Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

As you may remember, we did a chapter-by-chapter on PNM a while back. That went really well.

Then later Hugh and I crossed swords over the surge and definitions of timelines on Iraq. Hugh and I had/have different definitions, I think, of what constitutes partitioning in Iraq, so we parted ways over what the surge could or could not accomplish. I saw then and believe today that the cleansing was basically a given and is largely completed now (except the struggle over a trio of northern cities, to include Kirkuk), meaning I see the partition as essentially being blessed by the surge (which granted the Sunnis self-rule locally and acknowledged the Shia conquest--for all practical purposes--of Baghdad, as one might expect from a population that constitutes 60 percent of Iraq). Moreover, to me, the 2011 timeframe for the drawdown of combat troops was about as fast as is humanly possible, given the immense footprint and gear. Now, the question is all about what and who we leave behind for the long haul, but back then, the discussion was white-hot about how we'd get to this point, and that's where the utility of dialogue broke down for, because if you opened your mouth whatsoever on the inevitability of drawdown, the cut-and-run notion was applied (which, again, as someone familiar with the difficulty and time involved in any drawdown, just didn't compute in my mind).

I haven't been on his show since.

Now, with the new book, we seek to resume the dialogue that worked so well in the past.

We will tape tonight and it will run Wednesday at 3pm PST. Tonight we'll do the first two chapters, where we'll either succeed or fail on the dialogue, but I'm betting we'll succeed and disagree reasonably where we just think differently.

Assuming such, we'd probably tackle the history chapter the following week and double-up on chapters the rest of the way, meaning we'd finish sometime in early-mid March.

My guess is that we'll tape throughout to accommodate skeds,and that he'll run them all on Wednesday, 3pm PST--meaning 6pm in the East.