Recent criticism

Mark ZenPundit Safranski beat Tom to the punch on criticizing William Lind's criticism of Tom's work.

In that post, Mark also linked John Robb's criticism of Tom: Contra Barnett. I'm most interested in pointing out Robb's work because it's so much more even-handed than Lind's. Furthermore, the comments get really good with Mark and Robb going back and forth constructively. We want to link rational discussions of Tom's work, including those viewpoints that disagree. Check it out.

Comments

[mark safranski]

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the link, much appreciated.

I enjoyed the back and forth with John Robb. Aside from his experience and perspective he clearly was very familiar with Tom's work and posed tough but fair questions.

What was really weird was Lind. If you read Lind's papers you'll notice some elements in 4GW that are congruent with PNM/BFA concepts - not everything by any measure but enough that the sections of overlap should be easily visible to anybody familiar with both. Aside from working very hard just to slam Tom, Lind does not really seem to " get" economics in general (unlike Robb) and he proceeded to do to PNM/BFA what he now accuses Echevarria of doing (and with some accuracy) to 4GW.

Very weird.

[Keith, Indy]

I found the whole thing quite confusing as the descriptions of Toms work didn't seem to match my own perceptions of it.

Maybe it's because I can seperate where Tom is trying to describe what is (Gap, Core) with what could be (A-Z ruleset) if the Core could sit down and cooperate. The Core has great incentives for doing so, and so, maybe a little to optimistically, I "buy" the vision. It is a game plan to work against. Won't be perfect, but nothing in life is.

I found the following discussion of interest as it starts taking the State Department down the path of what can we do to get better.

http://austinbay.net/blog/?p=851

[IJ]

The review by John Robb was interesting. He comments that it is worth "exploring the conditions favoring employment of a large Sys Admin force as well as indicators that the Core should use other approaches or maybe just stay out."

First things first. It's surely difficult to address these matters without thinking of the experience in Iraq. Most of the world seems unconvinced that the 'Leviathan' invasion of the sovereign nation was justified. As a consequence, US pleas for SysAdmin forces (boots on the ground from troop intensive countries in the developing world) have gone unanswered. The only rule-set was broken - the UN Charter.

[Steve G.]

There's an interesting post at the "Shrinkwrapped" blog, about "The paradox of liberalism in Wartime." (url follows) http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2006/01/the_paradox_of_.html

In it, the blogger comments about the difficulty in waging peace. I wonder how accurate the comments are in the article regarding the futility of attempting to conduct the sysadmin function. It's obviously damned hard, based on the work, money, and loss of life in Iraq. But I'm not sure it's futile, as the blogger seems to say.

[H. H. Gaffney]

Well, it tends to be over-simplified below.

The six-step procedure is, of course, fantastic. It seems modeled on Bosnia and Kosovo, and is not an unreasonable representation of what happened in those two places -- successfully, as it has turned out SO FAR, but without the great detail undertaken in each step.

It obviously didn't work in Iraq -- though we are told by the
Administration that everything is going great and that anything to the contrary is all the fault of the media. It seems like that Russell Kirk rule cited is working in spades in Iraq, per the polling.

But I have to disagree with the blanket statement that "the forces of disorder will be stronger, because they are driven by a factor Barnett dismisses, the spreading crisis of legitimacy of the state." It ain't that bad. First of all, there are not that many countries (I use that word instead of "state") that are failing -- a lot are in trouble, a lot need better management, but let us not forget that, per both the work at CIDCM at the University of Maryland and the Human Security Centre at the
University of British Columbia, the number of internal conflicts around the world is dropping like a stone. I have done my own count and can confirm it. And where the statement comes from that the "forces of disorder" are stronger than the "functioning core" comes from I can't
imagine. This is not a real description of the world today. There's a lot of talk about the world being "dangerous and uncertain," but that is more a reflection of the fact that it's getting into Washington's defense budget season (remember when the Soviets were stronger in all respects than the U.S. and the rest of the West?). We all live in fear of the next terrorist attack, to be sure. That does not mean they are
somehow bringing down "the state" and the whole world with it.

But the fiasco and disaster of Iraq seems very likely to cure the U.S. Government from trying something like that again in any near future. We haven't figured out how to apply any six-step procedure yet to Iraq, much less Iran. Maybe things are working a little better in Afghanistan, but we are not out of the woods there, either (there are practically no woods in Afghanistan).