The most important measure of connectivity is caring

Hans Suter emailed the following to Tom with a link to Ethan Zuckerman's Is Israel a problem for the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Dear Tom, the mental image of core and gap in the largest number possible of people is easily one of the most important items in the political process of the core.

Nathan Zuckerman has an excellent post on this. To wet your appetite here an extract:With forty times the violent death toll, you’d expect to hear a bit more about conflicts in central Africa - instead, Congo, Uganda and Sudan rank #1, #2, and #3 on Alertnet’s list of “forgotten emergencies.” Through hard work and advocacy by activists and journalists, many Americans have some awareness of the conflict in Darfur. But the deteriorating peace process in Sudan gets lots less attention than the details of the current Israeli incursion in Lebanon.

The other two conflicts almost never make the news, even when major developments occur. DR Congo will have elections on July 30th, a chance for the first democratically elected government in that unhappy nation since the US helped overthrow Patrice Lumumba and install Africa’s greatest kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko. The elections are difficult, fraught with infrastructure issues, political tensions, flares of violence and accusations of fraud. But they’ve merited 6,180 stories for “congo” on Google News over the past month, while “lebanon” yields 96,100 and “israel” yields 136,000.

There are lots of reasons why conflicts in the Middle East garner so much attention. Some are newsgathering factors - news happens where there are reporters to cover it. While many US newspapers are cutting overseas bureaus, most have maintained a major presence in the middle east, often in Baghdad and Jerusalem. And most don’t have bureaus in Kinshasa, Kisengani, or even Nairobi. Newspapers have finite staff resources, and the conflict in Lebanon is demanding the attention from those reporters, as Joe Strupp reports in a story for Editor and Publisher:

Tom's comment:

The most important measure of connectivity is caring. Israel is hugely connected, so when it acts, we care, because we can see it. Congo is amazingly unconnected, so when far larger numbers die there under the same levels of injustice or insanity or whatever, no one cares. In the end, right or wrong has nothing to do with it. It's where you can get the reporters to cover and the cameramen to film.

The natural and inevitable rule-set calibration

OP-ED: "Bush's Unintended Internationalism," by Jim Hoagland, Washington Post (national weekly edition), 17-23 July 2006, p. 5

9/11 triggers a rule-set reset in US national security, which, by extension, resets the global security rule set.

The global reaction to that new set of rules comes in a variety of manners, usually lumped under the rubric of diplomacy, since nobody out there seeks to balance the U.S. directly on security matters.

But there's another, more discrete reaction, one not unlike the usual domestic response to such dramatic shifts (seen most clearly in U.S. Supreme Court rulings like the recent one on tribunals). In effect, it's the rest of the Core generating its own version of an A-to-Z rule set on contextualizing the use of American military power:

In spite of itself, the Bush administration is reshaping and revitalizing international law as a governing concept and a force in world politics. This White House gives new meaning to the notion of unintended and devoutly unwanted consequences.

Its highhanded policies in the war on global terrorist networks and the occupation of Iraq have provoked sharp reaction at home and abroad. Over time, this reaction has turned into a search by others for legal and political frameworks to contain President Bush's campaign to concentrate national security power in his hands and shield it from even cursory scrutiny and consultation.

So Euro governments and civil liberty groups both here and abroad are forcing new debates on international law. We think we can play "Dirty Harry" in this Long War, but the "Serpicos" (another of my "Heroes Yet Discovered" in BFA) are amassing on the strategic horizon. We will either become more transparent, and inevitably more linked to the International Criminal Court, or we'll be hounded by the press and UN and civil rights groups into decreased rates of activity. We either sync up our rule set with an emerging global one or our own people will balk at their individual exposure, one that is easily redefined from administration to administration.

Good example of where we fail is provided by Hoagland here: the Bush Administration's refusal to work out some SOFA or Status of Forces Agreement with the new Iraqi government. This is a basic attribute of state sovereignty that forces our troops toward some nominal Iraqi control, as Hoagland points out.

All these efforts are the collective equivalent of my A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt states. Hoagland captures this well when he writes:

A new framework for international law is being developed in reaction to Bush's global policies--without other significant American input. That is the message from America's allies, from Congress and now from the Supreme Court that the president should finally heed.As I often write, it is one thing to propose and demonstrate a new rule, something Bush does well, and another thing to achieve its acceptance beyond your immediate circle. A first Bush administration was great at the former, but a second Bush administration was doomed on the latter.

Tom around the web

Tom's commentary on the situation in Lebanon has been so popular, I'm only going to feature it in this post

+ Weblogs that linked to A sense of the wider conflict emerges:

• The Glittering Eye calling it 'tremendous' and 'a must read'
  
  
• Pajamas Media
  
  
• Fester's Place
  
  
• Matthew Gross, who leads me to...
  
  
• Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly who writes 'Barnett is almost certainly too optimistic about what we could accomplish with Iran -- and far too cavalier about nuclear proliferation -- but this still seems mostly correct to me.' Oh, well: one outta' three ain't bad ;-)

+ Weblogs that linked to Iran launches a pre-emptive war...

• Atlantic Rift
  
  
• New Yorker in DC (whom we've sometimes seen around these parts)
  
  
• History's End

Let me know if I missed any...

Thank you Bill Easterly...

COLUMN: "Count Ethnic Divisions, Not Bombs, to Tell if a Nation Will Recover From War: "Long term, a squiggly border indicates less strife than a neatly drawn line," by Austan Goolsbee, New York Times, 20 July 2006, p. C3.

This is the most important article I've read in a long time, citing a new study from the always brilliant William Easterly, along with Alberto Alesina and Janina Matuszeski, called "Artificial States."

For months now, in my brief, I've been ad-libbing this bit about fake states, noting how America is all squiggly lined on the right and straight-lined on the left, and comparing that to how Europe is all squiggly, but it left behind a post-colonial Middle East and Africa full of straight lines.

This observation dovetails with my usual argument on the Balkans' break-up as real success and the assumption that Iraq must remain whole as naive, and it goes nicely with a long-term argument I've nursed in the brief that says that fake states will naturally trough-out in disintegration in response to globalization's disruptive integration and eventually the process of breaking up fake states will segue into the integration of newer, smaller, real ones (like that article on the Balkan states all wanting into the EU and NATO).

How long does such a process take? Well, it took the latter half of the 19th century for the United States (Civil War, settling of the West), and it took almost the entire 20th century for Europe (WWI, WWII, Cold War, now the EU), so yeah, it's gonna take a while in the Middle East and African portions of the Gap.

So I've been saying lately that our task in shrinking the Gap is mostly about managing the devolution of straight-line fake states into squiggly-line real ones. That devolution is likely to turn violent most of the time, so our task is managing that violence and pushing the situation as quickly as possible toward integration, reconstructuion, connectivity, and economic development (hence, Steve DeAngelis and I reach for Development-in-a-Box, quite naturally, as the next tool in the toolkit).

I've been thinking for a while that I just need some patina of academic research and I've got a new sequence of slides here, and voila! Easterly and Company come along with this great bit of work that says there are two key predictors for resiliency after civil strife: the more squiggly the lines the better, and the corollary (saying the same thing) that, the more ethnic groups are divided politically, the more security troubles you have and thus the less likely development will occur.

Great stuff.

Ahmadinejad misunderestimated by WSJ

EDITORIAL: "The Taepodong Democrats: Missile-defense politics in the age of Kim Jong Il," Wall Street Journal, 21 July 2006, p. A14.

A sad, unimaginative piece from the board at WSJ, giving the leftover logic of why missile defense is still our strategic salvation.

Now, don't get me wrong. No one in their right mind is against TBMD, or theater ballistic missile defense, or the sort of Patriot stuff that sort of works. That, I would spend bucks on.

I'm talking the dreamy strategic stuff that's somehow supposed to keep Kim in the box, or solve our troubled relationship with Iran. How strategic missile defense stops Iran from sending in Hezbollah against Israel is beyond me, but such is the state of the logic here.

Here's my favorite line: "Neither logic nor deterrence are the first words that come to mind when we think of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Oh really!

I'd say the man is quite logically deterring our attack right now in Lebanon.

This is a sad sort of nonsense from the WSJ. Journalists as strategists--gets you in trouble almost every time.

Coverage of Dubrovnik in NYT

ARTICLE: "Four Nations Face Barriers as They Seek Bids to Join NATO," by Nicholas Wood, New York Times, 19 July 2006, p. A11.

Pretty basic story, with nice front-on shot (remember mine from the side?) of all the PMs lined up in Dubrovnik. It's "enlargement fatigue" seguing into a wimpy "absorption" excuse from both NATO and the EU.

The Americans are acccused, quite naturally, of pushing the enlargement issue for the sake of their own agenda.

Damn straight. We'd like to not have to go back to the Balkans for genocide-cessation duty.

Trying to regain some sense of buffers: The New Core states flex some political muscle

ARTICLE: "You Won't Read It Here First: India Curtails Access to Blogs," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 19 July 2006, p. A6.

ARTICLE: "Putin Favorite Re-emerging In Ukraine: 2005 Election Loser Gathers Support," by Judy Dempsey, New York Times, 19 July 2006, p. A6.

Russia's been spooked for a while, and with good reason. It's imperial suicide of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a supreme gift to history, and what did it get in return?

A lot of internal chaos, a huge amount of external criticism for not letting Russia itself splinter like the rest of the empire (Chechnya, as ugly as it gets), not much help or entry into the corridors of power (sort of in NATO, sort of in G-8, not yet in WTO), and most of its former holdings gobbled up as quickly as possible by the West.

And so we wonder why the counter-reaction is so strong.

Me? I wonder why it remains so weak.

Russia right now is just recapturing the standard of living it once enjoyed, back before the Wall came down.

I wrote a piece for the Center for Naval Analyses back in 1993, called "Tracking Russian Foreign Policy Into the 21st Century: A Bear-Watcher's Guide." In the briefing version of the text, I end with a slide that shows an interpretive line graph suggesting that Russia's "political-economic path" was going off a cliff in the early 1990s, that it would trough painfully in the mid-1990s, and that, in the "best case," it would return to roughly where it left off in late 1980s by 2007 (I have no idea why I picked that date, I just did).

When I published the piece, I caught a lot of crap for that slide, and the notion that Russia's recovery would be so swift (I titled the slide, "Out on a Very Long Limb"!). My worst case was "Russia on the Eurasian Periphery," but my mixed one was "Russian as the Eurasian Bridge" and my best one was "Russia as the Eurasian Hub." Clearly, today Russia sits somewhere between the mixed case ("normal great power") and the best one (there I had the West integrating Russia as the "Fourth Pillar" in a northern hemispheric security zone centered on North America, united Europe, Russia and Co. and a rising East Asia).

Is Russia all that we hoped it might be? No way.

But is it any of the fears we really harbored ("resurgent Russia" was the excuse for the "reconstitution" pillar of U.S. national security planning over the first half of the 1990s)? No again.

All in all, Russia's been almost no trouble for us since the end of the Cold War. Yes, it went bankrupt in 1997. That was contained.

Yes, it's been a prickly partner on a host of issues, but it's never really taken us on anywhere, and hasn't stopped us from doing anything we really want in the Middle East, except repeat the Iraq bit with Iran (which, quite frankly, none of our allies want to see).

And yet, with all that compliance or acquiescence, Russia has little to show for giving up the Cold War, its huge military, and its empire.

So Moscow does what it knows how to do, historically speaking. It seeks to create controllable buffers between itself and the scary world outside--especially to the south.

It will largely fail in these efforts, especially over a long term that's probably not nearly as long as we assume (it gets easier to see "beyond the foreseeable future" with each passing year).

Will we seek to integrate it more in the meantime? I hope so.

India's path has been so much smoother from outsider to insider, and yet it's really no closer to the Western-dominated hall of global power than Russia is. Instead, it's kept almost like an American pet, or long-term hedge against rising China.

India's got its buffers and it border woes, just like Russia. No one has lost more "empire" in terms of bodies than India has over the past half century. And no one has sought more connectivity with globalization than India has in the past decade and a half.

But India wants its buffers too, and in fear after the Mumbai bombings, the government will do some stupid things with blogs. New Dehli just wants more control over the situation right now, because it has a poor sense of where things are taking India in the months and years ahead. The rule set seems so unclear. Is India in or out? Can it be "lost"? Is it a front line no one in the West really cares about?

Tumultuous times indeed, but hardly as scary as made out to be. These are all problems of rapid but uneven integration: economics racing ahead of politics, technology racing ahead of security. These are good problems (I mean, it sure as hell beats economics and technology falling behind of politics and security, or the great, unfulfilled Orwellian fantasies we've long entertained for our world), ones that can be solved by better definitions of resiliency and rules that help a Moscow and a New Dehli see their real strengths, so they don't feel the need to reach out and try to control the uncontrollable in such petty fashion.

Plenty of people look at the world today and see only decline and violence and chaos since 9/11. I am amazed at how little the Functioning Core of globalization has suffered since that date: no real violence or threats of same amidst our ranks, slow but steady political integration that's still not keeping up with the economic bonds that are booming, spotty but emerging sense of shared security values, and the usual pin-pricks of harm inflicted by terror and God, but all in all, nothing really bad despite all this "tumult" centered in the Middle East and the rising price of oil.

These are all globalization's growing pains, and despite the lack of strategic imagination of our current White House, we're handling them quite nicely.

I know. I can't sell any newspapers or any air time with that message. That's okay.

Did you notice...

... that the WWIII is the wrong metaphor thread is up to 14 comments? Check 'em out and weigh in yourself!

WWIII is the wrong metaphor

DATELINE: Yardley PA, 22 July 2006

I had this discussion with Gingrich in Alabama earlier this year: he's pushing the Civil War metaphor, declaring 2006 to be the equivalent of 1862, and I'm pushing the far longer concept (I'm a big believer of Abizaid's Long War concept) of the settling of the Wild West.

Now, Gingrich, among others, are reviving the talk of WWIII that a lot of excited pundits were tossing about right after 9/11.

I consider this approach to be as wrongheaded as the End Times thinking: it's a form of escapism that turns the definition of war on its head.

First off, the world has never been more at peace. This is a not a claim or a vision. It's just the way it is, statistically speaking.

Second, World Wars were wars between states. We have none of those here. No State A on State B. The "war" that revives all this talk is Israel going into Lebanon against non-state actor Hezbollah. Wasn't a state-on-state war when Israel did the same to the PLO in 1982. Isn't a state-on-state war today.

Third, the road to victory in the Long War, as the new Counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine argues, is overwhelmingly non-kinetic. A "war," however "global" in its day-to-day expression (I have freckles all over my body, but it doesn't make me a black man), that is both won or lost on the question of non-kinetics (the ultimate exit strategy in the Middle East is called JOBS!) ain't exactly a rerun of either of those two bloodbaths.

Fourth, the scale here is all wrong. Not just the tiny percentages of combatants, but the tiny amounts of death. This whole "world war" since 9/11 hasn't yielded a good week's worth of WWII dead.

Fifth, this view indulges in the myth that what Israel does against 4GW opponents actually works, when it does not. Masada-on-steroids isn't the answer. We, the Core, don't have to shoot ourselves out of this situation. Time is on our side, as all all the major dynamics that count (energy, investments, demographics, sheer firepower, enduring ingenuity, strength of our societies, our enduring resilience--none of which favor the other side). The Brits in Northern Ireland or the U.S. cavalry in the Wild West are our models. Stick to the Long War. Don't give in to quick fixes or Armageddon-like fantasies. WWIII is just the End Timers with a patina of strategic analysis, but shit on a stick still tastes bad.

But worst of all, the WWIII talk obscures the solution set, which is not destruction but construction, not disconnectedness but connectedness, not take down nets but put them up. When you call everything a war, you come up with more "war" answers, and those inevitably involve firepower.

Firepower won't get us the win here, plain and simple. WWIII is not realism, it's romanticism. It's starry-eyed, not clear-eyed. It looks for what is easy, instead of what is right.

Resist the temptation. Make your own history. Stop living in the past and embrace a future worth creating.

Losing connectivity...

DATELINE: DC, 21 July 2006

Spent yesterday getting from Nevada to Baltimore. A real disaster to complete a disastrous week. Suffice it to say it's 2330 when I'm sipping a martini with Steve in DC.

Spent the time writing.

Looks like I'll have short piece in October Esquire on the Middle East, but--as always--it will look ahead more than behind. Talking now about something for the end of the year as well. Good to feel, since it was getting to be a while since my last appearance (March).

Today is easy day. Quick trip to Langley to visit the National Intelligence Council. I have an old friend there who's now the vice chair. Want him to meet Steve given Enterra's growing profile in the Intell Community.

This weekend is the Enterra summer party at Steve's. With my phone screwing up, I will be effectively out of pocket.

[Development/Connectivity]-in-a-Box: Ends v. means

Mark has a nice post where he picks up Tom's deliberations about Development-in-a-Box v. Connectivity-in-a-Box. As he so often does, Mark zooms out and offers some helpful meta-analyisis. One excerpt:

The difference between the two concepts comes down to ends and means.

While it is true that "development" is actually a process, "Development in a Box" is a phrase that screams "Outcome!". In contrast, "connectivity" has a range of possile understandings that can indicate only the potential for future exchanges or mass migration or ongoing flows of economic and military might. Therefore, what "Connectivity" yells is "Change!".

Leaving Las Vegas

Not tonight. Bad weather strands me for the night as I miss the last connection to BWI. Free night at cheap hotel sees me cruising the Strip at 1am in a cab. Unexpected weirdness. My bad luck with airlines continues. Tough summer for biz travel.

Now there's a statue, pardner!

The Duke at the OC Airport.

There's your connectivity-in-a-box!

ARTICLE: Bridging the Digital Divide: In war-torn Congo, cellphones are radically changing the way people live, by Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post (national weekly edition), 17-23 July 2006, p. 10.

Open para here is priceless:

Until not long ago, if Zadhe Iyombe wanted to talk to his mother, he had to make the eight-day boat trip up the Congo River to the jungle town where he was raised. In a country with almost no roads, mail or telephone system and a grisly guerrilla war raging, making that exhausting and dangerous trip was about the only way he could find out if his 59-year-old mother was still alive.

Then he got a cellphone.

Now he talks to his mother every day.

Connectivity soothes.

Cellphones are revolutionizing commerce and medical treatment and advertising and agriculture and just about anything you care to name in Africa, simply by connecting people to people and people to information and sellers to buyers.

The article says there are now 2.4 billion cellphone users in the world. Experts used to say that half the world's population had never used a phone. But with the majority of the world's cellphone users (59%) being found in the developing world, cellphones become the first technology in history to have more users among developing states than developed ones.

And this usage trajectory is steepest in Africa. 63 million users two years ago, but 152 million today. Congo is ground zero for this connectivity make-over: 3.2 million cellphones to only 20,000 conventional landlines.

And so the global cellphone companies come --and invest.

This is connectivity-in-a-box, pure and simple. Harnessing that rapidly to a postwar or postdisaster situation? That's Development-in-a-Box.

And guess what? Steve DeAngelis and I don't need to sell that vision to the aid bureaucrats in DC. We really need to sell it to the corporations who can make money in the interventionary aftermarket.

Cellphones are such a great commerce steroid:

Conveniences such as laptops, Internet access, ATMs and credit cards are rare or nonexistent in Congo, so entrepreneurs are devising ways to use cellphones to serve the same functions.

Sure, bad guys will also use the technology to do bad things--oldest story in the business (and they still call it "wire fraud"), but think of the pre-loaded cellphone that our intervening Marines hand out upon arrival: think of all the stuff we plug into that phone to make them happy the American military showed up. Think of how fast we set up that net, because the private sector companies are already plugged into the coalition-run recovery plan. Why do the companies want in under such dire circumstances? They want the access to the virgin market.

That can be Development-in-a-Box, meaning one crucial component. Not a big aid program, but something where the Pentagon hard-wires the private-sector effort right into its campaign plan, so that it's ready--bingo!--right from day one, demonstrating the immediate empowerment that makes individual-led economic recovery/development possible.

Great article that many readers sent me last week. As will be my custom, now, given my heavy sked, I wait until the piece shows up in my national weekly edition that I get in the mail.

For now I get the WSJ every morn, the NYT every day in the mail (usually 2 days late) and the WP in the weekly edition. Yes, I could spend all day online, but I like my busy life and my kids too much for that sort of lifestyle.

America's gotta have it!

BOOK REVIEW: Goliath's Burden: Josef Joffe argues America's power is crucial to global security [free registration required], by Roger Cohen, New York Times Book Review, 16 July 2006, p. 13.

Joffe's book, √úberpower (only a German could come up with that bon mot!) makes some good arguments, according to Cohen, who argues audaciously himself in this review that "there is not much daylight, after all, between Bill Clinton's 'indispensable' nation and Bush's insistence that 'the only alternative to American leadership is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world." For to me, Bush is just Clinton plus 9/11 and a lot less personal charm.

But Joffe loses me with his preferred East-West divide between a Belgrade-Baghdad-Beijing Belt and a Berlin-Berkeley Belt (now that's Friedman envy of the worst sort!).

Europe keeps expecting America to "come home" and it just ain't gonna happen. We're living in the vast rule-set reset that is globalization's advance around the planet. Europe and Japan, the classic West other than America, wants largely to sit this process out, instead arguing over cheese standards and ag subsidies and UN Security Council resolutions.

That is not how the Long War will be waged, much less won. Frankly, nobody's putting either Berkeley or Berlin in charge of anything. In those soft, protected enclaves, all is protected and connected. There are no incentives to wage this fight, to build those markets, to extend that connectivity.

Again, our main allies in this Long War/shrink-the-Gap effort will be New Core, not Old Core.

Joffe, as smart as he is, has outlived his era.

Gross Domestic Cool

ARTICLE: Selling 'Japan-ness': Japanese Retailers Try Trendier, Cheaper Approach As They Expand Into U.S. [subscription required]," by Amy Chozick, Wall Street Journal, 14 July 2006, p. A9.

Believe I cited Foreign Policy article of that name ("Japan's GDC") in BFA.

Basic fashion world article, but one that highlights Japan's growing content clout in globalization. No one calls them "cultural imperialists," and yet their impact is no different from ours: the selling of the cool and new that crowds out any locality's old and traditional--if given the chance:

"People don't just think of shrines and temples when they think of Japan now, " says Nobuo Domae, chief executive officer of Uniqlo USA. "This is the perfect time to take advantage of our Japan-ness."

So if the New Core (Brazil, Russia, China, India, Korea) set the new rules, I guess the Old Core (especially Japan and US) still set the new style.

And in a Left Brain world, that's pretty cool.

Brooks and Friedman must have taken (or skipped) the same poli sci courses in college

OP-ED: Democracy's Long Haul: Looking back on the liberty to come [subscription required], by David Brooks, New York Times, 13 July 2006, p. A23.

Maybe I'm not so narrowly read after all!

It was odd to read Friedman in the "World is Flat" act so surprised when Michael Sandel (one of my favs at Harvard and a great guy to boot) basically told him that his "flat world" concept was simply Marx updated or Marxism on steroids. You just wanted to go "Duh!"

Then again, Friedman rehashing Marx in his book would get awfully dull awfully fast, so there you have it.

Now we get David Brooks, whom I generally like even more because he's not so cut-and-runnish on Bush in general, who just last week declared Big Bang dead after just three years but now takes the long view on backsliding among the class of Huntington's "third wave of democratizaton" (Sam's best book by far, IMO).

Resurrecting the revolutions of 1848 (Marx's favorite intellectual stomping ground), he notes that many of those new dems slide back into authoritarianism, only to see these same states turn quite innovative, democracy-wise, a bit further down the road. So, taking a cue from both Russia and Iraq of today, he sees basically four stages of democratization, followed by chaos, followed by authoritarians restored, followed (hopefully, like the class of 1848) by gradual reform.

To me, this makes perfect sense: a rapid expansion of the Core is likely to unfold in this manner, hence a certain patience is in order and it's better to stress growing connectivity in the short term instead of rapid democratization--especially in Friedman's hypercompetitive flat world. Such conservatism in politics is an acceptable form of protectionism in the face of globalization's rapid embrace of your society It's the defensible social "tariff."

Separating strategic concepts from practical products

The reason why I woke up one morning and started contemplating Connectivity-in-a-Box over Development-in-a-Box is because Steve and I are getting a lot of handler advice on taking the concept to the higher levels of public/government/corporate awareness, and, quite naturally, a lot of that advice is coming from the world of official developmental aid (aka, the foreign aid crowd). Even more naturally, the bureaucratic tendency of such advice is to offer all sorts of softening and inclusive language, designed to make everyone feel part of the solution and dampen any implied insult by DiB's enunciation--as in, the vast majority of foreign aid is broken and wasted, so let's fix it!

Frankly, when I read the material softened in this way, a creepy feeling wells up in my gut. Do enough of this to "gain acceptance" by the establishment and pretty soon you have something that's so inoffensive and so vacuous and so marginal that any "victory" in gaining said acceptance is basically worthless.

Why? By making the concept more acceptable and less threatening you've basically given all the established players enough coverage of their equities (preferred way of doing business) that you've opened the door for them to say, "we already essentially do that" or "we've got that capability already in house" (typically in some lesser-included formulation where it is assumed that existing capabilities and procedures can handle the scenario/goal you raise) and you close the door on any substantive change.

Strategic concepts need to be bold, clarifying calls to action. How they get translated to projects and products is another matter. Strategic visioneering isn't about the means, but the ends. Development-in-a-Box is insanely ambitious by past standards, but why speak to that past? Why not speak boldly and clearly to the future worth creating? Why not appeal to the next generation instead of the powers that be--right now.

Frankly, I like the image of "young man, narrowly read" (the title of my favorite Amazon review where I got 4 stars for my ideas but a stern dressing down for not spending more time cross-referencing the ideas of other authors, instead relying so heavily on newspaper articles--the shame!), because the vast majority of what gets published in my universe of national and international security is such hide-bound pablum that I can't even finish the summary op-ed, much less the weighty tome standing behind it. I read that "widely," I'd never say anything original. Indeed, this is why I read almost exclusively outside my field.

And I like the results, and judging by the speaking fees, so do other people, both inside and outside the system.

When I spoke at the DC chapter of the Society for International Development about DiB, almost every speaker after me made a point of disclaiming its viability, to the approving nods of grey beards throughout the audience.

And yet I signed a slew of programs for all these twentysomethings who rushed me after my presentation (even having my picture taken with several).

So which side do you appeal to as grand strategist in a Long War? Why, it's obvious. You go with the Long Tail in the Long War--i.e., not where the power is concentrated or bunched up now You wage your struggle as outsider to the system.

And frankly, I've found much more success as the outsider than the insider, and I've found that success in both the outside (DiB is an easy sell outside of the DC/gov world) and on the inside (DiB seems to get Steve and I the partners we really need).

It's not hubris to be so audacious, so long as you run with those who get it and don't bog yourself (or your enunciation) with those who want to nibble you to death or those who will--quite frankly--never get it

Make your breakthroughs and exploit the chaos.

In the end, there will never be one Development-in-a-Box thing or product or contract or project. There will be a host of things and products and projects and contracts that explore the dynamics and mechanisms and procedures and goals implied.

So why not keep the main strategic concept bold? Audacious? Breathtaking? Even confrontational and slightly insulting?

If you're in the business of creating and promoting new rules, why not be all those things?

In the end, Connectivity-in-a-Box just isn't far enough out there. It's basically already here in cellphones (he types, blogging away from his Treo, now using his Mac basically only for PPT) and WiFi. I say, let's piss people off. Let's challenge them to dream of that future worth creating. The stronger the resistance, the better the conversation--and the better our enunciation becomes.

I wrote in BFA that the grand strategist wants to be exactly at that point where people say, "I like your logic, but it'll never happen." You want people right on the edge of plausibility. That's where you want to be operating.

DiB keeps us on that edge, whereas CiB does not.

So here endeth the rebranding proposal.

Signed...

Five paper PNMs in one airport store and 2 hard BFAs in another.

Between such random signings and the organized ones (once signed 400 for a bank's annual dinner gala), I estimate I've signed roughly 5k volumes between PNM hard, PNM paper and BFA hard.

My muse/editor has spoken on CiB re-brand proposal

Mark Warren hates Connectivity-in-a-Box. He says that whenever he mentions Development-in-a-Box, people say, "What's that? Tell me about that!"

CiB, he says, comes off as soft-peddling to reduce critical resistance, a wuss-out ploy I never seem to indulge in, and certainly NOT how I got to where I am today.

Steve DeAngelis is looking smarter on this proposal. He opposed it. Now I am feeling chastened--and wussy.