Posts tagged “geopolitics”

My friend Laurie cuts through the Russia-Georgia conflict with brutal efficiency: war with Russia never ends well, nobody has two decades to waste, and clearly we should all just gang up on China instead.

Terrorism operates like a successful web startup: distributed, peer-to-peer, networked, and exploiting the long tail of countless small attacks rather than one decisive blow. Al-Qaeda is to conventional warfare what Amazon is to retail. I wish this analogy weren't so compelling.

I break down the Iraqi insurgency into three groups: local power-grabbers, Iranian-backed destabilizers, and largely mythical al-Qaeda fighters. The real danger is Iran exploiting instability to seize territory and oil influence. Withdrawal ultimately hurts Western interests more than staying hurts Iraqis.

Don't tell me we're "winning by numbers" in Iraq. With 25 million Iraqis, if even 1% want to fight us, that's 100,000 insurgents. We're killing 20 at a time. Do the math. Numbers are precisely the argument you don't want to make here.

I debate Ben about Iraq: the war was the right thing to do even if Bush's motives were self-serving. The UN is toothless, European opposition was self-interested, and Iraqis couldn't free themselves. I'd love a world government, but until then, at least our empire isn't genocidal.

We're going to win in Iraq -- everyone says so. But guerrilla warfare could stretch the conflict, eroding public support until we're forced to withdraw. A victorious Saddam would destabilize the entire Middle East. None of this was at stake before we invaded. Now we have no choice but to win.

I attended Davos and got rare full access. The mood was grim: global economic collapse feared, anti-American sentiment intense, Al Qaeda largely dismantled but franchised, and Iraq war universally dreaded. The world's 5,000 rulers are smart, naive, arrogant, and very, very worried.