The ground truth
: Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon’s New Map and a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, has a weblog [via Die Zeit] filled with lots of blunt and interesting commentary, including this, which leads to a compliment for Iraqi blogs:
I understand the deal with the devil in Najaf, and I know that temporizing situations can work in our strategic favor. But such deals only work if we spend the meantime creating the connectivity that generates strategic despair on their side, not ours.
Strategic despair is when your side surveys the environment and says to itself:
