Some common sense on Iran

■"Our Allies In Iran," op-ed by Afshin Molavi, New York Times, 3 November 2005, pulled from web.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/opinion/03molavi.html

Very much worth reading.

Here's my favorite bits.

WHEN Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called last week for Israel to be "wiped off the map," he raised fears not only abroad but also at home, particularly among Iran's sizeable, democratically minded middle class. The new president's confrontational tone threatens to deepen the isolation of Iran's democrats, pushing them further behind his long shadow. Western powers have a dual challenge: to find a way to engage this population even as they struggle to address the new president's inflammatory rhetoric.

By the time Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected in June, a sustained assault by hard-liners had left Iranian democrats disoriented and leaderless, their dissidents jailed, newspapers closed and reformist political figures popularly discredited.

But democratic aspirations should not be written off as a passing fad that died with the failure of the reform movement and the replacement of a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, with a hard-liner, Mr. Ahmadinejad. The historic roots of reform run deep in Iran, and support for democratic change remains widespread.

Iran's modern middle class, which is increasingly urbanized, wired and globally connected, provides particularly fertile soil for these aspirations. The Stanford University scholar Abbas Milani has described Iran's middle class as a "Trojan horse within the Islamic republic, supporting liberal values, democratic tolerance and civic responsibility." And so long as that class grows, so too will the pressure for democratic changeÖ

Now more than ever, middle-class and other democracy-minded Iranians need to preserve and expand their network of institutions independent from the government - institutions in which they can take refuge from the rapacious hardliners who seek to control all aspects of Iranian life. That network should include a strong private sector; a rich array of nongovernmental organizations dealing with issues like poverty, women's rights and youth unemployment; and social, intellectual and cultural associations that communicate with counterparts abroad.

Unfortunately, United States sanctions now prevent any American person or group from financially supporting, say, a microfinance bank, a program to train future political leaders or even an education initiative for rural women in Iran. That is a mistake Ö

Critics may protest that bolstering Iran's economy through such middle-class development will prolong the Islamic regime. But that's unlikely, if history is any guide. Certainly two decades of economic growth, during which the middle class swelled and political and economic ties to the United States were tight, failed to preserve the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi . . .

Today poverty, not prosperity, again propels Iran toward extremist politics. Mr. Ahmadinejad's election - however flawed - did not reflect a popular desire for a harder-line foreign policy or for a rush to obtain nuclear weapons. Rather, it emerged from a persistent sense of low-grade economic pain, resentment of the ruling elites' corruption and frustration with widening income gaps. Most Iranians concern themselves far more with the price of meat and onions than with the Arab-Israeli peace process or uranium enrichment Ö

Before the revolution, American officials often urged the dictatorial shah to share power with the emerging middle class. The shah chose to ignore that advice, and Americans eventually stopped offering it. Now is the time to dust off such thinking and pursue a policy that targets economic support to our natural allies in Iran's economic center. Only a strong and stable middle class can ensure that Iran's inevitable winds of change do more than knock down a few trees - or produce another populist demagogue.

Bloody brilliant.

Burn-out

Dateline:Crystal City hotel, Arlington VA, 3 November 2005

Up early this a.m. for 0700 breakfast meet in DC with Steve DeAngelis and some federal contacts. Great discussion.

Then back to my hotel for hour iinterview with Dong Young Yun, Washington correspondent of the Yonhap News Agency out of South Korea. She was a great interviewer, and the conversation was mostly about Kim Jong Il.

Followed that with another hour with two reporters from USA Today, Matt Kelley (who profiled me last year for AP) and Dave Moniz. Two very well versed guys in the subject of defense, so that was bang-bang-bang and then 60 minutes had passed. It's a lot of fun to go the second time with people to whom I was just being introduced last time. No need for pleasantries, just the content flow. It's a nice form of interpersonal connectivity that BFA allows me to enjoy this time around (last time too nervous).

Then I do the Glen Mitchell show out of Dallas NPR. He's a solid interviewer, and this was my third time on his show. He had a bad cold and it "showed" in his voice, but he pulled through and the questions from callers were all great. That ran an hour over the phone in my hotel room.

Then an hour with Michael Barone of U.S. News. I had extremely brief F2F with him last time during break in my National Defense U brief (the long CSPAN one) and had only interacted with him substantively over the phone, so it was cool to just sit down with him and go at it for the hour. He has an interesting style of sort of arguing-but-not-quite-arguing with you that keeps the flow moving very rapidly. I learn something in interviewing by that.

Then I go see an old friend in the hospital, and I don't pass up the chance to tell him how much I love him and how much he's meant to me as a mentor.

Then I rush to a Navy banquet, sit through dinner, and do an hour-long brief before about 100. Then I sign about . . . I dunno . . .. 50 to 60 books, maybe more. I lost track. My right hand really started hurting.

I am baked.

Zenpundit: No legitimacy, no resilience. No resilience, no state

Profound post. Worth reading. Gives me much to think about, as Mark always does. Snip follows:

The hydra-like insurgency in Iraq has drawn attention to the political conundrum faced by state authorities when facing unconventional opponents. Whether they come in the form of traditional guerillas, transnational terrorist networks and even looser " leaderless resistance" movements that attract superempowered individuals, State actors often face the damned if you do, damned if you don't cycle of reaction and retaliation. Drifting into a seemingly permanent loss of initiative, the state allows the non-state actors to " write the script" in the political and moral dimensions of the conflict, creating strategic losses even out of tactical and operational victories.

This has led some military theorists of the 4GW school to make particularly gloomy forecasts in regard to not only Iraq, but toward all "state-building" interventions and even the long-term stability of the states of the Core. 4GW and "Open-Source " warfare of Global Guerillaism are inarguably very effective and these methods of warfare, when a State reacts conventionally and with political ineptitude, place the very legitimacy of the state itself is in jeopardy.

It would be a grave mistake however to conclude that these forms of warfare represent a magic anti-state bullet. They do not. 4GW forces can lose wars and have. Much of the current track record of 4GW success rests primarily upon the recurring failure of their state opponents to deliberately maximize their existing advantages and secondarily to develop and employ countervailing tactics. In other words, these represent failures of strategic vision on the part of statesmen and commanders who get caught up in the small-picture dynamics of the scenario rather than directing their attention to shaping the scenario itself. Some quotations to keep in mind here:

KERA-FM (NPR) Now

Taking phone calls from listeners. . .

1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EST

KERA-FM (NPR)

Host: Glenn Mitchell

A view from Iraq

Got this email recently. Name withheld at request.

Tom:

I'll start out with the obligatory gushing. Bottom line up front,††

your stuff is great. It's like reading my thoughts, only they are††

developed, coherent, humorous and researched. You're a touch less††

conservative than i am, but i can live with that.

a brief introduction - I'm currently serving in Iraq. I work at a division headquarters. Because of my unique location, I got to see a lot more issues than most - specifically, the Iraqi government up close and personal, several contractors and the Dept of State side of the house, among others.

I've been reading your blog for about 6 months, and have read about††

everything else i can get my hands on for free. (I'm planning to buy††

your books when i get back, but right now i read escapist fiction.††

reading strategy/vision/tactical stuff just pisses me off)

anyways a few comments:

Today as I was driving around our FOB, a realization struck me like a††

lightning bolt. We desperately need the Sysadmin force. I've always††

agreed with this concept, but thought we could shoehorn it into our††

existing force structure. Not any more.

An example - contracting for the rebuilding of Iraq. Too fractured,††

no continuity and no real prioritization. We've spent $25 million on††

a sewage plant over the past year, still nothing. Why? 3 different††

battalion commanders in that AO, money flow changes daily and no big††

picture - As a commander, i love the autonomy, but we have to change††

our culture. The BCT concept is a decent solution for some††

warfighting problems, not working for the sysadmin stuff. From my††

perch, i see very little prioritization of rebuilding, it's killing us.

You need oath-swearing individuals to run reconstruction. Outsourcing††

the training of the Iraqi Police and governance consulting for the††

Iraqi government is a not good. Don't get me wrong, lots of well††

meaning good people here, but they do not have the same incentives to††

get stuff done, specifically an overriding dedication to mission††

accomplishment. There are too many mercs (not just the security††

contractors) and corporate consultants who do nothing. Kick them out,††

get the military in the business of training the iraqi government.

The Army is stuck on the the training center model of training. When††

you go to JRTC, the O/C's say they are all there to help, but we know††

the real deal. Their "help" is usually along the lines of "hey here's††

what you did wrong, boy you suck, here's some ideas how to do it††

better next time". We need to be actively teaching and mentoring††

these guys on the basics. I had to train a police captain how to take††

notes. This guy did not know how to take notes. How can i train him††

to run patrols and conduct operations if he can't take notes? That's††

the level we need to get to (sometimes). If they know how to take††

notes, great! next topic.

ok, enough venting for now. I only ask that you keep me reasonably††

anonymous.

thanks

Fascinating email huh? I basically concur with all his diagnoses, especially his take on not wanting to outsource security to the private sector. This guy has his head screwed on straight.

We wish this guy well and thank him for serving our country.

Just what the doctor ordered...

Dateline: hotel, Crystal City, Arlington VA, 2 November 2005

Up at 0500 in San Antonio. Driver to airport. Short fligth to Dallas-Fort Worth (some airport!), then the long haul to Baltimore. First class, so relaxed. I set up the boilerplates on 10 blog posts, but then start dicking with the brief and I do that the rest of the way. Put together what I now feel is the killer package of PNM greatest hits plus slides that cover the first half of BFA (the prescriptions--just can't get to the back-half material in these one-hour briefs).

Land at BWI, hop in rental and drive to Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (hope I remember that acronym correctly). Speak in same big auditorium there I spoke at about two years ago. SRO plus another 100 or so on closed-circuit. I give them 70 slides in 70 minutes in that bang-bang rapid-fire way that my slidemaker Bradd Hayes prefers. It goes over very well. Some Big War crabbies frowning throughout, but a lot of young faces very excited.

Then I hop in rental and drive to hotel in Crystal City, steam wrinkles out of my pants, switch ties, and walk several blocs to Principles of War seminar talk I give to another SRO audience of defense community types. Event is Office of Force Transformation sponsored and hosted by current head of Navy plans and policy, a good guy named John Morgan (think he's a three-star). I get two hours here instead of one, so I really relax and have fun with the 70 slides. Probably my best performance to date with the BFA brief. Signed books. Made a lot of contacts. Got some feedback from people inside the Pentagon about how BFA already being put to use. Extremely gratifying to hear. The reform movement in the direction of the SysAdmin force is real and it's happening.

Good example: just got invite from Lt Gen David Petraeus to address big command school student body audience in late Jan at Fort Leavenworth in KS. Gonna have to quid pro quo that one. Want some face time before then.

Yes, yes, the wheels are turning.

Tomorrow is chock-full for me. May be looking at a super blog post on Friday.

One for the record books ...

Tonight was easily the worst performance I have ever given in my professional career, and beyond a doubt the worst reception I've ever endured.

It was a strange, strange evening, really a public speaking version of a "perfect storm" of bad outcomes, despite basically everyone involved making decent decisions and reasonable compromises and trying to make it work.

I have never felt humiliated or so summarily rejected onstage, and I can't remember the last time I was uncomfortable--until tonight.

Hell, the MC could only talk--out loud--about the "extremely trying circumstances" as he asked the audience to applaud as I slinked off-stage.

Really. It was that bad, as in Bill-Clinton-1988-Dem-convention-bad!

If that had been the first time I'd given the BFA brief, I would never give it again.

And yet a half-dozen people came up afterwards and said it was a good talk (content-wise), while admitting the audience completely tuned me out, continuing with their meals as though I was background music.

If I hadn't spoken successfully over meals in big rooms before, I would swear off ever doing so again. But I just gotta believe this was a freakily bad confluence of parameters (sound flicked on and off on clip-on until I abandoned it, screens were literally dozens of yards from my podium position, audience was totally burned out on speakers and apparently were really pissed that I was: (a) not Rumsfeld as long promised/rumored/hoped for and (b) not what they were looking for in terms of evening entertainment.

I mean, when I fumbled late on a slide (I simply refused to go through with a humorous reference regarding my family because I feared showing a picture of them would create some nasty backlash from the audience), the audience actually applauded my moment of silence (a la Bill Clinton being cheeredin 1988 when he uttered the words, "In conclusion . . ."), seemingly in attempt to convince me to abandon ship.

I did so about three slides later, mumbling my final words with almost no sense of where I was going to end it all.

Humbling ain't the word. . .

This was Favre throwing 5 INTs and looking incompetent against the Rams in a playoff game a few years back--that bad. It must have been equisite to watch. I came close to simply walking off stage more times than I could count.

All that after four really cool hours of signing books (both) for dozens upon dozens of people. Talk about a steep drop!

I apologized to anyone and everyone who would listen afterwards, calling it my worst performance ever. My hosts apologized to me profusely. It was almost like a contest or something, that's how obviously bad the whole thing seemed to everyone in attendance. Like a nightmare blind date that was WRONG! Just plain WRONG from the get-go.

I must deconstruct for lessons learned. But all I want right now is a room-service burger and sleep before flying out early tomorrow to Baltimore.

I give the brief twice tomorrow. No choice but to get back up on the horse.

Signing books in San Antonio

Dateline: Convention Center, San Antonio TX, 1 November 2005

Flew in from Indy this morning, landing in Texas around noon.

I speak tonight at the Geoint (United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation) Symposium's annual awards banquet.

They had me down to sign books from 2:30 to 3:30, and as I was signing books, I started working the brief on my laptop between people. I end up just hanging at this table next to the impromptu bookstore just outside the exhibit hall for the entire time between that first signing and the scheduled second one at 5:30-6:30. Felt like a couple hundred books in all, evenly split between BFA hardcovers and PNM paperbacks. Lotsa nice discussions, to include bumping into some old friends like Rob Holzer from the Office of Force Transformation.

Weird sort of way to spend an afternoon, signing books for four hours, but actually pretty cool to have all those discussions with very hardcore readers from throughout the defense community.

Here's the daily catch:

■ The SysAdmin force: now more than ever

■ The oh-so-Catholic Supreme Court

■ The next wave of laws to test companies' resiliency on rule sets

■ China's "Deadwood" capitalism persists

■ Malawi: too much globalization or too little? Ask the loggers.

■ EU on Tony the Tiger: "He's grrrrrrrrreat! (except in Denmark)

■ Another example of private-sector SysAdmin forces: born of sheer desperation

■ Iran's mullahs on Hollywood: Be afraid! Be very afraid!

The SysAdmin force: now more than ever

■"7 More U.S. Deaths in Iraq End a Lethal Month," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. A6.

■"U.N. Tells Syria To Stop Impeding Slaying Inquiry: Unanimous Council Vote; Damascus Is Warned of 'Further Action' if It Fails to Comply," by Warren Hoge, New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. A1.

■"U.N. Demands Syria Cooperate In Hariri Probe: Sanction Threat Is Omitted As Resolution Is Weakened To Gain Unanimous Vote," by Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 1 November 2005, p. A14.

■"The Winding Damascus Road: Progress against Syria, in the U.N. fashion," editorial, Wall Street Journal, 1 November 2005, p. A16.

■"India's Premier Says Pakistan Must Do More To Stop Attacks," by Hari Kumar,New York Times, 1November 2005, p. A10.

Great graphic in the NYT story, showing death totals by month in Iraq.

Here's the short version: We lost about 140 in the war (March-April 2003), and then we averaged losses of less than 40 a month for the next five months (the period of the peace we blew, big time, by not making security and the reconstruction happen). Since October 2003, the 25 months that followed featured 10 with totals of roughly 80 deaths or more, a number we didn't even hit in the intense last days of the war (April). Thirteen more months featured roughly 40 or more deaths. Only 2 months had death totals in the range of the first five months of the peace.

We get the peace right in those first five months. We have enough boots on the ground and a SysAdmin force that's adequately equipped and funded and prioritized and internationalized and inter-agency-ized and guess what? If we keep the death totals under 40 a month, we're talking roughly half as few casualties as we've suffered to date, and probably a whole lot better than that because the insurgency never would have gotten off the ground (hands made busy by the economic recovery wouldn't be making bombs).

Something to think about.

Because when we fail in Iraq, there is so much more we do not do around the world.

We can't invade Syria right now if we wanted to. Don't even dream about Iran, so please, let's not even entertain the notion that we're "giving" them the bomb by our inaction. We gave them all the opportunity and time and motivation for the bomb by deciding to go after the Taliban and Saddam. They want it now, they've got it.

Being a grand strategist isn't about telling people what they want to hear. It's about helping them see the inevitable and working to shape that outcome as much as possible.

Something will need to be done about Syria, and Iran will have to be co-opted as a security pillar in the region. That and a host of other things will have to occur if we want to see the Big Bang through to serious fruition across the region, meaning we leave lasting security alliance structures in our wake.

Those alliances will require outside patronage other than our own, to include not just the EU, but India, Russia, Turkey, China, Japan and Korea. We'll need all the properly incentivized players around the table, but that won't happen so long as we can't master the SysAdmin role.

Because we'll stay stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq, instead of being able to move onto to even more complicated situations in places like Pakistan and Syria, two places where the SysAdmin can be part of the solution set but the Leviathan force is unlikely to be.

That's a key point I need to emphasize more: the SysAdmin can and will go places that the Leviathan cannot, for a host of reasons (the simplest being that the SysAdmin is an invitation to network with something larger, while the Leviathan is basically a punch in the face).

Just look at fellow Core state India's problem with Pakistan, because it's not unlike our own. India can't send its version of the Leviathan there, and yet look what its SysAdmin-style assets could do in the Pakistani temblor: create good will in ways the Leviathan never could (best example is that Pakistan said yes to Indian helos but no to Indian helo pilots!).

India can never fight its way out of the terrorist threat stemming from within Pakistan's borders, it can only negate that threat over time by networking itself, security-wise, with Pakistan. That's SysAdmin work, not Leviathan.

More and more in the future, we're going to find ourselves realizing that: the only answer here is the SysAdmin force.

And that is going to remain especially true so long as we keep buying for the Leviathan and underfunding the SysAdmin force. Unwittingly, that's what all the China hawk crowd does, day in and day out: it robs Peter (GWOT's SysAdmin force) to pay Paul (the Leviathan's dreams of future great power war).

I ask you plainly: who is the idealist looking ahead? The guy who sees the inevitability of the SysAdmin force and the A-to-Z Core-wide rule set on processing politically bankrupt states in the Gap? Or the "realists" who pine for war with China over Taiwan?

Which pathway seems more likely? Which arguments seem more insane? Which route gets you more American deaths?

Think about it.

The oh-so-Catholic Supreme Court

■"Bush Picks U.S. Appeals Judge To Take O'Connor's Court Seat: Hailed By Right; Democrats Say Alito Presents Problems-Filibuster Seen," by Elisabeth Bumiller and Carl Hulse, New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. A1.

■"Potentially, the First Shot in All-Out Ideological War," by Todd S. Purdum, New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. A18.

■"Alito Could Be 5th Catholic On Current Supreme Court," by Lynette Clemetson, New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. A19.

Bush went conservative all right, and now we've really got our threat to Roe v. Wade. The American Catholic church has let itself become defined by this issue, which accounts for the increasingly conservative caste of both the clergy and faithful.

Now, with Alito likely to join Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, and moderate Kennedy on the bench, we're looking at a majority Catholic Supreme Court. It wasn't that long ago (my early years) that there was a single, dedicated "Catholic seat" on the Court.

Now, thanks to the divisive issue of abortion, the Catholics are running the Court more and more.

Really amazing when you think of it. When I was born, the great religious controversy was having the first (and to date, only) Catholic president, John Kennedy. Oh the concerns that the White House would be captured by the Vatican!

Well, the Vatican is coming awfully close to capturing the Supreme Court.

And as a moderate Catholic, I confess I am made nervous by this development.

Reversing Roe v. Wade is a chimera, a dream. With global connectivity, abortion can and will be outsourced to nations (like India, with its burgeoning medical tourism) on a low-cost basis. Our only alternative will be ultrasounds at airports to stop pregnant women from traveling abroad, which, quite frankly, will come off like some queer sci-fi future dystopia story or--worse--like some scene from a freaky socialist regime like old Nicolae Ceaucescu's Romania (that's how all those orphanages got filled up, my friends, not a pretty sight).

Still, what an opportunity for Bush to take the heat off his administration! Good call for him. Timing couldn't have been better.

The next wave of laws to test companies' resiliency on rule sets

■"Date Security Laws Seem Likely, So Consumers and Businesses Vie to Shape Them," by Tom Zeller, Jr., New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. C3.

So many breaches by companies on consumers' personal data in the last year, sometimes basically torpedoing the company in question by killing its reputation.

Now Congress is considering up to a dozen bills, many which will mandate all sorts of new reporting regulations, like confessing each breach to the FTC. Companies, naturally, seek to fight such regulation, but if it must come, they want a clear federal rule set to ride herd over any discrepancies by state, otherwise the compliance issues skyrocket in complexity.

The biggest problem right now, according to an expert quoted in the piece, is "the patchwork of laws governing too many narrowly sliced industries and too many different situations, when it is really all about the data."

The nightmare? The FTC routinely auditing your company's security program following every reported breach.

It's stories like these that make my job as Senior Managing Director of Enterra Solutions, provider extraordinaire of rule-set automation that covers your ass on both reporting and audit trails, far easier than it might seem. Once a door is opened, this capability sells itself in the current, highly-complex-and-growing-ever-more-so regulatory environment.

Expect to read more and more stories like this. Privacy is the ultimate human right in the networked world.

China's "Deadwood" capitalism persists

■"Dispute Leaves U.S. Executives In Chinese Legal Netherworld," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. A1.

Fascinating story about how a state-owned Chinese firm uses the police and courts to try and shake down a rival U.S.-based firm for money it says it's owed.

Most people will look at this and say, "My God, that's the state running a company! How unfair!"

The scarier reality is this: a company is running the local government. There is irony beyond belief in this outcome for Mao's China, because it describes the sort of high-end capitalism that Marx feared: when companies became so important to the state that the state lets itself be used by them.

This will taper off with time as the global investment community (supplier of that $50B a year that keeps China's economy humming) begins demanding more transparent rule sets, as is, there are easier ways to collect disputed debts than getting the government to imprison your rival's senior executives.

Here's the key para from the piece:

Difficulty enforcing contracts, rampant violations of copyrights and trademarks and protection of domestic industry champions have heightened trade tensions at a time when China is struggling to convince the outside world that its growing economic might poses no threat. Beijing is under heavy pressure to embrace global legal norms with the same fervor it has pursued foreign trade.

As I say in BFA, if you want to understand capitalism in China today, watch HBO's "Deadwood," where Al Swearengen, the evil boss of the frontier town basically has all the local authorities on his payroll. In short, the company owns the town and the government to boot. There is a lot of this in China today, masquerading as state-own enterprises (known as "wearing the red hat") when, in reality, it's more often the other way around--namely, the company owns the local government.

And before you get too jacked. Remember that this is different in degree but not in kind from the way cozy government-corporate relationships that marked the rise of Japan, South Korea, Singapore and others in the region.

Yes, yes, autocrats build nations, but democracies are better are running them and processing all the competing social demands. Monopolies build nets, but markets are better at running them.

In Asia, the governments build companies, then the companies outgrow the government, and as the transaction rate in the private sector skyrockets thanks to foreign trade and investment, that better market begins to demand better government. Markets make democracies, not the other way around.

Malawi: too much globalization or too little? Ask the loggers.

■"Malawi Is Burning, and Deforestation Erodes Economy: A nation imperiled by foresters who make just $20 a month," by Michael Wines, New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. A3.

Globalization destroys the environment. Globalization impoverishes.

You hear these myths all the time.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you want to see serious environmental degradation, look at the states least connected to the global economy. If you want to see the most stringent enviro laws, check out the most globalized economies.

Multinational corporations come into impoverished countries and pay--on average--40 to 50% higher wages than the local economy.

How important is that to "saving the environment"?

Let the loggers of Malawi speak:

Mr. Juma and his friends are loggers, members of a vast fraternity that has illegally laid waste to half this nation, mostly in the last 15 years, all to hawk firewood and charcoal at roadside stands. [Not for export, mind you]

Because of them, experts say, Malawi loses nearly 200 square miles of its forests annually, a deforestation rate of 2.8 percent that the Southern Africa Development Community says is one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.

The cutting blights a pastoral, sometimes breathtaking landscape. It dries up streams, pollutes the air, lowers the water table, erodes the soil and silts rivers so badly that, officials here say, hydroelectric plants are blacked out by the gunk.

It is hard to think of many other things that Mr. Juma and his fellow loggers could do that would damage the nation more.

The problem is that it is hard to think of many other ways that Mr. Juma and his fellow loggers could make a living, period.

"The problem is that we have nothing else to do," said Mr. Juma, a wiry 33-year-old with a neon green shirt tied around his bare waist, standing over the remains of the chopped-up masuku [tree]. "We have no money to raise our families. We have nowhere to run, nothing else to do. So we have to cut the trees to feed our families."

All this destruction to generate about $8m in income a year for all those loggers.

Imagine just how much they'd love to be "exploited" by a big old Western multinational corporation.

More than 60% of the Malawis live on less than a dollar a day, the official global standard for extreme poverty. The global average is 20%. Most live in rural areas, and so their hopes to escape poverty are nil.

This is the essense of the journey from the Gap to the Core: from the rural to the city, from no job to a job, from no income to some income, from women as birthing machines to women as factor workers, from devastating the environment to having a stake in its survival.

The reason why the loggers cut down the trees is that less than 2% of the public are hooked to the electrical grid, so that's how they heat homes and cook food. Simple as that.

Malawi is landlocked, but full of cheap labor just waiting to be "exploited."



Too much globalization?

Not enough, my friends, not enough.

Guess who's right next door to Malawi? Robert Mugabe's imprisoned Zimbabwe. Guess what he does for property values and the investment climate?

Think it doesn't matter for the environment? Think again. It's all connected.

EU on Tony the Tiger: "He's grrrrrrrrreat! (except in Denmark)

■"Corn Flakes Clash Shows the Glitches In European Union: Nations Retain Separate Rules That Business Leaders Say Hobble Economic Growth; How Much to Fortify a Cereal," by G. Thomas Sims, Wall Street Journal, 1 November 2005, p. A1.

The E.U. is becoming a sort of weird, rules-engine superpower, meaning they create rule sets that will determine much of the emerging global rule sets on a host of issues, with food safety being a key one (just watch them on the avian flu and poultry).

And yet, sometimes the E.U. gets so wrapped around its axle on these things that it gets awfully self-indulgently counterproductive.

This article is a hoot, showing how the states in the E.U. fight over the weirdest little bits about folic acid, Vitamin D, etc. That means Kellogg still needs to generate four versions of corn flakes for sale in the E.U. Imagine such a thing here and you start to realize what a real model we are for the future of globalization.

But it's not just food, as the article points out. Caterpillar must make special vehicles for Germany, where back-up horns need to be louder than in the rest of the E.U. Germany's also a place where you basically can't hired a temp, unless you buy them for days on end. So companies buy temp workers for far longer than needed to comply with the law. As the head of Manpower (based in Milwaukee) put it: "It's lost GDP."

This is the number one reason why Korea, Japan and especially China haven't switched their dollar reserves to euros: you basically buy a slower rate of growth with Go-Slow Europe.

Another example of private-sector SysAdmin forces: born of sheer desperation

■"Opening a New Front in the War Against AIDS," by Peter R. Dolan, Wall Street Journal, 1 November 2005, p. B2.

Baylor College of Medicine and Bristol-Myers Squibb come together to invent the Pediatric AIDS Corps, or doctors who will be dropped "behind the lines in southern Africa."

Sub-Saharan Africa, the article notes, has 1% of the medical workers and more than 60% of the AIDS patients, with AIDS being a very manpower-intensive treatment regime. In that environment, kids naturally suffer the most (experts estimate that only 1 in 100 kids there gets any care whatsoever). At 1.9 infected, that's about 1,000 deaths a day.

Puts our 1,000 troops a year in Iraq in some perspective.

Why make the comparison?

We do the SysAdmin right in Iraq, then those 1,000 troops don't die. Instead, they're perhaps providing logistics and command and control and medical support for things like the Pediatric AIDS Corps.

It costs $130,000 a year to send a doc over there, but it's estimated that they can treat 1,3000 kids and trains dozens of other healthcare workers during that one year.

When we screw up the SysAdmin effort early in the Iraq "peace," we don't just condemn that country to lengthy civil strife, we tie down our military assets that might otherwise be used--as they have been so extensively throughout the Gap across the 1990s and right up to 9/11 (almost completely unbeknownst to the American public, because casualties were close to zero in such operations--save for accidents)--in exactly these sorts of humanitarian relief ops.

So it's not just our losses that should be added up when we fail to field the effective SysAdmin force. We need to add in all the opportunity costs, costs which have become so painfully obvious that private colleges and corporations are taking matters into their own hands out of a sense of moral obligation.

We can do better.

Iran's mullahs on Hollywood: Be afraid! Be very afraid!

■"Iran strikes up the ban vs. foreign pix," by Ali Jafaar, Variety, 31 October-6 November 2005, p. 8.

Fascinating connectivity-v.-content-control dynamic with Iran.

Tehran's hardliners ban all foreign films that are described as promoting "secular, feminist, liberal or nihilist ideas."

Well, that pretty takes care of Hollywood and everything on HBO!

Yes, this is the latest braindeadchild from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Gotta keep a lid on anything coming from the "world oppressor."

This reverses the stand of previous president Mohammad Khatami "to open up Iran to Western culture."

The upshot? Content smugglers in Iran will have a heyday. There is a "massive black market and illicit satellite viewership" in Iran (it is estimated that 50% of the houses in Iran have satellites--what a bitch for the mullahs!).

Iran's total movie B.O. is about $14m annually, with only 3% officially from foreign films. Most experts and local media players say the actual foreign revenue (almost all black market) is probably 50 times that amount.

Yes, yes. "Isolating" Iran globally is really going to pull down this hardline regime. This is the same strategic genius that's brought you the longest-running dictatorship in the world: Cuba's Fidel Castro.

Enough said.

Watch RealPlayer "After Words" - Barnett and Feeney

Watch RealPlayer recording:

After Words: Thomas P.M. Barnett interviewed by Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)

Description: This week on After Words Thomas P.M. Barnett discusses his book "Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating." It's his strategic roadmap for U.S. foreign policy and a plan to strengthen national security. He is interviewed by Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL).