An "Oh Sh*T" Moment or Three!

I was moved to title this post with an asterisk censored exclamation borrowed from the title of a recent post by Niall Ferguson, Author and Professor of History at Harvard University. Ferguson pulls no punches in a hard hitting essay that traces the decline of civilizations to a sudden drop off a cliff than a slow gradual decline over centuries. He explains the decline in these terms.

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

If you don’t know what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.

Note these examples of how the great civilizations of the past ended their running with the bulls.

The Roman Empire didn’t decline and fall sedately, as historians used to claim. It collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders and internal divisions...

The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East imploded this year....Here yesterday, gone today.

Ferguson lists five institutional innovations that he dubs "killer applications" that allowed the West to surge ahead of all of the Rest, beginning in 1500.

Western Civilization's Killer Apps

COMPETITION Western societies divided into competing factions, leading to progressive improvements.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology.

THE RULE OF LAW Representative government based on private-property rights and democratic elections.

MODERN MEDICINE 19th- and 20th-century advances in germ theory, antibiotics, and anesthesia.

THE CONSUMER SOCIETY Leaps in productivity combined with widespread demand for more, better, and cheaper goods.

THE WORK ETHIC Combination of intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation. 

Ferguson presents troubling statistics to back up his view that we are hurtling like the train above, towards that cliff, and our own "Oh ShiT! moment. He then turns to describe what can be done to "reboot the system" and do, what he says Americans have always done;  kick start our instinctive loyalty to those "killer applications" of Western ascendancy.

Read More: America's Oh Sh*T Moment

Now if you want a couple of more possible "Oh Sh*T" moments to wake up too; try these possible scenarios. IAEA says foreign expertise has brought Iran to threshold of nuclear capability

And Israel's possible response. Will Israel attack Iran's nuclear capabilities?

Finally, for a real slide down a mile long razor blade into a pool of alcohol is this story from The Atlantic. Read about how Pakistan moves their nukes and our plans for keeping them from ending up in the wrong hands.

Pakistan lies. It hosted Osama bin Laden (knowingly or not). Its government is barely functional. It hates the democracy next door. It is home to both radical jihadists and a large and growing nuclear arsenal (which it fears the U.S. will seize). Its intelligence service sponsors terrorists who attack American troops. With a friend like this, who needs enemies?

The Ally from Hell!

Tdaxp Reports Fellow Blogger is On Fire!

Thomas Barnett's keyboard

Thomas P. M Barnett

The essential and astute observer Dan of tdaxp.com gets a major hat tip for calling attention to how much attention Thomas Barnett is paying to the events in Iran. Barnett recently returned from Shanghai, where he spent a week meeting with China's top foreign affairs academics.

Dan's post list the 19 posts Barnett has written about Iran since June 24. This represents over 40% of the total posts during this time. If the reader goes back the previous week more insightful posts appear shadowing this developing story. Dan points out that Twitter was given a lot of credit for exposing what was going on, but true analysis can not be done in 140 characters.

Read more:

Tom is on Fire with Iran posts

Tom Barnett continued his analysis today with this post. Neither 'Islamic' nor a 'republic'

I might add that Barnett has an uncanny ability to not only write excellent thought provoking columns about Iran, but can add commentary to news reports that many times carry more insight than the original piece.

Neda! Iran's Boston Massacre?

One of the events that stirred the passions of colonial Americans was an event called the Boston Massacre in 1770, when British troops fired on a group rioting after a confrontation over an unpaid bill by a British soldier. The incident and the aftermath, contributed to the American Revolution. One of the ways that the incident was kept in the public eye was an engraving made by Paul Revere which became a visual rallying cry across the colonies.

Yesterday, I linked a video of the death of a young Iranian women who the world has come to know as Neda. The result of the 40 second hard to watch and even harder to listen too video has spread across the social and mainstream media like wild fire. 17 related articles »

Atlantic online has confirmed her death in this post Confirming The Basij Murder Of Neda

President Obama has spoken out forcefully regarding the deaths as reported in the New York Times article, Tehran Tense After Clashes That Killed at Least 13.

In Washington on Saturday, President Obama called the government’s reaction “violent and unjust,” and, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., warned again that the world was watching what happened in Tehran.

It will be a test of wills to see if the death of one young women, whose dying gaze locked on the camera for a moment before she lapsed into unconsciousness may become the image that propels Iranians to reject their current government. The image of her dying in the street, an innocent bystander, shot down in front of her father as she watched the demonstrations blocks away will touch the soul of every father in America on this day we reserve for honoring fathers. How it plays to the soul of the Iranian people is for them to use.

The direct confrontation is easy to suppress, but a national strike where everyone stays home and refuses to work will soon shut the country down and in the long run be more effective. The fragile economy will collapse and people will suffer by not having enough to eat, but they will be alive and able to rebuild.

A Few Thoughts on Iran

This past week the news out of Iran has come via Twitter and Utube, that in our time is as significant as the telegraph was when it began to send instant reports singing along wires in dashes and dots, over one hundred and fifty years ago. At first, the MSM was out of the loop and spent the week catching up to what is becoming a replay of 1956, 68, and 89 when the population of a repressed society took a stand. Armed with green headbands and cell phones millions of Iranians took to the streets to send out 140 character bursts of information that in it's brevity resembled those early telegraph messages.

As the week progressed Congress responded with resolutions as the President held his bully pulpit in check amid some criticism that he needed to speak out more forcefully. The blogs have blazed hot with opinions and reports linking the Twitter reports as some began to write thoughtful pieces that tried to make some sense of what we as a people who value liberty as our bedrock creed should do or not do to help the Iranian people.

Thomas Barnett leads off today with this piece written for Esquire magazine.

Having followed the machinations of Iran closely for the last two decades (hell, I pretty much got a major player fired for following the place so closely), there's no doubt in my mind that Tehran's theocracy — sensing the looming furor we've seen from its contested outcome — fixed last week's Iranian presidential election. Not that former prime minister Mir Hussein Moussavi would have won the election outright, but it's entirely conceivable that, if the fix wasn't on, he could have forced a second-round fight with an uncertain outcome — or, worse, the sort of angry popular protests (and, worser still, angry mourning prayers) we're witnessing at this moment. Clearly the religious regime was having none of that (yes, it could have been worse and, yes, there could have been even more thousands of Tweets and riot officers). So the powerful mullahs, I'm pretty sure, chose to manipulate the vote count and portray President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's otherwise probable victory as an undisputable landslide.

Read more: Why Obama Should Let Iran's 'Red-State' Regime Die on Its Own

In a related post Barnett calls attention to this article written the day before the Iranian election.

"What If Israel Strikes Iran?" by John R. Bolton, Wall Street Journal, 11 June 2009.

Tom defines the article this way.

The gist appears in the call-out text: "The mullahs would retaliate. But things would be much worse if they had the bomb."

Iran won't close the Straits of Hormuz, nor cut its own exports to raise global prices, nor directly attacks U.S. forces in either Iraq or Afghanistan, nor launch missiles against Israel. It will unleash Hamas and Hezbollah and that's about it.

Then Bolton tries to sell with contrary logic: "This brief survey demonstrates why Israel's military option against Iran's nuclear program is so unattractive, but also why failing to act is even worse."

The deuce you say.

Read more:

Bolton's breakdown on Israeli strikes--a green light subtly lit

Others have added their views and support.

Iran: Helping Tweets Stand Up to Bullets By Nicholas Kristof

Arguing Iran by abu mugqawama

My worry: Budapest '56, Tehran '09 by Tom Ricks Foreign Policy Blog

Facebook, Google Go Persian, Aiding Iran’s Activists at Danger Room at Wired

Some of the Web’s leading firms are rolling out new features, to accommodate worldwide

interest in the protests in Iran — and to not-so-subtly help out the pro-democracy movement inside the country.

Iranian Election: Clockwork Orange at Threatswatch

Much like Stanley Kubrick's 1971 movie Clockwork Orange, Iranian elections are irresistibly difficult to watch. And this election has all the hallmarks of being more than just another sequel, but rather that rare occurrence where it is even more compelling (and irresistibly difficult) than any of its serial predecessors. One of the smartest - and most principled - Iran experts, my friend Michael Ledeen, explains ably just why this is. Their [open demonstrators by the thousands] candidate is the former...

The Tragedy of the Iranian Elections at Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions

It's hard to recall an event that held so much promise but resulted in so much crushed hope as did the Iranian presidential election; perhaps the events twenty years ago in China's Tiananmen Square comes close. The run up to the election was really quite extraordinary. The debates were candid; the accusations were as mean-spirited as any found in U.S. elections; and enthusiasm for change was high. Washington Post op-ed columnist Anne Applebaum notes that even in light of subsequent events, the election did expose a soft underbelly of Iranian politics.

Finally this from Threatswatch (Warning Disturbing Content) Neda: The Voice of Iran

Her name was Neda. It means the 'voice' or the 'call' in Farsi. And in a struggle largely fueled by Iranian women's demands for rights, Neda most tragically becomes the Voice of Iran. It is heartbreaking to watch, with her...

I have refrained from writing too much about this situation. My son's mother is from Iran and that side of the family has many members still living in Iran. They have my prayers and have asked me to not write too much as they believe that the time unfortunately is not ripe enough for a true regime change. The ruling elite and their Revolutionary Guard still hold all the cards as well as the arms to suppress any uprising. Gandhi like non-violent protests have no effect on a regime that from it's earliest beginning, sent children off to be martyred by the tens of thousands in the Iran/Iraq War and is willing to hang and stone women for social crimes.

Five Lessons About The Mideast

There is an important article in the Washington Post by Robin Wright, Why I Have New Hope for The Mideast. She tells of her journey the past year across the Middle East where she found surprising changes afoot.

"In 2006, three years after the Iraq invasion, I got so tired of the divisive debate in Washington about the future of the Middle East that I went back to the region I've covered since 1973 and listened instead to the people who live there. After traveling for the better part of a year from Rabat to Tehran, I came away surprisingly buoyed."

Wright found five lessons, that illustrate the reason she has "New Hope for The Mideast." I will tease you with them; the evidence she found, is waiting for you to discover in the article.

Two decades ago when I roamed the region, I sought out clandestine cells as the barometer of opposition. Now I look for computer nerds -- the pajamahedeen, or pajama warriors, who wield computers instead of roadside bombs. They personify Lesson 1 in the changing Middle East: The opposition is more open, ambitious, imaginative and stubborn than ever. And the YouTube generation has become a whole new political class.

Lesson 2: There is no longer a single truth, in either ideology or religion, and challenges to the status quo are coming from unlikely quarters.

Lesson 3: Old Cold War enemies have become unexpected allies -- and the pluckiest agitators for change.

Lesson 4: Watch out for the soccer moms.

Lesson 5: Pay attention to the moderate Islamists; many are seeking compromise.

She concludes that:

Democracy is about differences, which are bound to explode once disparate sides of society are free to speak and make demands. Opening new space also does not guarantee who or what will fill it. And all the factors contributing to change make the region susceptible to greater turmoil.

Yet what I found most inspiring in my travels was not the dreams that the outside world has for the people of the Middle East. It was the lofty goals they have set for themselves, and begun -- only begun -- to act on.

This article, along with an article linked in an earlier post, where Angelina Jolie Staying to Help in Iraq writes about her recent trip to Iraq, are signs of hope. The ill-executed plan to rebuild Iraq almost destroyed the hope for real change that is now developing across the Middle East. Fueled by the bottom-up efforts of people, connectivity, like water, is seeping into every corner of the globe.

Another report was filed today, by, Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers entitled, More "Dispatches from Front". His voice adds another prospective on the efforts of the men and women of our Armed Forces and the mission they intrepidly pursue.

In the latest postscript to this story, Tom Barnett offers his take on Robin Wright's story,The ultimate legacy of Bush's "big bang" strategy.

Hegemony and Iran, Revisited.

Last month I wrote two posts, Resource consumption and hegemony, roadblocks to the future? and Democracy in retreat? where the subject of American hegemony was addressed. Then later in a post,My Persian Sons I wrote of my connection with Iran.

Today, Tom Barnett has two posts that offer more on the subjects. The first is a comment on a review of Parag Khanna's book,Waving Goodbye to Hegemony by Robert Jordan Prescott at House of Marathon, A Global, Multi-Civilizational, Multi-Polar Muddle, I concur with Tom's view that this is "beautifully written."

The second post that struck home with me was a lengthy post about Iran,Same old in Iran where Tom takes the time to follow up on an article by Thomas Erdbrink in the Washington Post entitled, Iran's Clerical Old Guard Being Pushed Aside. After reading the Post article, I found Barnett's comments even more helpful, in that he added the icing on the cake to explain in detail what the original piece addressed. He begins:

With any revolutionary state, the original leadership generation ages out, usually without grace and with plenty of regrets. They see what could have been and what it's turned out to be. They look back over past decisions, and realize they would have done things differently if given the chance again to rule. They typically split across two impulses: 1) they should have been more stringent re: the revolution; and 2) they should have moved more decisively to normalize the revolution's relationship with the outside world.

And cuts to the chase with:

Fascinating stuff that shows, in my opinion, that Iran's revolution is hardly unique or unknowable or "irrational." Instead we see the same old, same old: corrupt ideologues versus less corrupt technocrats. Both think they can revitalize the failed revolution, and both are wrong. But with oil prices lubricating the regime's failures so nicely, the outcome of this yin-and-yang-like struggle may go on for a while, meaning we better be ready to seize our chances for soft-kill strategies when the technocrats are in power.
That, and we should pray for the Supreme Leader's imminent demise.

A fine bit of analysis by a man with a masterful eye on the horizon.

Postscript:
Additional insight about Iran, can be found at MilitaryHistoryOnline.com where an article entitled, Special Feature: Reflections on Iran. is a very informative report with pictures.

My Persian Sons

Over twenty years ago I met a young Persian woman, mother of two small boys, ages six and three. Fortune would have it, that we fell in love and I became step-father to these two boys. Time passed and we had our own son, a blend of the genes of Asia and Europe. The boys grew into men. Our son now 17, lives with his mother, our relationship parted, but the bond between my sons and I, remain as a father and his children.

Out of this relationship also came an understanding of the world that I never could have imagined thirty years ago. My two older boys are college graduates, in business together as partners, one is married and expecting his first child. My youngest son is about to graduate high school and wants to study political science or history, his sights set on international relations. I am amazed of his understanding of the World. The essay he wrote for college admission tells of a brief time he spent going to school in the United Arab Emirates, and the knowledge he gained about the diversity of the world and the importance of understanding all people.

I am not writing this for an exercise in bragging about my children. I do so because almost every day we are reminded about our problem with Iran. For the past twenty years I have watched as members of ex-pat Iranian families journey back and forth from the U.S. and Iran. I have met dozens of family members, coming from Iran. They all say, "We love America." To a person they long for a change in their countries political fortune. This silent passage for the past twenty years of people visiting and returning has set the corner stone for the future. When things change in Iran, and they will, the people will be ready to embrace the connections made in thousands of visits over the past years. In a series of articles linked on his blog today, Tom Barnett addresses the glimer of hope for that better relations with Iran will lead to a soft kill "alla Soviet Union."Bush seems ready to deal with everybody, even Iran—so far as Iraq is concerned
And just in, a New York Times article detailing tough economic times for Iran.
A Frail Economy Raises Pressure on Iran’s Rulers

When you strip off the veneer of idologies and get to know the people of a nation, they all are motivated by the same desire to survive and provide a better life for their children. I have found the same in almost every corner of the globe. As people diversify and make connections through business and personal relationships, the old custom to treat every stranger as a potential enemy dissipates. I am reminded of something I read in Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel:
Amazon.com: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies: Books ...
Diamond writes about a native tribesman from New Guniea who told of how it was until a short time ago, that when you met another man in the forest you carefully probed each other, hoping to find kinship, so that you could avoid mortal combat. Today, much of the world is past that point. The connected places are less likely to go to war with their neighbor nations because of kinship brought about by connections in trade, immigration, and trans-national marriage.

Don't believe this so? Marriage between nationalities in this country was a big taboo one hundred years ago. We now revel in: "My Italian Grandma taught me how to make such good spaggetti sauce." Or,"my Irish granddad could whip anybody's ass." I don't provide these examples to point out differences, but to show that the more we assimilate and accept diversity, the stronger and safer our nation becomes. Many of the men who fought World War II were the sons and grandsons of those who came here by standing in line at Ellis Island. We could have not been successful without their blood.

The next generation of talent, innovators and toilers in our nation carry names and the genes of hundreds of places we silently barred a few years ago. How we develop this talent and grow as a nation is the subject of my next post.

I will write more on this, when I discuss John Kao's book Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters and What We Can Do To Get It Back.