Connection or murder?

POST: Foreign companies digging oil wells in Kurdistan

Kurdistan remains committed to creating connectivity on the ground while Shiites and Sunnis are obviously more committed on the disconnectedness strategy, such as clearing out neighborhoods of unwanted people.

American, naturally, needs to go with the self-selected connectors here, taking our victories where we can and accepting the follow-on consequences.

My bottom line: never bet against the innate desire to connect with the outside world.

Thanks to AJ Barnett for sending this.

Struggling with cold, but clear on vision

Long talk with Neil Nyren of Putnam late last week before heading to family wedding over weekend (to include the impromptu trip to Canton).

Upshot is, I will recast the proposal to make it bigger in scope and content. I let the "how to" career strand dominate the book's proposed structure, when I needed--in Neil's mind--to keep the extension of the vision paramount.

There's no chance I can target the spring of 08, given Mark Warren's work with Harry Reid, and the fall of 08 is looking unbelievably crowded (not to mention the lack of available airspace due to the election), so the target is likely the first couple months of 2009.

Since I wrote BFA in January and February of 2005, I'll have three full years of new material to mine for Vol. III, casting it more in the vein of "Where do we go now?"

I'm excited to have this broader focus, which I should have aspired to naturally but for whatever reason did not. But Neil is good in that way, telling me that by the start of 2009 (with the new administration), people will want big answers.

Why globalization will not be stopped

BUSINESS: On The Job in China," photoessay by Edward Burtynsky, Time,, 9 July 2007, p. 24.

Neat shots.

Subtitle says it all:

A wave of more than 100 million rural workers has flocked to cities for factory work, fed by Western demand for cheap goods. If conditions aren't ideal, they are often better than farm life.

The biggest migration in human history. The entire flow of African slaves was less than 15 million, spread over decades. This is 100 million in less than a generation and many more to come. Making that migration work is the biggest challenge the Chinese Communist Party faces. Anything that threatens that development threatens the Party's rule.

All fantasies about "unrestricted warfare" aside, the PLA doesn't have a clue about how to defend the regime from the greatest threat it can possibly face: rising expectations.

Petraeus knows how this should end

ARTICLE: "Operation Last Chance," by Joe Klein, Time, 9 July 2007, p. 18.

The Petraeus quote says it all WRT the SysAdmin:

The vision thing is really important. You have to visualize what security here should look like when you're gone.

My column next weekend will explore the Leviathan-SysAdmin tension represented by Yingling's article.

Parks and immigration

ARTICLE: 'Picnics, Games and Culture Shock: Parks Work to Tailor Services While Educating Immigrants on Rules,' By Annie Gowen, Washington Post, July 1, 2007; Page A01

The parks story is fascinating, highlighting the historic role of public spaces as the daily mixing bowl of upper and lower classes (like sporting events and church services), and especially their role in conditioning new populations (i.e., immigrants) in how to act more American (when you think of it, public partying is a distinct cultural function--just consider tailgating).

Watch Ric Burns' docu-history of NYC and you hear the original social integration rationales for creating the greatest of public urban spaces known as Central Park. City fathers were intensely concerned that new immigrants were losing any and all chances for pastoral, restorative activities amidst the industrializing and increasingly crowded hustle and bustle of turn-of-the-century NY. Thus, Central Park was designed to serve as a social/class mixing bowl of sorts, with the distinct goal of lowering then-rising tensions between the born-here "haves" and the come-here "working-six-days-a-week-to-get-theirs" immigrants.

An interesting parallel.

Remember instability spreads

POST: Failed States, Part 2: How Instability Spreads

Good post and a good link. Stuff like this needs to be explained again and again right now to make sure our difficulties in Iraq don't push us toward isolationism as the next best answer.

The Americans Have Landed

The Esquire article: The Americans Have Landed

Map from the Esquire article (unlinked from the article, as far as I saw)

Author's Commentary
+ Run Up
+ Thursday, 1 March
+ Friday, 2 March
+ Saturday, 3 March
+ Sunday, 4 March
+ Monday, 5 March
+ Tuesday, 6 March
+ Wednesday, 7 March
+ Thursday, 8 March
+ Friday, 9 March

The photo gallery with its 279 photos

The C-SPAN interview
Purchase the C-SPAN interview on DVD

Africa Command: Photo Essays: Esquire showcases some of Tom's photos

Slideshow of the photo gallery (though the extensive captions are easier to read if you click through to the gallery):

I watch Michael Moore promote "Sicko" and he impresses throughout

Not an endorsement of everything claims, but a sense that he's trying very hard to make things better.

And is that not the essence of America?

This week's column

Realistically repairing America's image abroad

There's no question that anti-Americanism increased dramatically worldwide in the past half-decade, in part because of our muscular response to 9/11. It's also true that, since the Cold War's end, Washington has significantly curtailed its "public diplomacy" efforts to win hearts and minds overseas.

As political leaders and terrorism experts increasingly call for "strategic communications" in the long war against radical extremism, our intelligence community grows quite interested in this rising tide of anti-Americanism, calling it a threat unto itself. In the past year, I've had conversations with various agencies on this subject, and here's what I submitted for their consideration:

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.