Lost Nomad, a Korea-centered blog, also joins the tdaxp linkroll. Note that his feature, Girl Wednesday, has nothing to do with making LM a must read. Nothing at all.

Live from the FDNF and Mountain Runner are both great sites, with meatier-than-usual military analysis, with both writing recently about Private Military Companies ([Live from FDNF], [Mountain Runner]). Plus both share reading interests with tdaxp: FDNF enjoys Freakonomics, while MR reads Neither Shall the Sword.

Dan Nexon‘s Duck of Minerva joins Tom Barnett and Chet Richards as blogger phds linked to by tdaxp. But why refer to DM as Dr, Nexon in the blogroll, when the site has three other bloggers? Simple: Dan Nexon has commented here before ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]). Visit and ye shall receive….

Last, Aaron’s Groundrocket is back online. According to a poll, a plurality believes it was down because of incompetence. I’m not arguing.

“It’s coming up
It’s dare

You’ve got to press it on you
You’ll just be thinking
That’s what you do, baby
Hold it down, dare

Jump with the moon and move it
Jump back and forth
And feel like you were there yourself
Work it out

I Never did no harm
Never did no harm

Jump with them all and move it
Jump back and forth
And feel like you were there yourself
Work it out”
Gorillaz, “Dare”

There’s more…

“Dare,” by Gorillaz, Demon Days, 24 May 2005, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARE_(song) [buy the album, read the lyrics, watch the video].

To not feel bad in Iraq, we need to change our operational rhythm and align ourselves with the gun-smoking righteous.

To feel good in the Global War on Terrorism, this Long War, we must dare. We must recognize the inevitable, that:

• a strategy of shrinking the Gap requires more Iraqs
  
• America’s ability to act will be constrained by the orientation of the American people
  
• America goes to war with the citizenry it has, not the citizenry it would prefer to have

Combined with the fact that any invasion does harm — what Machiavelli called “evil” — we must recognize that certain strategies are out of reach.

We have to dare, not letting a Vietnam-style zero defects policy get in the way. We must embrace defects, realizing that the goal of wars like Iraq are system perturbations and connectivity, not the swift implementation of the ideals of a few of us. In particular

• liberal democracy
  
• State integrity
  
• women’s rights

(I am happy that of the above three search terms, only “liberal democracy” found no hits on whitehouse.gov. At least Bush is a third of the way there.)

Jumping back and forth, fast transienting, is an essential element of victory.

What Fabius Maximus has called hubris has been a costly mistake so far in Iraq. Fortunately, it’s a mistake we need not make again.

Guerrillaz, a tdaxp series in four parts
Part I: Feel Good Inc
Part II: 19-2000
Part III: Clint Eastwood
Part IV: Dare