Here is the most absurd reductionism: "If we fail in Iraq, then that proves disconnectedness is not the problem, and that all attempts to cure that through connecting failed or rogue regimes will trigger greater threat."

That's like saying, if this course of chemo doesn't work, the cancer isn't real.

I have a diagnosis and a prescribed cure. The latter has yet to be adequately explored, but that failure to date doesn't negate the diagnosis. It just means the research continues.

The difference between my vision and Robb's is that I can live with both failure and success. Robb needs bad things to happen, or he has neither diagnosis nor cure.

I could have structured my vision so. I just eschew that angle as inevitable fear mongering. Plus, I chose not to spend my life hoping that bad things will happen. Just not my chosen shtick.

That's not to unduly criticize Robb (I don't remember making any "John is ..." statements, which is what constitutes ad hominen). He's has a lot of good thinking, and being in the business I'm in, I'll never argue against exploring the dark side. I just argue for realizing that's exactly what you're doing when you're doing it. You are not exploring the totality of things. You are not seeing both yin and yang. And the danger comes when people start interpreting your work as comprehensive when it is not. That's basically my problem with Robert Kaplan and (sometimes) Ralph Peters: great stuff, but too often lacking context. If you're going to spot a weakness, you have to be able to spot the corresponding strength. The duality is always there.

I came to this conclusion early in my career and it was vastly re-enforced with Y2K: you can't strategize futures where you put all your marbles is having only bad things happen. If you catch yourself secretly delighted whenever there's something bad happening, you're not seeing the whole picture, and you're contaminating your vision. You have to have enough scope so that both good and bad can be taken with equanimity. Inevitabily, that means coming up with a long-term vision of sustained improvement on today's reality, because that's the history of mankind. If your vision is about how the world is "entering the new phase" of this or that disastrous reality, then you're basically short-terming the future, like some gold-hawker on cable TV. Deep down, those people know they're always wrong, but they spend a lot of time working to convince themselves and you that they're not.

To me, that's living on the churn. Fine for making money, just like on Wall Street. And if that's all I wanted to do, I'd make shitloads without really trying.

But I like really trying. I like trying as hard as possible for the best possible outcomes. When things go well, I'm happy as hell. And when go bad, I'm more determined than ever to find the way ahead. I find this mindset goes well with the vast majority of the military--saving the intell types. Not surprisingly, the darkest visions of the future typically arise fromt that community. Why? There again, they are tasked only to look at the downside. Do that enough, and you become intellectually stunted by that pursuit, like the diagnostician who only sees autistic kids so she sees autism everywhere she looks (just went through that one with Vonne Mei).

Grand strategy is for general practitioners--by design.

By all means, enjoy the dark side philosophers. I do myself. I just always try to remember their limitations, and to put their criticisms of my vision into some larger context.

Iraq proves a lot of things: that pretend states, once tapped, tend to fall into their constituent parts; and that some of those parts will do better than others (Kurds versus Sunnis, for example). It also proves that states cannot be created out of thin air, as some believe, but that they need to be grown. Growing states almost solely out of fear (security) is awfully hard, and typically pretty ugly. When states grow successfully, it's almost always overwhelming a private-sector driven economic function, as in, the more transactions, the more we need a good government/state to regulate them to the benefit of all. Frankly, that's how America grew up, despite our myths.

Iraq has not been allowed to develop any sort of economic critical mass. There is just too much bad blood to be explored by too many of the population, plus there are outsiders more than happy to push that agenda--for now. If we fail enough and the enemy succeeds enough, you can have yourself a nice little Lebanon that drags on for decades. But even Lebanon came back, now didn't it? And the way it came back was driven by positive connectivity with the outside world.

To say Iraq proves anything beyond Iraq is to miss a huge historical example staring us in the face: Dayton ten years later. Where are the huge losses there? Where is the out-of-control destructiveness of increased connectivity?

Was it perfect? No. But ten years later, how we handled the Balkans looks awfully good in comparison to the failures of this administration to effectively socialize not just the threat of Iraq but its ultimate solution set.

And all that proves is that Bush is better at dividing than uniting--plain and simple.

I say, run with that judgment all you want (I did in my last column), but don't pretend it speaks volumes to the future.