellect but actually in terms of their seemingly fruitless early years as leaders of nations at war and their relative low popular standing (Lincoln being about the most unpopular president in history until he was assassinated). Point being: Lincoln spoke eloquently about shedding lots of blood for a moral cause blessed by the Almighty, and today he’s considered our greatest president. But, as Junod points out . . .

Today, of course, those words, along with Lincoln’s appeal to the better angels of our nature, are chiseled into the wall of his memorial, on the Mall in Washington. And yet if George Bush were to speak anything like them today, we would accuse him of pandering to his evangelical base. We would accuse him of invoking divine authority for a war of his choosing . . ..

Another great riff soon follows:

We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling “blood and treasure,” then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let’s not flatter ourselves. If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.

Yeah, yeah, I know: Nobody who opposes Bush thinks that terrorism is a good thing. The issue is not whether the United States should be involved in a war on terrorism, but rather whether the war on terrorism is best served by war in Iraq. And now that the war has defied the optimism of its advocates, the issue is no longer Bush’s moral intention but rather his simple competence. He got us in when he had no idea how to get us out. He allowed himself to be blinded by ideology and blindsided by ideologues. His arrogance led him to offend the very allies whose participation would have enabled us to win not just the war but the peace. His obsession with Saddam Hussein led him to rush into a way that was unnecessary. Sure, Saddam was a bad guy. Sure, the world is a better place without him. But …

And there it is: the inevitable but. Trailed by its uncomfortable ellipsis, it sits squirming at the end of the argument against George Bush for very good reason: It can’t possibly sit at the beginning. Bush haters have to back into it because there’s nothing beyond it. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, but . . . but what? But he wasn’t so bad that we had to do anything about him? But he wasn’t so bad that he was worth the shedding of American blood? But there are other dictators just as bad whom we leave in place? But he provided Bush the opportunity to establish the doctrine of preemptive war, in which case the cure is worse than the disease? But we should have secured Afghanistan before invading Iraq? But we should have secured the cooperation of allies who were no more inclined to depose Saddam that they—or we, as head of an international coalition of the unwilling—were to stop the genocide in Rwanda ten years before? Sure, genocide is bad, but . . .

We might as well credit the president for his one great accomplishment: replacing but with and as a basis for foreign policy. The world is a better place without Saddam Huessin, and we got rid of him.

What Junod says here is exactly the same thing that’s always haunted me about Reagan: he was right about the Soviet Union. No, I don’t believe he killed the evil empire. Nor do I believe Star Wars or the defense build-up did that. Frankly, I think Deng Xiaoping did more to kill socialism than Reagan ever could pretend to have done—in either his movies or his real-life presidency. But the man was right. And I was wrong to base my opposition to him in my youth solely out of my personal antipathy for who he was as an individual (basically, I found the man to be a huge hypocrite on many levels—his ditching his first wife being a key one in my mind). But the man was right.

The same understanding that I now have for Reagan and for Bush is something the Far Right has never learned with Clinton. Yes, he sucked big time as an individual (pun intended), but damn it! He was right about the most important issues of his day—especially his headlong support for the spread of the global economy, which really secured the victory afforded by the end of the Cold War: the absorption of the “second world” into an expanded Functioning Core of globalization.

Bush is right on the big issue of this day: bin Laden and his types are just the latest resistance to the spread of the global economy and all it entails—both good and bad but overwhelmingly positive in the long run. To fight the bin Ladens of today is like fighting the Soviets of the Cold War: those who would keep entire societies deprived, isolated, and imprisoned with hate-filled ideologies. The Soviets were evil, and radical Islamic terrorists are evil.

Bush sees and understands this, but Kerry is too often given to parsing things out to absurd levels of ambiguity. Frankly, I’d rather be blunt and right than nuanced and wrong, and Kerry won’t win this election by being nuanced. He’ll win by painting a better happy ending and positing a quicker path to achieving it. The same bad guys will be standing in the way, and their names won’t end in Bush and Cheney.

Junod gets this, and so do I. My hats off to Tom for writing an amazing piece—one that really reminds me of who I am and what I believe in like few articles do today.

Here’s today’s catch:

Transforming Iraq and Afghanistan: all in good time

“Iraq Gives Order To Reopen Paper G.I.’s Had Closed: Gesture to Shiite Cleric: In Sign of New Tactics on Militants, Premier Lets U.S. Strike Falluja,” by Ian Fisher, New York Times, 19 July, p. A1.

“When Elections Threaten Democracy: Afghans simply won’t be ready to vote any time soon,” by Ansar Rahel, NYT, 19 July, p. A17.

“Tiny Agency’s Iraq Analysis Is Better Than Big Rivals’: Giving ‘the accepted analysis’ a ‘second, harder look,’” by Douglas Jehl, NYT, 19 July, p. A10.

Good rules in India, bad ones in the Philippines

“In Wake of Fire, Indian State Bans Thatched Roofs on Schools,” by David Rohde, NYT, 19 July, p. A7.

“Curbing Foreign Investment: Philippine Constitution Derails Development of Certain Sectors,” by James Hookway, Wall Street Journal, 19 July, p. A9.

Buy you Chinese! Buy! As if our economic lives depended on it!

“Beijing Is Able to Slow Economic Growth: Next Test for China Will Be How Easily It Can Absorb Possible Oversupply of Goods,” by Matt Pottinger, WSJ, 19 July, p. A9.

In the Gap there are two types of leaders: too weak and too strong

“Bolivians Support Gas Plan And Give President a Lift: Referendum Maintains Company Control,” by Juan Forero, NYT, 19 July, p. A6.

“Are Sanctions Evil? by Michael Judge, WSJ, 19 July, p. A11.

OEMs, meet the ODMs; the new boss isn’t the same as the old boss

“PCs Aren’t Just Made In Asia Now: Many Are Designed There,” by Lee Gomes, WSJ, 19 July, p. B1.

Anonymous’ brilliantly myopic plan to win the GWOT, or why intell weanies should never be in charge of anything important

“Q&A; with ‘Anonymous,’” USA Today, 19 July, p. 13A.

More evidence that Iran is in its late Brezhnev period

“Sorry, Wrong Chador: In Tehran, ‘Reading Lolita’ Translates as Ancient History,” by Karl Vick, Washington Post, 19 July, p. C1

Transforming Iraq and Afghanistan: all in good time

“Iraq Gives Order To Reopen Paper G.I.’s Had Closed: Gesture to Shiite Cleric: In Sign of New Tactics on Militants, Premier Lets U.S. Strike Falluja,” by Ian Fisher, New York Times, 19 July, p. A1.

“When Elections Threaten Democracy: Afghans simply won’t be ready to vote any time soon,” by Ansar Rahel, NYT, 19 July, p. A17.

“Tiny Agency’s Iraq Analysis Is Better Than Big Rivals’: Giving ‘the accepted analysis’ a ‘second, harder look,’” by Douglas Jehl, NYT, 19 July, p. A10.

Iraq’s tough new PM corrects a big Bremer mistake: shutting down a newspaper that had been sympathetic to Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement. Bremer thought he was buying the CPA some peace and quiet, but all he did was drive up local anger and resistance that ended up costing a number of U.S. lives. But he also okays a U.S. strike into a Falluja stronghold believed to contain Zarqawi’s personnel.

Together, Dr. Allawi’s two actions seemed early evidence of his stated strategy for taming the deadly insurgency by making concessions to fighters who cooperate and cracking down on those who do not.

How long will it take Allawi’s good cop/bad cop routine to bring real stability to Iraq? Probably quite some time. And yes, the first election probably will be a bit of a sham in both Iraq and Afghanistan, an outcome that happens to even the most mature democracies now and then (Florida recount anyone?). But admitting that we’re in both nations for the long haul does not reduce the utility of trying our best to bring democracy to either.

Yes, we will constantly be told by the experts and academics that what we’ve gotten ourselves into is so much harder than some decision makers in the Bush Administration thought, which is why the State Department’s bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) is always “right” whenever the desired results don’t meet our natural tendency toward strategic ADD. But the I-told-you-so crowd has no answers other than leave-it-alone! and for-God-sakes-don’t-do-anything-to-piss-off-the-terrorists!

Oh, wait a minute, I forgot about abstinence as a strategy—or getting off oil. Right, then we could turn the Middle East into India’s and China’s strategic security issue and that would make for a safer global security environment.

But that’s forgetting Israel and the House of Saud and . . . but let’s leave that laundry list to Anonymous—a seriously myopic visionary.

Good rules in India, bad ones in the Philippines

“In Wake of Fire, Indian State Bans Thatched Roofs on Schools,” by David Rohde, New York Times, 19 July, p. A7.

“Curbing Foreign Investment: Philippine Constitution Derails Development of Certain Sectors,” by James Hookway, Wall Street Journal, 19 July, p. A9.

India suffers a Station Nightclub-like fire in a private school and the country is aghast. With the country’s booming economy, more and more families are dishing out the rupees to put their kids in expensive private schools, which, even though they are often overcrowded, “offer a prized English education that parents believe can give their children an advantage.” Right on, say I, as ESL (English as a Second Language) is one of globalization’s great connecting tissues.

So the fire happens and the affected Indian state does exactly what little Rhode Island did after the Station Nightclub fire, it starts pushing all sorts of new fire code regulations and immediately closes all schools that have the offending thatched roofs until they’re replaced by something safer.

That is a rule-set reset of the good sort.

Here’s the bad one: after dictator Ferdinand Marcos was ousted in 1987, his opponents wrote a badly nationalistic constitution that forbade foreign direct investment in certain sectors. The result is not surprising: a serious lack of development in those sectors because foreign money cannot be tapped and the Philippines economy itself can only self-finance so much. Guess some would rather be a proud-but-poor Filipino.

So there has been no foreign-funded mining operations in the Philippines since 1968. That is why the Philippines are in the Gap, while ESL-crazed India moves into the Core: the former wants connectivity, but still too much on its own terms, while the latter accepts the notion that connectivity requires the synchronization of internal code with that of the outside world.

Buy you Chinese! Buy! As if our economic lives depended on it!

“Beijing Is Able to Slow Economic Growth: Next Test for China Will Be How Easily It Can Absorb Possible Oversupply of Goods,” by Matt Pottinger, Wall Street Journal, 19 July, p. A9.

More and more indications that China has generated the much-desired “soft landing” for its economy if . . . and here’s the kicker for the formerly centrally-planned economy . . . if the Chinese consumer base can absorb all the goods that will be generated by the investment boom of the past few years.

Already, China is moving into the rarefied territory that defines the United States’ real economic power: the power of its consumption as much or more than its production. More and more we’ll see the global economic health defined not just in terms of what America is willing to buy, but what China is willing to buy.

China will be a near-peer in diplomacy faster than we think, and a near-peer in economic faster than we think. The one thing it won’t be any time soon is our military near-peer. Thinking of China’s “threat” solely within the context of war is a mistake, because its real source of competition with the United States will come in the everything else.

In the Gap there are two types of leaders: too weak and too strong

“Bolivians Support Gas Plan And Give President a Lift: Referendum Maintains Company Control,” by Juan Forero, New York Times, 19 July, p. A6.

“Are Sanctions Evil?" by Michael Judge, Wall Street Journal, 19 July, p. A11.

Let me skip over the details of the referendum on the gas project. Bolivia is a poor country, and God knows it won’t be developed simply because it’s got some gas. Trying to grow an economy on the exportation of raw materials is just about the slowest way to go, as we’ve seen time and time again over the 20th century.

The real problem with Bolivia is the weakness of its political institutions. Here’s a pretty good guy operating as president, but here’s how a knowledgeable observer describes his ruling situation:

“Here you have a guy who has no control over the armed forces, no control over the police,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian-born expert who oversees Latin America studies at Florida International University. “He basically controls the palace, and he has the daunting mission of trying to re-found the country.”

What define the Core are stable-enough political systems that, on average, rotate their leaders every 4-to-6 years. That’s true for 90% of the Core countries, according to my research as reported in PNM.

Inside the Gap, the situation is the opposite: 90% of the governments can’t meet that Goldilocks’ happy medium. Just under one-third of Gap states can’t keep a leader for four years, on average. And just under two-thirds can’t get rid of a leader in less than six years. Only one-in-ten Gap states rotate their leadership regularly. That yields a bad mix of too-weak and too-strong leaders. Bolivia’s got a weak one right now, whereas Burma has far too strong of one in its military junta.

The cure for both is connectivity in general, although our tendency with the latter is to throw sanctions at the problem, which basically never results in the authoritarian leadership being thrown aside but instead tends to enrich them while making the plight of the masses even worse.

Our approach is completely backasswards: we should be throwing aid at the weaker states and pursuing regime change with the harsher ones. Does that mean invading every authoritarian regime? Hardly. But it sure as hell doesn’t mean trying to wait out the Big Man through sanctions, which surely hasn’t toppled any Castros or Qaddafis around the world.

Again, if the Core were serious about shrinking the Gap, we’d develop an A-to-Z rule set on how to process politically-bankrupt states and once we successfully employed it a few times, you’d see dictators grabbing their loot and heading for the border in plenty of states further down “the list.” But until that resolve is bolstered by rule sets, this clean-up effort will remain a largely American affair, meaning something we’ll whip ourselves into doing now and then, always to recoil almost immediately from the subsequent realization that finishing the job will take time—like in Afghanistan and Iraq today.

OEMs, meet the ODMs; the new boss isn’t the same as the old boss

“PCs Aren’t Just Made In Asia Now: Many Are Designed There,” by Lee Gomes, Wall Street Journal, 19 July, p. B1.

Yet another story about rising Asia in general and the notion that today’s “dumb” manufacturers of our brilliant goods will soon be tomorrow’s “smart but cheaper” design engineers.

I cite it only for the new acronym, which I love to collect. OEM means original equipment manufacturer. You can be an OEM and not be the true brains behind the product.

ODM means original design manufacturer, meaning you both design and build the product, even if it gets sold elsewhere under someone else’s name—like Dell or Gateway or Apple or . . ..

Every once in a while an ODM steps out in the spotlight and demands the world recognize it as a brand name. Samsung was an ODM for many years, this article points out, but “now it rivals Sony as a global brand.”

Samsung may be one of the first to make this migration, but it won’t be the last.

Anonymous’ brilliantly myopic plan to win the GWOT

Why intell weanies should never be in charge of anything important

“Q&A; with ‘Anonymous,’” USA Today, 19 July, p. 13A.

The basic argument you get from the CIA intell vet who directed the agency’s research on bin Laden for several years in the late 1990s (and now available in his anonymous “Imperial Hubris” book) is the same logic you’ll get from a lot of Middle East experts, terrorism experts, and diplomats familiar with the region. In effect, they’ll say it’s all America’s fault because what really drives al Qaeda is their hatred of our policies. End all those policies and al Qaeda and other terrorists will stop hating us and trying to kill us. Any other approach to the Middle East “dooms us to failure in the GWOT.”

Anonymous sums up bin Laden’s offer of conditional surrender on our part as well as any other expert I’ve interacted with recently. Here are the six demands:

1. Stop supporting Israel against the PLO and Hamas
2. Get U.S. troops out of the Arabian peninsula
3. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now
4. Stop supporting Russia, China and India in their suppression of Muslim extremists or separatists
5. Get off oil ASAP so we’re not always pressuring OPEC to keep oil prices low
6. Stop supporting corrupt Muslim regimes in the region.

If we do all these things, the world will be a much safer place for Americans with regard to Middle Eastern terrorists trying to kill us and harm our interests around the world.

Not too much to give up, is it? Just turn over the Jews, who shouldn’t be our problem anyway (I mean, God! We didn’t commit the Holocaust did we? We just let it happen!). Also we need to let radical fundamentalists rule the Gulf and send oil prices skyrocketing so poor countries all over the Gap are immediately priced out of that energy market or, if they choose to pay such prices, suffer huge debt crises down the road. We should also let Iraq and Afghanistan go back to what they were: dangerously disconnected states that bred both internal terrorism and external threats either through militarism or the open support of transnational terrorist networks. And it’s not too much to tell the New Core powers that we won’t stand for their efforts to keep their states whole and instead inform them that if they’re going to depend on Gulf energy in the future, then they damn well better plus-up their military budgets pronto so that they can do all the strategic heavy lifting in the region in coming decades (Isn’t China going to be our strategic enemy anyway?). And we should move America onto to hydrogen so the Middle East can turn itself into another Central Africa as quickly as possible, or—almost as worst—another Soviet-like gulag of repressive regimes whose dictators are corrupt fundamentalists as opposed to the corrupt elite dictatorships we now suffer there.

Yes, if we do all that, we’ll really be pursuing a grand strategy of “peace and justice” that will buy us coexistence with the fundamentalist radicals who dream of plunging the region into the same 7th-century paradise that the Taliban built in Afghanistan across the 1990s. Then we’ll really be safe and we’ll have the strategic stability that should have defined the post-Cold War era if only America didn’t have so many wrongheaded policies in the Middle East.

Yes, give the terrorists everything they want and they won’t be pissed off at us any more. And the global economy will be better as a result, and stability will sweep the planet.

It’s a brilliant plan, proving yet again that intell weanies make the best grand strategists.

More evidence that Iran is in its late Brezhnev period

“Sorry, Wrong Chador: In Tehran, ‘Reading Lolita’ Translates as Ancient History,” by Karl Vick, Washington Post, 19 July, p. C1.

Interesting article about the bestselling book, “Reading Lolita,” which is a very well-written account of what it was like for a literature professor to teach in Tehran during the early 1990s, or before the rise of the reformist elements represented by Mohammad Khatami’s landslide election as president in 1997. No one argues with it’s depiction of life back then, the only gripe raised by many living in Iran today is that the book is basically a historical offering that too many in the West are reading as an accurate description of current events.

In that regard, “Reading Lolita” reminds me of reading pediatric cancer studies when our first-born was undergoing her treatments in the mid-1990s. The problem with all such studies was that they represented a past treatment rule set that no longer existed. A good medical study tended to stretch over several years, meaning it looked at patients who were treated roughly a decade earlier. The analysis generated tended to be far more scary than the current reality of the treatment protocols, because frankly, things had progressed dramatically since then. So I was always wary of reading such articles, because they tended to darken one’s outlook on the future in a disproportional fashion, meaning they exaggerated the dangers your child was actually facing in the here and now.

The same seems to be true of “Reading Lolita”: it’s a great depiction of what was Iran about ten years ago but not what Iran is today. That Iran today isn’t what it was ten years ago doesn’t mean the mullahs still aren’t authoritarian and bad, or dangerous in their pursuit of WMD, but it does mean we need to understand the larger context. As society there increasingly slips out from under the mullahs’ control, it’s only logical that these repressive leaders will seek external opportunities to bolster their regime legitimacy, meaning more confrontations with the West. Understanding that longer-term dynamic helps us realize that Iran’s talk and actions will grow in aggressiveness in direct proportion to their own fears of regime collapse.

That dynamic got us the resurgent Cold War tempo of the late 1970s and the early 1980s, when the Soviets got more adventuresome and ended up getting Reagan as a result. When our push met their shove, the hollowness of their regime revealed itself. Doesn’t mean Reagan “won” the Cold War, but it does mean the guy was right to push back at that point in history.

This is something we need to remember with Iran in coming months and years as they inevitably acquire WMD.

What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor? (reviewing ZenPundit)

Dateline: Amtrak train from Kingstown RI to New York Penn Station, 18 July

I used to employ this joke at the beginning of my mega-brief. I heard it from Phil Hartman during his last appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He claimed to have made it up on the drive to the show, but a lot of people say it’s a much older joke than that. You just never knew with Phil . . ..

When I used the joke in the brief, I would simply throw up the question against a black background and wait and wait . . and wait . . . until the audience got a little uncomfortable. Then I’d click the remote and the screen would fill with a shot of the Earth from space (the one Al Gore liked so much) and as it would appear the sound effect from the old movie promos for Dolby Sound would blare and the punch line would materialize below:

Make me one with everything!

Cheesy I know, but it often got a big laugh. Always bigger on the Left Coast than the East Coast, and a great laugh overseas everywhere save one country—India. Gotta be careful with Buddha jokes there.

The point of the delivery was to tell the audience that I was going to cover an insane amount of ground in the brief: not just the 20th century, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era, but also 9/11, system perturbations as a new model of crisis, a new ordering principle for DoD, a model for how globalization works, the emerging American way of war (and peace), and a grand strategy for the U.S. in the 21st century (making globalization truly global). All that in 90 minutes!

So it made sense to joke about the brief’s insanely ambitious scope.

But I liked the joke on another level. As I have said earlier, I see my material and vision as fundamentally one of peace and balance and a sense of global justice—albeit one informed with a realist’s perspective of war and the role of security in making all that happen. I purposely seek the middle ground, where both the right and the left either find themselves attracted or find me impossible to dismiss casually.

I think both sides seek that middle ground right now. The right, in many ways, needs something to be “conservative” against, meaning it needs an enemy of sorts, and just bitching about diversity, or multiculturalism seems awfully sad as an ideology (Keep the world safe from gay marriage!).

A good article in the Saturday Times looks at this trend: “Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future,” by David Kirkpatrick, New York Times, 17 July, p. A1. Many young conservatives are wary of Bush’s attempt to transform the Middle East, and yet polls show that young conservatives trust the government in general far more than their parents did a generation earlier. So they’re often meandering somewhere in between a desire to deal with global terrorism in a strong way while not trying to take too much on in terms of government intervention. One brand of logic, marketed by a group of theological conservatives, is summed up by the word “sustainability,” a phrase familiar to anyone—like myself—who worked in the development community in the 1990s, when it became the rage in foreign aid circles. At its most basic, sustainability is about seeing all the connections and having a healthy, almost conservative respect for balance over “great leaps forward.” But the overlap is even stronger than that, because both theological conservatives and the development community in general have a strong focus on community institutions or the general notion of “capacity building.” What makes the ideological approach both compassionate and conservative is that it focuses on private-sector institutions, like churches, as it believes fundamentally that minimal governmental control is the key to empowering people and their communities to look after themselves as much as possible without creating dependencies on the government, aid organizations, etc.

Internally, the conservative approach yields one type of social programs, but externally, it begins to sound an awful lot like nation-building in search of an operating theory of the world, as in, “Where do we put our nation-building dollars so as to have the biggest positive impact on the world?”

And that’s when you begin to see the tie-ins with my work on security—you begin to become “one with the world” by recognizing the imperative of making globalization truly global. You see the flows and you naturally want balance. You want no one left on the outside, noses pressed to the glass. The Global War on Terror, then, quickly starts looking like a very poor stand-in for a grand strategy, as if simply killing the most violent extremists in the way would make this outcome come about all on its own, when you know instinctively that only killing the bad guys in a GWOT is the individual-level version of the Pentagon’s Cold War tendency to think of and define war solely within the context of war, and not within the context of everything else.

Make me one with everything!

So, when I get lumped in with the neoconservatives, I don’t mind so much so long as the vision isn’t simply ghettoized by that distinction. I want my grand strategy to make sense to the neocons, because if it doesn’t, it won’t go anywhere. But I also want it to make sense to the lefties of the left—the serious anything-but-war crowd who’ve been living too long in the dreamworld that says the right mix of foreign aid and trade will bring development to regions suffering serious deficits of security and freedom.

So when the conservative journals review the book, I’m happy, but I’m even happier when the liberal end of the spectrum finds the essential truth in the material, and doesn’t simply write me off as an apologist for the Bush Administration (as I believe the Post and Times have done in not reviewing the book).

So imagine my delight when I’m turned on by my webmaster to the writings of the ZenPundit, who’s taken more than a passing interest in the book. Now remember, more than once I’ve received reviews or emails from people accusing me less of being a warmonger and more of being a closet Buddhist with a dreamy belief in the end of war as we know it (hell, I basically predict it in the book!).

Who is ZenPundit? Just a guy named Mark with a blog.

But more than that, what he does with PNM is what every writer dreams of: he sees so much more in it than other readers—so much so that he can actually elevate above the material and pull more out of it that even I had previously realized.

But enough preamble, let’s dive in with his first post:

ZENPUNDIT @ http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2004/07/pentagons-new-map-handy-guide-to-must.html

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP - A HANDY GUIDE TO THE MUST-READ FOREIGN POLICY BOOK of 2004

Tom Barnett has written an exemplary book that enunciates something you very seldom see in American public debate—a long-term strategic vision for the United States that gets beyond the crisis de jure. Moreover, it's a strikingly positive vision that can politically connect with the American public across party lines—“Shrinking the Gap" is a clarion call that can supported from liberal humanitarian interventionists to neocons to cold-hearted realists. As a paradigm, this is the Convergence of Civilizations, not the Clash.

Moreover, the PNM builds on the historic American commitment since FDR to freeing markets that every administration has supported since WWII. The Pentagon's New Map, as a concept, represents both innovation for the post-9/11 world and reassuring continuity. Ted Rall and Michael Moore are going to hate it. So will Pat Buchanan. Everyone else however will be willing to give Barnett's ideas at least a serious look.

A Quick and Dirty Guide to PNM Terminology:

The Core: The industrialized, connected to the information economy, mostly peaceful, rule of law abiding, liberal democratic world.

The Old Core: The heart of the core, the old G-7/NATO/Japan states led by the United States.

The New Core: Those modernizing states that decided to join the Core in the 1980's and 1990's - these are not always as liberal, democratic and law-abiding as the Old Core but they have more or less irreversibly committed to moving in that direction—China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil and the like.

The Gap: The Third World regions mostly disconnected economically and politically from the Core. Hobbesian in character, ridden by violence, oppression, poverty and anarchy. Ruled by despots—when ruled by anyone—committed to keeping their nations disconnected as a political survival strategy.

Rule Sets: The explicit and implicit rules that provide the framework by which nations interact and function internally. There is a clash of rule sets between the Gap and the Core and within the Core between Europe which mostly cannot and will not intervene in the Gap to enforce rules and the United states which can and sometimes must.

Connectivity: The degree of acceptance of globalization's many effects and the ability of a nation's individuals to access choices for themselves. Most international hotspots are in the most disconnected parts of the Gap.

Global Transaction Strategy: Barnett's equivalent to "Containment"—a national and Core strategy to "Shrink the Gap" by connecting and integrating into the rule sets of the Core.

I am going to discuss some of Dr. Barnett's more specific observations and recommendations—and where I see caveats—in a subsequent post but overall the PNM is a book that will have an intellectual impact that will be both broad and deep.

What I liked about this initial post was that the ZenPundit actually came up with better definitions of the key terminology than I did in the book. Not different ones, just more elegant and direct. As I said to Mark in a post I left on his blog site:

That's one of the best definitions of connectivity I've ever come across. Wish I used it in the book.

I await your detailed analysis. The convergence of civilizations concept I actually covet. I can't imagine why I never came up with that, especially since Sam is an old professor of mine, and probably the first guy who ever seemed to get me at Harvard.

To say the least, I am fascinated by your review so far. What really makes me feel like I've writen a good book is when I come across something like this and realize that readers can make more of the ideas than I did myself in putting them on paper.

Keep up the good work.

Mark the ZenPundit returns the favor in a follow-on comment:

Thank you very much. I found your book to be extremely stimulating intellectually and I've recommended it to a lot of my friends and colleagues—in fact the delay in my further review is partly due to loaning out my copy of PNM to a friend. You also solved a problem for me regarding the charges of "Empire" against US policy—I knew that was incorrect but I couldn't articulate it very well in the simple way critics like Chalmers Johnson or Paul Schroeder make the accusation. You did & my hat is off to you.

Feel free to use the "Convergence " metaphor. I think cultures quite naturally tend to bleed over into one another memetically with until you get to the mutually incompatible core values—Huntington is looking at that aspect while you are looking at the merging element (Is the glass half-empty or half full?). Islam, which has "bloody borders" has a very limited set of principles but they are unfortunately currently non-negotiable in a way concepts like "democracy" are not.

In a later email exchange, Mark joked about how odd it must be for me to get a positive response from such a lefty Buddhist!

But it isn’t really. As one previous review pointed out, my effort to seek the balance of everything is very Buddhist (or, as I would point out, very Christ-like in his more Buddha-like moments). That’s how so many critical reviewers can laud me for my naïve desire to save the world while simultaneously condemning me as a war-monger and dangerous idealist. I don’t just want war, man, I want it all!

But to want it all is to see it all, which gets me to ZenPundit’s second post on the book:

ZenPundit

Saturday, July 17, 2004

THINKING ABOUT THE PENTAGON’S NEW MAP—CONNECTIVITY AND THE FOUR FLOWS OF GLOBALIZATION

Tom Barnett’s book , The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century is hip deep in concepts which makes it both an intriguing read and a difficult review. But since this is a blog I’m free to tackle the book in parts and today I’d like to look at Barnett’s key concepts of Connectivity and his four flows of globalization that "connect" societies and nation-states into an interdependent whole. If you have a copy of PNM handy I strongly recommend you take a look at Chapter 4 "The Core and the Gap.” It’s the one where Dr. Barnett lays out the war on terror in "the context of everything else"—which is the essence of strategic thinking.

Context is important because it’s what usually gets dropped in these types of discussions because most government experts and academics are by definition niche specialists. They resist moving their arguments and ideas into the realm of everything else because it messes up their crisp clean models with real-world complications in fields where they do not feel nearly so expert. This is a major reason why American national security, foreign policy and even military planning seldom rises above the level of tactical thinking…that is when we are not stuck in crisis management, ad hoc, muddle through mode. American strategic thinkers have been so few—Brooks Adams, Alfred T. Mahan, Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Herman Kahn, Richard Nixon—that a book like PNM, like Kennan’s " X" article, fills a crucial intellectual gap at the policy planning level of our government.

Dr. Barnett advocates a Global Transaction Strategy to "shrink the Gap" and promote Connectivity to integrate disconnected states into the Core, advancing the process of globalization—and in so doing extending the benefits provided by the "Rule Sets" associated with liberal democratic capitalism and the rule of law, broadly defined. Barnett further refines the enormous historical phenomenon of globalization to "four flows" between the Core and the Gap (p. 192).

PNM MODEL OF GLOBALIZATION

"…four essential elements, or flows, that I believe define its basic functioning from the perspective of international stability. These four flows are (1) the movement of people from the Gap to the Core; (2) the movement of energy from the Gap to the New Core; (3) the movement of money from the Old Core to the New Core; (4) the exporting of security that only America can provide to the Gap."

In other words, Barnett is defining globalization as a dynamic exchange relationship involving migration, resources, money and power.

He further elaborates on his model with "the Ten Commandments of Globalization" (p.199-204):

1. Look for resources, and ye shall find
2. No stability, no markets
3. No growth, no stability
4. No resources, no growth
5. No infrastructure, no resources
6. No money, no infrastructure
7. No rules, no money
8. No security, no rules
9. No Leviathan, no security
10. No will, no Leviathan

"Leviathan" is the enforcer of rule sets, in all practical purposes the United States acting alone, with an ad hoc coalition or through international organizations where we have a preponderant influence.

Dr. Barnett concludes his chapter with a superbly insightful (i.e., I agree with him here 100 %) explanation that conceptually ties together rogue state dictators and non-state actor terrorists into the Gordian Knot of menace that they truly are in reality (p. 205):

" A bin Laden engineers a 9/11 with the expressed goal of forcing the Core to clamp down on it’s borders, seek its energy elsewhere, take it’s investments elsewhere and ‘ bring the boys back home". He wants all of that connectivity gone, because its absence will afford him the chance for power over those left disconnected."

… an explanation that applies equally well to Kim Jong-Il as to the erstwhile master of al Qaida. I'm just wondering why the hell the Bush administration hasn't grabbed this one since they've been struggling to convince their critics (who are invested at treating rogue states, terrorism and WMD as disparate unrelated problems in order to do little about any of them) that the dots that they know in fact to be connected, connect in a comprehensible way.

MY COMMENTS:

My first reaction to the section on the PNM Model of Globalization was that, while Barnett has described the major categorical relationships of globalization, the idea could still face some further refinement in terms of defining globalization (and what connectivity really is) as an action. What exactly is it?

Jude Wanniski once made the brilliant observation in his book, The Way The World Works, that there is and always has been only one market in existence—the global market. Wanniski’s statement implied, correctly in my view, that the term "Globalization" is really describing something other than a new connecting of markets and cultures because they have always been connected to some degree however small. Even North Korea, in its self-imposed lunatic isolation, was never an autarky. The DPRK always had foreign goods, people and ideas—starting with Communism itself—flowing across its borders—the difference was in terms of degree.

Tariffs, immigration quotas, censorship, banking regulations, propaganda, environmental rules, cultural preferences or aversions, borders, police, armies, bureaucratic paperwork and all the other man-made obstacles to Tom Barnett’s "four flows" do not stop the transactions and interactions—they slow them down and limit them to an artificially narrow, politically chosen, rate.

I would therefore define globalization as "the general acceleration of the rate and widening of the parameters of exchange." When we discuss globalization’s effects we are looking at the results of a recent global increase in the speed and the range of human interactions compared to the past, thanks to trade liberalization, the internet, the fall of Communism and the other systemic changes of the last twenty years.

"Connectivity" might be a good way to express the degree to which a nation has maximized their possible rate and range of exchange—the UK is more "connected" than Russia, which in turn is more "connected” than Kazakhstan. If I was more able at quantitative analysis I could probably bat out a reasonably valid, rough and ready 100 point scale to measure a nation’s connectivity in terms of "the four flows" (Unfortunately "…this is a job for…Brad DeLong !" or at least somebody with a Ph.D in Econ). It could be plotted out on a bell curve and at a certain tipping point a nation could be considered "disconnected," which is where you would expect to find many states of the Gap. I would also include the movement of ideas as a "fifth flow" of globalization, particularly scientific ideas but Dr. Barnett was looking at globalization the prism of strategic American and Core interests—hence the movement of people, energy, money and security.

Next post I want to examine the PNM strategy as it relates to China’s connectivity as part of "The New Core". Four years ago, on the H-Diplo listserv, in a post called "The Coming of the Global Hypereconomy," I posited some observations regarding the potentially centrifugal effects of an uneven spread of connectivity with high rates of speed in a nation of the size of China. I'm not certain if I would be as pessimistic today but the post does retain a great deal of congruence.

All I can say is, this guy’s analysis really makes me overtly jealous! Like I was taking a nap or something when I wrote the book!

Again, ZenPundit extends the material, which is enormously exciting to any writer, but especially so to me, given my ambitions. To replace containment as a grand strategy, I needed to enunciate something so all-encompassing and yet fundamentally direct to people’s understanding of how the world works in this age that it could be both readily understood by layman while retaining its coherence under the sort of microscopic analytical deconstruction of the sort that ZenPundit offers. In short, it needs to be both very robust and very flexible, which is hard, because robustness in theory is usually bought at the price of rigidity (great theory, until the crucial flaw is discovered and then it all comes tumbling down). That is why I purposely chose the language of information technology, proving yet again that PNM really began as a serious theorizing effort when I got involved with the Y2K debate (see, Star Trek didn’t teach me everything!).

Other than his fundamental sloppiness with certain aspects of punctuation, I really don’t have any critical comments to offer here on ZenPundit’s exploration of the book. It is quite thrilling to watch someone locate so much “room” inside your thinking, especially when he arrives from the left versus the usual right. Simply put, Mark made my entire weekend during a period in my life when tension is rising.

Which gets me to the reason for this trip: going to NYC to get the visas for myself and Vonne for our upcoming trip to China (so you can imagine how interested I am in ZenPundit’s next post!). The whole adoption process is really just as tense and draining as a pregnancy. I don’t offer that from a women’s perspective, because I don’t have any, but from the prospective of the dad who has lived through both methods now—biological and adoption.

I know, I know, I have a long way to go on this one still—literally. But I have to say, the process provides “both pain and delight” (another ST reference) in measures approaches even the difficult biological pregnancy (as our third one was).

So dad is off to NYC to go through the expedited, same-day visa service at the Chinese Consulate on 12th Street in Manhattan. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Mom sweats out the final notice from our agency about our actual travel dates (so many summer camps to cancel, so little time).

Here’s the weekend catch:

Iraq: the real transformation begins

“Reporting And Surviving, Iraq’s Dangers: Only when Iraq calms down will it become clear how well its most critical moments were covered,” by Ian Fisher, New York Times, 18 July, p. WK1.

“Two Bombings Aimed at the New Government Kill at Least 6 Iraqis,” by Ian Fisher, NYT, 18 July, p. A10.

“U.S. Diplomat Starts New Job By Deferring to the Iraqis,” by Somini Sengupta, NYT, 18 July, p. A10.

“In Slow Steps, Iraqis Take Their Places in the Ranks of Security Forces,” by Somini Sengupta, NYT, 18 July, p. A11.

“An Elite Squad of Iraqi Soldiers Tests Its Newfound Autonomy,” by Ian Fisher, NYT, 18 July, p. A11.

“In Iraq War, Death Also Comes To Soldiers in Autumn of Life,” by Edward Wyatt, NYT, 18 July, p. A1.

How about a Department for the Gap?

“Never Again, No Longer? Post-9/11, humanitarian intervention has gone out of fashion, and the people of Darfur are paying the price,” by James Traub, New York Times Magazine, 18 July, p. 17.

“Despite Appeals, Chaos Still Stalks the Sudanese,” by Marc Lacey, NYT, 18 July, p. A1.

“9/11 Report Is Said to Urge New Post For Intelligence: C.I.A. and Other Agencies Likely to Fight Idea of Cabinet Job,” by Philip Shenon, NYT, 17 July, p. A1.

The great race between India and China

“A Young American Outsources Himself to India,” by Amy Waldman, NYT, 17 July, p. A4.

“How a Technology Gap Helped China Win Jobs: Beijing moves quickly to overcome India’s advantages in software development,” by William J. Holstein, NYT, 18 July, p. BU9.

“In Fire, Striving India Town Finds Dangers on Path to Modernization,” by David Rohde, NYT, 18 July, p. A1.

“Editor’s Death Raises Questions About Change in Russia,” by C. J. Chiver, Erin E. Arvedlund and Sophia Kishkovsky, NYT, 18 July, p. A3.

Nicholas Kristof at his best

“Jesus and Jihad: Massacres of non-Christians draw a crowd,” by Nicholas D. Kristof, NYT, 17 July, p. A25.

Iraq: the real transformation begins

“Reporting And Surviving, Iraq’s Dangers: Only when Iraq calms down will it become clear how well its most critical moments were covered,” by Ian Fisher, New York Times, 18 July, p. WK1.

“Two Bombings Aimed at the New Government Kill at Least 6 Iraqis,” by Ian Fisher, NYT, 18 July, p. A10.

“U.S. Diplomat Starts New Job By Deferring to the Iraqis,” by Somini Sengupta, NYT, 18 July, p. A10.

“In Slow Steps, Iraqis Take Their Places in the Ranks of Security Forces,” by Somini Sengupta, NYT, 18 July, p. A11.

“An Elite Squad of Iraqi Soldiers Tests Its Newfound Autonomy,” by Ian Fisher, NYT, 18 July, p. A11.

“In Iraq War, Death Also Comes To Soldiers in Autumn of Life,” by Edward Wyatt, NYT, 18 July, p. A1.

I’ve blogged in the recent past about how I think we’ve reached a real tipping point in Iraq with the political handover to the interim Iraqi government. Today’s Sunday NYT offers a slew of supporting arguments, I would argue.

Here’s the opening paras from the first article, an insightful piece from Ian Fisher in the Times’ Week in Review section:

We were cornered last week by a few dozen members of the Mahdi Army, the violent and unpredictable militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite Muslim cleric Moktada al-Sadr. They were yelling at us—it seemed like all of them at once, these poor, angry young men who two months ago would have chased us away or worse. But this time, the screaming was not about the injustices of America or the glory of jihad but about . . . about . . . about their high school final exams.

“We studied!” bellowed Mahdi Kazal, 20, who wants to study communications (and whose other vision of the future included a threat to kill the new Iraqi minister of education). “There is no water. There is no electricity. But we studied!”

This is the sort of moment that a reporter dreams of stumbling upon, because it was surprising and revealing. But as the violence in Iraq spiked this spring, such scenes had become largely off-limits to Western reporters because it was just too risky to wander around watching the new era in Iraq unfold.

It turned out that many Shiite high school students in Baghdad had flunked final exams, leaving them blocked from applying to college, because of suspected cheating. They said that the accusations were trumped up: that the new government was cracking down on Mr. Sadr by punishing his young followers.

Whatever this says about the Mahdi Army, it was an instructive moment for me, as a reporter here. The young men in the slum of Sadr City were approaching us. We did not feel threatened. They wanted to talk, and not just about the evil of America. They were talking about their futures.

Scenes like this tell you that something in Iraq has shifted, even if it is unclear exactly what or for how long. In the last few weeks, since the new Iraqi government took over, the hair-trigger tension has slackened, and many Iraqis are permitting themselves the luxury of hope in the midst of a long and unpleasant occupation.

That can be the description of an important tipping point, or it can describe yet another—but far slower—descent into disconnectedness. Much will depend now on the economic largesse of the Core—never a good bet.

The other stories speak to themes I’ve raised earlier: that the violence will increasingly be directed at the Iraqi government itself, raising the uncomfortable issue—for the insurgents—of Iraqi-on-Iraqi war. You can call the government “puppets” all you want, but when you’re being egged on by foreign terrorists like Zarqawi, at some point you have to start asking yourself what is the point of Iraqis killing other Iraqis to either please or piss off foreign powers.

More and more it will become harder to justify the violence strictly in terms of the “occupiers.” Our new ambassador John Negroponte will have a profile several godheads lower than Uber-chief Paul Bremer, and as Iraqi troops start doing more and more of the patrols, they end up taking more of the bullets and making more of the kills.

The tipping points won’t all be on their side, however, as the occupation will inevitably change us as much or more than our enemies. Already, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the tenor of our boots on the ground as this occupation pulls in more and more reservists, who tend to fit my Sys Admin description quite well: older, more educated, married with children.

When they bring grandpa home in a body bag, you know we’re waging a different sort of war this time around—both in terms of the motivation of those on the front lines and the suffering back home that their lost lives trigger.

How about a Department for the Gap?

“Never Again, No Longer? Post-9/11, humanitarian intervention has gone out of fashion, and the people of Darfur are paying the price,” by James Traub, New York Times Magazine, 18 July, p. 17.

“Despite Appeals, Chaos Still Stalks the Sudanese,” by Marc Lacey, NYT, 18 July, p. A1.

“9/11 Report Is Said to Urge New Post For Intelligence: C.I.A. and Other Agencies Likely to Fight Idea of Cabinet Job,” by Philip Shenon, NYT, 17 July, p. A1.

Every time the U.S. engages in anything resembling nation-building, there is a huge recoiling from the effort—within the Pentagon, within the U.S. political system, and within American society writ large. It happened after Vietnam and stuck with us for a couple of decades. But it also happened ever so predictably after Somalia, then Haiti, and it tinged every decision we made across the years in the Balkans.

Just as predictable as the negative reactions to the actual efforts are the non-interventions that follow: like our cut-rate Reagan Doctrine of the 1980s where we sold rebels arms and did nothing else, or our blind eye regarding the “killing fields” of Pol Pot in Cambodia, or our ignoring of the Balkans for so many years, and our general indifference to Africa in general, or our complete non-registering of that half-a-Holocaust that was the dictator-fueled famine in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea in the late 1990s.

God forbid we ever act unilaterally!

The Sudan situation today is just the latest hand-wringer for humanitarian interventionalists—or Democrats with a conscious. These debates are all the same: lots of whining about doing something, brave talk about sanctions and other diplomatic bullshit, and then stone-cold silence when the reality sets in that if you want to stop the disaster you’re going to have to send in somebody with guns to stop the bad guys from doing that voodoo that they do so well—whatever the particular incarnation is.

If we are ever going to get serious about really winning a global war on terrorism, we’ll realize that shrinking the Gap is what deserves a new cabinet-level post, not some intell weenie who can run around Richard-Clarke-like, screaming about the end of the world or the sky is falling!

Creating a cabinet-level czar for intell will solve nothing. It’ll just create someone new, right below the President, to hear a load of conflicting advice and caveats from a dysfunctional CIA and its lesser includeds. That new cabinet position will be all about making America feel good about itself, as if 9/11 and the global war on terrorism was all about us! Our feelings! Our fears! Our needs!

A new Department of Everything Else to go with our stellar Department of War would say to the rest of the world: you matter. But that would be too much of a leap of bureaucratic faith, we are told (even by someone as astute as Sebastian Mallaby writing for the Post recently). No, instead of what we really need to interact with the outside world better, we’re going to get a Chicken-Little-in-Chief.

God help us if we get that numbskull Gary Hart in the job, or even worse, our man with the white bed sheet over his head—Richard Clarke.

You think John Ashcroft is scary, Michael Moore? You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen Richard Clarke as the new Intell Czar.

The great race between India and China

“A Young American Outsources Himself to India,” by Amy Waldman, New York Times, 17 July, p. A4.

“How a Technology Gap Helped China Win Jobs: Beijing moves quickly to overcome India’s advantages in software development,” by William J. Holstein, NYT, 18 July, p. BU9.

“In Fire, Striving India Town Finds Dangers on Path to Modernization,” by David Rohde, NYT, 18 July, p. A1.

“Editor’s Death Raises Questions About Change in Russia,” by C. J. Chiver, Erin E. Arvedlund and Sophia Kishkovsky, NYT, 18 July, p. A3.

Neat story about the native American who goes to India looking for a career. You can really tell when a country joins the Core, because then you see fresh young graduates heading there from America itself, in a sort of reverse “new world” phenomenon.

But if India is starting to attract that reverse flow today, China has been doing it for a while, as we’ve seen in previous stories about mid-career types leaving their staid U.S. surroundings for the rough-and-tumble world of China. Heck, remember all those stories about the “wild west” Russia attracting all sorts of adventurers across the 1990s.

The difference with India, though, is telling. This guy isn’t going back to carve out some new industry or sector amidst a “wild west” atmosphere of tectonic shifts. He’s going there for a sense of long-term career opportunity. In Russia, the right sort of questioning attitude in business can still get you a bullet in the head, whereas in India, if enough people ask the same question, you’ll get a peaceful shift in ruling parties (something that’s still hard to imagine in either Russia or China).

So yes, Putin’s got things under control in Moscow and the fourth-generation of Party leaders seem firmly entrenched in red-hot China that is poised to supplant India as THE great back office to the Old Core any day now, but India’s got a rule set that the other two emerging pillars of the New Core do not: they can rotate not just leaders but entire ruling parties, and that speaks to a stability for long-term business that suggests that India’s future may be far brighter than either Russia’s or China’s.

And yes, I see that brighter future at work whenever I read some Triangle-Fire-like story like the one about the private school in India, where almost 100 kids were killed in a disaster that any well-functioning fire code would have prevented. In a situation like that, it’s better to see rules rolling in rather than heads rolling off, as we’d be more likely to see in a China or Russia. In China, the old doc who blew the whistle on the government’s SARS cover-up is getting his mind “reeducated”—one painful day at a time. In Russia, Forbes is looking for a new editor brave enough to write about corruption while wearing a flak jacket.

In India, you’ll see an explosion of government regulations regarding fire codes. Rules will hold sway, not reeducation nor revenge killings.

That’s not to say India doesn’t have its own set of problems, just that it’s farther along in synching its internal rule sets with the emerging global rule sets associated with globalization than either Russia or China is. India rarely gets much credit for that, but frankly, its why India was never seriously mentioned inside the Pentagon since the end of the Cold War as a potential “near-peer competitor” of the U.S., whereas both “resurgent Russia” (in the early 1990s) and “rising China” (since the Taiwan Straits crises of the mid-1990s) frequently were/are.

Good rules, good neighbors—inside this growing Core of the global economy.

Security types now like to crow that America has a “border” with Iraq. Well, we’ve had one with India for a lot longer. We just didn’t notice.

Nicholas Kristof at his best

“Jesus and Jihad: Massacres of non-Christians draw a crowd,” by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, 17 July, p. A25.

Brilliant piece from Nick Kristof, who is just hitting his stride as an op-ed columnist, which means he’s about five years from deteriorating into the painful predictability of a Tom Friedman who’s increasingly trapped by his own mega-celebrity.

But for now, I say just enjoy him for all he’s worth.

This piece is about the “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic novels that have sold like hotcakes for years now, even though the entire phenomenon is largely ignored by the establishment press like the Times.

Kristof’s point is a simple one: imagine how America would interpret a publishing phenomenon in the Middle East in which a bestselling series of fictional novels exploring a religious-inspired “end times” theme—say, based in the Koran vice the Bible—culminates in a final book whereby Mohammed comes back to earth and makes every non-Muslim “infidel” explode in flames at the very sound of his voice. Do ya think we might find such a social phenom more than a bit scary?

Well, imagine how the rest of the world might interpret America in light of the unprecedented popularity of the “Left Behind” books.

And then ask yourself if President Bush doesn’t simply give (some of ) us what we really want whenever he lets slip the “C” word.