Bremer wants his SysAdmin

Sent to me by reader Paul Speer (I need to get better at citing people who send me stuff, sorry! Then again, not always sure they want their names used [sorry Paul!]).

Here's the op-ed from Bremer in IHT: IN Iraq, Wrongs Made a Right.

Here's the crucial package:

Another clear lesson is that America must be better prepared for the post-conflict phase should it find itself in similar military situations in the future. The administration has made a good start by setting up offices of reconstruction in the State and Defense departments. But the effort must be broadened through the government and especially the private sector.

The goal should be a quick-reaction, public-private Civilian Reserve Corps consisting of people with expertise on matters like the establishment of telecommunications facilities, rebuilding of electrical power plants, modernizing health care systems and instituting modern budgeting procedures.

That, I would say, is the horse's mouth all right. I like the emphasis on public civilian and private. Marry that up to the security element, and make it as multinational as possible, and you have my SysAdmin force.

Stick that function inside a cabinet-level department that says America is serious about shrinking the Gap, and you have my current book.

I am still out ahead, but my lead is getting shorter, because, as I say in BFA, the grand strategist doesn't take you somewhere you'd never otherwise go, he just gets there first and says "This way!"

Thus the need to keep writing! I can almost spot the next cairn on the trail up ahead.

Wore my Packer coat to mass yesterday and ....

It worked.

Pats lost last night.

So for another year we see that no team in NFL history is capable of winning three championships in a row. It remains an impossible feat!

Except the Packers did it twice (1929-1930-1931 and 1965-1966-1967).

Funny, last night during game there was poll for fans: Which decade dynasty was most impressive?

The list was Steelers in 70s (4 championships!) 49ers in 1980s (4 championships!), Cowboys in 90s (3 championships!) and Pats in 2000s (three championships!).

Funny that no one bothered to include only team to win 5 championships in a decade: Green Bay (1961, 1962, 1965, 1966, and 1967).

Ah, but we know that the there was no NFL before the Super Bowl ...

My routine warning from Warren not to blog the upcoming Esquire piece too much

So I will shy from blogging stories that would pull me down that line of temptation.

It's just hard, because you get so psyched about the piece and it's so big in your head.

But Warren never pays me until the piece comes out, clever bastard that he is, so I will have to bury my knowledge for now by pretending "I know nothing--noooooooooothing!"

I've already begun doing this. Was going to blog story about Army decision to kill drone program, but as I started getting into the analysis, I started spilling over into points from the article, so I just had to junk the piece.

Ditto for a WSJ piece on Army in Iraq over weekend. Tempting, tempting, but no.

I must avoid the triggers that make my bad behavior inevitable!

Puppy will sit until master throws the check across the lawn.

Diplomacy as psychiatry

Here is the blog entry as it was brought to my attention by a reader: http://writinghistory.blogspot.com/2006/01/diplomacy-as-psychiatry.html.

It's such a queer premise, in the standard sense, that I am immediately drawn to it. I used interpersonal psych stuff in my Ph.D. (later book) to explain how two bullied countries (East Germany and Romania) dealt with the bullier (USSR). The DDR tried to become best boy in Third World ("Are you pleased master?") and Ceaucescu used venue to play bad boy a la Tito ("See, I make friends where I please!"). So I am partial to this sort of stuff.

The question he poses?

A country is based around an identity. That identity can be mature ("We are Singapore and Singapore stands for ... X in the world.") or, for lack of a better word, retarded in its development ("I don't know who we are except we've suffered a lot together in the past and I'm generally pissed off about the outside world.")

So this blogger's basic question really is, Is there a role for national "psychiatry" in bringing a Gap nation up from the depths?

And I guess I would say, yes, there is.

And it would run like this: First in security, you need to help them understand their self-destructive behaviors and gain confidence in themselves and their capacities for self-rule and self-defense. Second, in economics, you'd need to help them understand similarly their capacity for self-development of capital (especially human through education and the liberation of women). Ultimately, you'd have to work on their political identity in the world, a sense of who they are and what they're capable of.

I say it in BFA: the journey from Gap to Core is one of youth (Gap) to middle-age (New Core) to seniority (Old Core). It really is a demographic journey as much as anything else, so remember that when you deal with national identity in the Gap, you're dealing with kids, so to speak, or very youth-skewed demographics.

This is why the spread of religion in the Gap, especially the dueling spreads of Islam and Christianity, is so vital. Youth look for guidance, and the most accepted global package for that is religion, which, like much psychiatry, is all about gaining self-control, self-awareness, etc.

Great map displaying China's economic integration with the world

Don Beck of "Spiral Dynamics" just sent it to me. Very cool.

Map itself is found at: http://maps.maplecroft.com/china.

A canned PowerPoint-ish movie shows a bunch of details and how to interpret the map here: http://movies.maplecroft.com/china.

The main measures are trade and investment flows. Countries are ranked from low to extreme in integration with China. Most of the extremes are those countries that surround China, to include key trading/investment partners Japan and South Korea (ring any bells for U.S. national security?). Others are found in Middle East (Yemen, Central Asia (Kazakstan), Africa (Sudan, Angola, Congo) and even Latin America (e.g., Chile). Pretty much entire New Core is at least High, as are several Old Core (like Germany, US).

It's a fascinating map. Gives you a sense of China's reach, especially in the Gap, which is, I imagine either on par with ours or larger.

Why is this useful? We need to understand China's growing economic influence throughout the Gap, not to thwart it per se, but because we'll be going to these places more and more and finding China and its interests there more and more. We'll need to take those interests into account (unless we're spoiling for a fight), and we'll need to learn how to leverage those interests into pushing China toward cooperative security schemes in these countries--furthering our interests.

China is a giant train. We want it to go down certain tracks, but no one in their right mind wants to stop or derail this train, because it creates too much good for both China and the world.

Great review of Paul Bremer's book

REVIEW: "The Bremer Paradox: The standard criticism of the former head of Iraq's rebuilding is groundless. His real mistake was behaving like a proconsul (My Year in Iraq by L. Paul Bremer, with Malcolm McConnell)," by Robert L. Pollack, Wall Street Journal, 14 January 2006, p. P10.

Very solid review worth reading. Basic premise: Bremer exaggerates how bad it was when he came in, but his decisions to disband the Iraqi army and ban Baathists from power were right. His real problem? He was a control freak who screwed up the security and didn't put an Iraqi face on the process early enough. Even today as the locals run things, Bremer denigrates them as weak compared to his own firm hand.

In short, Bremer didn't understand his role then and still doesn't today. We lack this kind of postwar talent on the civilian side, and it cost us dearly in Iraq.

This is why I call for a Department of Everything Else, not just some tiny office tacked on to State.

My one gripe with Pollack is the notion that the quick disbanding of the Iraqi army was necessary to get buy-in from Shiites and Kurds. But this is a highly debatable point. Me, I would assume an insurgency of loyalists is always in the cards, so be prepared to beat back that danger first and risk the civil war-like split with other groups in the meantime(and there are always persecuted minority/majority groups like this in this pretend colonial states created by the Europeans decades ago--that the was the entire design purpose!) because, as we learned here, if the insurgency grows big enough, they can trigger that civil war on their own anyway by forcing your counter-insurgency toward solution sets that raise that danger.

But overall a real solid and penetrating review.

Why the WSJ is the world's best tool for getting smart on grand strategy

To me, grand strategy is seeing the big picture, not just pushing the security angle in some weird attemtpt to shape everything else like it's playdough or something. It's about contextualizing the use of military power, not rationalizing it.

And there is no single pub that provides you more material for that "everything else" perspective than the Wall Street Journal, which my wife, past editor of a major U of Wisconsin student newspaper (Badger Herald) and a journalism B.A., always describes as the best example of strongly structured newswriting in the business (that perfect upsidedown triangle of tight-wider-widest retelling of the story's main point from front to back in the article).

I was asked by the new boss of the Sylvan Learning Center where son attends what would be the three pubs I would take with me to the desert island (this guy did finance work abroad in Japan for years), and I said WSJ, Economist and Variety (damn, reminds me to renew). The Wall Street Journal and The Economist are simply neck and neck, in this regard, and I'd vote for Variety in third to break the tedium a bit (although the more I come to appreciate Esquire as I get older and more "male," the more I think it would eventually supplant it).

Here is just a great, simple article from the WSJ today that proves what I'm talking about. Seemingly esoteric subject (foreign direct investment), but so well delivered that if you read it through, you are really a whole lot smarter about the world, how it works, and where it's going.

ARTICLE: "China Drew Over $60 Billion In Foreign Investment in 2005," by Andrew Browne, Wall Street Journal, 14 January 2006, p. A2.

Key points and bits:

-->FDI in China in 05 was just a hair under what it was in 04, despite the small appreciation in the Chinese currency, the rising wages, power shortages and overcapacity in key industries like steel, aluminium, cement and autos.

-->This number doesn't include all the "billions of dollars pumped into Chinese banks, insurance companies and brokerages by overseas financial giants"

-->Hong Kong remains leading conduit. EU investments jumped over 20% higher from previous year, while U.S. investments dropped by same amount.

-->Strongest I in comms, electronics and transport, to deal with all the bottlenecking (China is connecting up its interior now more than its "exterior").

-->This FDI drives about 60% of China's trade with the world, meaning almost two-thirds of China's trade is due to foreign companies coming there and "exploiting" its cheap labor. What does that tell you about integration and shrinking the Gap? You need access to foreign capital to do it, and they will come if you give companies access to your cheaper labor. The result? Your economy grows and you create a stable urban middle class, which now counts at least 50m in China today, according to this article, whereas other estimates are more generous, suggesting a pool of 300 million middle-class purchasers in all, both urban and rural).

-->This FDI flow will slow in manufacturing, as China can only suck up so much manufacturing before wages rise, so it begins to outsource such stuff and turn more and more to services sector, where outside firms eager to tap that growing domestic market (and all those savings, which in turn will fuel even more aggressive emerging markets investments inside the Gap over time).

-->"As China becomes the world's biggest market for a growing number of products, many of the world's largest companies believe they have to invest in China or risk losing global leadership." This is why the long-term view of war with China gets awfully weak, as do the painfully simplistic comparisons to Kaiser Germany and still-feudal Japan at the beginning of the 20th century. We're just talking about an entirely different level and form of connectivity with the outside world.

-->One fly in ointment? China plans to soon make foreign companies pay same corporate tax rates as those paid by domestic companies (remember, the synching up of the domestic rule set with the global one), a practice of favoritisim to outsiders that dates back to 1978 and Deng's first moves to trigger foreign investment.

Simple article, well delivered. Read it through and you are so much smarter--but only if you connect it to the "everything else," including war and peace.

Why my writing goes in this bent more and more

Long-time blog readers will remember my lengthy agonizing in print about whether or not I should write a sequel to PNM. I simply had to work out that logic and rationale in the blog, which is the purpose it serves for my thinking (especially in recording it).

I get so many emails that either challenge my career or ask for career advice, plus my work for Esquire has taken a turn toward examining individual-level (or led) change (Rumsfeld, now Mattis, Petraeus and Wallace), plus I'm doing such change agent stuff through Enterra, plus I get to spend so much time with this ball of change energy called Steve DeAngelis, plus my work with Frank Akers and Oak Ridge is all about taking advantage of all that learning and thinking going on there ... it just seems to be where the work is pulling me.

So the logic of Vol III seems clear enough to me (stories of such change and leadership, interspersed with my personal logic and career stories of building those skills in me and using them with others, plus the desired deeper drill down on SysAdmin, Dept of Everything Else, development-in-a-box--all of which are coming naturally to me through my ongoing work, speeches, email interactions, etc.--topped off with a direct, "release the inner grand strategist in you" sort of guidebook material), and yet you can expect me to spend a lot of time in this blog working these issues out in my head.

This will seem weirdly self-indulgent to some, inviting the usual charges of huge ego and self-absorption, but I will share such stuff because: 1) again, that's what the blog does for me, so f--k 'em if they can't take a joke!; 2) your advice has shaped my thinking and delivery a great deal (I hear voices as I write, in a good way); and 3) I just think it's cool to reveal that kind of stuff. Anyway, it beats making up autobiography and calling it non-fiction, right?

A good question, my best answer

This is an email I get every so often. This is how I replied today.

Prof. Barrnett:

Have you been in combat? If not, why?

Are you Straussian in the sense to which Anne Norton talks in her book.

I have bought your books, but am afraid your premises are wrong, totally wrong.

We are headed to Syracuse with the Athenians, led by a bunch of faithless chicken hawks.

I have 24 years in the Army, and it frightens me that you teach anywhere in the military. I also did three years in Vietnam, a great background for skepticism in the time of an illegal invasion.

[name withheld]

Burlington, NC

My reply:

I don't advise on operations, but strategy. I don't tell warriors how to fight but when and why. In over 15 years of working with senior officers, I have never been asked how to wage the war, but where it will happen and why and what our goals should be.

Maybe you want military rule in this country, but I believe in civilian control, and that's why I've spent my life working with the military.

You are certainly free to call me names on that basis. People called me names under the first Bush, then Clinton, now the second Bush. They'll call me names under whoever comes next. You work for the military, you get used to that on day one. Me, I only worry about what officers think about me. They're the ones buying my books by the tens of thousands and flying me all over the world for my advice. Maybe all of them, including all the foreign officers, are just incredibly stupid and you know better.

Or maybe they just view this world and age differently than you do.I dunno, maybe you've been called a lot of names over the years for your service and views. Maybe that's why you feel the need to equate my views with such accusations of cowardice and duty-shirking.

Personally, I think it's a very honorable thing to work with the U.S. Military, an entity I've described as being the greatest force for good I've ever known. When it does well, people admire you for that career. When it does badly, people often despise you. I stay with the military during the good times and bad, rejoicing in their successes and feeling awful over their failures. But I stick around over the years because I continue to believe--and see daily--that the miltary does many great things for this world.

Thanks for tour note. I can tell it meant a lot for you to write it.

Tom Barnett

When you work for the military and people disagree with your views, many will automatically label you some coward who avoided military service like the plague and now only cynically uses the blood of others for your fantastic desires and schemes.

Truth is, I never expected to work for the military while I was young. I always expected to work for the State Department as a diplomat, so I got an education that fit that track. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the military looked like a terrible career choice, with the most emblematic movies being "Stripes." Still, a lot of my friends from my small farming community did join, looking to find themselves. Me, I wanted to do diplomatic battle against the Sovs, my dream being to negotiate fabulous nuclear arms agreements, which I studied like crazy--along with Russian.

What I found when I got done with school in 1990 was that the State track was extremely limited, and none of the people I met there seemed open to my way of thinking.

I looked into the intell community and got very far with CIA, but then was dropped form contention after I took a day's worth of psych tests. I was told I just didn't have the personality they were looking for. In the end, after years of working with them, I agree.

So the only companies that were interested in me were ones that worked for the military. I felt this would be a dead-end track for me, because, hey, the wall just came down and my Soviet background was now this huge liability. Many prospective employers asked, "why should we hire someone like you with this training?"

But I did get hired, as I noted in PNM, and began an 8-year stint of working primarily for the Navy and Marine Corps. The process of being a civilian analyst taught me a lot. Then I worked directly for the government at the Naval War College, to include the two-year stint in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Now I work directly for the government on a free lance basis.

You could say I wandered into this career somewhat. I've stuck it out because I really like working for the military. Looking back, I feel this career path served me well in what I do for the military, which is help them understand their place and function in the larger world.

Sometimes that place and function includes waging war, more often now it includes waging peace. These are controversial activities for most Americans, who are of many opinions about what our nation's role in the world should be.

And so they tell me their views on a daily basis because of the prominence I've gained by this blog, the Esquire articles, the books, the speeches and media stuff.

Every so often I get this email. Obviously, the person disagrees with my views and my role of working with the military. Then they go a step further and start calling names in an effort to dismiss me. Fair enough. Free country.

This is how I typically respond. I post here not to discourage others from hurling such accusations via emails--again, free country. I post here because today I just felt like posting here, and that's what the blog is for.

The logic here is the usual one: only those who've been in combat can talk about the conditions under which it occurs. I agree with that. I think you leave combat to experts.

But that logic is always implicity extended to the decision to go to war. There I disagree. I think the decision to go to war is--in our system--the purview of civilians, otherwise you basically have military rule over foreign policy, something I've seen lead to many wars and needless suffering in the world with no beneficial outcomes on the far side.

As I say in my reply to this email, I don't advise on how to do war. Instead, I really advise on how to do peace, or the everything else. Sometimes that advice includes arguments on the necessity of war, which is like the general M.D. saying you need to have surgery, but then telling you to go see a surgeon for how to do it.

Now, when you face such tough decisions in life, it's comforting to access the opinions of people who've actually been through such things, but you wouldn't base your decision on whether or not to have a surgery simply on the basis of what previous patients told you, you'd want somebody who's spent their career working such issues to give you what is hopefully their best advice.

But certainly, you'd want access to a variety of opinions: your general doc, your surgeon, past patients. You'd want a sense of risk and pathway dependencies. You'd want your own mini-debate to play out so you could see the big picture.

But you wouldn't necessarily discount anything your doc said simply because he'd never been through open-heart surgery before, or consider him inherently evil for suggesting this might be the best course for you.

What I think grand strategy does is help people, institutions and governments put together a thinking process that forces them take into account the widest angle view possible for such decisions as going to war so that they're able to reason their way through not just the causal chain leading up to war, but far more importantly, the causal chain that will ensue postwar.

That's what I try to do in my work, and I think my career choices that got to my current set of skills in this regard are both honorable and fairly smart (and fairly standard if you look at previous versions of myself in history). If I had spent no time amassing these skills and this experience in working with the military, then I think the charge of just bloviating my way in these debates would be valid. But I'm not a tourist in this field, nor the journalist. I'm a practitioner in the field of grand strategy, one that has sadly, in our defense establishment, fallen in recent years to just journalists and academics in that backward-looking, 20/20 hindsight mode.

And that's not only sad, it's very dangerous for the military to outsource such thinking to observers and commentators vice professionals who actually work with them on these issues and planning, because there is so much incredible inside talent right now that is poorly used by the system (something I noted in PNM up front).

So what you have far too often in our defense establishment is a military that feels very competent in war but not so in peace. You have a chattering class that seems to be in charge of America's grand strategy, which mostly consists of running away from whatever it is we just tried. And then there are the civilians working for the military who mostly just tackle efficiency issues, keeping their opinions on such matters to themselves.

What we need are civilians who have real skills and real confidence in playing the role of strategists with the military, which needs to recognize them in this role and use them better than they do. The military also needs to raise better officers who can employ such thinking more fully, something I see happening right now in the Army and Marines (the subject of my upcoming Esquire piece), and to a lesser extent (because there's less impetus) in the Navy and Air Force.

But, quite frankly, what keeps the military from engaging in those skill sets and encouraging them more among their civilians is this notion that still lingers from the Cold War: we do the war, we don't do the peace. If the military reaches into the peace, it'll turn into colonialism or Vietnam quagmires, and if the civilians reach into the war--even worse. So there's this pretense of a solid divide between war and peace--again, a queer legacy of thinking from the Cold War with its almost theological threat of global nuclear war.

My point is this: if you want to do this sort of work as a civilian, you need to understand your role and be able to deal with accusations like this the one embedded in this email. If such accusations frighten or cow you, you can't be in this business.

You need to know who you are and what you're trying to do. It is a very honorable and good thing, but you need to be prepared to face a lot of people who will think your motives are not only misguided, but purposefully evil--reflecting your lack of moral character.

"The Monks of War" goes to bed

Rest of my day lost to the final tweaking of the Esquire piece, which I finally see in Second Pages (meaning all type-set by page, photos in, but call-out bits and photo captions not done yet). I spend two hours with Tom Colligan, fact-checker extraordinaire (he catches things that just blow my mind--I pity the fool that tries to sneak things past him!), and we work on his toughest remaining mysteries.

Piece looks great. Very cool photos of the generals. Six full pages, plus three "jump" pages in the back.

After that, tonight it's a series of calls with Mark to negotiate those last few sentences (Warren really lives and dies with this, and I like these exchanges the best). My guess is that the beast is gone from my hands/influence for good within the next couple of hours. I am very pleased with the outcome--really. It's amazing to start this thing as an email from Gen. Petraeus leading to a phonecon with Mark while driving from BWI to DC one afternoon ... and wham! All those trips, interviews, transcripts, writing, edits, fact-checking, photo-shoots (long talk with the photographer this time) and so on and so forth and four million issues later ... there it is.

Let me count: PNM in Mar 2003, Mr. President (Iraq) in June 04, then Mr. President (2nd Term) in Feb 05, Rumsfeld in July 05, and China in Nov 05. So this makes my 6th Esquire article, clocking it at roughly 6,000 words. I've probably written a good 30,000 words in the mag so far. When I hit 100k, I'm looking for a publisher.

Gearing up for my new jobs/titles connected with Oak Ridge National Laboratory

PR announcements ready to roll from Oak Ridge's side. My man Steve DeAngelis is on the road right now, so probably will wait until he returns to releash the hounds of PR!

Looking at a couple of "distinguished'": one with Oak Ridge itself (way cool) and one with the Howard Baker Center at U. Tennessee (also way cool). Between them, I figure I'll get that educational discount on my new desktop Mac (you know the one ...).

Spent afternoon with my new boss at Oak Ridge, a retired Army flag by the name of Frank Akers, who is one of the more amazing people I've met in my career.

Frank's career hits so many spots, it's unreal: BA from Naval Academy (that's right, an Army guy with an Annapolis degree!), attended Command General Staff College in Leavenworth and the Army War College in Carlisle, then MA and PhD from Duke. Typical slough-off, he.

Service stretching from Vietnam to Desert Storm, rises to one-star Chief of Staff at 82nd Airborne, so he's a Ranger to boot. Retires to become Associate Laboratory Director for National Security at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. What the hell kind of Ranger walks out of the service to that job?

At Oak Ridge, according to his bio, "he is responsible for managing a focused research and development portfolio that includes nonproliferation and threat reduction, arms and export control, homeland security, and counter terrorism technologies for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Akers also coordinates ORNL activities with the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agencies with a mission involving national security, law enforcement, and public safety."

Think I'm gonna have fun as a "distinguished BLANK"?

Well, Frank flies in from Oklahoma, where he told me he spent a fascinating couple of days with David Boren's university (yes, the former senator is now president there) and first thing he tells me is, he'd like to take me there some day to see all the interesting things they're doing to create a high-tempo learning environment. After working the Esquire piece on Quantico and Leavenworth, this is beginning to feel like a real groove, moving me more and more in the direction of casting Vol. III as a study of individual-level strategizing and transformational change. Frank says ORNL is also doing some fascinating stuff with Singapore, so I'm like, "You have me at distinguised!"

I head to Oak Ridge later this month to kick this baby off. I could not be more psyched.

Invitation to appear on Japanese public TV

Offer from Japanese public TV network NHK to participate in panel discussion show on meaning of Iraq war and the postwar world. Would be taped in NYC in Times Square station of Reuters in late Feb. First date they offered is no good (already have Orlando speech for big corporation gathering), but back-up date works, so I will do it if possible.

NHK picks up travel, so no cost to me, and since the rights to PNM sold very nicely in Japan, no harm in spreading the world about BFA to the same audience. Sold almost 10,000 copies of PNM in Japan in 2004. Hell, I can remember thinking that would be a great number for PNM in the U.S.!

Already been on Korean public TV, but this would be first time for me with Japan's. Never been to the country, and after Singapore, it's the place I'd like most to visit for the first time in the region.

Hope this works out. Don't usually discuss offers in the blog, but figure I might as well get credit for the invite if the skeds don't work out.

"The Chinese Are Our Friends" now available in full for free on Keep Media

Link is the same as before: http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Esquire/2005/11/01/1037812.

Now, you can read the whole thing without having to pay $3.95.

I have been amazed at the positive networking function this article has unleashed for me: connecting me to all sorts of like-minded people. Really glad I wrote it.

Podcast with Tech Central Station in the works

Dateline: In the Shire, Indy, 12 January 2006

Gave good 45 minutes over the phone with Max Borders. TCSdaily.com (a publication of Tech Central Station) will do edited podcast and maybe a transcript.

Borders was good. Interview was thus easy, despite the long holiday layover.

I am getting, for weeks now, a real flood of AskTom emails that are particularly good. Plenty of people who've read both PNM and BFA, and pushing me on further points. I find my replies getting better and better (any good interview is driven by the interviewer, as I've often pointed out), and that I'm taking the key points and punching them into a file of ideas I maintain on my Treo for Vol. III of the PNM series.

Having that great give-and-take brings my out of the January doldrums. Too early to discuss Vol. III with Putnam, but I know I will write it (as does Mark Warren) and publish it somewhere eventually. My fun working title is "Release the Inner Grand Strategist in You!"

I don't feel the need to crank this one as fast as BFA. First, I'm a bit winded from the last two years. Two, I would like to settle in the house this year, as well as go full-court press with Enterra, because there are so many great opportunities to go great and good things through it with the government. I say, "as fast," because I am committed to the notion that III comes out in the spring, like PNM. I found the fall release too damn hard (and crowded). So either I write III next summer and fall for the spring of 07, or I bide my time for the next go-around and catch the spring 08 release date. I am partial to the second scenario for the reasons cited, and simply because it makes sense to me in terms of the maturation/flow of my thinking. I just feel like taking more time this time.

Then again, if Putnam were to like III for the spring of 07, I would take up the challenge like anyone would. I just will be okay if it doesn't work out that way, because the pace might be better, and it would give both PNM and BFA time to keep building and spreading and doing their thing.

Also, in this longer pathway, I wouldn't seek publication of my prequel manuscript (the "Hobbit" to my "Lord of the Rings" trilogy" until 2009, when the main subject of the book would be reaching her 18th birthday ... which would feel about right to me.

But I digress ...

All these emails make for a good biweekly newsletter.

Yes, Steffany and I decided to go two times a month, because weekly was just too much! So the plan now is: mid-month is guest writer (this next time my long-time mentor from the Center for Naval Analyses Hank Gaffney, in a great essay) and end of month will be me. But in both issues lotsa Q&A with readers, which I think are getting better and better because you write better and better questions. So thanks for all your efforts.

UPDATE: The transcript, audio excerpt, and iTunes podcast instructions (search for keyword "TCS" in the iTunes Podcast directory) for the TCS interview with Max Borders are now available. Other link: TCS Daily Podcast RSS feed.

U.S. Thinking on Iran as Muddled as Ever. Next Up? Syria.

■"A Firebrand in a House of Cards," op-ed by Dariush Zahedi and Omid Memarian, New York Times, 12 January 2006, pulled off web.

■"Iran's Nuclear Challenge," editorial, Washington Post, 12 January 2006, p. A20.

■"Russia Won't Block U.S. on Iran: Commitment Is Cited by Officials Pressing for IAEA Vote," by Dafna Linzer, Washington Post, 12 January 2006, p. A18.

■"Help Us, America ...," op-ed by Farouz Farzami, Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2006, p. A12.

■"Let's make sure we do better with Iran than we did with Iraq: The west's next step on Tehran's nuclear plans should be to understand the regime and society, not to start bombing," op-ed by Timothy Garton Ash, Guardian, 12 January 2006, pulled from web.

■"U.S. Ratchets Up Pressure on Syria In Hariri Probe: Answers Are Sought in Death of Ex-Lebanese Premier; Threat of Sanctions Looms," by Neil King Jr.,Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2006, p. A11.

The Iranians are weak, as a society, as the first op-ed argues, but expecting the hardliners to give into Russia's offer to process their uranium just doesn't make any sense. Iran doesn't want nuclear power for the power, but for the bomb. It wants the bomb because it fears U.S. invasion. It will fear that invasion until it gets the bomb or gets something like it from the U.S. in terms of guarantees. Such guarantees can't happen unless we somehow co-opt Iran strategically. If we did that, the hardliners' arguments are easier for competing factions within Iran to dislodge, but so long as we work to isolate Iran and promise "grand bargains," in the muddle logic of the mocking WP editorial, where we give them some carrots and expect them to go along with feeling deeply insecure about U.S. power and presence in the region, we only strengthen the hardliners' position.

The hardliners can hold out, if we choose to make the Iranian people choose between nationalism and cooperation. We need to give them a choice that is both nationalistic and cooperative ... duh!

And that's why I argue for co-optation that gives Iran's leadership a sense of security and invites the government, slowly but surely over years, into a cooperative security relationship with the U.S. and Russia and China and India and ... okay ... the Europeans too.

Whether we realize it or not, Russia and China and India have ALREADY chosen on Iran: they want its oil and they can wait pretty much forever on reform (much like us with the House of Saud ... so put that stone down right now, my fellow sinner!).

We are told by some, like the Iranian journalist in the WSJ op-ed ("forbidden to publish in her own country" ... no doubts there), that our pressure on Iran reveals fissures in their political system. True. But guess what? They've been there for years. By continuing the pressure, we just help the hardliners in the government, while not taking advantage of what allies might be found in the mullahs (yes, Virginia, not all are nuts) and especially in the parliament (closest to the pissed-off public).

Now, for something completely different: common sense from Timothy Garton Ash, an all-around brilliant fellow who's been doing this stuff for years and years:

The European policy of negotiated containment, mistrustfully backed by America and ambiguously accompanied by Russia, has failed. It was worth trying, but it was not enough. The Europeans did not carry sufficiently credible sticks and the Americans did not wave large enough carrots to sway the theocrats in Tehran. Neither half of the old transatlantic west could induce oil-hungry China and energy-rich Russia to play the diplomatic game sufficiently clearly our way.

The seemingly half-crazed new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would probably regard a cost-benefit analysis as an invention of the Great Satan and a prime example of western secular decadence. Allah, he would say, is not an accountant. Yet if cooler heads in the regime behind him are making a cost-benefit analysis, they could still conclude that this is a risk worth taking. The mullahs are floating high on an ocean of oil revenue: an estimated $36bn last year. This money can be used to buy off material discontent at home.

They know that the US is deeply mired in neighbouring Iraq, where the Iranians wield growing influence in the Shia south. As President George Bush might privately put it, Tehran has Washington by the cojones. The mullahs also know that China (which has a large energy-supply deal with Iran) and Russia have very different interests from Europe and the US; and they know that countries like Germany and Italy will be deeply reluctant to let sanctions restrict their lucrative trade with Iran. That's a strong hand.

Everyone seems to agree that the next major step is for the matter to be referred to the UN security council. Even the Bush administration, so contemptuous of the UN during the Iraq crisis, now regards that as Plan B. What then? The security council raps Tehran over the knuckles. President Ahmadinejad says go to hell. The security council comes back with sanctions, which would be limited by the geopolitical and energy interests of China and Russia, and the economic interests of Germany, Italy and France.

Iran continues (overtly or covertly) with uranium enrichment, while those sanctions produce a growing siege mentality in the country. The regime will tell its people that they are being unjustly and hypocritically punished by the west, merely for developing nuclear energy for peaceful use, as Iran is entitled to do under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Compare and contrast Washington's treatment of nuclear India! Many will believe that propaganda -- which, like all the best propaganda, contains a grain of truth. External pressure, in this form, could thus consolidate rather than weaken the regime.

I could not concur more, as readers of this blog may attest.

Unfortunately, Ash punts at the conclusion of his article, saying we shouldn't bomb because it will just turn the pro-West Iranian public against us, but that we should take the threat of a "fragmented" (good term) Iranian government holding the bomb seriously. Then he says we need to share info with the Europeans and think this thing through before doing anything rash.

Since the man has ruled out all the stupid and ineffective routes, what remains, ipso facto, is the co-optation route that crowds out the nuts in the Iranian government by rewarding the realists. But Ash doesn't go that far. Too bad.

Too bad that the U.S. government (meaning State) isn't smart enough to realize the same dynamic is likely to occur with Syria, where, if we were in the business of co-opting Iran, we'd have a real chance with such pressure.

As it is, we're likely to waste our time on these efforts too, although Damascus isn't swimming in a sea of oil profits (thanks to China and India ratcheting up global demand, not the invasion of Iraq), so there's some hope.

China's trade surplus is much ado about nothing

■"China's Trade Surplus Tripled, Topping $100 Billion Last Year," by Murray Hiebert, Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2006, p. A2.

The China trade surplus thing has long baffled me.

One, if we count intra-multinational corporate trade, we realize it's far smaller, as much of our "imports" from China consist of our corporations going over there and basically renting cheap Chinese labor. The alternative? I guess higher labor and less competitive goods, which is sure to win us the future high ground in this hyper-competitive global economy.

Two: our rising imbalance with China is nothing new, but just a shift of those past imbalances with the rest of Asia. China's stolen ASEAN and Japan's and South Korea's past shares of surplus and aggregated them unto itself. Big f**king deal, say I. Want to give them back to those countries so we can have higher wages, less ... oh, forget it!

And why not let that imbalance happen with China, because that flow of U.S. money, which comes back in China's Treasury buys and sticking dollars in our secondary mortgage markets and other capital markets (meaning we do awfully well in this transaction), can only help to speed China's marketization process, which only weakens the Party's control and pushes the political system, slowly but surely toward more pluralism.

Ah, but the Party seems to crack down on political dissent more and more!

Or is it that the Party HAS to crack down on such stirrings more and more?

And what is responsible for those stirrings? All this change brought on by China's embrace of globalization?

And doesn't China's rise also make the rest of the region more capitalistic in a defensive mode, thus furthering the long-term course of capitalism and democracy?

Or should we retaliate, depress our economic strength, put the money in arms, and plot for brilliant future great power wars with China?

Depending on your congressional district, this is a tough call. If you're not beholden to special interests, though, it's actually a fairly easy one.

Army and Navy see a different present, which yields a different future, which yields different force structure realities

■"Army Is Poised to Kill Spy-Plane Effort," by Jonathan Karp,Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2006, p. A3.

■"Army's Iraq Work Assailed By Briton: Senior Officer Points to Cultural Ignorance In an Essay Published by the U.S. Military," by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 11 January 2006, p. A17.

The Army is forced to pull out on a hugely expensive but iffy spy plane. Its budget numbers suck with the ongoing efforts in Iraq, and so it's forced to choose more wisely than it has in the past. Does the Army need more spy planes, or just more HUMINT and unmanned drones?

Navy, Army's partner in the spy plane deal, had done its usual: loading up the requirements on this thing for all aspects naval so that, in the end, the SOB was virtually too heavy to fly (thus the search for larger air frames and the skyrocketing costs).

Army is going in another direction than Navy, which is heading for a high-low mix of absurdly expensive and increasingly irrelevant mega-platfroms and a host of smaller littoral ships (Cebrowski's dream). Navy can't afford both types in the numbers desired, so it will end up with too few of each (hard to do mathematically, but it will manage).

Army, toughened up and made far more realistic on things like Future Combat System (forget the brochures, it will be much simpler than portrayed in the end) by its high optempo in the global war on terrorism, is moving ... against much of its institutional will, toward embracing the many and the cheaper. And the real revolution in the force is intellectual ... the subject of my upcoming Esquire piece.

So letting Brit one-star-equivalent rip the Army some new ones in a journal published by the service is not as wild as you might think. His complaints are reasonable, if overstated. Real importance of the piece is its publication, not its hyperbole.

This is the context I seek to establish on my usual grand scale in the article, "The Monks of War."

Still waiting on the first pass version!

Planning the next big hike!

Dateline: In the Shire, Indy, 11 January 2006

Morning lost to picking out window covering fabrics. Not too bad really.

Then back to the house to do one-hour conference call with Dr. Don Beck of "Spiral Dynamics" fame http://spiraldynamics.com/ and a band of similar thinkers at a DC-based conference. Don always seems to have a lot of former military and especially special ops guys at his events, which intrigues me. Haven't cracked the code of his career yet, but he's a very interesting and charismatic guy with big thoughts galore and an amazingly diverse background that's taken him the world over. Good conversation. Just sad to do it from my crappy bedroom in my crappy apartment.

Then rescue Pilot from Honda dealer and pick up kids.

Then to new house with spouse. Cabinets up throughout house, as well as all doors. Gutters now on, so outside complete save drive and sidewalks, playset, deck and patio, all of which await a bit warmer temps. New grading ended drainage issue. Discovered next door neighbor planted nice pine on my side of property line (I'll take it, as we planted two dozen trees of various sorts on back property already). Almost all doors in. All trim stained and basement almost done with trim (that home movie room looking sweet!). Wood for floors off-loaded and that goes in next now that tile done throughout. Saw my shower done for first time today. All in all, very uplifting.

Got the flights for our Hawaiian 20th Anniversary trip today. Very exciting for us all (unfortunately, all six of us). Will be talking at Pacific Command and spending the whole time on Oahu. Just not willing to do the intra-island flights with all those kids and two pretty young. We plan to do up Oahu this time big time, and be as lazy as possible doing it.

Between reserving those flights and seeing the house with so much activity and change, my spirit renewed somewhat.

Need to call that Popular Mechanics reporter back tomorrow for last couple of questions. Gave him interview last week. He's writing a piece he says builds off the November China piece I did in Esquire. Steff: remind me to call him tomorrow!

Meanwhile I await the First Pass layout pages from Esquire on the Army-Marines piece, titled now "The Monks of War." Always a thrill to see the piece laid out for the first time, especially the accompanying photos.

Hard-liners make good negotiators

■"After Sharon: The death or departure of Israel's superhawk will darken hopes for peace,"The Economist, 7 January 2006, p. 11.

■"Iran's Nuclear Decision Starts Shock Wave: U.S. and EU to Call for IAEA Emergency Session, Demand Action by U.N. Security Council," by Carla Anne Robbins and David Crawford, Wall Street Journal, 11 January 2006, p. A4.

Sharon was the latest peace messiah for Israel: the superhawk who gets all dovish, but realistically so, in last years of life. His departure makes everyone pessimistic on hopes for a two-state solution with Palestine, especially since Abbas has proven so weak at controlling his own.

Meanwhile, Iran breaks the seats on its nuke site and a showdown with the West (and the East, sorta-maybe-sometimes-you-never-know), that will get expressed first in the UN, which, as always, chooses to express its "dismay" first. If really pissed, here comes the sanctions, and we know how all-powerful and compelling those can be.

So the hardliner-turned-dove departs in Israel and the hardliners in Tehran see little cost in pursuing the nuke option, which best guesses estimate they're still three to five years away from achieving.

Same as it ever was.

So our inventive diplomacy will be to: 1) feel lost without Sharon; and 2) the same-old, same-old with Iran.

This is the most depressing pair of articles signaling the slowdown of the Big Bang strategy in the Middle East that I've seen yet. I really get the feeling Bush is done in the region, with the slimmest of hopes for rock-star Condi to do something besides be really admired for the fabulous woman and role-model she is.

But I think the Middle East now awaits the new administration.

Can Latino gangs trump the GWOT? Turn it south?

■"Out of the underworld: Numerous, mysterious, and now spreading fast in the United States," The Economist, 11 January 2006, p. 23.

You read these articles about once every 10 months: the one declaring the rising tide of criminals seething into our country from the south. They run so much smuggling and account for so much violence. The center of their activity in the U.S. is Los Angeles.

As always we hear that their growing threat rivals that of traditional transnational terrorists, except they have no political agenda whatsoever, except to be left alone enough to make their dough. Their numbers are vast, and yet virtually no one in the gangs seems to have any money. It's a sad, desperate, Hobbesian existence, and it's coming to a neighborhood (you know the one) near you.

I read these articles every ten months and hear the same thing every time. Don't really doubt any of it. Just don't know what to do with it particularly, cause I just don't see the tide rising to point to truly redirecting U.S. national security, which I see stuck in southwest Asia for now and sliding into Africa over coming years.

And yet watch this trend we must, because if there is to be a turn southward in the GWOT, this will be the main reason really. Problem with this scenario is, what is the wild card event that pushes this?

End of the article is sadder still but accurate: "The only real hope is that economic growth will eventually lift El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras out of their poverty and so reduce the incentives for joining gangs."

Pretty pathetic, I know. Trouble is, pretty accurate too.