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Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Breakout And Pursuit
There is a reason that the anonymous Wretchard has had over 6 million visits in his first 14 months of blogging.
During the days when the overt action was centered on Iraq, it was easy to forget that it was one battlefield within a theater. Now the theater itself has come to the fore and the atmosphere is one of 'breakout and pursuit'.The breakout creates a new set of opportunities and problems. These can be described as 'emergent phenomenon', -- the result of interactions between individual elements within the Middle East and Southwest Asian theater that are now bouncing off each other. Worse -- or more exciting -- is that these recent developments now have linkages into Europe and Russia. France and the EU, for example, are getting engaged in Lebanon while going in the other direction, Russia has declared interest in supplying technology to Iran. Just as it was important to recall that Iraq was part of the Middle East theater, the Middle East itself is part of action spanning the globe. In retrospect, events as disparate as the dismantling of of the Libyan nuclear program and the exposure of the AQ Khan atomic weapons mart played their part in leading up to current developments. As historical drama the GWOT's scope is staggering and may prove to be bigger in certain respects than that old yardstick, the Second World War.
Posted by Kate McMillan on March 2, 2005 in Military | Permalink
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Comments
Right. Wretchard's (anonymous)blogsite, The Belmont Club, is a great site. Factually grounded and excellent analysis. Notice his blogroll that lists other great sites. I'd add a few , .e.g. the Daily Demarche (also anonymous)to those but that's just minor, for if you go into one site, it will link to others. That's the power of the global internet network, which is all about decentralization rather than centralization.
This network effect of decentralization and dynamic collaboration is in evidence not merely in knowledge-generation, which is, I maintain, a key function of both the blogosphere and the internet structure, but in political and economic networking as well. The global world is also moving into decentralized decision-making and collaboration.
The most recent analysis on Belmont is on the effects of the network-function, described by terms such as 'the theater widens'.. in the Middle East..whose democratic effects, i.e., the transformation from closed to open societies, is far broader than its nodal origin site; the ME.
The old nation-state as sovereign in a centralized, top-down governance (a belief held by such as Jean Chretien and the current Liberal party) is out of date in the modern world. Networking removes the control of knowledge from a centralist authority and moves it into the whole population...which then acts, as I keep repeating, as a CAS, complex adaptive system, and self-corrects its data to provide accurate information..etc.
Knowledge generation that is focused around a centralized control (Author as authority) is also becoming irrelevant, for knowledge is now generated by, in science, a collective. Knowledge must be open to both empirical and logical debate. In the humanities, it would be arrogant for any one individual to claim oneself as authority, for our knowledge always rests on the work of others.
So- the network is vital. The reason why Wretchard's blog has been visited by over 6 million in that short 14 months..is because of its legitimacy of content - which content is based both on Wretchard's posts and on those within the Comments discussions.
Posted by: ET | 2005-03-02 10:47:08 AM
Not just 6 million readers - he has 2,883 incoming links - that's a massive "usefulness and approval rating". And if you've been reading him, you'll understand why - his analysis and forecasts are proven correct, time and time again, even when they flatly contradict the "conventional wisdom" of the paid punditry.
Wretchard has a gifted ability to read a mainstream report, pull it together with other sources, his own knowledge, and reveal what is really going on behind the scenes, so to speak.
With a track record as good as the Belmont Club has, he hardly needs a page revealing his identity and "qualifications".
Posted by: Kate | 2005-03-02 11:07:29 AM
And if you'll scroll down a bit on Wretchard's main page, you'll find the perfect articulation of what makes Norman Spector's comments so irritating and enraging, both in the "blogging for chickens" thread and elsewhere. Wretchard is talking about some Ward Churchill comments, but I think they apply well here:
"The implicit assumption underlying this discourse is that "we" -- and not you -- ask the questions. ... As Robert Kaplan pointed out in The Media and Medievalism, the most powerful tool of totalitarianism is to don the guise of righteousness and assume "the right to question and to demand answers, the right to judge and condemn, and the right to pardon and show mercy." It is in the end an attempt to usurp the wellsprings of legitimacy."
Posted by: surly | 2005-03-02 2:56:25 PM
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