The crush of The New Map Game

Dateline: above the sold garage, Portsmouth RI, 31 May 2005

Busy day, so no regular articles blog. Got up early for phone conference call with Royal Dutch/Shell people. I will participate in training seminar of two dozen of their top managers in NYC at end of June. This was the get-acquainted call.

Then rest of day spent updating regular brief, plus constructing new brief to lay out/preview BFA. I'll give the regular brief (always improved slightly from last time) to players tonight to kick off game. Tomorrow, I'll give the BFA preview brief after the first day of play is done. Other than heading the Control Team in the exercise, my secondary job in The New Map Game is evening entertainment. Ah well, keeps me thin to be talking so much during meals. . .

Newsletter: Monday, May 30, 2005

The Newsletter from Thomas P.M. Barnett, May 30, 2005 is now available for download:

May 30, 2005 Newsletter (PDF)

May 30, 2005 Newsletter (Word)

The question of hedging in the strategic environment

"But of course, it isn't an unknowable future but merely a back-to-the-future shift of enormous proportions, one that sees us resurrect a type of military force we haven't employed on the battlefield since we settled the West across the 1800s: the frontier force that not only wages Leviathan-like war but administers to an embryonic system of integrating economic and social order. In many ways, America returns to a myopic focus on the details of small wars and small victories, to an integrating function that features skirmish after skirmish instead of culminating and clear-cut inter-state wars (which, by the way, are disappearing from the world). The "lesser includeds" of the Cold War now become the "greater inclusive" by which we shape not just our military forces but our entire foreign policy establishment, but that can only occur if we are able to demote the concept of great power war from its perch as number one ordering principle of the Pentagon to that of merely hedged-against conflict scenario, meaning we dedicate a certain portion of our scenario planning and force generation against this particular scenario, trusting in our ability to maintain a sufficient hedge against what's out there in potential great power foes (I'll spot you China for the next twenty years, but who else?)."

Discussion space at:

http://bloggingthefuture.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?t=45

B-day choices, B-day lessons

Dateline: above the sold garage, Portsmouth RI, 29 May 2005, 48 days to departure

Mom asked me what to get for b-day, and I said cuff links, because I'm growing to like French cuffs. My Dad liked tie bars. I find myself wanting similar but different things more and more as I seek to both emulate and distance myself from the one man whose approval I crave desperately in all things but no longer enjoy due to his passing.

Mother-in-law gave me a dollar figure and told me to buy the books I wanted from Amazon. This was also fun to consider, because I like the constrained budget quandary. When I was with college, they bought me many books, but those books stayed at college when I left, so this was an act of replenishment. I chose the following: 1) Lexus and Olive Tree, by Friedman, because it truly changed my career and made me realize "globaloney" is an epitath worth enduring in the search for true strategic knowledge; 2) The World is Flat, also by Friedman, because he's back in the saddle on this one and off security (where he tends to sound shrill and often confused) and so I have great hopes for this one; 3) Clash of Civilizations by Huntington, because, along with Lexus, it's the other point I sought to align PNM with to form a conceptual plane, and because Sam was nicer to me than any Harvard prof except for Ulam, my mentor; 4) Why Globalization Works by Martin Wolf, because it's the best damn book ever on globalization and it feels like the book I would have wanted to write if I were an economist (and it figures prominently in BFA); 5) The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, because it's just such a great book and such an eye-opener and because I got Blink! from the TED conference and I wanted to have both in hand; 6) Col. Thomas Hammes' The Sling and the Stone, the best book yet on the concept of 4GW (I met him and interacted with him during my Norwegian trip and speak of that interaction in BFA); and finally 7) Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, a fascinating small book on the history of this counter-intuitive notion (that the West is demonized by the non-West for its strange mix of mind strength and moral decadence; it too is featured in BFA).

Almost making the cut: 1) Globalized Islam by Olivier Roy (big in BFA) and 2) Who are We? by Sam Huntington. But I had to respect the challenge of buying and rank ordering within the budget.

Wife got me some great luggage stuff and lotsa nice clothes, as she always does, plus she set up the purchase of my dreams: a memory foam mattress to replace our aging king Stearns and Foster. I had slept on one during my book tour last spring and came away convinced I would be a better human if I had one (first day after sleeping on one I gave the interview to Lamb, and that got me the NYT best seller--so there!), but TempurPedic, the company everyone knows about from the ads wants over 2 grand for a king one, and Consumer Reports just came out and said they were overpriced by half, so I was at a loss on how to ever make one happen (good bed, but where to buy one reasonably?).

Well, wife finds out and we go to Fall River mattress factory where we test the memory foam, chose the desire dense foam core, and have one custom made for half the price! Turns out the TempurPedic price is mostly about their ad campaigns, whereas the technology is there for anyone to use. Every such mattress has the same 3 inches of memory (or NASA) foam on top, with only question being the firmness of the dense foam core. You can buy the 3-inch memory foam and slap it on your ordinary mattress for just a few hundred, but I didn't want the silk-purse-out-of-a-sow's-ear approach, so finding this mattress place was the best answer. We won't use the new bed until we hit Indiana. It will be a big part of the new, Midwestern, kinder-and-gentler Tom. No more East Coast crabby for me! I want a good night's sleep and a smile on my face. Now if Indiana will only decide to go for Central Time, my entire plan will be complete!

Today I took oldest two to Six Flags New England for a farewell tour. Sounds sadder than it is, cause we got season passes on the anticipation of stop-overs at Six Flags Great America on our way to Lambeau, plus there's one in Kentucky (a state I have never visited) just two hours south of Indy.

It was a beautiful day, one in which all the threats of rain did not materialize until closing time. My last ride there was a good one, the Superman roller that was best rollercoaster in the world for three years running (2000-2002) after debuting in 2000. Now 43, I realize I can only be turned upside down at very high speeds about 25-30 times before I start finding it just plain tough. Used to be able to go all day long on that one, but today I did find myself napping on a lounge chair in the water park while they played in the various activities. Still, to prove my manhood and still-retained vigor, I did match my son on the 7-story straight-drop body slide, thus solving the mystery of the strange brusing we had noticed on the backsides of many young men in the park during the afternoon.

There was no back-slapping after that feat, mind you.

My young man hugged me when we got to the car after our long day, and asked if he could kiss me in thanks for the time spent together.

That was the best gift of all.

The Cake Worth Baking

Dateline: above the sold garage, Portsmouth RI, 28 May 2005, 49 days to lift off

The lady who made this cake runs a bakery known as The Mad Hatter. She is RI's cake decorator of the year according to RI Monthly.

Evoked? Provoked? www.letthemeatcake.org

Just plain hungry? www.getyourown.com

Got milk? www.dairystate.gov

Me thinks he made up the last one.

The Cake Worth Baking

Dateline: above the sold garage, Portsmouth RI, 28 May 2005, 49 days to lift off

The lady who made this cake runs a bakery known as The Mad Hatter. She is RI's cake decorator of the year according to RI Monthly.

BTF: New Forum Categories

The forums at Blogging the Future now group as three categories:

Thomas P.M Barnett

Strands of Connectivity

Military-Market Nexus

Phonecons are my life

Dateline: above the sold garage, 27 May 2005, 50 days to the move

Two great phonecons today: one with Don Beck's "spiral dynamics" center down in Dallas (a guest virtual appearance at a workshop of his) and a second with Steve DeAngelis of Enterra, a man who's my virtual clone from the world of information technology. I look forward to someday finishing his sentences.

It's amazing how little my work day has changed since I left the college. The big difference now is that instead of staff meetings, I pick up my kids at school.

Day lost to organizing and filing hard copies of endnotes on BFA. Got stacks and stacks of papers in many piles on the ping-pong table in the basement. Slice articles with one of those neat boards with a chopper on the end, staple them together, 3-hole punch and then place in order in 3-inch binders, one per chapter. 452 notes, average 2-3 cites per, means well over 1000 separate articles, I'm guessing. Not sure I'll ever bother to count them.

Here's the daily catch:

■ Axis of Evil: two very different takes

■ China's "moving" all right

■ History catches up to some musical pioneers

Axis of Evil: two very different takes

■"Trade Group to Start Talks to Admit Iran," by Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, 27 May 2005, pulled from web site.

■"N. Korea Denies Nuclear Testing Reports," by Associated Press, New York Times, 27 May 2005, pulled from web site. A1.

You kill authoritarianism with connectivity, so it makes sense to bring Iran into the WTO. Good move by the Bush administration to drop our long-time resistance to these talks beginning. No, the Euros never got an agreement with the Iranians to stop pursuing nuclear energy through uranium enrichment, but the two sides are still talking and agreeing that some agreement makes sense.

Then there's the flip side with North Korea, a totalitarian regime we can't kill with connectivity because it's too shut up and isolated from the outside world. Here we're told the same lies the Iranians tell us, but no talks, no search for agreement, just the threat of tests.

Guess which one we should pull the trigger on?

History catches up to some musical pioneers

■"These Days, Kraftwerk Is Packing Light," by Richard Harrington, Washington Post, 27 May 2005, p. WE8.

Just a nice story about one of my favorite bands from my youth, a hugely influential German group that set many of the original rules about techno, house or dance music, and what later becomes rap and hip-hop. The last strains are the weirdest ones, because Kraftwerk is about the nerdiest band you could imagine.

I have just about everything they've ever produced, with my favorites being "Computer Love," "Autobahn," and "Tour de France." Their early albums are like listening to a popular music history lesson, because you can immediately pick up how much of today's music began with them.

Read the full story at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/26/AR2005052600677.html

Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!

China's "moving" all right

■" China Makes Its Move," op-ed by Richard Holbrooke, Washington Post, 27 May 2005, p. A27.

■"Entrepreneur Mines China's Demand For Steel Products: Mr. Forrest's Vast Ore Claims, Deep in Australian Desert, Draw Money and Questions; Buyers Said to Be 'Desperate,'" by Patrick Barta, Wall Street Journal, 27 May 2005, p. A1.

The number of people in the Pentagon who remain relieved that Richard Holbrooke never became Secretary of State are almost too many to count. The man has the capacity to piss people off like almost no one else among the Democrat foreign policy elite. And he manages this while using the sort of diplo-speak that shouldóunder normal circumstancesónever raise the slightest hackle among listeners.

This is one of those great op-eds that only someone of his generation of foreign policy experts can write: it describes much and does so accurately and still manages to say almost nothing of value. In my mind, only Kissinger writes stuff of equal caliberóand equal disutility. It reminds me of an old Talking Heads line: "You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything."

But at least the upshot has value: at the end he notes that there isn't much of a strategic coordination of U.S. government policy vis-‡-vis China. In that diagnosis he is dead on. Besides that counterintuitive "separate lanes" stuff (i.e., making a point to keep all our various bilateral issues with China separate from one another), this administration is clearly of two minds on China: some see the rising potential ally, others simply want to get on with the hot war they've been daydreaming about since the end of the Cold War.

To the administration's credit, the cooler heads have consistently prevailed, but now that Iraq's basically a non-issue security-wise, the Pentagon's debates over budget have simply moved onóor back, as it wereóto China. So the Chinese become the preferred foil again for those Big War elements on the Leviathan side of the house that want to keep their big-ticket items well funded. Leading this charge inside the Pentagon is clearly the navy, spearheaded by the increasingly irrevelant (and don't they know it) submarine community, which had ruled the Navy for most of the Cold War and resents being deposed much like the communists do in Russia still. For most of these guys, it's China or bust, and so we should expect the demonizing campaign to continue.

China will, of course, provide plenty of ammunition for this charge, what with its rising energy demand pushing it into all corners of the globe looking for resources. Just you wait, because soon intell agencies and military strategists will speak of America's growing "vulnerability" to the Chinese cornering certain strategic raw materialsójust like we once fantasized about the Soviets in Africa and the Middle East.

7th Inning: Barnett hits Hubbert's Curve

Instant replay:

July 27, 2004

Lotta people sending me info on the infamous Hubbert curve analysis that "proves" global oil production is irrevocably peaking and thus inevitably heading toward a crash. The analysis is essentially correct but fundamentally myopic, because it largely misses a fundamental fact about global oil markets: they are not run by multinational corporations but far more by national oil companies, or NOCs. NOCs control 60% of production but control close to 90% of reserves, as West points out in his excellent op-ed in the Post: > Read: The knock on NOCs

September 21, 2004

We will progressively run out of easily accessed oil. That will raise prices over time, pushing us to new technologies that allow us to extract oil from shale and sands. But as those new sources cost somewhat more, and as the world progressively works to decarbonizes its transportation energy usage (not to mention it's use of coal to generate electricity) due to environmental concerns (like clean air and global warming), technologies also arise in the automotive industry to push us toward hybrids and ultimately to hydrogen-fueled vehicles.

> Read: Doomsayers correct on end of oil like Marx was right on end of capitalism

Hubbert's Curve: does not apply in Gap

Snipped from The Newsletter from Thomas P.M. Barnett, 2 May 2005

Received April 24, 2005

Winfred asks,



After the last email I caught up with the view from Peter Huber's³ head essentially via The Bottomless Well⁴ . That made me think that my question to you about the oil demand/supply effect on global stability was sophomoric.



However, it may not be that clear cut. I don't know enough to doubt Huber's assertion that for all practical purposes humanity has at its disposal essentially an unlimited supply of energy. He includes that getting energy from the source to the user is within the capability of the human mind. The fly in the ointment is that he seems only to mention in passing that the technology of getting the energy from the source to the user is but a small part of the process. In my mind, the significant variable stated over-simply is "politics and social structure."



In other words, based in part on trend analysis, the question may still be valid if thought of as a relative decreasing availability of energy. Or, "What effect will an increasing energy crunch have on global stability?"

Tom replies to Winfred:

Hubbert's Curve⁵ is real and applies to Core areas where oil supplies have been exploited to death. It does not apply in Gap where National Oil Companies (NOCs) rule the reserves⁶. We simply haven't explored most of the Gap. It's that simple, really.

#####



³ Peter W. Huber at www.phuber.com

⁴ Amazon link to The Bottomless Well

⁵ ìIn 1953 King Hubbert made a mathematical prediction of when oil production in the U.S. would peak. His model predicted production would peak in 1970 which was only wrong by one year. The model assumes production will increase until some maximum value and then decrease as consumption uses up the reserve forming a bell shaped curve. This kind of modeling can be done with any resource which has a fixed reserve (no new sources are found).î Full text at physics.ius.edu/~kyle/E/Reserves.html#hubbert

⁶ NOCs control 60% of production but control close to 90% of reserves. Full text at www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/000670.html

Counting the days

Dateline: above the sold garage in Portsmouth RI, 26 May 2005, 51 days to blast off!

Future-in-Review appearance went well. Just me and Dave Davison on stage at coffee table with him lobbing questions and me in hyper-speed mode on responses, swigging variously from coffee cup and Coke can. Already got some nice emails from attendees. Huge ballroom and everyone behind rows of tables on laptops, so like talking at press conference almost. Got a few laughs, but they tended to dissipate in huge space.

Saw Amory Lovins, as usual. In the past year I seemed to have pulled off the trifecta of Pop!Tech, TED and Future-in-Review, andóif I'm not mistakenóAmory was at all three as well (definitely last two). Always nice to bump into him.

Come to think of it, that trio plus a couple of Highland Forums makes for a mighty handful of top-flight conferences. More reasons for me to be thankful for having written PNM, cause it's hard to believe they happen absent that.

After appearance, got to chat with Sidney Rittenberg after the talk and compare notes on China. If you don't know his amazing story, Google him.

Shared limo to airport with CTO from Microsoft. We exchanged ideas on the differences between Chinese and Japanese cultures. Very interesting fellow, and the conversation reinforced a theme I sound mightily in BFA: America will find itself naturally drawn to New Core more than Old Core in coming decades.

Long flights home saw me work footnotes (putting together my giant three-ring binders of hard copies of citations). Got word from Neil today that unbound galleys come to Mark and I around 23 June and we have til 5 July for the big changes. After that it's mostly proofing. So I am counting out my days and parsing my labor very specifically between now and blast-off day. I pretty much know what I have to be doing on every single day, with very little slack.

Conference call today with Alidade on The New Map Game. With such high-level press in attendance (Atlantic Monthly, NYT Mag, U.S. News, Daily Telegraph from London), we want to be sure no one walks away with any conspiracy thinking about offline wargames in Newport plotting secret invasions of anybody. Had that happen with Jack Anderson on the Y2K work (read his column on my media page) back in 1999. No, we want to make clear to players and press alike that security, while a baseline, isn't some magical trump card in this game. It doesn't rule all, it just informs all. Real victory in this game is when peace breaks out and the Gap gets shrunk. That's why this game will be historic: we'll be mapping potential pathways of success, not merely gaming point scenarios of failure. If we don't imagine the upside, then the downside doomsayers dominate the conversation.

In my mind, this game is the proof of concept. Next one we play in DC.

Here's the daily catch:

■ Not in China's backyard!

■ Return of the Gorbachev in Iran?

■ Democracy starts with women

■ The enduring appeal of young America

■ China connectivity versus content

■ The blurring of public and private = the military-market nexus

■ Strategic fear: what goes around comes around

■ Democracy is a contact sport

Democracy starts with women

■"With Loans Poor South Asia Women Turn Entrepreneurial," by Cris Prystay, Wall Street Journal, 25 May 2005, p. B1.

■"Asia's Democratic Values: The U.S. has played a critical role in transforming the region," op-ed by Francis Fukuyama, Wall Street Journal, 25 May 2005, p. A12.

Another great article highlighting the utility of microfinance in empowering women in traditional societies. Notice how you never read stories about microloans empowering men in the Gap, just women?

Here we're into the territory of Prahalad's "power at the bottom of the pyramid": if you want to reach new markets in the world, they're more often than not going to be rural and impoverished, so you better reach the women the same way Singer and Sears and JC Penney figured out how to do in the U.S. decades ago.

Empowering women drives democracy because empowering women is how you set in motion broadband economic development. There was no "Asian miracle" that did not involve women entering the labor force, pure and simple. We set that example, and we can trigger that development, but only if we keep women at the forefront of our development aid.

Return of the Gorbachev in Iran?

■"Iran's Ex-Leader Seeks Return In the Trappings of a Reformer," by Neil MaqFarquhar, New York Times, 25 May 2005, p. A1.

■"Europe Gets Iran To Extend Freeze In Nuclear Work: Dispute Is Unresolved; Delay Provides Political Cover as Iranian Pick a New President," by Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, 26 May 2005, p. A1.

As I blogged earlier in the year, "heeeeeeeeeeeeere's Jani!" as in Ali Akhbar Rafsanjani, the liberal former president and "self-styled free-marketer." Think it wouldn't matter if he made a good showing in the election? Think again. Rafsanjani's ideas speak to Iran's overwhelmingly young and incredibly ambitious youth population. He's all about individual empowerment and the diminishment of the mullahs' reach.

So the Europeans are right to let this dynamic play itself out in the Big Bang environment that is the Persian Gulf right now.

Not in China's backyard!

■"China Backs Uzbek, Splitting With U.S. on Crackdown," by C.J. Chivers, New York Times, 25 May 2005, p. A3.

■"China Gives Strategic 21-Gun Salute to Visiting Uzbek President," by Joseph Kahn and Chris Buckley, New York Times, 26 May 2005, p. A7.

Prior to 9/11, China had led the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a collection of great and not-so-great powers surrounding Central Asia that were interested in maintaining stability there at a time when the U.S. evinced absolutely no interest in making any effort to do the same. That all got pushed aside in the subsequent Global War on Terrorism, and all of a sudden the U.S. acted like it was calling all the shots in the region: picking winners and losers at will.

Well, not in China's backyard. We have our favored dictators andóguess what?óso does Beijing! And they have them for the same reasons: sometimes they value stability over change, especially when energy is involved.

We can view this as throwing sand into the face of the U.S., as one American Sinologist put it, or we can be a little more cognizant that not everyone's definition of the military-market nexus will match ours in every single Gap state. Until we're ready to start openly condemning the House of Saud, that's a good one to keep in mind.

The blurring of public and private = the military-market nexus

■"In Terrorism Fight, Government Finds a Surprising Ally: FedEx: Since 9/11, Firms Cooperate More Often With Officials; Implications for Privace; UPS and the Post Office Balk," by Robert Block, Wall Street Journal, 26 May 2005, p. A1.

■"A Natural Alliance: Coming together to fight poverty," op-ed by David Brooks, New York Times, 26 May 2005, p. A29.

The willingness of FedEx to cooperate fairly extensively with the U.S. Government on terrorism issues is yet another example of the rule set reset following 9/11. Yes, there is a patriotic tinge to it, but it's also about good business practice in a world where being robust and secure is a competitive advantage:

Business associations say the government's call to arms gets a good reception in part because companies want to prevent the disruption and bad publicity that would come from terrorists using their systems. "All we are trying to do is to protect our assets and not have our assets used for bad purposes, says Fred Smith," FedEx's CEO.

This is the essence of the military-market nexus.

But there is also the spiritual dimension. If the "good life" is good for us, then we ought to be able to share it with others. That's not just good business, that's good faith, and so, as highlighted yet again in an op-ed (this time David Brooks), we see more and more Beltway experts begin to realize the growing power of the faith-based community in shrinking the Gap. Evangelicals, as Brooks says, "feel less represented by the culture war-centered parachurch organizations, and better represented by congregational pastors, who have a broader range of interests and more passion for mobilizing volunteers to perform service."

You have no idea how many audience members have come up to me after talks, saying that their church spent a Sunday morning debating the moral implications of PNM's call to shrink the Gap. People are looking for ways to connect to a Global War on Terrorism that involve the "everything else" other than war, and thank God for these people becauseóultimatelyóthis is how we all win in the end.

China connectivity versus content

■"China, New Land of Shoppers, Builds Malls on Gigantic Scale," by David Barboza, New York Times, 25 May 2005, p. A1.

■"In China, Curbs Imperil Internet TV: Tight Grip on Programming May Limit Appeal of Services Being Tested by Phone Firms," by Rebecca Buckman, Wall Street Journal, 26 May 2005, p. B4.

No, no, we are told, the Chinese are different. They want to get rich only to become powerful and a threat to the West. Marketization isn't pacification. We are naÔve to believe that in their security, the Chinese will seek consumerism. Rather, they will seek markets only to bolster their security.

So we are told that China wants the connectivity of globalization, but none of the content of Westernization, when in reality they are no different than anyone else on the planet: with connectivity they expect choice. Give them a broadband pipe into their homes and they expect not just standard Chinese TV fare, they want the entire 500-channel universe, and if Chinese regulations say only 30% of programming can be foreign, guess which side will eventually give on that tug of war.

The enduring appeal of young America

■"Young Bolivians Adopt Urban U.S. Pose, Hip-Hop and All," by Juan Forero, New York Times, 26 May 2005, p. A4.

Hip-hop globalizes because it speaks to young men feeling disenfranchised. Everyone goes through that in their youth, some more virtually than others. It's just the nature of growing up.

But in many parts of the Gap, that sense of being shut out of opportunity is real, and so hip-hop is a venue to express that anger in a way that doesn't curtail future connectivity. More than just harmless rebellion, it's about getting your head straight about the life ahead, which will inevitably involve "revolutions" of all sorts against the system that will otherwise naturally shortchange them.

Rule set resets come with a soundtrack, and for most of the world's youth that soundtrack is hip-hop.

Democracy is a contact sport

■"Syria's Voices of Change: Ruling Party Reformers, Emboldened Dissidents Debate Their Nation's Destiny, Despite Dangers," by Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, 25 May 2005, p. A1.

■"Protesters Attacked in Cairo: On Voting Day, Pro-Mubarak Mobs Beat Dissenters," by Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 26 May 2005, p. A1.

Two good examples of why we need to be both patient and realistic about the pace of political change in the Middle East. It's dangerous to stand up for pluralism in these regimes. You take your life in your hands when you open your mouth.

Here's the opening paras from the Shadid piece:

Ayman Abdel Nour's contest with censorship began with a term not uncommon in Syria: "forbidden."

Last spring, the word appeared on the screen of his Compaq computer, barring him entry to his Web site, all4syria.org. His computer was the problem, he thought at first. Perhaps the server was down. Then he realized the government had blocked his site -- a forum for unprecedented dialogue among groups, parties and thinkers in Syria -- nearly a year after he had inaugurated it.

Abdel Nour, a 40-year-old reformer from within the ruling Baath Party, lost little time.

The same day, he collected the e-mail addresses he had -- 1,700 in all -- and dispatched his daily update. Two days later, the government blocked e-mails from that address from entering the Syrian network. The next day, he changed the address and transmitted another bulletin. Then that address was shut down. Changed again, and blocked. And so it went for nearly a month and a half -- Abdel Nour devising new addresses, the government barring them -- until the censors finally gave up.

"I was always ahead of them," said Abdel Nour, a kinetic multi-tasker fond of reading e-mail, holding a conversation and answering a cell phone at the same time. "They couldn't read my mind. They couldn't ban the addresses in advance."

Since then, Abdel Nour's e-mail list has grown to 15,200 subscribers, including secular and religious dissidents, intellectuals, businessmen, party leaders, ministers and Syrian embassies. Through its content and as a symbol, the bulletin has emerged as a crucial interlocutor in the tentative, precarious space permitted to dissent in a country where nearly everyone suspects that change is ahead, even if they clash over the shape and direction it might take.

What guys like Nour are doing is nothing less dangerous or admirable than what Soviet dissidents did for years. We lionized them and justly so. We need to be similarly impressed and supportive of such efforts in the Middle East becauseóas recent events in Cairo showóit's a great way to get your head split open if you're not careful, and sometimes even when you are.