zenpundit.com

I feel this one will be a weird mix.

Top Billing! Col. Dr. Kilcullen vs. Col. Dr. Bacevich over Dave Kilcullen’s new book,  The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Dual hat tip SWJ Blog and BJ at Newshoggers.com).

Bacevich Review: Raising Jihad .  Killcullen Rebuttal: Accidental Guerrilla: Read Before Burning

I have not read Accidental Guerilla yet but it seems obvious that Andrew Bacevich begins from a position longstanding and very strong, non-interventionist, anti-COIN, pro- “Big Army/Near Peer Competitior” policy views. I suspect that may have influenced his take on Dave’s argument just a bit, thus leading to Dave to speculate that Bacevich may have not read the final book or read it in full. A possibility; about 80% of the books I review here are advance copies sent by publishers, authors or their agents.

Outside the Beltway ( Dave Schuler) – Negotiating With Iran

Dave’s reasoned and reasonable take on the Obama administration’s opening moves with Iran.

Coming Anarchy – Financial Warfare and Idea: The Dictionary of Modern Ideas

Liked both of these posts – phrase of the day – “argotic arms race”.

Two for One:  Whirledview (CKR) – Diplomacy Is Not What Bush Did  and Duck of Minerva (Nexon) – Haven’t they Filled the Protocol Positions Yet?

This post by Cheryl is a lucid counterpoint to my knock on Obama administration stumbles in foreign policy while subsequent events have caused Dr. Dan to move in my direction on this score.

Threatswatch.org ( Elkus, Tanji) – Legacy Futures in Cyberspace and Brave Digital World 

A cyberspecial.

Tom Barnett is on C-Span in a few hours.

John Robb indulges his dark side.

Open the Future – The End of Long-Term Thinking

A good example from Jamais on how words frame analytical thought.

NewsDaily – Who got AIG’s bailout billions?

Primarily the Brits, French and Germans it turns out – the same folks who were loudly blaming the crisis on American capitalism in public had the weaker and more poorly managed financial systems, despite heavy state regulation, and were taking enormous handouts from U.S. taxpayers in private.

Scientific American – Building a Portrait of a Lie in the Brain

SEED – Adapting to a New Economy , A Hormone to Remember and Is MIT Obsolete?

WSJ – Philanthropy and Its Enemies  (Hat tip to Instapundit and Steve Schippert)

A united Hard Left and multiculturalist Race Hustling attempt at extortion and hijacking of private foundation endowments to advance political causes of the Left through a blandly named front group that is led by extremist antiglobalization activists like Christine Ahn and “social justice” organizers such as Judy Hatcher. Ironically, most of the major philanthropic foundations like Rockefeller, Ford and MacArthur are pretty liberal in their orientation and grant giving but in the perspective of these folks, “liberal” is another name for right-wing, capitalist, crypto-patriarchy. People like this are why David Horowitz never lacks for material.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Evan Williams on Twitter’s user-driven evolution…..

Humor, a take on an old optical illusion ( hat tip Dave of Thoughts Illustrated)

The Armed Forces Journal on the economic decline of America.

The author makes too many assumptions regarding China’s resiliency.  The opacity of China’s hybrid, mercantilist-driven, political economy makes estimates of it’s true strengths and weaknesses difficult. We know how many treasury bills China has bought from us but not the real extent of hidden debt, underemployment or inflation. China’s leadership did not vastly increase the size of it’s paramilitary forces in the past decade because they were confident that it would all be smooth sailing ahead.

ADDENDUM:

Chinese premier takes on politics 2.0

The Obama administration has been strikingly inept in the last few days in foreign policy, making a series of gaffes and counterproductive gestures that, had George W. Bush made them, would be igniting howls of anger and ridicule from the New York Times and the Left blogosphere. Now the crickets are chirping.

In a short span of time, the White House has managed to 1) embarrass visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown; 2) enrage Jerusalem by offering Gaza almost  $ 1 billion ( in return for….?) while HAMAS is still firing rockets at Israelis ;and 3) pull the rug out from under our NATO allies Poland and the Czech Republic with of a give-away-the-store offer to Moscow on missile defense, while pleading for help with Iran. A clumsy and premature gesture that President Medvedev treated with contempt and left Prague and Warsaw, which stuck their necks out in agreeing to host the missile systems, scrambling for diplomatic fig leaves. I wonder to what degree the Czechs and Poles had been consulted beforehand?  None of these actions appear to have been properly vetted and they left the new administration looking very green, slightly impulsive, indifferent toward America’s allies and fairly arrogant.

In fairness, almost every new administration makes first and second year blunders in foreign policy, most of which are completely forgettable in the long run. For example, as a student, an old professor of mine who was an eminent authority in Southeast Asian studies, once recounted to me LBJ giving ” the Johnson Treatment” to the King of Thailand, whose person is considered sacred to Thais and was, probably, in any event, unprepared for being put into a giant Texas bear hug.  Ronald Reagan did not give Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher prior notice of the invasion of Grenada and had initially waffled in the early days of the Falklands War. At other times, the early mistakes prove decisive, such as John F. Kennedy’s failure of nerve during the Bay of Pigs ( or alternatively, approving a cocked-up covert-op plan in the first place) which helped precipitate the later Cuban Missile Crisis.

The one bright spot in foreign policy was the unveiling of the Obama administration’s new National Security Council structure which seems to have been judiciciously considered with an eye toward improving interagency DIME integration in policy formation and enforcing real discipline in execution. On paper, it’s a very good plan with some important changes for improving the national security community’s performance.

Now they need to put it into practice.

This is good, once you get past the pedestrian observations about the economic crisis:

The New York Times had a major and significantly positive profile of former Speaker of the House Newt Gincrich the other day ( Hat tip to Nate). It’s worth reading. The NYT gets many things right about Gingrich and Gingrich nails many of the problems currently bedeviling the Republican Party:

Newt. Again.

 …..Now, as Republicans on the Hill begin to awaken from a November beating that left them semiconscious, Gingrich finds himself, once again, at the zenith of influence in conservative Washington. It is a fortuitous collision of man and moment. Having ceded the agenda to a Republican president for the past eight years (and having mostly obsessed over White House scandals for much of the decade before that), Republicans now find that they have strikingly little to say that isn’t entirely reactive – or reactionary. “It was like ‘The Matrix,’ when Keanu Reeves wakes up and his eyes hurt because he hasn’t used them,” David Winston, a pollster for House Republicans, told me recently, talking about the 2006 election that relegated Republicans to the minority for the first time since 1994. “We just didn’t know how to do ideas anymore.” Whatever else you think of Gingrich, he has always been considered a prospector in bold and counterintuitive thinking – floating ideas, throughout his career, that have ranged from giving every poor child a laptop to abolishing the entire concept of adolescence.

….Gingrich is all about offering, as he puts it, a “better value” for the American customer – constructive solutions Republicans can take on the road during the next midterm election season and beyond. “Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial,” he lamented to me. “They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.”

Newt is a horizontal thinker with a high level of expertise in a number of fields and a considerable degree of creativity. As a political figure, he does several important things exceptionally well:

• First Newt conceives of politics in strategic, structural, longitudinal, terms.
• Secondly, Newt is an idea merchant. He has them and he is quick to recognize the potential of ideas generated by others. Often, Newt’s capacity for horizontal thinking leads him to appropriate attractive concepts or proposals that are neither “conservative” or even “political” and make them conservative Republican signature policies.
• Third, Newt excels at crafting and framing tactical messages. He regularly comes up with phrases  that have strong memetic “pull” or “hooks” to them and distill the essential idea out of a complicated policy and he can use this ability to punish enemies or promote his own side. This is not the same thing as being a great tactician. Arguably, when Newt as Speaker had to juggle managing the House, formulating strategy and tactics, the latter consistently suffered to Newt’s personal disadvantage. Gingrich demonstrated better tactical skills as a Minority Leader and especially as a Whip but he had far fewer distractions at that time.
• Fourth, Newt cultivates leadership in others. He makes connections. He educates. He gives his assistance freely and promotes the careers of proteges and allies.

This is not to say Newt is without flaws. Politically, for the Democratic Party, Newt is a “target rich environment” whose unpredictability in the public spotlight can generate incidents that become the story rather than the message Newt was trying to get across. However, lacking any official position, it is much harder for Democrats to represent any gaffe by Newt as coming from the Pope of the GOP. In fact, engaging Newt directly in public debate at this time, especially by a senior member of the Democratic Party leadership or President Obama, will superempower Gingrich politically and increase his influence and profile regardless of what they say. The mere fact they are saying anything confirms Gingrich’s status as a major “player”. Nor can they ignore him forever if his advice permits the Republicans to score significant victories.

Gingrich has his opponents in a familiar bind and I’m sure he likes it that way.