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Ahmad Chalabi died earlier this month. Most people don’t recognize his name. Until three years ago, neither did I. That was before I wrote a review of the book Arrow’s in the Night. If there is one book that helps explain why, in 2015, the United States in still mired in the Mideast, it has my vote. Here is part of what I wrote:

Only a handful of people, those in the top policymaking positions in the United States’ government in the years – and even decades – prior to OIF, understand why the United States ultimately went to war to depose Saddam Hussein.  Until now.

Arrows of the Night takes the reader on a half-century journey beginning with Chalabi’s exile from Iraq in 1958, to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, to Chalabi’s work in post-Saddam Iraq.  This journey is both complex and compelling as the primary subject, Ahmad Chalabi, has a larger-than-life resume of triumphs and scandal including a degree in mathematics from MIT, a doctorate from the University of Chicago, work as a university professor and a wildly-successful banker, a conviction for embezzling, and work as a CIA operative.

Throughout this journey, in all his occupations and avocations, Ahmad Chalabi maintained a singular focus – and as Bonin describes – an obsession, to overthrow Saddam’s Ba-athist regime and return to his Iraqi homeland in a blaze of glory.  This was his strategy, and everything else was tactics. While the United States ultimately might have gone to war in Iraq again under the George W. Bush administration to finish what his father’s administration had not, without Ahmad Chalabi, the last half–century relationship between the United States and Iraq – and indeed the entire Middle East – would likely have been vastly different had this complex and complicated man never been exiled from Iraq, or had he merely lived quietly in exile.

This, in a nutshell, describes Ahmad Chalabi’s journey, which began in 1958 when his wealthy Shiite family was exiled from Iraq after a revolution that ultimately put Saddam Hussein in power.  It describes how the young Chalabi devoted his life to restoring his family to prominence. His first coup attempt was in 1963 at age nineteen, while on a school break from MIT. His next was aided by Iranian intelligence. But as the years passed and Saddam stayed in power, Chalabi came to realize that he needed the United States to help him rid Iraq of Saddam.  Only the world’s superpower could make this happen.

More on Ahmad Chalabi’s journey in this New York Times article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/world/middleeast/ahmad-chalabi-iraq-dead.html?_r=0

And in this New York Times Op-ed here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/opinion/why-america-invented-ahmad-chalabi.html

What will the future hold? We all want to know. But as the late Yogi Berra famously said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

What about the future? On the subject of looking at the future, I suspect you all know there is a cottage industry of people who call themselves “futurists” and we all likely have our own favorite people we follow – either in fact or in fiction – who seem to have a knack of being right about at least some of their predictions. As to the ones who aren’t right very often, they tend to drop off our lists. And speaking of “futurists,” I think that term is going a bit out of vogue as some of the conferences and media I follow now feature “thought leaders” as a primary draw.

In the event Yogi isn’t the person you turn to for philosophical insights, here is what Walter Frick had to say in this month’s Harvard Business Review about the art and science of looking at the future. He talked about the new book by Phillip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforcasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

Forecasting is difficult. Still, accurate predictions are essential to good decision making in every realm of life. We are all forecasters. When we think about changing jobs, getting married, buying a home, making an investment, launching a product, or retiring, we decide based on how we expect the future to unfold.

And not to put too fine a point on it (and I hasten to add I’m not Tetlock and Gardner’s literary agent) in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Leonard Mlodinow reviewed both Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking and Superforcasting: The Art and Science of Prediction and found the arguments made by Nisbett (who Malcom Gladwell called “the most influential thinker in my life) lacking, while those made by Tetlock and Gardner compelling.

Stay tuned to this website as we’ll look to the future downstream.

Defense Media Network hosts all of Faircount Media Group’s defense, homeland security and military medicine content. Defense Media Network aggregates all of Faircount Media Group’s publications in one easy web site. For uniformed military, civilian and industry people interested in defense, it is typically the first site bookmarked and it is typically the first place they go for news and analysis.

When a book triggers the reporters and analysts at Faircount Media Group they post a review of it online. Here is the review of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Into the Fire, Defense Media Network posted:

http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/book-review-tom-clancys-op-center-into-the-fire/

Few would argue that empathy is a good thing. After all, we want people to be empathetic toward us, and in the main, we want to be empathetic toward other people. But are we all empathetic, or is it an innate quality that some of us have and others don’t?

You’ve probably heard the saying, “One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic,” before. It is thought to capture an unfortunate truth about empathy: While a single crying child or injured puppy tugs at our heartstrings, large numbers of suffering people, as in epidemics, earthquakes and genocides, do not inspire a comparable reaction.

Perhaps for all of us empathy is only as limited as we choose it to be. See how this might apply to your journey. More here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html

Just two months ago, Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Into the Fire was released for the first time as a trade paperback publication. The first book in the series, Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Out of the Ashes received high praise from all the traditional book reviews. Into the Fire continues in the same tradition. Here is what Publisher’s Weekly had to say about Into the Fire:

Couch and Galdorisi’s stirring sequel to 2014’s Out of the Ashes pits Cmdr. Kate Bigelow, captain of the USS Milwaukee, and her crew against North Korean naval and special forces units intent on seizing the ship, which has been conducting training exercises in the sea off South Korea. The North Koreans have found vast undersea energy deposits in international waters and have made a secret deal to sell them to the Chinese. Taking the ship hostage will give them leverage against the U.S., which will surely oppose this deal. Bigelow proves to be a formidable foe, managing to outrun and outgun her North Korean adversaries. She runs the Milwaukee aground on the small island of Kujido, sets up a defensive base, and settles in to wait for friendly forces to come to the rescue. Tasked with that mission is Chase Williams, director of the secret Op-Center, who with other elements of the U.S. military attempt to pull off a daring, skin-of-the-teeth operation. A terrorist attack on the United Nations provides an exciting coda.

Stay tuned to this website for more on Tom Clancy’s Op-Center

By any measure, Dean Koontz is one of the most successful American authors of our generation. His novels are broadly described as suspense thrillers, but also frequently incorporate elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and mystery. He has had many of his books reach the number one position on the New York Times Bestseller List. He has sold over 450 million copies of his books.

Dean Koontz doesn’t often offer writing advice to the rest of us…but occasionally he does. This advice – what he reads and why and what books he commends to presidents and to the rest of us is worth taking a look at.

More here from Dean Koontz:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/books/review/dean-koontz-by-the-book.html

When Dick Couch and I were offered the opportunity to “re-boot” the Tom Clancy Op-Center series we wanted to pick the spot where we knew there would be churn when the book was published – and for some time afterwards. The Middle East was our consensus choice.

As one indicator of how this region – and this book – has remained topical and relevant, on May 5, St. Martin’s press re-released Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Out of the Ashes as a mass market paperback. The trade paperback was on the USA Today and Publisher’s weekly best-seller lists and continues to sell briskly.

As we suggest – this churn will last a long time. And these maps help tell the story of why the Mideast continues to churn:

http://www.vox.com/a/maps-explain-the-middle-east

We all belong to teams of some kind – at home, at work, at play. Sometimes teams we are on accomplish great things – but sometimes they fall short, often far short. Ever wonder why? I have.

That’s why a short piece under “Gray Matter” caught my eye. It made me think and in many ways cleared up some perceptions – and especially some misperceptions – I had in the past. Here are some nuggets:

• Nowadays, though we may still idolize the charismatic leader or creative genius, almost every decision of consequence is made by a group.
• Groups of smart people can make horrible decisions — or great ones. In other words, some teams were simply smarter than others.
• The smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.
  • First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.
  • Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.
  • Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Intrigued? Read more here.

Earlier this week we shared the dedication for Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Out of the Ashes. That dedication has stood the test of time in the short time the series has been rebooted. Here is our Author’s Introduction to Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Into the Fire:

The setting for Into the Fire is Northeast Asia, the center of enormous strife today and the cauldron where the next superpower confrontation could well take place. The issues causing discord in this region go back several millennia and it is unlikely they will resolve themselves in the next few years. Today’s fiction may, in every sense of the word, be tomorrow’s headlines. At the center of this story is North Korea. As Adam Johnson noted in the Reader’s Guide for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, “It is illegal for a citizen of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] to interact with a foreigner.” In a nutshell, this helps understand why North Korea is the most isolated nation in the world and why that nation’s decision-making is often completely unfathomable. Little wonder The Wall Street Journal called Johnson’s book, “The single best work of fiction published in 2012.”

 Juxtapose this against the widely-heralded United States “Rebalance to the Asia-Pacific Region,” and you have the compelling ingredients for conflict—you don’t have to manufacture them. What North Korea does will continue to bedevil the United States—and the West for that matter—for the foreseeable future. The Hermit Kingdom remains the world’s most mysterious place. As a Center for Naval Analyses Study noted, “The Kim-Jong-un regime has not completely revealed itself to the outside world.” Not to put too fine a point on it, North Korea would likely qualify as one of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s, “Unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

 North Korea is not new to the Tom Clancy Op-Center series. The first book of the original series, Tom Clancy’s Op-Center, was set in North Korea. The plot line for that book, published in 1995, had renegade South Korean soldiers setting off a bomb in Seoul during a festival and make it look like it was done by North Korea. Without putting too fine a point on it, the plot points of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center were skillfully manufactured two decades ago and the reader did not have to suspend disbelief to that great an extent. Now, with today’s confluence of similar geopolitical imperatives in Northeast Asia—with tensions between and among China, North Korea, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and other nations in the region flaring frequently—Into the Fire readers will have no need to suspend disbelief. What is happening in North Korea today could become the world’s worst nightmare tomorrow.

Into the Fire is tomorrow’s headlines today!

Being “creative” is often thought of only in terms of being artistic, and something reserved for only the gifted few who take up the “arts” as an avocation. I like a more expansive definition, like this on suggested by Pamela Druckerman:

I’ve always liked this idea that, somewhere in the world, there’s a gap shaped just like you. Once you find it, you’ll slide right in. That still left a critical question: How do you find this place? This is especially relevant for creative types, who often won’t have a clear career sequence to follow. They’re not trying to become vice president of something. They’re the something. They’ll probably spend lots of time alone in rooms, struggling to make things.

As someone who’s spent years in such rooms, I offered this advice. It applies to many nonartistic jobs, too. I’ve also forgiven myself for being an obsessive. The comedian Louis C.K. said, “Anything you do should be better than anything you did before.” Your bosses and clients will always expect you to deliver good work. You’re the only one who will care enough to make it great work.

Be creative. Do great work – whatever it is. More here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/how-to-find-your-place-in-the-world-after-graduation.html