(2006-02-24) Lind On Barnett

William Lind on Thomas Barnett. Among the critics and reinterpreters of Fourth Generation war, the bad is most powerfully represented by Thomas Barnett's two books The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint For Action. What Barnett advocates is bad in two senses: first, that it won't work, and second, that if it did work the result would be evil... Regrettably, in the uneducated and nostrum-hungry powerhouse that is Washington, Barnett's piffle is just the sort of patent medicine that sells. The more widely it sells, the more Iraqs America will have to endure. At present, it looks as if the next Iraq is spelled Iran. It's as good a place as any for Barnett's thesis to expire from sheer lightness of being.

Fabius Maximum agrees with him, from a Grand Strategy (and General Semantics) perspective.