Disconnectedness defines danger in Egypt

ARTICLE: Stifled, Egypt’s Young Turn to Islamic Fervor, By MICHAEL SLACKMAN, New York Times, February 17, 2008

When I wrote in PNM of disconnectedness yielding extremism, this is exactly what I was talking about: diplomas of no value, dreams with no hopes of being realized, the basics of life delayed into the distance. So you look for answers, and the more extreme your disconnect, the more willing you are to connect to radical strategies that either leap-frog that disconnectedness (the old communist promise) or promise you a completely orthogonal direction that's better (the usual religious version).

These alternatives are to be feared only to the extent they create violence. There is much imagination in them, and indeed, our own realignments must incorporate their thinking to some extent. We must absorb the third parties, so to speak.

(Thanks: Dude Spellings)

In my endless fascination with New Core similarities to the U.S. ...

"Tobacco Use" chart in Briefing section of 10 March 2008 issue of Time: the map leaps out at me because it shows the big smoker states and it's basically the BRIC + the United States + New Core-ish Turkey and Indonesia. Old Core Germany and Gappish Bangladesh round out the top ten.

Smoking is becoming a New Core/Seam-heavy phenomenon--that living on the edge of modernity/life/whatever sense.

Thirty percent of the world's smokers are located in China, which obviously is over-represented. India's second to China in terms of percentage of men smoking (China is 55 percent and India is 33%). In both countries women smoke in the 4 percent range--a weird sort of sexism. In more sensitive America, 26 percent of men and 21 percent of women smoke--something to tout!

I imagine you find a higher concentration of American smokers in the lower and lower-middle-class ranges, and that you find immigrants more clustered in those categories, so we act more New Core-ish because we simply fit that profile across a big chunk of our population. It's why we tend to rank not as high as we want on various advanced nation scores.

Who's afraid of Vladimir Putin?

ARTICLE: 'The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin's Crackdown Holds Russia Back,' By Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Pretty reasonable piece, but it argues against a strawman that time will reveal and repudiate.

Nobody argues that, all things being equal, it's smarter and more efficient to have authoritarians run your market economy than have a democracy process demands for proper governance from a market economy. The data is clear on that.

The basic "sequentialist" argument is about timing. Was Russia doing well with that mess of a political system in the 1990s? No. Is it more settled now? Yes. Does that help Russia get back on it's feet? Yes. Would that alone have done it? No, the price rise on energy and commodities enabled that. Looking ahead, will Russia keep growing if it calcifies in authoritarianism? Probably not. But if it keeps growing, we'll likely see more pressure for pluralism.

Putinism, if successful, is a phase--at best a recovery model, not a long-term economic model. The key will be: Will Putin accept the inevitable waning of his personal power (already begun by naming his successor)?

I think he'll have no choice and in a dozen years we'll be venerating him like Lee Kuan Yew, but hardly pretending like he found some new model that threatens the legitimacy of liberal democracies. Ditto with the Chinese.

Why must we constantly get so wobbly all the time over any success that does not mirror our current state? Especially when our own journey to this mature point wasn't pretty and featured all sorts of bad stuff that we condemn others for today?

As always, a little more belief in ourselves would be nice.

If all Putinism aspires to is raw materials authoritarianism, then that's all it will achieve. That doesn't scare me and it shouldn't scare you.

The A game model in globalization is a market economy plus liberal democracy. If you want risk-taking and innovation and competitive drive, then you have to accommodate it in all its demands. Authoritarianism, well-funded, can buy you the team, but it can't make it win over the long haul. Success simply makes people too uppity and demanding.

(Thanks: Terry Collier)

CRC a step forward (but in the wrong department)

ARTICLE: Civilian Response Corps Gains Ground, By Robin Wright, Washington Post, February 15, 2008; Page A19

In principle, I like the idea, but I see little chance in it succeeding at State, in part because State has such a low reputation in this regard that Congress won't fund it at anything but a small, keep alive level. I also don't expect that State's experience with using it is going to go well enough for it to grow into a seriously respected capability that attracts great cooperation with either the private sector or new, more appropriate allies.

In short, so long as it stays at State, I think it will remain a little, boutique effort, a sort of "See! We're trying to do better!" exercise.

I'm not trying to be unduly pessimistic. I just feel that adapting the SysAdmin function to either existing Defense or State entities will inevitably yield a suboptimal and therefore untrusted capability.

I honestly think we'll need to design something more avowedly public-private, a real hybrid, instead of something with which either Defense or State would be comfortable.

To work well with others, this function will need a capacity for un-American cooperation with others, and by that I mean a capacity for action that runs counter to stated policy. To really work, this function will need to tap into the instruments of stated policy, like USAID, DOD and DOS, but also a lot of entities not necessarily tied or obedient to stated policy. A serious SysAdmin leadership would be able to stand up to stated U.S. policy. It would have to be a trusted broker with real independence. For example, if a Tony Zinni could run this function, despite all his opposition to Bush policies, then you'd have a serious capacity.

Otherwise it's seen as a mere tool of the current administration, instead of its continued offering toward something beyond our obvious interests.

I may not be explaining this well because I have strep throat right now, but I'm serious in saying that my concept of a SysAdmin function includes the notion that it's ability to enable the play of other states and the private sector is more crucial than just attracting reconstruction actors within an existing U.S. Agency.

Still, despite that complaint, I do think the CRC is a step forward and one that bears watching and deserves support, no matter the poor location choice.

(Thanks: Gregory Kearns)

Better job of commenting on the manual than I offered

POST: A Manual for the SysAdmin Force, Enterprise Resilience Management Blog

This week's column

The 51st state: a huge upside-down question mark

If America doesn't add a new star before I die, I'll be the first Barnett -- in a long line of Barnetts -- to be born and die under the same flag. That just ain't right.

Travel back with me and track the growth of these United States across seven generations of my family:

-- Joseph Barnett (born 1754) saw 13 colonies form a new nation, and then grow to 26 states total before he died in 1838.

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

Weird, weak argument for trying to militarize the climate change debate

ARTICLE: Pentagon faces a battle on climate change, By John Podesta and Peter Ogden, Financial Times, February 13 2008 18:47

An example of the weird, weak arguments for trying to militarize the climate change debate.

By this reasoning, why not have the Pentagon lobby a position on HIV programs, development aid, or the Doha round--all far more impactful?

The Pentagon doesn't need some clear USG position on global warming to plan for contingencies. We know where fragile states are and they were fragile before global warming and they won't be made solid by an effective response to global warming.

Articles like this are just causes in search of constituencies, like the "genocide Olympics" movement. Unable to get movement from desired parties, activists start searching farther afield, so now it's, "Why isn't the Pentagon making a U.S. stance on global warming happen?" And that's plain goofy.

You can't generate political will on that basis. You just sound frantic and alarmist.

Global warming doesn't cause weak states. No simplistic causal reasoning captures that process or that cure. Nor will you get Americans to care about global warming because it's one small bit of the many reasons why Africans kill Africans, because Americans--and everybody else--have long demonstrated a resistance to such guilt-tripping and fear-as-motivation techniques.

You gotta sell on the good they can do and their own self-interest; same with the military and reform toward SysAdmin capabilities.

Give people a positive vision to achieve and stop this weak, overly-deterministic fear-mongering.

it simply does not connect.

"Bad! Bad dog!" is not a grand strategy.

Global COIN: also not the answer

ARTICLE: The Global Counter Insurgency, by Jonathan Morgenstein & Eric Vickland, SMALL WARS JOURNAL, February 17, 2008

Expect to read a lot of this sort of article that suggests global counter-insurgency is the equivalent of a grand strategy. In our premature excitement over aspects of the surge's success in Iraq, we now see analysts extrapolating wildly, with the same consequences: we view the world through violence, we see states as bulwarks against such violence, the USG is the biggest, inside the USG the Pentagon is the most competent, therefore the U.S. military can spearhead a global counter-insurgency strategy that manages the world.

The long war addresses friction, which is minor compared to the force of globalization's continued expansion. A grand strategy harnessing the latter to address the former, and does not pretend that addressing the friction constitutes addressing the universe of change going on. We don't have the capacity any more to determine an era, just to tilt its trajectory somewhat.

We don't want to go overboard on COIN thinking. It has its place, but it's not the sum total of anything. It is operational and tactical, but extrapolated to the global strategic realm, it simply loses coherence.