Great piece on Iran’s economic collapse, despite all the oil wealth

OP-ED: “Iran’s Economic Crisis: President Ahmadinejad isn’t bringing the oil money ‘to every dinner table,’” by Amir Taheri, Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2007, p. A17.

This piece shows why Friedman's Petropolitics law has rather short legs, historically speaking. Demography, among other things, can quickly overwhelm its explanatory power.

Condi’s got to do more, as does the USG in general, to bypass the leadership and get the economic connectivity flowing below. As this article indicates, Iran is dying on the vine because its current economic connectivity is so narrowly focused on oil and Ahmadinejad is preaching and practicing some stupid version of economic autarky a la Kim’s juche in the DPRK.

The big difference, of course, is that some real connectivity exists, thanks to the oil and gas.

Instead of asking India and China to boycott Iran alongside us, which will never work, we need to be working with them on how their economic infiltration can open up Iran.

This is a country ripe for the economic taking, but as is so often the case, we focus on killing weeds instead of growing some lawn. Détente is all about the latter, isolation and containment all about the former.

Killing weeds has its time and place, but that time and place isn’t with Iran right now, not with our current mess/tie-down in Iraq.

No, not when Iran’s this weak. That sequencing has been one of our own choosing, but Bush and company refuse to live by their choices.

Excellent piece by Taheri, who is superb on Iran.

Got the final pages on the July Esquire piece

Already got a 10k blog written for that one.

This one is special for me: another map which I annotate, and for the first-time ever some photos from me personally during the reporting. Got about 300 from the trip and I'll have to get either Esquire or Sean to make something happen online with them when the story comes out--canyoubelieveit--in something like three weeks!

Never had two so quick like that.

But . . . already have something proposed for Top 100 Ideas October issue (off-shoot from this piece that didn't make it in), an opinion essay, and possibly a write-up of somebody for the Best & Brightest.

If I got two out of three, I'd be incredibly lucky, but a fellow can dream.

As I said earlier, Warren did a beautiful job editing this one. With each reported piece, he's been required to generate less bridge stuff on his own as I get smarter in my reporting, but I remain immensely appreciative of how Mark's brought me along in this process. He is a natural teacher, and one of the best I've ever had (and I've had some world-class superstars).

On the ground feedback

Got this from a major in an MP battalion:

Sir
I have read you book and watched your presentation. I am highly impressed by the message you give. I have deployed to Iraq twice and clearly see how your principles, and concept need to drive changes in our military to meet future challenges.

I know you have a busy schedule; but would like to invite you to come and conduct a presentation with the officers and senior NCOs of our organization. Our schedule is open, and recommend sometime Aug this year.

Naturally, we'll see what we can do.

Nice feedback from the CIO cruise ....

You buy 41 copies of my book, I don't let your comment get buried here.

No, no, my new best friend. You go to the head of the line.

Hi Tom,

I think you'll be pleased to know that I just ordered 41 copies of The Pentagon's New Map on Amazon to send to the 41 executives I met with at the CIO forum this week.

Your speech was electrifying. It was a much discussed subject at dinners and lunches. I figured it would be perfect way to start the follow-up process from these business meetings. Even those who didn't attend the speech heard enough about it they will be pleased to receive this book.

Thanks again for the great presentation.

Paul

FYI: I have been telling friends and others 2 things about Iraq I saw reflected in your speech:

1) Where is it written that Iraq has to be one nation? It is better to split it up and we just securel the oil fields to ensure each nation gets its fair share. I believe the Sunnis will quickly kick out the terrorists and insurgents if they have a country to build. Even the Bagdad problem can be dealt with. There is a river running through the middle ... helloo!! Sunnis on the left, Shiites on the right, and just one bridge. Mission accomplished!

2) The war was won 4 years ago. It is an occupation with resistance. If only Bush would change the rethoric from war to occupation it would be so much easier to get out. Indeed, it is far easier emotionally to end an occupation than to end a war without having clearly won it. The U.S. just can't deal with that (yet). Why Bush decided to keep calling it a war is beyond me. He wasted the opportunity to claim a war victory.

Not bad. The best part being Paul came out of just that one talk with that much confidence in his ability to describe what's going on.

I honestly feel like my briefs are more mental workout than content dump.

You want the content, you do what Paul did. You buy the books.

Once in a lifetime?

This morning I wake up to find a small Chinese woman sleeping about three inches from my nose.

And I look into that beautiful face,
next to my beautiful wife,
in our beautiful bed,
in our beautiful house,
and I ask myself,

How did I GET here?

Clearly, I let the days go by.

But I don't think it was the water that pulled me down.

I think it was a couple of very large vodka martinis--up.

Which is kinda funny when I think about it, because that's actually how I ended up with my first three kids too!

Same as it ever was ...

And yet, if you ask Vonne, time isn't holding up. Hell, time's just an asterisk.

So I say, let's head into the blue again, now that the money's gone.

Twice in a lifetime ....

Here comes the twister!

More on Robb

Thinking further (a very good sign of John's impact, as I prefer to digest than to regurgitate), I think John was betrayed either by his ambition or his editor or maybe his agent into thinking he needed to present a full teleology (and by that, I mean, a creation-to-transcendance story in the manner of Hegel) in this book, when I don't really think he's there yet (and, quite frankly, I'm not sure a black hat can ever take you there--by definition, which is why John's criticism of my stuff was subpar for him, meaning I've seen better; I think he just included it because he felt the need to have some sort of survey, but it came off as an add-on in the book's arc--not fully formed). Therein lay all my criticism of a book I really love for the most part (more up front and in the middle).

That's really my basis for comparing Robb with Marx--for now.

(And for those who can't stomach any admiration for Marx, please avert your eyes, CAUSE I'M POLITICAL SCIENCING HEEEERE! And I get to do that, because I've got a license, and I've taught Marxism at Hah-vahd--back when there still was an evil empire).

Marx conceptualized a whole new economic era's complexities to a stunning degree, enhancing understanding of these very difficult-to-grasp processes and what they meant for society, politics--life in general. I think John's done something phenomenal here as well in terms of networks and warfare (or perhaps, better put, "conflict," since John, like me, sees little war in the future as we've known it in the past).

Marx felt compelled to run his logic to ground, and there his analysis got fantastic, as John's does for me.

I don't think John needed to go all that way in this first book, which could have stayed more purely diagnostic, like PNM, setting himself for something more prescriptive in a second book (harder, as I find out, but more fun to write, actually).

I honestly feel like John's just not there yet on prescriptions. I don't think anyone really is.

I spent Sunday through Wednesday at a high-end shipboard (Norwegian Cruise Line's Dawn ship) forum of Fortune 500 CIOs, taking Vonne along for a great time (our own state room off the back with substanital private balcony, our own table for dining, two black tie soirees, one that ended in just enough dancing to reinjure my knee (so my revisiting of my youthful romancing of my woman was painfully shortlived)). My keynote was a lot of fun, in a huge, steep, one-thousand-person theater with a fifty-foot wide (Al Gore-ish) screen show behind me that displayed the slides plus two live close-ups of me (best of all, they ran the talk on the closed-circuit ship TV non-stop the rest of the day, so I could "break down the tape" immediately upon getting out of my talk, which was cool).

Vonne and I sat in on a few workshops, and got to chat up 3 FBI agents over dinners regarding cybercrime and terrorism, and it really struck me that we're just beginning to understand the advances/tightening we need to accomplish in all these nets. Y2K was an interesting start, but just a baby step. What Steve and I are trying to do with Enterra is--in our opinion and that of the unnamed-but-famous big investors stepping up behind us--make a generational leap-frogging occur in our systemic resilience.

But even what we're doing, assuming we pull it off, is but one of several next steps for our systems, nets, and infrastructure as a whole. This will be a long and fascinating journey, and one of the most important guides we can have for that journey is a book like John's--admittedly a very black-hat, worst-casing sort of vision for warfare waged against us.

I believe that warfare will unfold, and I believe we'll handle it in stride--not casually or without losses, but "in stride" in terms of globalization's continued successful march. Remember, those hard-scrabble types in covered wagons this time are Indians and Chinese and Filipinos (all over our boat) and so on. These people are tough, they're way smart, and they don't f--king give up easily.

In contrast, our enemies are not the pick of the litter (I've met the pick of Islam's litter and they're way more talented--so much so that we're deeply incentivized to continue this Big Bang and all others to force-function their accessibility for mankind's overall benefit), plus they readily admit to themselves and to us whenever we catch them and question them (ask Marc Sageman) that they have no expectation of winning, which makes them scarier in a Robbian manner, but far more exhaustible than us. It's just money to us. It's their whole f--king ball of wax to them. So when we drop, it hurts but it does not damage. That's why their war footing (something we should never seek to approximate, because why should we symmetricize to no advantage?) is so pathetic. Watching Hamas and al Qaeda con sad women into killing themselves. I mean, really. Get inside that for a minute and tell me where that's ever won anywhere. That's not how homo sapiens won. That's how the rest of those monkeys lost. It's simply unnatural and unsustainable--as well as profoundly sick. No romanticism is possible here. Those nuts are slated for extinction--pure and simple.

John's brilliance in this book is getting us inside the natural OODA loop our enemies will have in this long war regarding our infrastructure. When his material sticks to that, it's undeniably profound. When it strays, the light flickers (like quoting that proven talent Scheurer, whose main accomplishment was . . . certainly on par with Richard Clarke's, which was . . . somewhere in the range of George Tenet's, which was . . . you see what I mean?). [Okay, John didn't quote the last two. I just like shitting on them.]

Robb's original analysis is so powerful, it didn't need that dressing, nor the unhelpful teleology, which is simultaneously too dark and too dreamily naive.

I'm not saying (as so many said of both PNM and BFA), that John should have written a shorter book. Rather, that he should have written a longer one that deeply argued the strategies and concepts he present in BNW so delphically (some sections are 2-3 paras only).

Thus, he should begin planning Vol. II immediately, using--as I did--feedback on Vol. I to fuel Vol. II, which definitely needs to flesh out all the concepts presented here, all of which are great, but because they weren't systematically stitched together, come off like one brilliant damn thing after another.

Honestly, that was the biggest problem with the book--its ordering structure. I felt lost through most of the book, wondering why I was hearing one thing after another or before something else. I could never quite tell where I was in John's thinking, and the toss-off teleological references (Those "this changes everything in the future" statements he never develops, much less backs up, because he presents only the war, not the peace, and you can't do yang with no yin) did not help. In fact, they came off like pointless boasts.

I know that's the pot calling the kettle black in some ways, but my pot works primarily in the strategic level, whereas John's forte is obviously tactics and operations. In my realm, the teleology must always be there, but in John's, it's really not required, and sometimes, like here in this first-stage primer of what I would naturally expect to be a number of books that extend the material over a career, it's actually premature.

Actually, premature is the wrong word. What John's covering here will simply morph too quickly for useful teleologies to be applied, much like IT itself. You can't do effective generational projections when the industry turns over as rapidly as IT does. I realize that John talks a lot of low-tech vis-a-vis hard infrastructure, but honestly, that stuff worries me far less than the cyber and bio, both of which are morphing right now with some serious speed. That's one of the reasons I don't do technology as a flow per se. It's just too fast and too ubiquitous. Plus, I just want it to go everywhere.

In short, John gives us vocabulary in BNW. What has to come next is grammar, not more history (or futurism) of the English language. Most futurism and strategic planning, quite honestly, is just about helping people get today, not tomorrow.

John's shown a huge talent in BNW for getting us to get today. He needs to take that further in the next book, not defend the teleology, which to me is fat on the bones he needs to stich together into a recognizable skeleton.

So skip the revolution, John, and build us the next generation.

SWJ to SysAdmin from below

POST: The Missing Mission: Expeditionary Police for Peacekeeping and Transnational Stability

Nice working-it-out logic from Small Wars Journal that basically gets the reader to the SysAdmin concept from "below," or the policing angle, rather than from "above" (the postwar/disaster peacekeeping role).

Either way you approach it, you come to Giuliani's conclusion: some sort of "blended force" is needed. The crime/terror blurring is real and very apparent, a point Robb makes well in his book, So our responses need to blend. We need to symmetricize, so to speak. We need to re-frontier our perspective.

Thanks to ry for sending this.

The militarization of climate change

OP-ED: "Environmental 'Intelligence?' We don't need to spy on global warming," by Peter Hoekstra, Wall Street Journal, 10 May 2007, p. A16.

Good example of why I don't care for the militarization of global warming's "threat": spy satellites redirected to watch environmentally-stressed areas.

This mind-set only opens the door for raiding the DoD budget for bucks and bodies for non-security issues.

But you can say: "Everything relates to security!"

Yes, but not every security tool relates to everything.

Interagency can't just be robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Hard to be a suburban insurgent

ARTICLE: "The Terrorists Next Door? Plot Suspects Lived Quietly in Suburb," By Anthony Faiola and Dale Russakoff, Washington Post, May 10, 2007; Page A01

This is exactly what I'm talking about: notice how in the Core this type of insurgent has to hide in plain sight? Then notice how they get caught: the video store.

In a connected place with strong local government (we have no idea how strong our local government is compared to the Gap), it's hard to be the guerrilla. You have to hide all the time. To emerge is to shoot your wad, one way or the other. The calibration of local rules, police, vigilance, etc, is constant. There are no warlords to buy off, just other off-grid types like yourself to ally with.

Do something weird and the grid's alerted and you're done.

Different in the isolated hinterland, though. There the bad boys can rule because the power is far away and the locals have to choose.

No choosing in the suburbs. Behave or we call the cops.

More back to the future

ARTICLE: Insurgencies Like Iraq's Usually Last 10 Years But Fail, Study Says, By Jim Michaels, USA Today, May 9, 2007, Pg. 8

Dupuy was always the best analyst on the long-term war trends.

The bottom line here: insurgencies don't win the majority of the time. And when they do? They set up nation-states of their own--same or smaller.

Technology does not change that dynamic. It just sizes it differently, as we see states multiply from below and agglomerate from above, the perfect example being more states in Europe plus the EU growing.

Not the death nor the hollowing out of nation-states, but their right-sizing through the reformatting process that is globalization.

One thing Robb's book made me realize: Core states tend to be bottom-heavy (more government below and thinner on top--e.g., the U.S. police structure), whereas Gap states tend to be top-heavy (and capital-centric to boot). The former structure disincentivizes the insurgent (the locals have vibrant local government), the latter is far more vulnerable to their penetration and supplanting.

Simply put, there is no hinterland in advanced states, politically speaking. Thus the frontier mentality on spreading rule sets inside the Gap, with the main foot soldiers coming from states currently building out their remaining political and economic hinterlands--New Core.

It's nothing we haven't seen before.

It's nothing we haven't done before.

And it's more back to the future than scary new era.

In guerrillas we trust

Not a book review, but more just my impressions. I just hate doing surveys of books.

Just finished Robb's book, "Brave New War," and I liked it for where it succeeds brilliantly (tactical and operational descriptions of the emerging threats, which Robb views as ascendant and which I view as just what's left over) and forgive it where it succeeds least (he doesn't sell me on the death of either nation-states nor globalization--the ultimate open-source network--in large part because he can't adequately define "win" and "defeat" in his rather expansive statements about global guerrillas declaring wars on states and even the world and "winning."

I mean, other than the nutty Salafi jihadists, who want to go feudal and pre-market, every other group John cites as successful tends to imitate your basic nation-state the first chance they get (or the first territory they can control), so how is that a "defeat" of nation-states? Even the "proto-states" and "states-within-states" suggest that the Gap suffers from too little statehood (as in, they need more, smaller states) than too much, so I guess I just see the need to remap the post-colonial Gap where John sees the end of the Westphalian Era.

When I read the book, it reminded me a lot of reading Karl Marx's stuff: stunningly concise and elegant on the dissection of current vulnerabilities created by technology's advance and its revolutionary impact on economics, plus good analysis of a growing gap between those developments and the political means we currently possess to manage that change. But, like Marx, John becomes too sweeping in his generalizations of why our current system is doomed to collapse and is basically incapable of reform, plus his prescriptions at the end trail off in a vague sort of way that's unsatisfying, like reading Marx's dream of a post-capitalist world that wistfully reconstructs much of the pre-capitalist world's charms (John's version of a resilient future utopia is a global society built around the same, bottom-up principles of the Internet, which makes it pleasantly communitarian in a way no one would resist--at least no one who grew up in a small town like I did).

John's book is deeply informed by the fact he's a serious technocrat who distrusts politics. Indeed, politics as any form of solution is basically missing in action in this book. When it's referred to glancingly here and there, it's always to catalogue dysfunction or corruption (e.g., America's entire political system is dismissed with a reference to Jack Abramoff's ability to purchase it at will--a blanketing statement which comes off as strangely naive in its cynicism, but that's not unusual for military guys who often describe Washington like it's some modern-day Sodom). Big entities of all sorts are dismissed in this way by Robb, whereas the heroes and change-agents are always outsiders, "guerrillas" (an all-purpose term to John, like "connectivity" is to me) and small entrepreneurs and start-up companies.

That bias shouldn't surprise: it's basically John's career talking. So his heroes come from his experience and ranks: they're the proles of this revolution who are going to inherit the earth the rest of "them" created but can no longer control.

So, like Marx, whom I consider to be one of the great conceptualizing geniuses of his age, I like John for his obvious and stunning strengths (the dissection of now), trust him less on his projections (he sees primarily the bad in all of this networking and tends to believe in only wholesale reshaping from below to achieve the better), and basically dismiss his dismissal that change cannot be made within existing structures: political, corporate and--yes--even hierarchical ones. I think that, like Marx, John vastly underestimates the role of political institutions in positive change and their capacity for adaptation.

My synthesis tends to be additive (politics and markets are all about adaptation and compromise, so every new thing helps), while John's is more destructively revolutionary, like Marx (the brittle old order must die and be replaced by a new, technocratically-tinged order that's vastly different in form and function).

I think John's dissection of guerrillas inside the Gap is very powerful, but that when he cites--by extrapolation--similar capacities for system disruptions and system perturbations in the advanced world, he doesn't prove his case very well. Again, to me, his argument there reminds me of Marx's description of capitalism getting to a certain stage and then just collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Keeping a failed state failed is not the same as crippling a functioning state with a growing economy. If it were, they'd be revolutions going on all over the Core regularly, when in reality change and adaptation is achieved more smoothly than John believes any nation-state capable of, even following huge expansions of technology like we've just endured again, but certainly not for the first time, in America's history.

Where John's criticism of states makes more sense to me is inside the Gap (I don't see states "hollowing out" inside the Core like John does--indeed, the most globalized states have the biggest and best and most powerful governments). There I do think his guerrillas can rule, under certain circumstances, by negation. But in the Core, by and large, I see these guerrillas as more nuisance than all-encompassing threat, so John's ROI arguments don't rock my boat, because the vast majority of such efforts by bad guys will never rise above the everyday noise level of routine failure and breakdowns, and when they do, they force change that's beneficial in far more ways than simply defeating terrorism, so the notion of being bled dry by guerrillas is--to me--unconvincing.

But again, I just ignore what I can't use in books and focus on what I can use from them, and here John's promise of a smorgasbord comes true, and he offers a panoply of cool conceptualizations that enhance our understanding of the future of warfare and the connected world's growing need for resilience. If I had been John's editor, I would have pushed him to make his entire book a more expansive treatment of these ideas, any one of which could have received far longer treatment, plus exploration and scenario description in venues less Iraq-centric.

John does give my books some treatment, but because he distrusts politics so, John views them as a diametrically opposed sort of utopianism (again, John trusts technologists, not politicians). Granted, the emergence of my more effective rule sets over time presupposes successful politics--both nationally in the synchronization of rule sets across the Core and globally in the Core's expansion and diplomatic integration (e.g., strategic alliance between America , China, and India), resulting in mutual aid efforts like my "A-to-Z rule set on processing political bankruptcy inside the Gap," which I believe is proven by our Balkans experience to be feasible and which John believes is disproven totally by Afghanistan and Iraq (the contrast to me being all about good political leadership versus incompetent political leadership, just like the difference between Barbor in Mississippi and Blanco in Louisiana WRT Katrina).

So, not surprisingly, being a top-down strategizer, I cast my communitarianism on a far grander scale than the tactically and operationally minded John, who likes his version more localized in form (i.e., bottom-up like the Web).

In sum. I really enjoyed this book and plan to consult it often in the future for deeper understanding of John's many brilliant conceptualizations of network vulnerabilities. I only include my criticisms here because I know a lot of readers consider John and I to be doppelgangers of each other on the question of connectivity, whereas I'm more the optimistic builder/white hat and John's more the pessimistic breaker/black hat, so some parsing of universal views seemed warranted.

To that end, I think John's predictions of great stressing of globalization will happen and that we'll collectively surmount them in many of the ways he advocates. I just don't see that process in the same disrupting revolutionary terms that John does, but rather in more relaxed (in terms of tempo) evolutionary adaptation where politics remains--in its many forms found throughout the Core--a useful tool of compromise (thus the importance of grand strategic vision).

But I am serious about comparing John's essence-capturing skills to that of Marx, which is not praise I give out lightly. That ability alone, as it did with Marx, makes John a formidable talent in helping us understand this world we live in.

Steve's in Kurdistan

POST: An Overview of Kurdistan

Steve DeAngelis, blogging out of Kurdistan, gives us some great history and background on the Kurds.

Yingling: as soon as could be

Gordon Matthew wrote:

Some background on Paul Yingling's piece. It's illuminating to read this interview with LTC Yingling from last Fall. Gives a broader sense of where he's coming from, and how congruent his ideas are with your own.

Tom writes:

Read for yourself and see if you agree.

I've been waiting on the Yinglings to appear. To outsiders, it seems like it's taken forever, but if you spent your life working with this crowd, you realize this is as fast as it could have appeared.

Very hard thing to do, but very courageous.

When I emailed him, Gordon was scrupulous to note that he had picked up the interview link from Small Wars Journal. When I went over there to look for it, top post is by Yingling himself, newly minted SWJ member.

(It was the SWJ Editor who linked the interview in their forum thread on the generalship article, by the way.)

What does it say about a guy that he posts a picture of himself getting his ass kicked? Call it, also, a metaphor.

Give Mia some credit

ARTICLE: China to Send Military Unit to Darfur, By Edward Cody, Washington Post, May 8, 2007

China stepping up. This is so much better than shaming Beijing into withdrawal. we want them to show responsibility on the ground, not disengage or reduce Sudan's meager current connectivity to the global economy.

That's the best way to transform the "genocide Olympics" (Western, do-nothing, know-nothing hypocisy at it's worst) into something better--like China-the-emerging-SysAdmin/peacekeeping-force-of-globalization ("We own our connectivity").

What is our military really doing to encourage this? What is our government doing? Virtually nothing.

So yeah, Mia Farrow gets more credit on this one than talking-point Condi does.

Thanks to Chris Mewett for sending this.

Past-era tools for next-era problems

ARTICLE: U.S. Debates Deterrence for Nuclear Terrorism, By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER, New York Times, May 8, 2007

Classic example of a solution trying to find the right problem.

So OBE it hurts, but such is the state of strategic thinking in America today: using past-era tools for next-era problems.

Deterrence was great while it lasted and lasts now only where it's most often completely unneeded.

Yes, some spots where it's still key (India-Pak) and where it might soon be key (Israel-Iran), but it won't solve the global guerrillas challenge Robb describes.

Not bad NATO!

ARTICLE: NATO paces Afghan offensive, By Philip Smucker, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, May 8, 2007

Grow some lawn instead of always killing weeds.

Ireland tamed Northern Ireland, and the Brit military just bought time.

The power of example + exhaustion.

Simply unsustainable

ARTICLE: National Guard deals with less equipment, BY DION LEFLER, The Wichita Eagle, May 8th, 2007

The right System Perturbation will inevitably come along and reveal the growing gaps.

This is a tertiary cost of not having enough allies in Iraq.

Kurds need freedom to work PKK

ARTICLE: Turkish-Kurdish Dispute Tests U.S. Strategic Alliances, By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, May 8, 2007; Page A17

For our alliance with both to work, we've got to give the Kurds enough independence so that they crack down on PKK themselves.

No fair fight

ARTICLE: Mapping the electronic jihad, By Rebecca Givner-Forbes and Clay Shwery, RSIS, April 25th, 2007

This is Olivier Roy's point about jihad fighting fire with fire: they globalize the movement to fight globalization.

Yes, in the short term it advantages their asymmetrical warfare approach. But here is where they lose: unable to disable globalization (forget the West and America, the Asians will simply not allow it), they increasingly lure the boy out of the country into the big bad world, and you know what?

That's an irreversible process that kills jihad over time.

So, no, they never did have a chance. The only questions remaining are time and pain.

Watch the brilliant "Ashes and Diamonds" (Poland's greatest film) and you'll know what I mean.

And yes, it won't be a fair fight. It was never going to be.

Thanks to Craig Nordin.

Waiting on this for a long time

ARTICLE:
US and China tug at ASEAN unity, By Michael Vatikiotis, Asia Times Online, May 8th, 2007

Waiting on this argument/analysis for a long time.

ASEAN grows, cooperation gets more complex, and just when it needs mulitlateralist impulses from within and without, along with a strategic vision for Asia's security/economic integration (to keep pace with NATO and EU), along come both the unimaginative Chinese and clumsy Americans all hooting and hollering about why "you need a much stronger bilat with me!"

This is a pointless contest that--ultimately--we cannot win.

We can only leapfrog and simultaneously jumpstart it by making the East Asian NATO happen ASAP, thus negating a choice that no one in Asia wants to make: between their favorite final assembler and their favorite customer.

Another example of what having two Bush terms costs us: delay.

Thanks to Rob Johnson for sending this.