Violence is decreasing per capita

ARTICLE: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, by Steven Pinker

Nice article on a point I've been making in my brief going back to 1996: the further you go back in history, the more per capita violence you find--pure and simple.

This is a good examination of that grand historical trend. I'm not sure I buy the notion that we soft scientists needed some biologist to clue us in. After all, Pinker's conclusions are based on data from "soft" fields like poli sci that have been compiled for decades. People just like absolute numbers more than relative ones.

Still, every bit helps when you fight the hype.

Thanks to Nathan Machula for sending this.

No big surprise on Iranian hostages

Tehran makes its point, gets its attention, and now seems reasonable and merciful in comparison to the West and local crazies.

In the end, a pure PR exercise and another example of Iran's proxy warfare against our proxies--just like last August.

No harm, no fouls, no progress.

Just more disrespect for the post-presidency of Bush.

I think Kim will end like Ceauscescu

ARTICLE: N Korea envoys 'keeping children', BBC, 3 April 2007

Hmmm. Makes you wonder about what else is escaping Kim's control right now in the DPRK.

I do think Kim's end will be like Ceausescu's--sudden and swift.

Thanks to Michael Griffin for sending this.

Rudy is speaking my language

ARTICLE: The Unlikely Frontrunner: Is the GOP in for a Rudy awakening?, by Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard, 04/09/2007, Volume 012, Issue 29

Foreign policy excerpt:

The question of temperament is particularly pertinent given the great stress Giuliani's supporters place on his possible leadership in the war on terror. Every activist I spoke with at CPAC who supported Giuliani told me they did so because of their certainty that when it comes to America's jihadist enemies, the former mayor will, in the words of one eager young CPAC delegate, "kick butt and take names." And kill them, too, presumably. It would be a great irony--and perfectly in keeping with the traditional illogic of Republican electoral strategies--if Republicans determined that foreign policy was the premiere issue in the 2008 election and then nominated a candidate who, like Giuliani, has no official foreign policy experience at all.

Giuliani spends a good deal of every stump speech stressing the need for America "to stay on offense" in the war on terror. His precise conception of that war, and his approach to foreign affairs in general, is harder to pin down. To the extent that he's amplified his view of the terror war, it seems much closer to the economic determinism of the moderate realist school than to the notorious butt-kicking strategy of the neoconservative warrior class. Indeed, he says the "war on terror" is itself a misnomer; he prefers the term "the terrorists' war on us," which does sound rather more defensive.

"Americans hate war," he recently told the Churchill Club, a gathering of Silicon Valley executives. "We're at war because they want to come here and kill us, not because we want to go there and kill them. We want to do business with them. We would love to have them all wired and part of the Internet buying American products, and then we'll buy their products. And then we'll have the kind of issues we have with China and India, like we used to have with Japan. But those are good issues to have. That's America, that's what America is about."

In the end, he says, victory in the terror war may come down to commerce. "Technology has transformed the world," he told the executives. "Part of the way we're ultimately going to win the war on terror is through that technology. We're going to win the war on terror because, yes, we have to be militarily strong, we have to consider defending ourselves, but ultimately we overcome terrorism when those parts of the world that haven't connected yet connect to the global economy."

Consider China, he said. "China has plugged in. It's still a dictatorship, and they have to overcome that. But they've plugged into the global economy. If you think of where the terrorists are coming from, those are places that haven't plugged in. Ultimately economic freedom pushes you to political freedom. . . . We need to be strong, we need to be determined, but we also need to connect as many of these [Middle Eastern] countries as possible to doing business with us, to being connected to the Internet with us."

Kick butt, take names, and then make sure they have hotmail accounts.

I sort of like the description of Rudy's foreign policy vision being from the economic determinist wing of the realist school. I've never considered this sort of vision to be anything other than highly realistic.

Thanks to Patrick Brogan for sending this.

Cutting out the middle man with fingerprints

ARTICLE: Biometric cash machines bring joy, By Amarnath Tewary, BBC, 3 April 2007

Maany Peyvan writes:

Speeding transactions to the poor while eliminating wage skimming by corrupt
contractors. No word on how fingerprints are used, other than ID. You've
mentioned this many times; first I'd heard of it in print.

This was and is an easy breakthrough that speaks to the utility of any connectivity technology that gets past literacy as a requirement.

SysAdmin, not SOF

ARTICLE: US helps fight against Abu Sayyaf, By Nick Meo, BBC, 2 April 2007

A good example of reducing the future battlespace. Best sort of pre-emption.

Now, Robert Kaplan would call this all special ops, but it's a more distinct breakdown between the secret stuff done by serious SOF and the civic action done by largely reservists which gets characterized as SOF because of institutional affiliation but in truth is classic, non-classified and out-in-the-open SysAdmin.

Despite assumptions, the two tend to be kept quite isolated from one another for a lot of obvious reasons.

Thanks to Pete Johnson for sending this.

A few more links

Some of our favorite sites linked to Tom's recent post, The side I've always been on. I'm going to run them down now instead of waiting until Sunday.

+ New Yorker in DC: The side we should always be on
+ ZenPundit: Recommended Reading
+ et alli: So Fine I wish this essay were mine

Also, that post has drawn 18 comments so far. So if you haven't checked them out yet, you should.

Best take on U.S. tariffs against China

EDITORIAL: "The China Tariffs: Another too-clever-by-half protectionist gambit," Wall Street Journal, 2 April 2007, p. A16.

We're now saying China's economy is "evolved" to the point where tariffs make sense because we can track government influence in a way that we can't with true nonmarket economies.

True enough.

More true: this is a job for the WTO, where our complaints should be pursued, not in some unilateralist Congressional move.

Shame on the Dems for this one. And shame on Bush for repeating the same nonsensical thinking that led, as this editorial points out, to the pointless 2002 steel tariffs.

All we accomplish by such acts is to weaken the Doha Round talks.

The non-surprise of the latest IPCC report

ARTICLE: "Poorest Nations Will Bear Brunt As World Warms: Preparation Disparities; Wealthy Countries Spend Billions on Themselves, Millions on Others," by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, 1 April 2007, p. A1.

The non-surprise is--of course--that the equatorially-centric Gap will suffer far more than the temperate-heavy Core (both north and south).

Best quote:

"Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic. A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We'll see the same phenomenon with global warming."

So says Henry I. Miller, from Hoover.

The subtitle on the jump page is too obvious for words:

Those responsible for carbon buildup are best able to adapt.

Duh! It's called development, and it beats poverty across the board: in good times, in marginal times, in bad times.

Obvious answer? Develop the Gap.

Best "flow" argument yet:

Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale focused on climate, said that in the face of warming, it might be necessary to abandon the long-standing notion that all places might someday feed themselves. Poor regions reliant on unpredictable rainfall, he said, should be encouraged to shift people out of farming and into urban areas and import their food from northern countries.

Big trick, of course, is that urban migration typically triggered when rising ag productivity pushes people off rural lands.

One thing is for sure: our classic definitions of resilience will change.

Of course the surge succeeds!

That was never in question.

The real question is, Will it last at all beyond where we concentrate troops?

All the concentration of troops does is approximate the actual desired peacekeeping presence we should have had there all along.

But it's like the light antibiotics coming late, when only the chemo will work. It's almost just enough, and it's way too late.

The ISG report was a gift from the gods to Bush and he didn't even bother to look that horse in the mouth.

On second thought ...

Why shouldn't Congress have a foreign policy of its own?

Hell, Bush doesn't have any.

I myself have pursued my own since Katrina.

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.

Ahmadinejad gets "dumb" and cuts a deal with London, and he may have just tossed away his chance to get Bush impeached and out of office before he is.

I think back to the depths of Clinton's administration and I was never this embarrassed over our standing in the world. That was just nonsense. This is just pathetic.

And it's such a waste of historic opportunities. That's what gets me the most.

Bush seems unable to define a victory, so he leaves it to the Dems to define a loss. As I said earlier, neither judgment makes sense, but such is the state of our leadership.

My kingdom for triangulation!

Not all politicians shirk prison issue

ARTICLE: The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion, By CHRIS SUELLENTROP, New York Times Magazine, December 24, 2006

Point taken: some politicians are willing to deal with the tough subject of prison/incarceration reform.

Thanks to Eddie for sending this.

Some are making progress...

ARTICLE: DoD Removes Six Countries From Imminent Danger Pay List, By Jim Garamone, American Forces Press Service, March 30, 2007

A sign of integration toward the Core. Imagine--if you're anyone but John McCain--how far we remain from this goal in Iraq.

Successful security cooperation

ARTICLE: Yemeni women sign up to fight terror, By Ginny Hill, BBC News, 2 April 2007

From another friend in CENTCOM: a description of successful security cooperation.

The kicker? Adding women to the mix was the Yemenis' idea.

A real problem when you create Africom: you split the Red Sea community when, in that part of the world, water connects rather than divides.

The SysAdmin learns the hard way, and under the worst conditions in Iraq, but he's learning

ARTICLE: "In Iraq, an Army Officer Battles to Open a Bank: Military Shifts Fight to Local Politics; Gunfire Outside Hall," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal 29 March 2007, p. A1.

Another stellar piece by Jaffe, who I--in my complete bias--consider the best reporter out there on military change.

Killer bit on "war within the context of war" yielding to "war within the context of everything else":

For decades, the U.S. military has defined warfare as separate from politics. When politics failed, war was necessary and the military took the lead. The attitude was one of the after-effects of the Vietnam War, in which the Army told itself that it had lost because politicians prevented the general from fighting the war they longed to fight.

"After Vietnam, we redefined officers as nothing but warrior-trainers," focused on teaching soldiers how to operate increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, says Lt. Col. Dough Ollivant, an Army strategist in Baghdad who has helped shape the current surge strategy. "We had a very restricted view of warfare."

The story itself revolves around a colonel's persistent effort to reopen a bank branch in a bad part of town.

Like I said in BFA: the Iraq war changes nothing in the U.S. military, but the Iraq postwar changes everything.

The SysAdmin done right empowers the disenfranchised and the natural insurgent

ARTICLE: "In Aceh, New Governor Works To Draw Investment to Province," by Tom Wright, Wall Street Journal, 29 March 2007, p. A10.

Aceh and the Christmas Tsunamis remain the best SysAdmin effort of late.

Irwandi Yusuf was in jail when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis struck Aceh. Today, he is trying to stimulate foreign investment and establish a model government in the Indonesia province.

After escaping from his cell when the wave hit, the former reber strategist was elected Aceh's governor in December. The elections were possible after Indonesia's national government in 2005 signed a peace accord that ended a 30-year guerrilla war for independence, granting Aceh a large degree of autonomy.

Best CPX (command post exercise) I ever did was with Pacific Command in the mid-1990s on a humanitarian relief op focused on Aceh that simultaneously dealt with the difficulties of a separatist movement (yeah, the very same one!). It went nowhere as well as the real op went, and yet, it's that kind of training and planning that allowed PACOM to be ready when it needed to be, so I feel a tiny pride in being a small cog in that enormous wheel (a huge command, a huge exercise).

What's so fascinating here is how our military played such a crucial up-front role and how quickly and well the whole scenario got to what really matters: attracting FDI. That the former rebel strategist is now governor is just too cool for words. Beating your enemy is one thing, but co-opting him is much better. Better for you, better for him, better for business.

Great minds lament alike

OP-ED: "Many Plans, No News: Back to the past in the Middle East," by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 30 March 2007, p. A23.

This piece, showcasing Friedman's strongest skills as a regional expert, echoes a lot of my frustration with Bush:

In the Middle East today, home of the invention of algebra, a new math seems to have taken over. It is subtraction by addition. It goes like this: Add more trips to the region by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice--who doesn't seem to have any coherent strategy--to an emotionally stale, restated Saudi peace overture to Israel, and combine it with a cynical Hamas-Fatah cease-fire accord and an Israeli prime minister so unpopular his poll ratings are now lower than the margin of error, and you'll find that we're actually going backward--way back, back to the pre-Oslo era.

Only the bad guys make history in the Middle East today. Only the bad guys have imagination and resolve. Arab, Palestinian and Israeli "moderates" are just watching. Their leaders have never been weak, and America has never been more feckless in framing clear choices to spur them to action.

We could be and should be doing better.

Then Friedman does the unthinkable: comparing Bush so unfavorably to Clinton, whose foreign policy looks better with each passing year.

Ouch! It's so good it hurts!

Killer ending:

The Bush team reminds me of someone who buys a rundown house that comes with remodeling plans by Frank Lloyd Wright, but insists instead on using drawings by the next-door neighbors. You get what you pay for. Or what you don't pay for.

Awesome piece.

Nation-building in Iraq: the good, the not-so-bad, and the ugly

ARTICLEL: "Silent Districts Speak Volumes On Sunnis' Fall: Insurgents Sever Area's Access to Life Basics," by Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times, 26 March 2007, p. A1.

We all know that Kurdistan is stable and flourishing (the good). Most of us know the not-so-bad story of the Shiites:

The contrast with Shiite neighborhoods is sharp. Markets there are in full swing, community projects are under way, and while electricity is scarce throughout the city, there is less trouble finding fuel for generators in those areas. When the government cannot provide services, civilian arms of the Shiite militias step in to try to fill the gap.

The implied contrast, of course, is to the ugly, or the Sunni areas:

The city-scape of Iraq's capital tells a stark story of the toll the past four years have taken on Iraq's once powerful Sunni Arabs.

Theirs is the world of ruined buildings, damaged mosques, streets pitted by mortar shells and so little electricity that many people have abandoned using refrigerators altogether.

We have successfully liberated Kurdistan, and if we weren't so bent out of shape on Iran, we could argue easily that our liberation of Shiite Iraq has also gone reasonably well.

Where we failed was in Sunni Iraq, and that failure was--in many ways--preordained.

Glass-half-full says we claim our victories where we find them by pulling most of our ground troops to safe Kurdistan, continue to hunt AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) with special ops throughout Iraq, and advise the central government on how to put down the insurgency based in Sunni areas (letting the Shiite militias do their thing as necessary).

You add that up and that's not a bad showing, despite all the pointless losses on our side due to poor planning, not enough numbers and poor resourcing and execution.

But we're so binary we can't accept any partial win, and we fret incessantly that Iran "wins" when it's really Riyadh that does (and stabs us in the back rhetorically at the worst moments--thank you King-I-Am!). So we fight Iranian presence in Shiite Iraq, for all the good that will do us and for all the harm such interaction would eventually do to the mullahs back in Tehran (just watch who changes whom more, as freedom tends to infect and spread by example). And we continue to act like the insurgency is our cross to bear and ours alone (thank you again, House of Saud, for your kind words).

McCain is very right in one aspect: resistance at home is all about casualties. Lower the casualties and no matter how nasty the fight, America will be happy.

Meanwhile, we focus on locking in our gains and limiting our future burdens by getting the locals to share more responsibility.

I know, I know, that's too risky. But again, do you think Americans dying in Iraq is going to foment necessary change in Riyadh and Tehran, or is forcing both capitals to put up or shut up on Iraq going to move those balls forward faster?

There is nothing sadder than watching a superpower make a war that's not its own become its own.

We won the war in Iraq in 2003. Our ownership of the postwar mess eluded our grasp a while ago. The ISG recognized this and suggested some of the logical remedies. America, in its binary mindset, either wants the "win" or wants to admit the "loss."

Neither makes sense at this point.

Selling to the bottom of the pyramid

ARTICLE: "As Its Brands Lag at Home, Unilever Makes a Risky Bet: CEO Shifts Resources To Poorer Countries; The Making of 'Cubitos,'" by Deborah Ball, Wall Street Journal, 22 March 2007, p. A1.

Great piece right out of the playbook of Prahalad.

This CEO isn't just talking China and India, but Africa and Latin America--the whole Gap.

Key line:

Unilever figures that 1.2 billion consumers will buy packaged goods for the first time by 2010--most of them in the developing world.

Each week 40k people in Asia use a washing machine for the first time.

As one section puts it, it's all about "getting there first."

Shrinking the Gap will be a private-sector-led affair. The roll of the military is to buy time, create stability and security, and help money flow.

Bush's post-presidency means we all move on

It's gets a bit much when every other post or column gets interpreted as some grubby plea for attention from Dem candidates.

And it's even more laughable considering my only F2Fs have been on the Republican side!

Seriously, my expectations have always been that no Dem president could stand much of what I argue for and that only a centrist Republican (much like my man Steve) would find me palatable.

People are misinterpreting my praise for the Dems tying Bush's hands. I expect the Dems to be what they are: the opposition. I do not expect them to come up with better plans. That's not how our system works or has ever really worked. I expect Bush to come up with a better plan on the basis on the effective resistance from the opposition. I don't expect Congress to determine U.S. foreign policy.

What's so frustrating right now is that Bush was told by the Iraq Study Group what the logical way ahead should look like, and despite the showy bits here and there, he's continued to blow off their recommendations completely. I find that deeply troubling after the beating he took in the midterms, especially since the GOP hierarchy stacked the ISG deck just to make it easier.

So despite all the domestic resistance (average people are not stupid, they just know a losing hand when they see one) and the manufactured "out," Bush basically soldiers on, losing more allies along the way.

I just don't see that as sustainable. I think it puts everything good Bush has done at risk by making his entire time in office seem like an out-of-control experience (Clinton's foreign policy looks positively logical in comparison, and he used the military a huge amount, surpassed only by Bush in the last several decades).

I think that if public and the Dem opposition don't make it clear that they want Bush to fix what he's broken (Iraq) before moving on to new targets (Iran) that Bush and Cheney would move to conflate one disaster with another, and that that second disaster would achieve a tipping point globally that the first one could not--in large part because it would be viewed as America fundamentally out of control instead of playing "control" (in a gaming sense) to the global security wargame that is the Long War. Bush the Father gave off that vibe, and frankly, so did Clinton. Bush the Younger does not, and that is dangerous. As I wrote in PNM, sometimes America is called upon by history to change the rules, but that bold stroke needs to be followed by something more than just further idiosyncratic behavior. Done right, like Bush the Elder kicking Saddam out of Kuwait (unfortunately, not finishing the job), the demonstration effect can be huge (inter-state war of the classic land-grab style basically goes away. Done with a system-level appreciation, like Clinton and Co. did in the Balkans, we can give the world a huge glimpse of the necessary rule set (my A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt states is basically born from that experience). Bush the Younger likewise signaled a sense of history with his arguments for reshaping the Middle East with Saddam's toppling, but as I have argued many times, then the strategic imagination stalled. Kerry could not have done worse. I'm not sure anybody could have done worse. That's why history will judge Bush the Younger's re-election as a real disaster. Bushes are apparently good for just one term (although I have real hopes for Jeb, the one Bush who probably does have what it takes to be a good, full-service president).

So yeah, I do hope things will temporize as much as possible and that little will change between now and Jan 2009. I think anyone other than McCain who gets elected will represent a sea change and offer America a host of new opportunities to right our foreign policy quite rapidly, and I look forward to that.

But I don't write to attract that sort of attention, because I don't want that kind of job. Getting sucked back into the DC bureaucracy where your fab title really boils down to managing a whopping two or three big existing programs where you get to turn a few dials during your time . . . I interact with those people all the time and have for years, and I don't want that job.

As for trailing the great man in some White House position, I just don't have the ego for that, nor the mindset.

Having me around all the time isn't a good idea--for me or the person in question. I just don't function well in situations like that, and so nobody uses me like that--not even Steve.

So please, let's stay on topic. There's definitely a strain of people who liked me and my stuff much better when I approved of Bush's choices more, and there's definitely a strain of people who like me and my stuff much better when I disapprove of Bush's choices more now.

But for someone who's on his third presidency as a professional in this business, I'm not particularly surprised that this president wears out his welcome near the end. They all do. The guys who got them elected tend to bail about 2-3 years in, that's just the nature of the grind. Then they get people who are less connected to what got the person elected in the first place, and coordination tends to suffer. Near the end, it comes off as every man for himself, and so the criticism gets a whole lot easier because the performance tends to get a whole lot worse.

I can't cite blog entries from late Clinton or late 41 because I didn't keep all those memos and emails, so this blog gets to see this sort of stuff from me for the first time. Unpatriotic to some because we're at "war," except I don't view it that way, meaning neither unpatriotic nor really at war. That's why I spend a lot of time giving talks on trying to disaggregate war from peace, and why I argue so much for a rules perspective in this blog.

Then there's just the personal reality that I'm gearing up for another book, and the rejectionist in one's self naturally emerges in this time ("They're all wrong and thus I MUST write this book!").

Then there's just the larger reality that we're all moving on beyond Bush much earlier than anticipated, as his second term has seen him become as authority-crippled as Nixon near the end or Carter near the end.

But my optimism in the future suffers no drop due to Bush's plight. I live in the greatest country in the world, during this planet's best, deepest, and most sustained economic boom in history. But because I know what this country is capable of when our leadership in admired (like Clinton was globally), I prefer to anticipate that resumption of history in about 20 months more than to spend my days defending people and choices I no longer think represent the best we can muster.

So I'll take obstructionism for now and do my best to prepare my usual audience for the possibilities that lie ahead.

And no, I don't want to work for any commands either. I like interacting with them all.