December 16, 2006
It's just not a straight line world
POST: From Globalization to Localization, By Stephen S. Roach, December 14, 2006
Good piece by Roach. I do think we're in a generalized period of "caboose breaking" on globalization for a number of reasons:

1) We've just gone through a period of rapid expansion of the global economy and any expansion (esp. that big) begets some pullback and--here--political "profit-taking" of the Lou Dobbs sort.

2) the global economy is growing very nicely and very broadly, so many leaders will hold back on big global agreements, prefering localism and regionalism in the meantime (easier to achieve, and a collective form of caboose braking against the dangers of "them"--outsiders). We'll see this in Europe in spades. Typically, you get the big, risk-taking global deals when the economy is slow, and politicians are desperate to restart growth. But only the ignorant position regionalism as the binary alternative to global accords, when they're historically necessay stepping stones--as in, first you crawl and then...

3) Rural unrest in New Core pillars (where I first encountered the dynamics that led to my caboose braking notion) will add to some of this slow-down as well. That's both natural and good.

4) The mood in the world's largest economy is one of withdrawal from the world, due first and foremost to Iraq, so that encourages slowness on globalization too.

But it's wrong to read a slowdown and localization as the "demise" of globalization (or the much-feared ideology of "globalism"), because that's like saying a recession should push you to rejects markets and capitalism. Sure, some of the more frightened and politically-opportunistic will certainly go down that path. They always do, but market optimism always returns, as do competitive pressures.

What's different today about globalization (which, after all, is just a fancy name for global markets) is that companies within national economies all end up feeling like they have to scour the world to access cheap labor, raw materials, intellectual talent/property, production capacity and R&D.

And that won't change with a slowing of globalization sentiments in some markets. It'll just be delayed.

Beware of fantastic standards being imposed--as in, "globalization must sweep the planet in a few short years, binding all the world's peoples in everlasting peace, or it's doomed!"

That sort of bullshit got you socialism and fascism in the past and now the global jihadist movement, and it'll beget even dumber, more fantasically impatient ideologies in the future.

Meanwhile, global markets and the resulting integration will continue to win out over the long haul. But no, almost none of this stuff happens without some violence (that's why I called it the Pentagon's new map) and predictions based on, or their opposing straw-man arguments requiring, linear projections always prove false.

It's just not a straight line world.

THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING

Gingrich: GOP needs new kind of campaign
By Beverley Wang, Associated Press Writer | December 15, 2006

MANCHESTER, N.H. --Even Republicans are impressed with the reception of Democratic superstar Barack Obama.

Speaking Friday night in Manchester to a ballroom full of Republicans, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said, "I do think every Republican ought to look at the reception Barack Obama got a week ago."

Gingrich, who like Obama, is weighing a presidential run in 2008, said, "the interest in him tells you something about Americans more than it tells you about him."

Visiting New Hampshire for the first time on Sunday, Obama, an Illinois senator, acknowledged he's become a symbol of the change Americans want in government.

Gingrich, echoing comments from state Republican Chairman Wayne Semprini before him, urged state Republicans to consider a new kind of campaign in 2007-2008.

Americans, he told about 100 people attending the Manchester Republican City Committee dinner-dance, are tired of negative attack ads. He said state Republicans should invite Democrats to their candidate forums, too.

Voters would be able to compare candidates side by side more frequently, and candidates would have a chance for more genuine dialogue, "for the purpose of discussing solutions for America," he said.

"If the Republican and Democratic parties in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina would agree to do a series of bipartisan events in 2007, we could create a year of solutions and dialogue," Gingrich said.

When speaking about Iraq, people should understand that "Iraq is a campaign in the real world," Gingrich said. "If this larger war didn't exist, I would say we should leave Iraq this weekend.

"When I look at Iraq, I see Iran. I see Afghanistan. I see Hamas. I see Hezbollah. What's the totality of the war we're dealing with? The answer is not to abandon Iraq."

Americans must maintain a strong presence in Iraq because "when our enemies think we are weak, it gets dangerous everywhere very fast," Gingrich said.

Gingrich is critical of the Iraq Study Group, comparing its findings -- and efforts to use them as an exit strategy from Iraq -- to World War II-era "efforts to appease Nazi Germany" according a posting this week on his Web site, http://www.newt.org.

He opposes reaching out to Iran for help with Iraq. However, "if Bush's promised change of direction isolates Iraq as the only world danger and if he offers only more of the same in fighting that conflict, then Gingrich believes America might as well pull out its troops and quit," according to the same posting.

Gingrich helped Republicans sweep to power in Congress in 1994 with his "Contract with America" which called for a rolling back of federal programs and waste. Yet he proposes a social overhaul in Iraq along the lines of a hybrid New Deal/Marshall Plan to boost safety and stability, according to his Web site. Flood the region with goods and provide resources to create jobs and infrastructure, and Iraqis will be standing on their own feet, he believes.

Potential GOP rivals Rudy Giuliani, Sens. John McCain and Sam Brownback already have formed presidential exploratory committees and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who leaves office Jan. 4., is widely expected to announce his candidacy. Gingrich, meanwhile, has said he won't decide whether to run until September. But he's following the prospective candidate playbook, speaking out on Iraq, courting New Hampshire -- home of the nation's first presidential primary contest -- and making appearances on national news programs. He last visited New Hampshire on Nov. 28.

------

On the Net:

Newt Gingrich: http://www.newt.org

December 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
This Age of Anxiety

By DAVID BROOKS
The Sidney Awards, named for Sidney Hook, are a nice way to honor the best magazine essays of the year and to pass along a few nutritious holiday reading recommendations. But if you spend a few weeks poring over the highlights from a year’s worth of magazines, you also get a window on the spirit of the times.

And 2006, let it be said, felt to many like the year of losing ground. There was a general sense that the forces of moderation in the Middle East were losing ground to the forces of radical Shiism. (The folks at Time are crazy if they don’t name Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad and Sadr People of the Year.)

There was also a sense that we were losing ground in Iraq. One of the best magazine writers on that story, George Packer of The New Yorker, tended to profile American dissidents who were trying to change the way we fight that war.

In an April essay, “The Lesson of Tal Afar,” Packer followed Col. H. R. McMaster, who argued that the Iraq war was as much a psychological and anthropological problem as a military and political one. Then, in December, his “Knowing the Enemy” appeared, about freethinkers in the Pentagon and elsewhere who were studying how Hezbollah and the Iraqi insurgents create narratives that demoralize their enemies, energize believers and create a sense of historical momentum.

One gets the feeling from his articles that America’s enemies are playing a different game. They’re waging an open-source campaign for cultural symbols, while we’re oblivious to anything we can’t drive over or kill.

The next great source of anxiety in 2006 was economic. The most influential article on this subject was Alan Blinder’s essay “Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution” in Foreign Affairs. Blinder undermined many moderate Democrats’ faith in free trade by arguing the negative effects of globalization will be much broader than previously thought. It’s not just the unskilled who will lose jobs, but also people who provide “impersonal services” that can be delivered over the Internet: radiologists, accountants, even college professors.

Two or three times more Americans work at these sorts of jobs, Blinder observed, than work at manufacturing jobs.

Then there was a series of articles propelled by parental anxiety. In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan wrote “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica,” a sharp look at the way fellatio is supposedly becoming a casual element in teenage friendships.

“I’m not, however, terrified by the oral-sex craze,” Flanagan wrote. “If I were to learn that my children had engaged in oral sex — outside a romantic relationship, and as young adolescents — I would be sad. But I wouldn’t think that they had been damaged by the experience; I wouldn’t think I had failed catastrophically as a mother, or that they would need therapy. Because I don’t have daughters, I have sons.”

Political writers offered policy prescriptions to parents who were falling behind. Karen Kornbluh wrote “Families Valued,” in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, on ways Democrats could make life easier for busy “juggler families.” Yuval Levin had a parallel essay called “Putting Parents First” in The Weekly Standard, urging Republicans to face up to the tensions between free market dynamism and healthy family stability.

Finally, there was the sense the forces of decency were losing ground to primordial ugliness, especially anti-Semitism. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote a fevered essay on the power of the Israel Lobby, which cleared ground for a million anti-Semitic rants. Jimmy Carter has just published a book intended to make Israelis look like racists.

I’m not sure the classic essay on this latest recrudescence has been written, but Anne Applebaum had a useful piece in Slate called “Holocaust Denial Is No Joke,” and Adam Garfinkle has a comprehensive look at “The Madness of Jewcentricity” in The American Interest.

It all adds up to quite a gloomy — though well-crafted — collection of essays, culminating in a National Journal piece by Paul Starobin called “Beyond Hegemony” on life in an age of declining American power.

I have to say, I’m as pessimistic about the Middle East as the next guy, but most of this broader existential gloom about America is absurd. The U.S. is in extraordinarily strong shape economically and socially. And whatever their short-term strengths, the Sadrs of the world simply do not have a social model that large numbers of people will want to live under.

Buck up, but stay informed.

From Booklist
The impetus for this memoir is the military hearing U.S. marine Pantano underwent in 2004 for the alleged murders of two Iraqi insurgents during a raid in Al Anbar (chronicled in a New York magazine cover story and featured on NBC Dateline). What is initially fascinating about Pantano's story is how 9/11 galvanized him. His first reaction after seeing the smoke and debris choking streets in Manhattan was to run to his barber and get a military haircut. Pantano had been a marine in Desert Storm but then morphed into a commodities trader and the founder of an interactive TV think tank. The core of his book is how 9/11 re-upped the semper-fi side of his identity. Although there is far too much initial background on family and upbringing, the heart of the book, which shuttles from Pantano's experiences in Iraq and the Article 32 hearing into the accusation that he committed premeditated murder, is suspenseful and involving. Pantano provides firsthand accounts not only of the marine ethos and the fighting in Iraq but also of the media pile-on during his hearing and the machinations of military lawyers. Although choosing to tell his story in book form necessitates too much padding--this might have been better as a lengthy magazine article--there is still lots to like here: good courtroom drama, excellent war reporting, and absorbing psychology. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Pantano's story is a tough, gritty, no-holds-barred saga of war by one who knows what it's like to be caught in a crossfire."
-- Oliver L. North Host of War Stories on Fox News Channel

"Demonstrate to the world there is 'No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy' than a U.S. Marine."

-- J. N. Mattis, Major General, U.S. Marines Commanding General's Message to All Hands, March 2003

"Every tenth page of Warlord should be stamped 'this is not a work of fiction.' Some men run from a fight, some hold their own; Ilario is the rare hero that runs to a fight. He is one tough mother!"

-- James Carville New York Times bestselling author, political strategist, and former U.S. Marine

November, 2001 edition - "JIHAD: The radical Islamic threat to America"

America is at war, but who is the enemy - the REAL enemy?

Like the patient who has just learned his body is riddled throughout with cancer, most Americans have just discovered that while they were living their busy lives, concerned with family and work -- a cancer has been growing and metastasizing in their midst.

The fear of further and deadlier attacks, coupled with disturbing reports of terror co-conspirators in the United States just waiting for orders to strike, has understandably caused America - the ultimate land of religious tolerance - to scrutinize closely, for the first time, all things Islamic.

Yet, Islam, which claims 1.2 billion adherents worldwide - and 3 to 7 million in the U.S. -- is largely unknown and mysterious to most Westerners.

"Islam is a religion of peace," Americans are constantly reassured, the terrorists supposedly comprising only a deadly lunatic fringe of a few hundred or even a few thousand who have "hijacked" Islam to philosophically justify their murderous hatred of the West.

Not so. While President Bush in his historic Sept. 20 speech "dismissed al-Qaida's version of Islam as a repudiated 'fringe form of Islamic extremism,'" explains Mideast expert Daniel Pipes, "Muslims on the streets of many places . are fervently rallying to the defense of al-Qaida's vision of Islam."

Although there are a great many law-abiding and peaceful practitioners of Islam in the U.S. and around the world, a dangerous and powerful strain of Islam, often called Islamism, is one of the fastest-growing movements in the world today. Like Communism and Nazism, Islamism is a brutal, coercive utopian movement - a politicized and virulent interpretation and implementation of Islam -- bent on nothing less than total world domination.

In fact, best estimates are that 10-15 percent of Muslims worldwide are of the militant Islamist strain. That means well over 100 million human beings are, to a greater or lesser degree, caught up with what amounts to the world's most dangerous cult.

The November issue of "Whistleblower" takes on Islamic terrorism, as well as the worldwide, militant totalitarian movement that spawns, fuels and, increasingly, enshrines terrorists like Osama bin Laden.

A partial listing of this special double issue's contents:

* "The war comes home: What you don't know about radical Islam can hurt you," by Joseph Farah, guides the reader through the minefield of misinformation and outright disinformation circulating about Islam.

* "Islam: From toleration to terror," by Paul Marshall, documents the horrific, modern-day epidemic of Christian persecution throughout much of the Islamic world, even in supposedly "moderate" nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

* "The secret world of suicide bombers," by Jack Kelley, takes readers on a rare, behind-the-scenes tour of the secretive and terrifying world of suicide bombers and the culture that creates them.

* "Bin Laden's lust for Saudi Arabia," by David Kupelian, shows how Osama bin Laden's sights are set on taking over Saudi Arabia - including its oil and its modern military.

* "What about Arafat?" by Joseph Farah, documents the Nobel Prize-winning Yasser Arafat's true distinction as nothing less than the father of modern terrorism.

* "America: Haven for terrorists," by renowned terror expert Steven Emerson, provides chilling and overwhelming evidence that America's ultra-lax immigration policies have allowed large numbers of known dangerous radicals to set up shop in the U.S.A.

* "America's militant Islamic lobby," by Daniel Pipes, is an extremely disturbing look at the hidden, radical loyalties of some of America's so-called "mainstream" Muslim organizations.

Plus, a 2-page world map depicting the growth and spread of Islam, and much more, including "The historic spread of Islam," "Is raising 'martyrs' child abuse?" "Silencing Muslim moderates," and finally - by WND editor and founder Joseph Farah -- "How to win this war."

For a 12-month subscription to Whistleblower, click here.

Related Items
BIN LADEN - The Man Who Declared War on America (book) - $17.95
Terrorism Factbook (book) - $11.99