China's emergence as global tourism magnet

ARTICLE: "2020 Vision: How and where we will be traveling in the year 2020 and beyond; The Hot Destination: China will draw tourists from everywhere," Indianapolis Star, 19 February 2006, p. K1.

As I noted in BFA, tourism industry officials have long predicted that China itself will provide the world about 100 million tourists a year. This article predicts that China, already the fourth-biggest tourist destination in the world today, will be number one by 2015.

Clearly, the Beijing Olympics and China's burgeoning film industry will accelerate this trend, as both will showcase China. And Shanghai, as the article argues, is poised to become the new New York, with double the Big Apple's number of skyscrapers already and plans to build 1k more.

Still think those alleged 40 million Chinese males who can't find a wife due to skewed sex ratios won't be able to get a date?

New Core drives Globalization IV's growth more and more

COLUMN: "Protectionism Threatens Emerging Engine of Growth," by Frederick Kempe ("Thinking Global"), Wall Street Journal, 21 February 2006, p. A4.

Cool bit on how the New Core increases drives the global economy in terms of demand. So more and more it's not just the U.S. that drives global demand. The EU and Japan haven't driven demand in a while, and show no signs of doing so any time soon.

Instead it is countries like Brazil, Russia, China, India and the East European countries that used to belong to the Warsaw Pact that are accounting for an increasingly larger chunk of global imports (rising from about 28% back in 1980, when Globalization III began, to an estimated 40% by last year (I date Globalization IV from 9/11).

That's the percentage growth. The actual growth is more impressive: emerging markets accounted for about a trillion in global imports in 1990, but draw in four times that amount today ($4T).

Says one banker, "The baton of global consumption is being passed from the U.S. consumer base to the millions of consumers in developing nations."

Still think there's no money to be made in shrinking the Gap?

The big hitch? Congress' rising penchant for protectionism.

This is myopic in the extreme. As this article points out, "One-third of U.S. corporations' foreign-affiliate income, which is a proxy for their foreign earnings, came from emerging markets in the first three quarters of last year, a record high and up significantly from 25% in 2002."

As the same banker (Joseph Quinlan, chief market strategist at Bank of America) puts it at the end of the piece: "Bad trade policy could upset this emerging consumer class as a powerful consumption force just when we need them."

As I wrote in PNM: we shrink the Gap for the most selfish of reasons. Neo-Marxist bullshit (Iike Immanuel Wallerstein) says the Core needs to keep the Gap the Gap in order to stay rich, when history is amply proving the exact opposite is true--just as I argued in PNM and BFA.

New Core sets the New Rules on medical coverage--yet again

ARTICLE: "In South Africa, Insurer Gives Points For Healthy Living: Frequent-Flier-Style Program Rewards Diligent Members; Model for U.S. Overhaul? (A Diabetic Wins Elite Status)," by Ron Lieber, Wall Street Journal, 21 February 2006, p. A1.

ARTICLE: "How the Amish Drive Down Medical Costs," by Joel Millman, Wall Street Journal, 21 February 2006, p. B1.

Fascinating pair of articles. In first, South Africa shows an interesting, carrot-laden way of improving the behavior of its medically-insured population. People love freebies, and they love point systems. Same basic drill as frequent flier accounts: the system rewarding those who give it the highest profits.

I know, I know, South Africa's New Core status seems thin to some, and how could America ever take any tips from such a public health basketcase as that?

But that's the essential point of my notion that the New Core sets the new rules: it's the countries experiencing the most growth and rapid development that tend to come up with the most innovative solutions for all sorts of social stress issues. So China is becoming a global center of innovative research on cancer (all those smokers), whereas India pioneers medical tourism (flying to Mumbai or New Delhi for that heart bypass at one-quarter the cost--flight included!).

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the New Core countries experience the bulk of necessity right now.

The second article would seem a Gap-within-the-Core argument, until you read far enough: turns out those Amish are winning their demands for cheaper care from U.S. providers by threatening to abandon them completely for long trips to Mexico for cheaper care. The Amish are basically trading their time, which they have in abundance, to threaten switching to New Core medical providers in Mexico in order to win price concessions from Old Core providers in the U.S.

Seems like the Mexican tail wags the American dog again!

PNM's publication in China derailed

Got an email over last weekend from lawyer Michael Tang in NYC, who helped set up the deal with Beijing U Press and worked as part of the translation team, saying that BUP now wanted to renege on our previous deal of cutting only a minimum of wordage regarding the Chinese Communist Party and Taiwan (so long as BUP could caveat the book as reflecting my personal opinions and not reflecting any official BUP stance).

Now, apparently out of fear of recent government sackings of editors who got out of line, BUP's senior managers have returned to their demands that everything mentioning Iraq, Iran and North Korea be removed from the text, otherwise they threaten to abandon the publication, which was set for January (basically, the book is completely set for printing).

Well, I thought about for a few minutes and decided to refuse their demand, instructing Tang to tell them we'd seek publication elsewhere.

I have a couple of options through other friends in China. Neither may pan out, and my agents here in the States have warned me that BUP may simply publish the book with the cuts they desire, pretending it never heard back from me or simply ignoring what I've decided. This is, apparently, an old trick.

If this occurs, I will obtain the Chinese translation of the full book and post it on the web myself, or I will arrange for my own separate translation of the cut parts or the book in its entirety and post one or the other on the web. May take a while, but I will try to do this if this scenario unfolds.

Meanwhile, I will seek out other interested parties in China through the contacts I have, and I will instruct my agents not to approach BUP regarding Blueprint for Action.

The neverending dream of the all-in-one solution

ARTICLE: “Rumsfeld Aims To Elevate Role Of Special Forces,” by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 18-19 February 2006, p. A1.

ARTICLE: “The Future of U.S. Warfare,” Julian Barnes Q&A with Peter Schoomaker, U.S. News & World Report, 27 February 2006, p. 25.

ARTICLE: “Army Teaches Officers to Think Globally,” by Associated Press, Washington Post, 21 February 2006.

ARTICLE: “U.S. Counterinsurgency Academy Giving Officers a New Mind-Set: Course in Iraq Stresses the Cultural, Challenges the Conventional,” by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 21 February 2006.

OP-ED: “Musings About the War on Drugs,” by George Melloan, Wall Street Journal, 21 February 2006, p. A19.

OP-ED: “Send in the State Department,” by Robert Kaplan, New York Times, 21 February 2006.

Usual great piece from Jaffe, this time on Rummy’s plan to expand Special Ops Command by growing 14k more bodies (this will take time, Schoomaker points out).

Here’s the worrisome bit:

The Pentagon chief’s focus on these elite forces reflects his conviction that the Iraq war--in which about 140,000 U.S. troops are struggling to rebuild a country from the ground up--is an anomaly that is winding down and won’t be repeated, say senior defense officials.

“We are not going to invade and occupy our way to victory in the long war against Islamic extremism,” said Michael Vickers, who served as a senior adviser on the secretary’s recently released review of Pentagon spending and strategy.

This is an okay argument, if not taken to extremes. Reality is that postwar reconstruction ops are here to stay, whether or not we repeat the largely go-it-alone approach we applied in Iraq. Remember, Bush the Elder started the first go-around on Iraq (beginning, we now know, our successful nation-building process in Kurdistan) and Somalia, and Clinton started efforts in Haiti (resumed under Bush the Younger), Bosnia and Kosovo. Bush then started an effort in Afghanistan (small footprint model) and then restarted the effort in Iraq (go-it-alone model), so you have to be careful to avoid the notion of many Big War hawks in the Pentagon, of which Vickers is certainly one, who want to push off the entirety of the GWOT (not to mention the entire Gap) to SOCOM, leaving the Pentagon free to dream up big wars against a big opponent, as in China.

There is no way SOCOM is going to handle the Gap on its own, and civil affairs will remain largely a niche function so long as it’s ghettoized in SOCOM instead of the Army. Plus, as Frederick Kagan points out in the Jaffe piece, Rumsfeld’s belief in the model of letting the locals handle as much as possible “is unshaken even in the face of multiple setbacks over the last few years.”

As Jaffe notes:

One of the most striking features of the Rumsfeld vision as outlined in the review is that it doesn’t provide much new for the conventional Army and Marine Corps units who are now doing the bulk of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather, it suggests that these sorts of wars are an aberration that won’t be repeated any time soon.

And here I think we finally locate Rumsfeld’s version of MacNamara-like guilt over Iraq. It is a classic out-of-sight-out-of-mind concoction, this QDR, that proclaims the Long War and then immediately outsources it all to SOCOM, as in, “Will no one rid me of this GWOT?”

Schoomaker’s remaking an entire Army for the Long War, but this force, and the Marines, seem missing in action in Rumsfeld’s QDR, which prefers, deep down, to keep planning on great power war with China. Despite all the rhetoric and new support to SOCOM, this is still Rumsfeld trying to lowball the GWOT, reasserting its status as lesser included when compared to “disruptive” threat China.

This is a shame, because the Army, the Marines, and CENTCOM are busting ass to refashion themselves sufficiently for the tasks that lie ahead, whereas Rummy seems intent on farming the entire effort out to an already tapped SOCOM that won’t magically cover the Gap with 14k extra guys.

This low-balling approach is what gets you the multi-decade, no-progress effort called the (global) War on Drugs, or GWOD I suppose. In the GWOD, we’ve transferred most of the costs to American society (roughly $50B a year) that would be better spent on increasing our foreign aid budget... oh, about 10-fold!

But here’s the rub in the end, as Schoomaker points out, and as the new COIN (counter-insurgency) doctrine points out, the winning mix is about 20% kinetic and about 80% non-kinetic. SOCOM, even expanded, comes nowhere near handling the 80% non-kinetic, which invariably involve the Army and Marines big time, along with a lot of civilian US government personnel.

Everyone knows this, except perhaps Rummy and the China hawks in the Pentagon, who want desperately for things to return to the way they were.

Even Robert Kaplan, in an excellent NYT piece, finds himself reaching for an interagency-focused federal department in the model of the British Colonial Office.

Can anyone say “Department of Everything Else”?

Apparently, Bob Kaplan can.

On Dubai port "scandal," I vote for connectivity

ARTICLE: "Bush, Congress Head for Clash Over Ports Deal: President Promises a Veto, As Republican Leaders Move To Block Dubai Acquisition," by Greg Hitt, Dennis K. Berman and Daniel Machalaba, Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2006, p. A1.

EDITORIAL: "Ports of Politics: How to sound like a hawk without being one," Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2006, p. A14.

EDITORIAL: "Paranoia about Dubai ports deal is needless," Financial Times, 21 February 2006.

After lecturing the Europeans over the cartoon flap, it's awfully weird to watch the paranoia, racism, and pure political nonsense at work on the proposed purchase of a British port-managing firm by a Dubai corporation.

The message we send on this is clear: if you're Arab, you're immediately untrustworthy. Dubai seeks to become the Singapore of the Middle East, and watching that rather progressive model of capitalism + Islam reach out for this strand of connectivity in a venue it knows all too well (shipping) makes perfect sense, just like CNOOC reaching for UNOCAL last summer.

Is it the pretense of these "hawks" that America somehow "secures" itself in a globalized world, not being able to trust any others in this process?

This thing is so overblown on so many levels as to be truly, madly, deeply stupid as a political football. Shame on any presidential types for grabbing this one and running with it. Our goal in the GWOT is to connect the Middle East faster than the jihadists can disconnect it, so again, what do we say here to the people of Dubai,who have--believe it or not--done plenty to aid our efforts in the region at great personal risk to their national security?

This is something I harp on in BFA: either we reward countries trying to make the journey from Gap to Core or we stop pretending we're in this GWOT for anything other than our own profiteering--political or otherwise.

The biggest joke? This labeling of the contract as somehow putting the company in question in charge of our port security, when it's only about managing commercial activities. The Coast Guard runs security for our ports--always has and always will. This is misrepresentation of the worst sort, and it's why I argue against a strategic communications strategy with the Gap: our own politicians screw up that sort of effort on a daily basis. Better to police our own loose lips than seek any singular voice abroad.

People act responsibly when you give them responsibility. Dubai has earned that trust. Either we're true to our word or let's just go Tom Friedman's 'cut-them-off-at-the-gas" proposal and tell the entire Islamic world that we accept Osama bin Laden's offer of civilizational apartheid.

I'm with Bush on this one. He's showing some serious maturity on a subject about which too many in Congress are acting childishly.

Working the Gap inside the Core

Nice email from a reader:

Mr. Barnett,

Just wanted to let you know that The Pentagon's New Map is on my top 5 books of all time. I think you should receive a Pulitzer for it. I've read all of your articles and am looking forward to Blueprint for Action.

I spent a few years in the Navy after college, finishing up as an Anti-Terrorism Training Officer just as 9/11 came on the scene. Have since spent my career as a Criminal Investigator for the banking industry and the last couple of years as an Investigator for an international shipping company. I'm also working on my M.A. in Criminal Justice. I only mention this because your work has inspired me to draw a parallel.

I think your Core-Gap principle as well as the "lessons learned" cited in the most recent Esquire magazine article could be completely applied to our domestic crime/corrections/judicial problems. We have developed our own internal "quagmire" because we are fighting the wrong war. I'm all for locking up the bad guys but this is ultimately a dangerously narrow-minded proposition. I think we in the Criminal Justice world need to think more dynamically and work on shrinking the Gap within our own country. In fact, my Masters Thesis might be on this very issue.

Just wondering if you've ever thought of this (you probably have) and hoping that you might someday consider an article on it?

Anyway, just wanted you to know that I'm a big fan. Keep up the good work and God bless.

M.B. (actual name witheld pending okay)

Phoenix, AZ

My reponse to M.B.?

I've been confronted a number of times with this observation, and believe it to be incredibly true. I know it's true from the months I spent with Enterra Solutions colleague Bradd Hayes doing strategic planning for the United Way of Rhode Island, and from my interactions with the Providence police chief on this subject.

Beyond that gut feeling, I have little to offer because I need people like yourself to educate me on what comes next--beyond this basic realization. So, naturally, I'd be thrilled to see your masters involve this question. The exploration of essential resiliency inside the Core's own Gaps should tell us a lot about how best to shrink the Gap with time.

Remember what I've said in the books and here in the blog: there is nothing going on inside the Gap right now that we haven't encountered and conquered (or attempted to conquer in the past). All we need to do in order to understand how best to shrink the Gap is to look inside ourselves and remember our past--and our present, as this excellent email points out.

But no, don't wait on any Pulitizers, which naturally go to books that do more reporting than I ever hope to achieve in my work. Not sure what the appropriate award is for grand strategy books, but I'll gladly take one of those!

Dan Forrester's paper worth reading

This report is worth checking out. It's a rare piece that explores what it takes to create change leadership within the government, and Dan does an amazing job of describing and categorizing the types of change leaders, so much so that I learned a good deal about my relationship with Art Cebrowski by reading it.

The paper reminds me of Gladwell's categorization of connecting types in Tipping Point, but again, pursuing a venue (the government) that's very rarely explored with this sort of approach, so truly path-breaking.

Tom Barnett: Government Change Agent

Google Alerts pointed me to the press release "Sapient Releases Findings from Change Agent Research; New Paper Provides Roadmap for Government Innovation".

From there I clicked to GovernmentChangeAgents.com

There I found a post dated February 10th entitled "Tom Barnett, a Change Agent and 'Horizontal Thinker' No One Can Ignore". In that post, Dan Forrester thanks Tom for all of his help with the paper Dan wrote for Sapient "The Government's New Breed of Change Agents, Leading the War on Terror". Tom is featured very prominently in that paper (Acrobat search returns 7 hits). Dan links Tom's original post from February 2005 where Tom mentions doing the interview. (How's that for circular linking! ;-)

In the next post at GovernmentChangeAgents.com, Dan writes about Art Cebrowski, Tom's mentor. Dan credits Tom for helping them get an interview with Admiral Cebrowski for the paper. The coolest thing about that post, to me, was the link Dan had to the tribute page the Office of Force Transformation has put up in the admiral's memory. One of the tributes they link is Zenpundit (have you seen it, Mark?). Strangely, they don't link anything by Tom, though Tom didn't write a tribute per se.

Tom writes:

This report is worth checking out. It's a rare piece that explores what it takes to create change leadership within the government, and Dan does an amazing job of describing and categorizing the types of change leaders, so much so that I learned a good deal about my relationship with Art Cebrowski by reading it.

The paper reminds me of Gladwell's categorization of connecting types in Tipping Point, but again, pursuing a venue (the government) that's very rarely explored with this sort of approach, so truly path-breaking.

Tom in the news

The Knoxville News-Sentinel reports (some registration required):

The March 15 [Knox County Public Library] book discussion will focus on "The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century" by Thomas Barnett, and "Allies: The U.S., Britain and Europe and the War in Iraq" by William Shawcross.

The News-Sentinel is on the way to becoming "The official newspaper of Tom Barnett". ;-)

A well-timed break

DATELINE: in the Shire, Indy, 21 February 2006

Back from nice trip to Boscobel WI, my hometown. Fun times with two of my six siblings and one of my nieces.

Hit the Chicago Shedd Aquarium on Friday on drive up, which was really cool. Only problem: I have so many kids (4) that the family membership pack was actually cheaper!

Oddly enough, a nice article about me and PNM in my hometown newspaper this week. I will try to blog later tonight, but no promises.

Got what was winding its way through the family finally, on ride home last night, and it's already blossomed into the usual right-side ear infection/sinus infection combo. Got a doc appointment for tomorrow, which means I will be close to brain dead until Thursday morning, when the antibiotics have had a chance to work some magic.

Good week to get sick, as I am not traveling at all and need to work on my taxes.

Toured the house today: floors all done now, including the garage's special coating. We talk more and more about the closing, moving in, etc. Much of outside work won't be done, due to weather restrictions, but big French tile/drain already put in along back line of property, so drainage permanently fixed now, which is a big relief given the huge rains recently. Closet people and appliances coming soon.

Will try to work some tonight, but I have my doubts. Looks like the Olympics for me.

[posted for Tom by Sean]

The fixation on who's up and who's down isn't helpful

I guess i was surprised to see this from Fukuyama ("After Neoconservatism," New York Times Magazine, 19 February 2006).

It seems like he's gotten more defensive on the whole "end of history" thing as he's gotten older, so he seems more fixated on these camp arguments that I think, over the course of time, will be considered rather overblown.

In the end, Bush is Bush just like Reagan was Reagan. W sees the world in rather stark terms of good and evil, and he believes in defending the good and attacking the evil. Dressing it all up with Leo Strauss and neocons and Paul Wolfowitz secretly running more of the universe than is normal for a DEPSECDEF is all cool, in that DC-who's-up-and-who's-down sort of way, but it's not actually very descriptive or particularly helpful to our understanding of where we've been or where we going.

9/11 gave us a strong sense of where we are in history right now, along with where globalization is right now as well as Islam adapting itself to its encroaching embrace of its predominantly traditional culures. Bush acted on that realization and forged a host of new rule sets that will not go away. Some want to chalk that all up to "neocons," but I honestly think it's a whole lot deeper than that.

So Bush got us in deep in the Middle East on the basis of his view on how to respond to 9/11, and we're somewhat stuck right now with what's already on our plate. So don't expect any major military interventions any time soon. Bush is probably done for his second term, and much will depend on who comes next.

But guess what? That next president will face the same basic international environment: same problems, possibly new solutions in addition to the ones we've tried so far, but unlikely to abandon the right and the propensity to use the same tools Bush tapped, to include the military. As I like to point out: the entire post-Cold War period has seen three presidents so far use the military a whole helluva lot. I don't see that essential dynamic, or what I call the military-market nexus, going away any time soon.

What innovations a new president should bring is a more flexible definition of who can be our allies in this process. You can call this whatever school of thought you want, and many names will inevitably be employed with little common sense (but academics have rarely required that in their works) and result in numerous goofy bestsellers that explain nothing that readers don't already know and simply want reinforced.

But in the end, much will depend on the person in the Oval Office. If I could get a Bill Clinton-like player on economics and a Bush-like guy on security, I might actually have the peanut butter-chocolate combo of my dreams, and the best packages on both sides right now are probably Hillary v. Hagel, although I think there are several on both sides who can grow into that understanding over the course of a very long campaign (Warner, Brownback, maybe Feingold, very possibly Bayh). Kerry and Rice are strangely attractrive long shots, made so primarily because it's hard to imagine the transformation from--respectively--past-losing candidate and single/rather closed-off personality who's never run for office. Then again, watching Hillary's trajectory makes one realize that such transformations are completely possible.

But again, what neocons-up-or-down has to do with any of that is rather amusing but pointless to consider.

But I guess it's okay for a period of navel gazing that the wonks and academics do so well.

I, however, will do my best to resist, because I think that scorecarding is the death to big think.

Tom's too optimistic... for teenagers!

ARTICLE: "Teens examine theories on peace: Author's plan for better world intrigues youth", By Rachel Troy, 16 Robin Wetherill, 16, Izaak Hayes, 15, and Zoë Hayes, 17, Y-Press, IndyStar.com.

When Tom spoke last month at the Indiana Council on World Affairs at Butler University four members of Y-Press (youth staff) for the Indianapolis Star averaging 16 years of age went to listen. Then they reviewed what they heard. Short version: one for, three against. The 'againsts' generally think Tom is too optimistic. What's wrong with kids these days!?! ;-) But, seriously, go read their thoughts for yourself.

A few more design tweaks

Tried to make the site easier to navigate and read by simplifying a few things and adding some basic lines to differentiate between post and comments. Also doubled the 'previous | main | next' navigation from the top of individual pages to the bottom as well. Now, if you're reading the comments and scroll to the bottom of the page (and don't have anything pertinent to add in the comments ;-) you can navigate back, forward or up (to the main index page) easily.

Bonus hint: Another handy way I sometimes read the comments is to scroll down the page and 'ctrl-click' on all of the posts that have comments that I'm interested in reading to load them in the background in a tab (you are using Firefox or an analog, right ;-).

Thank you to those of you who have written in to suggest these or other improvements to the website design. I'm about done with tweaking and ready to move on to a redesign which may or may not change the way the weblog looks, but will certainly give me a better understanding of the code behind it and how to change it properly.

Tom on the WP from the minivan

ARTICLE: "In the Mideast, the Third Way Is a Myth," by Shibley Telhami, Friday, February 17, 2006; Page A19

Driving with family up north and got this article sent from a reader.

Great article. Gets at something I've always felt insinctively about the region and which drives my co-optation strategy with Iran. This realization is what needs to happen among U.S. decisionmakers if we're going to keep the Big Bang rolling (hmmmm, feel like I have my next column).

Here is the key point in the text:

This leaves U.S. foreign policy with limited choices. Full electoral democracy in the Middle East will inevitably lead to domination by Islamist groups, leaving the United States to either continue a confrontational approach, with high and dangerous costs for both sides, or to find a way to engage them -- something that has yet to be fully considered. Given this, skepticism about the real aims of these groups should be balanced by openness to the possibility that their aims once they are in power could differ from their aims as opposition groups. This requires partial engagement, patience, and a willingness to allow such new governments space and time to put their goals to the test of reality. Hamas, in fact, could provide a place for testing whether careful engagement leads to moderation.

[posted for Tom by Sean]

Disappearing ...

On long weekend with family.

Will be trying to work a couple of lengthy written interviews when I have moments, so blog will come a distant third.

Should be back up and running late Monday or Tuesday.

Enjoy the holiday!

Tom in Austria's Profil

Sebastian Heinzel's interview with Tom: "Mussen raffinierter vorgehen", Profil, February 6, 2006

A kind Austrian gentleman wrote Tom and mentioned he'd read about him in Profil. I tried to find the interview online, but couldn't. So I wrote him back and asked for help (as I only know a few words in German). He was kind enough to scan the article, which is not available online, and now I present it to you.

Page 1 Page 2

Any of you Germanaphones want to comment?

Soft kill and softer killing, but in the end, it's still all about leaving the place more connected than you found it

ARTICLE: "Rice Asks for $75 Million to Increase Pressure on Iran," by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 16 February 2006, p. A1

ARTICLE: "The Lessons of Counterinsurgency: U.S. Unit Praised for Tactics Against Iraqi Fighters, Treatment of Detainees," by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 16 February 2006, p. A14

OP-ED: "For Pakistan, American Aid Is All Guns, No Butter," by Helene Cooper, New York Times, 16 February 2006

Rice asks Congress for $75 mil to work the soft kill on Iran's hardliners (media stuff, aid to local opposition, etc.). We spent $10 mil last year, so a significant plus-up, but not one suggesting that the Bush Administration is willing to go beyond such soft kill strategies.

"The United States will actively confront the policies of this Iranian regime, and at the same time we are going to work to support the aspirations of the Iranian people for freedom in their own country," Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing on the administration's foreign affairs budget.

Meanwhile, our units rotating back to Iraq for the second go-around show more and more intelligence in working the counter-insurgency. The second article is about the Third Armored Cav in its second go-around in Iraq. First time around was pretty rough, but a lot of learning occurred among officers, so this time around you have Col. H.R. McMaster, who was Abizaid's chief brain-trust guy (head of his Commander's Action Group cell) working the scene in a manner befitting his PhD in history.

The last time the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment served in Iraq, in 2003-04, its performance was judged mediocre, with a series of abuse cases growing out of its tour of duty in Anbar province.

But its second tour in Iraq has been very different, according to specialists in the difficult art of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign -- fighting a guerrilla war but also trying to win over the population and elements of the enemy. Such campaigns are distinct from the kind of war most U.S. commanders have spent decades preparing to fight.

In the last nine months, the regiment has focused on breaking the insurgents' hold on Tall Afar, a town of 290,000. Their operations here "will serve as a case study in classic counterinsurgency, the way it is supposed to be done," said Terry Daly, a retired intelligence officer specializing in the subject.

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.

The regiment's campaign began in Colorado in June 2004, when Col. H. R. McMaster took command and began to train the unit to return to Iraq. As he described it, his approach was like that of a football coach who knows he has a group of able and dedicated athletes, but needs to retrain them to play soccer.

This is the sort of iterative learning process that I sought to capture in "The Monks of War" article: we get smarter over time, they get more desperate. Toppling Saddam was a real System Perturbation, but working the insurgency is a serious, long-term horizontal scenario, requiring people who can see across time. A PhD in history has to help on that score. Doesn't mean you're not still killing bad guys, it just means you do it with more care and discretion, making sure you don't simply create more enemies in the process.

In the end, you get to leave when their economy is working. Jobs kill insurgencies, not soldiers.

The last piece, an op-ed, is a pretty sad statement on how we've waged such Long War stuff in the past. It's mostly told from the perspective of a long-time businessman in Pakistan, who speaks of the good times before all this warring began, remembering a Pakistan that was effectively modernizing and growing ever more economic connectivity with the outside world.

Then the Americans came with their particular wars, not in 2001, mind you, but back in 1979. And ever since we started using Pakistan as a staging area for warfare in Afganistan (back then, against the Sovs), we managed only to do one thing effectively over the years: slowly but surely disconnect Pakistan from the larger world by increasing the amount of hardliner violence that both occurs within its borders and emanates from the country.

As this guy, Syed Jawad Ahsan, puts it:

"Pakistan didn't used to be like this," he said. "All this extremism that you see here now is because of Afghanistan."

He meant the Afghanistan war that started in 1979, not the one that came after Sept. 11. The way Mr. Ahsan sees it, Pakistan before 1979 was a much more open society, with wine bars in the cities and a small measure of freedom. But when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, America responded by arming, and largely creating, the Islamist fighters who drummed up religious fire in their war to drive out the Russians. Next door, Pakistan became a front-line state, and American money flooded to the mujahedeen. Ever since, Pakistan has been home to a growing cadre of fundamentalist Islamists, many of them bent on jihad.

With the huge gap here between rich and poor, militants find young boys with nothing to do easy prey. Mr. Ahsan can't fathom why Americans aren't working on the economic conditions that breed discontent.

"We don't need more of your F-16's," he said. "What we need is trade in textiles. We need a free trade agreement, like the one you're going to give Egypt, like the one you gave Jordan, like the one you gave Morocco."

The United States agreed in 2005 to resume sales of F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. The sales had been suspended for more than a decade because Pakistan began developing nuclear weapons. But Washington has refused to grant a bigger and far more important concession: duty-free access for Pakistani imports.

F-16s don't connect your economy up with globalization, do they? The Long War needs to generate a Long Peace, or it never ends. Peace comes with connectivity: people making stuff and not just craving retribution and jihads that create nothing but dead bodies.

You have to ask yourself if we're using Pakistan today any less cynically than we have in the past. If we're not doing better by now, then the moderates and businessmen in both Iraq and Iran have little to look forward to.

Interesting analogy on China-U.S.: U.S. and Britain cooperation on piracy

Got this from Rob Quayle today in an email:

Violent piracy hits new waters.

This might be a common enemy that could get the US Navy & the Chinese Navy together.
In 1825, just 12 years after the War if 1812, the US and the Brits were cooperating extremely
well against Cuban pirates (See The Pirate Wars, Peter Earle (a Brit), 2003).

Interesting observation.

Just penned my second Sunday column for the Knoxville News Sentinel today. Decided to go with a China overview similar to my November piece in Esquire, just one that makes different arguments.

I have to admit: I really like penning these little 720-word vignettes. When you're not forced to do one on contract, which is how I've done most op-eds (the editors tell you what they'd like you to write about, so you're always working their angle instead), and can just dream up what you'd like to talk about, it's really pretty fun. I can tell already I'd have no problem going at a much higher frequency. Globalization alone gives you tons of topics.

Take that, Bill Gates!

Dateline: In the Shire, Indy, 15 February 2006

Good to be home with no biz travel for a bit.

Yesterday I gave a good show at the SID conference. Big room, very packed. Projector pretty old and it clipped the left side of my screen pretty badly. But I went a solid 45 and did about 20 of Q&A. My host Asif Shaikh, president of International Resources Group, was very happy afterwards. Just provocative enough to piss off plenty of old-timers and just daring enough to thrill a lot of young people. I signed books for about 45 minutes afterwards--all PNM, which was kind of nostalgic. Oh, and one BFA for a young man who ran downstairs to the book store and picked it up.

Nice talk with old USAID bud Tony Pryor, who is now a big player at IRG.

Then off to Reagan via the subway to catch my plane home, buying some roses at GW University on my way into the Metro. Pretty open flight back on USAIR.

Last night focused on the Missus, and then the baby teething and maybe with an ear infection coming on.

Today was an interview with some Austrian equivalent of Der Spiegel. I would look up the name but I tend to forget these things and then the piece comes out and I get some emails from the country and I'm like, "Huh?"

Then a bunch of crappy paperwork of the type you face when you travel so much. Actually, most of the day lost to the maddening slow-down of our PC, crippled as it is by XP and five people who use it.

Afternoon saw spouse and I tour the new house. Wood flooring going in very fast now upstairs (no carpeting whatsoever), and the rest of the house should be done by middle of next week, leaving only some ceramic work in the basement and the coating of the garage floor. Trim, including all the built-ins done next week too. Sinks and final plumbing going in now. Home theater room looking sweet, awaiting the gear. We're talking deck and patio and sidewalks and playsets more and more, as the construction will move outside next month to start on all that stuff. Getting pretty thrilling to walk the place, and I feel the need to stop by almost every day now, just to escape this f--king apartment (frankly, all six of us want to divorce all of the other five about now--we even sent kitty away to Nona's for a while to preserve her feline sanity).

Tonight was helping son #1 on science project. Got the good news on him today regarding some medical stuff coming up: all covered by insurance. So I take my hat off to Steve DeAngelis again for getting us the top-line nationwide BC/BS, something you get when you work remotely like I do. Makes a big difference, cause we were looking at a pretty big price tag if the insurance said no.

Tonight was sadly taken up by witnessing the death of our four-year-old HP all-in-one. Grindy noises as of late predicted its demise. Bit much to watch, but the old beast put in a lot of effort for us over the years, and its demise pushed me over the edge on our aging Gateway as well, so unhappy have I become with PCs and Microsoft on PCs in general. Time to go all Mac.

Buoyed by a couple of new talks lined up today by my speaking agent Jenn (Special Ops Command--Pacific and the Joint IED group now headed up by the famous Monty Meigs), I bravely pulled out my Visa and ordered one of the new Intel-chip IMacs (the 17"). I added some RAM, made the mouse and keyboard wireless, and was rewarded by my former Marine salesperson with an academic discount (I revealed my new affiliation with the Howard Baker Center at U Tennessee), which basically killed the tax. Oh, and I got a free HP all-in-one for my trouble as part of the deal, which was nice.

Only bitch? Good week until it arrives. So we go sans printer for a while, and endure the horrifically slow pace of our XP-infected Gateway. Boy, I won't miss it whatsoever: all the extra crap you had to do to keep that thing running, free of disease, etc. It just got to be a part-time job to the point where I never used the damn thing except for Quicken, and my new laptop carries that, so ...

Plus, this way, the iTunes kids can work it all out within the Mac universe, which will save me some effort. All in all, a brave new world I can't wait to enter--cootie free.