Offshoot of tribalism concept in joe's long thread:

read it through once. digesting. I must be missing something because I'm not hearing a new way of looking at the world other than defining the Third World as the Gap.

bookmark.

The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years. The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.

If you take this message from Osama and combine it with our military-intervention record of the last decade, a simple security rule set emerges: A country's potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity. There is a good reason why Al Qaeda was based first in Sudan and then later in Afghanistan: These are two of the most disconnected countries in the world. Look at the other places U.S. Special Operations Forces have recently zeroed in on: northwestern Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. We are talking about the ends of the earth as far as globalization is concerned.

But it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it, and we are the only country that can. Freedom cannot blossom in the Middle East without security, and security is this country's most influential public-sector export. By that I do not mean arms exports, but basically the attention paid by our military forces to any region's potential for mass violence. We are the only nation on earth capable of exporting security in a sustained fashion, and we have a very good track record of doing it.

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

There's a lot here, so I'll pick and choose a few quotations for comment.

Thomas Barnett wrote:

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

A classic correlation-causation fallacy (in this case, a cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy). Barnett looks at a map and says "wherever the US is, there also is peace;" hence he concludes that the US presence causes the peace. To put it mildly, the causal link that Barnett assumes is largely unproven.

Senior Strategic Researcher in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College. Currently, Thomas is on temporary assignment as the Assistant for Strategic Futures, Office of Force Transformation (OFT), Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he is working with OFT Director Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski (USN, ret.) on a cluster of strategic concepts that link change in the international security environment to the imperative of transforming U.S. military capabilities to meet future threats.

Consider this compelling analogy from Barnett: I believe that history will judge the 1990s much like the Roaring Twenties -- just a little too good to be true. Both decades threw the major rule sets out of whack: new forms of behavior, activity, and connectivity arose among individuals, companies, and countries, but the rule sets that normally guide such interactions were overwhelmed. These traditional rule sets simply could not keep up with all that change happening so quickly . . . Eventually the situation spins out of control and nobody really knows what to do. Economic crashes effectively marked the end of both tumultuous decades, followed by the rise of seemingly new sorts of security threats to the international order. In the 1930s, it was fascism and Nazi Germany, while today most security experts will tell you it is radical Islam and transnational terrorism. In both instances, the community of states committed to maintaining global order was deeply torn over what to do about these new security threats -- try to accommodate them or fight them head-on in war? . . . My shorthand for rule-set divergence in the 1990s is roughly the same one I would offer for the 1920s: economics got ahead of politics and technology got ahead of security . . . We didn't construct sufficient political and security rule sets to keep pace with all this growing connectivity. In some ways, we got lazy, counted a little too much on the market to sort it all out, and then woke up shocked and amazed on 9/11 to find ourselves apparently invited to a global war."

He argues that the Cold War strategy of "containment" no longer applies. We cannot simply contain the Gap, we must shrink it. And the U.S., as the only remaining superpower and the only nation with a truly transnational military, must lead the way in shrinking the Gap.

Barnet believes the U.S. has a moral responsibility to provide a "security export" to the rest of the world and to spend its time NOT just envisioning ways to mitigate disaster and global conflict, but to envisioning a "future worth creating." "There is no denying that problems in the Gap reflect a tremendous legacy of past abuse and unfairness on the part of the Core in general," he argues, "but shrinking the Gap as a strategic vision is not about making amends for the past. Instead, it is a practical strategy for dealing with the present danger that will -- on regular occasion, I believe -- reach into our good life and cause us much pain if we continue to ignore it. But more than just looking out for ourselves, shrinking the Gap is a strategy that also speaks to a better future for the roughly one-third of humanity that continues to live and die in the Gap."

Regardless of your political and religious persuasion, regardless of your support or opposition of the current Administration, you cannot secede from this debate. The decision cannot be made by default or by a political process that does not include the collective voice of our citizens. Barnett appears to be the only person telling us the full truth about this engagement and its cost: " . . . we are never leaving the Gap and we are never 'bringing our boys home.' There is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking the Gap, and if there is no exiting the Gap, then we'd better stop kidding ourselves about 'exit strategies.' No exit means no exit strategy."

Whether you can reluctantly accept this result as inevitable, or it frightens you to the core, there is no denying that we, as a nation, cannot shrink the Gap and care for our own citizens in any reasonable way IN THE FACE OF continued tax cuts and deficit spending. We must wake up, consider the challenges ahead of us, force our leaders to address these challenges and our options in more substantive and coherent forums than those allowed in an election year, and make our voices heard.