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SUNDAY RECOMMENDED READING

Rob at Businesspundit gets pride of place today as he launches a volley against the wisdom of crowds and emerging long tails with “The Wisdom of Niches: Why Experts Still Matter“.

I take issue with Rob’s generalization of the relative value of depth and breadth but this contrarian post is one that deserves wider play in the blogosphere. It was excellent.

Peter Lavelle of Untimely Thoughts has his weekly round-up of expert opinion in ” Is there a post-Soviet teleology? “. Closely related, at America-Russia.net, is “Putin’s China visit shifts power” on Putin’s summit with Hu that emphasized a ” strategic partneship” revolving around energy market access and develpment as peer to peer military cooperation.

This is New Core integration and the United States should play a more active part in it – for that matter, it would be good to actually develop an engaged relationship with Russia rather than playing reactive, ad hoc, diplomacy.

Paul D. Kretkowski at Beacon posts on “Public Diplomacy and the Video Gamer “. Hmmm, perhaps Everquest and World of Warcraft can win the war on terror.

Former DIA analyst, Rick Francona at Middle East Perspectives deciphers the DoD’s”Iraq Perspectives Project“.

That’s it.

REST FOR THE WICKED

Vacation time ! Staying in town but enjoying the time off from work to catch up on various tasks, read, relax and -of course – blog ! Something I have been very hard pressed to find time for lately.

But first tonight Mrs. Zenpundit has me hosting a small party this evening so the blogfest will have to wait at least a few more hours.

“THE PRESIDENTIAL SEARGENT-MAJOR IS HERE TO SEE YOU GENERAL ABIZAID”

Josh over at the Adventures of Chester is promoting an idea to break the natural tendency toward self-referential group-think that emerges at the highest levels of military command – give the President of the United States his own Sergeant-Major.

Technically, of course, to paraphrase LBJ, they’re all the president’s seargent-majors but it could hardly hurt President Bush to receive the unvarnished perspective of a senior career NCO, fresh from combat in Iraq. This was the very reason that the position of Sergeant-Major of the Army was created, to give the brass the perspective of the NCO and enlisted ranks and this proposal would merely extend the feedback up to the Commander-in-Chief.

As Josh wrote:

“Now tie it all together. You can see it, yes? What the President needs is his own Sergeant Major – a directed telescope on the battlefield reporting directly to him. Not his staff, not the White House Spokesman or the Press Pool. The chain goes straight to The Man himself.

One more thing he needs: a little letter signed by POTUS that says, “This man may go wherever he wishes. Do not impede him.” He can laminate that and put it in his vest and that’s all he’ll need for access. “

A bit romantic. Commanders will always, in time-honored fashion, pull out the stops to impress any fact-finding VIP but one reporting directly to the President of the United States is going to have to be careful he does not get lost in the maze of Potemkin villages that will be built for him.

But overall, a good idea. One that may give senior officers and Pentagon civilian apppointees a few heart attacks

IRAN AS A SOVIETOLOGY FLASHBACK

The Brezhnevian mediocrity posing as Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Khameini ( or Grand Ayatollah, as he claims, without much evidence by Shiite scholarly standards) has ruled in favor of talks with the United States over the fate of Iraq. This move, was in my view, rather interesting on a number of levels.

The problem with dissecting Iranian politics – aside from the dearth of American scholars and USG analysts with a reasonable command of Farsi and real “in-country” experience – is that we have a faction-ridden elite whose convoluted machinations are mostly opaque. In terms of depth, our sources for Iran are quite poor , a condition that long preceded the revolution in 1979 due to the bipartisan acquiescence of multiple American administrations to the paranoid wishes of that man of straw, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, to hobble CIA activity in his country. As such we are left groping in the dark to understand the latest turn of events. Here is my view:

First, it is useful to recall as we ponder Iraq, regardless of the mistakes that the Bush administration has made since the fall of Saddam, we do not have to live next door to Iraq but the Iranians do. Moreover, their oil-rich provinces are home to an Arab minority just as their northwestern borderland houses Kurdish tribes. A nightmare scenario in Iraq has unavoidable spillover costs for an Iranian regime that is most likely better at formenting chaos than trying to suppress it on their own turf.

Secondly, Iran’s ruling clerical elite have been badly divided by the rise of ultra-hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has his supporters among a minority of the senior ayatollahs who previously blocked any bold moves on Supreme Guide Khameini’s part. The Clinton administration had previously reached out to Iran, offering a truckling apology for the CIA toppling of the erratic Mossadegh in 1953, only to be sharply rebuffed by Khameini who lacked much freedom to buck the clerical consensus on ” The Great Satan”.

Beyond that, I’m not sure we know any more about Iran’s internal politics than we did in the days of the Soviet Union where analysts poured over pictures of the Politburo reviewing parades from Lenin’s tomb for clues to the inner workings of elite Soviet decision making. An approach I never gave much credence – after all, didn’t these old guys need to use the restroom ? Run behind schedule because of infirmities ? Yet great import was placed on the body language and proximity of septuagenarian Communist bureaucrats trying to weather a public appearance for hours in the bitter Moscow cold. A ritual that killed more than one elderly Politburo member, including Leonid Brezhnev.

Trying to decipher Iran’s mullocracy reminds me a lot of Sovietology. We may be looking at all the wrong things.

ANOTHER FOR THE DEFENSE

I recently learned that David Kaiser, a professor at the Naval War College and a person with whom I have often sparred on H-Diplo ,has a blog, History Unfolding.

Dr. Kaiser is the author of American Tragedy, a history of the Vietnam War as well as other works on diplomatic, economic and social history. I am frequently, though hardly always, in general disagreement with Dr. Kaiser but I seldom fail to read his posts and suspect that you may enjoy them as well. He’s a fine writer, which is rare enough in academia, and argues his points well.

As an introduction to the world according to Kaiser, here is “Gambling on War“, where the arguments regarding von Clausewitz and defensive strategy will resonate with the followers of the 4GW school. An excerpt:

“Clausewitz’s classic On War is long and difficult, and it truly requires many years of study to assimilate, but the reader gradually realizes that certain fundamental principles, as well as a few specific questions, pervade it. Many people know his concept of “friction” and the “fog of war,” which makes battles so devilishly hard to understand and requires extraordinary qualities of mind and spirit for generals on the scene to unravel. This is an insight that has survived modern technology, as the repeated attempts to kill Saddam Hussein with air strikes—none of which, we now know, actually aimed at one of his many real hiding places—recently proved. A battle is like a football game, and just as difficult to predict. Generations of military historians—most notably those unhappy partisans of the Confederate States of America—have tried to stand this principle on its head by rewriting the outcome of every critical battle of the civil war to show how it could (or should) have turned out differently.

…To wise leaders, the inescapable uncertainty of war should militate against embarking upon it unless it is absolutely necessary—which neither Vietnam nor Iraq in 2003 was. Reinforcing this point, Clausewitz also argued repeatedly that defense was the stronger form of warfare, both tactically (since the defender need not move and fire at the same time), and strategically, since the attacked party was more likely to secure the help of allies who recognized a common interest in the survival of sovereign states. The United States implicitly recognized that principle after defeating Axis aggression in the Second World War and wrote it into the UN Charter, which authorized war only in self-defense. It enjoyed considerable allied assistance in the Korean War—another clear case of enemy aggression. But Vietnam never seemed like such a clear-cut case of aggression because South Vietnam was always so fragile, and most of the world rejected the “preventive war” argument over Iraq—in large part because other nations understood that the idea of national sovereignty simply cannot be reconciled with the concept of preventive war. By going on the offense, the United States forfeited a huge strategic advantage. It should not be too late to regain it, but the genie is out of the bottle in Iraq, and more damage, apparently, will be done.”

Shades of William Lind.