Some sense of sequencing on Iran please

ARTICLE: "Persian Shrug," by Edward N. Luttwak, Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2007, p. A16.

A simplistic argument based on a simplistic read of history. Luttwak claims detente with Sovs "propped up" the regime and Reagan puts a stop to that and kills USSR in short order. So he advocates skipping any opening up with Iran and simply pushing them hard for internal collapse.

There is no soft-kill without some connectivity, in my mind. Without it, there is no way to prepare the follow-on regime, to let it develop and emerge.

Reagan's challenging was well timed because detente had lured the Sovs well down the path of economic and social connectivity with the outside world (the whole infiltration of "hard currency," or dollars with actual monetary value that illuminated how worthless so much of the Sov economy was, plus the growing realization of how Moscow was being ripped off by energy subsidies to Eastern Europe (something Putin's still correcting to this day).

We have some vulnerability on oil revenue with Iran today that Saudi Arabia seeks to exploit, but just causing pain there won't get us regime change. Instead we're likely to get more repression with some secretive temporizing on nukes (like NK).

Luttwak's history is bad and dangerously misrepresentative. You have to set up the soft kill, otherwise one dictator's fall sets up the next.

What's better than diagnosis?

Steve Flynn writes a great book about how America's in dire need of infrastructure upgrades WRT civil defense and disaster response.

Steve DeAngelis invents himself an enterprise resilience maturity model approved by Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute (where he's a visiting scientist), gets himself a fistful of patents for the associated technology, and signs a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with Oak Ridge National Lab (where he's also a visiting scientist) to turn their famous SensorNet into the next-generation ResilienceNet, profiled in Esquire's December "Best & Brightest" issue.

And yeah, Steve's working on a book of his own.

Cool to diagnose.

Cooler to fix.

And yes, that's why I'm with Enterra and not some think tank.

Now who's the paper tiger?

ARTICLE: Stock Sell-Off in China Hits Wall Street: Dow Tumbles 3.3% in Biggest Loss Since '03, By David Cho and Tomoeh Murakami Tse, Washington Post, February 28, 2007; Page A01

That is a new world when stock sell-offs in China ripple into our markets.

Tom.torrent

Google tells me there's a video torrent available of Tom talk at the NDU back in August. If you know what a torrent is and have the software to get it, by all means, check it out ;-)

(If not, I'm not prepared to do the tutorial right now, though I probably can later. Or maybe someone can comment some tips. Or you could Google it ;-)