Merc-wear

USAID guy who chaired my panel sees me out of suit at end of conference and spurts out, "Hey, you're in your merc-wear!"

My reply: "When I'm with the mil, I just try to blend in!"

What is merc-wear?

Black slacks (special travel pants), black nylon T, and khaki multi-pocketed sleeveless vest over--oh so very Blackwater.

I've actually dressed like this for years on the road: the equivalent of a woman's basic black dress and a utilitarian overcoat. You're never quite too-under-dressed but you're also ready for just about anything.

But I had to laugh. It took a USAIDer to make that connection visually for me.

The payoff is where you find it

Travel all the way to HI to speak for only 30 mins and do 30 Q&A?

Well, the audience is the leadership of Special Ops Forces throughout Asia, to include the Chinese again for only second time, so that's enough influence-spreading to justify the trip in itself.

But the real pay-off (beyond the numerous side conversations) is to sit through the two-dozen 4-minute report-out PPTs delivered by the team leaders from the break-out groups populated by all these SOF officers from around Asia. It's one big brainstorming dump from the world's most talented military officers on a host of interagency and international issues.

Got several columns and a bunch of ideas for Vol. III. An incredibly privileged learning experience, for which the price of entry was--quite naturally--my own teaching session.

My brief (only 12 slides) was well-received, meaning I got about 90 percent of the questions from the audience on my 3-person panel. But I also got into a yelling match with a very angry American official from the Office of Secretary of Defense/Special Ops and Lower Intensity Conflict, and since SOLIC is sort of Special Ops's civilian masters, I sort of bite the hand that feeds me (this gig at least).

Oh well, if I burned an OSD bridge this late in an administration, it's not so bad. If it is, then PASOC simply won't invite me back a third time.

Still, I don't consider it a good talk if somebody ain't pissed off enough in the audience to blow their stack ....

Still, it was weird to see a USG official lose it like that in an official forum. I felt embarrassed for the guy.

From the Pacific Special Ops Command conference

+ It's so basic and trite, and yet I found the same thing to be true about 95 percent of Gappish Alaska: simply put, the Gap has few good maps. The Gap does not know what it does not know. The original transparency is a good map, and for much of the Gap, there are no good maps.

When I say "maps," I mean any map that charts anything. You can't figure out how much you're losing until you realize what you have.

+ BTW, I was brought to PASOC to talk about the future of interagency ...

And yeah, the DoEE is a real concept because it addresses real needs.

You want traction?

Doesn't get any more real than these operators when it comes to the Long War.

Alaska-Russia ties: tip of the iceberg

ARTICLE: Russia Plans World's Longest Tunnel, a Link to Alaska, By Yuriy Humber and Bradley Cook, Bloomberg, April 18, 2007

Interesting. I heard the bridge concept when up in Alaska, but the tunnel seems--if you can believe it--more feasible given the tough seas (ever watch "Deadliest Catch" on A&E?).

With arctic ice melting due to global warming, the intermodal ties between America (meaning Alaska) and Russia will skyrocket in the next quarter-century.

This--pun intended--is just tip of the iceberg.

Thanks to Joseph Gallagher for sending this.

Iran: more Brezhnev and soft kill

ARTICLE: Culture War, By Azar Nafisi, New Republic 13/4/07, Apr 17, 2007

What this reinforces to me is how similar Iran today is to late Brezhnevian USSR, especially the bit about the main preoccupation of the population being day-to-day survival in depressing economic times.

As a revolution fails ever more pervasively at home, you always see more soaring revolutionary rhetoric abroad and more expansive--but equally as ineffective--efforts at fomenting political change abroad. This is the history of Cuba under Castro and it becomes the inevitable history of Venezuela under that buffoon Chavez.

In the end, the soft-kill connectivity option is far more powerful than we realize, given the internal weaknesses.

Economic connectivity for the masses is the best route to marginalizing political elites.

Don't believe? Then you're just another blind guy feeling up the Chinese elephant.

Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this.

Democracy will not survive premature birth

OP-ED: An errant push for democracy first: In Iraq, the U.S. has failed to heed Woodrow Wilson’s lesson of self-determination. Instead, dysfunctional borders merely cement foreign policy failures of the past, By Ralph Peters, USA Today, April 18, 2007

Brilliant bit by Peters to remind us of the sequencing here. Democracy, simply put, doesn't come first, self-actualization does. If nations feel unbirthed or aborted by history, there's no hope in pushing democracy prematurely.

Fake states to real states, then democracy becomes possible, if driven by connectivity that empowers the masses.

Next step: invest blood

ARTICLE: In a Major Step, Saudi Arabia Agrees to Write Off 80 Percent of Iraqi Debt, By Steven Mufson and Robin Wright, Washington Post, April 18, 2007; Page A18

Nice move by the House of Saud, but in keeping with their tendency toward limiting their involvement to treasure only, there's only so far they can go with this approach.

My prediction? You won't have real Middle Eastern piece until the Saudis start spending blood too.

Thanks to Vonne for sending this.

Speaking on Interagency today...

in Honolulu at Pacific Special Operations Command's annual regional conference.

See if you can spot the reproducible strategic concept:

Allegation: what Tom says 'war' in the ME is REALLY about

Google tipped me off to this post from yesterday on Islamic Forum by thezman, one of the IF Guardians.

The answer: 'taking out opponents of "Globalization" (Islam) and making the M.E safe for Israel'.

Man, I missed that.

The same post points to the famous C-SPAN video from Tom's presentation at the NDU in June 2004, broadcast Labor Day weekend, now uploaded to Google Video. It doesn't take a writing analysis to guess that thezman uploaded it.

He recommends watching it until his readers have it memorized so they know what the 'Global Elites' are planning.

I guess it's good to have it up on Google Video...

How to win Iraq's civil war when three makes a target?

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "Violence Beyond Baghdad: Once-Peaceful Towns Pay Price of Security Push," by Philip Shishkin, Wall Street Journal, 16 April 2007, p. A6.

Excellent piece that puts our dilemma on full display: to bring stability we need to crack down on both Sunni and Shiia militias, but taking that fight to both takes the fight to more peripheral towns previously spared suh violence.

The end result too often? We piss off locals and often end up uniting Sunni and Shiia to fight us instead.

Thus the definitions of "winning" and "losing" must be recast, yes?

Putin's economic success creates his own political challenges

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "Crackdown Galvanizes Foes of Putin: Arrests, Beatings of Protesters May Unify Kremlin Opponents Ahead of Presidential Elections," by Alan Cullison and Guy Chazan, Wall Street Journal, 16 April 2007, p. A4.

Honestly, if I were to say read one column and one column only in the MSM, it would be the WSJ's "Politics & Economics." Since I don't always label it so, you probably don't realize that I cite it far more than anything or anyone else.

Great piece here that shows Putin's heavy hand on politics inevitably engenders resistance. For a while, the rising incomes and investments will keep most off the playing field, given the tumultuous 1990s, but those memories will fade and as economic confidence rises, so too will political demands for freedom.

It probably won't happen this election, but quite possibly during the administration of Putin's successor.

Good stuff to see, even better to track.

Don't worry. I keep all the 2x2 matrices in my head now.

That's what I want to teach in Vol. III.

The generational shift on global warming is everything

ARTICLE: "Moment of Truth," by Jerry Adler, Newsweek, 16 April 2007, p. 45.

A Harvard oceanographer is lambasted in a torrent of emails for saying he doesn't believe in worst-case scenarios for global warming, not because he doesn't believe the data, but because "we can't be that stupid."

Makes sense to me.

This dialogue of hyping-to-trigger-delayed-action is an old one on the subject of the environment. The "boiling frog" must be induced to jump, so goes the logic.

And yet we see the same, slow-but-steady change pattern on subject after subject (drunk driving, smoking, recycling, etc.): teach the children well and within a generation's time, they end up teaching society on the subject.

Everyone thinks it's the weighty tomes, but frankly, it's the kids stories.

If you've visited a kindergarten lately (I had one last year and 1-to-maybe-2 to go), you know what I'm talking about. If you watch a lot of Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network or PBS, you know what I'm talking about.

Note to self: lotsa kids help your grand strategic vision.

Here's the kicker line from the piece:

"Suddenly CEOs were expressing genuine concern about this issue, not just, 'Can you get these people off our back?'" Over and over again [activist Paul Hawken] heard a variation on the same story: CEO's daughter comes home from college and says, Dad, we can't be that stupid.

Indeed, this is the vignette I hear over and over again from congressmen on China once the daughter comes back from her MBA-summer-abroad in Shanghai.

And the children shall lead ...

And I get more psyched to write Vol. III.

East meets East in MLB

ARTICLE: "Matsuzaka Comes Home to a Far East Reunion," by Jack Curry, New York Times, 12 April 2007, p. C16..

Matsuzaka faces Suzuki in the continuation of their battle: Ichiro, arguably one of the greatest hitters in MLB histoy, has never fared well against Daisuke.

Oh yes MLB's turning Japanese!

More Asianification of America's pasttime, but it's so poetic and so representative of the overwhelmingly positive influence the U.S. had on Asia's rise over the past half-century (reduced by some vertical thinkers solely to the Vietnamese war).

This story reminds me of what I wrote about the NBA in BFA: both went east and south for new talent, or primarily to the New Core. The NBA went more Sov bloc east, while MLB went more Far East.

Either way, the result is the same: a truly international sport.

The New Core sets the new rules on stem cells

ARTICLE: "In Brazil, a Deadly Bug Spurs a Stem-Cell Project: In a Debated Study, 1,200 Patients Will Get Their Own Marrow," by Antonio Ragalado, Wall Street Journal, 11 April 2007, p. A1.

Fascinating piece on how Brazil pioneers stem-cell therapies for Chagas disease (you've probably never heard of it unless you donate blood; it involves an enlargening of the heart) that involve shooting them right into arteries.

Here's the underlying reason:

For Brazil, a developing country of 190 million people, the stem-cell study is a bid to develop affordable treatments. Unlike pricey medecines that poor countries can't afford, there's no patent on bone marrow and the infusions don't rely on foreign technology.

One doc calls it a "poor man's cell therapy."

Most new rules from New Core states can be described thusly.

Brazil isn't the only country doing this. America, Finland, Denmark, Austria and Poland are also listed in the piece, but what's interesting is how its project targets a disease that mostly afflicts the poor through bites by face "kissing bugs."

Think about Brazil's push on cheap AIDS triple-cocktails and fighting America's cotton subsidies in the WTO and you see the pattern.

Why can't the IMF become the rescuer of first resort?

OP-ED: "What's Left for the IMF? Developing countries are increasingly eschewing the Fund's 'help,"' by Adam Lerrick, Wall Street Journal, 13 April 2007, p. A13.

Decent piece that starts well by describing how New Core economies have grown past the currency crises of the 1990s (yet another global trend that was to last forever--except it didn't) and thus don't need IMF help anymore, but then ends weakly by suggesting the IMF sell off its gold to self-finance now that it's no longer in the business of being the '"lender of last resort."

Much like the World Bank, the IMF is facing an identity crisis in Globalization IV (2001 and counting) and struggles to reinvent itself.

But with post-conflict and post-situations dotting the Gap, why not refocus on that needy bunch?

Or Goldfinger can sell off his stock and call it a millennium ...

Please help Sean gather up any writings/posts people have done regarding the Department of Everything Else (or anything like it)

I don't plan to write on it per se in Vol III except to explore its practicality in more depth, so this would be helpful.

Any and all material welcome!

Three levels of overlapping processes

ARTICLE: Why I Declined To Serve, By John J. Sheehan, Washington Post, April 16, 2007; Page A17

Good version (the three levels) of what I was trying to describe in the NPR interview about overlapping processes.

Self-imposed worst strategic circumstances

OP-ED: Resolve to Be Ambivalent, By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, New Yokr Times, April 15, 2007

What I've been saying for a while in posts and two columns (utility of split government and the difference between commitment and dedication): Bush and Cheney have the twin problems of telegraphing their punches and then sticking to their guns when the fight's moved on.

More ambivalence (adjust now or get screwed later--same difference to globalization's march) and more self-confidence (time is clearly on our side) would be most welcome.

It's time to stop waging the Big Bang under the--self-imposed--worst strategic circumstances.

Pop!Tech links

The following weblogs mentioned Tom's Pop!Tech talk:

+ The Pop!Tech Blog

+ kottke.org

+ Hot soup in my eye

+ pamc

+ designverb

+ Community Mobilization

+ Savory Times

+ dan collier

Transcript from Barnett/Bartnett/Burnett interview on NPR

Here's the transcript, made available, according to the site, because of "intense interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

When I speak from the center, they call me Barnett. When more from the right, it's Bartnett (bit harsher), and then the more supplicating Burnet when my inner lefty speaks.

I know that's a lot of coding, but it's crucial and I wouldn't ask NPR to employ it if I didn't think it was useful.

More seriously, I'm never happy with transcripts. I'm a bit of an elliptical talker, and while that can be engrossing to the ear, it doesn't come off so well on the posted page.

Show was entitled "The Middle East and U.S. Policy."

Go here for the audio.

I had a question about Turkey that they cut, unfortunately. Maybe another question or two (like where I explain the three fights I reference), as well.