George Friedman: The Next Decade: Where We've Been... and Where We're Going

In September, 2010, the author opined within the context of an NPR story on U.S. foreign policies and the Obama Administration; James Traub writes: George Friedman, head of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, recently wrote that "the most significant effect of 9/11" was that "the United States became obsessed with a single region." He concedes that this was inevitable in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Today, though, he argues, it is necessary to ask: "What does the United States lose elsewhere while it focuses on the future of Kandahar?" Friedman shares the Afghanistan Study Group's skepticism about the consequences of military failure there, but he also makes the cold-blooded assertion that "the United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States." Kibitzers like Friedman, or me, don't have to deal with U.S. public opinion, of course. Another terrorist attack would make it even harder than it already is for Obama to advance a post-post-9/11 strategy. And I don't think Friedman is right in claiming that, for example, Russia exploited U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East to attack Georgia in 2008. But there are undeniably grave costs to that preoccupation, and not only in blood and treasure. Doubling down in Afghanistan has further ratcheted up the public sense of menace — they'll attack us here if we don't stop them there — while the failure to make headway has deepened public cynicism about America's capacity to shape a better world. Obama has adopted from Bush the premise that the United States must find a way to tame the Islamic world, though he has tried to go about it in a very different way. But though this may be true in the long run, in the short run it has turned out to be a thankless task. Read that full NPR story here.

Thanassis Cambanis, Hezbollah, Terrorism, and "Engagement Hawks"

WNYC recently reported on Hezbolah, and asked Cambanis to opine on the subject. The following is a podcast summary: Veteran Middle East correspondent Thanassis Cambanis discusses the cross section of people that make up Hezbollah—part standing army, part political party, and part theological movement. >A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah's Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel looks at the organization and the people it includes, and Cambanis follows a few Hezbollah families through the 2006 war with Israel in order to get a fuller understanding of the ideological and religious roots of the conflict in the Middle East.. See the WNYC webpage on this feature here. Download the podcast here. See also: Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics), Tea with Hezbollah: Sitting at the Enemies Table Our Journey Through the Middle East, Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Cambanis recently wrote in the Boston Globe: There's an increasingly assertive group of “engagement hawks” — a group of professional diplomats, military officers, and academics — is arguing that a mindless, macho refusal to engage might be causing as much harm as terrorism itself. Brushing off dialogue with killers might look tough, they say, but it is dangerously naive, and betrays an alarming ignorance of how, historically, intractable conflicts have actually been resolved. And today, after a decade of war against stateless terrorists that has claimed thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of foreign lives, and cost trillions of dollars, it’s all the more important that we choose the most effective methods over the ones that play on easy emotions. See that Boston Globe article by Cambanis here.

Sale of Controversial Security Firm Xe Securities Imminent from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

Erik D. Prince, founder of private security firm Xe Services — formerly Blackwater Worldwide — has reached a deal to sell his company to a small group of investors in California. Blackwater became the center of a debate about using private security firms in foreign wars after an alleged skirmish between insurgents and Blackwater personnel in 2007 left 17 Iraqi civilians dead. In the wake of the controversy, the company lost a large State Department contract to protect the U.S. embassy in Iraq, but formed over 30 separate "shell companies" in order to continue to receive millions of dollars in other government contracts. What's next for the private security firm? We're joined by Allison Stanger, author of "One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy." Stanger tells us more about Xe Services, past and future.

Download that podcast here.

A Conference For Malware Writers from Slashdot: IT by Soulskill

tsu doh nimh writes "There is a security conference being held in Mumbai later this year called MalCon, and the organizers say it's the first ever conference dedicated to the 'malcoder community.' Brian Krebs interviewed one of them and got this gem: 'Just like the concept of "ethical hacking" has helped organizations to see that hackers are not all that bad, it is time to accept that "ethical malcoding" is required to research, identify and mitigate newer malwares in a "proactive" way.' Bruce Schneier is speaking at a sister MalCon event in Pune, India two days later, and he said he doesn't agree with the organizer's premise that more malware is needed to build better security tools."

Read the full Slashdot post here. Also, check out this CNN piece on the trend of the larger nation states enforcing several security regulations about the internet.