Taking boys and Vonne to Colts game v. Miami

Don't tell Bret, but we're arguably watching the best ever this afternoon, from the 14th row, 35-yard line, Colts side.

Wife got Manning in white, because she looks hot in white. I got Harrison in blue, cause I was a WR/CB in H.S. Tight little stadium

Peyton and Co. marching.

Peyton ran for one TD and threw one to a defensive lineman for another.

20-15 after 3.

Manning to Harrison for 27-15. Right down our sideline. Double-pump. Very sweet.

Last punt. Miami with ball on 20 with one minute left. Colts 27-22.
Happy New Year to everyone.

Israeli nationalism v. Globalism

Dave Goldberg wrote:

Tom,

What angers me is not critisism of Israeli policies, or accusations of
religous separatism in the state of Israel, but rather Jimmy Carter's
apparant intellectual dishonesty.

Please see What Would Jimmy Do?, Jeffrey Goldberg, Washington Post Book
World, December 10, 2006.

Dave Goldberg (no relation to the author)
Springfield VA

Saw the piece and think it's fine. Doesn't change my post whatsoever though. I don't make a case for Carter's book, but for his basic criticism, which I see as quite sound.

Saying he's somewhat partisan (not emphasizing Arab rejectionism enough, for example) doesn't make the crux of his argument invalid. It just makes his book weaker. I didn't offer a book review, just commentary on the debate and what I liked about where Carter focused his critique. Carter's argument needs to be dealt with head on, not seemingly discredited on the basis of factual errors and interpretations.

But I liked the piece so I'm happy to cite in the blog.

In the end, Israel's biggest long-term problem is that its nationalism is race-specific in a globalizing world where such state-sponsored "affirmative action" comes off as hopelessly discriminatory, whether you're talking Muslims in Tel Aviv or Paris or Los Angeles. By asking the Middle East to integrate itself truly with globalization, we commit them to ending such religious/racial discriminations in their countries. Ultimately, the same gets asked of Israel, and that's where I think U.S. support will falter, because I think the bulk of Israelis remained committed to keeping Israel a fundamentally closed club built to promote the interests of a single race.

I understand that desire, even as I reject the premise philosophically.

Then again, I'm an American.

This week's column

A foreign policy wish list for 2007

I don't see much to celebrate in terms of our country's foreign policy in 2006. As we look to 2007, here's my top-10 wish list, in no particular order of plausibility.

10. A certain Latin American leader passes quietly, with no evidence of American involvement. Not Hugo Chavez, who's rather harmless in his backfiring attempts to resurrect socialism down south but rather Fidel Castro, whose impending death finally sets in motion a political evolution that should generate America's 51st star within a decade.

How's that for a bold prediction to start the column! ;-)

Read on at KnoxNews

Saddam is dead (but who benefits?)

Saddam Hussein Is Put to Death: Former Iraqi President Hanged Before Dawn in Baghdad to Divided Reaction, By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, December 30, 2006; Page A01

I still believe Saddam should have been put on trial in the International Criminal Court or by some other UN-sanctioned court than by the successor Iraqi government. While I believe he should have been put to death, I really fear we allowed the proceedings to speak to the wrong audiences.

China's motives: sane as ours

ARTICLE: China Offers Glimpse of Rationale Behind Its Military Policies, By Edward Cody, Washington Post, December 30, 2006; Page A17

The Big War crowd wants to keep overfeeding the Leviathan while starving the SysAdmin, no matter how many ground personnel deaths that takes in Afghanistan, Iraq and everywhere else we go in this Long War. They will tell you the "real war" is going to be with China over Taiwan. Why? The Chinese are--by default now--the second biggest military spender in the world. Our worst-case estimates place total Chinese military spending at roughly what we spend on acquisitions alone, or what we spend on R&D alone, and nowhere near what we're cranking just in Iraq on an annual basis. The vast majority of the stuff they've imported has been from the Russians, and last time I checked, we weren't that impressed with their stuff. According to our own Pentagon, in a generation's time China could be spending roughly half of what we're spending right now.

Think China's going to close any gap that way?

Ah, but the advantage of proximity WRT Taiwan. China "gets" Taiwan and the West falls, does it not? Because it would signal that . . . oh something or other.

But China makes it clear each and every time that the trigger will be Taiwan's actions. So what does America do? We sell Taiwan very sophisticated arms. We bolster our alliance with Japan on this score, inviting Japan into our defense guarantee on Taiwan (yes, that Japan that was the colonial master of Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century and still denies its atrocities vis-a-vis China in Manchuria during WWII). In fact, we bolster our military ties with virtually every country that surrounds China--save Russia--during the Bush administration. Moreover, we cite China consistently to justify high-tech capacities that we continuously purchase in dollar amounts that vastly outweigh China's spending. Between now and 2025, we are likely to spend the Chinese military by $10 trillion dollars.

So what is China guilty of in this last explanation of its vaunted defense build-up?

As a rising economic power they're doing to their military the same thing they've been doing to their economy for years now: swapping out cheap labor (here, ground troops) for high-tech capital (mostly air and naval, aping their model, otherwise known as the U.S. military). Why does the PLA ape the Pentagon? Who else should they logically ape?

And here are the provocative rationales offered by Hu Jintao for China's build-up:

1) danger on the Korean peninsula (hmm, that one's hard to critique);

2) rising U.S.-Japanese military cooperation (given the state of Sino-Japanese relations, that seems fairly plausible, does it not?)

3) rising provocations re: independence from Taiwan (that's really BS, but a standby for the Chinese).

China continues to use Taiwan as a national diversion, with the Party leadership making that the great excuse for a build-up that logically arises from China's rising. Yes, the obsession is real, and it's mind-boggling with the PLA. I have sat in conversations with their military strategists and planners and listened to nonsense after nonsense on this issue. You'd think the whole frickin' universe revolved around this all-important scenario, when--truth be told--this scenarios matters only to military acquisition planners in both Beijing and Washington. Why? Frankly, it's all we have left and for the Chinese, it's a nice cover for what I believe to be the long-term rationale truly at work: China's growing fears over its rising energy dependence, which within years will vastly outweigh ours.

But my God! What kind of nation builds a big military to protect its access to energy around the planet?

Well, actually, that would be us by a huge margin.

But imagine if the Chinese were perceived to move in that direction! This would be an affront to us, would it not? Wouldn't it signal China's trying to cut off our access to energy in the Persian Gulf (Where we get all our oil, right? Or is it China's oil in the main?).

Ah, now I'm confusing myself. All this mirror imaging by China's strategic thinkers, whether it's on Taiwan or energy security, that's got to be something just to confuse us. Surely they cannot be so unimaginative simply to ape our moves, building a naval and air force whose primary design is to prevent our ability to threaten their ability to threaten Taiwan's ability to threaten independence? And beyond that simply to guard sea lines of communication? Surely the Chinese strategic vision is not that narrow, that myopic?

Why the hell not? That's basically our Big War rationale. With China, they're aping #1. But what exactly is our excuse when Marines and Army are dying every day in this Long War we've declared? Why is the Pentagon so intent on having a war with the country that inevitably becomes our biggest economic partner?

I'm not overstating. There are many in the military and especially the Air Force and Navy that just gotta have their conflict with China. Otherwise these guys must contemplate evolutions of their forces that they do not care to contemplate.

Too many Pentagon planners want to make the environment match the force, not the other way around. They'll tell you China spies on us and tries to steal our secrets, constantly trying to make their force more like ours. They'll tell you the big future threat we face is the loss of Taiwan. They simply don't want the war we've got, and if left to their own devices, will continue to build a force that's unprepared for that war--getting our people killed in the process.

This Sino-focused strategic argument is nothing more than the primacy strategy in disguise. It's the notion pushed by the neocons near the end of the elder Bush's administration, which said that now that the Sovs were gone, our #1 goal in military spending should be to remain the world's biggest military power by far. Well, an extra $10 trillion vis-a-vis your #2 competitor strikes me like we're already there. But that's not enough for the primacists, and if it takes a botched Long War effort and thousands upon thousands of U.S. ground troops to achieve, well then that's just too damn bad.

Thanks to Keir Lauritzen for sending this article in.

A short history of Tom on Second Life [updated]

Tom wrote yesterday about his appearance back in October 2005 in Second Life: A second look at Second Life.

He didn't have the link to the spot on NPR that included a short interview (at 4:25) with him on his appearance, but our loyal readers took care of that: Visiting the 'Second Life' World: Virtual Hype?

Some pics:

Walking to the gig at the...

... in-world UN

Interior shot

Some audience shots

[note the guy front left being Hiro Protagonist]

The virtual from the real [the real suit is better ;-)]

Tom kicks off

Tom and the Map slide

A-Z Rule Set slide

Taking questions

A list of Tom's posts and other links on his appearance:
+ Thomas P.M. Barnett comes to Second Life in avatar form
+ All typed out
+ Second Life appearance transcript
+ Thomas P.M. Barnett's Second Life Transcript and Slides [this is actually a pretty good presentation of the Brief, with a few slides. I've decided I need to add some of these links to the Brief page...]
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART I
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART II
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART III
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART IV
+ NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART V

Update: Wagner James Au writes in to say that the best link to coverage on Tom's appearance on Second Life is THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT. Thanks, James.

On the weblog...

Since Tom wrote an update on the comment situation, let me give you a little more information.

By now maybe you've noticed the new home page design. This project was undertaken by Janet Shellenberger at the behest of Tom's scheduler, Jennifer Posada. Thanks, Janet, for your work.

Integrating the weblog into the new home page was my responsibility. I could not have done it without the assistance of Big Bad John Serrao. Thanks, John.

Since Tom's first 4000 weblog posts are not yet reintegrated into Movable Type, you cannot currently use the 'Search' feature in the sidebar to find anything before the weblog went down around the first part of this month. However, that's what Google's for.

By way of example, Tom was wondering about his appearance in Second Life. For my part, I just went to the Media Appearances page and looked it up.

Using the sidebar search only returns results back to December 9th.

I might have found out even quicker if I'd used Google site search. I see directly in result number 4 that it was October 26th, 2005 from 1130 am to 130 pm.

Why did I take you on this extended travelogue (aside from to show you that I know how to search Tom's site better than anyone ;-)? To show that, if you need to search before I get the posts reintegrated into Movable Type, you should just use Google to search Tom's whole site. The other major advantage is that you can get results from Tom's voluminous material that's on the website but not in the weblog. This is often very useful.

Therefore, I'm going to gin up a separate Search page that will include weblog search, Google site search and the Tom and friends custom search (that I came up with a few weeks back) at a minimum.

As Tom said, I'll be turning comments back on after the first of the year. In the meantime, I have turned on Trackbacks. They haven't returned near as many useful links as I've had to delete Trackback spam, but you might keep one eye open when you're reading posts, especially if some time has passed to gather links. For example, here's the most recent Trackback.

At least one person has complained about the size of the fonts on the new weblog home page. I may make them smaller, but have not decided yet. If you don't prefer this size, I encourage you to resize the text through the View Menu on your web browser or by holding down 'Control' and pressing '+' or '-' in Firefox or Explorer ('0' to return to standard size).

That's all I can think of right now. Feel free to email me with further questions. I'm not really looking for design suggestions at this time. You can put those in the comments when we turn them back on ;-)

Stopping at war isn't realistic, but it is realism

OP-ED: "Hearts, Minds ... and Schools: War isn't the best route to democracy," by Lawrence E. Harrison, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 25 December 2006-7 January 2007, p. 23.

ARTICLE: "The alternative to war: A landmark in the peace process," The Economist, 16 December 2006, p. 40.

ARTICLE: "The alternative to voting: A slide back into all-out war," The Economist, 16 December 2006, p. 40.

ON LANGUAGE: "Realism: The comeback work in foreign policy," by William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 24 December 2006, p. 20.

Good and very thoughtful op-ed by Harrison, that's somewhat obscured by the silly title (Duh! War isn't the best route? WHODATHUNKIT!). In it, Harrison makes a good case--based on a big project of research--that changing culture is the key to creating economic opportunity and successful connectivity with the outside world, and that this is the best route to generating democracy in the long run:

Our goal was to capture the role of culture and cultural change in a society's evolution. We found that Confucian values of education, achievement and merit played a central role in the economic "miracles" in East Asia. Open economic policies and the welcoming of foreign investment triggered several transformations, including in India, Ireland and Spain. Visionary leadership was crucial in the cases of Botswana, Turkey and Quebec. In Ireland, Italy, Spain and Quebec, modernization was also accompanied by decline in the influence of the Catholic Church [mostly on birth control, a concept that make sense as your economy matures--thus putting you at odds with the church--Tom].

We concluded that enlightened policies can, over time, produce cultural change--change that in turn spurs political pluralism and economic development. However, it is extremely difficult to impose such changes from outside; war is not a helpful instrument. Better tools include education that inculcates democratic and entrepreneurial values; improved child-rearing practices; religious reform; and development assistance keyed to cultural change.

Then he goes on to list a number of foci that make sense in assistance, like literacy and getting (and keeping) girls in school.

No arguments from me on that stuff (as these are arguments I've offered myself in PNM and BFA). My only problem with this article is the presumed binary choice between using war as an instrument and avoiding it.

Obviously, you don't want to have to wage war any more than is absolutely necessary, but the definition of necessary is crucial. Some situations (e.g., certain dictatorships, some forms of civil strife) simply won't get better without outside intervention. These are ongoing wars against individuals within countries that will rage on--if allowed--and thus prevent the evolutions in culture that Harrison rightfully advocates. In fact, left to their own course, these situations not only retard such necessary evolution, they can send the societies in question down retrograde paths of dissolution (in many ways, on display in Iraq today and what we saw in ethnic cleansing throughout long-repressed Yugoslavia). Great dysfunction like that often necessitates very violent divorces, which we can trigger (like in Iraq) or stand by and idly observe (Balkans), but which we'll likely be drawn into in some manner because of the inevitably resulting regional instability.

You can say, "We should only take on the easy jobs," but truth be told, the easy jobs will be handled for the most part by the private sector (not a big U.S. military interventionary role in Ireland and India, for example). It's the stinkers that get left to intervening states.

And no, I've never advocated (as some cartoonish reviews of my work surmise) invading every Gap state to bring integration. But in certain cases, intervening is the best route, not for creating democracy, but for removing a key impediment to its eventual emergence. Why? Dictators tend to squelch economic connectivity between the masses and the outside world, because to let that stuff unfold is to lose power progressively over time. And civil strife kills such connectivity simply by making the environment too scary for outsiders to enter (unless they're energy companies protected by private security firms).

So yeah, war isn't the best route to democracy. But in certain cases wars are the only way to get to a postwar in which Harrison's ideas can get their logical play.

But if we're real realists, we're not interested in that postwar, just picking and choosing our wars for specific punitive effect. The problem is, the games really are won in the postwar nowadays, not in the wars. So interventionary wars themselves are not the problem (and indeed, sometimes are the solution), it's our unwillingness to take seriously the challenges of the postwar.

Indonesia's Aceh is mired in intractable conflict for decades, until the perfect, crushingly destructive foreign intervention occurs, known as the tsunami.

The disaster opened the eyes of both the government in Jakarta and the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) to Aceh's war-weariness. A peace deal was struck in August 2005. Since then, events have unfolded more hopefully than anyone could have predicted. Under the supervision of monitors led by the European Union, GAM disarmed and Indonesian troops returned to barracks. A law was passed granting Aceh generous autonomy.

A quasi-separation, achieved peacefully, amidst the massive reconstruction effort following untold destruction and death from a nasty outside force that crushed all in its path.

That's not to wish tsunamis on intractable conflicts. It's simply to note that sometimes something has to intervene from outside to break the deadlock, kill the conflict, stop the shooting and repression.

We made our recovery effort, engaging in nation-building and reconstruction with a far lighter hand and including a nifty array of local partners, and we resurrected a military-to-military relationship with Indonesia's armed forces for our reward.

Compare that effort (which I highlighted in BFA) with Sri Lanka's slide back into war. Yeah, it'd be nice if India took that one on again, but that's unlikely. And given the violence that will once again pervade that society, there's almost no chance that any of Harrison's precepts will be given a chance.

I know, I know. We're all realists now, thanks to our failings in postwar (not in the war) Iraq. But even an able diagnostician of those failures such as George Packer will readily admit that:

At some point events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security--that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils.

Globalization ain't going away, despite all its complications and challenges, and so pretending we'll only take the easy cases when we own the world's largest military just ain't realistic. Because what we don't try to fix (hopefully with plenty of others), others will be forced to fix--however well they can.

The real unrealism of today is the belief that by eschewing difficult efforts, we meet the Hippocratic criteria of "do no harm," when the harm, in virtually every instance you can name, has already been done by ourselves and others, leaving us just to contemplate whether we give a damn at this point or simply want to pass off our problems to those "others," whose efforts will inevitably be cast by national security types as "clear proof" that Country A is trying to reduce our influence by increasing theirs, and thus harming our "national interests," which too often consist of nothing more than our belief that certain regions are ours and ours alone to either ignore or screw around with.

A second look at Second Life

ARTICLE: "My So-Called Second Life: I stepped into this virtual world and found a lot of sex--and a guide named Cristal," by Joel Stein, Time, 25 December 2006-1 January 2007, p. 76.

Funny bit by Stein, who's almost always great, about some time he spent cruising--in that Al Pacino way--in SL (he got a gift penis, which was cool). The upshot? Despite all the visual weirdness, he pretty much behaved like he always did, and found that the people he interacted with did so as well. Sure, lotsa flavor surrounding the dating scene, but people are people in the end.

When I gave the interview to NPR on the subject (the story's surely run by now, and if anyone can find it...), I was surprised to find myself saying that the experience wasn't that different from any other speaking gig: being rushed in by handlers, with a certain amount of fumbling (mostly mine, in terms of movement), that awkward moment on stage when you're setting up under the gaze of an assembling audience, the slow start by me, getting into the groove while trying not to get distratcted by people in the crowd, and then a Q&A that was surprisingly above par (perhaps having to type a question makes it come off better, because I'm sure the same was true with my answers). On the far side, there was the sudden pull of my schedule: in the real world it's always about running out to catch a plane (I'm surprised I don't have nightmares on the subject, since I engage in that tense chase every week in some strange city--thus my great love of GPS), but here in SL it was my kids getting home from school and suddenly jumping all over me (my "office" at that point was about 10 square feet just inside the apartment door, so I took "meetings" with my kids frequently and resorted to doing radio interviews in the bathroom).

What appearances by people like Arianna Huffington and Joel Stein tell me is that SL is now pretty much established, which made being talked into appearing in it way back when ('05? or early this year? [Editor's note: October 2005]) kinda cool in retrospect.

On the comments...

Sean and I know it's frustrating to have them off while Sean works his way through the backlog of work created by the shift in our service model created by my writing too damn much (and thus running out of memory in the old system we had with MT).

Please be patient while Sean works through this load and we'll have the comments back up right after New Years.

On the bright side, the weblog sure looks better!

The column spreads, thanks to blog readers [updated]

Yesterday got an email from Lt. Col. (civil affairs) who saw me speak at the global civ affairs conference in the summer of 2004 (which I describe in Blueprint). He's got both books, reads the blog and articles, and has been waiting for one of my columns to appear in the local paper, the Abilene something or other.

Well, it did last week, to my complete delight, and now this guy's gearing up for a presentation to his church group, creating new readers.

Then just now I get email from reader in Milford MA, who's long pushed the editor of his local paper to run one of my columns. Amazingly, it finally worked with the Pakistan piece (my darkest piece by far).

So an interesting model: the blog sells the column and hopefully the column's spread creates a virtuous circle on other efforts to spread the thinking/vision, like the upcoming Fast Company piece.

I haven't found the Abilene entry, but here's the Milford one.

Update: I found the Abilene column: Nation building on our plate in Iraq.

Arguing for me in the IHT

ARTICLE: After Iraq, a new U.S. military model, By Stanley A. Weiss, International Herald Tribune, December 26, 2006

Pretty good summary piece on: 1) how this fight heads south and 2) why we need that East Asian NATO in place. Although it proclaims neither, it implicitly argues for both.

Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this.

Somali insurgents hiding?

ARTICLE: Islamist Forces in Somali City Vanish, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, December 28, 2006

On the evaporating Islamists in Somalia, you have to wonder if this isn't the same-old, same-old where the insurgents refuse to fight the war and wait for the resulting postwar.

Is this state-on-state? Hardly. Just Ethiopia's military going into Somalia looking for bad guys. Sound familiar?

Jimmy Carter's new book

ARTICLE: "Carter View Of Israeli 'Apartheid' Stirs Furor," by Julie Bosman, New York Times, 14 December 2006, p. B1.

OP-ED: "Jimmy Carter's Book: An Israeli View ... the former president has a religious problem with Israel," by Michael B. Oren, Wall Street Journal, 26 December 2006, p. A12.

OP-ED: "... And a Palestinian One: Mr. Carter has done this nation an enormous service," by Ali Abunimah, Wall Street Journal, 26 December 2006, p. A12.

Interesting to read the two op-eds: the pro-Israeli one is all full of history and makes no bones about accusing Carter of basically being anti-Semitic, while the Palestinian one is all about what's going on today. I guess when your behavior today is hard to defend, you talk about the past instead.

Carter himself, in the book and in all his speeches and articles over the years, has always been very careful to avoid criticizing what Israel does within Israel proper, even though there is a huge amount of discrimination against non-Jews in that country (after all, the country was created for Jews only, was it not?). Instead, his criticism in the book focuses on Israeli policies in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

But what really gets the Israelis and their supporters mad is the word "apartheid," not merely because it resurrects the old South African model (Israel, as fellow pariah, routinely cooperated with the white-rule government over the years on a host of security issues, to include nukes), but because the religious version of this apartheid structure comes close to what the West is currently condemning with regard to radical Islam. Try these two paras from Abunimah on for size and tell me this isn't religious apartheid uncomfortably close to that which the Salafi radicals would impose if given the chance:

A 2003 law stipulates that an Israeli citizen may bring a non-citizen spouse to live in Israel from anywhere in the world, excluding a Palestinian from the occupied territories. A civil rights leader in Israel likened it to the American anti-miscegenation measures from the 1950s, when mixed race couples had to leave the state of Virginia to marry legally.

For Palestinians, the most blatant form of discrimination is Israel's "Law of Return," that allows a Jewish person from any country to settle in Israel. Meanwhile, family members of Palestinian citizens of Israel, living in exile, sometimes in refugee camps just a few miles outside Israel's borders, are not permitted to set foot in the country.

Israel's fears WRT to a loss of cultural identity are just a precusor to that of the Arab world's fears WRT to a loss of cultural identity. Israel feels like a tiny island in a Muslim sea, and Islam feels like an embattered island in a Westernizing sea called globalization. Israel's fears center on demographic trends: unless they discriminate against Arabs, Jews become a minority in their own nation eventually, the real threat of "dismantling the Jewish state." Islam tries to find solace in its own demography, citing numbers, when in reality the youth bulge is the civilization's own worst enemy, given the opportunities of cultural connectivity afforded by globalization's ever deepening penetration. Both cultures reach for apartheid-like defenses, feeling completely justified in that response, because the preservation of cultural identity is crucial in their minds, as in, worth fighting and dying over.

But as we know from globalization, the enforcement of islands of cultural uniformity tend to come at very high prices. That Israel has consistently pulled off its own version of apartheid within a constitutional framework has been nothing less than amazing to watch, because it is a state and government and people with very profound ethical values. And yet, pull it off they do, just like America did for decades with African-Americans and still does with homosexuals in many subtle and non-subtle ways.

The Arab regimes suffer no such guilt, and engage in all sorts of religious oppression with great ease. Thus, in comparison, their condemnation comes much easier for us than confronting the unpleasant policies of the Israelis.

But it's clear that in the end, real peace comes with religious freedom throughout the region--meaning for all states, including Israel. Carter's just pointing that out in his book, and angering a lot of Jews in the process.

Oren's counter is pathetic in this regard:

In his apparent attempt to make American Christians rethink their affection for Israel, Jimmy Carter is clearly departing from time-honored practice. This has not been the legacy of evangelicals alone, but of many religious denominations in the U.S., and not soley the conviction of Mr. Bush, but of generations of American leaders. In the controversial title of his book, Mr. Carter implicitly denounces Israel for its separatist policies, but, by doing so, he isolated himself from centuries of American tradition.

Interesting huh? Not a defense of the separatist policies but a condemnation of Carter for not going along on the subject like so many politicians have in the past. The defense amounts to: You haven't complained in the past, so why now?

Better ending comes from Abunimah:

As other divided socieities, like South Africa, Northern Ireland and indeed our own are painfully learning, only equal rights and esteem for all the people, in the diversity of their identities, can bring lasting peace. This is an even harder discussion than the one President Carter has courageously launched, but ultimately it is one we must confront if peace is to come to Israel-Palestine.

So the question is, do you want to be associated with what's right, or what's been going on for decades?

Bush's decision to lay the Big Bang on the region was a declaration of wanting to do what's right and not merely put up with what's brought stability--at high moral costs--in the past. The question we face on Palestine is whether or not we'll pursue such necessary change for just the Muslim nations of the region, while giving Israel's apartheid policies a pass, or whether our beliefs in such justice are truly universal.

The danger to Israel is no greater than that to any other culture in the region. The state of Israel was created to deal with a danger that has long since passed, much like the United Nations. Israel must move to a post-Zionist cultural identity if peace is ever to be achieved. I seriously doubt Israel can manage that move, and thus I see an inevitable decline in U.S. support as globalization forces accommodation from Islamic cultures in the region that is not matched by Israel's.

I'm not saying this will happen anytime soon, because in all of its imperfections, Israel is a shining beacon of what must occur throughout the region, politically, economically and socially. But Israel is likewise a symptom of what's wrong with the region in its religious exclusionary practices, and since real freedom cannot come to Islamic cultures there without such religious freedom (or what Benedict calls "reciprocity"), our push for democracy in the region, which will inevitably win out thanks more to globalization's forces than our own, will also inevitably put America at odds with Israel's achievement of political freedom coupled with religious apatheid.

As America long proved with its own version of racial apartheid, you can achieve the facade of political and economic freedom overlaying such injustice, but being slick about it doesn't make it right--or sustainable.

I know that agreeing with Carter on this subject opens me up to similar charges, but since I've been so long castigated as both a Jew-lover/tool of Israel and an obvious anti-Semite (I'm an equal-opportunity offender, it seems), depending on which subject I'm discussing, I long ago grew numb to such allegations.

Apparently, Carter has too.

Having said all that, my long-held position has been that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is not a hold-up to neccesary change in the region. To me, that argument is a complete red herring. The real problem with the region is that the political, social and economic structures of these countries (besides highly-globalized Israel, that is) make them unable to adapt themselves to the challenges and the opportunities that globalization demands/offers. Why Israel really burns most of the region is that it represents everything they need to become but have not become.

But on this issue of religious separatism, Carter is right, and here Israel shares the same burden of change as the rest of the region. Recognizing that doesn't make you pro- or anti-Israel. It just makes you honest.

A system perturbed is a rule-set awakened [updated]

ARTICLE: "Asian Quake's Telecom Disruption Exposes Global Networks Fragility," by Jason Dean, Wall Street Journal, 28 December 2006, p. A1.

Asia is more tied economically and network-wise to North America than can be supported by its telecom connectivity--when quakes strike, that is.

A quake off of Taiwan late Tuesday doesn't seem to kill anyone or destroy anything (at least, no one bothered to mention any such details in this piece), but it does damage as many as eight undersea cables, a good example of a system perturbation whose primary impact is disconnectedness.

And in this day and age, that which would be a tertiary effect in importance is now the primary. International phone service disrupted, financial data flows interrupted, etc., all showing that telecoms in the region are not keeping up with the connectivity growth of recent years:

With more and more multinational companies relying on distant regions of the world for outsourcing and component manufacturing, the stability of communications has become a primary concern.

Asia pulls in tons of FDI, but given its earthquake-prone status, apparently has low-balled the number of undersea cables and back-up systems in comparison to the U.S.-European bonds. Factor in the growth and we have rule sets out of whack, now exposed, with few real costs, by this quake.

The question is, how does Asia respond?

As indicated by the absence of the Asian NATO, we see a region with stunted region-wide cooperation on matters of shared vulnerability. This was exposed by SARS, which led to new cooperation that's handled avian flu far better. But on the quakes/disaster relief & recovery stuff in general, we don't yet see the rule sets on sharing and backing each other up that we see well-established ... say... in the American southeast over the past several decades on hurricanes.

(Update: Steve writes today in Rebuilding the Gulf Coast that coop there is revealed to be weaker than that of Atlantic Ocean-fronting SE states.)

A competitive advantage was seen in this quake for those companies that found workarounds, typically by buying services from telecoms with sufficiently redundant cables and satellite back-ups. As a whole, stock markets were "unfazed."

But scrambling did occur, like what happens with a crash on a major commuter route during rush hour, the side-streets got jammed with activity.

So the crash, as one expert notes, "raises the question of whether there needs to be a new wave of investment" in these cables.

And there you have the money opportunity, as in, go long on telecoms able to meet this expected investment surge.

Increasingly, investors carefully monitor stuff like quakes simply to foresee such investment shifts like the one called for here. This is why the most important function of system perturbations, besides calls for new regulation/reforms/rules to address the rule-set gaps unveiled, is the signalling to markets for where investments should flow next.

I learned this drill in the economic security workshops I ran with Cantor Fitzgerald atop the World Trade Center in 2000-2001: whenever we presented our combined flag-CEO-spooks audience with a scenario of disruption, the national-security types got all spooked by these events, wondering what would happen if some nation or bad actor was able to pull off a similar stunt, but the investor looked at these events primarily as churn, as in, "I make money now on dealing with the revealed deficiency." Locals are incentivized to pay up for the new capabilities. Why? If they don't, they lose the competitive advantage.

In some ways, this gap revealed stems from a previous boom-and-bust investment wave, the telecom boom of the 1990s. So much capacity built in wasn't quickly met by a rising demand, so many companies went belly-up. Meanwhile, though, in Asia the demand skyrocketed over the past decade and the telecoms apparently weren't there to make it happen. So now, apparently, it's time for the Pacific bonds between Asia and North America to catch up to the gold-standard Atlantic bonds between Europe and North America, where, for example, Verizon has a "mesh" of cables so that shifting flows from damaged to undamaged cables is routinely achieved.

Earth is doomed! Doomed I tell you!

Watched "Forbidden Planet" (50th anniversary edition) tonight and then spooled through a host of trailers for films of that era (early fifties) and they were all about the end of the world by various tragedies, typically unleashed by (gasp!) NUUUUUUUUUCLEAR POWER!

Biblical prophecies fulfilled! Man's worst nightmares unleashed! The seeds of our own destruction ... what were we thinking?

Just goes to remind you that when we enter an era of new rule sets, like that ushered in--in many people's minds--by 9/11, we endure a long silly season of such prognostications.

To point out that fact is to be--of course--horrifically naive or, worse, tragically afflicted by man's hubris! And if you cite the fallacies of the fifties, then your opponents will retreat to other ages and you're quickly into hypotheticals of the most amazing, Fox-TV sort. But people have such a strong internal need for the "end times." You can't reason them out of it, and the secular versions are just as strong, always invoking man's arrogance instead of his usual venal sins.

I can't remember how many documentary films I sat through at Immaculate Conception that said way back when that we'd all succumb by now to disease, or bugs, or pollution, or the widely predicted ice age.

Then there was the ozone hole we could never fix, except we did.

The environment is the usual lead example today, with predictions of millions upon millions of deaths being possible, and so all sorts of dramatic changes are proposed at huge costs, when, of course, for pennies a year we could save the same numbers from all sorts of early childhood diseases or make all sorts of advances in combating this or that affliction right here and now.

But we never seem attracted by those pennies-on-the-dollar arguments for real lives today. Instead, we're always pining for those mythically vast numbers deep into the future, using frightening images of the worst vertical shocks to justify the most extreme horizontal scenarios of change. The same rotten kids who don't deserve the world we've given them today are equally undeserving of the horrible world we're leaving them in the future.

Some things never change.

But it is always a competition for attention, is it not? In a perfect world, all risk is balanced equally and with similar vigor. It's just that we all seem to value different things. Today's sacrifices are typically viewed cynically, while tomorrow's carry the greatest nobility imaginable (much like yesteryear's, back when all wars were "honorable"--an epithet far more easily bestowed by history than by current news coverage, as I remember a Cold War that was complete bullshit right up to the point where it ended well, and then it was suddenly a noble cause that rang true for the entire run, did it not?). So we were always up to past challenges, but never up to today's challenges, hence the natural inclination to retreat into hypothesized futures both terrible and terrific. That our past victories fixed all those past problems is soon forgotten, and assumptions about our sudden stupidity abound ("Complexity! Complexity I tell you!").

My favorite line from one trailer ("The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!") has the scientist warning the military officer not to miss with the next shot, as he notes, "This is the last isotope of its kind this side of Oak Ridge!"

I'll be sure to let my colleagues in Tennessee know they better gear up some new ones for the next round of monsters to be slain.

None of this is to make light of the real challenges we face, which--as always--are great and varied.

It's just to remind people that there's a reason why humans dominate this planet, one I consider both divine and devilishly mundane.

So don't surrender the future just yet (always tempting as these end of the year recollections remind you of all the tragedies that beset us over the past twelve month; why? because they're news man!).

We've never had a smaller percentage of humanity involved in organized violence than we do today.

We've never had a more robust or deeply integrated global economy than we do today, nor one growing so steadily and broadly.

We've never had more new scientific knowledge accumulating or smart people being put against tough tasks.

And we've never been more spiritual (outside of Europe, of course).

Humanity will top out at 50% more people than we have today within the next four decades. How we treat these four decades will determine much about the future of our species, but I see that challenge as our best one yet.

Not to be feared but to be relished. Not used to inspire fear but to build confidence. Not avoided but created.

It's bucks AND bodies

Harlan Piper wrote to Tom:

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the Euro recently surpassing the $ in total circulation value, and the UAE's announcement that it will join Chile in starting to switch over to Euro reserves? Are these central banks "voting" for new global leadership?

Tom says:

Natural and good thing. Euro becomes the second great global currency. Some merging of Asian currencies will become the third someday.

It's a good development for economies that want to hedge their bets some, but it doesn't equate so easily to global leadership. Europe, for example, won't be using its currency's reserve capacity globally to finance a military superpower, but rather probably to fund its old-age pension.

Remember, it's bucks AND bodies.

When Sys Admins Ruled the Earth

Gunnar Peterson wrote in to say:

Happy holidays Tom,

Thought you would enjoy this one by sci fi writer Cory Doctorow (think Generation X version of Bruce Sterling) called "When Sys Admins Ruled the Earth"

The story resolves... after a series of horrific events

"Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he¬πd go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?

It was what he did. He was a sysadmin."

Online here: When Sys Admins Ruled the Earth

Tom says:

Funny stuff.

Doctorow was the first author to speak in Second Life. I was the second.

Think about it...

Merkel in Germany, Royal surging and Sarkozy looking vulnerable in France, and Hillary the leading Dem candidate in a U.S. tired of GOP leadership.

What would it be like to have Germany, France and America all led by women at the same time?

This day will come faster than expected, so the male tendency to sell by fear will have to give a bit, one imagines.

And I think this would be a very good thing, making many more good things quite possible.

Bush can't sell Chirac and Schroeder on a host of issues, but would Hillary have the same problems with Royal and Merkel? I think not.

I'm not talking less competitive. I'm talking less binary.

Royal markets herself as the mother-protector of France in the age of globalization.

Think about that. I would expect more SysAdmin, less Leviathan.

And I think that would be a very good thing.

Beyond Chirac, France can only get smarter

ARTICLE: "French Candidates Try Softer Touch to Woo Minorities," by Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, 14 December 2006, p. A4.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right candidate, tries to live down his role in suppressing the Paris riots last year, courting the same people he labeled as "scum" back then.

Telegenic (no kidding!) Segolene Royal (wasn't she in "Davinci"?) pushes "inclusiveness."

Even Jean-Marie Le Pen's got a poster with minorities marching alongside him into the future (imagine George Wallace's conversion). Le Pen's still all law and order. He's just admitting that appearing too white French on that score isn't enough to be credible as a candidate.

In sum:

With France's presidential election four months away, Mr. Sarkozy and the other leading candidates are campaigning hard to seduce the country's alienated and disadvantaged ethnic populations.

One French sociologist describes the shift as such:

Five years ago, immigration and integration were not campaign issues of the mainstream parties. This time, the French are questioning the failure of integration and asking themselves about their capacity to integrate new foreigners. The debate has changed.

Royal goes so far as to declare minorities to be "the future of France," deciding the "question of survival" for France in globalization's competitive markets.'

I know, I know. Europe will never adjust to its Muslim minority. These people will become an endless source of instability there and threats over here, due to our connectivity to Europe. No real change is possible, or at least not possible in our lifetimes, certainly not with such unregenerates as Le Pen. Instead, it's all cultural suicide from here on out.

Or mebbe not.