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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (53145)	7/7/2004 2:37:41 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793957

Thomas Barnett blog: The military-market nexus centers on energy "Harvard and Russian Oil Company Clash Over Shareholder Dividends," by Simon Romero, New York Times, 3 July, p. B1. "China's Boom Brings Fear of an Electricity Breakdown: Cloud-seeding, higher thermostats and dimmed neon may lie ahead for China," by Howard W. French, New York Times, 5 July, p. A4. Money may make the world go around, but energy fuels it. Many security analysts will look at such headlines and see only the potential for conflict, but I see far more the imperative for cooperation. Russian needs foreign sources of capital for its energy industry to thrive, and so it has to accept new levels of transparency. It isn't easy or pursued willingly, but money needs rules to feel comfortable traveling, so if you want money to visit your neck of the woods, you have to put out the welcome wagon as defined by the market. China's infrastructural requirements on electricity alone are enormous, numbering in the trillions of investment dollars. Expect many such articles forecasting inevitable doom in, or conflict from, China on this issue. The fear-mongering on China will never cease, but to demand a better world-historical pathway is not naïve in the least: it simply requires that we spot the obvious overlaps between China's long-term strategic needs for stability and our own long-term strategic needs for stability. Both center around the Middle East, which is where globalization's military-market nexus is rightfully located for the next couple of decades—or until the global marketplace moves beyond oil to something else. The extent of the system perturbation caused by the Iraq war (II) "Military Draft? Official Denials Leave Skeptics," by Carl Hulse, New York Times, 3 July, p. A1. "Changes Urged As Need Grows For Reservists," by Thom Shanker, NYT, 4 July, p. A1. More evidence that the Iraq occupation—like all occupations—will end up changing the occupiers as much as the occupied. For the Pentagon, the occupation ends up transforming transformation, shifting its focus from the warfighting side of the ledger to the peacekeeping side. Why? Because you cannot technologize your way out of that problem set: it simply requires significant numbers of well-trained troops. The fact that the U.S. military is so imbalanced in this regard (able to wage wars with little recourse to reserves but quickly overwhelmed by the lack of needed reserves once the peacekeeping begins) is what is fueling the speculation that the draft must inevitably return. That notion alone will push the Pentagon toward some amazing reforms. Why? No one in this military wants to go back to the nightmares of the draft. Not because of the politics, but because of the sheer impracticality of trying to field a professional force using just anybody pulled off the street. The U.S. military has been running away from that sort of force for roughly three decades, and when push comes to shove on reservists, it'll bite the bullet on big changes before it'll ever give in to what just about everyone in its senior leadership considers a crazy idea that would ruin this military they've spent their entire careers resurrecting from the ashes of Vietnam.