Just about caught up to my life

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 16 September 2004

The time since we got back from China has been rather hellish in terms of scheduling. As I had expected, a ton of invitations for speaking engagements flowed into my email accounts while I was in China throughout most of August, and keeping track of what I said to whom got rather nightmarish as we kept switching cities every week. Then, when I got back to the office, there was the magnificent effort of trying to untangle all these dates, eventually saying no to a bunch of them and tying the rest up in bundles as best I could.

Then the C-SPAN broadcast hit and I spent a week doing almost nothing but email, right as my three oldest kids were getting back to school and we were adjusting to having a new baby in the house. Then, just as that cleared, a new wave of invitations started streaming in, both public and private (with the latter mostly being universities right now). Suffice it to say I am booking (both across the US and overseas) through April of '05 right now. Since I can't really rely on my admin guy at the college for help on anything beyond handling all my travel requirements, vouchers, etc., I am my own scheduler, which really makes me appreciate how nice it would be to have an assistant.

But, finally I am starting to get ahead of the curveójust a little bit. The yellow sticky notes around my screen in my office are slowly being reduced in number, and I've drastically cut down the number of times I've had to exclaim to my wife "Was I supposed to do that?" in recent days, so I'm starting to feel myself to be the master of my domain once again.

In general, I'm shifting away from the concerns of promoting the book (and all the media stuff that entails) and toward the promotion of the visionóor bureaucratic change that vision aspires to.

[BTW, right now I'm beating Niall Ferguson, Sam Huntington, and Bob Woodward on BarnesandNoble.com, and Lee Harris, John Lewis Gaddis and Walter Russell Mead on Amazon.com--not that I track the "comparables" obsessively or anything . . .]

I know, I know, so many reviews point out how "unrealistic" many of my ideas are, and yet somehow that doesn't stop various military commands, the Pentagon, the Joint Staff, the State Department, the national labs, and the intelligence community from issuing all these invitations for high-level briefs andóbetter yetódiscussions and informal advisory roles. As we planned with Putnam, the book is now just ripening in many policy and decision makers' minds as a serious road map for change during whatever transition emerges from this national election (to Bush II or Kerry I). So everybody who's inviting me across the USG is doing so with an eye to whatever strategic planning process they're currently working through. I don't pretend to have many answers (I didn't leave much out of the bookóthat was the whole point!), just a consistent framework for viewing the world and where U.S. national security policy should want to take that world.

Of course, having the capacity for real big-picture stuff not only puts you in high demand at moments like these, but it gets you all sorts of unwanted attention from those (like my TX admirer yesterday) who are more than certain that you're part of the global plot for . . . . somebody . . . . to rule the world. [I realize I should know who, but frankly, after you've been called all the names I've been called, you have a hard time remembering which side in this epic struggle you're supposed to be working forósigh!].

Good thing I handle ambivalence well . . .

Today I offer yet another review. This one is a second one from the Washington Times (no direct link to archives that charge). The first one was by Congressman Mac Thornberry (R-TX) back in early June, but apparently that wasn't considered either a formal review (although it listed the book title like one, it's actual title was "Rethinking Strategy") or the editors there decided that once was not enough. I know the author of this review vaguely, and his split verdict is typical of manyóbut not all, by any means--senior academics in the world of professional military education.

Following the review, hereís todayís catch:

■How Chechnya joined the GWOTóon the wrong side

■Iraq's new map

■The Gap is not a Muslim world (half-true)

■Russia's 9/11 (part 1) was just as ugly as ours

■When FDI comes a knockin' in the Gap

■Regime change in Japan: send in the lawyers!