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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Thomas Barnett On Iraq

Thomas Barnett On Iraq

by Tim F|  October 13, 200710:04 pm| 15 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, War

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If you don’t know about it, the annual TED talks program has a vaguely creepy Ayn Rand/Mensa club-of-supergeniuses vibe to it, but I have to admit that the eclectic speakers list includes some truly excellent talks. For example, this 2005 presentation by military strategist Thomas Barnett covers the same ground that us blogs have hashed over for years, yet somehow he packs in three four major ideas that hadn’t occurred to me before, or at least not as clearly. And it’s funny. Give it a listen and see whether you agree.

Also – Al Gore speaking in 2006. Guess the topic!

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15Comments

  1. 1.

    Chris Johnson

    October 13, 2007 at 10:56 pm

    Holy CRAP, that guy’s good.

    I knew there were guys like this out there. It’s just that OMG TURRISTS has been considered more of a vote-winning strategy. Now that that shit is over, can we start doing what Barnett is talking about?

  2. 2.

    Ted

    October 13, 2007 at 11:34 pm

    vaguely creepy Ayn Rand/Mensa club-of-supergeniuses vibe

    Umm, those two things have nothing to do with each other.

    Ayn Rand, and geniuses, I mean.

  3. 3.

    Chris Johnson

    October 13, 2007 at 11:47 pm

    True dat. Actually it seems like TED isn’t anything like either…

    Rand: all about celebrating total dominance and beatdown in all forms
    Mensa: all about personal intellectual dominance with no other agenda
    TED: all about the ULTIMATE IDEAS FROM EVERYWHERE, apparently.

    It doesn’t always impress, but hearing Barnett- damn. I also watched the guy who boiled down a talk on ‘success’ into three minutes, but that was way more infomercial.

    The amazing thing about the TED thing is not that they are way smarter than you- not all those guys are smarter than me anyhow, I make my living trying to be smarter than all other audio ‘plug-in’ designers- it’s that they are not talking down. It’s a commercialized version of one of those superpower summits where people sit down and thrash out what’s REALLY happening, forget the sound bites.

    We can’t even get OUR CONGRESS to deal on that level anymore, it’s nice to see it happening somewhere. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary for adults to get together and make no concessions to the Cliff’s Notes crowd.

    Maybe that’s it. What with the demand and the incredibly high bar to clear if you want to be there much less be a presenter, there ARE no Cliff’s Notes people there to be slowed down for. No ‘gentleman’s C’s. No Dubyas. It’s not a crowd of angels- I notice Bill Gates was apparently in there- but they’re all capable of seeing the big picture.

    I’m going to go check out Gore’s presentation, which I’m guessing is about global warming.

  4. 4.

    sglover

    October 14, 2007 at 12:05 am

    The folks who run this site lately have been falling all over themselves with mea culpas over their previous infatuation with Bush, the current GOP, and so on. I suggest they save themselves future embarrassment and take a very, very hard second look at Barnett’s jargonized magic thinking. The guy’s built his entire career around wrapping vacuous or nonsensical “insights” in layers of obscurantist verbiage.

    Good critiques and examples of Barnett’s snake-oil nostrums are here and here and here. A good insight into Barnett’s snake-oil character is in this comment thread. Barnett is the used-car dealer of the military-industrial-“security” complex. Don’t be taken in!

  5. 5.

    The Other Steve

    October 14, 2007 at 3:07 am

    I didn’t like his starting point. That being “We need to invade countries and rebuild them.” If you reject that initial assumption, nothing he says makes any sense.

    Here’s the thing. We did what he is suggesting in WWII. Why? Because it was important.

    We committed a HUGE force to fighting the war. We utterly and totally destroyed the enemy. Then, the military leadership went over and talked to the state department leadership, decided what they were going to do moving forward. And they retained the experienced, mature soldiers who could help with reconstruction… and let everyone else go home.

    It was a winning scenario, in large part because… We had to do it.

    Where we get into problems, and where we shall always get into problems is through wars of choice. Wars where we don’t really have to commit, but gosh darn, it’d sure be nice if that guy was gone so we could get Copper ore cheaply. And the whole model falls apart, because it won’t be properly funded. Doesn’t matter if you have a commitment up front, nobody is going to give a damn.

  6. 6.

    Chris Johnson

    October 14, 2007 at 5:04 am

    I don’t agree unless you’re pulling up stuff that really contradicts what he said. The points I was impressed by were his insistence that you had to separate the killers from the builders. That’s a huge insight and he’s laying it out with amazing thought and thoroughness. It appears that he’s been evolving his views as he writes successive books- the very first link you cite, sglover, is a POSITIVE review. The third link, the Yorkshire Ranter, is right the first time- that the armored tank-vehicles running over Iraqis is the opposite of Barnett’s ‘SysAdmin’ idea.

    I think it’s a stupid name, but that doesn’t matter.

    Other Steve is right. We did what Barnett is talking about in WWII. Our WHOLE ARMY was more SysAdmin-like in WWII. They believed all that talk about Four Freedoms. We don’t have people like that, we have the post-GenX-generation out there, and it turns out they’re good at taking orders and suggestions and running with them. They’re damn good Marines, it’s quite reasonable to hate and fear them, and it’s REALLY hard to beat them in a fight.

    They need to go away now so the adults, if we have any left, can try to make sense of the wreckage.

    I believe Barnett is simply being pragmatic- he’s relatively free of bluster like you get from a Dubya. I don’t see him as a guy who poses in flightsuits. I see him as very similar to some military guys I know (including a Navy Commander, believe it or not): his JOB is to go and kick ass and stop when he’s told to stop, the Heinlein notion of ‘diplomacy continued by force’ and in his way he has one foot in the ‘Leviathan’ and one foot in the ‘SysAdmin’ camps. He considers it inevitable that there will be further situations where, somewhere in the world, things go SO WRONG that an organization or government will have to be smashed.

    After WWII I would tend to agree- after Iraq I’d say that we ourselves are the best example of the necessity for such a capability. It’s just that we have gravely undercut any justification for such a force by horribly abusing that position. If that ‘SysAdmin’ thing was a reality, MAYBE it would be less of a disaster.

    It’s not Barnett’s job to question the larger justifiability of us having that power at all. Possibly anyone with that much power would abuse it. But I like very much the clarity with which he sees the situation. I’ve hung around leftie sites for a long time, but it took Barnett to report that the last man to fire a shot in air combat is a general now??? That’s crazy, and he seemed to have no hesitation in reporting it.

    I call that somebody who’s trying to work from a basis of reality, even if he does assume without question that WE need to be the ‘Leviathan’. Of course, that’s an accurate perception. Ask Iraq.

  7. 7.

    Media Glutton

    October 14, 2007 at 5:43 am

    I watched the Al Gore vid — thanks Tim! — and I’ve got to give a big shot out to those environmentalists who wrote op-eds and actively supported Nader in 2000. And I just want to say a big “F-U” to each and every single one of you. Good night, everybody!

  8. 8.

    ThymeZone

    October 14, 2007 at 10:26 am

    OMG, that Barnett guy is great. Most entertaining 23 mins I’ve spent on the tubes in a long time.

    I didn’t like his starting point. That being “We need to invade countries and rebuild them.”

    Well, he isn’t about foreign policy. So I think he’d go along with “If you need to invade a country, don’t do it unless you know how to rebuild it.” What he called the “Powell Doctrine.”

    It’s so obvious, it hurts, and one has to wonder, how did those potatoheads in charge of the US the last few years miss it?

  9. 9.

    John Cole

    October 14, 2007 at 11:28 am

    The folks who run this site lately have been falling all over themselves with mea culpas over their previous infatuation with Bush, the current GOP, and so on.

    Folk, singular. Not folks. I forget who Tim voted for, but it was not Bush.

    I am the only moron here who voted for him. Twice.

  10. 10.

    Tim F.

    October 14, 2007 at 11:47 am

    I forget who Tim voted for, but it was not Bush.

    I stopped voting for Republicans when they nominated Bush. As far as I was concerned a party that shows that kind of judgment doesn’t deserve my vote.

  11. 11.

    The Other Steve

    October 14, 2007 at 1:34 pm

    It’s not Barnett’s job to question the larger justifiability of us having that power at all. Possibly anyone with that much power would abuse it. But I like very much the clarity with which he sees the situation. I’ve hung around leftie sites for a long time, but it took Barnett to report that the last man to fire a shot in air combat is a general now??? That’s crazy, and he seemed to have no hesitation in reporting it.

    I call that somebody who’s trying to work from a basis of reality, even if he does assume without question that WE need to be the ‘Leviathan’. Of course, that’s an accurate perception. Ask Iraq.

    Ok, I’ll grant you that he’s just studying what he is studying, and is leaving the police issues out.

    As for Iraq. They said the same thing about the Soviet Union, that we needed to invade and remove their government.

    But reality is, that eventually things collapse of their own ineptitude and it’s a lot less costly to everyone involved if we contain and wait, than to go in and smash up the place.

  12. 12.

    Chuck Butcher

    October 14, 2007 at 4:34 pm

    Sometimes things need to be smashed. If that is true (I’m not arguing against the idea that most don’t) then it is necessary to prepare for post smashing. The military as organized and the State Dept as organized are not any good at it. State really should keep us from smashing, Dept of War do the smashing, that leaves room for something else. I am very uncomfortable with the idea of putting fixing under control of specialists in smashing and fixing is pretty damn dangerous for State.

    It really probably could be done without another Dept, but the turf wars common in any big organization would be a problem. I can argue with a lot of Barnett’s POV, but he’s got a lot going for him also. Snake oil? That’s a bit strong.

  13. 13.

    maxbaer (not the original)

    October 14, 2007 at 9:11 pm

    Thanks for the enjoyable videos. Mr. Barnett is a good salesman, but his product sounds like Neoconservativism 2.0. Politically it may be hard to put it to the test for some time to come anyway. We’re stuck to the Iraq tarbaby now and Afghanistan is no glowing success. I wish Al Gore had shown this side of him during the 2000 campaign. Hell, I’d love to have a beer with him.

  14. 14.

    sglover

    October 15, 2007 at 12:21 am

    Here is Barnett in 2005, when he was still lauding the magic of Bush’s “strategy” in Iraq. Blessed with his pitch-man’s ear, clever Tom was calling it the “Big Bang”. Tom Friedman couldn’t put it any cuter! Savor:

    Yes, Americans still die, but in side-light situations. We’re not the main focus any more. As it should be, the Big Bang gets expressed primarily as a civil war.

    Sadly, for all his self-professed genius, it seems that poor Tom was working at right angles to reality. The Big Bang’s luster has dimmed quite a bit since then. But no matter — Barnett knows when it’s time to discreetly edge away from a failed brand, and he’s more than happy to do it.

    So don’t make the mistake of believing that Barnett’s “matured” or “learned” anything. Like so many Iraq war cheerleaders, he’s trying to minimize his own part in urging it on. If he’s got any concerns about the end results of his own war enthusiasm, they’re about his speaking fees. Empires have always had courtiers like Barnett, spinning sophistries to put the latest organized theft on a more exalted plane. “Leviathan” and “SysAdmin” were always just exceptionally ugly shorthand for, first we smash, then we grab.

  15. 15.

    Michael

    October 26, 2007 at 7:31 pm

    “So we keep Special Operations Command hot on the heels of al Qaeda, but we talk to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq.”

    This is a quote from your last post, SG. 3 years later, the Sunnis have turned against Al-Qaeda, the Shiites are fighting each other, and the Iraqi government is working with the Kurdish authorities to deal with their problems with Turkey. Sounds to me like a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t about us, all right. His prediction haven’t come true on Syria yet, but I haven’t seen any signs yet that it’s impossible. Chris seemed to sum up your previous set of links fairly well, except that that discussion thread seemed to consist mostly of you and some other guys talking about how much you hate Barnett.

    Hate to tell you this, but you’re not doing too well in convincing the rest of us to share your feelings.

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