Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Dateline: IcelandAir Flight 633 from Reykjavik to Boston Logan, 1 February 2005

Gotta admit: the Iraqi election process went very well, and it was very impressive to see so many voters, so many candidates, and such a professional effort all around but especially from the interim government leadership. It's a big deal this all went so well in a country of over 25 million (something like three dozen deaths nationally despite a lot of efforts from the insurgency).

You have to hand it to Bush and the Neocons: they don't just talk about doing stuff, they actually get it done. Ugly and incompetent at times (basically the entire occupation)? Definitely. But they get it done. Others talk, promise, hedge, and generally give reasons why none of this can ever happen, but this election happened. It is awfully hard to imagine anything but Saddam still in power if Bush isn't president these last four years. And it's awfully hard to imagine all the change and tumult in the Middle East since 9/11 that actually has the region looking like it might finally start moving in the direction of something better after roughly half a century of U.S. presidents promising to do something and never quite doing anything but let it sink further.

The big thing now for the Bush administration is simply being smart enough to realize that with all the initial conditions severely altered, they need to plan adaptively if they want to take advantage of what they've started. That's basically my pitch in the Feb. Esquire piece, which the magazine will soon post online.

Frankly, my favorite media story to date on the election was run prior to Sunday's vote ("In Culture Dominated by Men, Questions About Women's Vote," by James Glanz, NYT, 30 Jan 05, p. 16). Talk about a glimpse of freedom: all those Iraqi women, for the first time in their lives, making a political decision "away from the immediate influence of husbands, sheiks and other clerics."

Here are some of my favorite bits:

• "Many women here express resentment over the de facto control that clerics already exercise in this lives and cite clerical rule in Iran as an example to be avoided. Many say that in the privacy of the polling booth, whatever the sheik may have directed will not be in play."


• "'I would go and listen to him and see if his words would be of interest to me,' said Om Muntadhar, an elderly government worker and a member of a local aid society. 'But when I go to the booth, I will do as I wish.'"


• "Women in Basra generally cite security and stability as top concerns for election day and put religion lower on the list."


• "'We want a really strong person, not a sheik,' said Iman Abdul Karik, also a government worker,. And Iman al-Timini, a translator, said she heard the same message from women again and again: 'No one would vote for the turbans.'"

Here's the real promise: the U.S. mandated that at least one-third of the candidate lists be made up of women. No matter how many get elected versus the religious leaders, we've set something very powerful in motion here, something the Salafi jihadists like al-Zarqawi and bin Laden will never abide by.

Catching up on news stories:

Africa insourcing? You bet, and language is key

An interesting piece in the International Herald Tribune ("Accent on Africa: A new continent for outsourcers," by Marc Lacey of NYT, 1 Feb, p. 11). Key of development seems to be legacy of English and French colonialism, which generates the language skills. Ghana and Kenya (English-speaking), plus South Africa of course, show the greatest advances to date, plus the greatest potential. But a bunch of French-speaking countries (Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, Madagascar) are also joining the club, even though that's a potentially smaller global market over the long haul.

So far there are only about 50,000 call center jobs in Africa, out of a global total of six million, but as India, Philippines and Canada mature as labor forces and the price tags there start to go up, up-and-coming African states can be the next ones to move up that ladder. It's lucrative enough so that companies involved basically bypass the lack of wireline infrastructure and go satellite.

Kim Jong-Il rerun in works, making me ill at thought

Scary article on Kim Jong-Il making noises about one of his idiot sons succeeding him some day ("North Korea raises notion of a 3rd-generation Kim," by James Brooke of NYT, 1 Feb, IHT, p. 2). His old man started getting the people ready 30 years ago on Kim when he hit his early 60s, so dutiful monarch that he is, Kim, age 62, is doing the same.

After hearing East Asian experts at the MIT seminar talk about having to live with North Korea at least until Kim dies (best guess, a good 20 years), the notion of one of his sons carrying on the tradition is deeply disturbing. The North Korean population is basically developmentally delayed as a society after all these years of iron-fisted rule and lack of decent nutrition, which—of course—impacts the 0-5 crowd most of all, making North Koreans progressively feeble-minded over time. I guess we should just wait another half century or so and maybe the entire place will be filled with four-foot-tall Neanderthals, like those tiny prehistoric humans whose remains archeologists just found. I'm not kidding, either. People there are shrinking in both size and IQ, thanks to all the years of deprivations. The Hermit Kingdom will be a modern-day Pygmy Kingdom if the Core doesn't finally step in and stop this horrific madness.

Unlike Iran, where I think the country and regime is ripe for connectivity (marginalizing the mullahs in a killing-them-softly-with-our-connectivity scenario), North Korea's continued isolation will serve no useful purpose while merely continuing the suffering of all those millions. Kill the mullahs' rule with connectivity alright, but just plain Kill Kim (pick any Vol. you want from my Esquire piece).

China's magic number

Interesting note from Davos meeting ("At Forum, Leaders Confront Annual Enigma of China," by Mark Landler, NYT, 30 Jan 05, off web): the usual "China's development will by no means post a threat to other countries" from China's exec VP sent there, Huang Ju.

But here was the bit that caught my eye: remember from PNM how I do the bit about all the conflicts in the world in the 1990s, and virtually all occur in countries with GDP per capita levels of less than $3,000?

Well, China's GDP per capita is predicted to triple by 2020, growing in total size to $4 trillion (still less than half of today's US economy, which sits in the range of $10 trillion). That number will yield a per cap of $3,000.

So China's emergence is ultimately not a danger, and yet, the Core as a whole has some history to cover with China between now and 2020, does it not? Otherwise, maybe we don't make that magic number without some useless and unnecessary conflict—something I also deal with in the Esquire piece right on the stands today (and hopefully on the web next week or earlier).

Dateline: IcelandAir Flight 633 from Reykjavik to Boston Logan, 1 February 2005

I gotta admit: I am doing very well on my BFA schedule given the travel of the last five days. I had my plan going into this multi-stage, multi-time zone, multi-lingual, multinational trip, and by God I kept it—to my complete amazement!

My plan on Friday was to get the last section of Chapter 3 done (10 of 18), which I did, just before dinner and my two-hours of presentation and Q&A with the MIT National Security Seminar XXI.

On Saturday my plan was to organize section 11 of 18, or the first of Chapter 4's three parts. I did this, just barely, over the course of listening to all the lectures on Saturday at Airlie House in Warrenton VA. I sort of have a mental breakdown during that last session before dinner, when I was unable to figure out a compelling narrative for the section, but I finally decided, just before the cocktail hour began (which may have had something to do with my sense of urgency), that I was trying to be too damn clever and I should just come up with some basic 4-part outline (which I did, and then it was Miller Time). After dinner I co-lead a discussion group with a very interesting and talented East Asian scholar by the name of Tom Christensen from Princeton, and then I and my four beer coupons headed over to the Airlie House on-site pub, where I hung out debating acquisitions with an Air Force one-star (who had seen the brief about a year earlier, also at Airlie) and a retired USAF colonel now in PA&E in the Pentagon (Programming Analysis and Evaluation). It was a fascinating discussion, the kind that's almost an education unto itself, so I felt it was important to simply take advantage, plus they were both such cool kids to speak with that I simply couldn't resist.

I slept late Sunday morning (meaning I didn't get up at 0600) and then spent the last lecture session of the seminar finishing up my section's organization and getting about 500 words down. Then I participated in the seminar faculty's plenary session (i.e., you all sit on stage and answer questions) and that was okay (I liked hearing the students effortlessly use Core and Gap terminology), but then it hit me: I had forgotten my paper tickets to Denmark at home!

My host, the Copenhagen-based Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), had FEDEX'd them to me back in mid-December and I put them in a special box (apparently marked PUT RIGHT OUT OF YOUR MIND!), whey they sit still. I was just so focused on getting everything set for my trip in terms of my writing materials, passport, etc., that I completely forgot about the paper tix, my excuse being I haven't used any for several years.

Well, this was just the latest in a very long string of screw-ups committed by me. Last week I blanked out when dropping off Em at a knitting lesson off-island during a snow storm and didn't even notice, much less wait for my daughter to discover, that the store/school was closed! So I drove off, amiably chatting over the phone with a Danish journalist interviewing me and poor Em was stranded to the point of going to a neighboring house and asking to use the phone.

Next up was my "brilliant" decision the night before I flew out Friday morning. I decided I would clean up the garage for spouse Vonne, because it was all full of melted snow and the usual crap you deal with after a blizzard, so I pulled out both cars, organized the place and swept out all the debris and water, and then switched the cars in the garage because I was taking the van to Logan and leaving Vonne the SUV Pilot for driving on the still snowy roads. My bad decision was to back the two cars in, which seemed like a nice gesture for some reason but really was disastrously stupid because of the way I've hung our many bikes from the ceiling. Up shot, the next morn when Vonne drives out with the kids to school, one bike, that apparently got pushed out of whack slightly when I backed in, managed to pop the back window on the Pilot and punch a tiny hole in it, which—of course—immediately segued into a complete fracture on the way to school so that by the time Vonne had everyone dropped off, there was no back window, just a lot of crunching glass every between our house and school, as every bump along the way shattered the glass more!

That's how you spend $400 fast (of course, just under our deductible; then again, our insurance doesn't cover a writer expending all his brainpower on his book), plus delight your wife, plus leave your children safer and better off when you're traveling abroad. Really, almost a trifecta of genius!

I now have a theory: there is only so much IQ anyone has, and it's really quite fungible but limited. So, the more brainpower I pour into the book, the less I have left over for my daily life, meaning the longer I go on this book, the bigger menace to family, society and myself that I become. If I went over 200k, I am almost positive it would cost somebody their life or leave me permanently impaired as a human.

Then again, judging by my growing stupidity in my daily life, this book should be nothing less than pure brilliance!

At least that's my theory . . ..

Anyway, I have Vonne call my point of contact and direct host in Copenhagen, a very personable and competent young researcher named Henrik Breitenbauch, the co-editor of Raeson who interviewed me a while back and arranged this whole trip as a result of that first interaction and his ongoing interest in my work. He called SAS, Scandanavian Airlines, the national carrier of Denmark, and found out I should just report early at the Dulles counter and fill out a lost ticket form and pay $100 as a fine of sorts. Naturally, this made me feel even dumber (actually, only $100 dumber), and I was a bit pissed since all I had to do to get my ticket back was show up and flash my ID, just like with a G.D. e-ticket! I mean, really!

But whining was no good, because I had committed the original sin, so I paid.

Good news was I wrote another 1,000 words in the cab to Dulles, plus another thousand while waiting for the counter to open. Then I did another k waiting for boarding, so I was 3,500 in before takeoff and feeling very good about the content. Once in the air, I ate the food (it was a United partner flight) and vaguely had on "Mr. 3,000," the Bernie Mac (always good) movie going on in the seatback in front of me. Breaking for dinner, I powered through from 6pm to roughly 9:30 and finished at just over 6,000. Not happy with the clipped ending, but I was too tired to care.

At that point, we were only about 3 hours from landing in Copenhagen at 7am local time the next morning (Monday), so I powered down, popped an Ambien (the world's greatest sleeping pill), and managed almost two hours before being awakened for "breakfast" at midnight my time.

Vonne and I got Ambien for China, and it is the best by far. Need a prescription, but it's considered very safe because it gets out of your system very fast. The best thing is, it definitely gets you down within about 20 minutes, but no matter how little you sleep on it, you wake up feeling pretty darn good.

And it worked this time just as well.

Landing at 7am, I got through the usual drill and found Henrik (a slightly taller, better looking, and just-as-smart and better-read younger version of myself—not that I was intimidated though I couldn't help but be impressed) waiting for me. Henrik has that annoying habit of some Europeans: being just as good as an American in anything you can name AND managing to do it a second language (including much of his really good analytical writing). To my delight right at the moment, though, Henrik's most pertinent skill was that he really knows how to host someone, showing great hospitality and consideration throughout. I, in return, committed myself to putting on a really good show so as to pay him back in turn for his grace and good planning throughout.

So Henrik hails a cab, gets me to the hotel (the d'Angleterre: a classic Old World sort of luxury hotel that apparently all the rock and movie stars stay at when visiting Copenhagen), where I shower and change into my suit. Then he takes me on a really cool walking tour of downtown Copenhagen (one very beautiful city) on this gorgeous balmy and brilliantly sunny late January morning.

First stop is a department store with a good collection of nice touristy stuff, so I get a great CD collection of all Hans Christen Andersen's fairy tales, plus a book of the same, plus a nice replica of the famous Little Mermaid statue located on the waterfront. Then we hit a well-known amber jewelry store (the classic local precious stone of sorts), and I got earrings and necklace crosses for spouse and kids.

Then we make our way to the original Borsen building, meaning the stock exchange that was used going all the way back to the mid-1600s. Borsen is still the name of the business newspaper in town, the Danish equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, which had run a full-page color ad with a giant picture of me (the one from the old AP profile from last spring) announcing the talk in advance (Henrik was nice enough to clip me a paper copy). Borsen was my paying host (actually, the Borsen Executive Club), meaning they covered all my travel costs. Borsen thus co-hosted the talk with the DIIS. It was a full-house scene of about 200 people, and a Danish TV network taped me (just for clips), so I was double-wired with remote mikes, which certainly straightened up my tired slouch.

But really, you could feel the excitement in the room, so I got pretty psyched and totally forgot about my fatigue and lack of sleep. The hall was gorgeous (I'll post pictures in a day or two) in that museumy-sort-of-way, and the sound system was really clear, which made my delivery much easier. Huge screen and a strong projector, so I was set.

To my complete surprise, my delivery was really good. Giving the talk Friday helped a lot, but the truth was, I always give as good as I get, and the audience was really attentive and strong in the sense of "this is a big deal" that it gave off. As Henrik informed me later, the Danes are really serious about peacekeeping and developmental aid, so hearing someone from the States' defense community make a pitch like PNM was really exciting.

I have no idea how long I went, but the audience was with me from start to finish. Following the talk, I took the stage with the editor-in-chief of Borsen, who was visibly pleased by my performance. I took about 30 minutes of questions (all very solid), and I was better in the responses than I was in the brief, which is really rare for me, but again, if was just me feeding off the audience.

Once done, a short reception, then I taped about 15 minutes of Q&A with the local version of Ted Koppel, who was, like everyone I met there, awfully damn sharp in terms of the subject matter and his eloquence in English. Continuing my amazement, I was even better in the interview there, I was just so juiced from the previous two hours and was simply running on adrenaline. Plus, when really professional people take you very seriously, you tend to respond.

Then a quick interview with a Borsen columnist.

Then Henrik and I stroll back to the hotel, where we drop off gear, I decompress for 30 minutes, and then we head out at 3:30 for a long walking tour of the rest of downtown Copenhagen, to include one amazing Protestant church full of statuary, and Copenhagen U. Henrik's command of history is nothing less than amazing, and he's just a great conversationalist.

About 5pm Henrik steered me to a very nice modern hotel where we drank coffee and chatted another 90 minutes about all sorts of subjects, revealing clearly to me just what kindred souls we are in terms of the way we think and express ourselves. I had that rarest of feelings for me: envying this young man's future journeys as his thoughts mature even more. Actually, for his late 20s, Henrik is way ahead of where I was at that point in my life, so I'm guessing he'll surpass me with ease over the years, which should be very interesting to watch. That's how much he impressed me: by the end of the day I found myself thinking that if The New Rule Sets Project ever takes off, I would really like to hire this guy and make him my intellectual double.

And I gotta admit, that felt kinda weird, making me realize: 1) I'm no longer the youngest smartest kid around and 2) I will eventually, like anyone else, move from being mentee to mentor. People did that for me in the past (and still do), and I've gotta start repaying the system back, something I would really welcome doing with someone of Henrik's obvious talents and passion for the work (he is finishing his PhD diss. which is horizontal in the extreme—another reason I like him).

Eventually we retire to a very nice restaurant for dinner with his boss, a Danish naval commander (very peacekeeping experienced), another researcher who's in very deep with the UN's peacekeeping office), and a fourth researcher whose specialty I can't recall right now, but it was similar to the rest (again, the Danes take international peacekeeping stuff very seriously, so lotsa research on it).

These guys all spoke English very well, knew everything on their side of the Atlantic plus everything on mine. It was a four-hour meal, reminding me why I always like coming to Europe. Great food and the best red wine I think I've ever had (I usually hate it, but this stuff was really fine—personally picked by Henrik, naturally).

Lotsa good conversation, and I was surprised to hear from the one researcher who's deep in the UN peacekeeping office that PNM was a big hit there. He said that the book was all that everyone's been talking about there for about two months now. I was a bit perplexed, since I'm not known as a big fan of the UN. His reply: everything you say about the future, the map, the focus on peacekeeping, etc., it's all just very exciting and gratifying for people in the UN peacekeeping office to see in a popular book written by someone associated with influential thinking in the Pentagon.

Henrik and I walked back to the hotel and I sacked out about 11pm, setting my cell phone for a 9am local wake-up alarm (3 am our time back in Portsmouth). I was amazed to actually slept 9 and a half hours (thanks again to Ambien) and wake up feeling very good. Nice room-service breakfast and Henrik drops in and we head to the airport in a cab at 11am. We part at security with me promising him a job if I make it big post-War College and he shows up in America with his finished doctorate looking for employment. His parting gift is his recent pub where he analyzes PNM and the U.S. National Security Strategy, arguing that it actually dovetails with the European and UN focus on humanitarian relief ops inside the Gap since the end of the Cold War.

Oh, and Henrik gives me a copy of: 1) today's Borsen, which has both an editorial on my vision and presented a big story (with an amazingly unattractive action shot of me talking where I'm sure the photographer was working hard to make me look both scary and crazy) on page 21 on my talk; and 2) today's Jyllands-Posten, which has the full-page interview I gave last week by phone, along with a very large color photo of me (again, the AP photo).

On my first flight (Copenhagen to Reykjavik), I work all my notes for tomorrow's writing (section 2 of Chapter 4, or 12 of 18) while listening to dance music. Then I wander around the Reykjavik airport, which is very stark and beautiful in that Nordic way, and find myself seriously considering bringing the family there for our summer vacation (the place is a New Zealand/Lord of the Rings-like wonderland in the warm summer months, replete with nearly endless days of sunlight). I settle down and finish my reviewing, generating a boat load of pink sticky notes, which I spend the first chunk of the second flight organizing before penning this.

On the second flight I also rewrite the ending to section 1 of Chapter 4, ending up with a word total of almost 6,300. I'm now in the vicinity of 81-82,000 words total for the book, with 7 of the 18 sections yet to go, plus all the short chapter intros I have planned. Mark keeps laughing whenever we talk about the length of the book. He told me when I wrote up the proposal that I would obviously deliver a book well north of 100k, no matter what I may have promised. "Fool me once …," he seems to be saying.

All in all, a great trip. Really interesting times and good talks at both the MIT thing in Virginia and the DIIS event in Copenhagen, plus it was just really cool to finally visit Copenhagen with such a gracious host. Frankly, all I knew about Copenhagen and Denmark prior to this was the Danny Kaye movie on Hans Christian Andersen plus World War II history (underground, occupation, etc., oh . . . and the peacekeeping and environmentalism). Now it's a real place to me.

But the big thing is that I kept my writing schedule throughout and I'm happy with the output. If I don't manage that, it doesn't matter how neat the trip is.

11 sections down, 7 to go, and still right on sked to finish on Valentine's Day, where I begin making this all up to my spouse.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 2 February 2005

Thought I was going to write today, but with four out of six family members experiencing some violent stomach virus, I'm mostly washing bed linens today and getting opportunity to babysit Vonne Mei in my office all day. So writing took a back seat today, as did virtually everything else.

Did get my car's back window fixed though . . .

And I packed up the rest of my office despite Vonne Mei's presence, and got it all home.

As PNM hits abroad (Japan, Turkey), I start to get media requests from there. Will do interview week after next in DC with Japanese daily and will go on CNN Turkey by phone tomorrow night. I was told to be familar with Bush's State-of-Union speech, which I read but didn't watch (can't stand the ritualistic clapping and cheering--a bit too Soviet for me).

I found the speech fairly tepid in print. Maybe he gave it really well, but it was less interesting to me than the inaugural one. I know that one was Mark Gerson's swan song, so whoever wrote this one really seemed to go out of the way to avoid the high rhetoric of that speech. Too bad. This one did all the familiar stuff on the Middle East, but we've heard it all before from Bush, so no real new ground.

As for the rest of the world, he didn't have anything much to say apparently. Yeah, he mentioned non-proliferation and said US and Asia was trying to convince North Korea to give up on it, but that was it. No China, no India, no globalization, no global economy, just terror and nukes. To me, his foreign policy stuff came off as though he was abandoning the field in terms of anything bold or new and just hoping to just hold his gains in the second term, which concentraing on domestic stuff..

So what I got out of the speech was: I've got some domestic stuff I want to get done in second term, and I want Iraq to get better and serve as an example to the rest of the Middle East. Not exactly ambition defined, I would say, given what he did and tried to do in the first term.

Again, you got the feeling the White House wanted to avoid anything expansive on foreign policy after the way in which the inaugural speech was interpreted. But to me, that's not letting Bush be Bush, and if he's gonna be president another four years, shouldn't he be?

Writing tomorrow no matter who's puking or how much. Gotta get my own stuff out (urp!)!

I keep hoping any twitches I feel in my stomach are just that . . . .

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 3 February 2005

First off, last night went from bad to worse. Recovering eldest daughter volunteers to take baby in for the night (she rarely falls asleep alone) and Vonne Mei returns the favor with some impressive projectile vomiting. One bed down, four still in play. So I repair Em's bed, adding to the mountain of soiled bed stuff in the upstairs' hallway. Em back to bed and Mom takes baby.

Meanwhile, I take pup out. Bailey is now exactly twice as big as when we got him, up from 7.5lbs to 15 solid. He used to grunt when we picked him up to carry him outside, now I grunt and frankly, there's getting to be no need to help him up any stairs, etc., anymore.

I head up stairs with Bailey to put him in his kennel, when kaflooey! Vonne Mei strikes again. Now, two beds hit, three still pristine. Repair that bed. I take screaming Vonne Mei and get to spend two hours with her screaming and passing frightening amounts of gas that sound like someone just shot a Zeppelin or something. At 1 am she finally crashes, as I wrap her in blanket.

Good move. About 3 am I hear this almost crashing wave sound and I pop up out of bed instinctively, almost knocking Mei off the side and scaring poor Kev, who's sleeping with me because he's a healthy refugee like myself. Turns out the scary flushing sound was Mei blowing not her top but her bottom. Talk about a hazmat disaster site.

I reconstruct her, throwing the blanket on the hallway pile, get another blanket, wrap her again and doze off. 30 minutes later Kevin is complaining about stomach cramps. Hmmm. I take it under advisement.

Then Kev wakes me at 4am. "Dad!" he says in that rising voice sort of way that signals imminent threat. I immediately pivot off the bed, race to the garbage container, flip off the lid, pull out the bag and race around the length of the king size bed. Smart dad that I am, I have the can already tilted in Kevin's direction. I catch the blast from a good four feet away, like most Packer receivers catch Brett Favre's passes: it was either catch it or things get painful. Now it's three beds down, two still pristine, so to speak.

This is a major reconstruction, cause it's a king. Once done, Kev and Vonne Mei are all resettled and I settle in for a good 30 seconds or so and then Bailey does his early morning yelp that says, "Three minutes and it's gonna get bad!" So I pop up again, get dressed, grab the dog and do the pre-dawn check of the yard. Coming back in, I move some laundry on the machines, and then get an undisturbed 90 minutes of sleep.

Then I started my second-to-last workday.

Only scheduled event was lunch with my department at local brewery. Very nice and somewhat sad. They gave me an author's box, or a black leather box with fitted top that is designed for holding loose papers of a manuscript. Nice Ralph Waldo Emerson quote embossed on cover: "Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead here there is no path . . . and leave a trail."

Later in afternoon I do perform a live, 5-minute interview over the phone on CNN Turkey. Kind of weird because as I was waiting for it to start, I listened to the program and it was all in Turkish (go figure!) and I was beginning to get scared, worried that a translation voice-over would be live as well, and I know how cross-talk over the mike can be very discombobulating to an interview, so I steeled myself for the possibility.

But no, all of a sudden the host (female) is speaking English and introducing me and PNM. Standard start question: explain Core and Gap and Turkey's role. Feel I nail that one pretty well. Second question: what make I of references in State of Union to Iran and Syria. Make short bid to say what I think Bush meant and then did what comes natural to me, gave my preferred version instead. That went pretty well too.

In all, I was very pleased because my head was so into writing that for me to pause and perform like that was dangerous. Now, I can't wait to see the Turkish edition! I already have email interview questions in my email account that I need to get to tomorrow from actual translator of book, who's asking on behalf of big magazine there called Tempo.

Tonight I write late into the evening. Feels pretty good. Stop at 7,500 words on section on transition points for how countries move from Gap to Core. Harder to write than I thought. I work to keep it readable, so no plethora of stats or anything. I write these rather much like the way I used Gladwell's Tipping Point concept in the various reports I wrote on the New Rule Sets Project workshops at World Trade Center One (and yes, I am still amazed I will never visit that place again). But I poop out at 9:30 and do a conference call with my NRSP colleagues, my new crew.

Hopefully they won't have to buy me any parting gift for quite some time.

Get nice email from my brother-in-law Steve who is Mark's and my proxy reader for the raw text. He gives, as always, very detailed commentary para by para for section 5 of 18. In his mind, this is the best section yet and he really liked it. It was my big lessons learned piece on Iraq. His feedback made me feel very good, because it tracked with my own sense that I was starting to hit my stride with section 5. Plus, I need some kind words right now because I'm getting enough screwy sort of emails on both the Wired and Esquire articles. Frankly, a bit disappointed so far with quality of emails from Wired readers, although serious lawyer effort from one blog intrigues me plenty. Sucker for lawyers, since both parents practiced. When this guy gets the heavier analysis out, I may repost and comment.

Tomorrow I've got to finish the chapter, order the new Mac online (meaning my webmaster better have his suggestions ready when I call him before noon), and prep the last section of Chapter 4 for Saturday writing. Sunday I write my article for the second Rule Set Reset newsletter, a serious think-through of all the tsunami clips I've accumulated. Seemed like a perfect subject for the newsletter.

So, unofficially 82k previous plus 7+ tonight gives me 89k total, but no print-out for the Author's Box tonight cause I only print when section done. So I go to bed feeling a bit defeated, but able to keep my disappointment from flying out of my mouth.

And that's pretty good.

Check your local listings.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 4 February 2005

Last day at college today, just to drop off a few things and shake a couple of hands.

That part of my life is done, and I'm a bit sad and excited over that.

Today I tackled section two of Chapter 4 (Tipping Points in the Journey From Gap to Core), starting at 7,500 words and ending with 11,600, the biggest section yet. Felt pretty good. Word total for book now at 94,000.

Then spent night planning next and last section of Chapter 4, or section 13 of 18 total. This one is called The Fundamental Solution Set, and will be mostly about governance issues inside the Gap.

I am brain dead and must stop. Going to see (with kids) if I made Tucker Carlson's show tonight. After that movie with kids in basement.

Tom, it's okay to blog as usual, and to update Blueprint for Action, but if you edit any other pages, the changes are likely to disappear by Monday.

Dateline: above the garage in rather balmy Portsmouth RI, 5 February 2005

Read my last newspapers courtesy of the Naval War College last night. Had been getting access to paper daily copies of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (the latter came in the mail several days late).

I already get the Post online in the daily email format, which is great, frankly. And I get the Times at home by paper subscription. So I think the only real decision is the Journal: paper or electronic? I hear you can do the Journal online for less than $100 a year, which sounds too good to be true, but if it is, I think I'll go that way.

Here's the catch:

On the health front

Story in Post ("Foreign Drugs Approved For Anti-AIDS Program: Decision Means Treatment for More," by Shankar Vedantam, 26 Jan 05, p. A10) catches my eye, because it's further sign that Old Core America comes around to New Core Brazil's push that it be able, along with other New Core powers (China, India, South Africa), to produce cheaper generic drugs for use in dealing with the AIDS crisis in the Gap. Now the US decides it can buy these same generic drugs from such New Core producers for its own $15B program of aid to HIV sufferers inside the Gap.

Nice, and it actually made everyone involved feel happy.

The other health story is scarier, and of course involves the always-almost-imminent-but-when-in-the-hell-is-it-actually-going-to-show-up Avia Flu ("As SE Asian Farms Boom, Stage Set for a Pandemic: Conditions Ripe for Spread of Bird Flu," by Alan Sipress, WP, 5 Feb 05, p. A1). Not quite sure why this story was written, because it contains absolutely no new news, just the general noting of a long-term trend in Asia of there being more farms. Real story, is that these farms are becoming more connected to the global economy, as are the regions, so travel issues and contagion possibiliites loom large. Biggest point: "governments in the region lack the money, manpower and, at times, political will to enforce these [tough safety] requirements on an industry that has become a vital component of economic growth."

To me, that's economics getting ahead of politics, and connectivity getting ahead of security. When such rule-set gaps appear, System Perturbations rise in their potential to harm us all--or at least force a massive rule set reset.

Iraq seems like a different place after this election

First, you can't help but be taken aback by the front-page story with photo in the NYT on the 2nd of Feb ("Iraqis Who Died While Daring to Vote Are Mourned as Martyrs," by Edward Wong). If hearing that word used in that manner doesn't tug at your heart strings, then you need to check your passport and see if you're really an American.

Second story somewhat gratifying and somewhat creepy ("Iraqi Police Use Kidnappers' Videos to Fight Crime: Captured and Cowed, Insurgents Seem Far Less Powerful," by Christine Hauser, NYT, 5 Feb 05, p. A1). If this isn't some clever Fourth Generation Warfare (okay, it's just fighting video with video), then what is? It seems weird to us because America is a post-modern, post-shame culture, but Iraq is neither, so it has impact there. Cooler is the idea of a "most wanted" crime show for Iraqi TV based on American versions. People there have always wanted one thing first: law and order. You can give it to 'em, but you also have to show it to 'em.

As one Iraqi official said, "Because of their confessions and the disgusting things they did, we have reached our limit. There is no more patience."

Well said.

Third story ("Iraq's Sunnis Rethink Strategy: Concilliatory Line Carries Conditions," by Anthony Shadid, WP. 5 Feb 05, p. A1) suggests that at least some big portions of the Sunni population see the writing on the wall with this election. That was always the Bush administration's plan: make it seem inevitable. It seems to be working.

The Big Bang keeps banging

I love these stories, because if Bob Geldorf is just so f--king bored with Africa, I reached that point with most Middle Eastern regimes a long time ago.

First one focuses on Syria ("Religious Surge Alarms Secular Syrians: Islam's Clout Among Frustrated Youth Challenging Governments Across Mideast," by Scott Wilson, WP, 23 Jan 05, p. A21). Same old same old: authoritarian governments don't provide for the masses, a youth bulge is working its way through the system, and these pissed off young people are turning to the only alternative they have at hand: radical Islam. This scares secular Syria. Boo hoo.

The secular middle class are starting to speak up. That's good. And they accuse the government of cynically coopting the hotheaded youth in order to deflect anger away from the incompetent government and toward those "evil" Americans occupying Iraq. Guess how long works? As one Iraqi newspaper journalist said, "It's a temporary cooperation. Nowadays, they have the same enemy: the United States. But once the U.S. soldiers leave Iraq, what happens to us?"

This ride-the-tiger phenomenon will continue to haunt Arab regimes more and more in coming months, and it was all by design. The Big Bang keeps banging.

Better version occurs in Egypt ("As Egypt Struggles, Prime Minister Tries Tough Love: Nazif Shakes Up Economy By Freezing Public Jobs, Cutting Tazes and Tariffs; A Suggestion on Birth Control," by Karby Leggett, WSJ, 3 Feb 05, p. A1): here we're talking about a Mubarek who's old enough and scared enough and just smart enough to appoint a vigorous, smart, reformist, no-nonsense PM named Ahmed Nazif. This guy is moving the pile like nobody's business--at least by the standards of Egyptian politics for the last . . . oh . . . 24 years of "emergency rule."

Nazif is working the usual Arab package: "soaring unemployment, hidebound bureaucracy and rampant corruption." Plus he's got a youngish 70 million citizens and no oil to speak of. So what you do if you want to stay in power all these years? Well, the modern pharoahs have "kept private business on a tight leash, discouraging trade and promoting state-owned companies."

And they wonder why Egypt's economy sucks and totally belongs in the Gap . . ..

Nazif is breaking some china, and it's fun to watch:

He introduced the most far-reaching economic changes in Egypt's modern history, cutting customs tariffs by 40%, signing a trade deal with Israel and the U.S., and chopping income taxes in half. Now he's planning more painful steps. He wants to slash the government payroll and scale back subsidies on everyday goods.

Hold that question. Yes. Yes. Yes.

The Big Bang keeps banging.

The Axis of Evil is down to two wheels

Another story about our good friend Kim selling nukes etc. to anyone who'll buy ("Uranium Testing Said To Indicate Libya-Korea Link: Fears on Possible Sales," by David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, NYT, 2 Feb 05, p. A1). So him we're going to negotiate with?

Second story ("Rice Says Military Action Against Iran Not on Agenda," by Robin Wright, WP, 5 Feb 05, p. A12) seems to indicate that Rice, while not promising war any time soon, has decided she's going to be bad cop at State to go along with Rumsfeld's bad cop. Hmm. That's helpful. I mean, we have so many levers to pull with Iran, surely we can stop them from acquiring the bomb after all these years of no trade, no relations, no nothing. And Rice goes out of her way to signal she's not interested in carrots. She wants Iran to stop the program in exchange for . . . ? U.S. military domination in the region right on Iran's eastern and western borders? Nice offer. I'm sure it'll work wonders. And I'm sure this principled stance will convince Iran to stop supporting the insurgency in Iraq and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Yes, I'm sure the mullahs will give us the peace we seek in both situations. I mean, look at what we're offering!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 5 February 2005

Got up this morning and spent two hours figuring out the organization of this section, which I end up calling "The Fundamental Solution Set" within Chapter 4, "Shrinking the Gap By Ending Disconnectedness." Then I crank 2,500 before my son Kevin's YMCA basketball game. We lose on a last-second long-distance shot, 28-26. Our best player, big man Kyle, is gone for the season with a broken wrist thanks to his father's desire to expand his horizons with snowboarding. I could have broken Dad's wrist when I heard. Missed his rebounds today. Easily 36-28 with him playing. Kevin does well, then sloppy in man-to-man D sections, then good again at the end, with a couple of nice assists. We had been up 7-1, then down 19-10, before tying at 20 and keeping the game within a basket til the end. Still, hate to lose the close ones.

Back in the chair after the game, I crank another 3,300 for a total of 5,800 words, giving me basically 100k words with five sections to go (three sections of chapter 5, conclusion, preface + the chapter intros we do later when we're editing).

Feel very good about this section. See little editing ahead and that is the first one I've felt that way about. Mark's editing was front-loaded on the first three chapters in PNM and then much lighter as it went along. That had to do with me really finding myself in the process.

This time is harder, and now I know why. Last night on phone Mark asks how I like writing a book without any slides to guide me. Smart ass, he, but a really telling question. Made me realize a lot of my angst. Smarty-pants editors are like that.

Watched Tucker Carlson last night and have to admit that it's a pretty cool show. Sorry my segment didn't make it this week, and given the positive feedback from producer and Carlson himself (to mutual friend Warren), I expect it to go on, and probably next week. Cool thing I look forward to is how they might package around the interview segment. Interviews last night ran about 8 minutes, as mine did, but Carlson had short segments fore and aft and mixed in between exchanges. So a lot of production around the interview segment, and I look forward to seeing what they do.

Off to movie with kids now. Kevin is now so interested in WWII, thanks to the Nintendo Cube game where he can play WWII fighting scenes in various countries, that he's now demanding to watch "The World At War" documentaries and "Band of Brothers." Not exactly the way I got interested, but I'll take it.

Actually, it was how I got interested. I just played "war" with cruder toys . . ..

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 6 February 2005

The FA list has been active since the month of March 2004, for a total of 11 lists. Nineteen books have appeared once, 8 books have appeared twice, 11 books have appeared three times, and 7 books have appeared four times.

The books that have appeared the most:

• Three books (Foer, Hersh, and Norton version of 9/11 Commission) have appeared five times

• Four books (Rifkin, Coll, Woodward, Clarke) have appeared six times

• Three books (Petersen, Anonymous, Unger) have appeared seven times

• No books have appeared eight times

• The Pentagon's New Map has appeared nine times

• No books have appeared for 10 times or for all 11 lists.

Here's the list for the month of January 2005. You'll see that PNM held onto the 9th spot:

Foreign Affairs Bestseller List

The top-selling hardcover books on American foreign policy and international affairs. Rankings are based on national sales at Barnes & Noble stores and Barnes & Noble.com.

POSTED FEBRUARY 2, 2005

1) Collapse by Jared Diamond (Viking), new to list

2) The Case for Democracy by Natan Sharansky (PublicAffairs), #4 last month

3) The United States of Europe by T. R. Reid (Penguin Press), #2

4) 9/11 Commission Report by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks (Norton), #3

5) Imperial Hubris by Anonymous (Brassey's), #1

6) America's Secret War by George Friedman (Doubleday), #6

7) Our Oldest Enemy by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky (Doubleday), #10

8) The Persian Puzzle by Kenneth M. Pollack (Random House), #5



9) The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas P.M. Barnett (Putnam), #9

10) Chain of Command by Seymour M. Hersh (HarperCollins), #7

11) Tower of Babble by Dore Gold (Crown Forum), new

12) The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin (Tarcher), #13

13) Running on Empty by Peter G. Peterson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), #8

14) The Debt Threat by Noreena Hertz (HarperCollins), new

15) How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer (HarperCollins), #14

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 6 February 2005

Got a fancy invite/notice from Wired magazine that lists all the nominees in the various categories. For the complete list, go to www.raveawards.com/nominees.htm.

Here is the complete list of five authors nominated:

THOMAS BARNETT

The Pentagon's New Map

SUSANNA CLARKE

Jonathan Strange & Mrs. Norrell

RAEL DORNFEST, DALE DOUGHERTY & TIM O'REILLY

O'Reilly Hacks series

JEFF HAWKINS

On Intelligence

JAMES SUROWIECKI

The Wisdom of Crowds

I won't be attending the Awards Celebration at The Fillmore in San Francisco on 22 February. Wired will announce the winners that morning and then have the party that night (bit different). Someone from my partnership will show up though. I'll be in Norway giving talks to the military there.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 7 February 2005

Yesterday the family and I went to a "Families with Children from China" (FCC) party in North Kingstown celebrating the start of the new Lunar Year in China (2005 is the year of the rooster), and had a lot of fun. So many young Chinese girls in one place, plus a lot of cultural fun stuff and a great Chinese feast.

The Lion Dance being performed.

When I got home I found an email from a lawyer in NYC who originally worked with my agent to help us find a publisher for PNM in China (he loved the book). As many of you know, we ended up going with Beijing U Press.

Well, it turns out that this lawyer was on the team of translators that produced the Chinese version of PNM, so he emails me yesterday asking for a special preface.

I bang it out this morning and send on to him, excited to hear that PNM will soon hit the streets in Beijing as it already has in both Tokyo and Istanbul!

Here's the Preface I sent off:

Preface to the Chinese Edition

As the new father of a Chinese-American family, it is with the greatest pride and deepest honor that I present to the Chinese people this vision of a world without war. Let me explain that statement in full.

As you will note in Chapter Four ("The Core and the Gap"), my wife and I decided, after having three children, to adopt a baby girl from your great nation. This was a very purposeful decision on our part, because it meant that our family and the Chinese people would be joined through this child and future woman. My wife Vonne and I made this trip in the summer of 2004, visiting Beijing, Nanchang, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. It was a revelation for us on many levels to witness the amazing development that China is undergoing today, but most importantly this journey brought us to our second daughter, Vonne Mei Ling Barnett. The moment we became her new parents, we added a new homeland to the list of great civilizations that has shaped our family, and a new strand of connectivity between our peoples was born.

I believe the growing connectivity between China and the United States will shape the 21st century more than any relationship in the world. For the world to achieve truly global peace, America and China must enjoy a deep and lasting strategic partnership. I see no other route to a future worth creating, and thus it must be so. But to state this great requirement and to achieve it are two vastly different things, and so there is much work to be done in the coming years and decades. I have committed myself to creating this strategic partnership because I am certain that if it comes to pass in all its potential, war as we have known it throughout human history will cease to exist in this century.

This is the great challenge of our age, and China has it within itself to create this future more than any other nation on Earth. For if China can truly rise peacefully, then globalization's progressive advance around the planet will be made unstoppable, thus ending the disconnectedness from hope, opportunity and stability that still afflicts roughly one-third of humanity. But if the Theory of Peacefully Rising China proves false or unachievable, then the entire world will suffer the consequences of this failure, and they will be both terrible and inescapable.

I wish the Chinese people the greatest of good fortune, longevity and happiness as you continue to make your country one of the most important pillars of globalization. If this book aids you in your quest to understand the world around you and locate China's rightful place in that world, then I will consider it a small repayment for the great joy your family has imparted to mine through the new daughter we share.

Thomas P.M. Barnett

February 2005

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 7 February 2005

Spoke with the reporter Jay Tolson in early January. Can't remember how or why he got ahold of me, but he did, and we talked, and it resulted in a quote in the piece.

This is how the article starts off:

31 January 2005

Nation & World:



The Shiite factor

Long vilified as extremists, these Muslims may hold the key to a new Middle East

By Jay Tolson

Blunt words are not the usual fare of Washington think-tank gatherings. But American Enterprise Institute fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht served up a few at a recent roundtable discussion. "If Iraq fails," warned the former CIA analyst, "we're toast."

COMMENTARY: No offense to Jay, but Gerecht's words were exactly the usual fare you get at Washington think-tank gatherings, especially if someone from the Agency (current or graduate) is involved. CIA people will always give the most depressing, fear-mongering take on whatever you can name. This is what passes for intelligence in DC: constant worst-casing. Somehow this is seen as "analysis," when it's really just paralysis (in fact, the military loves to call it "paralysis by analysis"). Tell me how opinions like this are useful when they're all that the community offers. The CIA should be all about news you can use, but instead it's mostly about why you should never try anything anywhere. I can't imagine how bad American foreign policy would be if we actually listened to the CIA on a regular basis. In reality, it's mostly ignored. When they offer something close to agreement with what you're proposing, THEN they're cited, otherwise, pretty much ignored.

Here's the last section of the piece where I'm quoted:

Tactics. Almost every supporter of a favorable outcome in Iraq agrees that America must be a careful midwife, exercising tact in diplomacy and greater shrewdness in its strategic thinking. Even being too cozy with Sistani might not be a good thing, particularly if he is perceived to be a U.S. lackey. And Iraq's chances of subduing the insurgency might be greatly helped, says Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century and a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, if Washington tries to make Iran a more responsible player in the region. Tact means avoiding inflammatory labels such as "axis of evil" (which only rallies support for the shaky theocracy), and shrewdness means coming up with bargaining chips to draw Tehran away from building the Bomb. As he argues in a current Esquire article, Barnett believes that a more responsible Iran is more likely to change. "They will be influenced by what is happening in Iraq," he says. "Sistani may be their Lech Walesa."

COMMENTARY: I guess if I had said something really depressing and scary, I could have been quoted at the top of the piece. Instead, I said something analytical and got stuck at the end. Sigh.

Go here for the complete article: www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/050131/usnews/31shiite.htm

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 7 February 2005

Pictures, as promised from Copenhagen (just off my phone, mind you):

The old Borsen Stock Exchange main hall where I spoke.

The stage where I took Q&A with Borsen's editor-in-chief.

View of Copenhagen downtown from my hotel balcony.

Copenhagen shopping district street where I bought souvenirs.

Main government building in Copenhagen where their legislature is housed in former royal courtyard complex.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 7 February 2005

Quick catching up. Rest of day will be spent planning last full chapter, which I write this week.

Couple of articles with the truly startling (for some) analysis that the Iraq elections didn't trigger a load of violence but instead appear to be moving the masses of Iraqis over the hump of their resentment to the U.S. forces on site. First one ("Suddenly, It's 'America Who?'" by Dexter Filkins, NYT, 6 Feb 05, p. WK1) basically says that after the election there is this growing sense among ordinary Iraqis that the blame from here on out sits with themselves and their own government--now elected:

"We have no electricity here, no water and there's no gasoline in the pumps," said Salim Mohammad Ali, a tire repairman who voted in last Sunday's election. "Who do I blame? The Iraqi government, of course. They can't do anything."

Asked about the American military presence here, Mr. Ali chose his words carefully.

"I think the Americans should stay here until our security forces are able to do the jobs themselves," Mr. Ali said, echoing virtually every senior American officer in Iraq. "We Iraqis have our own government now, and we can invite the Americans to stay."

Just words? How about the second story ("Iraqis Cite Shift in Attitudes Since Vote: Mood Seen Moving Against Insurgency," by Doug Struck, WP, 7 Feb 05, p. A1), where Iraqi government officials say that tips on insurgents from the public are way up since the election?

No one's pretending the violence is going to end any time soon, just that a shift in identification has begun:

"They saw what we did for them in the election by providing safety, and now they understand this is their army and their sons," said Sgt. Haider Abdul Heidi, a National Guardsman wearing a flak jacket at a checkpoint in Baghdad.

Yes, we should expect the Shiites to push to make Islam the fundamental basis of their country ("Top Iraq Shiites Pushing Religion In Constitution: Islam as National Faith," by Edward Wong, NYT, 6 Feb 05, p. A1). There's no surprise in that. The U.S. wasn't exactly shy about such declarations as "In God We Trust" on our money and so on. The Shiites just want to declare their trust in Allah to push certain aspects of Islamic law. Getting into a fight with them over that makes little sense. The Shiites can have a government based in Islam and still not be a scary theocracy like Iran. After all, isn't Israel similarly defined by its religion? We shouldn't worry over this, because it's not our problem to fix ("U.S. Officials Discount Risk of Iran-Style Rule: Cheney, Rumsfeld See Iraqi Shiites as Distinct," by Bradley Graham, WP, 7 Feb 05, p. A18).

The Bush White House is planning a more low-key presence and approach to the region under Rice's tutelage, and that's okay. The issues there are theirs to solve, not ours, but I hope that low key doesn't mean we don't seek something besides stalemate with Iran, because I don't think we can shut them out forever and expect them to stand by while the Big Bang works itself out slowly over time.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 8 February 2005

Spent entire morning plotting out entirety of Chapter 5, which is very little reliant on past blogging and mostly about big ideas in other people's big books, sort of like Chapter 1 was in PNM, but here it will serve the same purpose as Chapter 7 (The Myths We Make), i.e., a chance to refute some arguments.

Felt good about the organizational effort, which I got done by 1pm, then I managed to waste the next four hours doing nothing, which I can do just as well as at home as at my old office. I could tell I just didn't want to write.

Then I got over it around 4pm and worked about 2,300 on the first section by dinner at six. Then from 7-9:30 I added a mere 1,000 more as my brain slowed. Happy with the content and sum, as I see the section at around 6k and wanted to get through half today, so I'll get up and nail the remainder in morning before moving on.

Gave quick interview today to Wired magazine person from the Netherlands who puts together these one-minute bits for a regular Wired segment on CBS Radio. Spoke for 4 mnutes, and he'll use 40 seconds with some narration from somebody else. It'll be on in about ten days. When, I do not know, but he'll send me a file or a URL at some point.

Got a copy of the WeltWoche piece on me in that Swiss journal and have already received several emails from Europeans on it. But the copy I received was all junked up with symbols, so I asked the journal for a clean one if possible, which I'll post if I get it. It will be, of course, in German.

Other than that I played with the pup a lot today, proving myself useful in spare moments around the house.

Brain dead now, off to sleep after last walk of pup.

Some, but not all, folks using Bloglines to read this page report that they're not seeing line breaks -- the paragraphs run together.

I use Bloglines with Netscape 7.2, running in Windows 2000 Pro, and the text renders as I expect. If you're using Bloglines, seeing something other than what you expect, please send me your Browser/OS configuration with viewing results. I'll publish what you report, then work towards a solution that allows a larger population of Bloglines users to see expected formatting.

Please send your feedback to me at critt.jarvis@newrulesets.com.

I haven't heard from anyone about issues with this feed in other aggregators. But, if you're using another aggregator and have similar problems, let me know.

Dateline:above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 9 February 2005

Only have it in PDF. Click here to view.

Even if you don't speak Danish, it's worth viewing simply for the nasty photo of me looking like a nut. This photographer crawled around on the floor at my feet as I was talking (I move around a lot), and it was getting to the point where I was afraid I was going to trip over him. But apparently, it was exactly this sort of dynamic he was looking for, because it yielded him the wonderful awkward shot.

The journalist who wrote the story apologized, saying the photographer thinks these sorts of angles are really "edgy" and "cool."

I feel like I've been Michael Moored!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 9 February 2005

This was written mostly by the journalist himself, meaning I gave a quick interview by phone but I don't think that resulted in much of the text here. If I had more time I would translate myself, which would be fun as I haven't worked a German text in several years (I learned how to read German for my PhD dissertation on East Germany).

And yes, even a quick glance over the text alerts me to the George Kennan comparison . . ..

Here is the text in full, provided with permission to repost by the journal:

Die Weltwoche; 03.02.2005; Nummer 5; Seite 30

Diese Woche

Eine Idee besser

Will er in seinen Vorlesungen ein Argument besonders hervorheben, lässt Thomas Barnett die Filmfigur Austin Powers sprechen: «Oh yeah, baby». Mit diesem Juchzer könnte man ziemlich viele Gedanken des Mannes kommentieren, der für George W. Bush die Welt neu ordnet..

In den letzten Wochen ging wieder das alte Gespenst um in Europa. «Nimmt George W. Bush Anlauf zu einem neuen Krieg?», fragte der Spiegel. Von Madrid bis Berlin legte man die Stirn in Falten. Ist der Iran nach Afghanistan und dem Irak die nächste Etappe auf dem «Wahnsinnsritt» des texanischen «Cowboys»?

Die Frage, wie der Westen am besten mit dem Mullah-Regime und seinen nuklearen Ambitionen zu Rande kommt, beschäftigt tatsächlich die aussen- und sicherheitspolitischen Denker in den USA. Doch scheint Krieg derzeit nur für ein paar unmassgebliche Aussenseiter eine realistische Option zu sein. Amerika plane keinen Militärschlag gegen den Iran, beschwichtigte Aussenministerin Condoleezza Rice am Wochenende: Man setze weiterhin auf Diplomatie.

Überraschend sind diese Töne bloss für diejenigen, die sich von der jüngsten Nervosität anstecken liessen. Wahrlich erstaunlich hingegen ist der Rat, den ein gewisser Thomas P. M. Barnett dem US-Präsidenten gibt: «Erreichen Sie eine Entspannung mit dem Iran, und akzeptieren Sie die Tatsache, dass er die Bombe kriegt!», schreibt Barnett in der neusten Ausgabe des Magazins Esquire. «Wir brauchen den Iran als Sicherheitspartner im Nahen Osten.» Bush solle es Nixon gleichtun, dessen spektakuläre Reise nach China ein neues Kapitel in den internationalen Beziehungen eröffnete.

Wer ist Thomas «Tom» Barnett? Auch in den USA haben nur wenige von ihm gehört, aber viele dieser wenigen sitzen an den Schalthebeln der Macht. Wenn wir dem Kolumnisten David Ignatius von der Washington Post glauben wollen, ist Barnetts in über 50000 Exemplaren verkauftes Buch "The Pentagon's New Map" gegenwärtig die Leiblektüre vieler amerikanischer Generale und Admirale. Michael Barone, vielleicht Amerikas führender Politologe, hat geschrieben, es gebe Anzeichen, dass Barnett sich als «einer der wichtigsten strategischen Denker unserer Zeit» entpuppen wird und «dass Rumsfeld einige seiner Ideen in die Praxis umsetzt».

Gemäss Barone ist «Barnett etwas auf der Spur und wahrscheinlich etwas wirklich Grossem. George W. Bush hat uns kein Szenario dafür gegeben, wie der Krieg gegen den Terrorismus über die nächsten Jahre geführt werden soll und wie wir merken können, ob wir dem richtigen Weg folgen und ob wir auf der Strasse zum Erfolg sind. Thomas Barnett gibt uns eine bessere Landkarte für den bevorstehenden Kampf.» In der «Neuen Landkarte des Pentagons» präsentiert der 42-jährige Militärtheoretiker nichts Geringeres als eine neue Strategie für das 21. Jahrhundert.

Schon gibt es Stimmen, die Barnett – hochgegriffen – als den «neuen Kennan» preisen. George Kennan, heute 101 Jahre alt, gilt als Architekt der Containment- oder Eindämmungspolitik, die von 1947 bis zum Ende des Kalten Kriegs die US-Aussenpolitik bestimmte. Das berühmte «lange Telegramm», das Kennan 1946 als Geschäftsträger in Moskau ans Staatsdepartement sandte, warnte vor den expansionistischen Gelüsten Stalins, und ein Jahr später plädierte er in einem mit «X» gezeichneten anonymen Artikel in der Zeitschrift Foreign Affairs für die «langfristige, geduldige, stetige, aber wachsame Eindämmung der russischen Expansionstendenzen». Direkte Folge von Kennans Analyse war die Truman-Doktrin: Präsident Truman befahl Hilfeleistung an das bedrohte Griechenland (und an die Türkei) und den Marshallplan für den Wiederaufbau Europas.

Mit dem Verschwinden der Sowjetunion wurde die Containment-Politik, die (wenn man vom Vietnamkrieg absieht) gute Dienste geleistet hatte, hinfällig. Unter Bush senior und Clinton tasteten die Denker im Staatsdepartement und im Pentagon nach einer neuen Strategie. Bevor allerdings eine solche entwickelt werden konnte, musste man sich über den Ist-Zustand der Welt schlüssig werden. War, wie Francis Fukuyama verkündete, das «Ende der Geschichte» angebrochen und der Liberalismus die neue bestimmende Macht auf Erden? Oder musste man sich für einen «Zusammenstoss der Zivilisationen» wappnen, der, wie Samuel Huntington warnte, den ideologischen Krieg abgelöst hatte? Oder stimmte etwa die Behauptung der Globalisierungstheoretiker, wonach Interdependenz und Zusammenarbeit den weltpolitischen Wettbewerb abgelöst hatten und Frieden und Wohlstand sich automatisch über die Erdkugel verbreiten würden? Doch weil keine der Theorien überzeugte, konnte man darauf keine Strategien aufbauen. Wie zuvor die Administrationen von Bush Vater und Clinton wurstelte sich auch diejenige von Bush Sohn anfänglich durch die anfallenden Probleme.

Der 11. September 2001 weckte die Amerikaner; und auch Thomas P.M. Barnett. Während dreier Jahre hatte Barnett mit Nationalökonomen der Wall-Street-Firma Cantor Fitzgerald an einem Forschungsprojekt gearbeitet, das den Zusammenhang zwischen Globalisierung und Sicherheit untersuchte. Am 11. September verlor Cantor Fitzgerald auf einen Schlag 658 Mitarbeiter. Barnett selber war Dutzende von Malen in den Büroräumen der Firma im 105. Stock des World Trade Center gewesen.

Nach dem Anschlag war er einige Tage lang unschlüssig, was er mit seinem Leben anfangen sollte. Als er sich bewusst wurde, dass der 11.9. die «Frontlinie in einem Kampf von historischen Proportionen» abgesteckt hatte und dass das amerikanische Militär für diesen Kampf eine zielgerichtete Strategie brauchte, sah er plötzlich eine lohnenswerte Aufgabe vor sich.

Tom Barnett, der als Professor am Naval War College in Rhode Island lehrt und das Verteidigungsministerium berät, war immer ein origineller Kopf gewesen. Er hatte in Harvard unter den grossen Sowjetologen Richard Pipes und Adam Ulam studiert, die Universität Leningrad besucht und über den Warschauer Pakt doktoriert. Als er begann, seine wehrpolitischen Ideen im Pentagon vorzutragen, fand er bei Hauptleuten und Obersten aus seiner eigenen Generation, den Entscheidungsträgern der Zukunft, schon früh enthusiastischen Zuspruch. Höhere Chargen begegneten ihm anfänglich skeptisch oder lachten ihn aus. Der Professor polarisiert. Er trägt seine Thesen nicht in altmodischen Vorlesungen vor, sondern in Power-Point-Präsentationen, welche an Performance-Art erinnern. Seine Briefings würzt er mit überraschenden Toneffekten und Zitaten aus populären Fernsehserien wie «The Sopranos».

Wenn ein Argument besonders betont werden soll, ertönt die Stimme der Filmfigur Austin Powers mit dem Schrei «Oh yeah, baby». Nicht die Art des feinen George Kennan, aber es kommt bei den Militärs an.

Fixierung auf «the Big One»

Die Summe seiner Erkenntnisse hat Barnett in «The Pentagon's New Map» zusammengefasst. 9/11 habe gezeigt, dass die bedeutendste geopolitische Störungslinie nicht zwischen Reich und Arm verlaufe, sondern zwischen den Staaten, welche die Moderne akzeptieren, und denen, die keinen Zugang zu ihr haben oder sie ablehnen. Er nennt die erste Staatengruppe den «stabilen Kern» (functioning core), die zweite die «Krisenzone» (non-integrating gap – nichtintegrierte Lücke).

Zum «Kern» gehören Europa, Nordamerika, Japan, China, Indien, Australien, Südafrika, Brasilien, Chile und Argentinien. Der globalisierte Kern zeichnet sich durch starke Vernetzung aus, wechselseitige Finanztransaktionen und einen reichen Informationsfluss. Im Kern sind die Regierungen stabil und der Wohlstand hoch oder steigend. In der Krisenzone, welcher Barnett Afrika (ohne Südafrika), den gesamten Nahen Osten, Zentralasien, Indonesien und den Rest Südamerikas zurechnet, ist die Globalisierung kaum oder gar nicht spürbar. Die Krisenzone leidet unter repressiven Regimen, Armut und Seuchen, immer wiederkehrenden Massenmorden und an chronischen Konflikten, welche die nächste Generation globaler Terroristen hervorbringen.

Wenn die Welt in Sicherheit und Frieden leben will, dann muss die Krisenzone, von welcher die Gefahren ausgehen, verkleinert und in den Kern eingebunden werden. Eine liberale Weltordnung stellt sich nicht automatisch ein. In der Krisenzone müssen fragile Zivilgesellschaften durch Handel, Wirtschaftshilfe, Zugang zu Technologie, den Austausch von Ideen und humanitäre Projekte gestärkt werden. Sicherheit, die der Krisenzone abgeht, ist eine Grundvoraussetzung für Wohlstand. Deshalb müssen die Staaten des Kerns in erster Linie Sicherheit in die Krisenzone exportieren. Der Export von Sicherheit kann durch die Entsendung von friedenssichernden Truppen wie in Bosnien, im Kosovo oder in Osttimor geschehen. In Ausnahmefällen – und dazu zählt Barnett Afghanistan und den Irak – müssen tyrannische Regimes zerschlagen werden.

Zwischen den Ländern im global vernetzten Kern wird es keine Kriege mehr geben. Die Staaten des Kerns werden ihre Interessengegensätze friedlich austragen – so, wie dies seit Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs zwischen den europäischen Nationen geschieht. Als logische Konsequenz seiner Analyse empfiehlt Barnett eine Neuausrichtung der amerikanischen Streitkräfte. Nicht alle sind mit ihm einverstanden. Nach der Auflösung der Sowjetunion hatten sich die Planer im Pentagon überlegt, welcher Feind in Zukunft die USA bedrohen könnte, und waren zum Schluss gekommen, dass dies China sein musste. Folglich galt es, sich auf den nach 2020 voraussehbaren militärischen Zusammenprall – in der Pentagonsprache «the Big One» – vorzubereiten. Wie viele Panzerdivisionen, Flugzeugträger und Unterseeboote brauchte man, um den «Big One» gewinnen zu können?

Für Barnett war schon Anfang der neunziger Jahre die Fixierung des Pentagons auf «the Big One» nicht nachvollziehbar. Nicht auf einen Krieg mit einer anderen Supermacht mussten sich die amerikanischen Streitkräfte vorbereiten, sondern auf Interventionen gegen Friedensstörer in der Krisenzone. Der Irak bewies dann, dass das amerikanische Militär die Aufgabe, ein tyrannisches Regime zu beseitigen, effizient erledigen kann.

Es zeigte sich aber auch, dass das Pentagon seiner zweiten Aufgabe, der Stabilisierung des Landes nach dem Krieg, nicht gewachsen war. Die Fehler bei der Besatzung ermöglichten es dem Widerstand, Teile des Landes ins Chaos zu stürzen. Truppen, die für die Kriegsführung ausgebildet und ausgerüstet sind, taugen nicht unbedingt für Friedenssicherung oder für Hilfseinsätze wie nach der Tsunami-Katastrophe. Deshalb plädiert Barnett für eine Reorganisation der Streitkräfte, die es ihnen erlauben würde, ihre beiden Hauptaufgaben wirksam zu erfüllen. Einerseits müssen sie als «Leviathan» (in Barnetts an Hobbes angelehnter Terminologie) oder Sheriff auftreten, der Tyrannen und Terroristen rücksichtslos bekämpft, andererseits müssen sie als «Systemverwalter» friedenssichernde und humanitäre Operationen zu einem guten Ende bringen.

Die von Tom Barnett konzipierte Strategie für eine friedliche Weltordnung kann von den USA nicht allein verwirklicht werden, sondern erfordert die Zusammenarbeit mit den andern wichtigen Mächten des Kerns. Diese Mächte – Russland, China und die EU – aber sind nicht bereit, das alte System aufzugeben. Sie setzen auf die Uno und das Völkerrecht. Unilateralismus und die Bush-Doktrin des Präventiv- oder Präemptivkriegs sind ihnen zuwider.

Barnett glaubt aber, dass man diese Staaten davon überzeugen kann, dass neue Regeln erforderlich sind. Er arbeitet gegenwärtig an einem Buch, das sich mit dieser Frage befassen wird. Seiner Meinung nach ist die Intervention im Kosovo, wo der Uno-Sicherheitsrat als Anklagekammer fungierte und die Nato mit der Leviathan-Aufgabe betraute, ein denkbares Modell.

Die Vereinigten Staaten sind die einzige Macht mit einer wirklichen «Kriegsführungskapazität». Nur sie können den Leviathan spielen.

Barnett ist aber auch der Ansicht, dass die USA, bevor sie kriegerisch intervenieren, grünes Licht erhalten müssen. Seiner Meinung nach ist der Uno-Sicherheitsrat in seiner heutigen Form aber nicht das geeignete Instrument, um militärische Interventionen abzusegnen. Barnett schwebt als Aufsichtsbehörde ein Gremium der wichtigsten Staaten des Kerns vor.

Die G-8-Staaten müssten aber auf 20 aufgestockt werden. Neue Regeln müssten die Souveränität der Einzelstaaten, die nach altem Völkerrecht immer noch sakrosankt ist, relativieren. Wie sich in Ex-Jugoslawien, Ruanda oder dem Sudan gezeigt habe, gebe es Notsituationen, wo der Schutz von Minderheiten gegenüber der staatlichen Souveränität Vorrang haben müsse.

Obschon Barnett den Krieg gegen Saddam Hussein befürwortete, sieht er militärische Interventionen als Ultima Ratio. Sein Vorschlag, die Mullahs im Iran nach der Bombe streben zu lassen, hat viel Kopfschütteln ausgelöst. Auf dem Weg zu einer Tagung in Washington erläuterte mir Barnett seine These: «Es ist die alte Geschichte: Niemand handelt verantwortungsvoll, bis man ihm die Verantwortung gibt. Was der offene Besitz von Nuklearwaffen verleiht, ist Verantwortung. Weit mehr beunruhigt mich ein Iran, der zwar praktisch, aber nicht eingestandenermassen nukleare Technologie sucht. Wenn der Iran die Nuklearwaffe besässe und dies allgemein akzeptiert wäre, wäre er durch die Konvention und die Weltgemeinschaft gezwungen, auf eine Weise zu handeln, die einem Staat, der derartige Macht besitzt, geziemt.»

Wenn man dem Iran auf Dauer die Bombe vorenthalte, werde er den Amerikanern im Irak nie helfen. «Und er wird uns nie helfen, wenn es um eine Zweistaatenlösung Israel–Palästina geht.» Doch ist es klug, einem Land die nukleare Waffe zuzugestehen, wenn sein einflussreicher Ex-Präsident, Ajatollah Rafsandschani, prahlt, mit einer einzigen Bombe könne man Israel auslöschen? «Was Rafsandschani damit meint», entgegnet Barnett, «ist, dass der Iran dann mit Israel gleichgestellt sein wird.» Wird sich Israel angesichts seiner traumatischen Erfahrungen im letzten Jahrhundert mit dem Risiko einer iranischen Massenvernichtungswaffe abfinden? «Welche Wahl hat Israel?», fragt Barnett. «Wenn der Iran die Bombe will, kann niemand ihn daran hindern.» Israel habe eine bessere Chance, vom Iran einen Deal zu erhalten und anerkannt zu werden, wenn es ihn als ernsthaften Partner mit der gleichen Nuklearkapazität wie es selber behandle. «Meiner Ansicht nach gibt es keine Anzeichen dafür, dass in Teheran eine Regierung von Idioten am Ruder ist, die glaubt, sie könne eine Nuklearbombe einsetzen und damit durchkommen.»

Vielleicht erklären sich Barnetts unorthodoxes Auftreten und seine originellen Ansichten damit, dass er im ländlichen Wisconsin aufgewachsen ist, wo die Leute schon immer nonkonformistisch waren. Obschon ein Befürworter von Bushs Irak-Politik, ist er politisch ungebunden. Er ist mit einer liberalen Demokratin verheiratet, die Gedichte schreibt, und Vater von vier Kindern. Seine Gedanken versprüht er auch via eigenes Weblog, in dem er Zeitgenossen über seine tägliche Arbeit und seine Erlebnisse auf dem Laufenden hält.

Thomas P.M. Barnett: The Pentagon's New Map. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004

Weblog: www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog

Mehr von Hanspeter Born unter www.weltwoche.ch/weblogs

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 9 February 2005

Two interesting articles in the NYT today on North Korea.

In first ("U.S. Asking China to Press North Korea to End Its Nuclear Program," David E. Sanger and William J. Broad," NYT, 9 Feb 05, pulled off site), we hear that Bush sends a special emissary to Beijing to deliver a personal letter to President Hu Jintao, which urges him "to intensify diplomatic pressure."

China is promising to send a delegation to Pyongyang this month, but has also asked the White House not to issue any scary statements in the meantime. Bush has avoided mentioning the stories about Kim's nuclear sales that recently appeared in the press.

Our diplomats say that China was "surprised by the quality of the scientific evidence" about North Korea's nuclear efforts. "Until now, the Chinese, at least in public, had dismissed American charges that North Korea had a secret nuclear program to build weapons from uranium, based on technology it obtained from A.Q. Khan [current Time cover boy], the Pakistani nuclear scientist."

Hu actually took the meeting with Green and another midlevel American bureaucrat, which is "highly unusual," because of their low standing on the food chain.

In the second piece ("Bush Bites His Tongue," by Nicholas D. Kristof, NYT, 9 Feb 05, pulled off site), Kristof makes his own comparison to Nixon going to China, stating his opinion that connectivity will do most to undermine the regime quickly, along the lines of the embryonic economic connectivity both China and South Korea are producing with the Hermit Kingdom.

But Kristof also says this:

North Korea is the eeriest and most totalitarian country I've ever visited, making even Saddam Hussein's Iraq seem normal by comparison. I realized how regimented the entire country was when I stopped two girls randomly on the street for an interview on a 1989 trip and the girls started praising their leaders--reciting identical lines in perfect unison.

In his new book ["Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader"], Mr. [Bradley] Martin tells the story of how one of the Dear Leader's assistants, while drunk, told his wife about his boss's womanizing. The wife, apparently a true believer in the North Korean system, was shocked and wrote a letter to the leadership to protest this immorality.

The Dear Leader had the woman brought to him, then denounced her before a crowd and ordered her shot. At that point, her husband begged to be allowed to kill her. Graciously acceding, Mr. Kim handed him a gun to kill his own wife.

So this is a regime that is not just menacing, but monstrous."

Kristof fears Bush will pursue a harder line and argues against it, but the key distinction here is one worth mentioning vis-a-vis the Axis of Evil's other remaining pillar--Iran. Iran is basically a tired authoritarian system that's ripe for reform from within, led by a government long at odds with the mullahocracy. No such opposition exists within North Korea, which isn't just authoritarian, but truly totalitarian, meaning it rules over the people's entire lives from top to bottom.

I don't believe you negotiate with totalitarian leaders, but that you do try to kill authoritarian regimes with connectivity. To me, this is the key distinction, and it's why I say coopt Iran but kill Kim.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 9 February 2005

Section felt effortless, and I really feel like I'm running down hill toward the finish line.

Total of 5k gives me a running total of about 105k.

This book is largely in the can now, and I'm working the margins. When Mark Warren and I speak on the phone, our conversations are so much clearer now. We are gearing up for the huge editing process that has us both excited.

Write section 2 of Chapter 5 over next two days. Racing out the door now to catch a plane.

In January I received an email from Lisa who reads this blog using Blogines:

I just did a check with on a Windows XP machine with Opera, Foxfire and Internet Explorer. They all look the same to me. . . no line breaks or paragraph breaks. I've also viewed it (not today) with Mac OSX Safari, with the same result.

Any suggestions? No problems with mozilla on an XP machine

Now, it's February and I've got a bit of time to explore the issue, requesting feedback from readers. Thus far, here's what I've been told:

"FYI, it looks fine in SharpReader"

"using Radio (from Radio Userland) .. lines run together all combinations of platform and browser . . . PC and Mac, IE and Firefox "

"I read the Barnett weblog in Bloglines using Firefox 1.0 in both

Windows XP and Linux, and it always looks fine to me -- paragraph

breaks, indentation for blockquotes, etc."

"No formatting problems noticeable in Tom's blog. I'm Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2; normally use Mozilla Firefox when I read; sometimes Deepnet Explorer."

Hmmmm. . . I'd like more data about Radio/Frontier UserLand. My referral logs show a bunch of you out there. Do you see paragraphs in this post? Indents?

If anyone wants to suggest a tweak to my RSS 2.0 template -- that will render the expected formatting in Radio -- please let me know.

Dateline: Westin Kierland Resort and Spa, Scottsdale AZ, 9 February 2005

Got word from my PR guy at Putnam that Tucker Carlson's PBS show will air the interview segment with me this Friday night, 11 February. Check your local listings, because it's not on at the same time everywhere. It's on at 9pm where I live, but you know PBS, every station airs when it wants.

Dateline: above the pool in the Westin Kierland Spa and Resort, Scottsdale AZ, 9 February 2005

Flew this afternoon. First time I left the yard since Friday, that's how focused I've been on the book.

Cracked out an old laptop of mine I haven't used in years because my new Mac hasn't arrived yet. Got 2,700 words out before the battery died. Figure I'm halfway through section 2 of Chapter 5. Not sure I like this one so much, so maybe it won't make it in the book.

After checking into the hotel and checking out the ballroom set-up for tomorrow, I go see my Mom who's in town seeing her sister. Nice visit, but short. Able to pass on some 80th b-day presents.

Nice hotel, this one.

Dateline: SWA flight 2279 from Phoenix to Providence, 10 February 2005

Story is interesting: "Japan Discusses Possible Sanctions On North Korea," by Sebastian Moffett and Gordon Fairclough, WSJ, 10 Feb 05, p. A10.

Japan's broaching of tough economic sanctions on Kim Jong Make-Me-Ill's regime is described as its "toughest posture yet." Right now Japan is the 6-Party-Talks player talking most vociferously about doing something about North Korea.

Put that together with Bush special emissary to Hu Jintao, and you get one big hmmmmm.

Dateline: SWA flight 2279 from Phoenix to Providence, 10 February 2005

Neat story today in Times ("Asterisk Aside, Saudis Prepare For Their First National Election," by Neil MacFarquhar, NYT, 10 Feb 05, p. A1) about upcoming Saudi election. Yes, no women voting. And yes, only half the seats on these councils up for grabs, as the royal family gets to pick the rest, but hey, it's a start for the only country in the world named after a family. Saudi Arabia is not really a country, but at least it's trying to act like one, and that's amazing. 9/11 doesn't do this. Nor does Afghanistan. Iraq does this—pure and simple.

As for Iraq ("Shiite Offers Secular Vision Of Iraq Future," by Dexter Filkins, NYT, 10 Feb 05, p. A1), not every Shiite political heavyweight is talking a big role for religion in the constitution.

Great opening sequence:

Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of the leading candidates to become the new Iraqi prime minister, recalled the day last year when he and other Iraqi leaders were summoned to the holy city of Najaf by the country's senior Shiite clerics.

The topic was the role of Islam in the new Iraqi state. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, questioned whether Mr. Mahdi and the others, members of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, had the legitimacy to draft an interim constitution.

"You were not elected," Ayatollah Sistani told the group.

Mr. Mahdi says he did not hesitate to answer.

"You were not elected," he told the ayatollah.

Now to the "bad" Core.

Good WSJ story ("Putin Survives Parliament Vote of No Confidence: Welfare Overhaul Still Puts Kremlin on the Defensive, Threatening Other Efforts," by Alan Cullison, WSJ. 10 Feb 05, p. A10.) on Putin backtracking a bit in response to recent pubic protests that segue into a no-confidence vote in the parliament. Hell, as a former Soviet expert, I just enjoy reading that headline!

I know, I know. Death of Russian democracy and all that.

Give me a break. This baby is just learning to crawl, and a no-confidence vote here and there simply reminds us that Russia is still learning—on all sides.

Sadder story ("Lenovo Deal Elevate China Fears: Proposal to Buy IBM Unit Raises Security, Competitive Issues," by Greg Hitt, WSJ, 10 Feb 05, p. A4) reminds us how dumb some members of Congress can be. Somehow this sale is going to be the death of us! China's going to get their hands on computing technology! Now China's buying up "crown jewels" just like Japan did!

Boo hooey!

Ask yourself why IBM is willing to sell. Does anyone with their head out of their ass think controlling the PC market is the key the future? They have a saying among the Echo Boomers: "How come you're still using a laptop?"

Better yet, try this on for strategic thought: article notes correctly that these fears are reruns of those we had on Japan, Inc. at start of 90s, but then—we are reminded—we were talking about a democracy and a military ally.

So the answer we get from some deep minds in Congress? "Let's cut those crafty Chinese off from this technology! That'll teach 'em!"

This is so bassackwards you want to cringe. Yes, our economic and technology ties with China far outdistance our political and military ones, and this proposed sale reminds us of that reality.

So what's the answer? Slow down the economic and technological connectivity? Or speed up the military and political connectivity?

I say to Congress, FIRMLY GRIP BOTH SHOULDERS AND PULL!

Dateline: SWA flight 2279 from Phoenix to Providence, 10 February 2005

Woke up this morning feeling oddly out of it. The previous night I managed to lose an entire post at Moveable Type, forcing me to enter in a far smaller one in replacement. I find this is something that happens when I surf through a hotel broadband system: for some reason, I time out at Moveable Type, meaning I enter in this huge post and when I hit "submit," the site simply dumps me back on its front page as though I had made no such effort whatsoever! Really starting to piss me off, especially because I seem to forget this lesson time and time again.

After that I was scanning emails until 2am my time, and frankly, answering almost none of them. Some nights, especially on the road, I just feel overwhelmed by the interactions and all the suggestions, prompts and admonitions from not only all you readers but my LLC partners as well. I just start shutting down; the visionary starts losing his vision.

Part of it last night was this slew of crazy-ass emails I've been getting from Wired readers. I mean, really, these are some of the dumbest-f—king emails I've ever received. They're so badly written, so idiotically reasoned, just so plain STUUUUUPID! (in that Dexter of "Dexter's Laboratory" sort of taunt), that I don't know whether to laugh in derision or cry at the notion that such nimrods actually read Wired and thus, presumably, represent some serious sampling of the IT world.

Now, having interacted with that community in depth over the years, I know it has its share of just plain weirdos, but the extreme right-wing nature of these response simply stuns me. It represents a strange sort of living-in-my-parents-basement sort of mentality. These guys aren't just angry, they're apoplectic—not to mention infantile in a sad, sad, SAAAAAD sort of way. I mean, they taunt you in this pathetic, Monty Pythonish/Black Knight sort of way. You find yourself wishing their mom or dad would catch them at the keyboard and simply smack them upside the head and send them to sit on the stairs in an extended time-out.

What's so weird is how they go on and on about what a liberal wimp I am, how I must "hate Bush" and "hate America" and "want to take it up the rear-end from the UN" and so on. This, on a piece that celebrates vigilante justice in the short term while arguing for a Star Chamber-like collusion among the world's great powers over the mid-term to round up and kill terrorists in the Gap with little to no concern for state sovereignty there!

I mean, God help these dumbasses! Their analysis of the piece is just so Ali G-like in its hipster doofism (right down to their corndog ****SLAM DUNK!****** sign offs!), that I find myself shaking my head like I've never done before in my life in sheer incomprehension. I mean, somebody raised these boys. Some mother actually loves them. Some normal people, I'm certain, have to work with these guys on a regular basis.

It all just makes me want to wash my hands more regularly.

What's even funnier, of course, is to get those letters on the Wired piece while I get the lefty condemnations on the Esquire piece. In reality, both articles flow from the very same logic: realistic in means, idealistic in ends. I want all the goody-two-shoes stuff and I want it in my lifetime; I just don't have any illusions about the bodies to be dropped along the way, or what niceties should be observed in that process. That, my friends, is what happens to a pie-in-the-sky Democrat who's spent his entire professional life living and working with the military. I don't apologize for this outcome. I simply revel in it.

But sometimes, I must admit, I am flabbergasted by the contrasting reactions it creates among readers. But I guess it just reminds me that when I'm forced to package my ideas within the confines of magazines, no matter how good they are or who there audience is, I run the risk of extreme misinterpretation.

Now, you have to understand, magazine editors don't fear this outcome whatsoever. In fact, they love it. They don't like to admit they do, but they do, and their rationale is: don't write down to the dumbest readers because it's pointless to try and reach that low, so accept the fact that you'll be "controversial" to pinheads on both sides and keep selling those copies!

My salvation is this: the books balance this dynamic. With the books, I dare you to pigeonhole me so. Sure, if your pinhead is pointy enough, it can be done. It's just a lot harder. But in books you capture the vast hump of the Bell Curve, leaving just the extreme shoulders to hop up and down in their indignation—both righteous and lefteous and often just plain crustaceous.

Whew! That last chunk mostly redoes the post that urped out of me this morning, only to be lost in the ether in the manner I described above.

Anyway, I get up this morning and feel pretty weird. Call from home reveals poor wife was run ragged by suffering, sick baby Vonne Mei almost throughout the night, adding to my sense of ennui (or just maybe, on-me, as in the usual guilt trips associated with business travel). I really do love staying up late with sick kids, not in some nasy, Munchausen sort of creepiness, but because I like eating food I shouldn't in the middle of the night while watching soft porn on HBO (and no, I don't watch if baby's actually coherent enough to notice it), plus I just love being Daddy in those moments, because those moments remind me of my Mom's most tender care during my many years of suffering night terrors and sleepwalking (I was world-class to the point of requiring sedatives at one point, and if you knew my Mom's fear of all medications, you'd realize how desperate she must have been).

Anyway. . .

So I waiting on my really fine room-service breakfast, when I get a call from Jay Tolson of U.S. News & World Report who—yet again—is tackling big-picture subjects in his own personal survey of recent grand strategy articles, to include my current piece in Esquire (naturally, I immediately steered him to the Wired piece for balance!).

So we chat for an hour while my breakfast gets sorta cold, which wasn't cool (er. .. nevermind). The others he's looking at include: Norman Podhoretz, whom I must confess I never bother read with all that "World War IV" nonsense; Andrew Bacevich, who is an "empire" guy now in recovery; and Robert Wright, whom I respect deeply cause he's just so damn optimistic!

Cool part: I hear that Wright returns the favor. This is doubly cool because I'm folding in his Non-Zero argument into section three of Chapter 5 tomorrow.

Anyway, I like Tolson because Tolson likes me in the best sort of way: he sees the long-term idealism and doesn't flinch at the near-term realism.

Don't know when the story appears, but keep an eye out for it. My guess is early March.

When I get done with breakfast, I notice that it's 9:15 and I'm in my PJs slurping coffee when I'm staring at a 90-minute brief in front of 450+ Raytheon executives in a ballroom downstairs at 10am and I haven't showered much less packed.

Amazingly, this happens to me almost every time.

So I crack the whip and fly out the door, leaving my cellphone recharger as an accidental tip to the maid (classy, I know).

Downstairs I hook up on this elaborate stage. I get to prowl the 30-foot-wide low-rise stage, while two giant rear-screen projections display the brief. Great lavalier mike and sound system mean I can modulate my voice all I want, but the techies run the sound effects a bit low for my taste (or maybe I was just missing an effective feedback). Two huge monitors on the floor allow me line-of-sight, teleprompter-like real-time knowledge of how the slides' animation was advancing (nice), and best of all, a third monitor gave a countdown on my time, which is really helpful. I promised 75 minutes and gave 80, leaving 10 for four questions. I ended the second I saw the "wrap up" order flash onscreen.

The upside of a presentation like this: I sense how big a hole the second book is going to fill. I give this talk without this second manuscript in hand, and I guarantee you, I'm walking out of there saying to myself: "My God! I should be writing a sequel!" If just feels so damn good to be able to tell people that Vol. II's first draft is almost done and it's coming out in the fall. I love anticipating things, and books are the best—in that regard. Only thing better is possibility of child #5, but let's not even go there after the past two months of non-stop illness in the house . . ..

CEO Bill Swanson gave me a nice intro, and following my talk, he presented me with a gift, leather duffel bag (they also gave me a gorgeous leather folder with nice, "heavy" pen (two things I always turn over to budding writer son-Kevin). When I was with the government, this would have constituted my entire payment. Fortunately, I do better much better now.

My hosts seemed very pleased, even ecstatic, with the presentation, so lunch was full of the sort of stroking I typically need after such public exertion (don't worry, it wears off in about an hour or two—just like great sex). This time it wore off even faster, because after my handler escorted me to the CEO's reserve table, I was immediately introduced to Bill Russell, legendary captain of the Celtics (11 NBA champions, 8 in a row, 5-time league MVP, Hall of Famer, 2X NCAA champion and Olympic Gold Medalist).

That resume knocks your ego down quite rapidly, but in the best sort of way, because of course it's quite thrilling to meet somebody of his great stature (no pun) and get to chat over lunch. Russell was the "team ego" speaker after lunch, and both his talk and the highlight/life bio short film they ran before it were fairly profound.

Lunch wasn't bad either.

After that I swap out my clothes, and hang a bit in the lobby, starting up where I left off yesterday on section 2 of Chapter 5. I rewrite the intro a bit, which gets me from 2,700 to 3k, and then I hop in the scheduled Towne Car for the ride back to Sky Harbor Airport (I must admit, not only does Raytheon run a secure top-management conference, but it's about as smooth as it gets on logistics for speakers).

Oh, I almost forget to mention, the other big military speaker for the two-day (the rest were business motivational types) is Adm. Vern Clark, Chief of Naval Operations. He gets 75 minutes tomorrow morning—and a nice duffel bag, I assume.

At the airport I have a really bean burrito, cause you've got to eat Mexican when this close to the border (San Diego being the best, hands down, in my experience). Run the total word count to 3,700 in between phone calls to Vonne. Plane leaves 35 minutes late, but strong tail wind means we should land in time.

Meanwhile I bang out another solid 1,500 to end the piece at 5,200, putting me at just over 110,000 total for the manuscript so far, with one more section to go in Chapter 5, the Conclusion, which won't top 5k, and the Preface, which Mark wants to keep very short and powerful, just like the China Edition Preface (where I was unusually inspired).

So wow! This thing suddenly feels awfully close to being done! And that feels no less amazing than it did last time (although in that blitzkrieg, I stopped twice for two trips to Lambeau).

Time to bug the Flight Attendant for a coupon beer . . ..

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 11 February 2005

Found this in my email box when I got home:

North Korea: ‘We have nukes’

U.S., allies blister Pyongyang for pulling out of disarmament talks

NBC, MSNBC and news services

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea triggered an avalanche of international criticism Thursday when it boasted for the first time that it had nuclear weapons and rejected moves to restart disarmament talks any time soon.

Rest here

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 11 February 2005

Here is the blurb on the show's PBS site:

Tucker engages Dr. Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, and national security strategist. Barnett tells Tucker his ideas for how the United States can maintain its security. He states that America needs to rely on Iran for security in Iraq, and we should allow them to have nuclear weaponry. He says that we need to make peace with Iran and form a relationship with China to help the situation in the Middle East.

Dr. Barnett has worked in national security affairs since the end of the Cold War, is a New York Times-bestselling author and an award-winning professor.

For details on the entire show, click here

Baby's got pneumonia, so that's it for me today.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 12 February 2005

First off, baby Vonne Mei is doing much better. The Amoxycilin is working wonders on her lungs, and she was back to smiling for the first time in a long time this morning.

Yesterday was supposed to be my day to write the entire last section of Chapter Five, but I got caught up in a load of travel planning for a slew of trips I'm taking in the coming weeks (Washington, Norway, San Francisco Bay Area two separate times!). All that ensued after I spent the morning at the doc's with Vonne Mei (well worth it).

So I didn't start writing until 5pm and I got only about 1,800 words in by 9pm, which is ungodly pokey for me.

Watched Tucker Carlson last night and felt okay about my performance. Bit too much of the old head-leaning thing, plus I made one boner when I talked about Taipei or Pyongyang possibly staring a war between "us and the United States"!

Still, I was pretty happy with the whole thing, especially how Carlson treated both me and the article. The only thing that pissed me off was them putting "United States Naval War College" under me twice as I spoke. Some truth to it, in the sense that I was still at the college when I taped it on 28 January, but that is definitely the last time you'll see that line flashed, except in a "former" sense.

Got up this morning and added just 2k by 12:15pm, when I broke for Kevin's basketball game. We had two kids sick and our one big guy still sidelined by his broken wrist, so only seven available. We faced the same team the guys played without me when I was off at the MIT gig down in VA. That time we narrowly lost. This time I was head coach because my partner was feeling awfully ill, so I took it as a matter of pride that we kicked their little asses 26-13!

Back on the PC, I rambled through another several thousand words, ending the section at 7,500 total, which surprised me, but it just turned out that I had that much to say and that much material to cover. Pretty happy with it, but even happier to be done with the last substantive chapter.

Word total for book now at roughly 118,000. Conclusion I expect will be less than 5k. Preface will be very short. So I probably finish with 125,000, absent the endnotes (less than last time) and the chapter intro's (also shorter than last time, I think).

I will plot the Conclusion tomorrow morning and write it in the afternoon. Preface is Monday morning, then I help Kev on a couple of school projects before the Valentine's Day festivities kick in (already covered).

I feel like I've been writing all year on this book, and then I realize, of course, that I have . . .

Off now to Bean Town to pick up my new Mac Powerbook laptop,. The one I ordered over the web was delayed, so they secured me one at local store for pick-up. Already got all the peripherals I ordered, so I will be a new man tonight. Taking the kids along to see a movie.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 13 February 2005

Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review who interviewed me a while back for his regular segment. In this piece on Friday, he mentions the Esquire piece.

For the entire article, click here

The best and worst of Ayn Rand

By Bill Steigerwald

TRIBUNE-REVIEW

Friday, February 11, 2005

It's not easy being balanced when it comes to Ayn Rand . . .

Esquire, meanwhile, is looking editorially brighter and better these days, though it is still keeping its wheezing "Dubious Achievements" on life support. No one living can remember when they were last funny, but 2004's verbal/visual look at war, politics and scandal elicits a few chuckles.

Actually, there are more genuine laugh lines in professor Thomas P.M. Barnett's piece, "Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Your Second Term, Secure Your Legacy, and, Oh Yeah, Create a Future Worth Living."

Barnett, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, is one of the hottest American war policy experts in D.C., thanks to his info-taining power-point presentations to Pentagon brass and his best seller "The Pentagon's New Map."

Barnett says the long-term success of President Bush's big-bang strategy to democratize the Middle East and end terrorism hinges on two global bit players thousands of miles away -- North Korea and Taiwan.

Either country, Barnett warns, "is a threat to pull the president's attention away from the Middle East while simultaneously torpedoing the most important strategic relationship America has right now" -- the one with China.

Meanwhile, wielding an entertaining mix of pop culture references and Pentagonese, Barnett -- who likes Bush and agrees with his big-bang strategy -- says the road to lasting peace in Jerusalem and Baghdad starts in Tehran and ends in Beijing.

Talk about dubious achievements. Barnett's tour of the globe's hotspots and recommendations for U.S. military or political intervention is a wild, fun-filled ride that could make Condi Rice dizzy -- and Pat Buchanan cry.

COMMENTARY: Ah yes, the pop strategist strikes again. Still, there's much good to be had in making strategic thought real and important right now. With the Echo Boomers (1982-1995) coming online in a big way socially (already online in a big way technologically and in terms of consumer power), someone needs to reach back to that group, because it's very goal-oriented, very naive about the world, very ambitious about changing that world, and incredibly multi-kulti in its tolerance and political orientation. They are a natural SysAdmin generation.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 13 February 2005

I am told that Zaman Daily News' online version is the first online presence of a major Turkish newspaper. Below is an excerpt from an article that explores PNM less as a review and more as a cultural touchstone.

This coverage reflects the fact that PNM the Turkish edition has hit bookstores there. I went on CNN Turkey a bit back regarding this.

Click here for the full article

ZAMAN ONLINE: First Turkish Paper on the Internet

ABDULHAMIT BILICI

How to Understand the U.S.

In the manner the Justice and Development Party's (AKP) dominant position wiped out the enthusiasm in the Turkish political arena, the international system also adopted a similar monotony after the Cold War . . .

I can personally say that I spent an important part of my one-week holiday reading an interesting book, which helped my understanding of the U.S. a little bit more. Professor Thomas P.M. Barnett, who has been a researcher on strategic topics at the Naval Academy and a member of the "U.S. power unity" team, which was established after the September 11 attacks, wrote a book that gives hints about how the Pentagon, which is the most influential government agency in the current U.S. policies, perceives the world.

The author, in his sensationally titled book, "Pentagon's New Map," reveals a new perspective on U.S. policies after September 11 although he sometimes bores the reader with exaggerated references to his own story.

He divides the world into two: On the one side, the "center" which comprises North America, Europe, China, India and Japan where globalization works. And on the other side, the vacuum which comprises the Middle East including Turkey, Central and Southern Asia, all of Africa, except Republic of South Africa, where cannot integrate into the global system. Barnett claims that peace and stability in the world can only be ensured if this vacuum is narrowed with military, economic, political means and he opposes a division on a religious, cultural and civilization perspective as Huntington suggests. He says that September 11 showed that the West will not be able to find absolute peace behind high castles if it does not, through cooperation, carry justice, freedom and prosperity that people living in the center enjoy this non-integrating space.

A last note for Bush haters: Barnett, who served as a security adviser for the U. S forces for 10 years, does not approve of the methods used in implementing this perspective he presented, and he is frustrated by Bush's speeches and those of his friends too. Maybe, you may also want to read this Harvard-trained strategist's book like a mystery novel.

COMMENTARY: Given the level of anti-Americanism and conspiracy-thinking in Turkey right now, this was an awfully kind reference. I think, though, he may have taken the whole "Fox Mulder" spoof a bit too seriously!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 13 February 2004

Started the conclusion with an exploration of the generation to come, the Echo Boomers, treating my son Kevin as exemplar. Then I launch into quick descriptions of the several dozen "Heroes Yet Discovered" that will populate both the Blueprint for Action and the Future Worth Creating.

Felt like a very hopeful and rousing conclusion to the book. I can't believe it's basically done. Tomorrow I crank a short and very compelling (by Mark's suggestion) Preface. We still debate whether or not to include a glossary of key terms (which I favor) or simply making sure we re-introduce everything very early in the text.

I think I will crank my short Preface tomorrow and then gin up my preferred version of a Glossary as its companion and see how Mark responds.

Today's Conclusion rang in at just over 6,000 words, giving me roughly 124,000 with only tidbits and end notes to go. Not sure how much I'm going to pursue with endnotes this time. Almost all will be "for more information see"-types of entries. We shall see. The academic in me will probably make it so.

My author's box is basically full now. Room for just a little bit more.

Fired up my Mac laptop today. Fueled up one battery, then burned it down completely as instructed to "stretch" it, so to speak. Then fueled back up again and swapped out. Doing the same with second one now. Loaded up MS Office and transferred my current brief over just to see it work and everything checks out. Bought a nice RF clicker online, so I'm pretty much ready to roll now. Will take some getting used to, though. Like driving a stick after not doing so for many years. Shouldn't be too bad. Gives me a feeling of a new start.

God! I still can't believe I'll have another book out later this year!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 14 February 2005

Got up, drove Jerry to school, ran some errands, and then back home on PC to crank about 850 words to start the Preface. Break to have oil changed on van, so I work at dealership on Mac, which I am getting used to. Back home with Jerry after picking him up and I finish Preface at 1,500, probably editing this one piece more than the rest of the first draft combined.

Then I take glossary that Steve Oppenheim made for PNM press-kit (on the site too) and thin out phrases that don't continue on in Vol. 11 and that leaves me about 1k in glossary, which I tack onto end of Preface just to feel complete (not sure where exactly it should be located). I like the glossary definitions because Steve crafted them all right out of PNM text, and rather than having any spectacularly cool, dictionary-like entries, I say go with them that brought you to the dance.

All that remains now is Dedication, Acknowledgements, and short chapter intros (total of about 5k max). Right now the total text at just over 126,000, without endnotes (just a pile of paper for now that needs to be organized).

Felt good about Preface, but feel even better about having the Author's Box almost completely full now!

Big thing for me: I kept to sked. I promised first draft by 14 Feb and it's here. Next, we promised edited manuscript to Putnam by April Fool's, and it's going to arrive on time as well.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 14 February 2005

Here's a combo distillation of Wired article and quick interview with Danish paper. Reporter was Poul Hoi, and yeah, it's in Danish.

I think the title reads: Military Philosopher who's half Brett Favre and half Dirty Harry. Anyway, that's how I like to read it.

The paper is Berlingske Tidende, described as the leading Danish newspaper, and published in Copenhagen since 1749, making it is one of the oldest newspapers in the world.

Go here for the original post

Militærfilosof: Farvel Dirty Harry

Af Poul Høi

USA må opgive sin Dirty Harry-holdning i kampen mod terror. Slut med politibrutalitet og tortur. Ikke af hensyn til terroristerne eller menneskeretsorganisationer, men fordi holdningen i sidste ende kan føre til konflikter med Europa og Rusland, siger en af USAs førende militærfilosoffer.

Amerikanerne elsker Dirty Harry.

De kan lide ideen om en ufordærvet kriminalbetjent, som sætter forbryderne til vægs og ikke spilder mange ord undervejs.

Nuvel, Harry har et lille problem med retsplejeloven, og det er formentlig godt, at han skyder forbryderne, for hans anholdelser og afhøringer vil ikke holde vand i en retssal. Men hvad Søren? Harry bryder reglerne, når reglerne nærmest beder om at blive brudt, og målet helliger midlerne.

Jo, amerikanerne kan lide Dirty Harry og ideen om Dirty Harry.

Men hvad sker der, når denne kærlighed til en filmhelt også slår igennem i udenrigspolitikken? Og hos militæret?

Så er det ikke længere helt så simpelt - og det er præcis, hvad der nu skaber problemer for USA.

Det fastslår den førende amerikanske militærfilosof, Thomas Barnett.

Han fremlagde først sin kritik i magasinet Wired, og han uddyber den nu i et emailinterview med Berlingske Tidende.

Barnett er en af de tænkere, som for alvor influererer en ny generation af forsvarspolitikere og officerer. Han er professor på Naval War College, og hans bestseller fra sidste år, »The Pentagon's New Map«, fremlægger en sikkerhedspolitik og en militær strategi, som - skrev en anmelder - kan sikre »det andet store amerikanske århundrede«.

Han er hverken høg eller due, nærmest - for nu at citere en dansk politiker - ugle. Han går ind for en aggressiv udenrigspolitik, når det er nødvendigt, men først og fremmest går han ind for en klog udenrigspolitik, som uden unødvendige konflikter fastholder den amerikanske overmagt.

Og i den nuværende krig mod terrorismen kan Barnett se sådan en unødvendig konflikt, nemlig den amerikanske brug af tortur eller »Dirty Harry-metoder«.

Hvis det fortsætter, kan USA komme til at bruge uanede ressourcer på at forsvare sig selv mod anklager om menneskeretsforbrydelser, og det må stoppe, siger han.

Som han skrev i Wired:

»Hvis ikke vi vil bruge den resterende del af terrorkrigen til at efterrationalisere politibrutalitet og tortur, så må USA anerkende - for det første, at landet ikke er hævet over loven, og for det andet, at det behøver et nyt sæt regler for at fange, afhøre, indespærre og retsforfølge udenstatsaktører såsom internationale terrorister.«

Forstår opbakningen

Det er en advarsel, der har slået ned i Washington med et vist efterdrøn.

Barnett er ikke en hr-hvilken-som-helst - han holder powerpoint foredrag for forsvarsledelsen og for forsvarsminister Donald Rumsfeld - og hans timing er velvalgt.

I begyndelsen af George W. Bushs anden præsidentperiode står det klart, at USA har accepteret tortur light - eller som en af fortalerne for de nye forhørsmetoder har udtrykt det: USA praktiserer nu »tortur på en moralsk korrekt måde«.

I forrige uge blev Alberto Gonzales indsat som ny justitsminister, samme Gonzales, der som Bushs juridiske rådgiver stod bag hele det amerikanske opgør med Genèvekonventionen, og som indvarslede de nye forhørstider, og Michael Chertoff, den ny antiterrorminister, har ligeledes i sin tid i justitsministeriet talt for brugen af hårde metoder.

Professor John Yoo udtrykte i Berlingske Tidende i går hele det republikanske synspunkt om, at de nye tider er accepterede tider.

»Bushs valgsejr og godkendelsen af Gonzales er et tegn på en generel accept af regerings antiterrorpolitik, inklusive forhørsmetoderne,« sagde han.

Men det er et farligt synspunkt, siger Thomas Barnett i dag.

Ikke at han ikke forstår det. Han forstår både Bush-regeringens bevæggrunde og offentlighedens tilsyneladende opbakning til tortur light - som han siger:

»Terrorisme er en fuldstændig omgåelse af de regler, som civiliserede lande lever under, så når du indlader dig på det, så vil folk ikke nødvendigvis føle, at du er beskyttet under de normale regler. Så simpelt er det. De erklærer krig mod vores love og hele vores system, og når hele vores system er i fare, så er der en tendens til, at vi går ud over systemet for at beskytte det.«

Behovet for regler



Problemet er heller ikke i sig selv, at forbryderne bliver skudt ned under kampe i gaderne i Irak, eller at de bliver indespærret uden de sædvanlige retsgarantier. Thomas Barnett har ikke søvnløse nætter af den grund.

Problemet er langt mere realpolitisk.

»USA kan formentlig godt komme afsted med en Dirty Harry-politik, så længe som USA har lyst til det. Sådan en slags koldkrigsagtig nedskydning af forbrydere, som ingen vil græde tårer over. Problemet er ikke at gøre det, problemet er i højere grad at få udarbejdet nogle mere permanente regler for, hvordan alle civiliserede nationer tackler terrorisme uden for deres egne grænser.«

Hvis alle lande - som USA - blot fastlægger deres egne spilleregler, vil landene snart tørne ind i hinanden, og dén tanke kan til gengæld forstyrre Barnetts nattesøvn, for det vil ødelægge hele verdensordenen og hans tese om, at civiliserede lande ikke længere fører krig mod hinanden.

»Faren er, at Europa og lande som Rusland, Indien, Kina og USA med tiden vil begynde at støde ind i hinanden i konfliktområderne . . . og ikke blot kan vi komme til at modarbejde hinanden, men vi kan også komme til pr. vikar at føre krig mod hinanden, og det vil være meget problematisk.«

WCO for de inviterede



Hvad er løsningen så?

For at begynde med hvad løsningen ikke er - løsningen er ikke FN. Thomas Barnett er helt enig med de konservative amerikanere, som betragter FN som noget nær en anakronisme.

Løsningen er i stedet en sikkerhedspolitisk ekvivalent til frihandelsorganisationen WTO. Barnett kalder organisationen for WCO, World Counterterrorism Organization, og WCO skal som sin første opgave fastlægge juraen for kampen mod terror og bygge de fysiske facilliteter til at rumme retssager og fanger.

Dernæst skal WCO opbygge et politinetværk og en stor global terrordatabase.

Det vil ikke være et Interpol, hvor alle i princippet kan være med. Nej, kun inviterede lande kan få lov til at blive medlemmer af WCO - og de inviterede lande vil netop være USA, Rusland, Kina og de europæiske lande.

Det vil ikke være nemt, det vil ikke komme af sig selv, men lige som WTO opstod over mange år - og gennem mange fejlskud - vil WCO også udvikle sig og ende med at sikre kloden et »voksent overopsyn«. Barnett erkender, at det smager af gammeldags imperialisme, at disse lande får lov til at sætte dagsorden og f.eks. marchere ind i tredjeverdenslande og nedkæmpe terrorister eller anholde dem, men over for nogle lande er det en nødvendighed, og som han siger i magasinet Wired, man kan ikke i den forbindelse regne med et FN, hvor lande som Libyen bliver gjort til formand for menneskeretskommissionen.

Så Dirty Harry må blive ren.

Ikke af hensyn til forbryderne, ikke af hensyn til menneskeretsorganisationer og andre kritikere, men fordi hans regelbrud og hans tju-bang metoder spærrer for et WCO-samarbejde, og fordi de i sidste ende kan føre til et tju-bang med stater, som USA ikke har lyst til at slås med.

www.thomaspmbarnett.com

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 14 February 2005

Good article in NYT ("U.S. Is Shaping Plan to Pressure North Koreans," By DAVID E. SANGER, 14 Feb 05, pulled off web).

Here are the opening paras:

In the months before North Korea announced that it possessed nuclear weapons, the Bush administration began developing new strategies to choke off its few remaining sources of income, based on techniques in use against Al Qaeda, intelligence officials and policy makers involved in the planning say.

The initial steps are contained in a classified "tool kit" of techniques to pressure North Korea that has been refined in recent weeks by the National Security Council. The new strategies would intensify and coordinate efforts to track and freeze financial transactions that officials say enable the government of Kim Jong Il to profit from counterfeiting, drug trafficking and the sale of missile and other weapons technology.

China lining up, saying harshest things yet about Kim. Japan getting tough with effective reverse-blockade of North Korean ships.

The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad is coming together.

And they said I was crazy!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 14 February 2005

Good article in Post ("Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision," By Robin Wright, Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, February 14, 2005; Page A08), which loves to stick it to Bush. I found the analysis rather doofy, though. Usually expect better out of Wright. She's poking a straw man here (ah, what was it again? Yes! Jeffersonian Democracy flying right out of Allawi hind-quarters!).

Here's the key paras:

But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.

Yesterday, the White House heralded the election and credited the U.S. role. In a statement, President Bush praised Iraqis "for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom. And I congratulate every candidate who stood for election and those who will take office once the results are certified."

Yet the top two winning parties -- which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president -- are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.

Thousands of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-dominated slate that won almost half of the 8.5 million votes and will name the prime minister, spent decades in exile in Iran. Most of the militia members in its largest faction were trained in Shiite-dominated Iran.

And the winning Kurdish alliance, whose co-leader Jalal Talabani is the top nominee for president, has roots in a province abutting Iran, which long served as its economic and political lifeline.

I don't know anyone who had his head on straight in DC who expected much better than this with the elections. Pretending the White House thought they'd end up with some secular regime hostile to Iran is just nonsense.

Now the Post is just catching up to the reality that drives my logic in the Esquire piece: Saddam is gone, we have our Big Bang rolling, but let's be real about tabling our winnings with regard to Iran.

Meanwhile, Friedman's rerunning his get-off-oil op-ed for like the 20th time. Really good stuff showing he's basically out of ideas since 9/11. He wants to be a serious thinker on security but he doesn't know how to be. So he shoots for the moon on economics, hoping it sounds really profound. It doesn't. It sounds like pie in the sky.

How much you wanna bet his upcoming tome on geopolitics goes on and on about his "geo-green" strategy?

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 14 February 2005

Here is the blurb Sen. Richard Lugar's staff is sending out regarding my talk tomorrow.

I am so blown-off from book writing I am not even sure about what I'm doing tomorrow, except I think I'm meeting someone before the talk at noon, then a Japanese newspaper interview right after, then a Congressman, then an interview for a research project, then another Congressman, then I go to dinner with several Congressmen, then I drive to Williamsburg late at night, trying to find hotel.

Anyway, here's the blurb. Wish me luck. First time driving a Mac.

Security for a New Century 109th Congress

The Pentagon's New Map

When: Tuesday, February 15 at noon

Where: Russell Building, Room 385

Dr. Thomas Barnett, former professor at the Naval War College and author of The Pentagon's New Map, will join us for a discussion of his operating theory of the world - and a military strategy to accompany it. Dr. Barnett's new security paradigm can be summarized as "disconnectedness defines danger," while "connectivity" (networks, financial transactions, media flows, and collective security) underpins stability and rising standards of living. Addressing globalization's "ozone hole" defines the appropriate strategy in today's global security environment. How does this theory align with the U.S. strategy and objectives in the war against terrorism? What does this view mean for the role of the military? What additional tools are necessary to export connectivity and shrink the gap?

"Security for a New Century" is a bipartisan study group for Congress. We meet regularly with U.S. and international policy professionals to discuss the post Cold War and post 9/11 security environment. All discussions are off-the-record. It is not an advocacy venue. Please call 224-7560 for more information or write Libby_Turpen@Lugar.senate.gov.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 16 February 2005

Back home after the whirlwind trip. Flew out yesterday morning at 8am, arriving in Baltimore-Washington International. Grabbed a Dollar and drove to Union Station in DC, where I parked. Short walk to Russell Senate building.

Nice old hearing room (385). Talk began at noon. We put the screen in the well and Services came with a funky little projector. Room set up for about 60 in all, and maybe another 20 against walls and sitting on the floor. Staffers, but a lot of other USG people there, plus some print media. Went 1:20 and took questions until 1:45. Signed about half-dozen books. Saw some staffers I recognized from last summer. May follow up down the road with actual Senators, but won't hold my breath on that one.

Toshiyuki Ito, staff correspondent from The Yomiuri Shimbun is waiting for me outside the hall. We walk and talk to Longsworth, a House building on other side of Mall. He does about 30 mins Q&A on global posture changes with basing, holding small recorder up to my face the whole time. He says he's about halfway through PNM and it's hard for him in English. So I tell him to read the Japanese edition and save some time! We part outside of Longsworth.

Up in Longsworth on 5th floor I do 30 min office call on freshman Rep. Geoff Davis, 4th of Kentucky. Former Ranger, no less. He had really liked PNM and wanted to meet me. His people had contacted me by email, so we had the sit-down. By some accounts this guy has more military experience than the rest of the frosh class combined, and it shows. Very personable and very knowledgable. He and I share a big interest on the growth of religion inside the Gap and New Core. Bid him goodbye at 3pm, knowing we'd meet again at dinner.

Then spent hour in cafe in basement of Longsworth (they have that whole underground network among all the buildings) with Dan Forrester of Sapient corp, who is doing research article on "change agents" in the government. I had given him a slew of names to chase earlier, and now he was interviewing me. I will probably use this piece as cite in Vol. II.

At 4pm I make office call on Rep. Steve Israel, from Long Island NY. About an hour with him on military matters, discussing a group of thinkers he's putting together. Guy also just set up "center aisle" caucus group to explore more civility between Dems and Reps, so let's just say he's both ambitious and idealistic, which means I like him from the start. This one also set up out of blue by email through staff. Israel just really liked the book. They asked when I might be back, and I told them mid-April for another speaking gig, so we may set something up for members, if possible. All in all, another impressive guy.

At 6:30 I have a drink with The New Rule Sets Project's Advisory Board in a fancy local restaurant called "The Monacle" on D Street behind Capitol. Places is crawling with Reps and Senators. Watch Diane Feinstein depart.

Our Advisory Board right now is one Kevin Billings, a very interesting and connected guy in DC who's private sector but knows his way around just about everywhere. Kevin had set up nice dinner for me, him, a staffer and four House Representatives. Geoff Davis was one. Ken Calvert (44th, CA) was another. Plus Gary Miller (42nd, CA) and Ed Royce (40th, CA). Also Calvert's Chief of Staff, Dave Ramey.

All very impressive guys, and all with an amazing grasp of US history, especially the Civil War. All had done a lot of travel around the world, meeting key players and really getting to know key countries in the Gap and New Core. Since this was a self-selected bunch (they all came to talk foreign affairs and security with me over the meal), I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the quality of their knowledge and experience. I'm certain not all Reps are that on-topic as these four are, but it sure made a really interesting 3 hours of fairly spirited discussion. These guys could talk about damn near anything you could name: energy, trade, mortgage rates in Mexico, Hernando DeSoto, etc. Pick a subject, and they knew something, usually connected to serious on-the-ground investigation on a congressional delegation trip. Again, I know all Reps aren't that solid and I was getting a skewed sample here, but I was impressed.

As I always say, you meet people in these positions and then walk away from the meeting either wondering how such a dumbass got a job like that or feeling pretty good that such smart people are in such important posts. This quartet left me feeling awfully solid about their four seats, at least. Hopefully, I'll get to interact with them all in the future. They all told some amazing stories of trips overseas and stuff they had done over their careers. I mean, these guys really get around. Royce just went to Sudan with Don Cheadle and the Rwandan hotelier (Paul Rusesabagina) he plays in the movie "Hotel Rwanda." Bit of a PR stunt? Sure. But anyone who's making that effort on Sudan certainly gets my pat on the back. Plus, he just seems like a very nice man who goes out of his way to do more than just talk about suffering inside the Gap. He offered me a lot of good questions, as they all did.

Only problem with dinner was that it ended at around 10:15 and I wasn't in my car until almost 11pm. Trick was, I had to get to hotel in Williamsburg to hit the hay, so driving until 1:30am.

Nice hotel there, though, with a Tempurpedic-like bed that almost made the drive worthwhile. I was there for panel this morning from 10-12 with 2-star USA Gen I met at Airlie House and lady analyst from Congressional Budget Office. Event was big conference of Programming Analysis and Evaluation division of Office of Secretary of Defense (the green eyeshade people who count the beans, and thus are very powerful on budgets). Our panel discussion was all about "calculating risk." It was a good session with good audience questions. I was a bit out of it on the sleep, but did reasonably well, keeping it lively. The host called it an "incredibly provocative" session at the end, so everyone seemed happy.

Then 3.5 hour drive to BWI to catch scary flight home to Providence (big storm here).

On way back in plane read March issue of Esquire. More on that in two next posts.

Fun trip, but exhausting. Still, great to see the book getting such play in high places, and the personal connectivity established was just fabulous.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 16 February 2005

Spoke with Mark Warren by phone on drive home from airport, and he tells me that the Feb-issue article I wrote for them is now on their front page. Here's the direct link: http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2005/050215_mfe_barnett_1.html. Very happy to see it online. Remember on the original PNM article, they never posted, so I did myself, and we were all surprised by the added bounce. So now they're learning and we all benefit from the additional exposure. Guess I'm changing the magazine just a tiny bit on that level.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 16 February 2005

Found out today when I picked up current March issue in BWI Airport. Very exciting to see it. Expected it would take longer to appear.

Even cooler news: Mark Warren (Executive Editor) said that Esquire's webmaster was preparing to make a link from their site to my weblog.

Here's the new masthead entry on "Contributing Editors":

Ted Allen, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Andrew Chaikivsky, Larry Doyle, Ted C. Fishman, Andrea Immer, Chris Jones, Chuck Klosterman, Ken Kurson, Robert Kurson, Andy Langer, Kim Masters, Bucky McMahon, Adrienne Miller (LITERARY EDITOR), Phil Patton, Charles P. Pierce, Martha Sherrill, Barry Sonnenfeld, Daniel Voll, David Wondrich, Stacey Grenrock Woods, Bill Zehme.

John Mariani FOOD & TRAVEL CORRESPONDENT

George Foreman SPIRITUAL ADVISOR

John Mayer CULTURAL ADVISOR

Andrew Chaikivsky is the great guy who wrote the original profile on me. Of the group, Barry Sonnenfeld the director ("Men in Black" movies probably his most famous recent ones) and John Mayer (singer) are probably most famous right now, though you gotta give it up to George Foreman (assuming that's the boxer we're talking about!?!?!).

Anyway, fun to spot. Made me feel a little less disconnected about having no steady day job!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 17 February 2005

I was told by many people that when I lost my regular day-time job there would be days (or, more likely, nights) when I would get very anxious about the future. No matter how confident I might feel on any one day, these moments would come, I was told.

I'm feeling that tonight.

Why?

Don't know, really. Started day taking kids to school and feeling very positive about that (too much travel right now, so happy to help around home).

Then off to meeting at local consulting firm that specializes in really cool table-top wargaming. It's called Alidade and it's run by Jeff Cares, a retired Navy commander. They want to run a Shrink the Gap 05 game in the spring with dozens of players spread out over teams (Old Core, New Core, Seam States, Gap). Their design is clever and cool, and it should be a lot of fun. I will present briefs to kicks things off and provide nighttime entertainment, and with my New Rule Sets Projects LLC partners I'll play Control for the game. All in all, should be fascinating, and frankly, should make me feel awfully good about my prospects.

Meanwhile, I have two prospective assignments from Esquire, doing stories on two very different subjects in the government: one would be quite anonymous and the other would be anything but. Two very different challenges, two possibly fantastic pieces. Gotta make me feel good, yes?

And I am feeling good. Prospects seem very bright for the consultancy, and the speaking gigs keep rolling in. Book is done in terms of first draft. Everyone seems healthy, and I seem kinda funky.

Bit of it is the change stuff: like figuring out healthcare (thank God I already scored a large life insurance), taxes.

Some of it is just the bewilderment of being so damn busy without a job!

Some of it is just the hard allergies I seem to get in winter nowadays.

Some of it is just the fear of all that travel over next three weeks.

But in the end, when I really think about leaving the college, I realize I have almost no feeling whatsoever, other than I miss a few people.

Searching my skull a bit more, especially after nice phonecon with Art Cebrowski, also recently released under his own recognizance from a federal work program called DoD, and I think I have it!

I really need a vacation. The stress of all the change and powering through all that while writing 125,000 words of manuscript has left me seriously impaired--like a long football season or something. I just feel sort of beat-up, and unhealthy, and tired.

I could really use about two weeks of nothing, then about 6 weeks of dicking around the house, doing small things,and then a couple of weeks to organize my new home office--all the time doing lotsa workouts and reading for pleasure.

Then, I would be ready for the travel I will engage in over the next three weeks, replete with speeches after speeches.

Oh, and I have to edit that book over those three same weeks, plus the three weeks that follow (which feature no travel, thank God).

Hmmmm.

But, I feel good about the book, and the travels should be interesting and fun, and I won't miss any of Kev's BB games or practices, and the healthcare will work out, and I'll start working out when the travel's done, and prospects are good, and health is fine across family, and I'm feeling so burned out I have nothing left to say.

Not true.

Tomorrow I get up, roar like a lion, pay the bills and make the healthcare applications. I drive the kids to school. I something something. I go on class outing with Jerry's preschool (skating, no less), then home for something something more. Then I watch entire single season of some obscure Japanese anime vampire series with kids, while I type my way through a slew of stories to blog from this week's newspapers.

And living in that moment should be okay. I should hug everybody, return every smile, pet the dog and cat, know everything will be alright: that Warren will edit, that I'll write these articles, that the game will be cool, that the travel will be fine, that the consultancy will work, that everyone's health will be good, and that I will learn to live those moments one by one and avoid the fear of expectations.

Here endeth the prayer. . ..

■"U.S. Aides Cite Worry on Qaeda Infiltration From Mexico," by Douglas Jehl, New York Times, 17 February 2005, p. A10.

■"War Helps Recruit Terrorists, Hill Told: Intelligence Officials Talk of Growing Insurgency," by Dana Priest and Josh White, Washington Post, 17 February 2005, p. A1.

I always love it when the intel chiefs testify on the Hill, because it’s like manna from heaven for fear-mongers.

Yes, it’s a scary world and yes, connectivity requires solid code, otherwise it exposes you to danger that—at first glance—seems worse than disconnectedness (except it’s clear from human history that the connected thrive, while the disconnected dive). So yeah, to connect up Iraq invites a lot of short-term danger but ultimately the resulting connectivity makes for a safer world. If we listened to the intell agencies, we’d be too afraid to ever do anything, because their vote is always “No, don’t do it.”

But you know what? The intell agencies don’t define who our enemies are. Neither does the military.

We the people get to decide who our enemies are. The defense community is only in charge of the “how,” not the “when,” not the “what,” not the “where,” and sure as hell not the “why.”

Never look to the intel agencies to tell you what to be afraid of, because then you’ll be afraid of damn near everything.

■"As Girls ‘Vanish,’ Chinese City Battles Tide of Abortions," by Howard D. French, New York Times, 17 February 2005, p. A3.

I remember our first ultrasound with our oldest. Finding out she was a girl was fantastic, because a female hadn’t been born in my family in more than three decades.

Alas, in too much of the world, but especially in China and India, the ultrasound is used to weed out unwanted girls.

Our Vonne Mei lives because somehow she escaped this technology or her parents or mother simply valued her too much to let that happen. Every adopting parent wants to believe it’s the latter at work, but mostly it’s the former.

The girls who really vanish are the ones who never see the light of day. Vonne Mei isn’t “lost,” but rather connected to a family who’s comparative advantage is that it knows the most essential truth about life: The world moves on a woman’s hips. The world moves and it swivels and bops. The world moves on a woman’s hips. The world moves and it jiggles and hops.

It’s the world of light, all right. Gotta open our eyes up!

■"Rocket Fails To Launch In Test Run: Third Straight Error For Missile Defense," by David Stout, New York Times, 15 February 2005, p. A11.

Yet another nifty failure of this close-to-$100-billion-boondoggle.

Where is our Tang!

And the real threat we face? $50 billion more over the next seven years.

Problem is, until we get better on SysAdmin, that price seems small to the one we pay for bad nation-building in Iraq.

But what would you rather do? Export security or import insecurity?

■"Buses to Span Kashmir Line, Signaling Step in Peace Talks," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 17 February 2005, p. A5.

Pakistan has nukes. It has lotsa crazy, backward fanatics. It’s got corruption galore, plus narcotics, plus terrorists to spare. And it’s given the technology to other states.

One thing it hasn’t done yet is use them. Instead, having nukes evened out the military situation with India, and once the experience of MAD (mutually-assured destruction) settled in (it took about a quarter-century, just like with us and the Sovs), the nukes stopped being an issue between these two states.

Of course, that could never happen with Israel and Iran, because their hatred and fear for each other is unprecedented in human history!

No, peace is much more likely with one side holding nukes and the other feeling pissed off, disrespected, and that it’s best option is supporting terrorist networks working beyond its borders.

Yes, that is the safer route that’s more likely to get us what we want.

■"Germany Pushes Proactive Path: Schroder to Use Bush Visit To Sell His Own Ideas, Calls For U.S. to Back Iran Talks," by Marc Champion and Frederick Kempe, Wall Street Journal, 16 February 2005, p. A13.

Neat article on what our European allies want from U.S.: want us to negotiate with Iran, want us to rethink the transatlantic relationship (letting Europe decide more); want us to forgive more Gap debt; want us to do more on CO2 emissions; want us to lighten up on China and let EU sell them arms; and want us to be more patient with Russia.

And you know what? Europe is right on all these points.

How hard would it be to make Europe happy? By my estimate: not at all.

■"For Mongolians, E Is for English, F Is for Future," by James Brooke, New York Times, 15 February 2005, p. A1.

Great story on how Mongolia is pushing English as dominant second language. It wants to join the Core and that seems like the best direct-route bet.

The models are Singapore and South Korea, but the future is Muslim societies that see the writing on the wall, like Turkey and even Iraq. In Latin America, it’s Chile that’s lead goose.

This is a huge advantage for us, a connectivity to be exploited and encouraged. And what have we done since 9/11? We’ve made this country a much less friendly place. Why? Out of fear and misplaced attention. We don’t need interdiction, we need identification.

■"Discovering Egyptian Gains: Investors," by Shumita Sharma, Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2005, p. C16.

Egypt is reforming economically under its new PM, driving up connectivity between itself and the outside world, so naturally money flows in, creating even more connectivity.

The Core’s job now is keeping that process and that flow moving. Happy confluences of events and people and motivations aren’t easily arranged, so they’re naturally scarce in history. Everyone likes to think that strategic planning is all about preparing for bad events and worse cases, when it’s the exact opposite.

■"Arms Buying By Venezuela Worries U.S.: Planes From Brazil On Shopping List," by Juan Forero, New York Times, 15 February 2005, p. A3.

Chavez is stocking up on arms and aircraft, and New Core Brazil is more than happy to sell them to him. Why?

The New Core naturally wants to prevent the Old Core from too much domination. Bribes, by and large, go downward, not upward. The Old Core tends to bribe the New Core, and the New Core tends to bribe the Gap. When New Core Brazil is bribing Gap Venezuela, it’s because the Old Core hasn’t done its job on Brazil.

Whine if you want, but rising pillars don’t act responsibly until the Old Core gives them responsibility. Absent that, they create their own responsibility, and we typically end up unhappy with their choices.

Meanwhile on Chavez: this is a typical bad sign for a Big Man. In the Core, we buy weapons all the time that we never use or even intend to use, but not so in the Gap. There, in that Hobbesian world, it really is use-em-or-lose-em.

■"10,000 Peacekeepers Sought By U.S. for Southern Sudan: Americans want U.S. forces to ensure that a peace pact is upheld," by Warren Hoge, New York Times, 15 February 2005, p. A10.

The U.S. would like 10,000 peacekeepers and 750 cops in Sudan—pronto!

And it would be nice if the UN took the lead. Problem is we’re holding up the Old Core’s desire to have the International Criminal Court be the lead player in prosecuting the guilty.

Time to get our chocolate in their peanut butter and vice versa. Otherwise, we’re left with saying, “It’d be nice if you did the peacekeeping so long as the ICC isn’t involved.”

Meanwhile, all we hear back is, “Oh yeah, well, it’d be nice if the ICC was involved so long as you led the peacekeeping!”

Guess where that dialogue goes. Nowhere.

We have to seed the SysAdmin and the SysAdmin must eventually feed the ICC. Piss and moan all you want about these outcomes. Decry them from the mountain top. Declare me a traitor to the Founding Fathers and a one-world-government toady.

But in the end, this is going to happen. Won’t happen cause we want it. Won’t happen cause we like it.

It’ll happen because we can’t stand the continued failure and pain we’re left with otherwise.

Supermen to overpower the Super-Empowered

■"Arab Superheroes Leap Pyramids in a Single Bound," by Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 16 February 2005, p. C1.

Fascinating article on rise of AK Comics in Egypt. An interesting tale of globalization, with cross-cultural fertilization galore. Not the clash of civilizations, but their merging.

In countries where the real social issues can’t be addressed directly in the media and arts, stuff like comics and science fiction can be huge (like both were in the Soviet Union) because it’s the “safe” way of exploring today’s issues in alternative universes, plus these media naturally appeal to the young—the hearts to be won.

Modeled behavior is everything—in governance, in parenting, in shrinking the Gap.

You know, when I taught my class at the college on “Thinking Systematically About Alternative Global Futures,” the whole point of the in-class training was to get the students to the point where they really didn’t need me, because they could see the news and read it with an eye to placing it naturally within larger contexts.

By the time I got to my email Wednesday night, a slew of readers had sent me this article, and most were the longest-reading ones (I can tell, because of the older email address they use for me). I really love it when I see that, because it means I’ve got to get smarter if I want to stay ahead of my own audience!

■"The Surprising Odds of Surviving a Crash: Majority of Fliers Walk Away From Airline Accidents; A Visit to FAA’s Safety Lab," by Scott McCartney, Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2005, p. D1.

Over the past two decades, almost 3,000 people were involved in plane/jets crashes in U.S. and more than half lived.

The flight attendants aren’t kidding about the “crash position”; it really works. No, really, it can be the difference between life and death.

Two other keys: keep your shoes on (don’t worry, the slides won’t rip nowadays) and know in advance how many rows you must travel to an exit (smoke likely to be bad, so you should be able to do it blind). You can get out and you can survive, it’s just likely to be nasty, with your survival depending on you’re being proactive and wading through some serious smoke and debris (so keep your shoes on!).

■"In Qatar, Oil Firms Make Huge Bet On Alternative Fuel: Supports Say New Diesel Is Cleaner, More Efficient; Untested on Large Scale," by Russell Gold, Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2005, p. A1.

Exxon, shut out of Saudi Arabia, is pouring billions into Qatar to create the world’s largest natural gas-to-liquid plant in the world. Big gamble? Yes. Getting the world to shift to this clear diesel is no mean trick, but not as hard as you might think. Work some huge rising vehicle markets like India and China and you capture a lot of the auto-making and truck-making players’ attention across the world. It’s not who has the most vehicles now, but who’s buying the most in the coming years.

But alas, none of this will really fit Tom Friedman’s dream of killing them (authoritarian regimes) softly with lowered oil prices, because the same (at least early) big sources of gas will hail from the same regions as the long-time big sources of oil. Yes, eventually, we’ll search the world over more intelligently on gas, but in the near- and mid-term it’ll all be what they call “associated gas,” or gas we’ve found when looking for oil (associated with oil).

Should we be depressed? No. The connectivity required on gas is a lot more than that required for oil: more technology, more industry, more pipelines, more long-term commitments and infrastructural change.

Don’t beggar these regimes; connect them.

■"A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield," by Tim Weiner, New York Times, 16 February 2005, p. A1.

■"New Factor in Iraq: Irregular Brigades Fill Security Void," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 16 February 2005, p. A1.

Experts keep wanting to attack the SysAdmin concept as “low tech,” when it’s really “wow tech” that’s got a lot more commercial-sector crossover potential. We can’t swap out people for capital much more on the Leviathan force, because it’s already amazingly capital-intensive. Logically, as an investor in the defense community, you should not fear the transformation of transformation from the Leviathan to SysAdmin, because the latter is the “Gap” of the defense universe: lotsa labor just waiting to be technologized into something more efficient. Robots were never going to take off in the Leviathan world, but in the SysAdmin universe, their potential is almost unlimited—and all of it can be used simultaneously in the private sector because policing is policing the world over, as is transparency and monitoring in general.

The SysAdmin force isn’t the death of the defense industry, it’s the salvation.

Especially since the environment it’ll be working in only grows more complex with time. The Fourth Generation Warfare types want you to believe that Network-Centric Ops are passé, when in reality they’re only beginning to come into their own, with the real progress of the future coming on the SysAdmin and not the Leviathan side. War remains incredibly simple and hellish, but peace gets more complex by the moment. In war, telling the bad from good is fairly straightforward, but telling all the good guys from all the bad guys in peace isn’t just hard, it’s godawfully complex. Networking the military is going to be a lot more interesting in the SysAdmin force than it ever was in the Leviathan force. The Leviathan lives in a pre-Net or Net-down environment, by and large, whereas the SysAdmin is networking personified.

■"Half World’s People to Live in Cities by 2007," by Irwin Arieff, Reuters, 15 February 2005, pulled off web (Yahoo news).

World goes majority urban in 2007. U.S. did it around 1920 and a generation later, we had an entirely new political landscape. Same will be true for world.

As I explore in the PNM Blueprint for Action, shrinking the Gap is one big exercise in successfully bringing the population from rural to urban, connecting these people to larger opportunities in the process. This urbanization process is a huge tipping point moment. We are on the verge of shrinking the Gap because the Gap is on the verge of so many things that we need to help these nations achieve, with security obviously being at the top of the list.

Right now about 75% of the Old Core lives in cities, but far less than half do in the Gap. Where are the biggest cities of the future? Most are New Core giant metropolises found in places like China, India, Brazil, Mexico. This is an obvious tipping point process.

Shrinking the Gap means growing “cores” all over the place, and they’re called successful cities that process all that ambition and connect it to something larger, and that something larger is the global economy, or the only thing capable of taking advantage of all that potential comparative advantage.

■"In China, an Unusual Level Of Criticism Toward an Ally," by Keith Bradsher and James Brooke, New York Times, 13 February 2005, p. A12.

■"Rice Assures South Korean Of U.S. Pressure on North," by Joel Brinkley and James Brooke, New York Times, 15 February 2005, p. A6.

■"Japan to Join U.S. Policy on Taiwan: Growth of China Seen Behind Shift," by Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, 18 February 2005, p. A1.

■"U.S. Seems Sure of the Hand of Syria, Hinting at Penalties," by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 15 February 2005, p. A8.

■"U.S. and U.N. Step Up Pressure on Damascus: Security Council Urges Troop Withdrawal," by Robin Wright, Washington Post, 16 February 2005, p. A14.

■"Iran Says Pilotless U.S. Jets Are Spying on Nuclear Sites," by Nazila Fathi, New York Times, 17 February 2005, p. A10.

■"Bush Urges Diplomatic Solutions to Conflicts: President Stresses Desire to Work With Allies on Standoffs With Syria, Iran, N. Korea," by Peter Baker, Washington Post, 18 February 2005, p. A6.

I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten about the Esquire piece where they tell me how crazy I am for thinking China will ever help us topple Kim Jong Il. But here is the Chinese media talking more critically than ever, and here is the Bush administration making no secret of its desire to recruit Beijing’s help. Key pen names being used to signal official intent, but China stops short of supporting regime change strategies like dropping radios or “other steps to help the country’s residents realize how poor and isolate they are.”

A war of connectivity? Too bad that the poor and malnutritioned rural poor have watched their height and IQ levels drop for years on end (I’m not kidding). When you starve an entire generation like that, you weaken them from within. To expect radios to do the trick alone asks too much. This is a real totalitarian state, with a truly infantilized population as a result. We’re talking the 70-pound 14-year-old who’s been locked in the closet for 8 years. It’s that sick and that real.

It’s not a choice between war and regime change. People may think that avoiding the war avoids the peacekeeping and nation-building, but all that strategy gets you is more suffering in the meantime. Are we waiting for that 70-pound 14-year-old to somehow grow into an adult who can stand up for himself? When they never get out of the closet?

Everyone knows, as the second article points out, “that China is the only nation with leverage on North Korea.” Why? It’s the only one that has both carrots and sticks and it willing to use both, as one analyst points out.

So why do we encourage Japan to simultaneously stand up to China over Taiwan? Where are we going with that one? Should we be surprised that most Chinese believe their government should side with North Korea so long as both countries see the U.S. as a common enemy?

We need to get something more out of Kim’s fall than just Kim’s fall, or even Korean reunification. We need a huge payoff from something of that effort, and that payoff is a security relationship with China that rules out war over Taiwan or anything else. Ask yourself if ultimately this isn’t something we’re going to want to have and need to have, and if that is the case, then real strategic vision is always on the lookout for making that happen.

North Korea is staring us in the face as an opportunity.

Over to the Middle East, we’re now fixating on Syria as a big problem, but Syria is more symptom than source. We fix Iran and we fix Syria and Lebanon to boot. Fixing Iran isn’t an invasion or an occupation. That is the only way to actually lose that society, which is already on our side. Nowhere near a totalitarian state, so you kill it with connectivity. No need to fly in radios to clue the population in. They almost revolted outright soon after Saddam’s fall.

But no, we can’t negotiate with a state that sponsors terrorism! I get a lot of those emails.

Yet somehow we did just that with the USSR for years on end, and frankly, as a student of Soviet support for terrorism around the world, there is simply no comparing the two. The Sovs were global and deep in their support. Iran is minor league in comparison. But with the Sovs we saw something larger at stake (peace in Europe), so we dealt and did the regime in with connectivity. How much has our isolation weakened the mullahs so far in Iran? Ready for something else?

Bush says he wants “diplomatic solutions,” but too often that just means “our way” with no threat of “highway,” and that won’t work. Deal the war or deal the peace.

Look ahead and ask yourself: Do you see North Korea in the future? If not, then the question is time, not “if.”

But also ask yourself: Do you see Iran not being a key player in the Middle East? Not being Shiite? Not having mullahs? We’re not changing those realities, but steering them down different pathways. The real question is, How to marginalize the mullahs politically?

Certainly not by trying the same isolating shtick that’s kept Castro in power in Cuba all these years.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 18 February 2005

Glass definitely half-full today. Got my first check from my speaking agency. That connected.

Spent half the day scheming on my new assignments with Esquire, and made me feel connected. Oddly enough, all that activity is like one neverending job search, and I find that more connecting than being stuck in a job I no longer felt anything for, in part because all that auditioning fits my personality (8 of 9) better than the pseudo-authority of belonging to an established entity. I like proving myself more than feeling proven - or even approved.

I will even confess to seriously thinking through the next book already! And I am moving toward aggressively pursuing that book (the one Mark Warren and I pondered up at the Leinie Lounge at Lambeau) before the Emily Updates, because I think the sequencing payoff is better (though I may be wrong). I will have to start carrying a notebook on Vol. III.

Happy news from Berkeley Paperback today. An email from a sales exec asked if anything special was going on early last week, because apparently Amazon sold several hundred copies on Wednesday - just like that! And we're talking three months before the book comes out. At first I suspected a conference coming up, possibly one where I'm speaking. Then I started wondering about some college ordering ahead maybe? Either way, it felt good, because it says the book continues to be discovered.

Today, back to the blog, so more work for my intern editor, Sean Meade, who goes through all my posts after the fact and proofs them for me. Sean volunteered for this job out of the blue a while back, and he does a nice job. Eventually, I want to pay him more than a compliment, which is why I'm hoping the Rule Set Reset continues to pick up speed. Our second issue comes out very soon, and we're keeping this one free like the first as we work out our form and sense of function. After this one, though, we hit subscription mode for real.

Wrote this all up over five hours of Japanese anime with the kids. All I can say is, the Japanese can do more than just teach a thing or two about vampires. Hell, they own the whole genre!

Best part? My first Mac battery went about 3:20 and I'm finishing exhausted here with 76% on number two. You gotta like that.

Go dog! Go! Now is the time for work! Work dog! Work!

And yes, now is the time on Sprockets when we dance . . .

Here's today's catch:

■ Working all the evil axes

■ 2007: the globalization urbanization tipping point

■ News that cheers this frequent flier

■ Qatar's doing this just to thwart Tom Friedman!

■ The SysAdmin goes high-tech as the environment regresses

■ U.S.: I nominate anybody but us to do Sudan

■ Supermen to overpower the Super-Empowered

■ Egypt getting a thumb's up

■ Big Man on big buying spree, and Venezuelans are certainly the winners here!

■ Europe is basically right across the board

■ Mongolia finds its voice in the New Core

■ The vanishing girls of China

■ Star Wars remains a great work of fiction

■ If crazy Pakistan can have nukes . . .

■ Who shouldn't define what's a threat to the United States

■"Iraqi Kurds Detail Their Strong Demands for Autonomy," by Edward Wong, New York Times, 18 February 2005, p. A8.

The Shiites need the Kurds to rule Iraq and the Kurds' price is real federalism that gives them substantial autonomy.

This is the end of the unitary state that was Iraq, and the sort of federalism that emerges here can be one scary model for the rest of the Middle East.

Clear losers? Sunnis. They lose the power and the control of the energy.

■"Brazil Carves Outs 2 Vast Preserves in the Amazon Rain Forest," by AP, New York Times, 18 February 2005, p. A5.

The real seam that defines Brazil is the Amazon, the bulk of which is an almost uncontrollable expanse. The Amazon is roughly half of the country, and the huge Para state exemplifies this sort of frontier lawlessness/justice, where ranchers rule with an iron fist right out of some nasty Sergio Leone Western. Private logging companies and ranchers have been digging deeper into the Amazon for years. Resistance arises, an American nun is assassinated, and Lula responds with two decrees creating a vast new reserve.

Who owns the Amazon? That has always been the question, and the lack of an answer to that question has always been a source of violence and woe for Brazil. We shall see if Lula's answer works, and how he'll enforce it.

■"Cambodia's Murderous Mystery Man [book review]," by William Grimes, New York Times, 18 February 2005, p. B33.

The book is Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short. A bio of the man who led the killing of 1.5 million out of a population of only 7 million, or roughly one out of every five people in the country.

Pol Pot was the Taliban of Maoism, or the Trotskyite of Leninism, or the Stalinist of Marxism: he pushed the logic to stunning conclusions.

His revolution was the ultimate expression of socialism's reach-back in time to start over with the right kind of society. His was the vision of the far left gone mad and Occidentalism taken to its utmost extreme:

"Money, law courts, newspapers, the postal system and foreign telecommunications--even the concept of the city--were all simply abolished," Philip Short writes in his superb, authoritative account of the man and the madness that transformed Cambodia, almost overnight, into hell on earth. "Individual rights were not curtailed in favor of the collective, but extinguished altogether. Individual creativity, initiative, originality were condemned per se. Individual consciousness was systematically abolished."

Pol Pol killed his countrymen systematically. It is estimated that Kim Jong Il's famine-induced genocide of the late 1990s killed upwards of two million in North Korea. But his story is far from being told.

One killed actively, the other worked hard to make sure people died for lack of food.

We won't know all the horrific details on Kim until years after his regime is toppled, but someday, you will read his bio for real and it will be just as scary as Pol Pot's.

■"2 Big Appetites Take Seats at the Oil Table: China and India Compete for Energy Resources in Places Others Shun," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 18 February 2005, p. C1.

Oh do we fret now that two long-time socialist states have embraced capitalism and growth in a big, big way. What were we thinking? Now they're a real threat!

People have this all backwards. By connecting to disconnected states that the Old Core shuns, New Core India and China don't threaten us, but give us new opportunities to change these countries and our relationships with them. This is definitely the case with Iran, but all we see is their "obstructionism."

We're talking 37 percent of the world's population with skyrocketing energy demands. People who think this will remake energy markets and environmentalism are correct, but that's not all. It will remake political and security relationships. We can adjust to that reality, or we can idiotically try to fight it or demonize it.

■"China Uneasy In Korea Role, Wary of U.S.," by Howard D. French, New York Times, 19 February 2005, p. A1.

■"7 Habits of Highly Effective Cadres: Western Management Experts Descend on an Eager China.," by David Barboza, New York Times, 19 February 2005, p. B1.

The opening paras of the first story tell it all:

The dispatch by China of a high-level envoy this weekend to persuade the North Koreans to return to talks on their nuclear weapons would seem to present it with an ideal opportunity.

China's economy is growing enormously, casting shadows in every direction. Its fast-modernizing military has the attention of every power, regional or global. No other country, meanwhile, enjoys the kind of long, unbroken friendship that China has nurtured for over five decades with North Korea. In short, all the pieces would seem to be in place for Beijing to score its first big coup in global diplomacy, brokering an end to the nuclear threat on the Korean peninsula.

The only problem with this optimistic scenario is that it is shared by almost no one in China.

For now, the Chinese remain reluctant to take major diplomatic risks on North Korea, convinced that this longtime ally, a country that Chinese soldiers shed blood in large numbers to defend, will never turn against them. Analysts say that Beijing's top priority is to maintain quiet on its frontier, and that it would take a more aggressive tack only if tensions between Washington and North Korea were to increase seriously.

Beyond such doubts, however, lingers an even more fundamental reason for the reluctance of China to take the lead in this crisis: its deep-seated skepticism about the United States' strategic designs in the region.

"If we cut off aid and the Koreas are unified on South Korean terms, that would be a big disaster for China," one analyst said. "The U.S. would insist on basing its troops in the northern part of the peninsula, and China would have to consider that all of its efforts going back to the Korean War have been a waste."

Other experts here look cynically on Washington's insistence on Chinese leadership in the North Korean face-off, seeing it as part of a broader effort by the United States to entangle Beijing in a growing web of international arrangements, the better to limit Chinese influence.

A fresh example of the divisions between the United States and China was provided this week with confirmation that Tokyo is moving closer to Washington's policy position that the status quo on Taiwan must be maintained. Chinese analysts often point out that having a friendly country tying up American troops on its northern border frees Beijing to focus its forces on other contingencies, notably the Taiwan question.

What this tells me is that America has it within its power to enlist China's support for Kim's removal from power, but that we're not signaling in the right way to make clear to China what benefits would accrue to it for this major effort on their part. And that's because we're of two minds on China, and that's too bad, because absent these sorts of Cold War leftovers (Taiwan defense guarantee, North Korea), there isn't much to divide us. China wants our ways, our advice, our progress.

What we can't decide is how important China is becoming to us, and so Kim lives on in our state of strategic confusion.

Again, too bad, because with China's help, Kim is eminently vulnerable. Clearly, we prefer fearing China more than getting rid of Kim. It's really that simple.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 19 February 2005

Brilliant! I fly to Iceland tonight. I mean, who doesn't want to fly to Iceland on a Saturday night . . . in February! I end up on the northern coast of Norway tomorrow, in Bergen to be exact.

Getting my rear out door means cleaning house with help of two oldest, plus coaching Kev in basketball (we lost first half big-time, won second half in fabulous fashion, but ending up losing game; Kev, however, was spectacular on defense with steals galore and lotsa assists on O).

Here's some stuff on my way out door . . .

■ The deal we're not making with China on North Korea

■ Yet another scary article on India and China wanting MORE OIL!

■ Pol Pot was a monster from hell, but Kim's bodycount (while passive) is higher

■ Who owns the Amazon?

■ The Kurds want their federalism

Dateline: business class lounge for IcelandAir in Keflavik Airport, Reykjavik, Iceland

Would you believe 45 degrees in February?

Can't say I like Icelandic keyboards . . .

Gotta keep this short, cause I´m hungry for free food and next flight starts boarding in five minutes.

Sure is beautiful terminal. Lotsa dark wood and all so Scandanavian sleek. Got a lot of work done on flight, organizing notes for book, plus writing reference letter for friend. Nice grilled tuna, nice Chilean wine, very old movie (First Wives' Club).

On to Oslo. Debating the Ambien pill. Feel I should sleep some. Good thing it is still dark here at 7am.

Gotta love business class. Was complete surprise when I checked in. Nice of host. Economy full of students!

I smell eggs . . .

Dateline: Hotell Bryggen Orion, Bergen Norway, 20 February 2005

I was hallucinating at the end of the my last post. No eggs, but some interesting meat substances. Ate so long I barely got on the plane in time. Had a row to myself.

Took the pill for the flight from Iceland to Oslo and missed the entire thing. It was boom-chaka-lak-huh? Started reading an article in Newsweek and never finished it.

Weird, but no one asked to see my passport in Norway when we landed. When I flashed the badge in Iceland, I entered “Scandanavia” for real, so nothing more required.

I was pretty groggy getting off plane is Oslo, and it took me a while to realize I needed to grab my checked luggage, even though I was ticketed through to Bergen. But that was what was weird: I had to pick up my luggage and resubmit it for the domestic flight component, but I didn’t have to show either a ticket or my passport. So the drill was sort of like landing in a new country (move your luggage) but then not (no customs).

Fell asleep in lounge waiting for plane. Nice older guy sitting next to me tapped me awake or I’d be there still. No biz class on third leg, and that was disappointing, since I slept through it all (the hot towels, the wine, everything!) on the second leg.

Then again, some sleep is required.

My naval commander host is waiting for me at Bergen airport with a copy of my book, so I recognize him versus vice-versa. I don’t follow the Esquire fashion rule of dressing up for plane rides like they’re still a privilege. No, I go comfy in some stylish casual my wife bought me for the China trip.

He drives me to Bergen and I take in the sites along the way. Pretty warm here. Snow-capped mountains a plenty, but little snow here on coast. Much like Rhode Island to be exact. Bergen is the second biggest city in Norway at just under a quarter-million, but it’s really dispersed among these seven mountains that pop up along the coast, so you don’t really get a sense of big city.

The old-town center here was one of the key pillars of the Hanseatic League from way back way back, so lotsa early Germanic influence here in architecture. Reminds me a lot of St. Petersburg, another northern port city with lotsa early Germanic influence. In many ways, this place feels like the closest I’ve come yet to revisiting Leningrad (the name of St. Pete when I lived a summer there in 1985).

The “hotel” we’re staying at isn’t the best, but it’s one the Norwegian navy has a deal with. Nice enough, in a mid-level British sort of way, but I would have taken the Radisson down the street with its broadband in every room. I have to type this on my Mac in my room and then memory-stick it into the public PC in the lobby. But that beats trudging to the Internet café way down near the McDonald’s.

Hmmm, McDonald’s . . . .

When I arrive with my commander host Odd (pronounced Ode, as in “Ode to Joy”), we sit and drink coffee with Chet Richards and his wife. Chet Richards, you may remember, reviewed my book, and my review of his review started a bit of snarky emails between us, making me a bit apprehensive about meeting him, because we have to get along over the next three days (I talk tomorrow and Tuesday, he talks Tuesday and leads plenary on Wednesday with me and Col. Thomas X. Hammes, USMC, author of The Sling and the Stone, a good book on Fourth Generation Warfare I used in Vol. II.

After two hours of chit-chat, in which I discover Chet to be a really nice guy and I believe he finds the same in me (proving yet again the old bit about avoiding judgment on anyone based on virtual contact), I head up to the sixth floor and my room. Put my pants in the Corby (which I loved so much from my talk at Parliament in London in late 2003 that I had Vonne buy one for me for home), iron my shirt for tomorrow, shower up, and then start working the brief (many nits to fix in transfer from PC to Mac, but no showstoppers). Still, some real work to do because tomorrow I will give the max version of the brief (like the one I used for the June 04 CSPAN taping) and I haven’t done that big version in about five months, so much to update.

I go out for dinner with the Richards to a local restaurant. I have a fab seafood salad (I figure, I’m in fish capital Bergen, why not?). We talk over the meal for a solid two hours, and it’s very nice. Chet’s a natural mentoring sort, like most retired military, so you learn a lot over a meal. He is very curious about Vol. II, and so I try out the material in bits and pieces, and as usual, this process makes me feel ever more excited about how good I think that piece will be. Mark’s right: I keep thinking that all this stuff is hugely obvious to everyone but then I have to understand that no one thinks the Core-Gap and everything else connected with PNM in the 24/7/365 way I do, plus a lot was left unsaid in PNM, so this material is definitely Vol. II (not a sequel but an extension) but also very new and unique.

Not sure I said this one before, but Vol. I should be thought of like a pennant turned backwards. In terms of content, the pointy end of the pennant begins at about 1973 and the fat end ends up at 2004. PNM wasn’t really about the future at all, but about figuring out now and how we got here. Vol. II is the opposite of Vol. I: this time the pennant is turned right-ways, with the fat end starting in 2005 and the pointy end reaching until about 2025-2030. So the book is mostly geared toward the next five to ten years, with only a small portion reaching out to the 2025 timeframe. I attach a small graphic to explain it further.

(Oops! Forgot in original posting of this message! Here it is the next day:)

Richards seemed to really like that explanation of the content difference between I and II, as does everyone else I explain it too. It’s a good image for me, helping me understand the two books’ center of gravity. Vol. I really had to focus most on explaining the world since 9/11 and Vol. II really has to focus most on explaining the world over the next five or so years, because that, as Neil Nyren points out, is what people really want most in this sort of sequel, not some fantastic trip to 2025.

Anyway, a weird sort of truncated day, tacked onto yesterday, but enjoyable thanks to the Richards and Odd. I will work the brief as required tonight and then pill my way to sleep so I can perform for a solid six hours tomorrow.

Dateline: Hotel same as last night, Bergen Norway, 21 February 2005

Slept through my alarm this morning, so had to rush out the door. Driven to Naval Academy with fellow instructors Chet Richards and Col. Thomas X. Hammes (USMC) by our collective host Ole, who BTW spent a portion of his childhood with his astronomer father in SE Wisconsin.

Jumping right in, I brief the students (all in uniform) in a steep classroom theatre from roughly 9:15 to noon. We then break for a nice lunch. School is right on one of the fjords, so fairly stunning view that reminds me of Bar Harbor ME. Then we return to class and I brief from 1300 to 1500.

At that point I am released for day and accompany the colonel for a ride up one of the city’s mountains on a cable car-like system that works largely by gravity (one car goes up as the other goes down, and they pass each other in the middle where the track splits to allow them passage—all very clever). A beautiful view from the mountain top, where I snap a few photos with my cell phone camera, which I will post later.

Tonight, we all get together (Ole, colonel, Chet and his spouse and me) and split some beers that Ole brings to the hotel (insanely expensive here, so Ole brings some cans from far more moderately priced Denmark next door, where he lives). Then after dinner in the hotel buffet-style restaurant, where I eat too much (8-of-9 has never learned to behave at a buffet—just not in my genes, and, at this rate, I soon won’t be either (jeans, that is)).

Then I while away night watching a brilliant BBC production on Mary Queen of Scots.

Feeling a bit weird with the time change, but then I always do. I did a very extended version of the brief over the five hours, with intermittent Q&A. Tomorrow I will finish the rest between 0900 and noon.

The students, I feel, are getting their money’s worth. Meanwhile, based on where they go with the questions, I am feeling better and better about the Vol. II.

OMYGOD!

I remember talking about an image that described the content of the two books in yesterday’s post, or at least I think I remember that.

But I forgot to upload.

Here it is. . .

Dateline: library in Norwegian Naval War College, Bergen Norway, 22 February 2005

First the bad news: didn't win the Wired Rave award for top author. It went to the guy who wrote a book on the brain. Still nice to get nominated. Sure glad I didn't skip this trip for that. Still, sad, or should I say "sæd"? Or maybe "såd"?

Learning to like the Scan keybørd!

Finished the brief today, then had nice lunch and asked for access to PC. Got online at library and realize now my problems of last two days due to hotel, not the email. So I catch up on all email here.

Fun to watch all the young officers hang out in library to watch cross-country skiing sports on widescreeen TV here--like watching NFL or NBA. Big deal here. Not a lot of scoring though . . .

Nicer room for last third of brief today, then I signed about hælf-døzen books.

Okay, I'll cut it øut--no rælly!

People here eat a lot of meat, and I mean morning noon and night.

Today I try to buy some cool sweaters for family back home, although considering reindeer pelt for Em. These are pretty cool. Still, the Rudolf factor . . ..

Some stuff I saw in press that caught my eye:

1) Prisoner Uprising In Iraq Exposes New Risk for U.S.
Nonlethal Weapons Proved Ineffective as Chaos Spread
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A01

2)Army Having Difficulty Meeting Goals In Recruiting
Fewer Enlistees Are in Pipeline; Many Being Rushed Into Service
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A01
The active-duty Army is in danger of failing to meet its recruiting goals, and is beginning to suffer from manpower strains like those that have dropped the National Guard and Reserves below full strength, according to Army figures and interviews with senior officers .

Rumsfeld pushed what he could over first admin in terms of transformation, mostly in people, organization, and strategy. Now that perfect storm of budgets and embarrassments of Iraq occupation meet his ability to survive as SECDEF, he will get his way on a load of things in coming months. It is crucial he stay in power now. The Army is cracking finally, and big change is coming.

3) Bush Arrives in Europe for Meetings With Leaders
Unity and Democracy Will Be Major Themes
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A18

A senior administration official said the United States had no intention of directly joining ongoing talks aimed at restraining Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, although many European officials have expressed concern that the talks involving Britain, France, Germany and Iran will fail without U.S. involvement.

"The issue and the problem is Iran's behavior," the U.S. official said. "My sense is that the Europeans want to talk to us in exactly those terms, which is the right way to talk about it."

Similarly, the official said, the United States had "real problems" with E.U. plans to lift an arms embargo imposed on China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

This is bad news. Only way we can make nice with Europe is to pair Iran and China? Where are we going with this? Linking India next? Where do we expect these countries to find energy in future? Who's knee-capping whom on growth here? This is not a viable long-term strategy.

4) Insurgents Wage Precise Attacks on Baghdad Fuel
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: February 21, 2005
The new attack patterns reveal that the insurgents have a deep understanding of the Iraqi capital's infrastructure network.

We need to wage peace SysAdmin-style because our enemies are already waging insurgency SysAdmin-style. Again, we change not because it's cool or progressive but because we lose otherwise.

5)China Accuses U.S. and Japan of Interfering on Taiwan
By JIM YARDLEY and KEITH BRADSHER

Published: February 21, 2005

EIJING, Feb. 20 - China accused Japan and the United States on Sunday of meddling in its internal affairs, and criticized a new joint security statement in which the two countries declared a peaceful Taiwan Strait as among their "common strategic objectives."

The mention of Taiwan in the statement issued Saturday by senior American and Japanese officials drew a firm response from China, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province and is acutely sensitive to what it regards as outside interference. By contrast, Taiwan's foreign minister cautiously welcomed the statement.

Neither Japan or U.S. gains anything real in this act, and just reveals our fears of being divided and conquered by China's rising economic power. I mean, come on! Does adding Japan to that mix do anything to deter China? Or does it just make them feel more vulnerable? And who thinks that is in our long-term interest? Again, where are we going with this over the long haul? Does anybody in the White House pay attention to how much China buys our T-bills or funnels its trade surplus with U.S. back into the secondary mortgage market? Our heads are up our asses on this one.

My quick dump. Will try to check in tomorrow after lunch.

Dateline: Sjøkrigsskolen (Sea War School), Bergen Norway, 23 February 2005

Splitting headache of the sort I associate with the pace of travel and high-pressure systems. Feeling a bit worn down, but maybe that's the 10 percent alcohol beer from last night, which really was delicious.

The more I hang around here, the more I understand my childhood home of Wisconsin, which is full of Norwegians.

Bought a couple of nice sweaters for wife and baby yesterday. Thinking of some basic toys for four-year-old Jerry. Not sure what to do with Em, since she vetoed the reindeer pelt via email (too bad, cause it's pretty cool). For Kevin, my older boy, I found something that I think will meet his newly heightened interest in WWII: an authentic German Mauser bayonet with its cover. It's in awfully good condition, with even the lock (for clipping on to rifle) still working. The workmanship is amazing, as is the weight.

Got it at an antique store where the guy had substantial amounts of Norwegian and German and U.S. military gear going back to WWI. Germans were here in WWII for roughly five years, so people find stuff in fields even today, but by now it will be incredibly rusted out (he showed me one of those). Authenticity determined by codes on bayonet that you can look up in books (he seemed to have them all). Owner still rides a German 1942 military motorcycle with side car. He said he used it to plough fields as a boy because the Germans had eaten all the horses. That was one fascinating hour of shopping, my favorite piece being a plaque from a Russian military shooting contest in 1906. He said a lot of Russians fled to Norway with the revolution, so this stuff floats around still.

Kevin will be amazed with it, and I just couldn't resist. He really loves my Dad's naval flare gun from WWII and Gen. George Barnett's rifle from WWI. This guy had a US Army flare gun from WWII as well, but I liked the bayonet better and it was priced more reasonably. I'm sure Kev will like it and I like the idea of using it to educate him more fully on WWII, the pivotal event of the 20th century. Amazing to think, I was born only 17 years after it ended, because it seems like such ancient history today. Growing up as a kid, though, this stuff, these men, this history was just lying or walking around all over the place. Now it becomes ever so rare, artifacts from a bygone age. The last real great power war. To me, worth remembering in all its complexity, in part because I grew up in its shadow and its imagery has shaped my professional life profoundly--namely, the desire to avoid its reoccurrence.

Holding the bayonet in my hand made me think of all the fears Stephen Ambrose described in his "D-Day" and "Band of Brothers" books: the fear among Americans as to whether or not they could stand up militarily against the Germans with all their superior military hardware/technology. I mean, the stuff they cranked industrially was very impressive, just as it is today--just amazing design and production values. So when the Nazis kicked ass in the opening years of the war, you can see why there was so much trepidation about fighting them. But that was the stunning success that was the Normandy invasion and the march on Berlin, even if it was mainly our production capacity against their mostly superior technology.

On the news:

1) February 23, 2005

New York Times

Bush Says Europe Should Not Lift Its China Arms Embargo

By ELISABETH BUMILLER



BRUSSELS, Feb. 22 - A simmering dispute with Europe came to the forefront on Tuesday when President Bush said there was "deep concern" in the United States that lifting the European Union's arms embargo against China would change the balance of relations between China and Taiwan.

The issue has been one of the few disagreements to spill into the open during Mr. Bush's trip to repair relations across the Atlantic. He and European leaders have worked intently to ease hard feelings over the Iraq invasion, and they have played down the conflict that has risen in the last few months over the arms embargo. Even as he expressed his concerns on Tuesday, Mr. Bush insisted that he was willing to listen to European views on the issue . . .

This just isn't going to work. The US can't trade with and invest in China like crazy, sell arms to both Taiwan and Japan, and then tell the EU not to do the same with China on both trade and arms. We just don't get to decide which other Core powers get to arm and under what conditions. China's rising economically, and like any other country in such a trajectory, it builds up and modernizes its military. We can't stop that, but we can shape it and work to make that process dovetail with a rising security alliance between us two. But the Bush Admin seems to think they're in the driver's seat on this one, when they're not. I mean, China's supposed to keep buying our debt so we can spend lots on our military and then we get to tell them what they can or cannot buy in military arms?

2) Japan’s population set to fall from next year

By David Pilling in Tokyo

Financial Times (the only hard-copy paper I get here)

Published: February 22 2005 08:59 | Last updated: February 22 2005 19:01

The number of men in Japan has begun to shrink for the first time since records began, heralding a fall in the overall population from next year.

The decline in the number of men signals a historic shift in Japan's population, the ageing of which is likely to have a profound influence on the country's pension system, labour market and tax base . . .

This turning point has arrived for Japan, but Europe is right on its heels and we're not that many years behind. Japan will be in the lead on this, and so it will establish many of the important early rule sets. Something to watch, as the Japanese redefine old age.

3) China allows banks to establish mutual funds

By Financial Times reporters

Published: February 21 2005 05:58 | Last updated: February 21 2005 05:58

China has officially allowed commercial banks to launch their own mutual fund ventures, a move designed to shore up its fledging capital market and expand lenders’ revenue sources but may pose challenges to existing fund managers.

The new rules, jointly announced by China’s central bank and the banking and stock market regulators on Sunday, allow commercial banks to set up mutual funds that can immediately invest in the less risky money and bonds markets.

The move offers Chinese banks a rare opportunity to expand beyond their traditional lending operations and get better prepared for more intense competition as China gradually opens the sector to foreigners. Many investors and analysts also see it as the first step towards eventually allowing banks to invest directly in China’s stock market.

Banks that get the approval for setting up funds must strictly separate the fund business from their traditional operations to lower risk, said the new rules. They can also set up fund management joint ventures with foreign partners . . .

This one I clipped as soon as I saw it. Another sign of China trying to ape the West's financial markets. Amazingly, the stock markets there last year lost money, despite the huge growth rate. Why? Weak rule sets on brokerages kept money out. So now the Chinese are trying to make it seem more safe. No capital, no capitalism, one of the big rules I explore at length in Vol. II.

4) US signals hard line on China military threat

By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and James Harding and Daniel Dombey

in Brussels and Mure Dickie in Beijing

Financial Times

Published: February 20 2005 20:37 | Last updated: February 20 2005 20:37

The Pentagon is preparing to ratchet up its assessment of the threat of China’s expanding military, in a signal that the Bush administration is increasingly concerned about China’s growing ambitions in the region.

The 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review, the formal assessment of US military policy, will take a more pessimistic view of the challenge posed by an emerging Chinese superpower than the 2001 overview.

Last week Douglas Feith, the under-secretary of defence for policy, said that the rise of China was one of the most important issues being examined in the review, which is expected to be completed this autumn . . .

Amazing, but the further we get from the Iraq war, the more the old habits kick in. It's like the Global War on Terrorism is fading and we're retreating into a more passive focus on big pieces like China. Bush's foreign policy is reverting to its pre-9/11 form, and that's bad news for both China and business.

5) Bush Says Russia Must Make Good on Democracy

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

New York Times

Published: February 22, 2005

BRUSSELS, Feb. 21 - President Bush warned Russia on Monday that it "must renew a commitment to democracy and the rule of law," but said he believed that the nation's future lay "within the family of Europe and the trans-Atlantic community" . . .

Same seems to be true on Russia. You have to wonder if Bush admin has decided that their criticism of Clinton admin is now starting to apply to them--namely, that they've let things slide too much with fellow great powers. Scary thing about this dynamic: how we get back into good graces with Europeans (or at least try) is to push for diplomacy on Iran and North Korea by others while simultaneously pushing Europe to join our harder stances vis-a-vis China and Russia.

Will be interesting to see how getting tougher on Russia and China will solve our issues with North Korea and Iran--really interesting.

When the Europeans here say they suspect there is no such thing as an overarching grand strategy in America's approach to the world, I have no good counter-arguments. It does indeed seem like we're pursuing a host of policies that cannot possibly work with one another, and nobody seems to be noticing in this administration.

Dateline: Keflavik Airport, Reykyavik Iceland, 24 February 2005

Long, crazy but fun day yesterday. After I posted yesterday at the college, off a PC in the reception area, I realized that I had left my Lexar memory stick in the library PC the day before. Good thing too, because it's worth a chunk of money! Plus it had copies of stuff I wanted.

Then I headed in and caught the end portion of Chet Richards' brief to the students and staff, or the part where he covered PNM and compared it to Col. Hammes' book (already folded into Vol. II) and other stuff by 4GW luminaries Bill Lind and the granddaddy of them all, John Boyd. In the end, he agrees with my stuff more than disagrees, and I've come to appreciate his approach now that I've seen him live.

Then off to another lunch in the cafeteria, where I made a strong effort to focus on fruit after eating so much meat and fish the past few days (Atkins heaven!).

When Richards finished up in the afternoon, we held two 45-minute plenary sessions with Ole from Denmark (my fellow Wisconsinite) serving as moderator and Hammes, Richards and I taking questions from the audience. As so often delights me in these settings, everyone was picking up and using the Core-Gap and Leviathan-SysAdmin terminology and running with it. I also got to make a bunch of arguments from Vol. II that sound better each time I say them because each time I say them I explain them better (practice!).

After we close out at 3pm, the school gives us nice, engraved brandy snifters with the Sjokriegsskolen logo on it.

Back in the car, we return to the hotel, noticing on the way that the killer outlet sweater shop is finally open after being strangely closed all week. So Hammes and I rush over and, having received instructions from my wife reiterating her desire for sweaters for all (I personally almost never wear one) for the kids' Xmas picture next fall (Vonne being the real strategic planner in the house). I got ones for Jerry, Kevin and Em for about $50 each. I could have bought cheaper, but when it's cheap, it's smarter to buy the real high quality.

So I return with sweaters for all but me, leaving--as I imagine will have to be the case once my wife sees it--the German infantry bayonet from WWII as my personal souvenir (along with the usual coins and various gifts).

So back to my room to work my taxes until we head out for the night. We assemble downstairs and are driven back to the war college for the last time for a rather elegant and wonderfully drawn-out (as in many courses and many different types of wine and liquor, etc.) banquet that ends, I think, around 2130 with another cool, engraved coffee mug, a similar beer stein, and then a nice war college plaque (nice to have received one from somebody's naval war college!)

Then we retreat to a private bar/reception area where we drink until about 1am. This last part was the best, because the conversation was most free-flowing (like the beer and cognac) and I really got a huge amount of very positive feedback on the book from some very excited and grateful readers, which, when combined with alcohol, is otay!

Back to the hotel around 2am and then up at 0930 for last breakfast at hotel, packing and out the door. Short Scandanavian Airlines flight to Oslo (like Boston to DC), where my connection is tight, so I have to rush to cash out my duty-free purchases (getting $43 back on the sweaters using these special receipts--just like in Denmark). Then I hop on my IcelandAir flight (back to business class) and I endure the modern remake of "Out of Towners" (at least I really like Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, but I saw it flying back from Copenhagen too!). But I got a lot of paperwork done on the flight (taxes and more separation from the government stuff) and had a great meal (salad with lamb). Now hanging here in the funky biz class lounge for another 20 minutes before cutting out to the roughly 5-hour flight home.

Having read Financial Times all week, I have to admit, the next time I get a decent offer on it from a frequent flier program, I will take it up, or maybe I'll just get it online, because it´s that good.

Got a bunch of hugs to deliver and time to spend with kids tonight, plus set a few paperwork things straight, plus get my ass to bed quick because I have to get up early and drive to TF Green Airport in PVD for a three-leg journey to Monterey for the TED conference, which began today--I believe.

I keep telling myself that it´s first class on the two cross-continent sections, and that it´s supposed to be a big honor to be invited to talk--for 18 minutes and no more! But the travel wears, and I wish I didn´t have to go. The free talks just wear nowadays, but I'll have to hope the payoff exists somewhere down the road. I did PopTech! this year and got Leigh Bureau in the process, so that was certainly worth it.

Still, the travel wears. . .

■"Latin migrants gain political clout in U.S.," by Ginger Thompson, International Herald Tribune, 24 February 2005, p. 5.

Fascinating article about politicians in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, who politic and campaign as much inside the state’s expatriate population living in the US as back home. Why? In some of the bigger cities, like Valparaiso, they have half their population living in the U.S. on a regular basis, sending back $100,000 a day! Or roughly what the city of Valparaiso spends all year in its public-sector budget:

The remittances sent home by migrant workers, both legal and illegal, are translating into political clout. Their communities in the United States, better organized and more vocal than before, have become social and political forces too important to ignore.

It is a phenomenon that has made Washington a principal battleground to lobby support among Salvadorans for the Central American Free Trade Agreement; New York a crucial state in elections in the Dominican Republic; and Chicago a mandatory campaign stop for Mexican politicians.

Next presidential election, 10 million Mexicans living in the U.S. will be able to vote in the context south of the border, if legislation just approved in their legislature passes as predicted. So it’s not just the rising role of Hispanics in the U.S. political system that brings us together, but the role of those same Hispanics in the domestic politics of their home countries.

Latino migrants send back $45 billion to the Caribbean and Latin America every year, outdistancing both foreign direct investment and official developmental aid (three years in a row now). Those voices, connected to that money, are getting organized politically in the U.S., and back in their home countries. Their power is getting impossible for any American politician to ignore.

As for Zacatecas the state, over half its population live in the U.S., primarily in California, Illinois and Texas—three huge electorial states in our national elections.

Do you know what the governor of Zacatecas said? Amalia Garcia, who regularly travels to the U.S., says “I consider Zacatecas as a binational state.”

The concept of growing America isn’t a choice and it sure as hell isn’t about military conquest. It’s an economic reality based on connectivity. It’s undeniable—and it’s coming in leaps and bounds.

■"US seeks Colombian help on drugs," by Andy Webb-Vidal, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 6.

Scary to think we want to apply same deal to Afghanistan as we have to Colombia, home of one of the world’s longest civil wars, which should tell you plenty about the success of our War on Drugs down there. We spray drug crops in Colombia and simply drive that effort into national parks. In Afghanistan, we’re sure to achieve similar “success,” while poisoning the land and its people (you can’t tell me it’s benign).

Does anyone think we shrink the Gap in this manner? Or just keep it the way it is, while we get the drugs?

■"German Turks mine rich cultural seam of migrant life," by Bertrand Benoit, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 3.

I like any signs that Muslims are finding either their political or artistic voices in Europe.

This article speaks to a number of rising film makers from the immigrant Muslim community who are learning to express themselves in the mass media.

And Germany better learn to get happy with this, because if Muslims can’t express themselves out in the open, they’ll continue to ghettoize themselves in “cultural cocoons” that presage a “parallel society.” Satellite TV works both ways in globalization: allowing the Gap to see what it’s missing and for Gap migrants workers and immigrants living in the Core to zone out of their daily lives with narrow media connectivity back home. Ghettos form in response to the lack of personal connectivity for immigrants living in the Core, they don’t prevent it per se (although they can certainly reinforce disconnectedness).

Media represents society. If you don’t want parallel societies, don’t let parallel media predominate. But also don’t expect immigrants not to connect up somehow to something that features descriptions of life they can recognize and see themselves within.

■"On the move: Asia’s giants take different routes in pursuit of economic greatness," by Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 23 February 2005, p. 13.

■"A share of spoils: Beijing and New Delhi get mutual benefits from growing trade," by Edward Luce and Richard McGregor, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 13.

I love all that talk about how we’re going to use India to balance China militarily in Asia. People who push that line simply are not paying attention. China and India themselves see their dual rise as very complimentary.

Yes, there are key differences, as Martin Wolf points out in his excellent piece:

Both are the heirs of great civilizations. But China’s civilization is inseparable from its state, while India’s is inseparable from its social structure, above all the role of caste.

This difference permeates the two countries’ histories and contemporary performance. As Lord Desai of the London School of Economics has noted, “for India, the problem [is] achieving unity in diversity.” China, however, is a “unitary hard state, which can pursue a single goal with determination and mobilize maximal resources in its achievement”…

China has accept both growth and social transformation. India welcomes growth but tries to minimize social dislocation. The Chinese state sees development as both its goal and the foundation of legitimacy. Indian politicians see the representation of organized interests as their goal and the foundation of their legitimacy. Chinese politics are developmental, while India’s remain predominately clientelist.

Wolf sees both countries as having to reform their political and economic institutions greatly in order to achieve further development, but like me, he sees this as “both constraints and opportunities.”

And you know what? Both nations see each other increasingly as an opportunity. Bilateral trade is skyrocketing, and economists and planners on both sides are coming to the realization that there is a lot of complimentarity in their development paths—one focusing on manufacturing and the other on services:

India and China are even exploring ways of joining forces to find cheap sources of supply and boost their competitiveness. There is increasing awareness—especially in India—that, far from competing in a zero sum game, both countries are growing at such a speed that there is enough room for each to accommodate greater productive capacity…

“The issue is not competition between India and China—there is no way production can keep up with demand in either country,” says a senior executive at Tata [India’s biggest private-sector consortium]. “The real question is how quickly what remains of global production will move to China, India and Brazil” …

The two countries are also tentatively exploring areas of co-operation, for example as partners for joint purchases in markets such as energy and commercial aircraft. Such a prospect, which Boeing or Airbus would not welcome—is so far not much more than talk. Nevertheless, there is a determination in both capitals to consider the unmatchable economies of scale that would be available to them as joint buyers of some of the materials and technology that both countries lack.

A side story on “Strategic parity prompts a neighbourly respect” gets to the point of the military-market nexus quite clearly:

India’s economic emergence is openlyncouraged by the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations, which has become increasingly concerned about the growing preponderance of China. In much the same way as the US hopes India will become a geopolitical counterweight to China over the next decades, ASEAN hopes India will become an economic counterweight.

That may be premature. India, with its sensitivity about sovereignty, bristles at being asked to play roles on behalf of other countries. But economic ties between India and China will continue to grow and a convergence of the two giants’ broader interests at the World Trade Organization and elsewhere will help bring them closer together.

Like I say, lock in at today’s prices or pay higher ones tomorrow, but China’s rise will embed them deeply within the Core on security affairs. We can seek to lead that process or we better be prepared to get out of the way.

■"The fate of failed states is our shared responsibility: The rights of human beings are far more important than the rights of more or less dysfunctional states to do what they wish," op-ed by Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 23 February 2005, p. 15.

■"Don’t look away this time: If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped," op-ed by Nicholas D. Kristof, International Herald Tribune, 24 February 2005, p. 6.

Another great piece by Martin Wolf, whose book, Why Globalization Works, features prominently in Vol. II

First he talks about fragile and failed states and offers some good observations (by others) on the boundaries of this problem set. The UK government lists 46 countries as “fragile,” with a population of 900m (14% of world total), with Indonesia and Nigeria being the biggies. The World Bank’s more limited definition yields 11 such nations (Afghanistan, Angola, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, Liberia, Burma, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe—all Gap, naturally), with an additional 16 named as Low-Income Countries Under Stress LICUS), yielding a global total of 165m.

Wolf’s main points are these:

First, we must accept the principle of qualified sovereignty . . .

Second, we must also embrace the principle of “do no harm” . . .

Third, we should invest more in prevention . . .

Fourth, we need the ability to respond swiftly and decisively to crises . . .

Finally, we need to achieve full integration of development assistance with other actions, including security interventions, in fragile and failing states.

Hard to do? Sure, as I explore in Vol. II, but as Wolf ends: “all the alternatives are far worse.”

The “far worse” is on display in Sudan right now, as Kristof likes to keep harping. Today he runs some tame photos of dead kids and a skeleton whose pants are obviously pulled down around its knees, indicating sexual assault before execution:

One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls’ school in Suleia who was burned alive. It’s been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.

Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.

Kristof cites reasonable estimates that close to a quarter-million are dead in this manner, with numbers accumulating at roughly 10,000 a month. When I argue for the A-to-Z Core-wide system for processing politically-bankrupt states, I don’t see it as some distant goal for distant problems, but a serious, short-term answer for ongoing genocide that’s occurring on our watch.

Kristof wants sanctions, a no-fly zone, freezing of government assets, killers sent off to the International Criminal Court, a “team effort” by Arab and African states to pressure Sudan (good luck with that one) and an international peacekeeping force of Africans (even less plausible), but one with financing and logistical support from the Core (now we’re getting somewhere).

What Kristof wants is what I want: a system to deal with these sorts of atrocities, and waiting on the Gap to come up with one on its own, or the UN, is simply fanciful. It’ll be a group of Core heavyweights. It’ll look like a Star Chamber and the vengeance will smack of Dirty Harry-like retribution.

And that’ll be a very good thing—not sort of good, not kind of good, but absolutely good.

■"What trans-Atlantic crisis? A common grand design underpins the major industrialized democracies," op-ed by Mohammed Ayoob, International Herald Tribune, 24 February 2005, p. 6.

■"Europeans see pluses in ending China bad: Commercial ties and diplomacy lead to dispute with U.S.," by Mark Landler, International Herald Tribune, 24 February 2005, p. 1.

■"China’s focus on Galileo pinpoints US security fears: Beijing’s involvement in Europe’s rival navigation service to GPS has Washington chiefs worried," by Raphael Minder, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 16.

■"Nokia makes the call: China will be No. 1 (Chief sees it passing U.S. in next 3 years," by Chris Buckley, International Herald Tribune, 24 February 2005, p. 15.

■"Pouring oil on the East China Sea: The East Chine Sea is one of the last unexplored high-potential hydrocarbon areas near large markets," by Mark J. Valencia, International Herald Tribune, 24 February 2005, p. 7.

Ayoob captures the strong sense I get from two recent trips to Europe: the trans-Atlantic bond isn’t the issue to worry about. That will remain strong. What’s going to change dramatically in coming years is both Europe’s and America’s relationships with New Core players China, India, Brazil and Russia. Yes, there will be a lot of hand-wringing over our focus on security with all these players while Europe will seem far more obsessed with forging economic ties. And if we let a focus on security put us at a long-term disadvantage with these markets, then we’ll have nobody to blame other than ourselves and our leadership’s continuing tendency to think about war within the context of war instead of in the context of everything else. The Global War on Terrorism is the top security issue; but security issues simply do not dominate as much as Americans and especially the Bush administration seem to think.

Europe is going to end the arms ban on China, not because it’s that hot to sell arms to China (the US remains, by far, Europe’s bigger market in that regard), but because it wants that military-market nexus to pay off in deeper economic ties over time. As Landler writes:

But there is much more at stake in the decision by Europe than whether it sells French fighter jets or German submarines to Beijing: namely, broader commercial ties and some genuine diplomacy . . .

“Europe wants to sell cars and perfume in China,” said Willem van der Geest, the director of the European Institute for Asian Studies, a research group in Brussels. “Its nonmilitary economic objectives weigh far more in this decision than any gains it would get from selling arms.”

Israel and Russia have never honored this ban, and soon Europe won’t either, and what it adds to the military mix won’t shift much of anything—the economics are doing that all by itself.

China will simply connect itself up, and no matter how we might try to narrow that process to trade while downplaying any nexus to security, China will not be denied. That connectivity, like linking up with and investing in Europe’s Galileo system (their rival to GPS), will define a growing military-market nexus between Europe and China. Trying to prevent that just puts us on the outside of this integration process within the Core, instead of at the middle of it. No one can steer China’s military emergence more than we, but we are choosing to abdicate the strategic opportunity out of fear. We’ll achieve nothing but our growing irrelevance in this process. China and India will be #2 and #3, respectively, in the global economy (measured at Parity Purchasing Power) within my professional lifetime—easily. So I make the point of shaping my strategic vision around an inescapable reality. As Robert Wright wrote in Nonzero: rule #1 for running the world is don’t fight inevitabilities. This is geostrategic martial arts, while too many leaders around the world are stuck in some myopic balance-of-power mindset. In this, I fear we run up against the lack of imagination and vision with the Bush administration, reminding me of why I supported Kerry and Edwards in ’04.

Nokia gives yet another example of why this shift in rule-set creation is undeniable: China will surpass the US as its #1 cellphone market within 3 years, according to its CEO. India is hot on its tail. China will account for roughly a quarter of global cellphone growth in the next five years, with subscribers more than doubling from 330m to 700m. And guess where most of that growth comes from? From China’s Gap-like interior regions. Cellphones have reached the point of being the razor you give away in order to capture the customer’s demand for blades.

Are we gonna fight with China over its access to Galileo? Hardly. And Japan isn’t going to fight with China over East China Sea gas and oil. They’re simply going to compromise, with the most logical route being Japan providing money to China’s exploration and development in return for cheaper prices on the resulting flow. Why? The economic relationship that develops between the two will determine the military relationship. Yes, we can talk Japan into some tough wording on Taiwan, but 10 years from now, count on Japan being more interested in pleasing Beijing on security than the United States. We’re dreaming if we think we’re preventing that somehow. We can either lock-in on China’s strategic price now or let others be drawn into that economic undertow. But no missile shield nonsense is going to break those growing bonds or negate the resulting military-market nexus that China inevitably builds with both Europe and Japan.

■"Bush to ‘think about’ Europe’s Iran strategy: Meeting with Schroder leads to ‘convergence’ on how to deal with nuclear tthreat (US president still insists Tehran must give ground)," by James Harding and Huge Williamson, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 1.

■"China applies gentlest of flicks to Pyongyang’s reins: Beijing resists manipulating North Korea dependence on Chinese oil and food supplies," by Richard McGregor and Anna Fifield, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 7.

Europe leads on Iran, while China hosts the six-party talks. If nothing else, this signals the limits of U.S. military power right now: our inability to do the SysAdmin job in Iraq means there’s little we can do on either Iran or North Korea. Ultimately, we’ll end up living with the consequences of this strategic weakness, which is why we’d be so much better off seeking dramatically better answers in the short-term with serious leadership instead of watching from the sidelines. Iran will get the bomb, and Europe will end up making the deal. North Korea will eventually implode, and what Asia will get is a dominating China with America nowhere in sight.

These things are going to happen. Our strategy right now seems only to consist of holding them off for as long as possible. The neocons feel burned by their one attempt at a System Perturbation, which is too bad, because it’s working wonders in the Middle East, but when you basically beg off hot pursuit of the initial conditions you’ve altered, it’s like you’ve thrown the ball down to the five-yard-line in football, only to punt on the next down. You’ve got to laugh when you hear the notion that somehow the neocons are running the world right now. If anyone is, it’s China and India by sheer default: their strategic rise provokes more vision and diplomacy than anything we’re doing. We’ve set off the Big Bang in the Middle East to do what? Return back to the same myopic fears of balance-of-power dynamics that the Bush administration seemed so consumed by prior to 9/11? These are very important years for a lack of U.S. global leadership, for growing and securing the Core will always out-shadow shrinking the Gap as THE strategic task.

And you know what? Whenever America gives off that zero-sum vibe regarding the rising New Core, we accomplish exactly what we need to avoid in coming years: we convince the Core that we’re probably quite zero-sum in our efforts to shrink the Gap. That impression just moves other Core powers to focus on integration with one another while hoping that those crazy Americans will remains obsessed with security and bogged down in the Gap.

China holds real cards on North Korea, and we see fit not to exploit that connectivity whatsoever because of our larger fears about China. Kim survives on oil and food from China, all of which stream across just three rail lines and 15 roads. But if you’re China and you see the U.S. constantly working to limit its quest for security, of course your chief fear on North Korea is that those crazy Americans will start something that you’ll be left to deal with militarily. I mean, look at America’s postwar effort in Iraq!

But you gotta know that Beijing fears a nuclear North Korea greatly, but not directly. A nuclear Kim could easily drive both South Korea or—even more likely—Japan into a similar nuclear stance, something Beijing fears far more. This isn’t my analysis: it’s the analysis of Cheng Fenguin of Beijing University. As he notes, “Taiwan will also find excuses to start its own nuclear programme.”

Add it all up and tell me we can’t put together a package on Kim that Beijing could buy into. But instead, what do we do? We get Japan to join our little security package on Taiwan.

This, my friends, is what passes for strategic vision right now in DC.

Dateline: IcelandAir flight from Keflavik Airport to Boston Logan, 24 February 2005

It really is something when you fly west for long stretches, because it just ends up being a day that never seems to end. If you’re in good shape, and especially if you’re in business with a nice Mac, you can get a lot of work done, assuming the movie doesn’t capture your attention too much (easy for me this time around, because IcelandAir doesn’t have good movies and worse, it doesn’t rotate them very quickly).

And I’m feeling good despite all the late-night drinking from yesterday. Fear I’ve come down with a bit of a cold, but it seems mild. Being able to hydrate and keep my legs stretched (row 1 the whole way back) has been great, and I’m always careful to wear my special flight support stockings that Vonne had made for us for our trip to China, and that helps a lot (no swelling from the long flight and a much reduced chance of deep-vein thrombosis).

I will definitely skip the wine on the last leg here.

Man, in reading the Financial Times, I have to say that it obsesses over China and India even more than the WSJ does, which I did not think possible, and yet there it is.

Mac question of the day: How do I delete text to the right of my cursor on a Mac? The “delete” key only eats to the left. Is there no way to eat to the right?

Here's today's catch:

■ America is not in charge of how the rest of the Old Core integrates with China

■ Europe on Iran, China on North Korea, US on the sidelines

■ India and China: there is no point in choosing

■ Feeling for the Gap, wanting a better system for Core action

■ America’s 51st state—shhhhhhh!

■ Our shell-game “War on Drugs” in the Gap

■ Muslims finding their cinematic voice in Europe

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 24 February 2005

Nothing beats being home. Nothing.

Almost hope the snow keeps me socked in tomorrow.

Dateline: Monterey Conference Center, Monterey CA, 26 February 2005

Got here yesterday late (long story I will tell in blog I post later today). Conference seems nice, but I hate going on in last session. Upside: Ray Kurweil is fellow panelist on future.

Rested, and get to present off my laptop. Have to sit through earlier session on "earth," but that allows me to gauge crowd and set-up a bit.

Will post yesterday's blog with news stories tonight, along with six "Reviewing the Reviews." After conference lunch, can get on bus with others and enjoy afternoon hike at Pt. Lobos, and I love hiking, so I'll do that. So I will log on in my room tonight, post yesterday, post reviews, and post story on TED presentation.

TED, I now understand, stands for Technology, Engineering and Design. Outstanding goody bag, I am told. Had to ask for mine to be built because I arrived so late and they ran out of much stuff, so we'll see what I end up with. Had nice Kodak digital camera waiting for me at hotel last night, which Kevin will love.

Music starting on first session of day, so have to run.

Wish me luck!

Dateline: Monterey Conference Center, Monterey CA, 26 February 2005

Boy, am I glad I asked about the goody bag! I saw all these attendees, boxing up gear and mailing them out via FEDEX in the main hallway, and figured the goody bag must be pretty substantial.

So I asked at registration, and they put together the speaker package for me: two big brown bags and a big packback full of gear. Also got two Matt Groenig-autographed comic books (Simpsons, Futurama) for comic-obsessed son Kevin. Noticed nice poster of my head shot from book in main hall. Will try to snatch that for trip home. Already located a nice poster tube.

Set-up here pretty cool on stage: bunch of work-station portable tables where you simply hook up your Mac (almost everyone has one, and they're all the big 19" screen, which I'm glad I didn't get because my full-size screen is big enough and the larger screens don't yield a wider keyboard--the only reason why I'd get it). So my laptop already on stage, with my Interlink RF clicker. Wired up with mike that sticks out from around left year on tiny stick.

After getting all wired up, hung out in hallway during break, and met Peter Schwartz. Very nice to see him again. He introduced me to his boss at Fortune and the guy who invented "Ask Jeeves."

Well, Kurweil looks like he's running out of time, based on the slides he scrolled through beforehand. I'm heading upstairs because the intro here is minimal and then you just pop up on stage and roll. I am doing the SysAdmin-Leviathan break and the A-to-Z-rule-set packages and that's it for 18 minutes. I will be flying!

Feels good to be so nervous though. It gets rare for me. Good news is countdown clock in back so I will always know where I am.

Dateline: TED Conference, Monterey Conference Center, Monterey CA, 26 February 2005

That was pretty cool.

Probably the best 20 minutes of speaking I have ever done. Crowd interrupted with sustained applause maybe 3 times. But the standing ovation to end the piece was both very unexpected (haven't received one since a Y2K talk in front of a bunch of SysAdmins down in FL in 1999).

Then I asked the host, Chris Anderson, why I didn't win the Rave award. Joke on me: different Chris Anderson!

Coolest on the way out the door: Charles Fleischer (Roger Rabbit) met me in hall, said I was funnier than most comedians he's ever worked with, and offered to call my kids on tape with a customized message in the guise of Robert Rabbit!

I will definitely have him call Jerome on the 10th! (his fifth birthday).

My hands were shaking pretty bad during the talk, which hasn't happened to me in a very long time, but it was way cool.

■"Groups Pledge to Account for Tsunami Aid: With billions of dollars in donations, efforts to avert fraud," by Elizabeth Becker and Stephanie Strom, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A4.

This article highlights one of the dynamics we've now come to expect with any major humanitarian disaster in the post-9/11 world, a subject I explore in my essay for the second edition of the Rule Set Reset, which we've decided to offer for free like the first one as part of The New Rule Sets Project's effort to establish its identity with potential partners and clients.

I think readers will be as impressed with the quality of the guest-written articles as there were with the first batch. Frankly, I've been amazed at who's been eager and willing to join this discussion. Put this creativity together with the stellar editing of my partner Bob Jacobson, the design of partner Steffany Hedenkemp, and the research efforts of our fourth, my webmaster Critt Jarvis, and it's a package we're very proud to lay out in front of the world.

Enjoy, and keep all the feedback coming. It's been invaluable so far and it's allowed us to get ready for our initial subscription issue coming in March.

■"Oil Revenues Hide Chavez's Economic Ineptitude," op-ed by Vladimir Chelminski, Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2005, p. A19.

Chavez has had six years and it hasn't been good, according to a private business consultant in Caracas:

After six tumultuous years in power, the claim by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that he is leading Venezuelans toward greater prosperity cannot be sustained. Any serious analysis of our economy shows a dramatic deterioration in Venezuelan well-being. A series of feel-good government programs only help ameliorate the negatives that would otherwise accrue to Chavez with his disastrous handling of the economy…

A main characteristic of our repressed economy is the imposition of exchange and price controls two years ago. We've seen this move before. Venezuela had these controls from 1983 to 1989 and from 1994 to 1996. In both cases, corruption ballooned, and the economy sank. In the end, they had to be discarded amid scarcities and hyperinflation.

Another economically pernicious measure introduced by this government is property confiscation. Earlier this year, the country's most productive ranch, owned by the British company Vestay Group LTD since 1903, became the target of a potential confiscation with plans to partition it for "cooperatives." This may be popular with the poor but if the past is any guide, the newcomers will either starve or go back to where they came from. Meantime, the nation will have lost a major productive asset. Next we'll be wondering why there is not enough investment and job creation.

Mr. Chavez still has credibility among his disciples and his charisma may carry him for some time to come, despite rising crime, filthier cities, declining services, an expanding informal economy and more beggars in the street than ever before. His followers are so infatuated that they do not pay attention to the contradictions in his speech or his numerous promises never fulfilled. But when the price of oil comes down, the . . . bloom is sure to fall off the rose.

■"Cancer Therapy Dropped In U.S. Is Revived in China," by Andrew Pollack, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. C4.

■"Soggy Steps Toward Space Walks," photo caption, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A14.

■"India's Cabinet Lifts Restraint On Land Investing," by Jay Solomon and Eric Bellman, Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2005, p. A16.

■"India's First Airline Offering Is Scooped Up in Minutes: Investors were willing to buy far more shares than were available," by Saritha Rai, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. C5.

The New Core will be that part of the Core most willing to take risks in coming years. They have the biggest problems, the tallest tasks, and the most incentive to keep pressing on. We'll see these states push the envelope all the time, and one place they'll do it in medical science.

In the first story, a Chinese biotech firm picks up a technology abandoned by an American company years ago as too dangerous: a specific sort of gene therapy for cancer treatment. And this company (Shanghai Sunway Biotech) isn't just looking to use this therapy in China, it wants to get approval to use it in the U.S. as well, something the company does by gaining a license agreement from the original American developer, Onyx Pharmaceuticals.

Try this one on for size: "The first and only approval of a gene therapy by any regulatory agency in the world happened in China in 2003." Within years, it could be coming to an American hospital near you.

New Core, new rules.

Meanwhile, the Old Core is getting so tentative about things. America can barely explore space any more because—God forbid—someone might die in space! Japan's on the same wavelength, but for them it's their military forces in Iraq. Afraid they might lose their first soldier in combat since WWII, the Japanese peacekeepers in Iraq are guarded by other coalition troops.

Meanwhile, China pushes ahead with an iffy cancer treatment. Why the hell not? If you've ever been to China, you know how many people smoke there. That's where all the U.S. cigarette companies fled when we started outlawing smoking here in the States.

With China pushing such experimentation, India feels the need to remain as bold as possible in its own economic development. China's airline industry remains dominated by its state fleets, but India's got its low-cost, private-sector airlines up and running, and they're redefining the nature of air travel there. Yesterday, Jet Airways held an Initial Public Offering and received 13 times as many bids as it had stock available, sending its value soaring. Between it and Air Deccan, India's future as a market for air travel looks awfully bright all of a sudden. Meanwhile, stodgy Air India, owned by the state, gets left in the dust as the cheaper airlines race ahead. 15 million travelers now, but 50 million by 2010. That's why the industry and India in general is pulling in foreign direct investment at unprecedented levels. Not China levels, mind you, but approaching the same zip code.

And this flow is a virtuous one, generating more and more attempts by India to find new targets for this outside money, hence the recent cabinet decision to allow for foreign ownership of real-estate projects up to 100%:

"It is expected that allowed investment . . . in the construction-and-development sector would have a multiplier effect on the economy by boosting construction activities of all types," said Kamal Rath, India's minister of commerce and industry.

It's not a matter of being dominated by foreign companies, but letting in that competition to spur local efforts at development. Connectivity trumps disconnectedness. Creativity unleashed (and plenty of stealing/copying of foreign technologies), and the new rules ensue.

■"U.S.-China Tensions Resurface: Beijing Legislation on Taiwan, Defense Build-up Fuel Criticism," by Murray Herbert, Jason Dean and Charles Hutzler, Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2005, p. A16.

■"A Shell Game in the Arms Race: China sells, and the U.S. ignores," op-ed by Matthew Godsey and Gary Milhollin, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A33.

Another scary article about China becoming more frightening to us: as al Qaeda fades to the background, China must rise to fill its place in the imagination of threat planners. It's almost enough to make you wonder if China doesn't secretly hope for another al Qaeda strike somewhere prominent in the Core.

Of course, all the blame here is on China, for contemplating the passage of an "antisecession" law, perhaps next month. Taiwan's recent noises about similarly symbolic acts designed to piss off the Chinese notwithstanding. The U.S. coaxing Japan to declare itself part of our defense package for Taiwan notwithstanding. Our plans for missile shields both at home and in east Asia notwithstanding. Our opposition to the EU selling arms to China notwithstanding. Our long-time supplying of military technology to Taiwan notwithstanding.

No, China is the only bad guy in this process.

And yet it and Taiwan just recently agree on direct flights.

But the bigger threat is the U.S. Congress hot to go after China now that it's "fixed" U.S. national security with a Department of Homeland Security and a National Intelligence Director (don't new offices and titles fix everything?). Watch here for the most salient overreaction to any "law" passed by China.

And then there's China's reaching for new oil supplies around the world, dispensing military support as part of the process to states we don't like, like Iran.

Can you imagine the United States ever being accused of only getting involved militarily with another state simply because it has oil? Really! Who do those sneaky Chinese think they are?

■"Bush's New Intelligence Czar: John Negroponte faces intrigue, subterfuge and shadowy fighters. And that's just in Washington," by Timothy L. Berger et. al, Time, 28 February 2005, p. 33.

■"Thrown to the Wolves: A haughty U.S. links arms with torturers," op-ed by Bob Herbert, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A23.

The "3-D jobs" are the ones filled mostly by migrant workers, and the term stands for dirty, dangerous and difficult. These words describe Negroponte's career: the man is willing to take very tough jobs and he always performs them with aplomb. Compare this guy to Colin Powell, media darling, who held high-profile jobs galore and basically accomplished nothing of lasting note in his career. Negroponte gets things done and doesn't draw attention to himself. His record speaks to why he gets being given such sensitive tasks.

Bush chose well for the National Intelligence Director. The first man to hold this job will go a long way to defining its essential rule set. CIA's Goss will report to him, and he'll share control over the 15 members of the Intelligence Community with a load of other cabinet secretaries, the biggest being, of course, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, whose department owns 80% of the IC's total budget.

But here's the real power to this position: he replaces the Director of Central Intelligence (Goss) as the daily briefer to the president.

Where I think Negroponte needs to work the process hardest and fastest is forcing the IC to define its emerging rule set on how we snatch and process terrorist suspects inside the Gap, especially in terms of how we choose to sometimes send them home to states there, like Syria, that we know will torture them. This is essentially the ground I covered in the Wired piece, and frankly, I'm becoming more enamored of the World Counter-Terrorism Organization I proposed in that article as more writers like Bob Herbert mount effective attacks on our policy of "extraordinary rendition" (sending suspects to known Gap torturing regimes). We have to come clean on this sort of stuff before we end up with some huge scandals. We have to build up the Core's rule set on this one. Negroponte needs to make this a priority.

■"25 Killed as Insurgents in Iraq Carry Out a Wave of Attacks," by Edward Wong, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A1.

■"Two Enemies: Non-state actors and change in the Muslim World," by Michael Vlahos, Strategic Assessments Office, National Security Analysis Department, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, January 2005, 20 pages.

■"Talking with the Enemy: Inside the Secret Dialogue Between the U.S. and Insurgents in Iraq—and What the Rebels Say They Want," by Michael Ware, Time, 28 February 2005, p. 26.

■"The Trouble with Syria: An assassination in Lebanon focuses U.S. attention on Damascus. What price will Assad pay?" by Johanna McGeary, Time, 28 February 2005, p. 30.

■"Syria Vows to Quite Lebanon But Declines to Say When," by Joel Brinkley and Hassan M. Fattah, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A8.

I spoke about this last summer: you get the hand-off, eventually the elections, and then at some point it just stops being about us and starts being almost exclusively about the Iraqis themselves. Two are in (Kurds, Shiites), and one remains on the outside largely. The insurgency lives, but fundamentally in Sunni land. Iraqis mostly killing Iraqis, but the state getting stronger by the day, even as its writ may not extend too well in Sunni land.

Yes, Americans still die, but in side-light situations. We're not the main focus any more. As it should be, the Big Bang gets expressed primarily as a civil war. That's Michael Vlahos' point in his latest (and always interesting) analysis of the Global War on Terrorism. He says that the Big Bang has—in effect—empowered two groups in the Middle East: the "Wilderness Ghazi" of al Qaeda jihadists and the "Civil Militia" that arise in Iraq (based on villages and tribal structures). In Mike's view, we need to disconnect and destroy the former while connecting and building up the latter.

So we keep Special Operations Command hot on the heels of al Qaeda, but we talk to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. The former will never be converted or negotiated with, but the latter can and must be.

Beyond Iraq, the Bush administration really has Syria moving where it wants it to go, already talking openly of leaving Lebanon (although being clever enough to mimic the White House's own words on our troops in Iraq). Bashar Assad really could be a Gorbachev there, but it'll take both time (for him to move his younger generation of supporters into power slots) and outside pressure (he needs external excuses to force him into internal reforms, but this is tricky, because if we push too hard, he is compelled to push back out of political self-preservation).

The weird part is, as Middle Eastern expert Steven Cook points out, Syria's been using Lebanon as its portal to the outside world: "It is absolutely clear that over the course of the last 15 years, Syria has used Lebanon as its outlet to the rest of the world, as its economic life-boat, and I don't see them giving that up."

The disconnected society using a far more connected one to survive, living off it like a parasite, keeping it from its own, fuller connectivity. With neighbors like that, who needs imminent threats?

What will Syria demand for its withdrawal: that which it believes its domination of Lebanon provides it? The continued survival of Bashar al-Assad's regime.

In the short run, not a bad trade. An authoritarian regime, not a totalitarian one, we kill it with connectivity, the same as Iran. Roughly 600,000 Syrians work in Lebanon today, doing the menial jobs. Their remittances back home keep the economy from collapsing from the lack of any serious outside capital. Promise Assad continued access to this market for this migrant labor.

Yet again, the military-market nexus.

■"Bush and Putin Exhibit Tension Over Democracy: An Awkward Appearance; Two Sides Announce Deal to Reduce Threat of Nuclear Terrorism," by Elisabeth Bumiller and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A1.

■"Bush, Putin Take Cooperative Tack As WTO Beckons," by Christopher Cooper and Gregory L. White, Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2005, p. A3.

■"What About Democracy? Leaders Mute Difference, Latching On to the Affirmative: Some see Bush ceding an opportunity to challenge Putin," by C.J. Chivers, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A10.

■"Russian Ex-Premier May Challenge Putin in '08: Kasyanov Denounces Path Taken by Kremlin, Implores Democratic Forces to Unite," by Guy Chazan and Gregory L. White, Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2005, p. A17.

■"In Putin's Backyard, Democracy Stirs—With U.S. Help: Before Kyrgyzstan Elections, Western-Backed Groups Offer Aid to Opposition," by Philip Shishkin, Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2005, p. A1.

I'm really beginning to feel that the WSJ not only outperforms the NYT on economics, but increasingly on security as well—especially when the New Core is involved. The WSJ seems to contextualize security within the "everything else" of globalization much better than the NYT does, as the Grey Lady seems fixated on always making Bush look bad. The collection of stories on the summit and Russia today bear this out.

As far as the NYT is concerned, the summit was a big nothing, with just a face-saving announcement on preventing nuclear terrorism. If anything, the summit highlighted the growing tensions between the two powers, and the hypocrisy of Bush's focus on freedom. Oh yeah, and Bush missed a big opportunity to slap Putin publicly over recent retrenchment there. Of course, the NYT fields some foreign policy experts to make all these points. In the view of the NYT, this is all that happened.

The WSJ's headline cites a very different subject:

In exchange for Mr. Bush's backing of Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization, Mr. Putin agreed to begin a cooperative program to secure his country's nuclear arsenal and "improve the transparency of the business and investment environment" in the wake of his government's seizure and sale of oil giant OAO Yukos last year …

Mr. Bush has said Russia's entry into the WTO will make the country more democratic, because it would force Moscow to adopt economic changes and strengthen its commitment to the rule of law. The agreement the two men signed calls for Russia's entrance this year. A final agreement between the two countries would be a major boost for Mr. Putin's long-running drive to join the international trading body and a chance for the Kremlin to show it isn't backing away from the open, market-oriented economic policies Mr. Putin says he supports. The U.S. is the last major trading partner Russia needs to deal with before it can enter the WTO.

This is a huge issue and this was significant movement, and amazingly the NYT doesn't mention the WTO agreement whatsoever in all its coverage. Stunning, isn't it?

Everyone knows what a huge impact China's joining the WTO in 2001 has had on its economic reform trajectory, and so getting Russia into the organization is a logical focus for the Bush administration—especially as it's focused on encouraging freedom and democracy there. I mean, are we supposed to demand democracy before truly free markets? Instead of seeing this larger progress, all we get from the NYT is "loose nukes."

You don't grow the Core with interdiction. You grow it with connectivity. Having Russia join the WTO is a very big step in this regard. The WSJ sees this. The NYT does not.

Two other WSJ stories show off the paper's sense of the larger picture. The first one highlights a rising former premier who's likely to challenge whomever Putin puts up to succeed him in '08 (yes, that headline is a bit weird, because Putin can't run again).

Kasyanov was premier from 2000 to 2004, and those were pretty good years economically for Russia. Yes, on his watch much of the retrenchment began, and about a year ago he was fired by Putin. Now he's firing back, making the "smooth and telegenic" Kasyanov appear to many observers as perhaps the second coming of Viktor Yushschenko, "another former prime minister who was sacked, headed the opposition, and ended up as president in neighboring Ukraine."

So, despite all the hand-wringing by all our former experts on the former Soviet Union, political analysts in Moscow are already opining that "Russia's political class feels the beast is weakening."

Meanwhile, Russia gets closer to joining the WTO.

Second story shows yet again how, if Putin is such a hard-liner imperialist, he sure does a rotten job of disconnecting the former Soviet republics from the outside world. Here the article lists how four big DC/NYC-based Non-Governmental Organizations are meddling all over the dial in the former USSR, pushing reforms and helping opposition candidates in the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldavia, the Caucasus, and all the Central Asian states—basically everywhere in the former Soviet Union plus Russia itself. One of these groups is George Soros' family foundation. Behind much of this activity lies the U.S. State Department, doing something it knows well how to do (i.e., work with states that are largely stable).

So look at it from Putin's perspective: former Soviet republics with meddling Westerners messing with the political process while NATO and the EU invite several toward memberships. And we're surprised that sometimes he gets surly on camera? Or that his government retrenches here and there? Good God! Short of just dismantling all power in the Kremlin, what are we supposed to expect of the man? Sure, he's got a long way to go, but remember how far Russia has come and remember all that Russia's given up without firing a shot. The man, quite frankly, puts up with crap from us that we'd never take from anybody—no matter what our circumstances. Here, the Europeans are correct: show some patience. Russia belongs in the Core, and Russia's in the Core—even if the NYT seems oblivious to all this "news."

Dateline: United flights from Providence to Chicago to San Francisco to Montery, 25 February 2005

Too little time in my own bed last night, in part because we had to take in baby and her diaper leakage necessitated some linen changing about 3 am. She is just about the cuddliest kid you could ever be forced to take in, so we forgive her the occasional lapses.

I got up around 0530 and saw that the snow was basically wrapped up at about six inches, with drifts up to a 18 inches in the yard. I can tell how much Bailey has grown by these measures, because in the last big storm he could only manage moving around in my footprints, whereas this time he blazed his own trail. He's 25 pounds, easy, now.

I managed to shovel the driveway before taking off. The six inches were awfully powdery, and the effort work me up. Driving not too bad on the roads to the airport, and amazingly, the United flight took off right on schedule. But, as expected, a two-hour delay in Chicago. I don't think I've ever flown United through Chicago without some delay. It's the only airport I dread more than LaGuardia in NYC.

The past 24 hours have seen me hustling in my pursuit of two features for Esquire: one target a complete unknown and the other about as well-known as you can get in America. The process of negotiating these things is proving interesting. Part sales, part seduction, it's pretty interesting to act as pursuer instead of the pursued. I have to use all my skills as the 8-of-9, one of the "little boys" who thrived by getting things from people more powerful than he. Both stories should be interesting if pulled off, as both will help the public understand aspects of national security that have never been adequately explained to them before. One argument is basically already in Vol. II, and I expect to use the other one as well (and have all along), so the synergy here is strong, and that's something I want across the board, just like the blog is the life and the life is the blog.

Finally got into Monterey around 8pm, just in time to go have dinner with an old friend, the man who was president of the Center for Naval Analyses when I was hired, Phil DePoy, who's now at the Naval Postgraduate School. In doing this, I skipped the party, but since I was talking early the next day, that seemed to make sense to me, plus I felt it was important to touch base with Phil. It's always good to choose friends over networking, because the latter rise and fall while the former stick around through the years.

Here's today's catch:

■ Bush shows a steady but reasoned touch with Putin

■ Negroponte is the USG's "3=D Man"

■ The Big Bang looking better by the day

■ China's version of the military-market nexus

■ The New Core tries "new" things

■ Chavez's shell game on oil

■ Rule Set Reset Issue #2

Find the original at www.defensecentralstation.com/021105D.html

My commentary follows:

Mind the Gap: Revisiting 'The Pentagon's New Map'

By Dean Barnett

Published 02/11/2005



When Thomas P.M. Barnett's controversial book "The Pentagon's New Map" was published in April 2004, it received an odd sort of bi-polar public reception. On the one hand, former Pentagon briefer Barnett was the subject of a favorable profile on the front page of the Wall Street Journal as his book quickly attained best-seller status. On the other hand, several prominent outlets such as the New York Times Book Review opted to ignore "The Pentagon's New Map." Those who chose to ignore it chose unwisely. Whether you like Barnett's vision or loathe it, ten months after the book's publication it is clear that Barnett's prescience was stunning.

"The Pentagon's New Map" was and remains controversial because in part of its original way of looking at the world. Barnett suggests that the globe is basically divided into two different kinds of nations. The first, which Barnett labels the functioning Core, consists of all the places where you might buy goods from or take vacations in. The second type of country, those in what Barnett calls the Gap, are the political and economic basket cases.



Before 9/11, Gap nations were not considered much of a security problem for the United States. While Americans would have humane concerns for those forced to suffer the tender mercies of Saddam, the Taliban or Iranian Mullahs, the only threats such potential malefactors posed to our way of life typically concerned our oil supply.



But Barnett argues that the world has shrunk to such an extent that countries in the Gap have an increasing relevance to American security. As evidence of how the world has become smaller, consider that you can get a Starbucks blended latté in Riyadh as you can in Raleigh, or that you can get a Big Mac not only in Kansas City but in Karachi. And consider how the internal politics and developments of a once obscure Gap nation—Afghanistan—had an enormous impact on American soil a few years back.



What offended many about Barnett's vision was his suggestion that for their own security the Core nations, primarily the United States, urgently had to set about integrating the Gap into the Core and that the first step of said integration might come at the tip of an American bayonet.



Leviathan and System Administration



Barnett also offers guidance for how to continue the integration when the bayonet has fully completed its deadly work. As we've discovered in Iraq, once a regime is toppled there remains much to be done. Therefore, Barnett advocates breaking the military into two distinct branches: A Leviathan branch which will serve as the aforementioned bayonet, and a System Administrator branch which will be tasked with helping create a society that can join the Core group of nations.



While in the wake of the Iraq experience much of this now seems obvious, change comes slowly to enormous bureaucracies like the Pentagon. Nevertheless, Barnett was perhaps the first to fully grasp the great difficulties in transforming a Gap nation and to provide a playbook by which to do so.



Although Barnett eschews jingoism, his book evidences a faith in America that is not universally fashionable. Moreover, the enormity of the task that Barnett prescribes suggests a conflict with no immediate end in sight and where "exit strategies" are a barely relevant concept.



But there can be little doubt now that Barnett's vision is ascendant. President Bush's Inaugural Address reads as if disciples of Tom Barnett had written it. By acknowledging that spreading democracy and freedom is not only noble but actually vital to American strategic self interest, Bush endorsed the cornerstone argument of "The Pentagon's New Map": Either we'll reshape the dangerous corners of the world, or their pathologies will revisit American shores in increasingly destructive forms.



What's more, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was an early proponent of transforming the military to confront precisely the kinds of obstacles that Barnett outlines. As Barnett said on his blog a couple of weeks ago, Rumsfeld "gets the challenge and the need for change, and he'll push the uniformed services to get it done." In addition to putting forth an original, provocative and persuasive theory about how the world now operates, "The Pentagon's New Map" has also cracked the code of how the Bush Administration is likely to function.



Dean Barnett (no relation to Thomas P.M. Barnett) writes about politics and world affairs at Soxblog.com under his online pseudonym James Frederick Dwight.

COMMENTARY: Since I've already commented on Dean Barnett's review of PNM as Soxblog, I'll just limit myself to the additional analysis he offers here. Basically, he pushes for the book to be appreciated as a serious guide to the Bush administration's actions and policies, and that's fine, but he implies real influence on my part when it's mostly just fellow-traveling and accuracy of my description (i.e., the Bush administration finds themselves operating in the world I describe and so my prescriptions often match their actions).

My real influence isn't with this administration, but with the long-timers who populate the government and military just below the political level. They are the ones who buy into the vision most, and that's where the influence will be felt and seen over the long haul. I didn't generate a grand vision to explain the Bush administration to the world, but to explain the world to this administration and everyone that followed in the coming decades. The Pentagon's "institutional memory" gets this book, and, in the end, that's its real measure of impact.

Find the original at www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_01/005506.php

My commentary follows:

Political Animal by Kevin Drum

24 Jan 05

THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP. . ..On the recommendation of several people, I have finally finished slogging through Thomas P.M. Barnett's bestselling book, The Pentagon's New Map. It was an intensely frustrating experience.

Barnett, a military theorist and consultant formerly with the Naval War College, presents the following thesis: the primary division in the world today, he says, is between two sets of countries that he calls the Core and the Gap. The Core consists of advanced countries that play by the rules and are committed to globalization (primarily Europe, North America, and Japan) plus countries that are committed to getting there (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and some others). The Gap is everyone else: a collection of disconnected, lawless, and dangerous countries such as Colombia, Pakistan, and North Korea, plus most of the Middle East and Africa. (A detailed map of the Core and the Gap is here.) American military action since World War II has been confined almost exclusively to the Gap, which means the task of the United States over the next several decades — and in particular the task of the United States military — is to shrink the Gap and eventually convert the entire world to the values of the Core. Only then will America and the rest of the current Core be safe.

So why was the book so frustrating? Because normally it's not fair to summarize booklength arguments in a single paragraph this way. You really need to read the entire book and absorb all the author's evidence to understand what he's saying. In this case, though, you don't. Barnett doesn't really present supporting arguments as much as he simply relates anecdotes about the personal journey that led him to his conclusion that globalization is the key security issue of our time — a conclusion that's eventually presented as sort of a personal epiphany. Either you buy it or you don't. (If you want a longer summary of the book anyway, Barnett's own version in the March 2003 issue of Esquire is here.)

In my case, I don't have a problem with Barnett's idea that Gap countries pose a greater danger to America than, say, China — although apparently this is a tough sell in the military. That takes care of his first 300 pages or so. But the final hundred pages have their own problem: a sense of destiny that goes way beyond mere optimism and turns into something little short of religious faith in America's ability to be right under all circumstances. For example, here is his argument about why America should feel free to intervene in Gap countries whenever we feel like it:

What gives America the right to render judgments of right and wrong, or good versus rogue?. . ..What gives America the right is the fact that we are globalization's godfather, its source code, its original model. We restarted globalization after World War II and we have made it largely in our image. . ..This gift of global connectivity generating peace is one we must keep on giving, because to let the process stall is to risk its demise, to possibly lose all for which we have sacrificed so much in the past.

This isn't an argument, it's just an assertion, and one that will convince no one aside from Americans who are already believers. Barnett spends a lot of time insisting that we need the support of the rest of the Core in our mission to eliminate the Gap, but there are damn few Core countries that are going to feel comfortable trailing along to clean up after our wars if this is the extent of our justification.

And make no mistake: that's exactly what Barnett thinks the rest of the Core should do. America has the only military capable of projecting power, he says, and we should feel free to use it unilaterally whenever we feel it's necessary. But the nation building that comes afterward — well, that's everyone's problem. In other words, America should decide where to wage war, and the rest of the world should follow our lead. The example of Iraq doesn't give me a lot of confidence that this is a workable strategy.

The book is unsatisfying in other ways as well. For starters, it suffers from a bad case of Tom Friedmanism: rah rah globalism leavened with simplistic lists and preciously named rules. For example, here's a summary of how he thinks American military power will create world peace:

America as global cop creates security. Security creates common rules. Rules attract foreign investment. Investment creates infrastructure. Infrastructure creates access to natural resources. Resources create economic growth. Growth creates stability. Stability creates markets. And once you're a growing, stable part of the global market, you're part of the Core. Mission accomplished.

But there's no analysis of even the first part of this chain: does America as global cop really create the security needed for all the rest of this to happen? I'm not sure history is kind to this notion, but in any case I'd expect at least a full chapter justifying it. But there's really nothing. Again, it's more assertion than argument.

In the end, Barnett makes two big proposals. The first, of course, is that American has to be ready and willing to enforce security everywhere within the Gap. The second is that we need two militaries: the standard one we have now, which fights and wins conventional wars, and a second one, which occupies countries and performs nation building. This is an interesting notion, but he never takes it anywhere. Could such a military force work? Would other countries really join us in this? What does it take to perform successful nation building anyway? There's a rich literature in these topics, but very little of it is reflected in Barnett's book.

I feel like I'm being unfairly harsh toward Barnett, who seems like a good guy who's been thinking about this stuff for a long time. But in the end, the problem wasn't that he failed to persuade me, it was that he didn't even try. I kept waiting for the argument to start, but instead I just kept getting more and more description. Sure, the Gap is unstable and disconnected, but can American power connect it? Yes, we can wage war unilaterally if we want to, but can we also get the rest of the Core to follow our lead if we do? Maybe evangelizing globalization to the Gap is a good thing, but is it enough to stop war? It didn't stop World War I. And what's required in addition to military power anyway? Barnett never really says.

Thus my frustration. It's possible that Barnett is on the right track, but he needs to write a book that makes his case, rather than just states it. He's writing a second book now, and maybe he'll do just that. We'll have to wait and see.

If a grand strategic vision allows for Iraq, then Drum's not on board. He admits he's bitching harshly because PNM doesn't scratch his itch directly, but does he ask himself why so many people have urged him to read the book? Perhaps they're just simpletons who fall for Tom Friedmanism. Ah well, there are definitely worse authors to be compared to.

The weakest part of the piece is when he holds out for the second book, like my life should revolve around convincing the great man Kevin Drum. How much you want to bet he starts skimming that book too and then declares it "just description" as well? He should have just ignored his friends. His snotty misrepresentation of my "unilateralism" and my alleged argument for cavalierly letting the rest of the Core pick up the nation-building and peacekeeping pieces reveals—yet again—that this reviewer's real problem is with George Bush. And when that's the case, they should simply say so and stop pretending to review PNM with such self-righteous whining.

Find the original at globalresearch.ca/articles/GAG501A.html

My commentary follows:

New Pentagon Vision Transforms War Agenda

by Bruce K. Gagnon

Global Network Space Newsletter 16 Winter 2005

Pentagon transformation is well underway. The U.S. military is increasingly being converted into a global oil protection service. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld has a "strategy guy" whose job is to teach this new way of warfare to high-level military officers from all branches of services and to top level CIA operatives. Thomas Barnett is a professor at the Navy War College in Rhode Island. He is author of the controversial book The Pentagon's New Map that identifies a "non-integrating gap" in the world that is resisting corporate globalization. Barnett defines the gap as parts of Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Central Asia all of which are key oil-producing regions of the world.

In what Barnett calls a "Grand March of History" he claims that the U.S. military must be transformed in order to preemptively take control of the gap, so the U.S. can "manage" the global distribution of resources, people, energy, and money. (It has long predicted that the gap between rich and poor around the world will continue to widen and that the Pentagon will be used to keep the boot on the necks of the people of the third world to the benefit of corporate globalization.)

Barnett predicts that U.S. unilateralism will lead to the "inevitability of war." Referring to Hitler in a recent presentation, Barnett reminded his military audience that the Nazi leader never asked for permission before invading other countries. Thus, the end to multi-lateralism.

Barnett argues that the days of arms talks and international treaties are over. "There is no secret where we are going," he says as he calls for a "new ordering principle" at the Department of Defense (DoD). Barnett maintains that as jobs move out of the U.S. the primary export product of the nation will be "security." Global energy demand will necessitate U.S. control of the oil producing regions. "We will be fighting in Central Africa in 20 years," Barnett predicts.

In order to implement this new military vision," Barnett maintains that the U.S. military must move away from its often-competing mix of Air Force-Navy-Army-Marines toward two basic military services. One he names Leviathan, which he defines as the kick ass, wage war, special ops, and not under the purview of the international criminal court. Give us your angry, video game-playing 18-19 year olds, for the Leviathan force, Barnett says. Once a country is conquered by Leviathan, Barnett says the U.S. will have to have a second military force that he calls Systems Administration. This force he describes as the "proconsul" of the empire, boots on the ground, the police force to control the local populations. This group, Barnett says, "will never come home."

Barnett¹s plan is essentially underway today. New fast, flexible, and efficient projection forces with "lily pad" bases are now being developed for control of the gap. Over the next decade, the military will abandon 35% of the Cold War-era bases it uses abroad as it seeks to expand the network of bare-bones sites in the gap. The planned changes, once completed, will result in the most profound "reordering" of U.S. military forces overseas since the current global arrangements were set 50 years ago.

According to Michael Klare, professor of Peace Studies at Hampshire College, "American troops are now risking their lives on a daily basis to protect the flow of petroleum. In Colombia, Saudi Arabia, and the Republic of Georgia, U.S. personnel are spending their days and nights protecting pipelines and refineries, or supervising the local forces assigned to this mission."

Klare continues, "The DoD has stepped up its arms deliveries to military forces in Angola and Nigeria, and is helping to train their officers and enlisted personnel; meanwhile, Pentagon officials have begun to look for permanent bases in the area, focusing on Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Uganda and Kenya." The Wall Street Journal has reported that "a key mission for U.S. forces (in Africa) would be to ensure that Nigeria¹s oil fields, which in the future could account for as much as 25% of all U.S. oil imports, are secure." National Guard units across the U.S. are now being assigned the task of developing on-going basing relationships with each nation on the African continent.

Role of Space Technology

The Bush administration is also exploring the possibility of expanding the emerging missile defense system into Eastern Europe as an element in the strategic containment of Russia, China and the Middle East. The Pentagon has been negotiating with Hungary, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic about one or more of them hosting new missile defense bases. Oil-rich Iran is to be encircled by missile defense posts in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

In order to pull all of this together the Pentagon claims it will need "a God¹s-eye view" of the world. A new "internet in the sky" is now being built for the wars of the future. Costing well over $200 billion, the new web would give war machines and military forces a common language, instantly emitting an encyclopedia of lethal information about all enemies.

According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon¹s Office of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking about is a new theory of war." The military wants to know "everything of interest to us, all the time," says one Pentagon insider. Military intelligence including secret satellite surveillance covering most of the Earth will be posted on the war net and shared with troops. "The essence of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere, anytime. Information technology is the key to that."

Thus U.S. military and economic control of the gap will be dependent on a system of networked computers. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a global network what the military calls net-centric warfare will, they say, change the military in a way the Internet changed business and culture.

I don't claim "that the U.S. military must be transformed in order to preemptively take control of the gap, so the U.S. can "manage" the global distribution of resources, people, energy, and money." I'm very specific about the limited role of the military inside the Gap, and my point about the flows is that no one controls them, although great powers can certainly screw them up.

The bits about the "inevitability of war" and allegedly comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany is real fantasy. When I reference Hitler in the talk, it is to contrast it pointedly with the U.S., but that distinction apparently doesn't trouble this fellow. As for the "end of multilateralism," that's just Gagnon purposefully misrepresenting both the talk and the book, and rather deceitfully at that.

Based on subsequent "quotes," it's clear to me that this guy has never read the book, but just caught me on C-SPAN and "reviewed" the book on that basis—again, fairly deceitful because he acts like he has read it. Instead, he starts quoting Michael Klare's book, which contains some of the most unsubstantiated fear-mongering I've yet seen in a serious book. The rest of the quasi-review goes off on the space tangent that's allegedly key to my plot to have America rule the world.

All in all, a rather hyperbolic review based on the talk, not the book.

Find the original at www.cominganarchy.com/archives/2005/01/27/battle-of-the-books/#more-241

My commentary follows:

Battle of the Books

Over the past month I read the two following books:

The Pentagon’s New Map

America’s Secret War

Now it’s time for my hard-hitting review as the optimistic futurist takes on the old school hardened analyst in a battle that decides the fate of our world!

Let me first tackle PNM: This book is a must read for anyone interested in current events. This is some of the best “thinking outside of the box” that I have seen in a while. Barnett’s theory of the Gap and the Core really makes sense, and he takes it one step further with his suggestion that rules change depending on which group you are in. “Disconnectedness defines danger” is an eloquent and well-structured argument that fleshes out the truly underlying attributes of the problematic theory that “democracies don’t war with one another.” The few complaints I have about this book, include the following: I found it far too repetitive, you could probably shave off about 50 pages; and it reads like a repackaged Manifest Destiny. This book is definitely written for Americans. I agree with his point that the US contains the “source code” for liberal democracies, but I felt that he over-emphasized this, disregarding the numerous fully functional alternative “code branches” out there, and their ability to contribute to “a future worth building.”

Now onto America’s Secret War. George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor, makes an analysis of the US war on terror starting prior to the 9/11 attacks and ending with Abu Ghraib. The interesting thing about this book is Friedman’s ability to guide the reader through complex geopolitics; it is almost like reading a good Clancy novel. Each event is lined up precisely with an accompanying logical explanation and analysis. Unfortunately with the lack of any references it all seems like a well-constructed fairy tale, told in 20/20 Hindsight-o-vision. If only he provided footnotes… Friedman is a great analyst but his “order of battle analysis” skills are not on par with true historians like Sir John Keegan. In any case this book is a great lesson in geopolitical analysis and sure gets you looking at events with a different lense. Although a must read for die hard armchair cold-warriors and geopoliphiles alike, I wouldn’t recommend it to “regular folk” like I would PNM.

These two books turned out to be on very different topics (future vs. the past), and are written by very different authors (new school vs. old school), but I was glad that I read them in close succession. One of the niggles of PNM is that it feels like he is calling for all Core nations to hold hands and sing from the same page together in shrinking the Gap. This, in my realist upbringing, is an impossibility, comrade. But while reading Friedman’s concise description of the geopolitical landscape, with alliances being formed and broken depending on the task, I realized the profundity of Barnett’s grand strategy. For all his idealism of ending war in our world, Barnett wasn’t necessarily saying that we all had to work together all the time, he does leave room for variances in foreign policy. His is truly a grand strategy, leaving the day-today geopolitics to guys like Friedman.

That is my short take on these books. So what is the fate of our world? Well… not necessarily the same as it has always been. But in the meantime there will be that familiar struggle…

COMMENTARY: Mr. Coming Anarchy gives me the usual slap-down of those who really like the book but want to offer criticism: too repetitive, too self-congratulatory (America rules!) and too long. Fine. He scores his point. Bigger point is that he gets it for what it really attempts to be: a serious attempt at grand strategy that doesn't focus on the tactics of today and isn't just a long bitch-session about what the author can't stand about the Bush administration's security and diplomatic policies. He also sees the book as accessible, which is key, and views me as new school (definitely not another Kissinger or Brzezinski). This is all good, so I take the quibbling in stride. Mr. Coming Anarchy, despite the bias of his nom-de-scare, knows his rear-end from his elbow in terms of strategic analysis, and that, my friends, is rare in this world.

The book review first appeared in the Naval War College Review, Winter 2005, Vol. 58, No. 1.

My commentary follows:

A New Standard for the Use of Force?

February 1, 2005

From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the collapse of the twin towers in 2001 to the present, after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States has not had a consistent national security policy that enjoyed the support of the American people and its allies. This situation is markedly different from the Cold War era, when our nation had a clear, coherent, widely supported strategy that focused on containing and deterring Soviet Communist expansion.

The tragic events of 9/11, the increase in terrorist attacks, and possible threats from such countries as North Korea and Iran that are capable of developing weapons of mass destruction make it imperative to develop a new national security strategy to safeguard the United States. In The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, Thomas Barnett, a senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, attempts to provide one.

Unfortunately, he does not succeed. The failure of Barnett's strategy is most vividly demonstrated by the strategic rationale he offers for the Bush administration's poorly planned invasion and occupation of Iraq.

According to Barnett, the world is divided into two parts, the Functioning Core and the Non-Integrating Gap. The Functioning Core consists of those stable countries in North America, much of South America, the European Union, Russia, Japan, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. There is little threat of war or widespread violence in the Core, because its members enjoy the benefits of globalization, specifically rising standards of living. The Gap, on the other hand, consists of areas such as the Caribbean Rim, most of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. In those areas there is a great deal of violence and turmoil, because they are not connected to the Core. This lack of connectivity results from the rejection of modernity by the elites in the Gap. Therefore, the members of the Gap do not enjoy the benefits of globalization, and hence these areas become incubators for terrorists.

If the United States wants to win the war against terrorism, Barnett argues, it must take the lead in shrinking the Gap. To do this, it must export security to the Gap until it is ready to integrate into the Core, or else the Gap will continue to export terrorism to the Core. Barnett calls this a "global transaction strategy."

His global transaction strategy makes the war against Iraq a war of necessity, not one of choice. According to Barnett, the invasion of Iraq was justified because "Saddam Hussein's outlaw regime was dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world-from our rule sets, our norms, and all the ties that bind the Core together in mutually assured dependence. He was the Demon of Disconnectedness and he deserves death for all his sins against humanity over the years." Wow!

These words are eerily reminiscent of what President George W. Bush said on board the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003, in his infamous "mission accomplished" speech. In remarks onboard the carrier the president claimed that "the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001" and that the defeat of Saddam Hussein was "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror."

It does not seem to matter to Barnett or his strategic view that the reasons the president gave for invading Iraq were spurious or that the war in Iraq represented a substantial setback in the struggle against al-Qaida. The unnecessary invasion of Iraq not only diverted attention away from Afghanistan, thus damaging the prospects for crippling al-Qaida, but created a new justification among the radical jihadists for attacking Westerners, drained the reservoir of goodwill that the United States enjoyed in the global community, and in the eyes of many Muslims transformed the war against terrorism into a war against Islam.

Instead Barnett characterizes the Bush administration's decision as "amazingly courageous," because "it has committed our nation to shrinking a major portion of the Gap in one fell swoop." This decision makes the author love and admire the U.S. government and, by extension, the Bush approach to the global war on terror.

As a consequence of the framework he has developed, Barnett is also an unabashed supporter of Bush's preemption doctrine when it comes to dealing with actors and regimes in the Gap. There are two problems with his approach. First, it confuses preemption with preventive war. It is not only legal under international law but moral for a nation to take preemptive military action when it has what Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld calls "elegant intelligence" about an imminent threat. But this is not what the United States did in Iraq. President Bush has stated repeatedly that Iraq was not an imminent threat, yet he waged a preventive war against what he claimed was "a grave and gathering danger." If this is the new standard for the use of force against members of the Gap, what is to prevent India from waging a preventive war against Pakistan? Or Russia against Georgia?

Second, while Barnett concedes that the traditional strategies of containment and deterrence will work against other Core states, he argues that it will not work against members of the Gap. Yet Barnett fails to recognize that while nonstate actors like al-Qaida cannot be deterred, even the most evil regimes in the Gap can be deterred, because their rulers wish to remain in power. The recent report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence demonstrates that Iraq was contained and that the sanctions and American and British military pressure helped to destroy Saddam's military machine and his capacity to produce conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz testified, the cost of containing Saddam amounted to $2.5 billion a year. At the time of this writing the Bush administration has spent $144 billion in Iraq, without making us safer.

Unlike the Bush administration, Barnett does not appear to have learned that the doctrine of launching preemptive strikes against established states in the Gap died in Iraq. Barnett wants to launch a preventive war against North Korea. According to his analysis, Kim Jong Il has become "globalization's enemy number one following Saddam Hussein's demise and must be removed from power." He believes that Bush's reelection means that such action is inevitable.

Finally, Barnett's analysis falls into the trap of thinking that terrorists in the Gap attack the West for what it is and what it thinks. However, as demonstrated in the book Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror by Anonymous (a twenty-three-year CIA veteran), America is hated and attacked for what it does-that is, the policies it pursues that impact the Islamic world, such as its support for apostate, corrupt, and tyrannical Muslim governments. He notes that "the Islamic World is not so offended by our democratic system of politics, guaranties of personal rights and civil liberties, and separation of church and state that it is willing to wage war against overwhelming odds to stop America from voting, speaking freely, and praying or not, as they wish."

Because of these failings, Barnett's global transaction strategy will not gain the support of the American people or its allies that containment did. Rather, the global transaction strategy is in reality an updated version of the domino theory, which led the United States to believe that if it did not intervene to prevent South Vietnam from becoming communist, all of Southeast Asia would become part of the Soviet empire. Just as the domino theory led successive American presidents to commit national blood and treasure to a peripheral cause that was not essential to the goal of containing Soviet communist expansionism, the invasion of Iraq, even though it is a member of the Gap, was not essential to winning the struggle against radical jihadists like al-Qaida.

Unfortunately, these conceptual weaknesses undermine some of the sensible recommendations that Barnett makes, particularly about U.S. force structure. Yet even the best organized and equipped military will be of little use if it is employed incorrectly.

For those looking for a twenty-first-century version of containment, I recommend Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. The "Global Balkans," which he identifies as a source of political instability, is similar to Barnett's Gap. However, Brzezinski shows how the self-defeating arrogance of the Bush administration has undermined what must be the American goal of creating a new global system based on shared interests.

Barnett, Thomas P. M. The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Putnam, 2004. 320pp. $26.95

Lawrence J. Korb is a senior advisor to the Center for Defense Information and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

COMMENTARY: This is the most cursory review of the book I think I've ever seen, but considering how much the Review pays for reviews (nothing), I guess that's to be expected. But more seriously, the review is not of the book, but of the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq, of which Korb, a manpower official in a Republican administration long, long ago, clearly disapproved. My entire vision is disqualified because his definition of the Global War on Terrorism matches those who argue for a solitary focus on killing bad guys, not decreasing their strategic operating domain or denying their strategic aims. You have to wonder, if the occupation went better, does my vision then work for Korb, because he clearly approves of the force structure suggestions (Leviathan v. SysAdmin)? Or does he simply not acknowledge the Gap or the dangers posed there? He likes Brezinzki's "global Balkans," so what's not to like about my Gap and wanting to shrink it (he says the two concepts are very similar)? Ah, but my analysis can be dismissed as just another example of "the self-defeating arrogance of the Bush administration."

That explanation is apparently enough for Korb to dismiss me, but we're also told that mine is another "domino theory," a criticism I find simply baffling, because Korb seems to be saying that denying al Qaeda its super-state stretching from Morocco to the Philippines isn't really doing battle with them. If that isn't thwarting their long-term aims, then tell me, what is? Ah again! We're told to check out Anonymous' analysis, which basically says we should withdraw militarily from the region and stop pissing off the terrorists there. Yes, stop pissing off the terrorists, there's a grand strategy I can embrace.

Korb's review was disappointing in the extreme. He always struck me as smarter, but his analysis here strikes me more like the bored comments of a grad student grading undergraduate papers, as though he was merely looking for the evidence to warrant my failing mark, like my apparent "confusion" over preemptive war versus preventive war. Clearly, Korb views the Iraq war as a U.S.-versus-Iraq matter only, so it's preventive because Iraq couldn't mount any serious direct threat against the U.S. But I never made that argument (again, Korb doesn't seem interested in reviewing PNM, but the Bush administration), instead making a clear argument that the U.S.-led international action against Iraq represented a preemptive war by the Core against a well-known aggressive actor inside the Gap, somebody who threatened both his neighbors and his own people. But again, this sort of academic legalese is a quaint way to justify marking down my grade, allowing Korb to instead cite the "masters." I am so humbled by his obviously disinterested effort.

Find the original at www.suntimes.com/output/roeser/cst-edt-roes05.html

My commentary follows:

Chicago Sun-Times

Book lays out America's challenge in the world

February 5, 2005

BY THOMAS ROESER

I never dreamed that a single book would change my outlook on the United States' role in world affairs, but one has. It's obscure but powerfully influential; easily in rank to that of naval captain Alfred Thayer Mahan who, late in the 19th century, laid out the strategy for our expansion into a great world power in a book only the military groupies had read. This one is The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century by Thomas Barnett (G. T. Putnam's Sons, 2004), easily the most influential book of our time.

It's obvious that George W. Bush is an engrossed disciple. The president's inaugural brimmed with natural law and Aquinas, but without the Barnett ballast it left me cold.

Obviously, Barnett occupies front-rank in Bush's thinking. Since the Cold War ended, we've been trying to come up with a unified theory of the world and a military strategy to fit, which Barnett has done.

Barnett, former professor and senior strategist at the U.S. Naval War College (as was Mahan), wrote an Esquire magazine article, which led to the book. It was a takeoff from the famous power-point briefings he gave the Pentagon in the early days of the Bush administration.

He divides the world into three parts, the first a functioning grouping of states that have been integrated into the world economy. This includes North America, much of South America, the European Union, Russia, Japan and Asia's emerging economies (China and India), Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, a total of 4 billion people. This is what he calls the Core.

In contrast, what he calls the Gap will be the source of much of the world's problems in the 21st century: the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia and much of Southeast Asia. The Gap's total population is 2 billion.

The third group consists of the ''seam states'' along the Gap's boundaries: Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. We and other Core nations have our work cut out to firewall these seams. China patrols its northern border against terrorists; Russia is concerned with the Caucasus.

Much of our problem since the end of the Cold War has had to do with the Gap. Bush was correct to move on Iraq because ''it is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world . . . and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence,'' Barnett writes.

He adds: ''Show me areas where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions . . . media flows and collective security, and I'll show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living and more deaths by suicide than by murder. . . . But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder and, most important, the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists''—the Gap.

Barnett points out that we have successfully exported security to the old Core, but Core nations must encourage more private investment to shrink the Gap.

''Think of it,'' he writes. ''Global war is not in the offing'' because our nuclear stockpile guards against it. Supposed war with China is not in the cards but we must supply more security from the public sector and more private investment to the Gap.

''Africa . . . will need far more aid from the Core than has been offered in the past. . . . This may sound like additional responsibility for an already overburdened military but that is the wrong way to look at it for what we're dealing with are problems of success, not failure. It is America's continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us'' to keep the peace.

Great book, great read. Read it and tell me what you think!

COMMENTARY: Hard not to like. Clearly the guy feels empowered by the book, and that's exactly what we were going for. Mark Warren and I wanted non-expert readers to find the book very accessible, to the point of feeling like they had been read into the program big-time, because with that feeling comes a sense of awareness that's powerful. People feel like they look at the world differently, with more confidence about America's role in history, and that makes for a better citizen. Or at least it beats the hell out of scaring people from every page. Plus, making it accessible means it's translatable. This guy could render the entire book fairly simply and directly, using a minimum of jargon (really none at all besides my new lexicon of Core-Gap).

And yes, I do enjoy the comparison to Mahan, especially since my requested departure from the same college he once headed.

Dateline: Marriott Hotel, Monterey California, 25 February 2005

Here are six reviews I've collected in recent weeks. Mark Warren made me promise not to review them in my blog while writing Vol. II, so I get to them only now.

As usual, the verdict is split: three find me quite profound and three find me rather superficial and full of nonsense—dangerous nonsense at that. Also as usual, the more "professional" and self-regarded the reviewer, the dumber I seem to be.

Here are the six posted individually:

■ Reviewing the Reviews (Chicago Sun Times)

■ Reviewing the Reviews (Naval War College Review)

■ Reviewing the Reviews (Coming Anarchy)

■ Reviewing the Reviews (Global Network Space Newsletter)

■ Reviewing the Reviews (The Washington Monthly)

■ Reviewing the Reviews (Tech Central Station)

■"West Africa Wins Again, With Twist: Togo's Neighbors Bring Pressure to Restore a Constitution," by Lydia Polgreen, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. A10.

■"Women's Voices Rise as Rwanda Reinvents Itself: But Numbers in Office Do Not Mean an End to Their Suffering," by Marc Lacey, New York Times,

26 February 2005, p. A1.

Two very encouraging articles on Africa. First one is about Togo, where not too long ago the military tried to install the son of the long-time strongman running the country as his presidential successor, defying the constitution. Well, neighboring states made a big deal out of the move, and apparently talked the military leadership of Togo to dethrone the son.

See, not every effort requires the U.S. military and not every effort requires bloodshed. Most will leave willingly if the right pressure is applied. Of course, it helps when we're talking a smaller state, which West Africa is full of. It's those big states elsewhere in Africa where getting the Big Man to leave is much harder—like Zimbabwe.

The other story is about how women have stepped into unprecedented political roles in Rwanda as that government continues to put itself back together following the genocidal period of the early 1990s. Part of it is just sheer practicality: the killing was conducted overwhelming by males against males (in the 98-percent range), leaving a 7-to-1 ratio of females to males, according to the highest estimates. Now, women make up roughly half of the lower house of the Parliament, an unprecedented number in human history, by all accounts. It doesn't mean everything works out nicely now for Rwanda, but if there can be an upside to the ethnic killing spree that occurred, surely this is it.

■"Pentagon reports more bombs, fewer U.S. casualties: Better armor and intelligence contribute to declining rates of injury and death," by Dave Moniz, USA Today, 25 February 2005, p. 9A.

■"U.S. to Resume Training Of Some in Indonesia Military," by Agence France-Presse, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. A13.

■"Afghans Accuse U.S. of Secret Spraying to Kill Poppies," by Carlotta Gall, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. A3.

■"Flaws Reported in Screening Subcontractors for Iraq Prisons," by Michael Janofsky, New York Times, 26 February 2005, p. A5.

■"Within C.I.A., Growing Fears Of Prosecution," by Douglas Jehl and David Johnston, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. A1.

The SysAdmin adjusts, because the enemy adjusts. The insurgents in Iraq change their tactics, on average, every 7 to 10 days, so we've learned to do the same. We're using computers to predict likely targets based on previous patterns, and our jamming technologies have made it harder to detonate the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

And then there's the growing use of robots to dispose of bombs.

Did we learn the hard way? Roughly 1,500 hard ways so far, with February being the best month since June of last year, but that's still almost 50 dead for us.

But the Army especially, after resisting the SysAdmin role so vehemently across the oh-so-busy 90s, is now embracing it with real vigor. The Army is having an almost Freaky Friday-sort of switch with the Navy right now: whereas the Navy was considered the premier crisis-response force (using the Marines for on-ground actions), now it's the Army that's increasingly being recast as the expeditionary big stick that looms behind the always rough-and-ready Marines. We're talking the U.S. Calvary settling the wild spots in the Gap, with the Army forming the center, the Marines forming the tip of the spear, and the Special Ops guys playing the role of scouts, assassins, and mountain men who disappear for months at a time, returning with only incredible tales.

Another good example of SysAdmin work is the U.S. getting back into the role as mil-mil mentor to Indonesia. Part of this is a long-term effort by Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, former ambassador to the country, but the tipping point is the shared experience of responding to the Asian Tsunamis, a point I make in the essay I wrote for Issue #2 of the Rule Set Reset.

Now for the failing grades:

We have got to find something else for Afghanistan than spraying poppies. Tell me you want this passage on our collective conscience:

Abdullah, a black-turbaned shepherd, said he was watching over his sheep one night in early February when he heard a plane pass low overhead three times. By morning his eyes were so swollen he could not open them and the sheep around him were dying in convulsions.

Although farmers had noticed a white powder on their crops, they cut grass and clovere for their animals and picked spinach to eat anyway. Within hours the animals were severely ill, people here said, and the villagers complained of fevers, skin rashes and bloody diarrhea. The children were particularly affected. A week later, the crops—wheat, vegetables and poppies—were dying, and a dozen dead animals, including newborn lambs, lay tossed in a heap.

Our narcotics experts, the article says, have been advocating this step for months to help us get control over the drug situation. This is control? This is what we want to be associated with? This is how we generate security in Afghanistan? This is how we win hearts and minds? All for illegal drugs used by our populations?

This activity burns bridges. It does not create connectivity.

Also plenty of bad examples of poor screening for private-sector personnel brought into Iraq to help run the prisons there, thanks to a Justice Department Inspector General report ordered by Sen. Schumer of NY. That report is just the tip of the iceberg, showing just how much better we need to get both in terms of contracting for this help and then overseeing its employment and integrating it better with our military forces' overall efforts.

We need to do this not only to protect our interests in these interventions, but to protect our own people. Until we get better and more clear rule sets in place regarding how we wage warfare against individuals, we'll risk not just our own people going over board but having to investigate and prosecute thoses abuses as well. That's a morale killer for everyone, so the clearer the rule sets, the more confident our people will be in their efforts.

■"Dream fulfilled helps Muslims realize theirs: Interest-free loans follow Islamic law without surrendering profit," by Elliot Blair Smith, USA Today, 25 February 2005, p. 1A.

■"Beijing eases rules for private investment," by Richard McGregor, Financial Times, 26-27 February 2005, p. 5.

■"Argentine president optimistic on debt exchange," by Adam Thomson, Financial Times, 26-27 February 2005, p. 2.

Great first article on how American Muslims have learned, over time, how to get around the Koran's rule set on interest when granting and servicing mortgages. The company profiled is American Finance House-Lariba, which is on the cutting edge of this lease-to-own-style mortgage vehicle that's expected to draw up large numbers of Muslim homeowners, both new and those refinancing, as this practice becomes more widespread.

Nothing connects you to an economic future worth creating better than a home mortgage. My guess is that America will someday feature more Muslim homeowners than any country in the world. And I'm guessing that day will come far sooner than anyone realizes.

Following the money gets easier and easier in China, and it should be, given the flow of foreign direct investment that country sucks in each year as the world's largest target (surpassing the U.S. now two years in a row). So while the defense community gets all jacked about the antisecession law, the State Council's just made it a whole lot easier to privately invest in power, rail, aviation and oil sectors—all of which define connectivity and PNM's "four flows" of people, energy, money and security. Why does China do this? The private-sector is providing the vast bulk of job creation, and that's what matters most to the Communist Party's long-term legitimacy.

And yes, I know how oxymoronic that statement sounds . . ..

Then there's Argentina's tumultuous ride through the A-to-Z rule set for economically-bankrupt states, loosely known as the IMF's still informal sovereign bankruptcy process. A while back New Core Argentina defaulted on a world record's worth of $100 billion of sovereign debt. Argentina has restructured and done most of what the IMF has asked, and now the upshot looks like 34 cents on the dollar. With the debt-restructuring process pretty much completed, it's now believed that 75% of the defaulted securities have now entered the exchange process. This is crucial, when Argentina went under in December 2001, about half of the population was suddenly plunged below the poverty line and the state was cut off from international capital markets—a situation that will end with this completed exchange process. Did global investors get burned? Yes. But Argentina's state coffers weren't emptied in the process, and that's crucial. Making sure Argentina stays in the Core is more important than everyone getting their money back.

■"Kurds Vow to Retain Militia as Guardians of Autonomy: An army is 'a symbol of resistance' and an insurance policy," by Edward Wong, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. A8.

■"Iraq's Serene South Asks, Who Needs Baghdad? Dreams of becoming an Arab Singapore, or a Shiite Kuwait" by James Glanz, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. WK3.

■"Iraq's dispossessed Sunnis seek new strategy: The relative success of last month's elections has forced the former ruling minority now at the heart of the insurgency to rethink its tactics," by Charles Clover, Financial Times, 26-27 February 2005, p. 4.

The Kurds remind me of the early American colonies just as they were being asked to join a larger federation: a fierce desire to retain their militia. Almost a hundred years later, when the U.S. dissolved into the Civil War, most federal soldiers fought according to where they were from—that's how fierce the attachment was. Should we be surprised to see the same thing in Iraq? No. Does the U.S. military rely on these forces to fight the insurgents? You bet. And therein lies the trick: we have to keep just enough of an idea of Iraq going on so that the militias don't see enemies beyond the insurgents. The Kurds fought the Kurds not so long ago, so the idea of militias is a bit dicey. But we have to expect it as the price of federalism in Iraq—as sloppy and as loose as they might end up being for quite some time.

Meanwhile, down south, there are some pretty out-in-the-open dreams about breaking off from the Sunni and Kurdish north. Some of this is a desire to take their oil and leave, which is natural, and some of it is desiring to be away from the real and potential violence elsewhere in Iraq, and that's even more natural. Being built around the port of Basra, there is likewise a stronger desire to connect up with the outside world. The election showing of the Shiite coalition will dampen this some, as the article points out, but it ain't going to go away. We're watching the same dynamics, often economically driven more than by ethnicity or religion, that dismembered the false state that was Yugoslavia. Iraq is a similarly odd historical creation by outsiders (Churchill had a big hand), and it may well have to devolve into smaller bits before it can come back together in larger ones.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, the Sunnis are fighting on and thinking on the results that were the national election last month. The narrowing solution, as I called it in the Esquire piece, is becoming abundantly clear: join or be left behind, because the Kurds and the Shiites aren't going to stand still, and they're not going to wait on the violence. Yes, some Sunnis want to bargain, but as the FT article points out, you can't really do that until you have a central government in place. So the process has to keep rolling. The system has to be built.

■"The Tipping Points: Three new stories in the Middle East," by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. A13.

■"Why Not Here? Bush changes the subject, worldwide," by David Brooks, New York Times, 26 February 2005, p. A27.

■"New Palestinian Cabinet takes office: President Abbas shows strength in selection process," by Mohammed Daraghmeh, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. 8A.

■"Rice Calls Off Mideast Visit After Arrest Of Egyptian," by Joel Brinkley, New York Times, 26 February 2005, p. A13.

■"Mubarek Pushes Egypt To Allow Freer Elections: After 50 Years of One-Party Rule, Move to Amend the Constitution," by Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. A1.

When Friedman dials down the hysteria on "World War III" and "neo-greens," you remember that he's a world-class journalist who got his start analyzing the Middle East. Here he offers three points of hope in the Middle East, three places where the issue has been reframed, in Gladwellian vernacular: Iraqi is now about an Iraqi government, freely elected, not the U.S.-led occupation; Lebanon is not about when Syria is going to leave, following the response to the assassination of the former PM; and the Israel-Palestinian conflict has shifted from Sharon-the-obstructionist to Abbas the leader of a truly technocratic leadership (nearly half have PhDs) that replaces the decades of corruption that was the Arafat-led Fatah.

David Brooks made the same basic point the day before, scooping ol' Tom a bit, but both of them were scooped by the stunning news out of Alexandria where Hosni Mubarek had a speech of his read in the parliament, calling for multiparty elections by the end of the year! Was a tipping point reached with the arrest of the opposition leader recently, followed by the obvious snub by Rice? Perhaps coincidental, perhaps meaningful. Clearly, Mubarek saw the handwriting on the wall with Saddam's fall and his own attempts to anoint a son as successor meeting growing resistance.

This is a stunning development, truly historic if it holds. Direct elections in Egypt, a country dominated by a single party quite effectively for half a century, simply do not happen without the decision to topple Saddam and trigger the Big Bang. Egypt is not just the region's most populous state, it is the center of the Arab world. This, following real elections in Iraq and Palestine, tells us all that Bush's decision—if argued poorly—was a good one. Not just necessary but good. Not just inevitable but good. Not just strategic but good.

Not just the good opening tag line for an article, but the inescapable logic of the Pentagon's new map. It doesn't belong to anyone, least of all America, but it's there and it must be addressed. Give Bush the credit he deserves for starting this process. The Gap will be shrunk in chunks, and we're watching a big one move right now. Not dominoes, my friends, but connectivity. Egypt will rejoin the world with this election, and Mubarek will reconnect to a legacy worth creating.

Dateline: United flights from Montery to San Francisco to Chicago to Providence, 27 February 2005

Yes, yesterday was thrilling, and man would I love to get that one on DVD. The hiking in the afternoon (the final group activity of the conference (Point Lobos) was also way cool, and it gave me a nice chance to meet some people (although the people most tied into my message approached me right after I spoke). Last night in my rather nice hotel room was all about answering the build-up of email. Then a decent night's sleep and the long road back to RI begins: I start with a driver picking me up at 5:15 am PST and get home around 10:15 pm EST, in time to watch the biggest Oscars get handed out with my spouse, who's more than a little beat manning the home front all by herself the entire week (save my very brief appearance Thursday night).

Looking forward to my own bed.

Here's today's catch, stitched together by the papers I accumulated:

■ The trifurcation of Iraq has begun

■ The Big Bang claims another victory in Egypt?

■ Good SysAdmin, Bad SysAdmin

■ Follow the money, find your way to the Core

■ Good governments, better Africa

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 28 February 2005

. . . in the head with a sinus headache to beat the band (too many time zones, too much flying, too big of a snowstorm heading this way so pressure dropping fast).

. . . and fed up with Hotmail. Going online with Mac right now and getting Mac account. Won't affect any of the emails that will be redirected to this new account (just like they were to my Hotmail account), but my old t_p_m_barnett@hotmail.com is going away. I will notify friends and family of new private email. What killed Hotmail for me was all the spam and the endless busy server signals. I just don't have the time for either any more.

I will seek to blog stories tomorrow. Just trying to get through son Kevin's basketball practive tonight. Got two trips coming up fast enough (one out of country), so can't push it too hard right now.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 28 February 2005

Blog reader Tom Guarriello wrote me today to say that "I've been to 5 TEDs and I'll tell you the standing ovations are few and far between."

Not coincidentally, Amazone ranking drops from just over 1,000 to 558 today and paperback now sits at just over 11,000.

So TED seeming to spread some word. . ..