Operations across the dial

DATELINE: Haven't yet started organizing the office above the garage, Indy, 31 May 2006

Last couple of days lost to operations executed (final landscaping, drapes going in, graduations from K- and grade-school) and concentrated effort at Enterra to draw up comprehensive ops plan. So a lot of look behinds and look aheads and strategic thinking.

And in such efforts both my spouse Vonne and my boss Steve are rather relentless planners, which I admire.

Couple of fascinating field trips coming up: one to amusement park with Em's graduating class and another with Steve to the HQ of a well-known private security corp with both a global reach and global reputation.

So a weird, dual-use week all around. Will seek to blog while traveling.

Ahmadinejad and Nixon: the ZenPundit remix

Mark Safranski springboards off of Tom's Only Ahmadinejad can go to Washington with his own Is Ahmadinejad the 'New Nixon'?. Not only is Mark's post (and the subsequent one) a nice survey of this issue, but he has a lot of great analysis and information.

One beef though: Mark finds Tom's analogy to be 'inexact'. Fine, buddy. It's easy to take apart a nice analogy with 'analysis' and 'facts'. Where's you narrative contribution, Mark? Use your left brain. Use your zen. Be the analogy! ;-)

Gapminder

I first saw the Gapminder tools Sunday night and emailed the usual suspects from around this weblog. A lot of you must read the same sources I do, because Tom got a couple of emails the next day asking if he had seen them yet.

I should have known Bradd Hayes would have already seen them. After all, he is Senior Director of Communications and Research at Enterra, the Editor of Steve DeAngelis' Enterprise Resilence Weblog, and long-time collaborator with Tom. In fact, he said:

1. He'd seen it several years ago.

2. He's prepared slides for Tom using that data base, and

3. He notes it in a draft of the Development-in-a-Box white paper.

Gapminder is a 'non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development'. And despite how it rings for us, the name has no official connection to Tom's work:

Gapminder work are due to a feeling of filling a gap. There has been a market failure in distributing global data. A lot of people are interested in the data, but do not get access to it (if they manage to access the data, they need to be advanced skilled statisticans to analyse it). Gapminder want´s to make the data more accessible and easier to use for instant analysis. We belive decision makers, politicans as well as education about society at almost all levels lack adequate tools. We want to develop these tools.

If you have an application or a particular chart that references Tom's work, please leave a comment here or email me.

Only Ahmadinejad can go to Washington

ARTICLE: "Iran Chief Eclipses Clerics As He Consolidates Power: Increasing Influence of President Presents Difficult Diplomatic Choices for U.S.," by Michael Slackman, New York Times, 28 May 2006, p. A1.

First off, the title of this article, as so often is the case in newspapers, doesn't match the text or analysis very well. But different people (editors) write headlines, and so you suffer this disconnect often (most op-eds I've written, I've been very unhappy with the titles chosen or altered).

The reality here is that the diplomatic choices for the U.S. are made much more simple.

The biggest problem we've had in reaching any sort of understanding with Iran in the past, as the article so wonderfully points out, is that any agreement or breakthrough with the government is rather meaningless, because the mullahs truly rule. So it's been an Iran of several voices in any diplomatic engagement, making any sort of agreement almost impossible.

The article's title also overstates the "power grab" aspect of of Ahmadinejad's moves: he does not do this in opposition to Khamenei, but rather with his blessing for larger, regime-preserving reasons that suggest the state is far more fragile than we estimate (more good news for us).

Ahmadinejad is irrelevant on the nuclear issue. It began long before he took power and reflects a concerted ayatollah-led bid for both national prestige and protection from U.S. invasion. Ahmadinejad's agenda overlaps on that issue only to the extent that he discovered, early in his administration, that it's faltering stature could be instantly improved with a very impatient and demanding public, if he chose to align himself with that strategy. In this move, Ahmadinejad has proven himself to be a very clever politician and a superb propagandist who plays the Americans, and especially the American-Jewish community, like a banjo (he plucks, we sing).

Our myopic focus on that nuclear bid (still several years off, but no matter to the propagandists on their side or the Chicken-Littles on ours) has obscured what is truly powerful and useful about Ahmadinejad's administration. As this article argues very well, the mullahs realize that having themselves represent the nation abroad isn't working, thus the apparent compliance in letting Ahmadinejad move in the direction of creating a political party powerbase that is, despite his personal religion, basically secular and more traditional:

In this theocratic system, where appointed religious leaders hold ultimate power, the presidency is a relatively weak position. In the multiple layers of power that obscure the governance of Iran, no one knows for certain where the ultimate decisions are being made. But many of those watching in near disbelief at the speed and aggression with which the president is seeking to accumulate power assume that he is operating with the full support of Ayatollah Khamenei...

Mr. Ahmadinejad is pursuing a risky strategy that could offer him a shot at long-term influence over the direction of the country--or ruin. He appears motivated at least in part by a recognition that relying on clerics to serve as the public face of the government has undermined the credibility of both, analysts here said.

The changing nature of Iran's domestic political landscape has potentially far-reaching implications for the United States. While Iran has adopted a confrontational approach toward the West, it has also signaled--however clumsily--a desire to mend relations...

"If the U.S. had relations with Iran under the reform government, it would not have been a complete relationship," said Alireza Akhari, a retired general with the Revolutionary Guard and former depute defense minister, referring to Khatami's administration. "But if there can be a detente now, that means the whole country is behind relations with the West."

As the piece argues so well, Ahmadinejad is pursuing a revamp of both economics and politics in Iran that is of almost Gorbachevian-level ambitions. In effect, to save the theocratic regime, he believes a separate political party needs to be built outside of the mullahs for regime legitimacy: in effect, handing us, out of his sense of political desperation in the face of the "challenges buffeting Iran" ("economy is in shambles, unemployment is soaring, and the new president has so far failed to deliver on his promise of economic relief for the poor"; "Ethnic tensions are rising around the country, with protests and terrorist strikes in the north and the souhhd, and students have been staging protests at universities around the country"), that which we seek--the marginalization of the mullahs or de-theocratification of the regime.

In short, we're so much closer, due to Iran's internal problems, in achieving that which we need most to achieve with Iran, a development that would make the achievement of nuclear capacity irrelevant (Iran having nukes isn't the problem--we can deter; Iran giving nukes to terrorists is).

Many of Ahmadinejad's critics inside Iran believe he will fail. This article gives us real pause for hoping for that outcome. He may well end up being our "Nixon" who can, on the basis of his unassailable rhetoric and staunch, anti-Israel reputation, the exact tool we need for our strategic purposes.

Despite all his talk on religion, this article points out that he's "adopted an ideologically flexible strategy." He pushes for more conservative values but loosens their application, especially on gender issues:

If there is one consistent theme to his actions, it is the concept of seeking justice, reflecting a central characteristic of Shiite Islam. In more temporal terms, his strategy appears to be two-pronged: to reinforce his support among hard-liners with sharp attacks on Israel and the West, for example, while moving to appease a society weary of the social and economic challenges of live in the Islamic Republic.

Nixonian in strategy--indeed.

Again, to me, this is very welcome news. Hoping on a Khatami or a Rafsanjani seemed rather hopeless. The only guy who can lead serious change has to be so trusted by the mullahs that he convinces them that his rise and creation of a distinct power base is the only path toward preserving the Shiite revolutionary caste of the government, thus preserving the mullahs power. This is the early Russian tsar striking at the boyars who created his position in the first place, as a form of protection from the rising challenges of the outside world (thus the mullahs' tacit approval). Ahmadinejad can become a very useful Caesar in this manner.

Now, the idealists will say, "This is horrible. We trade the mullahs for a real strong man."

But first things first. We have to kill the revolution and that will a trusted agent (not by us, but by the mullahs). To survive this process, Ahmadinejad needs to deliver. And since we know what he needs to deliver, we finally have some real influence and power over the situation, when we have neither now. Knowing what he needs to survive and knowing it is within our power to grant that, we begin a dialogue that can serve our purposes in Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Beirut, Damascus, Riyadh, Islamabad--all over the dial.

With that analysis, now read the opening paragraphs of the piece and realize what a potentially powerful position we have been handed by events in Iran:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to consolidate power in the office of the presidency in a way never before seen in the 27-year history of the Islamic Republic, apparently with the tacit approval of Iran's supreme leader, according to government officials and political analysts here [notice how the best articles on Iran quote no U.S. experts on Iran!]

That rate unity of elected and religious leadership at the highest levels offers the United States an opportunity to talk to a government, however combative, that has often spoken with multiple voices at cross purposes.

But if the United States, which severed relations with Iran after the 1979 revolution, opened such a dialogue, it could boost the prestige of the Iranian president [just like Nixon was boosted by detente and going to China despite being so buffeted at the time by Vietnam and economic crisis and political disaster at home], who has pushed toward confrontation with the West.

Political analysts and people close to the government here say that Mr. Ahmadinejad and his allies are trying to buttress a system of conservative clerical rule that had lost credibility with the public. Their strategy hinges on [my italics] trying to win concessions from the West on Iran's nuclear program and opening direct, high-level talks with the United States, while easing social restrictions, cracking down on political dissent and building a new political class from outside the clergy.

And the fear-mongers on our side want to have you believe that Ahmadinejad is JUST a nutcase whose irrationality means we must pre-empt and pre-empt now.

We have consistently misread and underestimated the complexity of Iranian domestic politics.

In reality, we have Iran right where we want it and need it to be: needing help from us to survive. If we had any diplomats of Kissingerian brilliance, we'd seize this opportunity and dismantle the mullahs' rule by 2010 (my prediction going back to PNM). Our biggest problem right now is the lack of strategic imagination and skill among the senior ranks of this administration.

And that gets me back to my old whine in a new bottle: what a shame it is that Bush won a second term. He started so much excellent play and opportunity in the Middle East, but his administration seems incapable of taking any advantage. And that deficit right now is due largely to how we screwed up the Iraq peace, and that deficit is due primarily to not having that SysAdmin capacity, and that deficit is primarily caused by our persistent and preferred vision of war over the past decade and a half.

And that's why vision matters.

And that's why I keep writing.

Still, a very promising bit of analysis that convinces more than ever of the need to engage Iran and pursue the soft-kill option. Amazing work by Slackman, and again, notice how there's nothing from Western analysts!

Tom around the web this week

+ The most linked post this week was Dangers of the blogosphere dialogue. Really struck a chord with a lot of people, including:

• The second reference to Tom that I've seen on MySpace (the first was myself ;-).
  
• In Barnett smacks the blogosphere, RattlerGator talks about how much he likes Tom's thinking (though later this week he disagreed in a couple of comments ;-).
  
• Frequent commenter Matt McIntosh quoted the post at length in The dark side of the blogosphere.

+ In Neo-Medievalism II Chirol does more mapping with reference to the Gap and the Core, but this time, in the Middle Ages.

+ Larry Kudlow has had Tom on his radio and television shows a number of times. He says Tom is 'brilliant' and called the weblog 'wonderful'. He references Tom in this post, which ultimately led to a sidebar link exchange.

+ Critt Jarvis, who originally 'pestered' Tom into starting a weblog and went on to webmaster and partner with him, has a new project: building a big, important game where people can try out ideas and get inspired to do something. It's called Connecting in Conversation. Here's a taste (from this post):

In the context of Connecting in Conversation, the minimum unit of culture is the BCU — Basic Culture Unit. A BCU comprises Security, Rule Sets, Money, Infrastructure, and Resources. The nexus of these aspects provides a container for the way we organize ourselves. We recognize containers as the villages, town, and cities we live in. The aggregate of the places we live may be called a nation-state, or region.

+ Nicholas M. Guariglia has a nice essay which draws heavily on Tom: Thinking Horizontally (Getting Away From Obsolete Logic).

+ Generation Watch (taking major cues from Strauss and Howe) refers to Tom a couple of times as a younger thinker who understands today's complex dynamics and is still optimistic.

Perqs of living near Indy...

Em and I are parking cars (prepaid) in Lot 1B at the Indy 500. Arrived at 0430 and hope to be cut loose no later than 1300 (race time). We aim to park about 2k cars with about 25 other parents and chorus kids from Em's future high school. This counts for fundraising duties for the year.

Amazed at the number of s--t-faced drunks already on-scene. Many seem all-nighters who plan to attend the race. Impressive, and a wonderful way to spend your 44th with your eldest.

Odd Indy 500 parking fact: few African-Americans, almost no Hispanics, but amazing number of Asians.

Brother from another planet reviews PNM and BFA

Justin Logan of the Cato Institute sends me his dismissive review of my two books that will appear in the Spring issue of Orbis, a journal I will confess I haven't been forced to read since grad school (and so I haven't).

Logan's is a classic realist/great power acolyte review of my thinking, and I am naturally found wanting, as in shallow, confusing, and just plain shoddy in my scholarship.

The last accusation is easy to level: I simply don't cite the books and authors he holds dear. In fact, I dismiss his beloved realism throughout, constantly citing the very name with ironic quotation marks.

Why is that?

Let me be as clear as possible: I was forced to swallow that realist/great power view of the world throughout four years at Wisconsin and six years at Harvard, and it never took. I found it bogus and bankrupt and a poor causal explanation for basically all of history. It was just too sterile, too narrow, and--worst of all--too insular. To read a realist's book is to be impressed with his scholarship, which consists solely of citing other realist authors' works ad nauseum and endlessly repeating the canonical statements from the accepted doctrine. If you don't cite, then your research is shoddy--by definition. And if you don't repeat, then your arguments and logic are anything but--you do nothing more than assert, my good fellow.

Isn't it interesting how when people like my logic, my book is full of scholarship and sound argument but when they don't, it's all very shallow and shoddy and full of assertions?

Reading this review is like reading a summary of a complex novel in another language by someone with 101 capability in translation. It's just plain goofy.

The whole connectivity argument is tossed because Al Qaeda obviously uses connectivity to fight back (internet and what not), and that alone proves that this conflict is not about connectivity. Hell, by this logic, once the Native Americans picked up fire sticks, it was no longer a clash of civilizations with opposing views of a future.

We are also told that Saudi Arabia is clearly incorrectly located in the Gap, because it's so connected to the global economy.

Yes, yes. Saudi Arabia is different only in degree from, say, the Norwegians with their oil.

So I and my vision are summarily dismissed as warmed-over Immaneuel Wallerstein core-periphery and resurrected Norman Angell delusions of economic connectivity ending great power war. These are the same two charges the realists fling each and every time, and they crush me so!

That Wallerstein argues a neo-Marxist critique of 1970s-era economic neo-colonization (almost swallowable back then, downright comical from the 1980s onward) in which the Core must keep the Periphery poorly connected, impoverished, and abused in order to remain rich while I argue the exact opposite . . . well, that's a silly detail that mostly involves economics, and the realists don't like economics, because it confuses their elegant views of great power billiard balls bouncing off one another on a cosmic pool table. Anyway, both Wallerstein and I use the word "Core," so cased closed for this grad-student-turned-research assistant to Ted Galen Carpenter at Cato.

As for Angell, his critique is alleged to have failed to explain and anticipate WWI, when nothing of the sort is true. He explained it's logical outcome just fine, and felt the logic of his argument to be so powerful that smart men would heed it. He was wrong only about the stupidity of "realist" leadership. Angell said that the European empires were so interconnected economically that if they went to war, it would be suicide that would decimate their empires and therefore they'd all be smart enough not to engage in such war, calling such a belief that war can be survived in that interconnected environment that was Globalization I (a crude sort of globalization based on the uncompetitive movement of raw materials from colonies to great powers, in which labor was very fluid but money not nearly so) a "grand illusion" (the name of his 1910 book; Angell later, in 1933, won the Nobel Peace Prize--the fool).

And so the typical realist take on my vision is that they've seen this all before with Angell. And since that theory proved false a hundred years ago, then so must mine. I mean, the realists already checked this logic out, right? That none of the European empires survived the disastrous civil wars of the first half of the 21st century, all of them being reduced permanently to second-tier powers, well . . . that doesn't prove anything.

But the bigger problem with the second-coming-of-Angell argument (which I address directly in BFA, naturally ignored by Logan) is that it ignores two profound facts: 1) this era's globalization is not a rerun of the European colonial model (where was global integrated production, R&D, etc. in Globalization I, or was that world economy as "flat" as today's, to use Friedman's term?); and 2) nuclear weapons killed great power war, yielding the longest period (still running with no end in sight) of no great power-on-great power war that the world has ever seen.

So yes, I am the second coming of Norman Angell. I'm just Norman Angell with nukes, and that's good enough for many in the field of international relations, but not the realists. Why? It simply spoils all their fun, not to mention renders useless their pathetic attempts to explain the Cold War.

It's hard to feel bad about this review, it's just so alien (and so gloriously grad-schoolish). Logan doesn't speak my language, doesn't see the same world, doesn't read the same stuff (I confess, I read newspapers that describe the world, not academic tomes that describe theories of the world--thus my naivete and confused logic). His critique disturbs me about as much as one from the Marxists, or that queer libertarian crowd.

I was actually invited to Cato by Brink Lindsey about two years ago. He had read PNM and thought it a perfect companion to his own, truly brilliant book on globalization (Against the Dead Hand), which I ended up using plenty in BFA (it's almost PNM's economic twin). Lindsey was taking over then as the new head of research at Cato, and he wanted to infuse the foreign policy/national security crowd there with some serious understanding of economics and globalization, which he felt was amply demonstrated in PNM. Our meeting was great. I was told to expect an invite to speak at Cato and that he'd be working hard to see if he could somehow get me a status on the staff, even if just adjunct.

I walked away from the meeting a bit incredulous. After all, Carpenter runs the foreign policy at Cato, and, for example, his new book is called The Coming War with China (Logan, BTW, was his research assistant, so you can imagine how "confused" and silly my arguments on China must have seemed to this dyed-in-the-wool realist-cum-libertarian pair). So the notion of Cato ever putting up with someone like me on the staff seemed a bit fantastic, as much as I appreciated Lindsey's thinking and his desire to improve the quality of the work that goes on there.

Naturally, I never heard back from Lindsey, and I can't say that I was disappointed or surprised. I would have loved to work with him personally, but why spend your career butting heads against the coming-war-with-China crowd. I mean, could there be anything less attractive or more pointless intellectually (ah, I spent my career slaying fantasies of a bankrupt ideology passed over by history!)?

International relations is a very big field. The realists like to pretend that they represent the intellectual high ground, so that their condemnations carry weight. And they do somewhat in my world, but only in a fairly narrow crowd that craves this logic as support for their own dreams of future war, with future fantastically expensive and large platforms, against fellow great powers. That crowd remains powerful in that acquisition realm, but its grip on thinking is rapidly dissipating throughout the rest of the defense community--most notably in doctrine. The Army and Marines that Abizaid, Wallace, Petraeus and Mattis are building and fielding and deploying and operating no longer live in a world the realists can recognize (thus the name calling from another era: "Wilsonian!" Angellite!"). These generals' definitions, forged by their careers, of competition and conflict simply do not synch up whatsoever with the realists' fantasies of the 19th century being rerun in the 21st (like all fundamentalists, realists retreat to an idealized past). They face a real opponent, not an abstraction, in a Long War that will not conform to realist definitions.

Thus, my attempts to describe that Long War as one of open, connected societies against closed, disconnected ones (and those transnational elements that would generate even more) is simply to be dismissed.

And I'm more than okay with that. Hell, I'm even proud.

Ignatius hits the bull’s eye on Iran

OP-ED: “It’s Time to Engage with Iran,” by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 26 May 2006, p. A21.

This is damn near a perfect op-ed, so good I desperately wish I would have written it myself--that’s how much I covet it.

I will quote at length. It begins with:

“Only connect.” That was the trademark of E.M. Forster’s great novel, “Howard’s End.” And it’s a useful injunction in thinking about U.S. strategy toward Iran and the wider conflicts between the West and the Muslim world.

We are in the early stages of what the Centcom commander, Gen. John Abizaid, calls “the first war of globalization, between openness and closed societies.” One key to winning that war, Abizaid told a small group of reporters at the Pentagon yesterday, is to expand openness and connection. He calls al-Qaeda “the military arm of the closed order.” The same could be said of the extremist mullahs in Tehran who are pushing for nuclear weapons.

America’s best strategy is to play to its strengths--which are the open exchange of ideas, backed up by unmatched military power. The need for connection is especially clear in the case of Iran, which in isolation has remained frozen in revolutionary zealotry like an exotic fruit in aspic. Yet some in the Bush administration cling to the idea that isolation is a good thing and that connectivity will somehow weaken the West’s position. That ignores the obvious lesson of the past 40 years, which is that isolation has usually failed (as in the cases of Cuba and North Korea), while connectivity has usually succeeded (as in the cases of the Soviet Union and China).

A telling example was the decision to engage the Soviet Union in 1973 through the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe. At the time, some conservatives argued that it was a dangerous concession that the Soviets might interpret as a symbol of weakness. But the CSCE provided a crucial forum for dissidents in Russia and Eastern Europe, and with astonishing speed the mighty edifice of Soviet power began to crumble. Similar warnings about showing weakness were voiced when President Richard Nixon went to China in February 1972.

I cite this Cold War history because the moment has come for America to attempt to engage revolutionary Iran…

Brilliant, as the Brits say.

Here’s a zinger I love:

Ahmadinejad’s letter clearly had the backing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the American context, that’s like having the support of Vice President Cheney for a peace feeler.

Ouch! Another bull’s eye! Ayatollah Cheney. I love it!

Best line (my italics):

My own Iranian sources say there is broad consensus in Tehran that it is time for talks with the United States. “Iran wants to start discussions the same way the Chinese wanted discussions” with Nixon, an Iranian businessman name Ale Ettefagh told me in an e-mail this week. “Great Satan doesn’t sell anymore. More than half the population was not born 27 years ago, and the broken record does not play well.”

The bundles of goodies we need to offer Iran “should stress connectivity--more air travel to Iran, more scholarships for students, more exchanges, Iranian membership in the World Trade Organization.”

An Iranian analysts with the International Crisis Group “noted in Senate testimony last week that opinion polls show 75 percent of Iranians favor relations with the United States.”

The killer ending: “Openness isn’t a concession by America, it’s a strategic weapon.”

Again, couldn’t have said it better myself--not that I won’t keep trying.

Ignatius rules the day on Iran, and Abizaid’s standing as head grand strategist on the GWOT within the military is demonstrated once again. I don’t think anybody gets this conflict better inside the military than Abizaid, and no one articulates it better among the pundits that Ignatius. They show the way at a time when the U.S. public is desperate for such strategic vision.

Friedman’s excellent capture on why Iraq still matters--and still must be won

OP-ED: “Standing By Stand-Up Iraqis,” by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 26 May 2006, p. A19.

Friedman remains one of our best analysts on the Middle East. It’s been so long since he was known for just that, thanks to “Lexus and the Olive Tree,” that you tend to forget that that is where he cut his teeth.

In this piece, he provides a vignette about a brave Iraqi member of parliament taking a bit of a dramatic stand for the future of his country, despite the personal danger to himself, and then says, “As long as I see Iraqis ready to take a stand like that, I think we have to stand with them. When we don’t see Iraqis taking the risk to build a progressive Iraq, then it is indeed time to pack and go.”

That statement is fair, it’s reasonable, and it’s moral.

The rest of the op-ed is given over to an astute Egyptian sociologist who compares Bush’s Big Bang strategy to Napoleon’s invasion of Iraq in 1798 (man that guy got around!). It says it “punched the first big hole through which modernity could seep into the Arab world,” ushering in a mini-Arab renaissance that stretched deep into the century.

What you are seeing in Iraq today is the “hard labor” of nation building in a country that has gone through almost 50 years of tyrannical rule, Mr. Ibrahim said. It is a naturally messy process, much messier than Easter Europe’s, with the outcome uncertain. “Everyone with a grievance for 50 years there is not breathing freely and wanting to act on their newfound freedom,” he said.

The reason that the violence in Iraq is so intense--mass executions, mosques blown up--is in part because of all these pent-up grievances. But in part it is also because two very entrenched forces in that part of the world--the theocrats and the autocrats; that is, the Qaedas and the Arab regimes surrounding Iraq, even the “pro-America” ones--are deeply worried that we might succeed.

“The theocrats fear modernity taking root in Iraq,” in the heart of the Arab world, “and the autocrats fear democracy taking root there,” Mr. Ibrahim said. Therefore, they are pulling out all the stops to make Iraq fail. America, Britain and their Iraqi allies must fail, the theocrats and autocrats say, so the Arab theocrats can tell their people that modernity is not an option and so the Arab autocrats can tell their people that democracy is not an option. The future of the Arab world is at stake here.

The killer line here: “Every major transformation since Napoleon in this part of the world has been the function of an external jolt,” Mr. Ibrahim said.”

That, in a nutshell, is why Bush’s Big Bang strategy was so visionary and so bold--and so dead-on.

And it’s why wasting it on things like Gitmo and the Iran isolation strategy is just so wrong.

Put Friedman’s op-ed on Iraq together with Ignatius’ (above) on Iran and you basically have why I still support the Big Bang strategy and favor the soft-kill option of connectivity with Iran. Taken together, you might it call it a blueprint for action in the GWOT (except I’d add strategic alliance with China and building an East Asian NATO on Kim Jong Il’s empty throne; then it’s on to Africa!).

These are seriously good signs: serious consensus emerging among the nation’s top opinion leaders (a strategy of connectivity and System Perturbations) and among the nation’s top military generals (the Long War and the “first war of globalization”).

Our side will win, but first the right definitions must prevail. Gotta know what you’re fighting for before you can win.

DiB can be done

Tom got this email:

Tom:

I'll be brief...we do agriculture work, USAID has hired us three times, through grants and contracts, to do post-disaster work. Critical components that USAID (or the Dept of Everything Else) needs to quickly respond:

1) experienced staff who are not afraid to make a decision, and relentlessly push contractors to perform

2) contract mechanisms to hire someone to do the work

3) available budget.

USAID has 1&2 in place. They have done a better job recently with #3, making sure there is sufficient budget in place either globally or regionally to quickly move it in response to a natural disaster.

Contractors by definition are nimble and (fairly) quick to respond (depending on the contractor). Good ones can find the right people willing to go into disaster areas at a moment's notice. This is our

problem, we do this for a living, if USAID is able to get their three tasks organized, we can handle the rest. Lots of public comment and complaint about the cost of contractors. I would argue that overheads for development consultancies are on par with NGOs, governments (USG overhead is quite high if someone took the time to figure it out), and MUCH lower than DOD contractors.

In contrast to contractors there are NGOs (the CARE's, Catholic Reliefs, Oxfams, World Visions, etc) of the world. Typically excellent getting food, medical and shelter organized after a disaster. They are paid to have materials at the ready, and to quickly get things moving... as a grantee, they also don't have to follow all the BS regulations (3 bid procurements, fly and buy American, etc) that we contractors have to follow. But they ABSOLUTELY SUCK at doing transformational development work. The are staffed with people who have a development worker mentality, not a private sector mentality, so cannot move beyond the immediate relief work (actually not in their interest either).

In sum (and in respect of your 3K memory), the "development in a box" infrastructure is in place, and can work. But there are numerous impediments built into the system that keep it from working as effectively as it could... grist for the next email.

Tom's comment:

Some interesting feedback from an exec at a contractor. Sure, a bit o' sales, but no backing down from the implied challenges of Development-in-a-Box, which I like.

Give me scarier bogey-men!

Chirol (of Coming Anarchy)emailed me to point out a post on Sun Bin, What if the Gap consumes the Core? (Incidentally, Sun Bin also linked Tom yesterday.)

Sun Bin begins (linking to Joseph Wang):

Joseph Wang believes there may be tremendous lack of imagination for us to not visualizing the scenario of gap consuming the core in the Barnett theory.

First of all, without being defensive, of course Tom can imagine or visualize the Gap consuming the Core. However, 1. He does not think it is likely, given the economic trends he details, and 2. He chooses not to focus on the pessimistic. He leaves that to guys like Peters and Kaplan.

Tom recognizes the dangers we face, saying we need to firewall the Core off from the Gap's worst exports.

Sun Bin quotes from Wang's post:

The one thing that bin-Laden understands that unfortunately most people don't is the central nature of the economic front on the war on terror. Put simply, if we get to 2100, and most of the world is living in decent middle class conditions, then bin-Laden will lose. If we get to 2100, and most of the world isn't living in decent middle class condition, then bin-Laden or someone like him will win.

I think Tom would generally agree with this statement, though even in the case of a 'loss' when we get to 2100, the war still wouldn't be over.

As to the nightmare scenarios Wang mentions, Tom does not normally try to account for sheer global catastrophe in his theory. If:

• enough Americans and Chinese are stupid enough to go to war against each other;
• there is a global epidemic;
• Saudi oil fields are destroyed;
• something goes horribly wrong, like one of Bill Joy's bugbears (genetics, nanotech, or robots) gets loose;
• a meteor hits the earth;

then all bet are off. If one (or all!) of those things happen, yes, we're probably in really big trouble. The future worth creating will be set back quite a bit. At that point, you can put Tom's books back on the shelf and dust off your favorite apocalypse.

Not to say that we simply sit back and wait for those things to happen. In fact, Tom's Blueprint for Action, especially, gives all sorts of prescriptions for creating a stronger globalization that will militate against the conditions that give rise to disasters like these (except for the meteor ;-).

This is where Wang ends up, with a few strategies to 'rage against the dying of the light' that line up with Tom's ideas.

Back to Sun Bin's post. He argues the seriousness of this possibility of the Gap consuming the Core with histories of cultural collapse. I read Tom's hope as being that we can rise above these cycles because of all the ways the world is different today, but I'll leave the specifics to him, should he care to address them.

Entropy is a sure bet. But I'm still with Tom, that the optimistic futurists usually beat the pessimistic futurists. For all their grousing, the world has not turned out like Malthus or Orwell or Marx feared.

I emailed this post to Tom, and here are his comments:

1) Never bet against human--much less American--ingenuity and perseverance in response to calamity. There is the "ugly American," but the "unimaginative" or "lazy" American is an Occidentalist myth. I don't eschew fantastically dark scenarios to keep my vision elegant. I simply believe that bottom-up and horizontally networked societies like ours will trump top-down elite-driven vertically -chained political and ideological movements/societies. We simply underestimate our own resiliency. My first great glimpse of this came in my Y2K work. Nothing I see since tells me otherwise--just the opposite.

2) the smart warriors find a way to make their opponents feel like their losing is actually winning. Integration forces a certain loss of identity, so to do it successfully, those integrated need to feel like they're "conquering" or changing the host more than vice versa. Done well, the line between illusion and reality is meaningless. So yeah, sure, the "Gap will consume the Core," just like Latin America will "consume" North America through the Hispanicization of America. Big deal! I don't care who's perceived to be on top, because the "sex" is the same.

Give me scarier bogey-men! I grew up in the Cold War and frankly find all these "new" ones rather weak. The "buy-out" or co-optation gets cheaper with each passing decade.

The heat of Virginia

DATELINE: fancy old hotel, but in the modern, adjunct section, in Williamsburg VA, 25 May 2006

Getting through the day, far enough along am I on the road to recovery. The flight in last night was unpleasant, ear-wise, but I survive.

Today I am up early and over to the CIA headquarters, where I go about two hours with a handful of mid-level analysts getting mid-career sort of training. I give them a sort of director's commentary version of the brief, getting a good response and fine dialogue.

The big surprise of the session was how much we end up talking about the blogosphere. That was somewhat by design, as my host wanted me to push how much I use alternative media as source venues for both new ideas and shaping them over time. So I threw up a bunch of screen captures from blogs listed to the right and explained the nature of the interactions and how it shaped my work. It was, by their own admission, a whole new world to this rather secretive crowd (all roughly my age), but the willingnessness to explore the concept was encouraging. As usual, I kept citing the NIC's interactions with the outside world as a useful example to follow.

I'll be spending some time with an old friend there soon (the National Intelligence Council) and look forward to those interactions with great anticipation. Much of my best work in the past has been associated with the NIC, so being back at Langley put me in a similar, contemplative mindset as those early days at the Naval War College.

After the time there, I drive down to Williamsburg. It's 80 here today. A flashback to those many hot summers up in Springfield, where training for a marathon was a near-death experience in the heat of the day, so I often had to run before sunrise.

Tonight it's a defense industry conference of CEOs and other senior execs--a prime audience. I will be sticking to non-diuretics at the cocktail hour beforehand. Hate having to wait all the way through dinner, but there you have it.

The plane that shouldn't die

ARTICLE: "The Plane That Won't Die: Boeing, Congress and the Air Force Thwart Budget Cutters," by Leslie Wayne, New York Times, 24 May 2006, p. C1.

No offense, but this is a badly written and badly cast piece. Putting it in terms of porkbarreling and special interests really misses the point, especially the horrific statement from some expert about how much body armor one could buy if we cut just one C-17.

The C-17s should be the future workhorse of the SysAdmin force, in addition to long-hauler for the Leviathan. They are a pure expression of global reach, and should play a huge role in non-kinetic global power. These things are built to land on crappy, short runways, and have proven that capacity in war zone after war zone and--more importantly--in disaster relief op after disaster relief op. It's track record is over two decades old and it's spectacular.

Meanwhile, we're spending $70B in R&D alone for some super-sexy steathy penetrating bomber jet that's really only useful way down the road against the Chinese.

Obviously, the Air Force is being squeezed by Iraq and the GWOT in general, and it's trying to do the usual trick of slimming down all categories rather equally, which is what the Pentagon has done going all the way back to Cheney's reign. It's a weird, non-analytical approach. Frankly, with the last USAF pilot to ever be involved in a dog fight currently deep into his first star, there are better arguments for cutting those sort of acquisition hogs than anything as connecting and utilitarian as the C-17s, and yet the production line is under serious budgetary attack.

Add on top of that Senator McCain's enduring and way-past-the-point-of-having-any-point feud with, and persecution of, Boeing, and we're watching an acquisition tragedy unfold.

But frankly, this story largely buries that obvious lead and casts the piece in the usual unimaginative manner.

The Disneyfication of North Korea

ARTICLE: "In Deep South, North Koreans Find a Hot Market," by Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times, 25 May 2006, p. A3.

This is a stomach churning piece to me, and it's not the first article written on the subject (I recall them as far back as two years ago): how South Korea is turning North Korea into this image of its harmless, country bumpkin cousin. Call it "Song of the North" and come up with your own zippity-do-da soundtrack to cover up the misery north of the DMZ.

I was a kid in the 60s, when we had the natural nostalgia for the 1940s (it's a 20-year cycle in America), and grew up in the 1970s when our collective fascination with the 1950s was at its height. What South Korea is doing now with North Korea is similar, just a weirder, far longer stretch.

As one North Korean defector puts it, "It [a popular retro South Korean restaurant that approximates a bad meal in the North] reminds South Koreans of the 1950s and 1960s, before South Korea industrialized."

I get the dynamic. Hell, there's an old Commie-style restaurant in Norther VA that caters just to nostgalgic ex-Sovs. When the past is truly past, it's pretty funny, in that "Hogan's Heroes" sort of way (not funny haa-haa, but more funny eeeeuw!).

But the past isn't the past in North Korea. It's just a place frozen in time by a forced disconnectedness that leaves millions of its citizens living lives of serious deprivation--and that's not Disney material, frankly.

As the piece says, "Older South Koreans, who still look upon the North as an enemy, want to see images of starving North Korean babies." But alas, the owner of the restaurant in question only puts up pleasant, neutral images.

And yeah, that creeps me out.

Just when you thought the comparisons to Nixon were overblown ...

ARTICLE: "Return of Jefferson Files Is Sought: Bipartisan Request Sent to Justic Dept.," by Shailagh Murray and Allan Lengel, Washington Post, 25 May 2006, p. A1.

REPORT: "Bush Orders Documents From F.B.I. Raid Sealed," AP, New York Times, found online at their webpage

The details of this case notwithstanding, it was extremely bad judgment for any arm of the Executive Branch to treat a member of Congress in the way that William Jefferson has been treated.

This one really crosses a line that quickly get everybody's back up againt the wall on the Hill, so I'm really puzzled by why the Bush White House is letting this one continue to simmer in full public view.

You can say Bush's decision today is designed to cool things off, but frankly, I just see it giving his opponents 45 days to work the subject in the mass media.

To me, it's just another detail in an otherwise odd pattern of political self-destruction. Bush's collapsing presidency reminds me of Newt Gingrinch's self-destruction. As soon as they start celebrating your "genius" in the Post Style section, I used to tell my wife while living in DC, your fate is sealed, because what gets artificially pumped up (the "genius" of Rove and the White House machinery in getting re-elected by a mere 40k margin in Ohio) eventually gets aggressively deflated. And like Gingrich, the Bush team is strangely compliant in their own demise.

The Iraq redux on Iran that I find so disturbing

ANALYSIS: “Terror Group Assists in Struggle With Iran: Some in Congress See a role for Anti-Tehran Exiles in Push for Regime Change,” by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 22 May 2006, p. A6.

ARTICLE: “U.S. Rejects Direct Talks With Iran but Keeps Meeting With Europe, China and Russia,” by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 25 May 2006, p. A6.

OP-ED: "The Persian Complex: Iran's centuries-old quest for respect," by Abbas Amanat, New York Times, 25 May 2006, p. A27.

ARTICLE: "Powers Inch Ahead on Nuclear Deal With Iran," by Reuters, Washington Post, 25 May 2006, p. A23.

The rerun dynamic on Iran is kinda stunning: relying on somewhat slimy ex-pat group that’s easily designatable as a terrorist group itself, a lot of loose speculation on the ease of the take-down possibilities using air power, the poor intell on WMD acquisition and a ramping up of timelines (again, with the danger of Israel taking things into its own hands as an implied strategic backdrop).

Noting the similarities is not to routinely condemn all the strategic logic attached (especially on Iraq, which had multiple outstanding UN “warrants”), but rather simply to acknowledge that this administration seems to have only one approach in these things, and that given the lack of success in operation #1, it’s hard to see how either Congress or our allies would bite on operation #2.

Also just as clear is that the Big Bang argument cannot be repeated casually. If you cannot follow up on the first effort, what would make anyone think you’d do better on the second pulsing of the regional system? Furthering the perturbation previously unleashed can be done in a wide variety of non-kinetic means, but trying to sell military ops against Iran just comes off as a widening of the war-like conditions that still afflict too much of Iraq, simultaneously denying the U.S. key potential partners in lessening that conflict--first and foremost Iran itself.

In general, rerunning the Iraq sales job just smacks of an unwillingness to learn. Warren had me write the “Monks of War” because he was interested in showing how U.S. ground forces are learning rapidly in Iraq in an operational and tactical sense, despite the apparent lack of strategic learning going on in this administration. When I started to research the piece, I felt like his original argument was too sharply drawn (i.e., the ground forces weren’t learning that fast and the government wasn’t learning that slow), but the more time passes, the better that judgment looks.

And I think that’s a major undercurrent of the public’s anger toward Bush: not only does he not get it, but his team goes out of the way to avoid getting it. Everything is piled on top of everything else: tax cuts PLUS huge upticks in spending, the GWOT plus China is still threatening, Iraq PLUS Iran, ongoing war ops PLUS a long-term acquisition agenda.

For a group of CEO-types so celebrated for making tough decisions, this crowd never seems to make any. It all just gets added to the pile, the strategic overhang growing like the federal debt.

For all this talk of a new strategic environment, this largely Cold War crowd has simply added all the burdens of today on top of all the fears of yesterday.

There is this Republican strategy that says, We spend like crazy and then force subsequent Democratic administrations to deal with the resulting ceilings--in effect, they load up on their preferred spending packages, especially defense, and by doing so force the hard choices on others. Expressed in this way, it’s beyond any political gamesmanship that any rational actor would accept as reasonable. It’s just so amazing cynical, and to the extent that it accurately describes what this administration is doing in national security, it quickly moves beyond cynical to truly dangerous for the global system as a whole. More to the selfish point, though, it’s just so self-destructive for this nation. It’s simply unsustainable. You can’t get from this A to any Z worth attaining. Instead, you just set the country up for a larger correction.

Choosing to rerun Iran with Iran, while begging off on the far more important dynamics of our relationship with the China/Taiwan/North Korea nexus, for example, just tells me that this administration doesn’t really see the post-9/11 security environment that it claims to understand so much better than the Democrats (that’s not to say that the Dems get it much better, only that Bush and Co. reveal themselves to be disappointingly limited in their ability to move beyond their decision to take down Saddam as THE bold move of the first term).

As I’ve said before: we’re seeing the limits of strategic imagination with this crowd. I felt we were close enough in 2004 that I was very confident in arguing that Kerry would have been a better choice then--that we truly needed to switch that horse right in the middle of the race to connect the Middle East. What stuns me now is not that I was right in that gut instinct (hardly a bold move for a life-long Democrat who’s yet to vote Republican in a national election), but how much that lack of strategic imagination would end up costing us nationally and internationally in a second Bush term.

In short, I think we’re just beginning to realize the price tag.

So if I were a Republican, I’d start running for president more openly against Bush and stop trying to position myself merely as the Hillary alternative. I think the 06 elections may feel an awful lot like the 94 seismic shift, and that it will be a public feeling fed up with this White House’s inability to learn from its mistakes that will constitute the prime force behind this backlash.

I don’t argue any of this easily: I don’t want to see us strategically sidelined, much less isolated, for the next three years. I fear globalization is simply put too much at risk in the meantime, and that none of us realize exactly how dangerous that may end up being for the planet as a whole.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to see how the current tack on Iran will get us what we want either. The Europeans are getting fairly explicit on what the solution set needs to be: a security guarantee if we expect Iran to give up the bomb. This administration won’t offer that guarantee, because it’s more interested in regime change than proliferation. The problem with this strategic approach is that it pushed Iran down this path in the first place.

There is a definition of stupidity (I think from Einstein) that says it’s expecting different results despite doing things the same way over and over again. I think we’re witnessing some strategic stupidity on Iran, and I just don’t get the lack of confidence to try something else that seems to permeate this crowd.

Frankly, we should be a more confident global superpower. I compare our assets to anybody’s, including China, and I trade this nation for nobody. We should act like that’s the case, instead of responding with so much fear to everything around the planet. The confident superpower cooperates with others, the fearful one resists everybody and pretends that’s strength displayed.

Iran wants respect, which it defines as security from our aggression. In a perfect world, Iran would have no oil or gas, and then we'd be able to get acquiesence from Russia, India, and China. But that scenario is not in the works, despite all the polite responses we get.

Meanwhile, none of this approach taps the one asset we need to tap most: the Iranian people and their dissatisfaction with the mullahs and the current government. Instead, we force a choice between perceived self-respect and humiliation, between a sense of identity and a none-too-veiled threat.

Here is Amanat's warning:

If the United States resorts to sanctions, or worse, to some military response, the outcome would be not only disastrous but, in the long run, transient. Just as the West did with Iran's railroad and oil industry, it can for a time deny Iran's nuclear technology, but it cannot wipe out Iranians' haunting memories. And no doubt the Islamic regime will amply exploit these collective memories to advance its nuclear program even as it stifles voices of domestic dissent. Even more than before, Iranians will blame outside powers for their misfortunes and choose not to focus on their own troubled road to modernity.

I see this pathway as the death of the Big Bang.

The best sign of the End Times for the Bush Administration [updated with link]

Lost the page on the way to my hotel tonight in McLean, but it was a section page 1 right column piece in the Financial Times saying that the smartest man in the Bush Administration (my term), Robert Zoellick, was leaving to join a Wall Street firm, having had it made clear to him by the White House that he won't replace John Snow as Secretary of the Treasury.

[webmaster update] Zoellick 'to quit for job on Wall Street'

Sad news for this now largely lost administration.

Bad news for U.S. foreign and security policy.

Really bad news for China.

Serious loss for Doha Round, and thus globalization as a whole.

I am now officially depressed at the notion of three more years of this sort of lame-duckness and lack of strategic imagination.

Protecting oil connectivity with military assets? How strange!

ARTICLE: “Pentagon Report Assails China’s Military Buildup,” by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 24 May 2006, p. A3.

ARTICLE: “China Raises Fuel Prices Again But Remains Below World Levels,” by Shai Oster, Wall Street Journal, 24 May 2006, p. A6.

The Pentagon’s latest report on spending in China notes ominously that the Chinese seem intent on two things: building a high-tech military capable of fighting short, high-tech wars (like we do on a regular basis) and extending its power projection reach for the long-term goal of protecting its sea lines of energy importation (imagine that!).

Where do you think the Chinese learn such things? Obviously, they model their military on our own, because we’re the Microsoft of militaries and we show how a great power deals with a dependency on imported energy. So voila! They copy us. Unbelievable.

Just as amazing, we assume that any such development is a direct threat to us.

A classic New Core case for connectivity

ARTICLE: “Czech Republic’s Location Leads To Distribution-Center Boom,” by Sean Carney, Wall Street Journal, 24 May 2006, p. A12.

Great story about the Czech Republic’s rise as a global logistic railhead, so to speak, thanks to the rush of connectivity that’s developed there following the end of the Cold War.

Remember back to the early 1990s, when experts were predicting how backward these states were and how long it would take them to gear up for the global economy’s hypercompetitiveness?

Now you have the little old Czech Republic attracting foreign direct investment and its “main selling point is its infrastruture,” or more specifically, its roads. Just like in military operations, the crux of the matter is typically logistics, not strategy. Connect up the motivated population and watch the integration proceed apace.

That’s what God is fooooooooor!

BOOK REVIEW: “The Confusion on Campus,” by Vincent J. Cannato (reviewing Excellence Without a Soul by Harry R. Lewis), Wall Street Journal, 24 May 2006, p. D12.

Weird book that says higher education in America (focusing on Harvard as the example) prepares only the mind and not the soul, thus it’s failing our society. It’s all just too relativistic, says Lewis.

Strange to see a social conservative bitching about how colleges aren’t doing more to shape men’s souls, when I would have thought such a function is logically left to organized religion. If our universities go down this path, they lose their appeal as magnets for foreign students, in my mind.

Frankly, I never looked to Harvard to shape my soul. The nuns back at Immaculate Conception did that.