RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s been more than two weeks since the terrible attacks in Paris. And what has been the response? French President Francois Hollande has tried to bring the U.S. and Russia into a wider anti-ISIS coalition. That effort, predictably, has gone nowhere because of the stark differences between the U.S. (which sees Assad as part of the problem in Syria) and Russia (which sees Assad as the solution). The fracas over Turkey’s shoot down of a Russian fighter has further splintered any attempt to create international solidarity against the Islamic State.

So where does that leave us? With a slightly intensified air campaign against ISIS that has now been joined by French aircraft and possibly soon by the British, too, assuming that Prime Minister Cameron wins parliamentary approval, as appears likely. In retaliation for the bombing of a Russian civilian airliner, the Russians have already dropped some bombs and missiles on Raqqa, the ISIS capital, although they are saving most of their firepower for more moderate Syrian rebels. And the U.S. has slightly increased the tempo of its air strikes — it is now willing to target ISIS oil tankers (after warning the drivers to leave their trucks) but still not ISIS oil wells, apparently for fear of causing environmental damage!

Unfortunately, there is no reason to think that air strikes alone will defeat ISIS any more than they have ever defeated any other determined foe in the past century.

Yet President Obama, having considered his options, has apparently decided to continue with the present strategy of relying on air strikes and limited advisory assistance to Iraqi and Syrian forces. Instead of confronting the growing ISIS threat, he insists on denigrating it. The onetime “JV team,” which supposedly wasn’t ready for the big leagues of terrorism, is now labeled by the president as “a bunch of killers with good social media,” which is about as accurate a description as calling Barack Obama “a community organizer with a nice airplane.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelledeen/2015/11/30/the-iran-deals-slow-death/

Back when the negotiations were still under way for The Deal between Iran and the P5+1, I accurately forecast the outcome would be a “No Deal Deal.” I described it this way:

Obama/Kerry/Rhodes won’t take “no” for a definitive answer, so we’re probably going to see a new form of creative appeasement. Short version: It will be a “no deal deal.” Iran promises to try really really hard to be nice and we pay for it. Everyone agrees to commit to a “real” agreement by the end of the year. Iran gets money–the continuation of the monthly payoff, and under-the-table arrangements like the gold shipment the South Africans delivered to Khamenei–and we get smiles.

There is no deal, per se–nobody signs anything–but we get the worst of it any how. If John Kerry thinks that’s enough for a Nobel Peace Prize, he’s got an even lower opinion of the judgment of the Oslo crowd than I do. And he may be right. Chamberlain was widely praised as a great peacemaker for a while, and Carter was greatly admired when he proclaimed we had given up our “inordinate fear of Communism.” And we’ll keep talking, won’t we? And Obama just reiterated–at the Pentagon no less–that guns don’t defeat ideologies, only good ideas do.

The hot air spewing at the Global Climate Summit is settled and irrefutable evidence of man-made global warming. rsk

Henry Kressel for thirty years was the senior partner in the technology practice of Warburg Pincus, one of the most successful private equity and venture capital firms, after a distinguished scientific career at RCA Labs. Norman Winarsky runs the venture capital division of SRI International (originally founded as Stanford Research Institute), one of Silicon Valley’s great idea factories. In this compact volume they offer a step-by-step guide to creating world-shaking new companies with billion-dollar market valuations. Why reveal their secrets? In fact, there are no secrets, only a set of filters that eliminate the vast majority of contenders from the running.

This is a cautionary tale more than an inspirational one, and many of the book’s deepest insights are found in its diagnosis of what went wrong with seemingly bulletproof ventures. Great new companies require the right technology for the right market niche, the right management for the right customers, the right investors for the right executives, the right financial controls for the right take-off trajectory. It sounds simple, and it is. It requires vision, experience, contacts and common sense to bring all these elements together in one venture. There are very few venture firms with the brains and bandwidth to do it all, but the ones who do produce a remarkably high number of hits.

Kressel and Winarsky have no use for the popular notion that start-ups should fail until they succeed, “pivoting” to things that work by trial and error. They write:

Failure has become de rigeur, particularly in software start-ups that initially require little capital and small teams. The idea seems simple enough: you start with an initial venture concept, put together a team, and launch the venture. You develop minimally viable products, keep testing different market and product hypotheses, and pivot based on the market feedback you get. You expect to fail repeatedly and hope to eventually get to product-market fit.

For an old Cold Warrior the scene on a bright October afternoon was surreal: America’s Second Cavalry Regiment crossing a Romanian river on a Soviet-built tactical bridge assembled by the Romanian Army, while overhead Vietnam-era MiG 21s carried out mock attacks, with German-made antiaircraft guns manned by Romanian crews simulating the destruction of the intruding MiGs.

The symbolism of the river crossing brought home to me the precarious condition of the U.S. military presence in Europe. American armor crossed on Romanian bridges because the Army has no tactical bridging in Europe. Romanian antiaircraft guns at the crossing sites highlighted the fact that our Army has no mid- and low-level antiaircraft weapons to protect America’s ground forces in Europe.

The Second Cavalry’s lightly armored Stryker vehicles that crossed on Romanian bridges worked well in Afghanistan against the Taliban. But they would turn into burning coffins when confronting Russian tanks. Numbers tell an even more frightening story: At 30,000, there are fewer American soldiers protecting Western Europe, a piece of the planet that produces 46% of global GDP, than there are cops in New York City.

How shall we rate the state of the world? Take a look around — from Islamic State atrocities in Sinai and Paris, to the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan, to China’s efforts to control the South China Sea, to Russia’s intervention in Syria, to the stabbing intifada in Israel.
You might be reminded of the classic exchange in Woody Allen’s movie Play It Again, Sam. The scene takes place in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Allen spots an exotic-looking brunette staring intently at an abstract painting. Plucking up his courage, he sidles up to her and asks: “That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it. What does it say to you?”

In an accented, bored-sounding voice, she answers: “It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.”
“What are you doing Saturday night?” Allen asks.

“Committing suicide.”

“How about Friday night?”

So there we are. How do we move forward? Let me begin by offering a few thoughts on how we got here. And then allow me to play National Security Adviser to the next president and offer some ideas for how best to conduct US future foreign policy.

The word “hubris,” from the Greek, refers to overbearing pride or excessive presumption. In his latest book, the distinguished British historian Alistair Horne takes us on an episodic journey through the violent first half of the 20th century to see where and how hubris led to military debacles costing millions of lives and leading to the downfall of warlords, regimes and empires. It is an eminently provocative and readable volume in no small part because Mr. Horne, who has written more than two dozen books on modern European history, here ventures into what for him is the new territory of East Asia. Readers are the beneficiaries of this voyage of discovery.

Even students of military history are unlikely to know much if anything about the 1939 Battle of Nomonhan, fought between the Japanese and the Soviets in one of the world’s most rugged landscapes, the bleak steppes between then Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Soviet-dominated Mongolia. Mr. Horne brilliantly reconstructs this long-forgotten battle—featuring tanks clashing on the trackless wastes—and connects it to future military cataclysms, including the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad a few short years later. It’s as if he has discovered a hidden spring from which mighty rivers of blood were to flow.

In the closet of Abdalrahman, eighth-century caliph of Spain, this note was discovered after his death: “I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honours, power and pleasure, have waited on my call.…In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen: O Man! place not thy confidence in this present world.”

In a footnote to this item, in the fifth volume of “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Edward Gibbon writes: “If I may speak of myself (the only person of whom I can speak with certainty), my happy hours have far exceeded, and far exceed, the scanty number of the caliph of Spain; and I shall not scruple to add, that many of them are due to the pleasing labour of the present composition.”

America’s role in the Global War on Terror grows stranger by the hour. President Obama’s fight against ISIS and other radical Islamic terrorists — such as it is — has entered the Twilight Zone. That is the only explanation for Obama’s increasingly bizarre tactics and statements against these existentially dangerous savages.

• After 15 months of airstrikes against ISIS, America finally managed to bomb 116 trucks that smuggle oil out of ISIS territory, generating some $1.2 million in clandestine cash daily. That sum buys plenty of knives for beheadings, Kalashnikovs for mass shootings, and plastique for suicide vests. France now leads the War on Terror, in the wake of ISIS’s November 13 massacre in Paris. Obama must have reckoned that, with France bombing from in front, he might as well bomb from behind.

But even this is kinder and gentler.

“This is our first strike against tanker trucks,” Operation Inherent Resolve Colonel Steve Warren told journalists from Baghdad on November 18. (A November 23 raid destroyed 238 more trucks.) Then he added this detail:

“To minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike.” Each leaflet reads, “Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them.” It continues, “Warning: Airstrikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life.”

Reminiscing after World War II, former chief of staff Gen. George C. Marshall remarked: “With Chennault in China and MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, I sure had a combination of temperament.” If Marshall had also recalled the European Theater, he doubtless would have included George Patton among the exasperating commanders he had to manage.

Winston Groom is a best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction, including accounts of the Civil War battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg and, most recently, “The Aviators,” a look at the trio of Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle and Charles Lindbergh during the early years of flight. In “The Generals,” he sets his sights on Patton, MacArthur and Marshall. “Their stories are linked as closely as any other set of generals in history,” he writes, “and when they died they passed into legend.”

One strength of Mr. Groom’s effort is the portrait he draws of these men in their formative years. He is a good storyteller, and after a chapter devoted to the ancestors and early years of each, he weaves together their exploits on the Western Front in World War I. There are gripping tales of Patton urging tanks forward and MacArthur assuring his superiors that he will take an enemy position or his name will head the casualty list. Marshall, meanwhile, was learning the intricacies of operational planning, initially with the 1st Infantry Division and later with Gen. John J. Pershing’s headquarters in France. Pershing, commanding the American Expeditionary Forces, had close ties to all three men, including romantic interests in Patton’s sister and the heiress Louise Cromwell Brooks, MacArthur’s future first wife.