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Wonderful question!Throughout my entire career as a serial entrepreneur and writer, I have been fascinated with a question that correlates directly with becoming part of the 1%:Is there some unique way of thinking that gives self-made billionaire entrepreneurs an edge?I’ve read more billionaire entrepreneur biographies than I can count, researched what they have in common, and met and interviewed several.Without a doubt, luck plays a central role. But luck alone doesn’t explain the repeated success of entrepreneurs who create billion dollar company after billion dollar company or who have enduring multibillion dollar companies: entrepreneurs like Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.By researching these entrepreneurs, I’ve found unique ways of thinking that aren’t commonly known among most entrepreneurs (even successful ones).The process of uncovering these principles has fundamentally changed how I think about business. Some have served as a reminder that it’s consistently doing simple things that matter most.Photo Credit: Steve Jennings/Getty Images For TechCrunch (Elizabeth Holmes), Michelle Andonian (Elon Musk), Joi Ito (Reid Hoffman), AP Photo-Nati Harnik (Charlie Munger), Steve Jurvetson (Jeff Bezos), World Economic Forum/Moritz Hager (Ray Dalio), Marcin Mycielski (Larry Page), Matthew Yohe (Steve Jobs), Stuart Isett/Fortune Most Powerful Women (Warren Buffett)For each entrepreneur I studied, I’ve uncovered a:Billionaire entrepreneur strategy. The overarching principle that has served as a foundation for the billionaire’s success. I focused on one specific, non-obvious strategy.Billionaire entrepreneur hack. How successful entrepreneurs are applying the strategies to grow their business.1. Charlie Munger (billionaire investor): Analyze what can go wrong instead of what can go right.Photo Credit: AP Photo-Nati HarnikBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Until I read billionaire Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack, I thought the key to success was creating a vision, setting goals, and working hard toward them every day.If I failed, I thought it was because I did one of these steps wrong.Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman and long-time Warren Buffett business partner, shows another equally important path to success; thinking through what can go wrong.Things constantly go wrong no matter how smart and hardworking you are.Realizing this, Munger continuously and methodically considers every way a plan could go wrong and plots out how to avoid each obstacle. He says:“Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead — through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat. Avoid these qualities and you will succeed. Tell me where I’m going to die so I don’t go there.”Munger’s approach helps him avoid roadblocks and be more prepared when he inevitably runs into one. Furthermore, combining goal setting and obstacle avoidance is backed up by a growing body of over 100+ academic studies on the topic. When people only ‘fantasize’ about the future, they actually end up taking less action than they would if they also thought about what could go wrong and made plans to avoid it.Bottom line: Being both pessimistic and optimistic is better than just being optimistic. One of the best ways to win is not to lose.Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:To apply this principle, test your plan with this three-step pre-mortem process developed by Meathead Movers CEO and cofounder, Aaron Steed:List the ways the project could failAssign a probability to each possibilityPrioritize actions that can be taken to avoid failureSteed created the process after noticing that certain projects at his 350-person company were getting poor results.Rather than adding new procedures to help those projects succeed, he developed the pre-mortem process to remove the barriers that were causing them to fail.One of the obstacles that Munger proactively avoids is psychological biases. As an additional resource, we compiled a 27 page report that summarizes the 22 psychological biases that Munger has identified throughout his 70-year career.2. Warren Buffett (billionaire investor): Use checklists to avoid stupid mistakes.Photo Credit: Stuart Isett/Fortune Most Powerful WomenBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Generally speaking, there are two types of mistakes: those that are stupid and those that are ignorant.Ignorant mistakes happen when you don’t know better. Stupid mistakes happen when you do know better.Stupid mistakes are the hardest to stomach because they’re the easiest to solve. Yet people, especially smart people, make them over and over.Warren Buffett and his 40-year business partner, Charlie Munger, don’t attribute their success to raw intelligence or brilliant ideas. Instead, they attribute a large part of it to consistently avoiding stupid mistakes by religiously following basic tenets and ideas they know will work.Talking about his and Buffett’s strategy in his book, Munger states:“We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.”To counteract the often negative influence emotions can have in investment decisions, Buffett and Munger use several checklists, including ones for investing, problem solving, and psychological biases.They claim that using these checklists have been crucial to their miraculous 21.6 percent return on investment for four decades, which is double the market average.More recently, checklists have been receiving well-deserved attention as a result of theChecklist Manifesto, written by Harvard Medical School professor of surgery, Atul Gawande.In a fascinating study by the World Health Organization, 8 hospitals who adopted a 19-point checklist saw deaths from surgery nearly cut in half!Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:Blake Goodwine has used a decision-making checklist to build his Lionize Media Group into a network of niche media sites with tens of millions of monthly visitors.His problem-solving checklist, shown below, lays out the path to a successful business strategy, and counteracts any internal biases that impede him from reaching his desired destination:Brainstorm. Dream up as many possible solutions as you can. This helps you avoid availability bias, which often results in us choosing the first solution that comes to mind rather than the best solution.Test. Test as many potential solutions as you can afford to. This avoids the confirmation bias of rationalizing the one solution you chose.Evaluate. Have a minimum success criteria for each experiment. This allows you to avoid doubling down on bad ideas that aren’t working in an effort to recoup sunk costs.Learn. Dive deeply into the data and learn from EVERY experiment, not just the one that worked best. Avoid taking mistakes personally and feeling shame over something that did not work.Goodwine says:“Even if this checklist helps you make big decisions just slightly better, it will change the entire trajectory of your life and business. It has for me.”As an additional resource, we compiled some of the best expert advice on how to create actionable checklists into a step-by-step guide.3. Ray Dalio (billionaire investor): Learn how to think independently so you can be smarter than everyone else.Photo Credit: World Economic Forum/Moritz HagerBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:“You can’t make money agreeing with the consensus view,” asserts Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world ($169+ billion under management).Doing what everyone else does is going to bring you average results. That’s the definition of average.To Dalio, the key to having enduring, extraordinary performance is to do what others won’t or can’t AND to be right.This is easier said than done. For example, 86% of professional investors do not beat the market. The numbers are sobering for entrepreneurship too: 30.9–37.6% of new businesses fail in the first three years.In a recent op-ed, Dalio explains why it’s so hard:“Whenever you’re betting against the consensus there’s a significant probability you’re going to be wrong, so you have to be humble.”The good news is that with enough practice, you can put the odds in your favor.Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:Thinking independently is more than one simple hack. Broadly speaking, it requires:Courage to stand up against the herd when you’re right and everyone else is wrongAccess to or understanding of information that other people don’t haveUnique ways of analyzing that informationHere are ways to hone each of those abilities:Ability #1: Stand Up Against The HerdWe are wired to want to fit in socially. So, standing up against the herd is extremely hard.Fortunately, courage is a skill that can be practiced.Emerson Spartz, founder and CEO of Spartz Inc., a digital media company that owns a network of sites like Dose and OMG Facts (45+M monthly visitors), practices daily what he calls comfort zone challenges. Spartz says:“These are little things I do that cause me to feel uncomfortable and socially awkward, but have no real negative impact.”These challenges train him to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, so he has courage when he really needs it.His favorite challenge is the coffee cup challenge, which is simply asking for a 10 percent discount when you buy coffee.Ability #2: Develop An Information AdvantageOne of the easiest ways to beat the herd is to have an information advantage. Here are four ways to get that advantage:Build deep relationships with people who have accomplished the goals you want to accomplish. By building relationships based on mutual trust and respect, where others want you to succeed, people share information they never would publicly. For more on this strategy, read Reid Hoffman’s strategy (see #7).Learn from other fields and bring the insights into your own. Most people focus on learning about their own field, even though other fields have proven insights that are applicable. Being an expert-generalist (a term coined by Orit Gadiesh, the chairwoman of multibillion dollar consulting company,Bain & Company) and going wide into adjacent fields will quickly give you a unique perspective.Build a lab, not an experiment. Entrepreneurs who can conduct more experiments will discover more new data and therefore have a big advantage. These entrepreneurs look at their business as a lab where they constantly run experiments. Many entrepreneurs fail here because they look at their business as one big experiment to test just one idea.Be good at pulling out the wisdom of others. Many successful people are not able to articulate how they do what they do. They just do it. Asking the right questions can help bring to the surface this tacit knowledge. One way that famous technology investor, Peter Thiel, uncovers this knowledge is by asking the founders he backs what they strongly believe that no one else does.Ability #3: Develop An Analytical AdvantageThis is where many of the billionaire strategies mentioned in this article can be applied:Charlie Munger (see #1)Elon Musk (see #8)As an additional resource, we summarized Ray Dalio’s seminal ebook, Principles, and interviews he has done over the years into a step-by-step guide on how to develop your own independent opinions.4. Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder): Invest in what will NOT change instead of only what will changePhoto Credit: Steve JurvetsonBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Judging by the media coverage of entrepreneurs, it’s easy to think that the #1 key to success is hopping on the biggest trends.Jeff Bezos shows that big trends are only part of the story. It’s also about doing the exact opposite and focusing on what does not change.Since its founding in 1994, Amazon has focused, like a laser, on the simple idea that people will always want to buy products as cheaply, easily and as quickly as possible. Therefore, Amazon can safely make huge technology investments in these areas and know they will pay off in the future.Bezos explained why this approach makes sense at the 2012 Amazon Web Services conference:“It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ or ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’”The strategy seems to be working. Amazon just became the most valuable retailer in the world this year, and its growth is speeding up, while the growth of its main competitor, Walmart, is slowing down.Bottom line: Become the best in one core area by continually investing in it over time, rather than jumping from trend to trend and starting over each time.Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:To apply this principle to your business, identify a core customer need that will likely stay the same (even as technology and culture evolve) to which your company is uniquely positioned to cater.Then build your company around it.This is what Ohio-based entrepreneur Jason Duff did.Realizing that nostalgia doesn’t get the attention it deserves, Duff built his whole real estate business around it. Nostalgia is the universal inclination to remember the past sentimentally in order to derive meaning from our lives.Duff applied this insight in his company by focusing on restoring historic downtown buildings rather than tearing them down and building modern structures.He used the following formula to create hundreds of jobs in his community and build several multimillion dollar businesses.Purchase overlooked historic properties at a large discountInvest heavily in repurposing and restoring themTell the story of what they meant (and could mean again) to the community through social media.In doing so, he has increased the value of the property, by tapping into the warm feelings held by the townspeople who remember coming to the building in their youth. His Facebook posts providing details on renovation projects regularly attract hundreds of likes.5. Elizabeth Holmes (31-year-old billionaire): Be laser focused on a single problem with no backup plan for your career.Photo Credit: Steve Jennings/Getty Images For TechCrunchBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Elizabeth Holmes, the 31 year old founder of Theranos (valued at $9 billion) doesn’t believe in backup plans. Speaking to a group of students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Holmes shared her philosophy:“I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted that you’re not going to succeed.”Conventional thinking says you should diversify when it comes to your career, business, and strategies within your business. The rationale is that if one option fails, you’ll still have something to fall back on.The problem with this approach is that it takes precious time and resources away from your best option. As a result, you decrease the odds that either one will work.Holmes’s approach is to spend extra time determining what to focus on and then put all of her energy into that one thing. The same philosophy is used by Warren Buffett who only makes 2–3 investments per year.Another benefit of going all in on one career path is that you are building up your skills, network, and reputation in that field, so even if things don’t go as you had planned, you can still use your ‘career capital’ to pursue your next big idea.Finally, Katy Milkman, a professor at Wharton, has performed research that shows that backup plans come with another unexpected downside. She explains the downside in an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast:“Because you know that all your eggs aren’t in this one basket, you may feel more confident and comfortable relaxing and letting up and not pushing as hard toward your primary goal since you know things will be OK, you can always go with your back up plan.”Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:By not having a backup plan, you can put all your energy into your primary plan.But, in order for this to work, you need to have put in the extra effort to make sure you’ve prioritized correctly.The “one thing” philosophy is a powerful approach that ensures you stay on track.The heart of this approach is taking extra time to prioritize, so you always have clear view of the one most important thing you can do for the day, for the week, for the month, and for the year to push your vision forward.This approach:Forces you to get a deeper understanding of what’s really importantIncreases the odds of completing that one thingRyan Simonetti, co-founder of Convene, which has 150+ employees, applies the “one thing” philosophy by waking up every morning and asking himself,“What is the one thing I need to do today to help my company accomplish its singular vision such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”In an Entrepreneur.com article, Simonetti shares,“When you compound this process over days, months and years, the impact is truly astounding. It is the 80/20 rule on steroids.”Professor Edward D. Hess has spent much of his career studying the outliers (both private and public companies) that achieved above average shareholder returns. What he shares in his book, Smart Growth, is that focus on a singular vision is one of the key themes of successful companies.6. Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder): Use storytelling to make your vision more compelling; not mission-speak.Photo Credit: Matthew YoheBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Having a powerful vision is essential for all entrepreneurs, but if you are going to excel, your stakeholders need to buy into your vision.That’s where most people fail.For many, the vision ends up becoming a few lines of mission-speak on their corporate website.Yet, there are other leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk who seem to have the superpower to distort reality.After listening to them, it feels like their vision of the world is inevitable and http://critical.It is easy to attribute this ability to charisma, but there is a case to be made that Jobs was just really good at storytelling, which is a learnable skill.According to academic studies on storytelling, great stories transport others into a whole other world and, in doing so, alter their beliefs, cause a loss of access to real-world facts, evoke emotions, and significantly reduce their ability to detect inaccuracies.Throughout history, visionary storytellers have changed the course of societies and industries:Billionaire Entrepreneur Hacks:1. Turn Your Vision Into A Detailed Story And Picture1–800-GOT-JUNK? founder and CEO Brian Scudamore captures his company’s vision through a document called the Painted Picture.In vivid detail, the document explains what Scudamore expects the company to be like in 3 to 5 years. This description includes both quantitative details (like the number of people the company will employ and how many locations it will have) and qualitative ones (like how employees will describe the culture to their families).The Painted Picture was paramount in 1–800-GOT-JUNK? growing its revenues to more than $100 million, Scudamore says. He recommends the following steps "retreat, visualize, and ask" to create your own:Retreat: First, grab a notebook and find a quiet space where you don’t have any distractions from your daily life.Visualize: Transplant yourself five years into the future. See yourself looking around at your life and your business. Imagine that you’re really in that place where the future HAS already happened. For example, if you have a five-year old child, imagine your child is now ten. Then, imagine yourself five years older.Ask: Once you’ve transported yourself to that place, ask yourself some questions that will help you “crystal ball” the future. Here are some key questions to ask yourself:- What is your top-line revenue?- How many people are on your team?- How would your people describe the culture of your company when talking to a family member?- What is the press saying about your business? Be as specific as possible: what would your local paper say about your company? What would your favorite magazine say?- What do your people love about your vision and where the company is headed?- How would a customer describe their experience with you? What would they say to their best friend?- What accomplishment are you most proud of? What accomplishment are your people most proud of?- What do you do better than anyone else on the planet?- Describe your office environment in detail.- Describe your service area. Who are your customers and how do they feel?As an additional resource, read Brian Scudamore’s article on the science-backed reasons that creating a vision is so powerful.2. Share Your Vision Often And EverywhereCameron Herold, author of Double Double, CEO coach and globally renowned speaker has helped tens of thousands of high growth entrepreneurs and leaders from 6 continents create a Vivid Vision for their organizations.One of the biggest mistakes that Herold sees leaders make is keeping their vision to themselves rather than sharing it with others.He recommends sharing your Vivid Vision as widely and as often as you can. This means sharing it with your team, family and friends, investors, media, customers, potential employees, and partners. He explains why:“When you’re a startup just getting traction, you can’t offer the salary and benefits that a world-class employee would normally get at a large company. You haven’t accomplished a lot that you can talk to the media about. So, what you’re always selling is the sizzle; not the steak. The sizzle is your vision!”A few ways and reasons that Herold recommends sharing your vision with different stakeholders include:Media Exposure. Herold recommends turning every conversation with the media into a conversation about the vision:“What makes a company like Uber get covered is not the fact that it’s a taxi service; it’s the story that Uber is completely changing the transportation industry. If companies like Uber only talked about what they did now, they’d be boring and they’d only get a fraction of the media coverage.”Employee Filtering. Herold says that the Vivid Vision should act like a magnet; it should attract those who are committed and repel those who aren’t. He shares one example of what one of his CEO clients told his employees after sharing the vivid vision with them for the first time, “15% of you hated what you heard. That’s alright. Now’s an ok time for you to leave. 5% of you loved it. Let’s build it. This is what we’re working toward.”Customer Relationships. Herold advises his clients to send out the vivid vision quarterly to their customers, “90% clients may not care, but even if just a few do, you’ll be able to take your relationship to a whole new level.”Employee Alignment. Herold says that sharing the vision internally leads to more clarity, less in-fighting, and less bureaucracy, because there isn’t confusion about what everyone is working toward. It’s crystal clear and not questionable. Herold recommends that every quarter, employees reread the vivid vision as a team and do a few things: (1) Highlight each sentence with green, yellow, and red depending on how it’s doing so everyone can visually see how the vision is coming alive. (2) Share how they individually can make each sentence of the vivid vision come true. (3) Circle sentences that really excite them and read those sentences out loud.Executive / Board Alignment. In a Forbes interview, Herold recommends having one executive read all or part of the vivid vision at the beginning of your meetings meetings with executive and board members.As an additional resource, go here to download Cameron’s free book chapter on how to create a Vivid Vision.7. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder): Build deep, long-term relationships that give you insider knowledge.Photo Credit: Joi ItoBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:If you reverse engineer the relationships of many successful entrepreneurs, as I have, you will realize that many people work with the same people over and over in their careers.In the technology world, this phenomenon has been cataloged extensively (see the mafias of Oracle, Netscape, Fairchild, PayPal, andMyspace). Each of these companies have spawned new multi-billion dollar enterprises as a result of former employees starting new companies together, advising each other, investing in each other, and much more.These long-term, collaborative networks are often referred to as mafias. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and part of the PayPal mafia, has put these types of relationships at the centre of his career and makes a case that others should too. In the information age, one of the best ways to get information is not from just being better at searching Google, it’s from learning how to build a network and get the information you need through that network, Hoffman says.In a fascinating interview on This Week In Startups, Hoffman goes so far as to say that the biggest mistake in his career was deciding that in order to be a product manager he needed to learn product management skills. In retrospect, he would have focused on placing himself in the right network by working at one of the fastest growing, futuristic companies at that time: Netscape.Hoffman refers to the information that only exists in people’s heads as the ‘dark net.’ This includes information that is not searchable online, in any book, or in any classroom and never will be.Getting access to this ‘dark net’ information from people who have accomplished what you want to accomplish is extremely valuable and will help you think independently. The ‘dark net’ includes people’s lessons learned and hacks, topics that are too sensitive to talk about because they make someone look bad, and tacit knowledge (knowledge that people have but aren’t able to articulate).Hoffman explains the power of the ‘dark net’:“Ten extremely informed individuals who are happy to share what they know with you when you engage them can tell you a lot more than a thousand people you only know in the most superficial way.”Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:Deep long-term relationships don’t happen by chance. Just as divorce rates are high, so too are partnerships that go sour.Two keys on building long-term relationships that I’ve learned from researching and writing on the art and science of building deep and authentic relationships for Forbes include:Key #1: Be extremely picky about whom you spend a lot of time around.Our time is limited. Every minute you spend with one person is a minute you’re NOT spending with someone else. Below are characteristics other relationship builders and I use for filtering our professional network:1. Professional network. Qualities that I look for:They value relationships over pure achievement and are willing and able to invest in the relationshipThey are giversThey are open to being vulnerable and to sharing their true experiencesI genuinely enjoy spending time with themThey are constantly growing and learningThey share similar values2. Close business relationships. Rohit Anabheri, founder of the firm Circa Ventures($10M+ revenue), has built multiple multimillion dollar companies before he turned 30. He has built each business through business partnerships by using the following rules:Have a mutual, enduring commitment to the relationship so you can get through tough timesComplement each other in multiple ways; strengths and weaknesses, visionary and execution, and styleHave clear, mutually-agreed-upon rolesKey #2: Invest the time.No matter how successful you are, building deep relationships still takes a lot of time. So, it’s critical to turn relationship building into a habit.8. Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla co-founder): Use decision trees to make better decisions.Photo Credit: Michelle AndonianBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Many thought that Elon Musk was crazy when he plowed all of his PayPal earnings into SpaceX and Tesla. However, there was a proven logic behind Musk’s decisions. Musk, like Warren Buffett, uses decision trees to make big decisions.Decision trees are particularly useful for avoiding stupid risks and big bets that aren’t likely to succeed.Making unlikely big bets:In an interview with tech entrepreneur Kevin Rose, Musk admits that he thought the most likely outcome for both SpaceX and Tesla was failure. However, they were both so important to the future of humanity and had so much potential that he felt the risk was worth it.Probabilistically, it makes sense. Here’s why.Financially, if Musk thought that SpaceX could be a $100 billion company and that the chance of success was 30 percent, the expected return statistically using a decision tree is $30 billion. Not bad!Musk could have easily focused on a company with a $1 billion potential and a 80 percent chance of success. But, in this case, the expected return would only be $800 million.Avoiding “Russian roulette” risks:If there is even a tiny chance that doing something could destroy you, it’s a very bad idea.In a talk, Warren Buffett compares these types of situations to Russian roulette:“If you hand me a gun with a million chambers in it, and there’s a bullet in one chamber, and you said, ‘Put it up to your temple. How much do you want to be paid to pull it once?’ I’m not going to pull it. You can name any sum you want, but it doesn’t do anything for me.”Smart people fall for this mistake all the time. In the same talk, Buffett shares the story of the collapse of the multibillion-dollar hedge fund Long-Term Capital.The leadership team included the smartest people in the industry along with Nobel laureates. Yet they played Russian roulette. For every dollar of their money they invested, they borrowed $25. This made them extremely susceptible to a downturn in the market, even a small one. This happened in 1998 and the firm went under in just a few months.Buffett’s point was that all of the company leaders were already extremely wealthy and had spent decades building reputations. So, the incremental benefit of growing richer was small compared with the risk of losing everything, which they ultimately did.Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:Utilizing a decision tree does not require a PhD. All that’s needed is a basic understanding of probability. Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to use the principles in your decision making:Understand the different outcomes that could happen (both positive and negative)Calculate the expected return or loss of each outcome:Attach a probability to each outcomeUnderstanding the magnitude of the return or lossMultiple the probability by the magnitude (probability of winning * value of win) — (probability of losing * cost of the loss)Add up and subtract all of the expected returns and lossesTo get started you don’t need to know the exact probabilities. Just following the process will give you unique insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise (i.e., the power of unlikely big bets and the risk of Russian roulette decisions).For a step-by-step guide on how to create decision trees, visit this page. It is an online companion to an economics textbook.—Special thanks to Rachel Zohn, Sheena Lindahl, Emily Shapiro, Austin Epperson, and Ian Chew who volunteered their time to edit this article and do research.Also thank you to Jessica Newfield, Antonia Donato, Amber Tucker, andEduardo Litonjua for reviewing the article and providing insightful feedback.Disclosure: Some of the contributors featured in this article are members of Seminal, a selective council that distills research-backed, actionable insights from world-class entrepreneurs and leaders.

STRUCTUREI think it is important to differentiate the groups involved at bringing content to the consumer. The historical structure has been, and arguably still is, concept, design, production, distribution. These have been challenged during media and digital convergence in terms of who specifically performs a given task but, regardless, the tasks still exist. Creative control (concept/design) rests with those that consider themselves creative, production (development) focuses on the management of the creation, and distribution seeks to manage recuperation costs (since 99% of entertainment products are front loaded; money spent before money earned). Cash is the blood that flows through these separate organs and this question, ultimately, asks how the distribution of entertainment products are changing to move blood to different platforms for transmedia creation.The evolution of the studio system has turned these conglomerates into finance and distribution entities (***US Only***). Since they manage the front facing revenue streams, they are obviously only interested in channels that either (1) increase that revenue stream (profit) or (2) promote the idea that increases the revenue stream (marketing). This model was established in an era well before media convergence so, of course, the business units are siloed according to platform. These two rules will not change unless a plausible model is found, which brings us to the feature of Hollywood and large corporation financing that drives creatives absolutely bananas: copycats.HISTORYHollywood is built in the idea of copycats. It is the nature of society & culture (tropes) and information products (you need to know about what you want to know about; think about: why you want to see a trailer, why your read in the comfy chair at B&N, why you "look inside" on Amazon.com books).The goal of the business end of media conglomerates is to mitigate their risk in front loaded investment by supplying a product that they know will be successful based on past performance. The great steps in evolution of modern cinema were often based on mistakes: Steven Spielberg gave birth to the modern blockbuster by spending way above budget on Jaws and Universal decided the only way to save it was to market the living hell out of it. It was a success so other studios then copied.CHANGEMost conglomerates are scanning the horizons for clues to how they can restructure to accommodate narrative that extends across platforms. I would argue that, on the strategic 5-10 year horizon, most studios want to have the ability to create true Henry Jenkins' definition transmedia projects but they don't know what steps need to be take in the 1-5 year range to hit the next horizon. As a first step, most have come to recognize the value of IP which is both driving the search as well as blocking the ability to move forward. Business Affairs teams' current goal is to acquire properties (for distribution) from people who are creating it. Those creators are not interested in giving away their work forever (they see the success Lucas has by maintaining control) so block the BA units and…stalemate. New creators who might be willing to sell their first work to "get a foot in Hollywood's door" don't have the name recognition to support a multi-million or billion dollar multiplatform project.WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?So now that we know that all of these fresh new thinkers will probably not be successful in the studio system, who will make it? Those that have experience (kind of) doing it before; we are looking for the Spielberg mistake in transmedia storytelling. I believe that it will look like a multi-hyphen very very well accomplished creative and producer who has the ability to walk into each one of the respective silos and have the studio executives fall at their feet: The JJ Abrams, James Camerons, GdTs of the world. They need to be multi-hyphens because not all film makers are good at writing, game design, interactive design, etc. Having a strong team is bound to help too.From here, a basic and successful business model will be created by the MBAs in BizDev of the studios. It will draw heavily on Modern Portfolio Theory and behavioral economics which shows that the return on multiple investments of different risks can be higher than any individual investment when taking into account emotional fluctuations. Since film, in particular, is such a risky business (80/20 rule), mitigating it across platforms will be enticing and optimizing the model through coordinated production, distribution, and ultimately, narrative (because of media convergence) will bring about a C-level doctrine to restructure to accommodate transmedia projects (**Note that not all media are or should be transmedia, so there will be some fighting to be expected). There will still need to be a new approach to IP control as well and the major studios will probably move out of their old distribution and financing production focus to more integrated IP management. This will, of course, fall upon the business affairs units and we all know that all that lawyers care about is precedent. With the proper C-level direction, a new legal strategy can be tested and the wheel of media evolution spins.EFFORTS BEING MADEThere are exceptions to everything that I just said and I'm happy to point the ones I know about out. While some of the major studios in the US believe that they have tried a transmedia approach and "are passed that because it failed," I believe that European studios has made some great strides. Because the financial structure for Arts/Culture is very different from the Hollywood approach, investment in new forms of media is dabbled in. I'm familiar with at least two major European media companies (One is in France and rhymes with Orange) that are exploring transmedia work but there are still narrative, culture and consumption habits that probably won't cross borders to the US. I'm rooting for them though.Less conglomerated media companies are exploring transmedia content development in the US too but, the fact that special divisions are created to explore this makes it fairly apparent that the main units aren't too interested in investing major strategy. Transmedia work requires that all units be involved not a special team of no units. This coincides with the fact that some are in sinking industries because of the Googles and Apples of the world defining the latest round of media and digital convergence.The marketing departments are often willing to venture into new directions because they are a cost center that proves their spends based off of things like impressions rather than financial return on investment. There are definite limitations to the narrative development within the marketing department because of the lack of margin on impressions for planning out a coordinated narrative installment. From a consumer perspective, they tend not to trust narrative from marketers because it is historically a blatant attempt to influence them.While the new Google-led model is enticing and bound to make some a splash in content development (eh-hem, personal plug: http://ro.me), the model will still need some heavy tweaking as people battle to get control of their IP once again with digital distribution. What the Tech/New Media model more interestingly brings is new capital models, namely VC and Angel funding. A creative Venture Capitalist may be more willing to challenge historical models with a new approach. Lesson here: every transmedia creative should work with someone experienced in business development to create projections and models for their project and pitching to formal business investors; hire an MBA student for their summer internship.SIDENOTEI don't think that television will be dying anytime soon though. It is engrained in our society and, even though there are massive movements to move the screen to multiple screens (tablets, laptops, phones, etc.), people still think of large screen in the room as a television. Because they think of it as a television, they will expect it to operate as a television. Apple isn't rumored to be making a massive new monitor to stick in your living room. They are making a television and the social script that accompanies the television means that people will expect to use, at least part of it, in the broadcast consumption script.CLIFF NOTES VERSIONThe evolution of the studio system now defines them as strictly a finance and distribution machine. Creative and production are still made through independent entities that are hired for a specific project/platform.Entertainment is such a high risk industry that major studio investment won't happen until tested business models are found and business models won't be tested until they are actually used. This Catch-22 can only be broken by accident (unplanned event or change in environment) or by a very skilled and very hyped (in demand) creative who has the ability to think and work across platformsThe European industry does not necessarily have these restrictions because of alternative financing models (government, grant, etc). There are projects in the works that are distributed by large conglomerates for their local markets. These projects probably won't cross borders due to consumption habits, cultural barriers, and narrative styles.The new media/tech industry will definitely have an impact in the near future but they also have an uphill battle against the low-production value reputation (when compared to traditional media).IP control is a major issue that won't be changed until there is legal precedent. Since studios are set on obtaining all creative control over an project and willing to sue anyone and everyone to maintain their traditional distribution models as well as shutting down new distribution models, there is little sign that new approaches to IP will be explored.

Yes, but the sources are hard to find.Here is a source showing that ISIS was created by the West:HOW THE WEST CREATED ISISThe following is a repost of an article that appeared at the Italian site Nena News in 2014. This article puts context to the Russian report, which in turn puts context to the amazing confession “we’re going to keep the oil.” As this Nena News report makes clear, the idea of keeping other people’s oil goes back over a decade and fits in neatly with the cooperation with both ISIS (and other terrorist groups) and the Kurds. It shows that the Kurds have long been part of the West’s oil theft scheme. It also shows that the idea of partitioning Iraq and Syria was an Israeli idea that was wholeheartedly endorsed by the Western powers.Many Westerners have complained bitterly of the uncontrolled migration to Europe and many have alleged high crime among immigrants, while others insist immigration is good for us no matter what. The upshot of this controversy is a split between the rank and file on the one hand and the elites on the other, and between the EU and individual states. And, let us recall, between US and European conservatives on the one hand and Western liberals on the other. And if we can rely on the information provided below, the answer is neither to hate, nor to pander to, people of any religion or lack thereof, or any ethnicity. And not to claim that Westerners are exempt of all blame and it is all the fault of the Arabs who lost their homes and families to Western bombs.Yet very few are willing to admit that the root of the problem is the West’s support for the Arab Spring, starting in the early 2000s, and the fact that the West was in fact, wittingly or not, supporting terrorists who were ripping apart individual Middle Eastern countries, especially Syria, Iraq and Libya. Wahhabist terrorists in territories that had never known Wahhabists. The report below clearly shows that this Western support, military training, materiel (guns, ammo, ordnance, missiles, etc), money – in exchange for the same oil as today, notably from Deir Ez-Zor – and moral support via the msm and the political class on both the left and the right, in the supposedly disparate administrations of mostly Bush Jr., Obama and Trump, is the main driver of the conflicts, without which the immigration to Europe would have been but a manageable trickle. If the Westerners suffering from the fallout of these Middle Eastern conflicts could bring themselves to admit that it was their own nations that generated the massive waves of migration, perhaps they could find reconciliation and redemption, tone down the internecine Western conflicts and start to solve them peacefully and in a civilized and brotherly way. But today, the West is far from achieving anything resembling reconciliation or brotherhood, either amongst each other or between them and their international guests.The contribution appearing below is intended as a possible first step toward understanding why the West is in this crisis and how the next one can be averted. The answer is simple: The West – starting with the US – needs to start tending to its own business and stop pretending to know what is best for others. I am reminded of the last sentence in Voltaire’s novel Candide: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.Yes, indeed. It is way past time to tend our own garden.This commentary and notes [in brackets] are by Vince Dhimos.HOW THE WEST CREATED ISISHow the West created the Islamic StateSept 13, 2014A deep analysis of the roots of Islamic State, created and founded by Us, Arab regimes and Israel to counter the Iranian influence in the region and the tools that today it can use to grow, writes Nafeez Ahmed.by Nafeez Ahmed – CountepunchPart 1 – OUR TERRORISTS“This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated,” Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference in August.Military action is necessary to halt the spread of the ISIS “cancer,” said President Obama. Yesterday he called for expanded airstrikes across Iraq and Syria, and new measures to arm and train Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces.“The only way to defeat [IS] is to stand firm and to send a very straightforward message,” declared Prime Minister Cameron. “A country like ours will not be cowed by these barbaric killers.”Missing from the chorus of outrage, however, has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert US and British regional military intelligence strategy in empowering and even directly sponsoring the very same virulent Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and beyond, that went on to break away from al-Qaeda and form ‘ISIS’, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or now simply, the Islamic State (IS).Since 2003, Anglo-American power has secretly and openly coordinated direct and indirect support for Islamist terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda across the Middle East and North Africa. This ill-conceived patchwork geostrategy is a legacy of the persistent influence of neoconservative ideology, motivated by longstanding but often contradictory ambitions to dominate regional oil resources, defend an expansionist Israel, and in pursuit of these, re-draw the map of the Middle East.Now despite Pentagon denials that there will be boots on the ground – and Obama’s insistence that this would not be another “Iraq war” – local Kurdish military and intelligence sources confirm that US and German special operations forces are already “on the ground here. They are helping to support us in the attack.” US airstrikes on ISIS positions and arms supplies to the Kurds have also been accompanied by British RAF reconnaissance flights over the region and UK weapons shipments to Kurdish Peshmerga forces.Divide and Rule in Iraq“It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs,” said one US government defense consultant in 2007. “It’s who they throw them at – Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr [a Shiite cleric leader in Iraq, who opposes Sunni terror], Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah [Hezbollah saved Lebanon from a deadly Israeli attack in 2006. This is probably the main reason they are hated in the West. Lebanon – where the Sunnis, the West’s, and Israel’s, darlings –are outnumbered by Christians plus Shiites, was supposed to be destroyed] and Iran.”Early during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the US covertly supplied arms to al-Qaeda affiliated insurgents even while ostensibly supporting an emerging Shi’a-dominated administration.Pakistani defense sources interviewed by Asia Times in February 2005 confirmed that insurgents described as “former Ba’ath party” loyalists – who were being recruited and trained by “al-Qaeda in Iraq” under the leadership of the late Abu Musab Zarqawi – were being supplied Pakistan-manufactured weapons by the US. The arms shipments included rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, rockets and other light weaponry. These arms “could not be destined for the Iraqi security forces because US arms would be given to them”, a source told Syed Saleem Shahzad – the Times’ Pakistan bureau chief who, “known for his exposes of the Pakistani military” according to the New Yorker, was murdered in 2011. Rather, the US is playing a double-game to “head off” the threat of a “Shi’ite clergy-driven religious movement,” said the Pakistani defense source.This was not the only way US strategy aided the rise of Zarqawi, a bin Laden mentee and brainchild of the extremist ideology that would later spawn ‘ISIS.’According to a little-known November report for the US Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) and Strategic Studies Department, Dividing Our Enemies, post-invasion Iraq was “an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to ‘red-against-red’ [enemy-against-enemy] firefights.”While counterinsurgency on the one hand requires US forces to “ameliorate harsh or deprived living conditions of the indigenous populations” to publicly win local hearts and minds,” the reverse side of this coin is one less discussed. It involves no effort to win over those caught in the crossfire of insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare, whether by bullet or broadcast. On the contrary, this underside of the counterinsurgency coin is calculated to exploit or create divisions among adversaries for the purpose of fomenting enemy-on-enemy deadly encounters.”In other words, US forces will pursue public legitimacy through conventional social welfare while simultaneously delegitimising local enemies by escalating intra-insurgent violence, knowing full-well that doing so will in turn escalate the number of innocent civilians “caught in the crossfire.” The idea is that violence covertly calibrated by US special operations [think Hong Kong, Kiev, Bolivia] will not only weaken enemies through in-fighting but turn the population against them.In this case, the ‘enemy’ consisted of jihadists, Ba’athists, and peaceful Sufis, who were in a majority but, like the militants, also opposed the US military presence and therefore needed to be influenced. The JSOU report referred to events in late 2004 in Fallujah where “US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists” undertook to “set insurgents battling insurgents.” This involved actually promoting Zarqawi’s ideology, ironically, to defeat it: “The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi’s murderous activities – and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters – thereby diminishing his folk-hero image,” and encouraging the different factions to pick each other off. “By tapping into the Fallujans’ revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis the Joint PSYOP Task Force did its ‘best to foster a rift between Sunni groups.’”Yet as noted by Dahr Jamail, one of the few unembedded investigative reporters in Iraq after the war, the proliferation of propaganda linking the acceleration of suicide bombings to the persona of Zarqawi was not matched by meaningful evidence. His own search to substantiate the myriad claims attributing the insurgency to Zarqawi beyond anonymous US intelligence sources encountered only an “eerie blankness.”The US military operation in Fallujah, largely justified on the claim that Zarqawi’s militant forces had occupied the city, used white phosphorus, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate air strikes to pulverise 36,000 of Fallujah’s 50,000 homes, killing nearly a thousand civilians, terrorising 300,000 inhabitants to flee, and culminating in a disproportionate increase in birth defects, cancer and infant mortality due to the devastating environmental consequences of the war.To this day, Fallujah has suffered from being largely cut off from wider Iraq, its infrastructure largely unworkable with water and sewage systems still in disrepair, and its citizens subject to sectarian discrimination and persecution by Iraqi government backed Shi’a militia and police. “Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies,” observed The Guardian in 2005. Thus, did the US occupation plant the seeds from which Zarqawi’s legacy would coalesce into the Frankenstein monster that calls itself “the Islamic State.”Bankrolling al-Qaeda in SyriaAccording to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business,” he told French television: “I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, confirmed that as of 2011, US and UK special forces training of Syrian opposition forces was well underway. The goal was to elicit the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”Since then, the role of the Gulf states – namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan (as well as NATO member Turkey) – in officially and unofficially financing and coordinating the most virulent elements amongst Syria’s rebels under the tutelage of US military intelligence is no secret. Yet the conventional wisdom is that the funnelling of support to Islamist extremists in the rebel movement affiliated to al-Qaeda has been a colossal and regrettable error.The reality is very different. The empowerment of the Islamist factions within the ‘Free Syrian Army’ (FSA) was a foregone conclusion of the strategy.In its drive to depose Col. Qaddafi in Libya, NATO had previously allied itself with rebels affiliated to the al-Qaeda faction, the Islamic Fighting Group. The resulting Libyan regime backed by the US was in turn liaising with FSA leaders in Istanbul to provide money and heavy weapons for the anti-Assad insurgency. The State Department even hired an al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan militia group to provide security for the US embassy in Benghazi – although they had links with the very people that attacked the embassy.Last year, CNN confirmed that CIA officials operating secretly out of the Benghazi embassy were being forced to take extra polygraph tests to keep under wraps what US Congressman suspect was a covert operation “to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.”With their command and control centre based in Istanbul, Turkey, military supplies from Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular were transported by Turkish intelligence to the border for rebel acquisition. CIA operatives along with Israeli and Jordanian commandos were also training FSA rebels on the Jordanian-Syrian border with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. In addition, other reports show that British and French military were also involved in these secret training programmes. It appears that the same FSA rebels receiving this elite training went straight into ISIS – last month one ISIS commander, Abu Yusaf, said, “Many of the FSA people who the west has trained are actually joining us.”The National thus confirmed the existence of another command and control centre in Amman, Jordan, “staffed by western and Arab military officials,” which “channels vehicles, sniper rifles, mortars, heavy machine guns, small arms and ammunition to Free Syrian Army units.” Rebel and opposition sources described the weapons bridge as “a well-run operation staffed by high-ranking military officials from 14 countries, including the US, European nations [My highlighting. See? The same countries that are now overrun with migrants and complain of their bad behaviour were the ones who sponsored the terror in the first place!] and Arabian Gulf states, the latter providing the bulk of materiel and financial support to rebel factions.”The FSA sources interviewed by The National went to pains to deny that any al-Qaeda affiliated factions were involved in the control centre, or would receive any weapons support. But this is difficult to believe given that “Saudi and Qatari-supplied weapons” were being funnelled through to the rebels via Amman, to their favoured factions.Classified assessments of the military assistance supplied by US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar obtained by the New York Times showed that “most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups… are going to hardline Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”Lest there be any doubt as to the extent to which all this covert military assistance coordinated by the US has gone to support al-Qaeda affiliated factions in the FSA, it is worth noting that earlier this year, the Israeli military intelligence website Debkafile – run by two veteran correspondents who covered the Middle East for 23 years for The Economist – reported that: “Turkey is giving Syrian rebel forces, including the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, passage through its territory to attack the northwestern Syrian coastal area around Latakia.”In August, Debkafile reported that “The US, Jordan and Israel are quietly backing the mixed bag of some 30 Syrian rebel factions”, some of which had just “seized control of the Syrian side of the Quneitra crossing, the only transit point between Israeli and Syrian Golan.” However, Debkafile noted, “al-Qaeda elements have permeated all those factions.” Israel has provided limited support to these rebels in the form of “medical care,” as well as “arms, intelligence and food…“Israel [my highlighting] acted as a member, along with the US and Jordan, of a support system for rebel groups fighting in southern Syria. Their efforts are coordinated through a war-room which the Pentagon established last year near Amman. The US, Jordanian and Israeli officers manning the facility determine in consultation which rebel factions are provided with reinforcements from the special training camps run for Syrian rebels in Jordan, and which will receive arms. All three governments understand perfectly that, notwithstanding all their precautions, some of their military assistance is bound to percolate to al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm, Jabhat Al-Nusra, which is fighting in rebel ranks. Neither Washington or Jerusalem or Amman would be comfortable in admitting they are arming al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in southern Syria.” [Yes, publicly, the US, Israel and Jordan would not want to admit this but in reality, they obviously were totally unconcerned that terrorists might soon seize all of Syria. Otherwise, ISIS would not have been able to take over the lion’s share of the nation’s territory by September 2015 when the Russians came and turned around the nation’s fate. This isn’t hard. The nation with the biggest armed forces in the world had claimed to be waging a “war on terror.” Yet a less powerful country with a much smaller air force was able to immediately turn around the war. It is painfully clear then that the goal of the united West was to enable the terrorists to establish a caliphate in Syria. Later in this report we read that the terrorists were stealing Syrian oil and selling it cheap to Western countries. This oil seized from the war-weary and impoverished Syrian people by Western-backed terrorists, became the genuine motive for persecuting the war.]This support also went to ISIS. Although the latter was originally founded in Iraq in October 2006, by 2013 the group had significantly expanded its operations in Syria working alongside al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra until February 2014, when ISIS was formally denounced by al-Qaeda. Even so, experts on the region’s Islamist groups point out that the alleged rift between al-Nusra and ISIS, while real, is not as fraught as one might hope, constituting a mere difference in tactics rather than fundamental ideology.Officially, the US government’s financial support for the FSA goes through the Washington DC entity, the Syrian Support Group (SSG), which was incorporated in April 2012. The SSG is licensed via the US Treasury Department to “export, re-export, sell, or supply to the Free Syrian Army (‘FSA’) financial, communications, logistical, and other services otherwise prohibited by Executive Order 13582 in order to support the FSA.”In mid-2013, the Obama administration intensified its support to the rebels with a new classified executive order reversing its previous policy limiting US direct support to only nonlethal equipment. As before, the order would aim to supply weapons strictly to “moderate” forces in the FSA.Except the government’s vetting procedures to block Islamist extremists from receiving US weapons have never worked.A year later, Mother Jones found that the US government has “little oversight over whether US supplies are falling prey to corruption – or into the hands of extremists,” and relies “on too much good faith.” The US government keeps track of rebels receiving assistance purely through “handwritten receipts provided by rebel commanders in the field,” and the judgement of its allies. Countries supporting the rebels – the very same which have empowered al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists – “are doing audits of the delivery of lethal and nonlethal supplies.”Thus, with the Gulf states still calling the shots on the ground, it is no surprise that by September last year, eleven prominent rebel groups distanced themselves from the ‘moderate’ opposition leadership and allied themselves with al-Qaeda.By the SSG’s own conservative estimate, as much as 15% of rebel fighters are Islamists affiliated to al-Qaeda, either through the Jabat al-Nusra faction, or its breakaway group ISIS. But privately, Pentagon officials estimate that “more than 50%” of the FSA is comprised of Islamist extremists, and according to rebel sources neither FSA chief Gen. Salim Idris nor his senior aides engage in much vetting, decisions about which are made typically by local commanders.Part 2 – THE LONG WARFollow the MoneyMedia reports following ISIS’ conquest of much of northern and central Iraq this summer have painted the group as the world’s most super-efficient, self-financed, terrorist organisation that has been able to consolidate itself exclusively through extensive looting of Iraq’s banks and funds from black market oil sales. Much of this narrative, however, has derived from dubious sources, and overlooked disturbing details.One senior anonymous intelligence source told Guardian correspondent Martin Chulov, for instance, that over 160 computer flash sticks obtained from an ISIS hideout revealed information on ISIS’ finances that was completely new to the intelligence community.“Before Mosul, their total cash and assets were $875 m [£515 m],” said the official on the funds obtained largely via “massive cashflows from the oilfields of eastern Syria, which it had commandeered in late 2012.” Afterwards, “with the money they robbed from banks and the value of the military supplies they looted, they could add another $1.5 bn to that.” The thrust of the narrative coming from intelligence sources was simple: “They had done this all themselves. There was no state actor at all behind them, which we had long known. They don’t need one.”“ISIS’ half-a-billion-dollar bank heist makes it world’s richest terror group,” claimed the Telegraph, adding that the figure did not include additional stolen gold bullion, and millions more grabbed from banks “across the region.”This story of ISIS’ stupendous bank looting spree across Iraq made global headlines but turned out to be disinformation. Senior Iraqi officials and bankers confirmed that banks in Iraq, including Mosul where ISIS supposedly stole $430 million, had faced no assault, remain open, and are guarded by their own private security forces.How did the story come about? One of its prime sources was Iraqi parliamentarian Ahmed Chalabi – the same man who under the wing of his ‘Iraqi National Congress’ peddled false intelligence about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda.In June, Chalabi met with the US ambassador to Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and Brett McGurk, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran. According to sources cited by Buzzfeed in June, Beecroft “has been meeting Chalabi for months and has dined at his mansion in Baghdad.”Follow the OilBut while ISIS has clearly obtained funding from donors in the Gulf states, many of its fighters having broken away from the more traditional al-Qaeda affiliated groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, it has also successfully leveraged its control over Syrian and Iraqi oil fields.In January, the New York Times reported that “Islamist rebels and extremist groups have seized control of most of Syria’s oil and gas resources”, bolstering “the fortunes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and the Nusra Front, both of which are offshoots of al-Qaeda.” Al-Qaeda affiliated rebels had “seized control of the oil and gas fields scattered across the country’s north and east,” while more moderate “Western-backed rebel groups do not appear to be involved in the oil trade, in large part because they have not taken over any oil fields.”Yet the west had directly aided these Islamist groups in their efforts to operationalise Syria’s oil fields. In April 2013, for instance, the Times noted that al-Qaeda rebels had taken over key regions of Syria: “Nusra’s hand is felt most strongly in Aleppo”, where the al-Qaeda affiliate had established in coordination with other rebel groups including ISIS “a Shariah Commission” running “a police force and an Islamic court that hands down sentences that have included lashings.” Al-Qaeda fighters also “control the power plant and distribute flour to keep the city’s bakeries running.” Additionally, they “have seized government oil fields” in provinces of Deir al-Zour [alternately spelled Deir Ez-Zor] and Hasaka, and now make a “profit from the crude they produce.”Lost in the fog of media hype was the disconcerting fact that these al-Qaeda rebel bread and oil operations in Aleppo, Deir al-Zour and Hasaka were directly and indirectly supported by the US and the European Union (EU). One account by the Washington Post for instance refers to a stealth mission in Aleppo “to deliver food and other aid to needy Syrians – all of it paid for by the US government,” including the supply of flour. “The bakery is fully supplied with flour paid for by the United States,” the Post continues, noting that local consumers, however, “credited Jabhat al-Nusra – a rebel group the United States has designated a terrorist organisation because of its ties to al-Qaeda – with providing flour to the region, though he admitted he wasn’t sure where it comes from.”And in the same month that al-Qaeda’s control of Syria’s main oil regions in Deir al-Zour and Hasaka was confirmed, the EU voted to ease an oil embargo on Syria to allow oil to be sold on international markets from these very al-Qaeda controlled oil fields. European companies would be permitted to buy crude oil and petroleum products from these areas, although transactions would be approved by the Syrian National Coalition. Due to damaged infrastructure, oil would be trucked by road to Turkey where the nearest refineries are located.“The logical conclusion from this craziness is that Europe will be funding al-Qaeda,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.Just two months later, a former senior staffer at the Syria Support Group in DC, David Falt, leaked internal SSG emails confirming that the group was “obsessed” with brokering “jackpot” oil deals on behalf of the FSA for Syria’s rebel-run oil regions. “The idea they could raise hundreds of millions from the sale of the oil came to dominate the work of the SSG to the point no real attention was paid to the nature of the conflict,” said Falt, referring in particular to SSG’s director Brian Neill Sayers, who before his SSG role worked with NATO’s Operations Division. Their aim was to raise money for the rebels by selling the rights to Syrian oil.Tacit Complicity in IS Oil SmugglingEven as al-Qaeda fighters increasingly decide to join up with IS, the ad hoc black market oil production and export infrastructure established by the Islamist groups in Syria has continued to function with, it seems, the tacit support of regional and western powers.According to Ali Ediboglu, a Turkish MP for the border province of Hatay, IS is selling the bulk of its oil from regions in Syria and Mosul in Iraq through Turkey, with the tacit consent of Turkish authorities: “They have laid pipes from villages near the Turkish border at Hatay. Similar pipes exist also at [the Turkish border regions of] Kilis, Urfa and Gaziantep. They transfer the oil to Turkey and parlay it into cash. They take the oil from the refineries at zero cost. Using primitive means, they refine the oil in areas close to the Turkish border and then sell it via Turkey. This is worth $800 million.” He also noted that the extent of this and related operations indicates official Turkish complicity. “Fighters from Europe, Russia, Asian countries and Chechnya are going in large numbers both to Syria and Iraq, crossing from Turkish territory. There is information that at least 1,000 Turkish nationals are helping those foreign fighters sneak into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. The National Intelligence Organization (MIT) is allegedly involved. None of this can be happening without MIT’s knowledge.”Similarly, there is evidence that authorities in the Kurdish region of Iraq are also turning a blind eye to IS oil smuggling. In July, Iraqi officials said that IS had begun selling oil extracted in the northern province of Salahuddin [possible alternate form of Saladin or Salah ad Din]. One official pointed out that “the Kurdish Peshmerga forces stopped the sale of oil at first, but later allowed tankers to transfer and sell oil.”State of Law coalition MP Alia Nasseef also accused the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of secretly trading oil with IS: “What is happening shows the extent of the massive conspiracy against Iraq by Kurdish politicians… The [illegal] sale of Iraqi oil to ISIS or anyone else is something that would not surprise us.” Although Kurdish officials have roundly rejected these accusations, informed sources told the Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat that Iraqi crude captured by ISIS was “being sold to Kurdish traders in the border regions straddling Iraq, Iran and Syria, and was being shipped to Pakistan where it was being sold ‘for less than half its original price.’” [Today, the Kurds are still an ally of the US, and now they are guarding the oil deposits in Deir Ez-Zor, with the only difference that Trump now proudly admits “we are keeping the oil,” in the full knowledge that by now the brainwashed masses would accept the message]An official statement in August from Iraq’s Oil Ministry warned that any oil not sanctioned by Baghdad could include crude smuggled illegally from IS: “International purchasers [of crude oil] and other market participants should be aware that any oil exports made without the authorisation of the Ministry of Oil may contain crude oil originating from fields under the control of [ISIS].”“Countries like Turkey have turned a blind eye to the practice” of IS oil smuggling, said Luay al-Khateeb, a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center,” and international pressure should be mounted to close down black markets in its southern region.” So far there has been no such pressure. Meanwhile, IS oil smuggling continues, with observers inside and outside Turkey noting that the Turkish government is tacitly allowing IS to flourish as it prefers the rebels to the Assad regime.According to former Iraqi oil minister Isam al-Jalabi,“ Turkey is the biggest winner from the Islamic State’s oil smuggling trade.” Both traders and oil firms are involved, he said, with the low prices allowing for “massive” profits for the countries facilitating the smuggling.Buying ISIS Oil?Early last month, a tanker carrying over a million barrels in crude oil from northern Iraq’s Kurdish region arrived at the Texas Gulf of Mexico. The oil had been refined in the Iraqi Kurdish region before being pumped through a new pipeline from the KRG area ending up at Ceyhan, Turkey, where it was then loaded onto the tanker for shipping to the US. Baghdad’s efforts to stop the oil sale on the basis of its having national jurisdiction were rebuffed by American courts.In early September, the European Union’s ambassador to Iraq, Jana Hybášková, told the EU Foreign Affairs Committee that “several EU member states have bought oil from the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorist organisation that has been brutally conquering large portions of Iraq and Syria,” according to Israel National News. She however “refused to divulge the names of the countries despite being asked numerous times.”A third end-point for the KRG’s crude this summer, once again shipped via Turkey’s port of Ceyhan, was Israel’s southwestern port of Ashkelon. This is hardly news though. In May, Reuters revealed that Israeli and US oil refineries had been regularly purchasing and importing KRG’s disputed oil.Meanwhile, as this triangle of covert oil shipments in which ISIS crude appears to be hopelessly entangled becomes more established, Turkey has increasingly demanded that the US pursue formal measures to lift obstacles to Kurdish oil sales to global markets. The KRG plans to export as much as 1 million barrels of oil a day by next year through its pipeline to Turkey.Among the many oil and gas firms active in the KRG capital, Erbil, are ExxonMobil and Chevron. They are drilling in the region for oil under KRG contracts, though operations have been halted due to the crisis. No wonder Steve Coll writes in the New Yorker that Obama’s air strikes and arms supplies to the Kurds – notably not to Baghdad – effectively amount to “the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal – as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example – are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company.” The Kurds are now busy working to “quadruple” their export capacity, while US policy has increasingly shifted toward permitting Kurdish exports – a development that would have major ramifications for Iraq’s national territorial integrity. [The ultimate unspoken goal of Western powers, bowing to Israel, is to break up Syria and Iraq into sectors along sectarian and ethnic lines, as we see further on. This is one of the main motives for the Iraqi and Syrian wars. Russia was the unforeseen saviour of these sovereign countries]To be sure, as the offensive against IS ramps up, the Kurds are now selectively cracking down on IS smuggling efforts – but the measures are too little, too late.A New MapThe Third Iraq War has begun. With it, longstanding neocon dreams to partition Iraq into three along ethnic and religious lines have been resurrected.White House officials now estimate that the fight against the region’s ‘Islamic State’ will last years, and may outlive the Obama administration. But this ‘long war’ vision goes back to nebulous ideas formally presented by late RAND Corp analyst Laurent Muraweic before the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board at the invitation of then chairman Richard Perle. That presentation described Iraq as a “tactical pivot” by which to transform the wider Middle East. [to better understand this, read about the Israeli Yinon plan to break up the Middle East and sow chaos. Supposedly, if the Middle Eastern ethnicities and tribes can be made to hate and mistrust each other, Israel will be more secure. Seriously?]Brian Whitaker, former Guardian Middle East editor, rightly noted that the Perle-RAND strategy drew inspiration from a 1996 paper published by the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, co-authored by Perle and other neocons who held top positions in the post-9/11 Bush administration.The policy paper advocated a strategy that bears startling resemblance to the chaos unfolding in the wake of the expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ – Israel would “shape its strategic environment” by first securing the removal of Saddam Hussein. “Jordan and Turkey would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and ‘roll back’ Syria.” This axis would attempt to weaken the influence of Lebanon, Syria and Iran by “weaning” off their Shi’ite populations. To succeed, Israel would need to engender US support, which would be obtained by Benjamin Netanyahu formulating the strategy “in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the cold war.” [Russia spoiled this plan for good]The 2002 Perle-RAND plan was active in the Bush administration’s strategic thinking on Iraq shortly before the 2003 war. According to US private intelligence firm Stratfor, in late 2002, then vice-president Dick Cheney and deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz had co-authored a scheme under which central Sunni-majority Iraq would join with Jordan; the northern Kurdish regions would become an autonomous state; all becoming separate from the southern Shi’ite region. [To set the record straight, on average, Iraq is majority Shiite, and that is the problem for the West and Israel, which favour Sunnis. Iraq is 70% Shiite]The strategic advantages of an Iraq partition, Stratfor argued, focused on US control of oil:“After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces.“Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection – and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.”The expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ has provided a pretext for the fundamental contours of this scenario to unfold, with the US and British looking to re-establish a long-term military presence in Iraq.In 2006, Cheney’s successor, Joe Biden, also indicated his support for the ‘soft partition’ of Iraq along ethno-religious lines – a position which the co-author of the Biden-Iraq plan, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, now argues is “the only solution” to the current crisis.In 2008, the strategy re-surfaced – once again via RAND Corp – through a report funded by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command on how to prosecute the ‘long war.’ Among its strategies, one scenario advocated by the report was ‘Divide and Rule’ which would involve “exploiting fault lines between the various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts.”Simultaneously, the report suggested that the US could foster conflict between Salafi-jihadists and Shi’ite militants by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes… as a way of containing Iranian power and influence in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.”One way or another, the plan is in motion. Last week, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Leiberman told US secretary of state John Kerry: “Iraq is breaking up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion.” [the only thing preventing this is Russia.]The rise of the ‘Islamic State’ is not just a direct consequence of this neocon vision, tied as it is to a dangerous covert operations strategy that has seen al-Qaeda linked terrorists as a tool to influence local populations – it has in turn offered a pretext for the launch of a new era of endless war, the spectre of a prolonged US-led military presence in the energy-rich Persian Gulf region, and a return to the dangerous imperial temptation to re-configure the wider regional order.Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar. He has contributed to two major terrorism investigations in the US and UK, the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest, and has advised the Royal Military Academy Sandhust, British Foreign Office and US State Department. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, CounterPunch, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others.