State of the weblog: now with more!

More features - because you asked for them!

(Well, and Tom did, and he's the boss ;-)

1. New, master glossary, linked from the sidebar. This may get tweaked in the near future (of course, everything is subject to tweaking).

2. 'Email this post' link. When you're reading one of Tom's posts and someone comes to mind, you're just a click and a couple of email addresses away from enlightening them further.

Enjoy!

Exhibit #1 why no serious thinker takes TNR seriously

An amazingly dense and superficial piece (yes, that is an incredible accomplishment) by Clay Risen in the 3 April 06 issue of The New Republic, a magazine whose fall from grace (and talent) has been stupendous in recent years (notice how, in 2 million words, I have never bothered to cite a TNR article?). The title is "The Danger of Generals-as-CEOs." It is a sly bit of intellectual assassination against Art Cebrowski, basically insinuating that the Iraq postwar experience reflects the Rumsfeld Pentagon's penchant to look to business for examples of how to generate institutional reform throughout the Defense Department.

This guy writes at a level of misunderstanding that is stunning. That there is no one at TNR with enough smarts to stop a piece this boneheaded tells me that TNR is a bankrupt place in terms of understanding beyond the usual inside-the-Beltway-who's-up-and-who's-down nonsense.

There is the institutional force and the warfighting force. Rumsfeld's revolution is overwhelming within the institutional force, as I laid out in my profile of him in Esquire last summer, and not with the operational force. Rumsfeld's revolution will make that operational force more responsive and efficient, but it doesn't not fundamentally alter the trajectory of that force's capabilities, except to make them easier to use.

Now, Rummy has misused the operational, warfighting force on occasion, most notably in postwar Iraq. But to insinuate that the business revolution he's successfully pushing through the DoD (in some areas more than others) is responsible for the postwar debacle in Iraq is just so stunningly ignorant as to make me laugh.

Clay Risen has no business writing on defense if that is the depth of his ability to understand. But again, this just tells me that TNR has gone right down the shitter in terms of talent, vision, and execution.

The clincher? Linking Net-Centric Ops to the business process revolution to Iraq. Oh, and linking all that to a rerun of Vietnam. That's comparing laptops to monkeys to apples--to the theory of evolution. It is so hopelessly STUPID as an approach as to define reason.

Consider this analogy: You have cancer and you're being treated by an oncologist. This guy or gal is responsible for the sum of your treatment, from stem to stern. That treatment will unfold over stages as such: you'll be operated on by a surgeon who will cut out the tumors; then you'll be worked on by a radiation oncologist who will treat the tumor beds in the immediate aftermath of the surgery; and finally you'll receive chemo from the chemotherapist, in a long-term effort to hunt down and kill any remaining cancer cells in your body.

What's Rummy has done is make the hospital run better administratively. Everything connected to your treatment should be better in that regard, but the fundamentals of your treatment and the decisions involved in that treatment aren't really impacted by this improvement in service provision. Again, hopefully your treatment is better delivered across the dial, but decisions are still decisions, and execution is still execution.

Net-centric warfare has basically improved the war equation, or the front-half of conflict, as I call it. Here, we'd say NCW makes for a much better surgeon. And yes, there are some in that crowd who believe it makes the surgery, or war, so good that outcomes in the later stages of treatment are vastly improved or even obviated. And yes, Rummy and his crowd were susceptible to that thinking. But at most I would judge that it may have caused a fraction of our problems in postwar Iraq.

Instead, the majority of the problem was caused by how badly we handled the immediate aftermath of war, or the radiation part if we stick to the cancer treatment analogy. You could say that in Iraq, we basically botched that whole segment, both in who we had leading the effort (CPA), the major decisions they made (dismantling the army, going overboard in de-Bathification), and the overall delay in getting the economy restarted (the lost year from June 2003 to April 2004).

That lost, immediate postwar "golden hour" is the fault of many people, to include Rumsfeld. But the failure there is across the government. It was a failure of the interagency process, which Rummy, Cheney, and the Neocons like Feith truly screwed up. But guess what? They screwed that up for a lot of political reasons, not because Rummy was pursuing a business revolution in the Pentagon or because Net-Centric Warfare had so improved the force as to create the overmatch with Saddam's forces.

But the real failure has been our government's entire mindset on the long-term treatment of Iraq, or the chemotherapy regime, to return to the cancer analogy. Here, we didnt' encourage the private sector development that needed to drive the process. Here, we were slow and incompetent in resurrecting the functions of the government. Here, we waited too long to start rebuilding the Iraqi security forces.

So you look over the entire "oncology" plan here, and you come to the following conclusions: 1) the surgery, or war, went very well; 2) the radiation, or immediate postwar, was botched horribly; and 3) the chemotherapy, or counter-insurgency and reconstruction, started very badly and picked up far too slowly, leaving the entire process, not to mention the patient, behind the 8 ball in licking the horrific cancer we called Saddam.

No matter how arrogant the surgeon was (NCW), it's idiotic to hold that element responsible for what came next. Yes, some of the arrogance connected with that capacity did influence the decisions about what came next, and there Rummy and Cheney (a former SECDEF) and the Neocons are truly to blame, along with Bush for letting it happen.

But in the overall treatment that has been Iraq, the failures came in the secondary (immediate postwar) and tertiary (reconstruction and counter-insurgency) segments, not the primary (war). Our real sin here has been the long-term institutional bias against giving a rat's ass about those secondary and tertiary segments.

Licking the Vietnam syndrome was not about learning how to win a win, but realizing what it takes to successfully wage a counter-insurgency strategy. That victory is finally emerging, slowly, within the U.S. military, primarily in the Army and Marines. And guess what? NCW will play a solid role in that, but largely a secondary one to the logic we'll learn from the Fourth Generationn Warfare mindset. That's a fundamental point in my second book: it's not a binary choice, but an effective blending. We need to wage war and peace differently and better and in closer tandem to one another.

But none of this logic, much less reporting can be found in this pathetically immature article. Instead we get the child-like logic that the push to reform a host of antiquated business/logistics/acquisitions/personnel/etc systems is what is truly behind our inability to effectively gauge the warfighting spirit of our enemy. Yes, yes, it was the billing system that killed my dad, not the disease--or the doctor's performance.

Net-Centric Warfare doesn't create the profound institutional bias against postwar planning or effective preparation for insurgency. Vietnam did that. The Powell Doctrine did that. And the military did that to itself. And the American public approved the entire process, year after year after year.

NCW helped pave the way for the brilliant wars we waged in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but why we've struggled in both postwar situations was not because we waged war too well, but because we refused to think beyond the kinetic victory to anything more.

Rummy and the Neocons are definitely guilty of falling into that trap, but to imply that guilt is somehow driven by the collective attempts by reformists to pull the Pentagon out of its Cold War methodologies is--again--to confuse the institutional and the operating forces. I'm not talking some deep esoteric insider stuff here. I'm talking Defense 101.

But there is no such sophisticated distinctions or analysis with this piece that passes for journalism.

There is no history here (except the fanciful linkage between Cebrowski and Gartska's original Proceedings article and the resulting debacle that is the Iraq postwar). There is no understanding of the immense institutional bias against postwar planning across DoD across the entire post-Cold War time period. None of that is to be found here. No, this is all because business logic is being applied to business processes within the Defense Department. That none of this impacts on training, doctrine or operational planning (which, yes, Rummy did screw up WRT Iraq) is a meaningless distinction for this pathetically constructed logic train.

Hell, why not interview actors who've played SECDEF if that's the extent of your journalistic effort?

And no, do not expect me to extend this condemnation of TNR into some blanket reprimand to the Democratic Party. Yes, TNR once aspired to represent serious thinking within the party, but I know enough serious-thinking Democrats to realize this piece of journalistic tripe reflects TNR's bankruptcy, not the party's.

I write for a magazine. I know how hard it is to boil things down. But this piece is just so stunningly bad, so frickin' ignorant, such a complete waste of time, that I am more pleased to use to this venue to say that Clay Risen is an accomplished idiot. Not just a weak talent. Not just bad execution. This guy is a dim as the day is long. Somebody else above him let Risen publish something this bad, and there's no escaping that boneheaded judgement. But Risen's piece is just above high school in its sophistication. And to sit back and let that sort of professional incompetence pretend to be anything but is wrong, as in, if there's any point to have the power to influence thinking then it must be used to root out sheer bullshit.

In any competent magazine, someone exists who's smart enough to ask enough good questions to blow away the superficial linkages this guy draws. But apparently there is no one at TNR with that capacity, which tells me it's not a serious magazine run by serious journalists.

Instead, it's a silly place with no talent that's desperate to recoup its rapid decline over the past few years.

Don't speak ill of the dead? Why the hell not? TNR's been dead ever since Sullivan left.

Tom to speak in Clinton School course [updated]

Remember when Tom said he'd be speaking at the Clinton Presidential Library? Here's some more info:

Clinton School to Offer Short Course on Global Leadership

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

LITTLE ROCK – The University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service will offer the first in a series of non-credit short courses, titled “Global Leadership in Public Service and U.S. Foreign Policy.”...

Speakers confirmed include: Thomas Barnett, author of “The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century,” journalist, commentator, teacher

Got a specific date, Tom?

Update:

5/18/06 5:15pm

Tom's talk will be semi-open. Contact the school directly to ask permission to attend if you're interested.

On air right now with David Allen, 1320 AM talk radio in Jacksonville FLA

[5pm]

Sorry for instant notice. On from 5-6pm EST.

Maybe it's on the web?

[5:10]

Go here: http://www.thedavidallenshow.com/node/about.

(do first segment and then back)

[5:20]

Show seems a bit conservative, but the tone of Allen seems logical and fair. Better yet, he speaks with great deliberation, which gives you nice breaks and plenty of time to think about your responses (super fast talkers are harder to dance with, so to speak).

Better still, the show is commercial, so breaks means you catch your breath--and can blog real time!

[5:30]

Here's the direct connect on listening live: http://www.1320thepatriot.com/.

Good news: he seems to archive on the web, so show should be around online sometime this weekend or on Monday.

Half way thru and this interview goes very differently from most: Allen asks a different slate of questions from most.

[6pm now]

Allen was great. I would go on his show again. Questions from callers were a bit disappointing though: too much the paranoia about globalization and the "ubermind" controlling all, etc.

Then again, all that fear shows I have plenty of work to do.

Sean: keep an eye on Allen's site and see if and when an archive copy goes up so we can link to it. Here is the page where old interviews posted: http://www.thedavidallenshow.com/audio

Finally: why this was so last-minute: I was supposed to go on yesterday with Allen, but our closing dragged on and I had to cancel at the last minute. So much running around on the house, it just slipped my mind to preview the appearance.

Still, one worth listening to, IMHO, just because the conversation was different from most--more like Bohannon's show in terms of a strong focus on globalization itself.

America’s protectionist politicians: always behind the learning curve

COLUMN: “Gradual rise of renminbi keeps market-watchers guessing,” by Steve Johnson, Financial Times, 23 March 2006, p. 24.

ARTICLE: “WTO urges US to resist protectionist sentiment,” by Doug Cameron and Frances Williams, Financial Times, 23 March 2006, p. 4.

ARTICLE: “China’s competitiveness hit by energy and labour costs,” by Tom Mitchell, Financial Times, 23 March 2006, p. 1.

Sens. Graham and Schumer take a fact-finding tour of China as part of their showy threat to jack up tariffs on all things Chinese. Schumer, whom I dislike immensely for more reasons than I can count, was bragging to the international press during this huge ass-kissing exercise that the Chinese certainly are taking his threats seriously. I like a charming political blackmailer myself.

This kind of pressure is--to put it mildly--rather crude. The Chinese have basically been slowly but surely raising the renminbi across 2006, tiny slices at a time. They are betting they’ll do just enough to stave off the protectionists on the Hill, who, apparently, would gladly torpedo China’s economic rise and the hundreds of millions that rise has lifted out of poverty. Of course, such an approach strikes some as strategic, because putting the Chinese government in a precarious position vis-à-vis their domestic economic performance will get us… a more repressive regime. But then that dovetails with the hawks, who can continue to use China to justify the wrong force structure for a war that will never be fought.

And you see the alliances that work right now in DC: those favoring disconnectivity in both economics and security, which is just what you’d expect from the leader of the Free World, yes.

But this is how you turn the 2000s into the 1930s: the foolish pursuit of zero-sum thinking (I maximize my gains by minimizing yours). To realize that so much of this thinking still permeates our Congress is really disturbing. We need more people with serious security experience and serious business experience on the Hill, rather than the clutch of life-long professional politicians we currently suffer.

Anyway, China moves toward making its currency more flexible and responsive to global market pressures for a lot of good reasons that improve the decision-making within its domestic economy, which is maturing as it accumulates wealth.

And it’s that maturation process that means the notion that China presents a neverending low-price pressure on all things global simply evaporates, as the world turns out to be a lot less flat than imagined. Energy costs and labor costs already mean that China is no longer the cheapest investment market in Asia, so the losses in trade experienced by the region’s smaller economies are already reversing, with Bangladesh, Cambodia and India gaining most.

Guess somebody better alert Sens. Graham and Schumer to prep their tariffs against the legions of poor in those states as well. I mean, gotta protect American workers from cheap labor. That way we’ll keep America productive and efficient and stuck right where we need to be on the production value chain. No sense leaping into any futures when the past is so comfortable.

Plan for reality in Iraq

ARTICLE: “Bush Pressing the Iraqis to Build A Governing Coalition Quickly,” by Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A12.

OP-ED: “Whatever Laura’s Feeding George, Pour It On,” by Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2006, p. A10.

ARTICLE: “Insurgents Shower Iraq Police Center With Mortar Shells: A second day of intense attacks against paramilitary forces,” by Edward Wong, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A12.

ARTICLE: “In Placid Iraqi Kurdistan, Strife to the South Elicits Little Sympathy,” by Robert F. Worth, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A12.

ARTICLE: “Basque “Fighters Set a Cease-Fire After 4 Decades: Spain Expresses Caution; After 800 Killings, ETA Says It Seeks Autonomy Using Only Politics,” by Renwick McLean, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A1.

ARTICLE: “Under-pressure group left in no position for hard bargaining: The separatists have been weakned by arrests and a degree of self-government for the Basque region,” by Leslie Crawford, Financial Times, 23 March 2006, p. 2.

INTERVIEW: “Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry: Iraq’s provinces ‘itch to exercise power,’” by Steve Negus, Financial Times, 23 March 2006, p. 6.

Bush continues his blind optimism tour, which gets better by the stop as he’s forced to answer more questions more realistically. He finally seems willing, as Henninger points out, to prepare the American public for realistic outcomes.

Here’s my definition of realism on Iraq: it would include fairly autonomous and successful nations arising in the Kurdish and Shiite portions and the Sunni triangle remaining a mid-90s-Bosnia-like mess for years on end.

To me, that’s two out of three, and having Saddam gone and triggering the amazing amount of political and economic change in the region over the past three years--that works out fairly well in terms of the sacrifices made.

I wish we could fight wars where we just got to crush traditionally arrayed enemies and then feel no responsibility for the aftermath. I just don’t think history or al Qaeda or the radical Salafis are going to give us those fights in the future. So I think we’ll just have to get better at counter-insurgency specifically, and postconflict stabilization and reconstruction ops in general, getting so good at them that we bring some serious USG assets to the real great power competition of the 21st century: shrinking the Gap by making markets there.

Definitely a long haul. Look at ETA in Spain: four decades of killing. What beats them? A war of attrition agains the leadership, increased local automony for political groups/entities/regions, and an improved economy that seduces angry young men with jobs and the promise of better lives.

So another 4GW force bites the dust!

So what will work in Iraq? The same damn things. We need to make FDI flow to generate local jobs. We need to accept that Iraq will be a weak federal state (or worse, a loose affiliation of states) and concentrate on the natural ambition of local leaders to run things locally, especially along sectarian lines until the security situations pans out better. And finally, we continue going after the leaders of the insurgency and terrorist networks, using Iraqis in this process as much as possible to restrict our losses but likewise to increase the competency and confidence of indigenous security forces (plus, quite frankly, the best counter-insurgents are always locals).

Laying out that sort of vision is a whole lot more realistic, especially when you tie it to a drawdown of U.S. ground troops, meaning we leave behind mostly logistical support, special forces and trainers, and our Air Force and Navy to serve as substitute air and sea forces for the local security forces. Then and only then our presence starts to look a lot more like the natural “shoulders” of any intervention.

America making it easier for New Core to study here

ARTICLE: “In Reversal, Graduate School Applications From Foreigners Rise,” by Alan Finder, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A20.

After the steep drops following the 9/11 attacks, the number of foreign students applying to colleges and universities in the U.S. is back up.

Part of this is the government streamlining the process, and part are educational institutions making similar improvements.

The leaders, as they have been for several years now, are China and India. Both shot up about 25% this year.

Yet another reason why we’ll have more in common with these countries in the future than with many traditional allies that have historically defined the “West.”

Speaking with the Speaker, and a great reporter

DATELINE: In the Shire, Indy, 23 March 2006

Last night was pretty good. Sat at the head table with the hosting general of the Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course and Newt Gingrich, who seemed to know a lot about me (saying things like, "this is a book I know you'd find interesting" and stuff like that, and asking a lot of questions that revealed some knowledge).

Gingrich is a pretty easy guy to talk with. Inquisitive as hell, he asks question after question and then he spits out theories every so often at high speed, often linking them to American history. His favorite point of comparison to today was the tougher years of the Civil War.

I countered more with the settling of the West, and we went back and forth some on the subject, which was fun.

Also, covered Iraq, where the consensus of the table (us and five or so 3-stars) was that we toppled the regime but that we should have kept the government (mostly because we were prepared to topple a regime but not to replace a government). Gingrich really liked that enunciation, and wrote it down on his Delta flight coupon sleeve, upon which he took notes throughout the night (not a napkin note-taker, he).

Gingrich asked me about Indiana (why I was there), said he loved the zoo there (I told him we had just visited and were members; he countered that he was a zoo freak who visited them every town he traveled to), and compared his Wisconsin experiences to mine (his wife is from a town not that far from my hometown).

Chatting through a dinner with him is pretty much what you'd expect, having seen him on TV so many times: accessible, very fast, likes to hear himself talk but listens very intently as well (asking you to repeat stuff he likes, or typically following up everything you say with a question). Serious Republican, no doubt, and he wears his credentials openly on every point, but not hard to converse with or conduct a reasonable argument. It's not hard to see why the military likes to have him around so much. He's a fascinating guy, and who doesn't like all the Civil War references?!

When I got up to talk, I was a bit nervous, or rather, a bit too tired, as I often am when I talk late after talking early (I am not the young man I once was), so I stumbled a bit on the first couple of slides, in part because the mike started feeding back and in part because my clicker did not work whatsoever, which was baffling, because we tested it all out earlier in the afternoon.

I had one of the hosting personnel swap out the batteries and it did little good: instead of clicking the keypad, I could use it but basically only if I held it almost over the laptop. Very weird. Worked fine back in my room. Really wonder about the RF quality of that room, which is a none-too-rare experience for me in venues.

Anyway, once I got warmed up, it flowed. But I was surprisingly more stark and forceful than usual, which I didn't credit to Gingrich being there so much as my sense from the room: about three dozen 3-stars from all services. Basically tough faces to work: thinking hard, agreeing or disagreeing hard, and working it all out very seriously in their skulls.

You can just sense that with certain rooms: this is not entertainment to them but something far more serious. So you just go with the feeling, and the delivery adjusts.

Still, I was a bit surprised. Just didn't expect such a strong flow.

Went about 60 (norm is 30) and then did about 30 Q&A, which was exceptionally good, and tougher than usual. Seems like everyone had either read or was reading PNM.

Signed about 25 copies of BFA afterwards, and Gingrich came up and said how much he liked the talk. What was especially cool during the signings was hearing what I heard several times during the earlier one that afternoon: senior officers saying this was one of the rare times in their lives when they ever bothered to get an author to sign their copies, which is kind of a weird compliment but one I get in its meaning--namely, people saying they don't usually get touched by a book but that this one did it for them. You get that sort of feedback from a 3-star and you feel pretty good about your decision to put it into print.

Then the real treat for me: a long chat over beers with Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal. He showed up at the reception because he heard I was talking (Gingrich flew in as well for the talk). Both he and Newt would have come anyway that night or early the next morning for their own stints with the JFOWC, but it was a real honor to have them both attend the dinner because of me.

I hadn't spoken F2F with Greg for a while, so a great discussion on what good reporting is over the reception before dinner, and then just a nice long private conversation (no flags) on the porch outside our rooms after the dinner and talk, a conversation that ran until midnight.

That meant I got little sleep before my flights home to close on the house this afternoon, but it was worth it. I respect Greg so much, and like him personnaly as well, that it was really great to have that time together, jawing our way through a host of defense and mil topics. Greg's been on the Pentagon beat for so long, and he's so on top of his game. Still, I'll be interested to see what the paper has in store for him next. He's simply too good a reporter just to keep doing the same thing forever. Frankly, I don't think he can get much better at what he covers now than he already is, and that's a recipe for stagnation if you're not careful.

Weird fact about Greg: his first newspaper job was in Montgomery, which is why he's easily talked into this course.

Ad hoc ad hominem

Got an email chastising me greatly for describing Senators Graham and Schumer as "dumb." The reader was disappointed that I had become too vicious and crude in my delivery, thus ruining my centrist appeal. He asked me to learn how to control my anger on the blog better.

All good points.

You should say the idea is stupid, but not the man, because it creates unnecessary resistance.

But curbing the anger?

There I pull back a bit from the criticism. Perfectly fine to argue that in a published piece, but the blog is not the published piece. The blog is the blog. It's stream of consciousness. It's about expressing the anger, and sometimes acting stupid or vicious or crude. If the blog becomes too calculated, it stops being the blog.

It has to remain ultimately personal--the glimpse within, warts and all. When it gets polished and always on message, it becomes the same as everything else, and the distinction is lost.

Still, good feedback. The person was expressing disappointment. That's how I made this person feel. And feedback is always all about how you make someone feel, far more than what you did.

So you balance the spontaneity with a few basic rules. You still want to be able to get mad, cut loose, follow the stream, and not really give a damn what any reader may think, because as soon as you start self-editing for that one reader, you start self-editing for them all, and then you might as well become a news personality who's expert at saying nothing offensive to anyone.

But the basic rule of sticking to the idea and not the person is a good one. Simple, and easy to remember.

A non-kinetic struggle for identity: found Chinese daughters

ARTICLE: “Adopted in China, Seeking Identity in America,” by Lynette Clemetson,New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A1.

A modest attempt to tell a very complex unfolding story.

Americans start adopting girls in China in 1991. The 61 of that year ballooned into almost 8k last year, yielding a cumulative total of about 55,000.

As I have written here before, and in BFA, this is not just any 50 girls growing up in our system. The vast majority go to middle-to-upper class white couples who tend to have few (rarely above 1) or no biological kids to begin with. So these girls will have everything going for them: attentive parents, wealth, education, and all the expectations that go along with the active and lengthy decision to pursue adoption (there are no “accidental” transracial adoptions save for those within families, typically by grandparents).

So yeah, a lot of hope and fear will be attached to these girls-becoming-women as they grow up, because adopting parents don’t just want the best for all the usual reasons. No, there is the additional guilt/fear of losing acceptance and love over time as the child discovers a heritage that the parents can likewise adopt but never truly live the way someone with a different face can. Plus, these girls are about as “Orphan Annie” as you can get: parents and birthplaces are shrouded in serious, almost Dickensian mystery. For example, we know our daughter was left on a certain spot on a certain street in front of a government building, and that the note accompanying here identified her as being born the day before. But that’s it. That’s Vonne Mei Ling Barnett’s entire legacy, other than nine months with a foster mom, her extended family, and the restaurant (which we visited with Mei) around which their lives revolved.

Now, this story is mostly about how the leading edge of the adopted girls is heading into puberty, being the same age roughly as our eldest daughter. And guess what? The crisis of identity is real, and it can go either way: a desire to blend in and leave behind a past that cannot be fathomed and a desire to congregrate with other Asians and explore a past that cannot not be fathomed.

Beyond that, the article is a disappointment, stuck mostly in a vague speculative mode. When I saw the headline, I was really psyched, because I thought some serious revelations lie ahead.

Guess I just have to settle for the heads up on timing.

Israel’s post-religion/post-modern history begins

ARTICLE: “A stricken leader sets the tone in Israel’s ‘post-modern poll’: Developments in the Palestinian territories have entrenched the suspicions of Israeli voters and look likely to favor Kadima in next week’s election,” by Harvey Morris, Financial Times 23 March 2006, p. 9.

A bit back I did a blog, or maybe it was just a comment, that referred to Israel as a “quasi-theocracy” that’s long held nukes. Got some questions on that all right.

Here’s what I meant: parties in Israel have long been identified by their measure of religion, as in, what type of Jews did they represent, and how did that definition of being Hebrew define their vision for what Israel must be.

Now, going back about a decade for me, in one of the first iterations of my Alternative Global Futures efforts, or, more specifically, the one in which I built 64 2x2 matrices of dueling scenarios by regions, by levels (system/state/individual), and by sectors (pol, econ, mil, enviro, soc, tech), I’ve been tracking the signs for the emergence of a post-religious, or post-modern Israel, believing as I did, that it would signal a lasting solution set on the peace/statehood issue.

I think that moment is arriving, and to my surprise, it’s arriving on a unilateral basis, meaning not in conjunction (at least not apparently yet) with a similar shift among Palestinians (although if Hamas goes truly political, a huge step will have been taken in this direction).

The key event here was Sharon’s decision to form the centrist party, Kadima, that separated him from Likud but likewise marginalized Labour and comes close to pushing the tiny, ultra-religious factions right off the table in terms of meaningful roles.

This decision was part and parcel of Sharon’s movement toward unilateral solutions: seeing no one worth bargaining with on the other side, Israel pulls out of the Gaza and West Bank, builds the security wall, and declares its one-state solution. I think this decision is made possible by two things: a sense that hunting down and killing terrorists is a dead-end (a lesson we must remember as we contemplate the challenges of draining the swamp, or, as I like to call it, shrinking the Gap); and the economic possibilities afforded the incredibly entrepreneurial Israeli economy thanks to globalization (Israel is a super-connected Core-like country trapped in a very bad, disconnected Gap neighborhood).

Then Sharon goes into the coma not long before the elections. At that point, I really wonder. Except now it looks more and more like the country as a whole remains resigned (and I don’t use that word negatively) to the centrist path, the one-state solution set, and Kadima’s grip on power--whether or not Sharon is part of it.

And that to me is quite historic, something I’ve been waiting patiently to witness since the mid-1990s.

And yeah, I do think the Big Bang has something to do with it.

Tom digs Tony

Tom liked Tony Blair's latest speech Why We Fight On.

Tom's comment:

This is why I have long--and proudly--declared myself to be a Tony Blair Democrat. Too bad he can't run for president. He is the Clinton-Bush mix I personally dream about. The guy is a great speaker, armed with the best speechwriters I've heard since JFK's Sorenson.

Good day so far at Maxwell

DATELINE: Air Force Inn, Maxwell AFB, Montgomery AL, 22 March 2006

Got a nice Temperpedic in my room, which always causes me to wake up an hour early feeling totally refreshed. Love how that works.

Blogged away the morning, and then gave 90 on stage at the Air War College. Several hundred in attendance. Did about 25 Q&A after that. Then signed books for about 45 minutes. Got quite the "thank you" from the resident French officer. I earned that one, though!

Got a chance to see friend Randy Fullhart, who reviewed PNM way back when and brought me here last time. He's now the one-star.

Tonight's dinner is a crowd of 3-stars from all services. The Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course. Dinner got pushed back an hour to accommodate Newt Gingrich's arrival. Not sure if he's talking tonight or not.

Should be interesting to finally meet the Newt. I call him my Tyler Durden. For several years now, everywhere I go, he's just been. I'm curious to see if we can be in the same room at the same time, or maybe I'm just losing it.

Adm. Cebrowski's Parting Wisdom

Daniel Forrester sends in this article about the late Admiral Art Cebrowski:

Parting Wisdom in Brian Friel's Management Matters

Tom writes:

Another important description of a great man's legacy and a great mentor's wisdom. I miss Art more and more with time.

WSJ’s brilliant broadside against the dreaded “trade deficit”

EDITORIAL: “Trade Deficit Disorder,” Wall Street Journal, 16 March 2006, p. A12.

This is now my new all-time favorite WSJ editorial.

I am an admitted fan of the editorial crew there, which had me in to brief in the summer of 2003, along with Art Cebrowski.

This one needs few comments, mostly exerpts:

The economy is growing smartly, more Americans are working, wages are rising, capital spending is robust and federal tax revenues are rising at a double-digit-year-over-year pace. This must mean it’s time for everyone to worry about the trade deficit as the latest sign that all this prosperity is an illusion.

So the piece quotes the latest “disturbing” statistics and notes the usual arguments about job losses and the need for tariffs against the Chinese (Chuck Schumer is certainly shaping up as just about the dumbest Democrat in the Senate, hands down, and his partner in this crime of logic, Lindsey Graham of SC, certainly aspires to similar status among the Republicans).

But on we go:

Here we go again. For at least the past 30 years protectionists have warned that the trade deficit will lead to ruin, but it’s closer to the truth to say this has it exactly backward: Since the mid-1980s the trade deficit has risen when the economy has grown and receded when the economy has faltered…

Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute recently ran the numbers and discovered that “there is a strong correlation between rising trade deficits and falling unemployment.”

Part of the problem here is simply one of accounting definition. In the national income accounts, the mirror image of a merchandise trade deficit is a capital-import surplus. When the U.S. investment climate improves--through such policies as reducing the tax rate on capital gains--global investment dollars flow into the U.S. Foreigners in turn earn the dollars to pay for those investments by selling Americans more goods and services than they buy from us.

The result? We typically get low-priced goods AND investments in our auto, technology and financial services industries. Everyone’s standard of living rises.

We would all be better served by simply throwing overboard the term “trade deficit”--which inaccurately connotes a disadvantage or inferiority. To refresh some memories, that was precisely the conclusion of the U.S. Advisory Committee on the Presentation of Balance of Payment Statistics during a previous trade-deficit scare in 1976.

That group of eminent economists advised that “the words ‘surplus’ and ‘deficit’ should be avoided insofar as possible” because “these words are frequently taken to mean that the developments are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ respectively. Since that interpretation is often incorrect, the terms may be widely misunderstood and used in lieu of analysis.”

Next, the editorial cites the work of two Harvard Kennedy School economists, Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzeneger, who say the current-accounts deficit is a mirage. Instead, our return in 2004 was a net $30 billion, and that has been the case, by and large, stretching back to 1982.

How can that be? “A correct descriptive explanation of this puzzle is that the rates of return on U.S. liabilities is significantly smaller than the return on its assets,” Mr. Hausmann writes. Foreigners are willing to accept a lower rate of return on their U.S. investments, such as Treasury bills, because they are partly buying dollar currency stability, liquidity, and a safe haven against political and economic risk. Foreigners, for example, hold hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. currency, which is the equivalent of a zero interest loan to Americans.

Think America being the world’s sole military superpower doesn’t have something to do with that? Think again. The military-market nexus at its summit.

By contrast, American assets abroad earn higher than normal rates of return because of noncounted factors such as insurance, know-how, and the value of universally recognized brand names like McDonald’s and Disney. When taking these into account, the authors conclude that America is a net creditor, not a net debtor, nation. Even more surprising, correctly measured, China is a net debtor to the U.S.

Bingo!

This editorial underscores the reality of today’s world: economic and network connectivity and complexity far outpace the political and military understanding and response. This is the crux of my work. This is the market niche we exploit at Enterra Solutions.

Simply brilliant.

I was asked recently by friend and Minnesota radio talkshow host Tracy McCray about what single source I’d want for news if stranded on the desert island.

To my complete surprise, I said the WSJ. Even as recently as three years ago I would have said the NYT. But the NYT tells me a lot of what I already know, whereas the WSJ scratches all the right intellectual itches that hound me today.

May not work for everyone, but for this grand strategist, there is no competition--except the Economist.

Now there’s a Sophie’s choice…

Racing up the financial learning curve in the Middle East

OP-ED: “Seven Pillars of Folly: Will al Qaeda clean up when the bourse melts down? by Edward Chancellor, Wall Street Journal, 8 March 2006, p. A20.

ARTICLE: “Mutual Funds Look Beyond Chaos in Iraq,” by Jennifer Levitz, Wall Street Journal, 17 March 2006, p. C1.

ARTICLE: “New Business Blooms in Iraq: Terror Insurance,” by Robert F. Worth, New York Times, 21 March 2006, p. A1.

ARTICLE: “Market Slump Hits Mideast: Governments Grapple With Investor Calls to Intervene,” by Yasmine El Rashidi, Wall Street Journal, 20 March 2006, p. C8.

Fascinating op-ed about the Middle East stock bubble that’s been brewing since our invasion of Iraq. It is partly caused by the region being flush with oil money and the trickle down effect that brings. But don’t overestimate that.

It is also caused by a doubling of foreign direct investment in the region, and by Alan Greenspan’s decision to make dollars cheap going back to 2002.

But what’s really behind the speculative bubble is that, this time, Middle Eastern oil profits are staying home instead of hiding in international banks or U.S. financial instruments like T bonds. The rulers see the writing on the wall in two senses: 1) the oil profits won’t last forever, as the hydrogen/fuel-cell clock is ticking across the Core; and 2) the youth bulge must be served, and that means diversification ASAP. Getting that diversification requires financial markets that actually function, and banking systems that actually provide. So across the region there is the push to become more Core-like, at least in financial systems.

We watched this process in Asia in the late 1980s and 1990s, and we watched it flame out temporarily in the Asian Flu. Such a bubble burst is inevitable here. Scaredy cats will cry out about “yet another al Qaeda victory,” which will be the same BS we hear every time anything gets tumultuous in the Middle East.

But you know what? Tumult is good. And it beats the crap out of the alternative we’ve been fostering for decades. Globalization is coming to the region, whether we play bodyguard or not. It will be painful, and reformatting, and it will engender violent responses and political extremism, which may wield power.

Iran’s revolution in 1979 was a preview of all this, and a warning about the dangers of going too fast or trying to make it purely top-down in execution.

So should we feel bad about this speculative bubble brewing? Hell no. The journey from the Gap to the Core is more internal than external. The most important territory lies between the ears. There is a natural learning curve, that can only be taught by crashes, not bubbles.

Meanwhile, Core investors sneak into more and more dangerous pockets in the Gap, looking for better returns. How safe does it have to be? In Iraq, we can talk about a country where terrorism insurance is a big seller because no one is untouchable there.

But all this goes to show you that shrinking the Gap may begin in certain circumstances with U.S. military interventions, but it ends when states are confident enough NOT to engage in market interventions.

No reason to exhaust our imagination before Hamas exhausts theirs

ARTICLE: “Hamas’s Two Faces: Militant Islamism, Local Pragmatism; Newly Elected Mr. Abduljawad Has a Foot in Both Camps; A Dilemma for U.S. Policy,” by Karby Leggett, Wall Street Journal, 15 March 2006, p. A1.

ANALYSIS: “A New Landscape: Hamas Digs In; A Major Shift in the Mideast as the Militants Prepare to Govern,” by Steven Erlanger, New York Times, 20 March 2006, p. A8.

Interesting story about a man who threw bombs in his youth, then became an Islamic scholar and devoted himself to his family, and then was talked into running for office by Hamas’ more moderate side.

The turning point for Mr. Abduljawad was the time in an Israeli jail. At least that's his recollected story. But frankly, I think the more compelling part is his coming back to his wife and kids and trying to reconnect himself to the life he had imagined wanting as a young man, before getting involved in the violence.

When that connection is made, he becomes pragmatic. He thinks of the future and less of the past. He still wants Israel gone, but he also voices the reality that it isn’t going anywhere, and that “I believe--no, I know--that we will talk politics with Israel in the future.”

Now, there are plenty of skeptical Israelis, who remember the moderates in Iran who thought they would eventually tame the radical mullahs after they took power in 1979. We’ve that delusion time and time again in history.

And yet, the rise of Hamas is more than just one set of radicals replacing the tired, corrupt bunch that came before it. Versions of Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood face similar choices in Jordan, Syria and Iraq: is getting power to be Islamist enough? Or is there no end to the strife?

What I find interesting about Hamas is that they’re already making clear they intend to be no puppet of Iran via the Islamic Jihad, and that there will be no stringent Sharia. This is, of course, a temporizing strategy. What remains unclear is, Temporizing for what?

One part of the strategy is the usual Palestinian woe-is-me cry for aid, which will work for a while. But in the end, people hate giving money to losers. Hamas better win by making a better Palestine. Nothing else will impress. Nothing else will constitute a win.

Meanwhile, the external powers make clear to Israel that it is fully empowered to make the one-state solution work for itself. If Hamas is smart, it won’t try and mess with that reality. Israel has chosen to make its own peace, without Palestinian agreement, and I think that is great news. The Big Bang makes acceptable the notion of Hamas’ rise to power through the ballot box.

Again, how Hamas deals with the gift they’ve been handed by history is up to them. But another clock has started ticking in the region.

Knight in search of dragons? A target-rich Gap awaits.

COLUMN: "The Wilberforce Republican," by Lexington, The Economist, 11 March 2006, p. 30.

Great piece on Sam Brownback, who is an evangelical Protestant turned Catholic following a midlife crisis (cancer scare). The speculation being a 2008 run for the presidency.

Good enough to be The Man? Probably not.

Good enough to be the next "most powerful" Vice President?

Hmmm. That's worth considering.

The biggest drawback, according to the Economist? Brownback's desire to rid the world of evil can come off as so hopelessly naive.

His targets?

Kim Jong Il. Darfur. HIV and malaria. Sex trafficking. American prison reform. An apology to Native Americans.

I ask you. What's not to like about this guy's ambition?

Trust the Iranians to be Iranian, trust the arms control types to be hysterical

ARTICLE: “Ayatollahs Aside, Iranians Jump for Joy at Spring,” by Michael Slackman, New York Times 20 March 2006, p. A1.

OP-ED: Speaking to Tehran, With One Voice: Don’t let Iran get the bomb by exploiting diplomatic divisions,” by Jessica T. Mathews, New York Times, 21 March 2006, p. A17.

Interesting story coupled with goofy op-ed. Both tell me to trust the Iranians to be Iranian, and nothing else.

The mullahs try for decades to suppress all remnants of non-Shiite cultural history in Iran, and fail dramatically. Instead, old pre-Islamic national celebrations are pursued with more vigor than ever, as a sort of noisy in-your-face protest of the growing irrelevancy of the mullahocracy’s horribly inefficient rule:

“I think these days, there is a silent resistance in Iran, especially among the middle class,” said Hamidreza Jalaipour, a sociologist. “They are resisting not politically, but socially and culturally.”

Meanwhile, arms control believer Jessica Mathews, says the Bush Administration’s policy with Iran will fail because we “cannot decide whether the top priority … should be regime change or non-proliferation; as a result, others of the major powers do not trust and will not fully support its antinuclear efforts.”

To which I reply, Duh!

Guess what? Those two issues are totally linked, not just in the minds of U.S. policymakers but in the minds of Iranian leaders. Pretending you can separate them is folly, but then so too are virtually all such efforts at arms control, which tend to treat fevers instead of infections.

Our thinking gets dumber, the Iranians’ resistance grows stronger, and the mullahs find themselves increasingly between Iraq and a hard place called Afghanistan, both of which feature thousands of U.S. troops.

We don’t realize our strengths in this situation. We bargain from perceived weakness because we think the hard kill is the only logical threat, when it’s really connectivity--the same force that soft killed the Soviet Union.

With the downshifting of global violence, you work the security rule sets more and more at the level of individuals, not states

EDITORIAL: “Dr Strangedeal: Congress should veto George Bush’s nuclear agreement with India,” The Economist, 11 March 2006, p. 9.

SPECIAL REPORT: “Bringing the wicked to the dock: But does an international search for justice hurt or help the pursuit of peace? The Economist, 11 March 2006, p. 20.

By and large, I think the Economist walks on water, but the mag’s whining about Bush giving India the acceptance it craves on being a nuclear power is just plain stupid. Typically, the mag is so level headed on these things, but it goes all girly-man over the “shock to the global anti-proliferation regime.”

Please.

States reach for nukes for very specific reasons: they've got a neighbor they fear who has them, they think they’re an equalizer vis-à-vis an external regime-changer threat, or they think it’s their ticket to great powerdom. Sometimes, like with Iran, it’s basically all three. Other times, like with North Korea, it’s just one man’s desperate grip on power and his complete willingness to do any evil to maintain that grip.

India reached for the bomb to feel accomplished. Over time it matched the Pakistani effort, provided by rival China. Today, India is no more likely to use nukes than any other country--really.

So we accept it as a sign of India’s great powerdom--simple as that. The mechanism and motivation fit, as far as we’re concerned. So nobody cares, except the whiney arms control ninnies who Chicken Little everything as another sign of the coming apocalypse I’ve been hearing about my entire life but still waiting to see.

Now, some serious thinkers like Andy Krepinevich will speak of a nuclearized Asia stretching from Israel to North Korea, But to me, that’s meaningless geographic clumping--a Gap not worth defining. China’s no danger on nukes. Neither is India. Neither is Israel. Pakistan is worrisome, because it can be radicalized quickly. Iran is worrisome because it’s not integrated into any regional security scheme, so it gets chips with the bomb, but no table at which to bargain them with anyone.

We need to build that table--simple as that.

We need to build that table because no Iran, no stability in the region. No good outcome for the U.S. in Iraq. No two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. No Big Bang run to fruition.

Our motivations and mechanisms are clear--and controversial. And so too are Iran’s. But this not a time to go all wobbly, something I just don’t expect from the Economist.

Why? Violence has downshifted in the system from states to individuals. I mean, just how many people have died from WMD in the last half century?

Then calculate the millions dead from civil strife and genocide.

This is why an International Criminal Court makes sense--for the Gap.

But the ICC requires an acknowledged and credentialed feeder system, just like our GWOT effort needs an acknowledged and credentialed receiver system, instead of the shadow courts and secret prisons we’ve got now.

Your peanut butter, my chocolate.

This is why I argue for the A-to-Z system for processing politically bankrupt states and their evil leaders in BFA: start it with the UN, get the buy-in from the money guys (G-20), unleash the Kraken called the U.S. military, send in the SysAdmin, then the reconstruction financiers, and then put the bastards on trial in the Hague.

And if they take the Goering route like Milosevic did? Fine. The trial was never about them in the end. It was all about establishing and enforcing the rule set.