It was a good piece until he said this:

"And what if a warrior takes command of a large and modernizing nation-state, as Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has done?"

Well, he hasn't - as anybody who knows anything about Iran's political structure knows.

The book itself sounds interesting, though. The theory is that if you know the culture and history of a people, you'll be able to deduce how they will fight strategically and tactically and possibly even their motivations.

What the review doesn't mention is if the book recommends a nation NOT starting a fight in those circumstances.

Kaplan is a source relied on by neoconservatives to begin with, and as an incumbent author, he is like an incumbent politician.  However, he has been there and done that, that is, stared into the maw of Bosnian violence and lived to write about it. It is another place in which US troops are everpresent imperial sentinels, at once expected and rejected by the same world for intervention, help, responses and leadership.  And in this range of expectations, isn't it true that the world knows the US to have the capacity for enforcing violence and resources for same, and so the expectations continue?  The Neocons have taken the proactive, we can do it, internationalist approach that if you fail to take the lead and beat the enemy, that is, control the rules of the combat game, then the enemy will kill you with a death of a thousand cuts?

Meanwhile, from sites like this one, I hear the message that "Look, if you're going to insert forces abroad, you MUST broadly and deeply consult and get local cooperation and assistance with prosecuting your foreign policy (including wars), or else you're going to self-defeat."  However, the Neocons, with a little help from a Capt. Kirk like president will play the gamble no matter how much logic Mr. Spock brings to the Bridge, reasoning that no one locally between Iran and Syria are going to jump onboard without the dumping of Israel, and the prospect of a Islamic Military Imperial Caliphate, which will not happen in the world if the West's power can prevent it.

The tactical considerations of constant guerilla and terror war do not seem to get much better than the Israel Palestine situation unless you have either authoritarian control of one warring group by the other, or, someone wipes someone else out.  There is actually a certain MAD aspect to the status quo in the Middle East, either because the sum total violence will eventually lead to someone making a nuclear "statement" or some other WMD spoiler attack, OR, the status quo is itself a slower WMD making life intolerable over time.  So I am not entirely sure that there cannot be some manner of peaceful acceptance of differences while there is middle path worked out for peaceful outlet from the pressures that have been causing these factions to fight each other endlessly -- it will have something to do with creating living quality and space for all that overcomes the impasses of perceived loss by the giving up of land.

But so long as money and influence is to be had by supplying and supporting constant guerilla warfare, it is likely going to continue because (a) it can be financed and (b) young men are willing to seek heroism or martyrdom when prompted to prove their self-worth by their respective cultures.  This is the foreign and war policy equivalent of treating little states as quasi-individuals and arming them in zones where legal redress goes by the wayside because there's no way to bring terrorists or armies to justice without war.  It is the Wild West re-complicating with cash support over and over again while the civilized West operating on similar profit motives clashes with itself.  Free markets allow people to create and sustain markets of sectarian violence as well as markets for improved health care products and drugs to help those same places.  We'll sell it all to them, just as we'll allow the sale of cigarettes and organic fruit to the same culture, with the overburdened health care system bearing an analogical financial situation to the middle east's humanitarian crisis-quo.

And while I write this, the multi-polar approach of the Russians and Chinese seems to be bringing some US policymakers along in measured cooperation, however, the US wants Russia and China to make their domestic citizen/individual rights participation in their respective governments as egalitarian in effect as their SCO mission language applying to their corporate sovereign governments.  For Russia, China and Iran currently subscribe to the point of view that governments are the only entities that should have full civil rights and powers, meting them out to the people only as much as is needed to keep them in line and supporting the regime.  This is the same as radical unregulated capitalism, except for with fewer masters (total governments at the center controlling or compartmentalizing industry directly or indirectly) than capitalism controls people using the purse, indulgence, fantasy, legal drugs, work time rules, currency assumptions, limited political candidate choices, and taxes, if you buy the view that money pays for policy changes to shape the government that industrialists must operate under.

Coming around full circle, it seems that the path to peaceful coexistence has more to do with what all sides are willing to eschew and give up for each other rather than forcing everyone to cooperate via breakable agreements.  That is, unilateralism can actually lead to multi-lateral action by common sense comity and escape from the stress of perpetual warfare.  However, this means that powerful and weak alike must put things on the table that some of their members want to keep and eat, i.e. some set of tasty sweet cakes that aren't required to live, but make one fat with power or money, or both.  The key is poly-mutual freedom to verify things given up for the protection of the whole.

This brings us back to concealment and its fearful suggestion that someone, somewhere is getting something over on us if we trust them to comply with understood status quos apparent on their face.  How do we deal with this without imposing a cumbaya guitar government with guns over all, a sort of passive aggressive state with a totalitarian inner conflict?  It has something to do with establishing the commonality of different countries' governments around the world in which the individual has enough constitutional rights and freedoms that the individual, connected to family members and friends, and co-workers, can check the big-entities of his or her cultures and force collective action for things individuals can appreciate: good food, good water, good shelter, good work, good off time and a balancing out of stresses to minimize the bad stresses and the inhumanities that large institutions can easily begin and end without ever fixing responsibility.

This will happen with an expansion of the notion of what profit means, and, an expansion into a system in which something else balances cash-flow as sustaining the basics for all citizens in a society -- food, water and shelter supplies.  What?  Some kind of individual, quick-turnaround and collective contribution-flow, measurable by work and result, access to needed things and to the reality of upgrades in privileges with those putting out similar benefits via individual and collective work.  It need not be currency based only, and the calculus of valuable actions must find expansion toward higher and higher standards of living with verifiability of contribution -- that's it.  This is the expansion of value view of reform of political economy in my mind.

If some government prompting of the expansion of value exchange for essentials while currency may remain the economy of ever-innovative and growing luxury, then so be it.  People need a course to practice in, some structure in which to begin their new efforts at improving their world with predictability.  But the essentials MUST major in quality for the essentials versus luxuries economy to be in balance.  In the US now, it can be seen that the rich can afford the healthy food, and the poor affords the sub-standard healthy food.  This must end as something the US gives up for example, and such a change threatens other cultures less when considering democracy.  Intelligent self-control must not only be fully expected from individuals, but from companies and governments alike.  This is the key.

Will this provide more freedom both from secular governments, religious governments and despotic governments?  I don't see how it cannot.  As with most every vision, these things must be tried again and again, forged and improved over time.  Perhaps we're already moving in that direction in developed countries, however, why not make the jump to lesser developed ones?  Eco-Econ-Pol Freedom seems to be the means by which the great mass of the nations' individuals may escape unproductive limits or intrusions into others' business, because everyone is simply too busy doing business along the lines of new rules of what productive business IS, and how much the collective economic system is willing to retool to reward such economic conduct.

These sort of changes, though they are not filled with the nomenclature of the foreign affairs history of the Middle East seem to me to be what the Middle East needs -- unrelated changes that help render obsolete the fear fuels that explode into this violence cycle no one seems to be able to stop or wean themselves from.

Well, isn't it true that whatever vision or new program, those who are addicted to violence as their way of doing business can always try to upset the competing order?  Disorder profits some.  However, systemically, if the means of "profiting" expand to exclude what is de facto unproductive while greatly expanding resource availability for financing what is de facto productive and healthy, the aggregate economy of the individual worker will respond as will the individual in the world of leadership of other individuals.

There are sharks in the ocean, but the ocean's ecologic and climatic trends determined by the intelligent industrious fish will decide whether they stay alive.  We can change economies ever so much more safely than the ocean can afford major changes in its balances without difficult complications.

Well, there's still some utopian in me.  May it be arrived at by individual freedoms coming to intelligent self-control.

Until then, it does not seem that either Neocon, SCO, NATO or even UN remedies are working.  We need individuals to move the entities around them to come to reason.  Only the individual can reason.