Reply #117: Regarding Thomas Barnett...

[tlcandie]

The c-span link didn't provide anything for me, but got this book review from Karen Kwiatkowski..

http://www.antiwar.com/kwiatkowski/?articleid=2762

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Dr. Thomas Barnett, Harvard trained political scientist and self-described Pentagon futurist, has a bone to pick with the Bush administration. America's invasion of Iraq was a great achievement, but the President hasn't yet shared with Americans why we are staying there, for … well, forever. Barnett's latest book, The Pentagon's New Map, cheerfully explains that there is no exit strategy for Iraq or Afghanistan. He writes, "We are never leaving the Gap and we are never 'bringing the boys home.' There is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking the Gap … and we better stop kidding ourselves about 'exit strategies.'"
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Using market, computing and advertising idiom, Barnett explains that there are two key roles that United States must play in the 21st century – that of rule-setting Leviathan and that of System Administrator. His book lays out how the Department of Defense must bifurcate accordingly into two robust capabilities: a killer app that is speedy, stealthy, powerful, young, male, deadly and used overseas only, and its mild mannered opposite, a policing-oriented force that uses military and civilian law, works at home and abroad and is not bound by posse comitatus restrictions. The Leviathan force and the System Administrator force are the main ways of getting America's greatest export commodity – security – out to the "customer."
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Barnett points out that the American social political reorientation has already started, and that our new organizing construct rests on two key documents: The PATRIOT Act of 2002 and the 2002 National Security Strategy. The PATRIOT Act might be described as a legislative assault on the Constitution, approved sight unseen by the Congress. The National Security Strategy introduced the radical concept of pre-emptive executive war. The sleeping legislative and aggressive executive are complemented by a silent judiciary which, in an interesting way, is represented by what Barnett calls a "real answer man," Attorney General John Ashcroft. An "answer man" is a "new source of authority within the government … armed with extraordinary legal powers, which might strike many citizens as threatening their basic civil rights." The idea here is that in a post 9-11 environment, we needed new domestic rule-sets. Barnett shares his observations because he had predicted this exact scenario long before 9-11. Perhaps he picked up this idea after studying Germany in the 1930s.
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