ARTICLE: 'U.S. Falters In Bid to Boost Iraqi Business: Few Products Sold To American Firms,' By Josh White, Washington Post, August 24, 2007; Page A01

You could have easily predicted this article on the Pentagon's late-in-the-game effort to revive Iraqi factories from the moment the effort was launched more than a year ago: from the long pole in the tent being security and the hesitancy of American businesses to the personal blowback against its hard-charging, take-no-prisoners leader. This is why I advocate a new federal agency to manage this sort of effort: two weird for Defense and too hard for State. There has to be a new bureaucratic culture built, one that marries up to the new mindset embodied by the Army-Marine COIN doctrine (and yes, it was very cool to see Nagl on "The Daily Show"!).

Two points to keep in mind: First, there is southern Iraq and its insecurity and there is northern Iraq and it's strong will to escape that pathway--indeed,the very definition of a future Iraq.

Second when done right, Development-in-a-Box‚Ñ¢ begins like any normal penetration of an underdeveloped market post-whatever: first come the bottom-of-the-pyramid sellers (the imports thing, with the initial waves being the most basic stuff, like food and media), then come the bottom-of-the-pyramid scavenging investors and infrastructure builders (who need to spot the potential for long-term security (not its opposite), and then come the BOP "exploiters" of cheap labor and resources (the "sticky" foreign direct investment). In every phase, don't expect American businesses to take the lead. It's just not where we're comfortable on the food chain. So, by making this effort so focused on getting American companies involved, we've replicated the same strategic straightjacket on potential outcomes as we did by failing to enlist any New Core pillars in Iraq's postconflict stabilization and reconstruction ops.

As I have argued from the beginning: the SysAdmin needs to be more civilian than uniform, more USG than DoD, more private-sector fueled than public-sector funded, and more the rest of the world than America-only.

We can't connect Iraq to a global economy on our own any more than we can bring security to it absent some larger regional security regime designed to enable that path and--necessarily--several more.

Still, this is a good and valiant effort. Gotta crawl, and understand what it is to collect all those bumps, before you get up off the floor and learn to start walking.

Tragedy to some, a simple and inevitable learning process to those who think systematically across global futures.