The view from Anchorage

Looks like Tom will be speaking in Anchorage tonight.

The preview article headline annoys me: Hawk rethinks the war in Iraq: BARNETT: Former U.S. military strategist to speak at UAA.

After that, the article's actually pretty good, with some good usage of the weblog (which I always like).

The author says he tried to interview Tom by phone this week (Tom?) and that Tom teaches at the University of Tennessee (not precisely), but otherwise, it's pretty good. I'll copy it for you below.

Four years ago, former Defense Department strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett -- who'll lecture on global affairs tonight at UAA -- heartily endorsed Bush administration plans to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein.

His reasons for doing so had less in common with Bush's originally stated purpose for the invasion -- to seize Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and disrupt its purported ties with the terrorist group al-Qaida -- than with the president's later rationale of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

As Barnett argued in an influential March 2003 Esquire magazine article ("Let me tell you why military engagement with Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable but good"), it wasn't the most powerful nations in the world that America had to fear; it was some of the most dispossessed. It wasn't Russia or China; it was the "disconnected" Third World nations that weren't part of the global economy and refused to play by global rules.

And if they had leaders, such as Hussein in Iraq or Kim Jong-il in North Korea, who were preventing their citizens from joining the "functioning core" majority of nations in the

West, those leaders needed to be removed -- by us if by no one else. He warned that it wouldn't be easy.

"As baby-sitting jobs go, this one will be a doozy, making our lengthy efforts in postwar Germany and Japan look simple in retrospect," Barnett wrote in his article, which he later expanded into a book, "The Pentagon's New Map" (2004), that became popular with military leaders. "But it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it."

Four years and $600 billion in U.S. war spending later, with more than 3,200 dead American soldiers, even former supporters of the Bush doctrine of waging "pre-emptive wars" are beginning to wonder: Is the U.S. Treasury really such a bottomless well? Aren't their limits to America's all-volunteer Army?

In his subsequent book, "Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating," published in fall 2005 -- 2 1/2 years into the war -- Barnett criticized the Bush administration for bungling the peace in Iraq (by cutting expenses and failing to send in more troops, among other things), though he still saw other opportunities around the world for "core" nation-building, ideally this time with more multilateral support.

A review of that second book in Publishers Weekly, however, described it as "an unconvincing brief" for more U.S. interventionism, wherein "American and allied troops -- a 'pistol-packing Peace Corps' -- could, he contends, undertake an ambitious schedule of regime change, stabilization and reconstruction in Islamic countries and as far afield as North Korea and Venezuela."

Responding in his blog, Barnett dismissed the critique as "a truly pinheaded review" that missed his central point -- that we now live in a post-9/11 world that forces us to cope with new exigencies.

"I have to get used to this sort of review, which is essentially the anti-Bush doctrine/anti-neocon/anti-Iraq review," he wrote then. (Efforts to interview Barnett by telephone this week weren't successful.)

But in his most recent blog postings, Barnett -- who now teaches at the University of Tennessee and writes a nationally syndicated column -- seems to have evolved as well.

"On second thought," he wrote Monday, writing in support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's scheduled trip to Syria, "why shouldn't Congress have a foreign policy of its own? Hell, Bush doesn't have any. ... So I say to Nancy on her road to Damascus: 'You go, girl!' Hilarious to hear Cheney decry the 'self-described strategists on the Hill.' If we had any real ones in this administration, he'd never hear a peep out of any of those guys and gals.

"I think back to the depths of Clinton's administration, and I was never this embarrassed over our standing in the world."

Daily News reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com.

LECTURE: Thomas P.M. Barnett will speak at 7 tonight in Room 101 of Rasmuson Hall at UAA. It's free and open to the public.