Only The Best People: Why The Best and The Brightest Sometimes Aren't

Donald Trump came to power on a wave of distrust. Americans had lost faith in government, it’s institutions, and the ability of their government to be honest with them.

It’s a through-line that begins perhaps with the assassination of John Kennedy, runs through the endless lies Americans endured about the Vietnam war, and continues through to the Iraq war; the lies about weapons of mass destruction.

And while Americans often want simple answers, the reality of policy, particularly foreign policy is far more nuanced and complex.

I have said over and over again of late, that I wish I could get into the time machine to read, 50 years from now, what historians will say about this period we are living through.

So it’s equally important that now, almost 20 years after 9/11 and 17 years after the start of the Iraq war that we can look with some perspective at the distrust that got us where we are today.

Again, the reality is nuanced, complicated and shaped by the foibles of human beings. Robert Draper tells that story in his new book To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq

My conversation with Robert Draper:

The Battle of Mosul - The Last Great Battle Against Isis

While many of you can recite the great battles of WW I and II and even the Civil War, the more recent battle that have been fought in the Middle East against ISIS are already forgotten. Certainly, the battle for Mosul was one of those

Beyond that, there is the relevance to events taking place today. The battle for Mosul, which helped take down ISIS in 2017, had as a major component, the forces of the autonomous region of Kurdistan. 40,000 Kurds that were part of the joint military effort in a battle every bit as important and as bloody as those of WW II.

Journalist James Verini was embedded with the Iraqi counter-terrorism service during the battle and tells the remarkable story in They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate

My conversation with James Verini:

War Today: We Pay and They Serve

Once upon a time war had structure. There was a kind of narrative arc to war. A beginning, a middle and clear end. In the modern era, certainly since Vietnam, they have become what Clausewitz called “protracted conflict.” Even the efforts to find resolution are nothing more than wars by other means.

Most have heard the biblical quote, that “you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but be not alarmed. These things must happen, but the end is still to come.”

With respect to America's efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan the end has still not come. Few understand this better than the men and women who served. And few articulate it better than Elliot Ackerman in his new work Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning.

My conversation with Elliot Ackerman:

From Kabul to the Oval Office

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often quoted as saying that “you can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.” This is as true in looking at the world, as it is here at home. There are lots of opinions about the US role and US actions in the world, specifically the Middle East. However, facts come first. And part of those facts include an understanding of the people, the history and the nuance of the region. Our domestic politics has debates every day about who best understand the American people...why should we conduct our global affairs without a similar understanding of others?

When it comes to the Middle East in general, or to Afghanistan, to Iraq and even our international policy architecture in the post war era, few understand the people, the history and the nuance better than Zalmay Khalilzad. He’s served four Presidents and has traveled from a small village in Afghanistan to the pinacle of the Oval Office. He tells that story in The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey Through a Turbulent World

My conversation with Zalmay Khalilzad:

Project Based Learning for the Military and Business

It has often been conventional wisdom that the military is always fighting current wars, based on lessons learned from the last war. That’s why we used centralized WW2 tactics in Vietnam, and then turned around and used the lessons of Vietnam in Iraq.

But the fact is that today there is a whole new breed to military tacticians and strategists whose ideas come not from the last war, but from the creative destruction of places like Silicon Valley and and our most advanced and cutting edge business schools. Ideas that eschew top down, large organizational command and control and instead respond to the need to collaborate, be nimble, and embrace a team oriented approach to management.

In today's military much of the movement in this direction has come from General Stanley McChrystal and his team. As the leader of the Joint Special Operation Command, this new approach was essential in fighting an enemy who itself was decentralized. But It was an approach that had to first break down traditional silos, rethink the link between communications and command, create a flatter organization amidst a culture that was build on top down thinking, and bring flexibility to an institution that revered tradition.

All of these are ideas also apply to business. Now General McChrystal and his team at CrossLead, including co-founder David Silverman,  have combined these ideas and are applying them everyday. They share them in Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

My conversation with Co-Author David Silverman:

A Biography of PTSD

Sometimes the reality of war is just too complex and absurd to be understood in real time. Perhaps that why books about war are so powerful and important. That’s why novels like Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5, The Things they Carried, A Rumor of War, and The Yellow Birds, have been essential for our understating.

Equally important to our understand is grasping the impact of PTSD on those who served or who, for whatever reasons, journeyed into the heart of darkness that is combat.

While embedded with troops in Iraq, journalist David Morris almost died when a Humvee he was riding in encountered an IED. His book, explores his own trauma from that event, as well as the history and science of post-traumatic stress disorder.The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

My conversation with David J. Morris:

Why do we always get it wrong?

Forty plus years ago, in Vietnam, we saw how the best and the brightest could ignore history, ignore truths and facts and conduct one of our nation's most disastrous wars.

Ten years ago this month, we saw how lies, inept personnel and poor and corrupt execution destroyed any hope of success in Iraq. These decisions still plague us today.

Four years ago, back into 2009, we thought that the Obama administration was fighting "The Good War," when it decided to surge US troops and civilians in Afghanistan. Yet again, we ignored history, didn’t send the best personnel, engaged in bureaucratic infighting and thought money could buy our way out. It did not.

Why do we keep making these same mistakes? Is it that the fault is not in stars, but in ourselves? These are some of the issues examined by esteemed and award winning journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his book Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.


My conversation with Rajiv Chandrasekaran:

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Iraq...the worst is yet to come

Washington Post special military correspondent Thomas Ricks predicts that the war in Iraq is likely to last at least another five to ten years.  He argues that invading Iraq was perhaps the worst decision in the history of American foreign policy.  As such we've made a mess that won't be easy to clean up as this preemptive and false war will continue to haunt us.  Ricks' believes that Iraq was an epic mistake for which there are now few good solutions.  He concludes that the worst may still be ahead of us.  His book The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq is put just out in paperback.

My conversation with Thomas Ricks:

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Imagining Iraq

How will history ultimately judge the colossal failures in Iraq? Those failures, compound by arrogance and politics have cost us a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives. Arguably none of it was necessary to achieve our stated objectives.

Charles Duelfer, who served as the deputy chairman of the United Nations weapons inspection organization from 1993 to 2000 and was also the leader of the Iraq Survey Group, which was the CIA-led team charged with the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq details the folly in his new book Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq

My conversation with Charles Duelfer:

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The Forever War

This years winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for Non-Fiction, announced earlier this week,  was Dexter Filkins for his book, The Forever War Finklins is one of the great war correspondences of our time.  He continues to do great work reporting from Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan for the New York Times.  

Last October I had the chance to talk to Filkins about his award winning book:

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