Recommended Reading

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND SECURITY NETWORK ( Samuel Logan and John P Sullivan ) – Costa Rica, Panama in the Crossfire

“….Around 65 percent of the drug smuggling traffic through Costa Rica and Panama is maritime, and most of the rest is over land,” Paul Knierim, an Agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with experience in Central America and currently working as the staff coordinator in congressional and public affairs, told ISN Security Watch.

Extreme violence is also on the upswing. In April, alleged members of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel abducted two suspected Envigado Cartel members outside Panama City’s Metro Plaza mall, just one sign of the country’s burgeoning drug trade. It is fueling a new generation of gangs (108 gangs at current count), paid ‘in-kind’ with drugs by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other traffickers.”

Is it time yet to speak of Mexico “going Lebanon” in polite company?

Global Guerillas – HENRY OKAH!

John Robb, premier theorist of systemic insurgency and systempunkt, is contacted by a transnational practitioner of global guerillaism. Commenters go nuts.

Steven Pressfield – Interview with a Tribal Chief #4: Warlords and Taliban

….Chief Zazai: The people are caught between two fires. When the warlords ran Afghanistan after the Soviets got kicked out, a poor person had to pay a “tax” to have a bicycle, to buy rice, if you sneezed they took money out of your pocket. The Taliban arose in response to this and were backed by the people who thought, These guys are bad but at least they are honest. At least they believe in something beyond their own greed and gangsterism. But then the Taliban became just as much of a plague upon the people by jamming their cruel ways down everybody’s throat. And we saw what Mullah Omar let happen, culminating on 9/11.

John Seely Brown: “The Social View of Learning”

Complexity and Social Networks Blog – You Lie 2.0

Any attention, even the worst kind, is leverage. If you know how to use it.

The Glittering Eye – Are We Promoting Our Grand Strategy?

Altogether this provides the United States with an ability to project force unparalleled in human history. Our military spending is commensurate with that and by nearly any reckoning we spend more on our military than any other country. Indeed, our spending exceeds that of the next fourteen largest spenders by a considerable margin, 41.5% of all military spending.

Whether we should be spending that much or will continue to spend that much is a matter of lively, sometimes bitter, discussion. Although I think its a reasonable subject for discussion, that’s not the question I’d like to raise here. My hydra-headed question is does our degree and manner of projection of force promote our grand strategy

Dave always likes to ask the uncomfortable questions. 🙂

That’s it!

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