A Brain Pentagon Wants to Pick, Despite Controversy, Strategist Is Tapped

[Rose Siding]

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; Page A19

Global security guru Thomas P.M. Barnett is in the unique position of being embraced by Pentagon officials and top U.S. military commanders as a visionary strategist -- even as he openly blames the defense establishment for botching post-invasion operations in Iraq.

Barnett's best-selling 2004 book, "The Pentagon's New Map," offered a thesis on the American military's future global role that the Defense Department found so compelling and easy to grasp that it has invited him to advise and brief hundreds of senior appointees and officers on strategy. His book sold as many as 85,000 copies, and his prolific blog entries -- which mix humor with often cutting insights on Pentagon strategy -- are closely read in military and intelligence circles.

Now Barnett is back in Washington to unveil his sequel work, "Blueprint for Action," in a closed-door speech this morning to a select group of about 500 up-and-coming military officers and defense officials at the National Defense University.

"No one ever said, 'cut it out' or 'shut up,' or ever put a squeeze on me," Barnett said in an interview. (In a typical Web log, or blog, entry yesterday, he wrote: "Iraq is doing just fine given poorly planned occupation (F to the neocons, C+ to the officers doing their best in a crappy situation on the ground.")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/18/AR2005101801461.html

[EVDebs]

1. John J. Robinson's Dungeon Fire and Sword: The Knights Templar in the

Crusades could have been just as informative. The world of Islam needs a 'reformation' and the trouble is the West can't do it for them.

By inserting ourselves over there on their home turf we merely ask for trouble. A strategic withdrawal into Kuwaiti desert territory while waiting for events to blow over is about all you can hope to achieve.

This is essentially what 'the West' ended up doing from the 12th through early 14th Centuries.

Furthermore the best thing you can do now is to publicly renounce the 'eretz Israel' map and any claims to the Temple Mount that evangelicals and right wing Israelis fantasize over:

Eretz Israel HaShlema / Greater Israel
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/israel/greater-israel.htm

This site makes one error, however. The Jesuit 16th Century origins of the 'futurist' eschatology is where the "Left Behind" viewpoint of the end times began for evangelicals, not simply with Cyrus Schofield in Tennessee.