Last Sunday, Andrew Krepinevich reviewed Cobra II for the Washington Post. His lead paragraphs are quite similar to the latest Time magazine piece about "Why Iraq Was a Mistake".

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made headlines last week by conceding that the Bush administration had made "tactical errors, thousands" in waging the war in Iraq. But, she argued, the administration pursued the right underlying strategy in toppling Saddam Hussein, and history's judgment will be based on whether "you make the right strategic decisions."

In their "inside story" of the war, Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor stand Rice's assertion on its head. They show that the US military's tactical brilliance during the war's early stages came despite the strategic miscalculations of senior civilian and military leaders -- and that the Bush team's misjudgments made the current situation in Iraq far worse than it need have been. As it turns out, in addition to the war with Iraq's tyrant, there was an ongoing war between US field commanders, their own senior commander (Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command) and civilian leaders in Washington.

About the book, Krepinevich concludes it's a bit like democracy -- it is flawed, but it's the best thing we've got so far. (You get an upfront sense of his take by his use of quotes on the term "inside story.")

Pointers to other recent MemeStreams coverage: an NPR story, and an NYT review.

Blundering to Baghdad

This is a review of "First In".

The success of jawbreaker offers lessons for US intelligence, but it would be hard to codify them with regulations or formal procedures. Rather, it requires officials who can balance competing goals.

For example, intelligence organizations need to reward initiative and innovation by individuals, but they also need to ensure that the organizations do not lapse into confusion. They need to turn over staff so the young, the eager, and the ambitious can find opportunities, but they must also avoid simply forcing good people out. Organizations need to be efficient, but they must also tolerate seemingly unproductive supporting activities that might provide big payoffs in the future.

In short, taking advantage of these lessons requires that hard-to-quantify trait called leadership — the ability to identify clear strategic goals, articulate a vision to the troops, and then make the day-to-day decisions to strike a balance between competing objectives. No set of rules and procedures can guarantee success, but one can craft rules that give officials the authority and the responsibility they need to strike this balance and then hold them accountable for their decisions.

Left to themselves, bureaucracies reward people who master the established process — that is, good bureaucrats. The challenge for intelligence organizations is to do the routine stuff while also stirring up the pot enough for innovators and risk-takers to have a chance to do their magic. This depends as much on leadership and imagination as it does on regulation and statute. Without them, there will be fewer Gary Schroens in service of their country, and the country will be poorer for it.

What they really need is jazz.

About this book, Warren Bass, a former member of the 9/11 Commission staff, wrote in the Washington Post in 2005:

The author is relatively laconic about battlefield blunders, but he is far less forgiving about what he sees as a massive strategic error: the Bush administration's shift of its focus to Iraq at the expense of the country he helped liberate from the Taliban. The only way to get bin Laden's head on that pike, Schroen warns, is to win full cooperation from Pakistan's balky military, beef up the CIA presence in the region, bring back the indispensable Special Operations units that had been pulled out "as early as March 2002" to prepare for the Iraq invasion, and launch a relentless, coordinated manhunt on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. This is deeply informed advice, ignored at American civilians' peril.

A Hero's Tale, Review by Bruce Berkowitz

We should work to bring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force rather than developing new, putatively more useable, nuclear weapons. At the very least we should continue U.S. adherence to the moratorium.

The urgency for such a commitment to deal with the nuclear threat — a danger with no precedent in human history — has been expressed powerfully and dramatically by Father Bryan Hehir, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, in his keynote address on “Ethical Considerations of Living in the Nuclear Age” at a Stanford University conference in 1987:

For millennia people believed that if anyone had the right to call the ultimate moment of truth, one must name that person God. Since the dawn of the nuclear age we have progressively acquired the capacity to call the ultimate moment of truth and we are not gods. But we must live with what we have created.

This is our challenge.

You might want to step back to Apocalypse Soon, especially if you missed it the first time around.

I couldn't find an online transcript of the 1997 speech quoted above, but I did find a talk from December 2005 which resonates in interesting ways with the John Rapley essay in the new Foreign Affairs.

The Shadow of the Bomb

Think America's debates about Social Security are troublesome for the future? Consider yourself lucky.

Over the next generation, it seems entirely likely — indeed, all but inevitable — that a large fraction of humanity, peopling countries within the grouping often termed emerging market economies, will find themselves coping with the phenomenon of population aging on income levels far lower than those yet witnessed in any society with comparable degrees of graying. For such countries, the social and economic consequences of aging could be harsh — and the options for mitigating the adverse effects of population aging may be fairly limited. In some of these countries, population aging could potentially emerge as a factor appreciably constraining long-term growth and development.

As we will detail in the next few pages, rapid and pronounced population aging represents a highly uneven, largely unappreciated, and as yet almost entirely undiscounted long-term risk for the world’s emerging markets.

Think about the fact that US prosperity is now substantially linked to Chinese investment. Project forward 30 years. Now put yourself in China's shoes: do you care for the elderly, and let America crash? Or do you let the state fail in order to prop up the US? Can you imagine the US pressuring China to block local expenditures for universal health care?

Did you read the Niall Ferguson piece?

Growing Old the Hard Way: China, Russia, India

Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the world's most popular assault rifle, says that U.S. soldiers in Iraq are using his invention in preference to their own weapons, proving that his gun is still the best.

"Even after lying in a swamp you can pick up this rifle, aim it and shoot. That's the best job description there is for a gun. Real soldiers know that and understand it," the 86-year-old gunmaker told a weekend news conference in Moscow.

Kalashnikov says Iraq shows his gun is still best

The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on user-centric identity and identity in the large. Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that don't necessarily have a formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization.

The goal of the Internet Identity Workshop is to support the continued development of several open efforts in the user-centric identity community. These include the following:

* Technical systems and proposal like Yadis (LID, OpenID, i-Names), SXIP, Identity metasystem, InfoCards, and the Higgins Project
* Legal and social movements and issues like Identity Commons, identity rights agreements, and service providers reputation.
* Use cases for emerging markets such as user generated video (e.g. dabble.com), innovative economic networks (e.g. interraproject.org), attention brokering and lead generation (e.g. root.net), consumer preferences (e.g. permission based marketing), and civil society networking

The workshop will take place May 2 and 3, 2006 at the Computer History Museum. We will also have a 1/2 day on the first of May for newbies who want to get oriented to the protocols and issues before diving into the community. If you are new to the discussion, we encourage your attendance on May 1st because of the open format we'll be using to organize the conference.

Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) 2006A

I suppose if I tied a naked Giselle Bundchen to the hood I could attract more attention, and of course I'm willing to try. But this car screams to be noticed.

Between pit stops, fly like the wind

"No one, and I repeat no one, is prepared for a pandemic that starts tomorrow."

"The famous line from emergency medical services is, we have trouble handling a Friday night. Handling a large pandemic, by most estimates, is out of the question."

"Even if there were enough beds — which there won't be — there won't be enough people. We have trouble getting enough nurses now."

"Will we close the schools? Will we shut down theaters? Will we shut down Disneyland? And what will that mean for the Orange County tax base? Those kinds of things need to be talked through ahead of time."

California Not Ready for a Flu Crisis

I AM BY nature and upbringing a pessimist. As a boy in Glasgow, I was encouraged to expect the worst, on the principle that by doing so you'll never be disappointed and sometimes you may even be pleasantly surprised.

This is not the American way. Optimism is in the DNA of the USA.

Nowhere is the sunny side sunnier than in Miami. I went there last week and was dazzled. The place is more than booming.

Yet, if history is any guide, our present golden age of globalization is unlikely to endure. It could be ended by a geopolitical crisis. Or it could be ended by a gradual domestic backlash.

Should Americans — and especially Miamians — be less optimistic? Conventional wisdom has it that they should. Economists want them to save more. Environmentalists want them to consume less.

Well, be careful what you wish for.

Don't forget about everyone else.

The sunshine state | Niall Ferguson

The way to avoid tragedy is to think tragically.

Haunted by Hussein, humbled by events