Barnett on Gates

Last week I mentioned that Robert Gates' address at NDU had echoes of Thomas Barnett. Barnett recently weighed in with his thoughts:

I don't agree with every single point here, but the general thrust is so dead-on that mentioning any quibbles strikes me as a trite enterprise. I know Gates is hot to leave, but I hope he gets extended exchange time with Obama's people and hopefully with the man himself. He has done a magnificent job of trying to set the Defense Department on the best and most logical path going forward, and if the next SECDEF doesn't keep up that course, I will be sorely disappointed. That's not to say I look back on Rumsfeld in an entirely bad light, because I do not. I think he screwed up Iraq far too much, but I think that was inevitable given the system. I prefer to point out how much he did to shake up the old system, which in turn allowed the COIN "insurgency" to brew inside the Marines and Army and finally succeed. Rummy was the new-rules maker who played a necessary role in his time--both good and bad. Fortunately for all of us, he is followed by the rule-spreader in Gates. That was essentially my argument for Kerry in 2004--the rule-spreader to follow the rule-maker Bush. In the end, Bush out-Kerries Kerry by making his second term almost a complete repudiation of his first term, which may sound good but it really isn't enough--the man and the mea culpa simply can't be separated. The problem is, Bush-Cheney simply backtracked and didn't get any further buy-in on the new rules their first term proposed and made clear in its choices. So here's the irony: we finally "win" Iraq and do so in a way that changes us for the better. But we can't really claim that win because we've so alienated our old allies and our necessarily new ones that we're now forced to consider their collective rise as some sort of threat, when combined with our current financial distress (long in the making and cathartic in the execution). But rest assured, all this talk of a post-American order is just fear-mongering of the short-term sort. We regularly go through corrections of course. That's not the issue, just the speed at which we traverse this situation.