I would be remiss if i did not recognize my great friend, colleague, the best president of the best World Affairs council in the United States. I know we have a lot of World Affairs Council Members here. Jim faulk, very grateful to jim for this help. We have players, including stephen hadley, who will be speaking tonight. A truly great Public Servant who was the director of the nsc under bush, and i say Public Servant in days when that meant something and it really mattered. And we respected people who hold these high positions. We look forward to hearing from him tonight. And i think now without even leaving the stage, i will get the first panel underway so that we can start this. As a college professor, i would say, get your notepads out. There will be questions, discussion. We are going to start with our first panel, and i want to invite the panelists to come up to the stage. Tim sale from the university of toronto, who was here as a postdoc, he is going to chair the panel and lead the discussion about this. He worked on among other things nato. I think nato has been in the news quite a bit, so make a note about that. Meghan osullivan, the kirkpatrick professor at the Kennedy School at harvard, an expert on north america, among other things, and one of the officials of the trilateral commission. And also former member of the Bush National security council. And finally, of course, peter feaver, welcome back to the hilltop. He is a professor at duke and director of the grant staff the grand Strategy Program and former white house official in the Bush Administration. If you all would not mind joining me and giving a big round of welcome for our panelists. Tim . [applause] tim thank you. It is a pleasure to be back here and it is a pleasure to be on stage with one of the interviewed teams and some of the policymakers from the surge decision. The three of us spent a lot of time asking questions of others , and so it is my pleasure to ask you some questions today. As we move around the country interviewing all of the 28 people that are interviewed for the book, we often began with the question, how did the surge story begin for you . And we ask the interviewees to sort of set the stage with when they started thinking about what we would come to know as the surge. I want to ask you a variation on that question, which is the origin story of the project itself. Where did it come from . Mr. Feaver i will observe that when we did the interviews, we ran into a lot of people who had come up with the idea of the surge. This is one of the phenomena that success has 1000 parents. I cannot lay claim to coming up with the idea but i can lay claim to coming up with the idea for this project. It actually grew out of work i did as a graduate student on the oral history of permissive action links, which was a device that protected Nuclear Weapons from unauthorized use that was invented in the late 1950s, early 1960s. As harvard prepared to do the oral history of the cuban missile crisis, they wanted to pioneer the technique with a smaller project and asked me and another person to do that. It was a great idea that turned out to have about four or five people who invented the idea and had been telling their grandchildren for decades that they had invented it. And it was not until we interviewed them and brought them on stage together that they discovered they were not the only ones. It turned into almost a comical exchange we brought them all when we brought them all together. I said to meghan, there were so many consequential decisions that the Bush Administration made. It would be interesting to do the same kind of study of Bush Administration decisions where we would interview folks separately to see their individual role and then bring them and collectively to see how the roles fit together. Said, great idea. Lets start with an easy one. The surge. We would have so much momentum we would do one after the other. It turned out to be more difficult to pull off and took longer than we thought. But i am very proud of what we were able to accomplish. That is how the project started for me. Meghan, what would you add . Ms. Osullivan i would confirm your thesis that everyone believes it begins with that. With them. I think that is a good sign. You and i had that conversation and agreed. This was maybe eight years ago. Something like that. When i left the government in 2008, i started teaching a class trying to, which was teach my students how National Security decisionmaking happens in the u. S. Government. And i structured a course that was around 15 decisions based on iraq. A deep dive into 15 decisions. The surge was one of them. I felt like this would be something that would be useful to try to dig into each of these decisions, the way peter said. It was a meeting of minds around some useful projects we might do. Like peter, this is not exactly how i expected it would unfold but i am very glad so many people devoted so much time and energy to putting this together. In something that i think will have some real historical import. Mr. Feaver it makes a lot of sense and success can have 1000 parents. It was interesting how that balance in our conversations, with people learning where their role fits in the broader scheme of decisionmaking. One question i want to ask you both. You are able to tell us about what was happening in within the white house and we also learned about Different Levels of different initiatives and different parts of government. Was there anything new for you in this project . What did you learn as we went through and put them all together . Mr. Feaver i learned i have a face for radio. The original plan was we were just going to do interviews. That is what meghan and i thought. The important piece that jeff and smu added was, lets make it a video record of peoples interviews, which will then make it more useful for other scholars, but also as a teaching tool for other colleges and courses. I think in hindsight, jeff was right. And does magnify its use its reach, but it made the whole process so much more complicated. There were some really amazing moments when we realized we needed to travel all the way to jackson hole to interview Vice President cheney, and we had an we thought we had an agreement to do the interview. And it was not until we were all sitting there that we had to renegotiate the agreement. I was already not looking forward to submitting my travel claim for the hotel i that i was staying at if i had nothing to show for it. I learned that doing an interview on video does change the dynamic of the person you are interviewing. And it makes it harder for them to sort of Say Something and as they are saying it, say, that is not what i meant, i meant something else. When you do a written interview as is done at the miller center, you get a chance to fix those. Because you realize five minutes after youve said it, i thought that was october, but now i realize it was november. When youre doing it in a video, you cant do that. And that makes people more cautious maybe. So there is a pro and con. My solution to that was that we would give everyone the option to Say Something offcamera afterwards, and occasionally we learned something from those sessions. But that was not a perfect fix for this challenge. Ms. Osullivan i think your question might have been about if we learned anything about the process we did not know. Certainly there are things that were new to me and doing interviews, but i would say my larger take away on the whole was that we at the nsc had remarkable visibility about what was going on. There were not any big shocks or surprises to me. That in fact was a surprise in itself. That does not mean we knew everything going on. The council of colonels which has become fairly wellknown, i was not aware that was going on at the time. I learned about it subsequent to the surge. But we saw what came out of the pentagon was more what came up through official channels. But i do think it underscores the point and value of oral histories, because everything was invented in a constant conversation. People in this room, i looked out and i think about the endless numbers of phone calls, hallway conversations, emails. There was a constant conversation going on with people working 16 to 18 hours a day. There was a lot of visibility over what we were doing, and i think the people who are working on the issue from every agency, we had some really good relationships there. And there was a lot of sharing. So i think that was good. In terms of learning a little bit about the process, one of my regrets is that we did not do this earlier. I think that is a pretty common regret. But it made me think about as a policymaker did i ever for a minute think about, is there something i could do for a story for historians that would make this more transparent later . I have to confess, it did not cross my mind. But i think were i ever to be in a position again as a policy maker that it is definitely something worth thinking about. I know in the Coalition Provisional authority in iraq, where i spent for more than a year, we had a resident historian. I was trying to remember his name. It is gordon. I dont remember his last name. He was someone who did not get a time and attention of people because it felt like everything was pressing, and it was. Everything was pressing. But in retrospect, having those people there at that time, it is worth trying to prioritize that a little bit more so that we can capture peoples insights and thoughts and feelings, but not a decade later, as we ended up doing. Tim on the issue of the transcripts and the videos themselves, i should say they are now available on the website. People can watch the videos and read the transcripts. Some of them have been annotated with footnotes, so there is some catch for that. But we made this material available for teaching and for scholarship. In academia, this comes with a secondary question, when are you going to get the documents . What about the primary sources . We have this oral History Collection and in some ways it has let us capture some of the constant conversation or know there is a conversation occurring outside of the written record. But im curious, you both wrote a lot of memos in government, what will change in the surge story when the primary documents are released . Will the story change . Ms. Osullivan thats a great question, tim. Im excited for the day they documents are public because they will help flesh out the story. A lot of official government revealingwill be less because many official documents of the product of the clearance process and people trying to forge consensus and put forward consensus views. There is some of that in the surge policy, but a lot of the surge documents, especially at the level of the president , were actually written to try to clarify different positions and different options, and to clarify the differences and consequences of them and move those to the president. I think it will be useful. There are two things i hope come out of it that i think are still part of the conversation, or the emerging narrative around the surge. The first, and this shows up in the book quite a bit, the idea that the president decision that the president s decision was a gamble. And phrase suggests there is a lot in the book and some of the interviews that there were two options, withdraw or double down. And basically the president didnt like the first, so he went with the second. I really dont think that is a representation of what happened and the complexity of the decision is very difficult to capture, even in multiple interviews. I think documents will show that president bushs decision to go with the surge was really the product of deep analysis. It is not that he did not like the alternative so he decided on the surge and there was all this effort to create a justification for it. It very much was a project of analysis. What are the dynamics of on the ground in iraq . How did they change from when we made our first strategy . What are those dynamics, and what are our abilities to affect those dynamics . I personally, how i was seeing it at the time was that the violence, which appeared to many as a civil war, that violence appeared to me to be two extremist groups, largely sunni and shieh, stoking violence among broader population. If that analysis was right i we , if we could get at those two extremist groups, we could deflate the widespread violence. However, if the violence was a product of historical animosity and not being stoked by external extremist groups, that would not work. It turned out it was the first. We did see a dramatic deflation of violence in the fall of 2007. Again, my point is not that president bush was just saying, i refuse to accept the option of defeat and therefore i am going for the alternative. The papers will show this. There was an extensive process to look at the drivers of the conflict, to look at how they might be changed, what our capabilities were, what the iraqi capabilities were. And while we certainly could not know the outcome, i think we can feel confident that this tragedy that the strategy was based on more than a gamble. The second thing, and i will keep this very brief, i think naturally a lot of the focus has been on the military component of the surge. This is true in the book. Some people have gone so far as to say there wasnt a strategy. I think what people find is there is a lot more tension that been revealed thus far on the political dynamics, even on changingmatic side, on our own structure, our bureaucracy. All of these pieces that came together with the military piece to be a strategy were there, they are just less glamorous, less visible. And i think someone looking over the documents will see them with much more clarity. Mr. Feaver one of the things meghan and i hoped to be able to do is get more documents released in time to be used in this. We got some, but not as many as we hoped. I do believe that some of those will be revealing. I was struck by my memory of what the document said was different from someone i was interviewing, there may me their memory of what the document said. I was pretty sure i was right, but the person i was interviewing thought it was Something Different and i thought, we have to wait until the document comes out to see which of us has the better memory of it. And could wave a magic wand release just one of the documents in time to be chewed on for this project, it would be was te memo, which when steve hadley convened that separate strategy reviews that had been done in different apartments into an interagency one chaired by jd crouch, at that moment, we were trying to figure out as an interagency combined what options we were presenting to the president. And there was an option coming from the jcs, there was an option coming from the state department, and it was a very powerfully written memo that had been written that proposed a very dramatic change in goals change in strategy, change in mission, change in goals, really. We spent a lot of time as a collective wrestling with this. Option. It was not a random thought out there. The interviews do not wrestle with that memo as much as they should have, and as a consequence, i think the academic essays at the back of the book did not wrestle with that memo adequately. But i think doing so would be test for the present for the presentist goal of understanding what it is like to make policy when you do not know what the outcome is going to be, knowing that the president chose the surge, knowing that it worked out so much better than the critics but it would, makes that whole line seem more inevitable than it did at the time. And wrestling more faithfully with what the options were. As we thought they were, as the protagonists in the strategy review were arguing for, that would be more useful for lessons learned. Kinds of studies. So i look forward to that. Selfishly, i do hope one of the memos i wrote finally gets out, because this was after the president had more or less decided on it, and steve asked me, what could go wrong . So red team the decision. I came up with a list of 12 things or something that could go wrong. The idea was task the interagency to address each one of these. And as we were addressing each one of these, three or four of them happened over the course of the next six months and i thought, this may not work out. Cradley may die in the kind of moment. Fortunately, the team, david moreeus and crocker, were adept at dealing with these situations as they arose. But i feel like as an analytic product, i rarely guess correctly, but there was a time when i guessed correctly three or four things that could happen. So for my grandchildren, i hope that one sees the light of day one day. Tim if i could sum up what i we are both saying is you need more historians. There is more work for us to do, and it raises my next question. Peter, you alluded to the academic section of the book. We sometimes call it the scholarly section. Two,book is divided into with oral history component of the beginning and policymakers on record and then scholars examining mess. Examining this. I think the chapter you wrote with mr. Hadley shows there is a distinction between policy and scholarship, and you both are great examples of this. You have credible academic training. But also this policy experience. Can you talk about how we bridge that gap, whether we should bridge that gap, what academic scholars can bring to policymaking, and what policymakers can bring to academia . Mr. Feaver i thought one of the most revealing moments in the project was a statement made by bets, and dick established scholar and one of the giants in my area of study. We were at a workshop and we were workshopping his chapter and we were arguing over a statement or something. And he revealed how much of a struggle it was for him to wrestle with these issues, in part because he had been shaped wake of the in the vietnam war. He was one of the first generations of scholars just as the vietnam war was ending. And, of course, he had been one of the most prominent critics of the decision to invade iraq. He signed the academic letters, etc. So he was telling me he was emotionally invested in the iraq war debate on one side of it, and in some ways, and i am projecting, he didnt say this. But as i heard him, i thought, you are as much invested in this particular narrative of iraq as any of the policymakers who had worked on the issue. And i realized the design of the project had was built on an assumption that probably was not sure, namely, there were policymakers who were biased because they had worked on the issue and thus had insights, but you had to recognize that they had a skew and you had to filter for obvious professional bias. On the one hand. And then there were scholars who were objective truth seekers who could stand apart from it, separate from it, and evaluate what the biased policymakers had said. And i realized in that workshop that actually, it was probably easier for the policymakers to be candid about ways they had called it wrong at the time. It seemed to me in our interviews many of the policymakers found it easier to have some selfawareness and admit when they got it wrong and it was harder for the academics. In particular, if you had gone on record saying the decision to invade iraq was bad or that the decision to surge is a mistake, and so many of the academics who had opposed the iraq war also vocally, actively opposed the surge and said it was a mistake. It was very hard for those academics to then step back and say, you know what . Maybe the surge was a better idea than i realized. To develop that objectivity. This was a question for my friends on the Academic Panel later this afternoon. Am i overstating this case . I might be, i dont know. Is at leastnk there on an issue like the iraq war where it has become so politicized in the academy, it is likely there is not an objective perspective. Everybody a stake. Everybody has a stake. That is an important difference. The other difference, of course, is something that histians know very well, political scientists ignore more regularly, and that is the Human Element to the context of a decision. By which i mean these are human beings making the decisions with all of the strengths and weaknesses that human relations produce. Justn mentioned this in passing, but i want to mention it here. One reason the surge strategy emerged was because of the trust that steve hadley was able to cultivate across the team. And, of course, steve is going to say it was not him, it was the president who was the primary trust generating engine, and i think thats right, but i give steve a lot of credit for growing the trust to be candid in the way we had to be. Because what we were talking about was the possibility that the most important project the president was engaged in might not succeed. That is a very hard thing to talk about inside the white house. And to have the freedom to do that and to wrestle with alternatives requires a lot of trust, and requires the person youre talking to is not going to be writing a memoir that is going to shiv you in the back and makes you look like a fool. There was one time, and i can vividly recall it. Steve was about to Say Something and he looked at me and said, you better not be writing a book about this. And i ended up writing something about it, but i did not do it in a way that was sticking a shiv in someone. That is the Human Element. But if you did not have that, if you did not have level of trust, i think certain policy options might not have survived long enough to be incubated to the point where they would work. I give credit. Steve was great. Meghan was really wonderful about allowing other people outside of her office to work on it. And i will give one last shout out. Brett did not get as much credit contemporaneous accounts, bob woodward and other accounts. But we now know what a great Public Servant he has been across several ministrations. Several administrations. But he was tireless on this issue at the time, and many others. So the Human Element is important. Political scientists extract all all of that out and produce a number. But that loses all the Human Element. Historians are better at capturing that. Ms. Osullivan not disagreeing, continuing on the discussion, but i think it is at the heart of this project, the difference between policymakers and academics. Let me add to what peter said. I was struck in the course of this project but also in reading the final product about something i had realized earlier on in my career when i was working on the issue of sanctions. This was before i went into government and i was a fellow at the brookings institution. I realize you had academics who kept saying sanctions dont work and policymakers used sanctions with abandon. What explains this . And i realized, policymakers and academics are just asking different questions. They are interested in different questions. I think this project reveals that in some fashion. As a policymaker, or at the time, the question i was interested in and still am was did this process provide advice and recommendations and a decision that was the best one open to the president at that time . That is what i am interested in. I think as we see in many of the academic chapters, which were really useful and interesting, there are a lot of other questions at play. And one of the things that animates a lot of the scholarly take on it is how does this process compare to some kind of ideal . Aren, as a policymaker, you much less interested in that because you realize there is no one ideal that works in every circumstance and if you are asking the question i am asking, does the process produces the best decision for the present at the moment, you realize the process is going to differ from president to president. Let me give you one example of what i am talking about. There was a lot of talk in the Foreign Policy community about the importance of the honest broker role of the National Security advisor. Brents go craft brent embodies that idea of the honest broker. When i think about this particular moment in history, this surge process, i think steve hadley played that role as the honest broker. But that would not have been enough. If he had only played that role, we would not have gotten to where we got to. Coulds another topic we talk about, but i think something that is not elucidated enough in the book is where the surge compares to the alternative. You might still have quibbles over the surge, but we have to ask, how it compares to the alternatives. Roll, hek to steve managed to play the role of honest broker in the sense that the president had access and was aware of all of the views and opinions and recommendations of everyone in his National Security team. He had this awareness and steve made sure it was the case but steve also played additional roles. He played the role of being an advisor, and he played the role of helping the president after that decision had been made to ensure the government was actually going to be in a position to implement the change in strategy. Being an honest broker was essential, but it was not enough in this case. I think a lot of academics would disagree with that based on the idea that the honest broker is the entirety of the job of the National Security advisor. It is a shout out to steve for managing an incredibly complex process in such a professional and gracious way, but it is also an example of how some academics might be looking at come out was the National Security adviser playing this role of honest broker . But me as a participant and policymaker, i am much more interested in, is the National Security advisor making sure the president has all the information that he needs to make a good decision, and providing advice to the president at a very lonely and dark moment . And making sure any decision made by the president actually can be implemented. Tim im going to turn to the floor in a moment for questions, and we do have microphones for people who would like to ask questions. But let me ask one final question before we open it up. I think it is appropriate here on a university campus. Thank you very much for the tower center and the center for president ial history. My question is about president ial power. It is one of these abstractions you mentioned, peter. Another person who crossed between academia and the policy world famously said that the power of the president is the power to persuade. I think we see that in this book. We see at times when the president understands that his comments or questions might shape policy options that are presented to him so he stays back from the process at certain times. Other times, he decides it is the right moment to persuade, to meet with the joint chiefs and others. For those of us who have not a president , and i understand the balance in this room may be tilted toward people who have worked for a president. But for those of us who havent, can you talk about what it is like to work in that environment, how important the individual working for the president is to that exercise . What it means to work for a president. Mr. Feaver meghan worked for a president much longer than i did. This is something that i have thought a lot about since i have come back, and also reading the daily newspapers the last several years. I had the privilege of working for two president s. President clinton, i was a jr. Nsc staffer early on in his administration. And somewhat more senior in the Bush Administration. There were very different personalities. Your interactions with them, at least my interactions with them, were very different. I had less access than meghan or certainly than steve had to president bush. But particularly with president bush, the overwhelming impression i had was how different he was from the cartoon caricature that my academic friends back at duke held of him. Their version of him was not smart, not thoughtful, not well read, inarticulate and reflexive, making impetuous decisions. And that was not the person that i saw. I saw someone who was deeply committed to the integrity of the office of the president , and the notion that he was a custodian of something greater than himself, that he was temporarily a steward of, but that he had to hand onto the next person, and he had to make sure he left the next person better off than he had been. And that was the job of the president , to leave the next person better off if you could. Im not saying he did not make mistakes. Of course he made mistakes. But there was a commitment to something that was greater than just his own legacy, his own standing, the way people thought of him. That was inspiring. He also was so much smarter than people gave him credit for. I will never forget one day he came to the nsc given all hands to give an all hands meeting. Many, many people work at the white house and never see the president. They are working at a level where they do not have interaction. That was my role in the clinton administration, so one of my jobs was to always beg for opportunities to at least be in the same room as the president. So, this was a moment in the Bush Administration where the president came and spoke to everyone at the nsc. For most of them, it was the first time in the room with the president. And he went around the world with no notes and said, this is what i am trying to do in southeast asia. This is what i am trying to do in qatar. Here is what i am trying to do in latin america. My job in Strategic Planning is was to be able to see the big picture and how all the different pieces fit. I could not have done as good a job as he did. And i realized this president knows so much more about the guts of what hes trying to do than my academic friends would believe. And i do think that causes staff to be loyal up. The Bush Administration, the team still has a high degree of camaraderie. We just got together a couple of weeks ago for a reunion. And it was striking to see the level of camaraderie. Is the last point i will say. My friends say, what do you miss most about working in d. C. . And i say, it is the teamwork, the sense that you are all working on something bigger than yourself that matters. In academia, you are mostly working on yourself. And in government you have a chance to work for something bigger. That is something that the president , i think, conveyed well. Ms. Osullivan i agree with everything that peter said, and certainly that is my impression and memory of the president , without a doubt. I will be very brief. But to add one more thing, and i think it gets to the heart of your question, which is about the president and anyone in authority and their ability to affect the information that comes to them by just a minute gesture. And president bush talks about this in his interview about how he was conscious of that. And i thought a lot about this during my time in the white house, because i would watch how carefully i watched the president. And not just his explicit verbal directions to me, but when i would walk into the oval office, if i was prebriefing the president before a phone call or meeting, i would look for every queue in the room to see how much time i actually had. Do i have two minutes or 10 minutes . I would rely on all sorts of things. What kind of shoes is he wearing . He is in a better mood if he is wearing cowboy boots and i may have longer. Is the Vice President in the room . Youre constantly looking for cues. I think that is part of being an effective person in government. That ifdownside can be you are a president , any joke, muttering under the breath, could actually shape what you get in your next briefing or what people give you, because there is that natural desire to please the president. So i do think the president was very conscious of that and i would say, and i will end here, but i would say he explicitly made it clear to me that he was open to me telling him things he did not want to hear. When i left the white house, i got this wonderful cd with 400 pictures of me with the president over the years i was there. And my mother was looking at it and said, why is he making the at face at you in almost every photo . And i said, because i am giving him bad news in every single one of these pictures. And that was true. Searchn we came to the decision, i think he may have said this to others, but it weighed on me very heavily. I still think about it. He said to me, i am looking to you to tell me how we can change the trajectory in iraq, but i am also looking to you to tell me if we cant. That is a big idea. He was saying, you know i want to win and if there is any way to do it, i want to know how to do it. But he was not saying, dont bring me any other conclusions. And i really remember of saying, i remember reflecting, saying, i think i am capable. If there is a way to be successful, i think i am capable of working with this Amazing Group of people are finding it and advocating for it. But am i capable of walking in there and saying, there is no step to take to change the trajectory . Fortunately, we did not have to go there. But the president was explicit about it and i think that is out of the character most people would expect. Tim what an incredible responsibility. I would like to open it up to the floor if anyone has any questions for peter and meghan and their experience about the making of the project. I believe a microphone will come right over. The two gentlemen in the middle. Thanks, brian. Yes, sir . Thank you for that excellent analysis of the surge and the process that was used. Do you know whether a similar process was used at the time the decision was made to go into iraq . Mr. Feaver neither of us were in the government at the time so that is a great question to ask our keynote speaker tonight at dinner, who is our friend and former boss, steve hadley. I do know that the administrations learn over time and i remember when steve took over for condi, he said, there are some things we did well in the first term and we need to build on that, and there are some process things that we did not do as well and we need to refine our process to do that. Thats in fact how my job got created at the nsc, to do more of a certain kind of processing. So i suspect in all administrations, they grow over time. Say having not been in the white house in 2003 or 2006 that this is something that comes up in the oral history volume. There are people reflecting on the learning process. It is very much part of the story. Mr. Feaver cory shockey, are who worked in the first term and wrote one of the papers, argue on the panel later this afternoon . Well, i suspect this topic will come up because this is something she wrote about. It is really great to hear about the inner workings in the white house and what goes on behind the scenes. How did you get into that . Was it your academic career pushed you there, or you had a call lake, or just luck you got in . Ms. Osullivan part of the lottery. I came to the white house after being in the Bush Administration for a couple of years previously. I joined the Bush Administration right after 9 11 as part of a wave of people who joined government. I went over to work at the state department. I then volunteered to go with our military to iraq as a civilian, so before the war, and ended up being in iraq for the first 16 or 17 months. When we transferred sovereignty to the iraqis, it would have been normal that i would have gone back to the state department. But at that point, i was offered a job by condi rice to come to the white house. That was a reflection of the fact that iraq was still a very difficult policy issue for the United States with a lot of time and attention was being focused on it and there were a lot of things that needed to be adjusted. I had been there for quite a long time and had developed some key relationships with people and hopefully a pretty good understanding of the dynamics on the ground. So there certainly was a big element of luck involved, but that was the path that got me to the white house. Mr. Feaver i have just connected a. By you i have just connected a dot by you asking that question. I did a little bit of work on the 2000 campaign for some of the Foreign Policy advisers to then governor bush. And in exchange, i got an interview with richard haas. He was going to be incoming director of policy planning. I flubbed the interview and he instead. Meghan i just realized, you got the job i was not good enough to get. So i was in the bleachers, in the cheap seats for the first term. Steve second term, when took over for condi, he created this new office. And i remember him saying he wanted an office of someone who would look at the big picture and only an academic would be arrogant enough to work across all of the issues that i want you to work on. So he was looking for an academic who could pass political muster in the white house. Academics are not bushs core constituency. I probably had an advantage in the interview. I was able to come in at that point. But i did not know steve the first time i met him was in the job interview. There was a somewhat of a risk for him to hire me although i had many other friends in the administration. A somewhat technical question and may be better for the later panel. But i am interested in how you make decisions and how the quality and accuracy of the intelligence that feeds the system affects the answer. And i know that you have painted a really surprisingly positive picture of the decisionmaking around the surge, and i am aware that in the early stages, the office of special plans was sort of set up to negate some of the stuff coming out of the Intelligence Community in general. So a general question about what you felt while you were there about the quality of intelligence, and how important that was. Ms. Osullivan i know peter has something he wants to say about this, but briefly, the intelligence was an integral part of our process. So, we had the director of national intelligence. The director of the cia. Im talking about the surge process now, not going back to 2003. Not everybody always appreciates intelligence, i always think about it as an input into the process. So policymakers do not spend a huge amount of time focusing on, could this intelligence be right . Was the source considered to be accurate . These are all new questions that generally, the intelligence is an input into the process and the policymakers job is to determine, given the nature of the problem, what should we do about it . So we used the Intelligence Community input in a variety of ways. I can give you one example in which i think it was critical. One of the debates that was occurring in the surge process was, what would happen, is it a viable strategy or part of a strategy to turn over the responsibility for quelling sectarian violence to iraqi forces . If you remember, there was an Iraq Study Group and it had a certain appeal to people. Let the iraqis deal with the sectarian violence, we will deal with al qaeda, and we will have this division of labor. It was a serious proposal by many and we investigated it and asked a number of different bodies to give us their assessment of what happens in that instance. Are the iraqis Strong Enough to actually beat back the sectarian violence on their own without american or Coalition Assistance . So, we asked a whole variety of factors for their opinions. I remember the Intelligence Community assessment was particularly important. All of the assessments said the iraqis are completely incapable of taking this on their own and we should expect much larger scale sectarian violence if we go that direction. But we turned to the Intelligence Community for evaluation along those lines. I remember that to be very useful. Mr. Feaver the one i remember that was the sharp point on what thean was describing was, question came down to what kind of leader was he . Would he lead as a sectarian or was he justure, or surrounded by people giving him Bad Information . Or was he just insecure in his position and needed bolstering . Important that was an unknown, but the viability of the surge depended in part on the bet he would make about who maliki was. Of course, we asked the Intelligence Community to make their assessment, which they did, but it was not confident enough in the judgment and the president sent steve to personally meet with maliki and take measure of the man. That was my first and only trip to iraq. Meghan has been there many times. But the three of us went. The purpose of the trip was for steve to take his assessment. I can tell you about this because his trip memo showed up in the New York Times a couple of weeks later, and it was the scariest moment of my professional career because there were only three or four people who had access to that memo, or so i thought. I knew i was one of them. I knew i had not leaked it but i was not sure i could persuade anyone else that i was not the one who leaked it. Fortunately the person who did was distributed more widely, so i lived to fight another day. But if you read the memo, you can see steve wrestling with this intelligence question. Who is maliki and what can we do to change the trajectory of the way he governs . The success of the surge hinged on the president , steve, and others getting that right, and i think they did. There is no question that maliki, under the surge, more effectively in a way that better suited what the u. S. Needed. Steve got the analysis right but it was an intelligence question. And at the end of the day, as meghan said, intelligence cannot give us a guarantee it would be one of the other. You had to bet. It was not a wild gamble, but it was a bet based on the best evidence that steve could gather. Tim this will be our second to last question. Branson. M ju;olie i worked for the Bush Administration for the last seven years and i was at the pentagon during the surge doing communications and was detailed to the white house at one point and we were outside the media asked by the media for information we could not give them. I am just wondering, looking and at all the papers historically, you piqued my interest with this, what role did the media play . Did you have to fight on another front, or how did that affect the whole decisionmaking and moving forward and being able to . Verysullivan specifically, and this has been said about president bush throughout the interviews and is fairly well known that the press, obviously we were all aware of the environment we were living in. Our families were reading the press. Our friends were reading the press. But i think it was remarkable in the way president bush was not driven by the press. I cannot even remember a single day in the many years i worked on this issue in the white house where i came in the office and had to respond to something that had been in the press that i had to explain what soandso was talking about in the press. There were many mornings i came in and there were questions, but they generally related to something called the iraq night note, which my office and my team did for the president every night, which was not things in the press but diplomatic reporting, intelligence reporting. So i do not feel like the media thee the people who were in policymaking world in a very considerable way. But it obviously affected the overall environment in which we were trying to operate. This allows me to make a point i was hoping to make, which is about, i think one of the things that is useful in doing a project like this oral history is to also say, what did not happen in the process that so often happens in other processes . It is remarkable how little domestic politics intruded into these deliberations. I have a specific memory. I can remember the president s face exactly. I was in the oval office and i forget what i said to the president exactly, but it was something about the actual policy in iraq and i made some comment about the politics and how would play at home and i how it would play at home. And i remember him saying, stop. I do not need your political advice. Just tell me what you think in terms of policy. The politics, thats my job. And he was very right about that. No one needs my political advice. It was incredible how little it intruded in our deliberations
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.