Michele Flournoy, the no. 2 power at the Pentagon, lays down the law in the new issue of Proceedings, along with the shadowy but powerful Shawn Brimley. Wanna know where the QDR is going? Read this and learn, little grasshoppers. And listen up: China and India are where it's at.

Pretty near the top they quote Alfred T. Mahan, which seasoned Pentagoners know is a sign that the Navy is getting teed up to get hit long. (This is like when Gorby would quote Lenin, or Marc Antony would praise Julius Caesar.)

Yeah, they want the State Department to get its act together-but who doesn't?:

The task for the United States is to respond to these challenges with a whole-of-government approach that advances our interests while legitimizing our power in the eyes of others."     

They also want to the Pentagon to help allies keep the global commons free:

Helping to build the capacity of our partners and allies and working toward a common agenda on these increasingly complex issues should be a critical pillar of America's national security and defense strategy."

Okay, sounds good. But this is my question: If the global commons (sea, air, space, cyberspace) really is gonna be contested, why does anyone think conventional aircraft carriers and short-legged fighter aircraft are the answer? I think it is time to commission the UCAV carrier the USS Obama, whose hull and aircraft would both be stealthy. With perhaps a crew of fewer than 500 sailors. (Most controllers of aircraft could fly them from Virginia.)   

You listening, Navy? Your professional magazine has run an article by two of the Pentagon's top civilian thinkers telling you where they think you need to go. You might want to think on this. You too, Air Force.   

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Hardly a day goes by without the op-ed page of the Washington Post carrying an article by a veteran of the Bush Administration holding forth on foreign policy. Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor, even has a regular columnist gig. And today Yosemite Sam advocates bombing Iran. It's as if in 1969, the people who brought us to disaster in Vietnam were constantly writing on how to build on their success-and expand the war to Thailand, Malaysia, and Burma. 

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Commentators and experts from around the country have called for the extermination of Auto-Tune, as if the creative path of popular music is so easy to deter, its favored technologies so simple to contain. One Beltway journalist and blogger now contends that our organization, the Center for a New American Security, should put our brainpower to the critical national challenge of sculpting just such a plan, as if Auto-Tune is the new Soviet Union, and as if we have found ourselves in a cultural Cold War.

This suggestion is based on a misunderstanding of the pragmatic, reasoned approach CNAS brings to all of its work. While we do not take institutional positions, I can affirm after a healthy debate that many of my colleagues agree that while the over-use of Auto-Tune should be walked back to a status of minimal but strategic, calculated use, a sweeping call for its death represents just the kind of un-nuanced policy which we attempt in all our work to counterbalance.  Do we call for the mass destruction of guitars because of Daughtry? No, we don't. Certainly Jamie Foxx et al.'s performance at this week's BET Awards argues for a measured approach to this issue."

Auto-Tune doesn't kill music, people kill music.

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Who lost Iraq? I think the Bush administration did, by launching a misbegotten preemptive war on false premises. Peter Feaver (full disclosure: an old and good friend, despite everything) doesn't think so. And his former colleague John Hannah in the White House Fantasy League is winding up to blame Obama.

I'm not throwing beanballs, Peter! I'm just trying to call the balls and strikes. But of course the Bush adminstration always had a weakness for Curveballs. Back into the stockade, you two.

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A few years ago, my smart, eclectic son picked a bunch of interesting Iranian films for us to watch. Most memorable were The Color of Paradise, The White Balloon, and Children of Heaven. Interestingly, all three of those were about children -- I read once that this was because Iranian directors couldn't speak directly to politics, so instead filmed parables and allegories. Even so, those films reminded me a lot of the classic Italian movies of the late 1940s and early 1950s -- realistic, tough and informed about the nature of life. (If you want more on that, watch Martin Scorsese's terrific half-memoir, half-documentary, Personal Journey, which amounts to a master class on Italian film.) We never did get to Taste of Cherry, though, after my son said he had a lot of tolerance for ennui but not enough for this one.      

Now, in honor of the Iranian protestors, we've started another round of Iranian films. This time we're focusing on films made over the last nine years. We started on Saturday with Offside, a modest film all the more striking for its smallness, about a handful of Iranian girls trying to sneak into a major soccer match. The movie was shot on the down low -- it is not giving anything away to say that one scene, in which a policeman grabs a girl heading toward the soccer stadium, the policeman was real. The DVD is also worthwhile for the interview with the director, Jafar Panahi, who discusses how Iranian authorities told him he could make another film if he would agree to censor his previous ones. He declined, and so wound up making this one on the fly with video cameras. Minor defense-related angle: Panahi is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, and his portrayal of soldiers in Offside has an insiders' feel to it, especially the fair-minded corporal (I think) from rural Azerbaijan dealing with a bunch of the smooth-talking Tehranis. 

Last night we watched Half Moon, a spooky Kurdish film about music and determination. Best scene: The village of exiled female singers. Suffice it to say that is the most anti-Islamic Republic of Iran movie I've ever seen.

Next up: Crimson Gold and Baran. As my wife pointed out, these powerful works of art are evocative of the soulful classics made in Poland under and against the Communist regime-Kanal, Man of Iron, and such.  

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