Bookwriting “Mission Accomplished”

Well I haven’t decided which aircraft carrier to make a showboat appearance on yet… Gotta try on my fighter-aircraft piloting duds and have the midshipmen paint the banner…
Nah, that all sounds like too much darn work. Because me, I feel I really did accomplish something already, getting this book manuscript produced and sent off to Paradigm very darn close to the agreed deadline… And anyway, in time to meet my personal deadline, which was today.
It’s been a lot of work but I feel I’ve learned a lot by doing it, and have usefully pulled together in new ways things I knew in some sense before.
The “new” things were mainly what you’ll see in Chapters 5 and 6, which are on, respectively, climate change and the shifting global power balances. Re climate change, I have of course long been aware there’s a huge “issue” out there. But frankly, when Tom Friedman would keep going on an on about it I often felt that

(1) It looked suspiciously like an attempt on his part to divert attention from the failure of the Bushites’ “transformative” project in Iraq to which he had earlier given such strong support (a fact about which to this day he’s never provided anything like an adequate self-evaluation or ‘mea culpa’ for), and
(2) There were huge aspects of the climate change story– mainly those to do with US policy, as such– that he was completely missing.

Well, now I feel a lot better able to substantiate that latter criticism. (And the former one certainly still stands.)
Climate change and the shift in global power balances are the two huge issues of which Bush– along with the vast bulk of the US political elite from both parties (except Al Gore)– have all remained recklessly unaware while they have kept 90% of their attention on the still-unfolding debacle in Iraq and the completely mis-focused, and actually unsuccessful, “GWOT”.
Indeed, re the shifting global power balances (see my earlier post on the subject here) it is not just that the US political elite has been AWOL attention-wise as these shifts have been occurring in the past 5 years, but the actions and choices of the Bush administration have themselves considerably accelerated these shifts. Well, okay, mainly one fateful choice and all the actions that flowed from that: viz., the choice to invade Iraq unilaterally, without UN approval of the decision and indeed in the face of the publicly expressed opposition of most other world powers to it.
From that point of view, we can see Iraq as the “Angola” of US imperial over-reach… the bridge too far whose taking then sets in train a much broader rollback of the power-projection project. (I have to note that my old and dear friend the strategic analyst Mike MccGwire foresaw all this in a phone conversation he and I had just days after the US invasion, in March 2003.)
The US militarists’ misadventures in Iraq have also– like those of their Israeli counterparts in Lebanon last year– provided a very valuable lesson to the whole world about the rapid decline in the strategic utility of raw military power in an age when people all around the world can actually see and understand what happens to the people living in the war-zone.
So anyway, I’ve been learning a lot and shall use much of this new material in shorter pieces that I’m planning to write between now and when the book comes out, next spring.
Meanwhile, big thanks to all of you who responded to my requests for help along the way (and for the general support you expressed for this book project.) I think Christiane will definitely be getting a couple of free copies of the book for her suggestions re epigraphs and graphics. I need to figure out if anyone else will be on the list…
As for me, I wish I could curl up in a ball and sleep for a week but alas I have lots of other things to do. Tomorrow I am giving this talk at the World Bank on the last book (the Africa book.) Yesterday something really nice happened. Last week I sent out an electronic notice about the World Bank gig to an old email list I had of people connected with that book. Over the past few days I’ve heard back from quite a lot of them– nice supportive stuff. But the best was yesterday, from Norbert Mao, who’s the elected chair of the “LC-5” district in Gulu, Uganda… He wrote that the copies of the book I sent him last year had really helped him deal with all the pressure the Northern Ugandans have been facing to let the ICC proceed with its plan to prosecute the LRA leaders, at a still very complex time in the peace negotiations there.
So it was great to get that feedback from Mao. It reminded me why I write books at all, rather than just posting here on the blog or doing newspaper columns or magazine articles. Books have a solidity and a shelf-life to them that is still quite distinctive. So I guess it is worth all the anguish??