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

To: LindyBill who wrote (56569)	7/27/2004 10:57:58 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793999

Barnett hits it on the head again. When you play primarily not to lose, I guarantee you can't win. Let's see . . . plus up foreign aid or search every cargo container? "At Nation's Ports, Cargo Backlog Raises Question of Security," by John M. Broder, New York Times, 27 July, p. A12. Should America's big ports possess the best, most sophisticated technologies and terminal systems for transmodal operations? Certainly, we should aim for the same standards now achieved in Singapore, Hong Kong and Rotterdam, because such efficiency determines economic competitiveness to a large degree. But how much should we focus on port security? Stephen Flynn, with his new book "America the Vulnerable," is generating a lot of sales and buzz like this article, by speaking of containers as "the poor man's missile" and saying "the question is when, not if" such containers will be used to deliver WMD into the U.S. He may well be right in his fears, but because he offers no context and thinks only of worst-case vertical scenarios, he tends to oversell his case. We've got the "bin Laden tax" already on the airline industry, and inevitably it gets place squarely on the shipping industry as well, either out of preemptive fear or in response to actual attack. But what we really have to ask ourselves is how much protection do we actually buy with such investments? There is simply no sense of balance in these arguments, or in this America-at-risk plethora of books now hitting the market. Firewalling America off from the outside world may seem logical, but it really comes down to spending a lot of money on ourselves in order to reduce our connectivity with the global economy. Efficiency yes, but universal transparency is a chimera—a goal far more likely to reduce our connectivity than enhance or protect it. Plus, it does nothing at all in terms of reducing the sources of terrorism, or shrinking the Gap. We are losing our sense of proportion in this global war on terrorism. Our instincts are always to pull back and look out for ourselves, instead of stepping forward and embracing the world for what it needs from us. Port security is not about winning a GWOT, just about not losing one. When you play primarily not to lose, I guarantee you can't win. Flynn can spread fear all he wants, and yes, he will inevitably be right, as even a broken clock is twice a day, but this is not a strategic approach to the problem set. We cannot prevent vertical scenarios like 9/11, and spending our scarce resources trying to do is misguided. We need to build robustness in terms of our ability to respond to and handle all the horizontal scenarios that result from a vertical scenario, because therein lies our true talents and strengths as the world's most horizontally networked society and economy and political system and military power. As Peter Drucker admonishes, we need to stick with our strengths and outsource the rest. Our strength is connectivity, not firewalls. Our strength is engagement, not isolationism. This struggle is an away game, not a home game. Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 06:29 PM

To: LindyBill who wrote (56569)	7/28/2004 10:32:23 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793999

A few points on Hubbert. Please take with the usual dose of NaCl because I'm simply not qualified to speak authoritatively on the issue. Very few people here--quehubo notably excepted--can. Hubbert made his predictions many decades before horizontal drilling and 3-D seismic exploration made the discovery and extraction of new reserves a lot less of a gamble than before. Second, there have been no major exploration efforts in the ME in decades. We don't really know how much oil lies there waiting to be extracted because there is no incentive to explore as it so easy to fulfill requirements from existing fields. This happened in Mexico in the 1970s--everyone thought Mexico had been tapped out of oil until some very big fields were discovered after exploration efforts became serious again. There is no avoiding what Hubbert predicts. However, I think it is going to happen a lot later than the pessimists suggest. We have a lot more time to develop alternative sources of energy than we think, though we are doing an incredibly poor job of it. The above of course doesn't factor in the terrorists. Obviously, they can dramatically change supply but probably only on a fairly short term basis.