Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Presidency Creating The Iraq Surge Strategy 20200127

and edelman has served in a senior position at the department of state, defense, as well as the white house, and served as u.s. ambassador to finland and turkey, and was vice president dick cheney's principled epi-assistant for national security affairs. ambassador edelman has received several awards, including four distinguished public servace -- service. and a presidential distinguished service award. far-left we have general loot. he has served most recently as non-states permit representative to the north atlantic council of nato in which he retired in 2017. previously he had a distinguished 35 year in the u.s. army. he also served for a total of six years in the white house under both presidents george w. bush and barack obama. in 2007 president bush named him deputy national security advisor to coordinate the war in iraq and afghanistan. before. being assigned to the white house, he served as director of operations both on the joint staff in washington dc, and on the united states central command. panel, have on the professor mcgurk, currently based at stanford university. before moving to stanford, mcgurk served as a special president envoy for a global coalition to defeat isis. in that capacity help -- lead to fight against the terrorist network. previously mcgurk served in senior positions in the george w. bush and barack obama administration, including in the bush white house as senior director for iraq and afghanistan and and as tippy assistant to secretary of the state for iraq and iran under president obama. mcgurk has led several diplomatic missions in the middle east over the decades. for example he led talks with russia over the syrian conflict under both president obama and donald trump. finally, the panel will be moderated by effexor -- professor brand, henry kissinger distinguished professor of affairs. he is also a columnist for bloomberg opinion and scholar of american enterprise institute. dr. brand is author and editor of many books, including american grand strategy in the age of trump, published just one year ago. professor brand served as special assistant to secretary of defense force with -- strategic planning from 205 to 2 016. so please join me in welcoming are very distinguished panel this afternoon. [applause] thank you very much. i would also like to thank our hosts here at smu for putting on this event today. it is a lot of fun to get together with the folks who worked to bring this book to fruition and so many of the policymakers who generously shared their time and insights with us. it is a pleasure for me to be up here on the stage with three gentlemen were not only importantly in solve -- involved in the decision-making with the surge and its implementation, who are also generous with their time and insights. the basic run of show is that each of them will have a chance to make some comments, then i will ask a couple of questions of the group, and then we will open it up to general questions and discussion. with that out of the way, i will go and handed off to my friend. >> thank you. it is great to be here this morning. thanks to smu for hosting this. i want to say it is really a pleasure to be up here on the panel, first with hal, who was a colleague at johns hopkins, but also with two great public servants. have been running a competition to see who is the most hated u.s. government official in turkey. i was be for myself, but i think of us both -- i think both of us wear it as a badge of honor right now. crown had to hang up my in recent years to brett, but that is only a complement to his great work he did as the coordinator for the counter-isil campaign. isould also note that there kind of a reunion quality for all this. i am surprised we did not get a t-shirt saying 13th annual surge reunion. but i do think that that highlights something that speakers in the first panel mentioned, which is the intensely human nature of the decision-making process. it is not often captured in scholarly studies of this. and the truth is a lot of us actually became good friends through this process. outnnot see where megan is there, but megan and i did not know each other that well. she had been at c.p.a. while i was ambassador to turkey. but through the course of this process we actually became friends. somethingk there is about the governmental processes when you are involved in them, as she said, there are long hours but there is also a lot of time and political pressure, a lot of stress in all of this. and managing all of this is very difficult. and for that, i do want to take my hat off to steve, who managed this whole process. he and i have known each other longer than either of us would want to admit. but if you go around the sit room, and if there were a bubble over everybody's head with their iq, you would be surprised at how high the average would be. you would go around the room and say, 192, 135, 118, 120. if you had their emotional iq's in a bubble over their head, the variance would be much greater. and i think that highlights some of the difficulty of managing this. to megan,first of all l, toter, to will, to ha jeff and timothy for managing this project to completion. i will confess that when they first asked me to do an interview i was a little bit skeptical, but i think the project in the book that has resulted is an enormously useful and important contribution to both the horse -- the historical record and an effort to provide an early assessment of both the decision-making process and of the surge itself. i was also struck, i want to say, i'm going to leave a little early because i have to catch a plane back to washington this evening, because i teach tomorrow, so i don't want my absence, or my departure to be seen as a political comment on the next panel among the academic contributors to this project, because i was actually struck by the incredibly, i , i wouldconstructive say, measured criticism that they provided. it, iagree with some of disagreed with some of it, but what struck me consistently through all the essays was a fundamental empathy -- not a sympathy, but an empathy for the incredible difficult problems the participants were wrestling with, and the constraints under which they operated, and the difficulties in reaching a decision with very incomplete information under excruciating time pressure when a lot of lives were at stake. and i think that is all too often missing from academic literature. so, i would like to just register that. i would go further and say i think that it is important to do projects like this across the board on key decisions made in presidential administrations. because, speaking now with somewhat dual-hatted nature, because i had a misspent youth. i spent the next 30 years in government. one of the things that strikes me is i have a much greater appreciation of how the documents do not tell the whole story. and that is becoming more acute in the modern era. documents do not tell the story -- whole story, first of all just because there are too damn many of them now being generated. i think when the bush administration emails work session to buy the national archives, there were 2 billion of them. the record is becoming just too great for any scholar to actually get their hands around in its entirety. moreover, because of the persistent problem of leaks, but also the increasing partisan nature of our politics and the criminalization from time to time of policy differences, documents are much more self-centered now. now.lf-censured they write to the fact that they might be subpoenaed. -- megan made the point a lot of emails are transacted. emails are frequently very cryptic and will be extremely occult for historians to decrypt. stuffen there is a ton of that goes on and phone calls. that does not show up in the documentary record at all. steve and i were talking about the fact that he and i had a number of phone calls, frequently unsecure lines, in the summer of 2006 as we were wrestling with the fact that there were some folks in the department of defense who agreed with steve and megan that we needed to have prevention reconstruction teams in iraq just as we did in afghanistan, but had a boss who did not agree. and we had to try to work through that. none of that shows up in the written record. megan's comments this morning triggered this, but we frequently do not have a good record of briefings, which are very crucial. principal officials of the government being briefed, i have a very vivid recollection of steve and i, a briefing with the secretary of defense at 6:00 in the morning the day after the coup in moscow in 1991, after he was returning from a fishing hole that he described as a place you had to fly to, then take a helicopter, then take a boss and then walked to. there's no record of that briefing in the documentary record. that noting is an art everybody understands very well. megan clearly did an excellent job, i know steve did in briefing president bush. i got to see steve's from time to time. you never know how much time you're going to have, and there is a great story about that, which i will recount here, which is from the reagan administration actually, which the late frank carlucci used to tell when he was national security advisor to president reagan. one day president reagan saw something in the president's daily brief about a guerrilla movement in mozambique, and he got interested in that. and so frank carlucci talked to hank cohen, senior director to the nsc in africa. he said hank, i need you to brief present reagan on this. he said how much time do i have? you have 10 minutes. so, cohen went off and did the briefing. he saw him in the hall a day later and said i have to briefing. how long is it? 10 minutes. cut it down to five. cohen went back and cut the briefing down to five minutes, ran into him the next day and said i have to briefing down to five minutes. he said cut it down to two minutes. cohen goes back and does the briefing. he sees him in the hall the next day and he says, i have to briefing down to two words. he stops and says, well, give me the briefing. renamo sucks. [laughter] so, briefings i think are extremely important. lot of briefings that went on this process at various points. some that were part of the official u.s. government effort and some that were not, and those briefings were extremely important and need to be captured. so i would like to nominate a couple of additional cases i think people should look at. one that comes up a lot in the course of this project and people talk about the first panel, which is the original decision to go to war to begin with in 2003. and i firmly believe that all the documentary evidence ought ifbe declassified, because ever there was a suspect that is right for revision, i think that is one of them. i hope it happens soon enough to allow mel to complete his book he is working on on the bush administration. with regard to the search itself and the story told -- surge itself and the story told in the book, i want to add my point of ofw, from the point of view dod and osd, the office of the secretary of defense, which figures a lot in the book. frequently you will see references in the book to say we could not do this or we could not do that because of opposition in posd. much as i think eddie vietnam era -- in the vietnam era there views int of use -- of part of john mcnaughton, who in some sense was my predecessor, because the undersecretary's issue did not exist at that time. osde is not a unanimity in about this. secretary rumsfeld had very strong views, but there were a lot of us in osd two enormous amount of sympathy with the idea that we needed to change the mission from train and transition, to protection of the population. and it was not just me. i think the late peter rodman and mary beth along, abe, chris, a lot of people in osd were sympathetic to this notion. there were a lot of back channel conversations going, not just between me and steve but me and megan and me and jd, steve's deputy, with whom all of us who worked in the flesh verse -- first bush administration not to try to help that process along -- got to try to help that process along. in september of 2006, we cosponsored with the state department a conference on counterinsurgency, in which we spoke specifically about that. and i gave a speech talking about the importance of actually thinking about population security. and here, i think is something that gets a little bit lost. there is a lot of focus on the increase in numbers. how many brigades we are going to have. and i do not mean to suggest that additional forces did not make a difference here. they did. clearly the commanders thought they needed additional forces. but as secretary rice says in his -- her interviews, additional forces doing the same thing would not have made a difference. and there is a wonderful chart in the book, actually. if you look at the peak of the number of boots on the ground we had in the surge in 2007, which i believe -- someone will correct me if i'm wrong. doug will correct me. 165. we were almost at that in december of 2005 when we had arranged for some overlap for the election in december of 2005. so, the number i think was less important here than the change in mission. crucial was really the thing that steve and megan and brett and colleagues at the nsc i think helped push us to that made all the difference. and i think another person who does not yet enough credit here is ray. there's a lotta discussion about dave petraeus, field manual 3.5, the counterinsurgency manual, which focused on population security. of course with jim mattis and others of fort leavenworth worked on that. the mnfially ray at commander, the corps commander, who turned us into operational art on the battlefield with security locations and all that. that ought to be noted. now, it's not like a lot of people were not focusing on counterinsurgency or coin, as we liked to call it, because everything at the pentagon has to have an acronym. but not everybody really spoke coin fluently. as elliot cohen likes to say, there are a lot of people in the government who spoke pigeon coin. folks,hink for a lot of the emphasis of the counterinsurgency doctrine was not so much on the population security part as it was on the all of government part. and we had lots of discussions inside the pentagon as we went through this particularly in our defense senior leader meetings about the whole of government and where was the rest of government in all this. steve got pulled into some of those on occasion by secretary rumsfeld. i'll be interested in doug's view of this because he sat through a lot of these as well. these through a lot of defense senior leader conferences because almost inevitably we would have a review of what was going on in iraq, and usually pretty quickly into it, someone, usually the general, would say, we are the only department of the u.s. government that is at war. where is the rest of the government? the interagency process is not delivering for us, and the interagency process is all screwed up. who in the pentagon is in charge of the interagency process? at which point all eyes in the room would turn to poor hapless undersecretary defense for policy. but we solved that problem with the surge. because we sent doug over to the white house to become the whole of government. -- >> you saw how that worked. czar to pull all this together. and the pleasure of working with doug after he went over there. so i think i will stop there. is doug next? ok, so. host, andagain to our to my fellow panelists here. as i read this book, literally finishing it on the flight down from washington yesterday, to be honest, i have a set of four observations that i want to share with the. ofe of them are sort memories or flashbacks to a very intense period of policymaking, but let me share these with the. the first one is about the president himself. and i think the book and the reflections of the 28 contributors reflect the power of presidential expertise. 2006 was notn late a new president. he was six years into an eight-year administration. literallyefited from hundreds of engagements on iraq. he knew iraq. the german military have a great term for this. i will try it. a fingertip feel. is that close? he knew the texture of the war in iraq. and he got this from literally hundreds of daily intelligence , theings, the famous pdb presidential daily briefing. after 2003, most of them were dominated by the topic of iraq. he got them from probably 100-plus meetings of his war council. he got this from hundreds of nightly briefing notes that megan mentioned casually in her remarks. these were famously called inside the national security council, potus notes. president of the united states, acronym, notes. and for the iraq afghanistan team, this was a daily chore. around 3:00 in the afternoon, put out an all hands call among this sort of squad of us who were dealing with iraq and afghanistan, and we gather the most recent, most current elements and put them in a three-page memo to the president. this went on for years. he got this expertise from personal close engagements with all the participants on the u.s. side, to include the military commanders, but also with his iraqi counterparts. so by 2006 when he was struggling with this question of sectarian violence that was spinning out of control, he was not an amateur on iraq. and the power of presidential and -- expertise i think is lost a little and not made as explicit as it should be in the telling of the story. to it underpins his ability ask the right questions, to challenge the assumptions, and to sort of nurse this project, this process to its conclusion. and i think this is really important. the other thing that was not there in the president's office by 2006 was a sense of hubris. by 2006, three years into the iraq war, we did not harbor sort of starry eyed visions of what was possible in iraq. we had been through that period. if there was such a time, it was not there in 2003. the president was very sort of sober and prudent and experienced no way that brought, i think, a certain sense of humility to sort of the decision-making process. we should not miss that. this process could have percolated below any president, but it was connected in this case to a president who was increasingly expert on this issue at hand, and was humble about our ability to affect things on the ground. all of that sets the stage for the decision process that the book covers. second observation has to do with the process. it was mentioned earlier that steve hadley i think largely was the central figure, and running a process of the national security council, the war council if you will, and the deputies and sub-deputies of the war council principal. deep into two levels the national security bureaucracy. but running a process that was fundamentally open, transparent, and based on trust. this is a very important, and i think too little appreciated quality of a successful process. why is trust so important? it is important, first of all, because it best serves the president. it gives the president a full range of policy options. when everyone trusts in his or her voice, that their bureaucratic voices will be heard. but it is also hugely important -- and the book does not take this on -- but it is hugely important for the next book, which is the implementation of the surge. if if trusting the decision-making process where everyone feels heard and respected, enables successful execution, then you can imagine a process that is not trusted that features a lot of backstabbing and a lot of second-guessing and is played out in the press, and how difficult that process would be to execute. because people would feel they are not heard, and they would essentially take the somewhat teenager approach of, well, now i will be heard in the execution process. right? there are execution insurgencies that take place and so forth. the surge decision did not have to do with that, an execution. and that was largely a product of the decision-making process itself. so, that kind of process, run by steve and nurtured by the president, was very important to the success of the surge, which is actually the next book, the implementation phase. i saw this actually firsthand as a minor participant in the surge decision, but as a more central figure in the implementation a few months later. and my job as an implementer of the surge, when i came to the white house working for steve and president bush, was vastly simplified and enabled by the fact that it was the product of a trusting decision-making process. so, i think the process deserves attention. my third point, third it reflectsis a -- on a subplot that is woven throughout the book. and this is the plot between the relationship between the security situation in iraq and the politics in iraq. up to the point of the surge, so, for roughly the first three we hadf the war in iraq, our guys on the assumption that improved politics and increasingly inclusive iraqi political process would improve security. in short, the first approach was politics first. this had to do with turning sovereignty over to the iraqi government, creating an iraqi constitution, holding elections, forming government. the sense was if we could get getis, shia and kurds to together politically, they would have no reason to fight. right? and we could contain any violence while the political process matured. by 2006, it was clear that the sectarian violence was overwhelming that approach. and it was insufficient. the politics were insufficient to quell the violence. and we were on a downward spiral. a piece of the surge decision that i just want to make explicit i weigh on my own observation, is that what the surge decision actually did was invert. it turned on its head this relationship between politics in iraq and security in iraq. and the surge essentially admitted that there is a security threshold that must first be attained to enable the politics. so in a way, we turn from politics first, to security now. security first. i think this actually played out in the year or so after the surge decision, because we saw that once sectarian violence was quelled, prime minister maliki was able to take some pretty bold political steps. after all was maliki who after a year or so of the decision marched. onto whom did he march? onto shia militia, his own political allies, former allies, when he went to quell shia-prompted violence. it was within 18 months of the surge decision that same prime minister maliki signed an agreement with president bush, one of the last things president bush did before leaving office enabled u.s. that forces to stay for another three years. and it was maliki who is able to get that political decision through two thirds majority in the iraqi parliament. those political moves were enabled by the improved security that was delivered by the surge. so, there's a bigger strategic move here. it is not just about 30,000 troops. ok? it is about this strategic inversion which put security first. so i have come to believe that aere's a certain sufficiency, minimum requirement for security that then enables politics. and i called that the security threshold. the fourth and final comment i have is a concern that we take a broader view of cause and effect when we consider the effects of the surge. look, we are all americans -- i suppose we are all americans. i think maybe we have naturally assumed that this american decision delivered a particular effect on the ground. that is, a dramatic decrease in sectarian violence. within months, by the way. within only a couple months of the surge hitting the ground in iraq. i think it is worth thinking about. maybe this is a long eri -- al ong eric's line of thinking about another book. thinking about the other effects that caused a decrease in sectarian violence, which are not american, fundamentally. let me list a couple that come to the top of my list. first is moqtada al-sadr, the head with his own militia. acronymized it. took to the sidelines. he took his shia militia off the battlefield. that naturally had a suppressive effect on sectarian violence. number two, the suni awakening predated the surge by probably about a year, well into 2006. you begin to get the swinging of tribes, and that was obviously before the surge. so there is a sunni part of this. argument toe's an be made that a lot of the sectarian violence was beginning to burn out, that mixed sectarian neighborhoods, especially in baghdad, had essentially been cleansed by the summer of 2007, when the last surge brigade arrived. that's not a very attractive policy option, to essentially cleanse these mixed neighborhoods, but i think a lot of that had already taken place by the time the surge got there. finally, i think we give too little credit to the joint special operations command's impact on the major accelerant to sectarian violence, and that zarqawicampaign against and al qaeda in iraq. so these were the folks who were pouring gasoline, essentially, on these sectarian fires. so all these other effects or other causes i think have a role to play in what dave petraeus and ryan crocker were able to observe when they went back on labor day weekend in september of 2007. that's two or three months after the last surge troops arrived, so a very short period. and they were able to say to the congress and the american people, we are seeing the early signs of a decrease in sectarian violence. so i would be a little cautious here among the historians in the room and so forth that we have sort of a cause and effect relationship between the surge itself and what we saw on the ground. i think it is a multivariable equation. >> thank you. i'm really honored to be here. , pierre see eric, hal was steve and all of the. -- be here with steve and all of you. i am not in the book, despite many conversations with peter. i was spending a lot of time in iraq and syria in this campaign against isis, particularly in syria. so the events of what happened is particularly on my mind. i think this is very timely because it is about what we can do as a country. we talked about ends, ways and means, the means being not just a brigade. it is such an open question now, it is very troubling. i also, before i talk about the surge, i always put up front the cost of the surge. about 1000 americans were killed in the first year of the surge. and i did not think we can ever forget that. and certainly president bush -- these decisions, i talked about stanford about decision-making, and people in silicon valley talk about how they make decisions. it is hard to even see them as comparable. these decisions are the most important, the weightiest, the most consequential for our country, our history, the men and women who volunteer to where the cloth of our country, and president bush felt that. i'm going to tell some stories, so indulge me with my experience in this. just one, the day after the speech announcing he was stunning but became 30,000 more troops to iraq, which was a wildly unpopular decision. he went to fort benning and the president spoke with a number of americans would be heading over to iraq. it was a pretty draining day. we had worked on this policy i felt very strongly. felt it was the right policy, i will talk about why. even after all those meetings that we had, president bush then went and spent about one hour with the families behind closed doors -- gold families behind closed doors. this is a president who is living and breathing about this war, as he has written about since every day. decision, ie surge think it is fair to say he is living it, he is breathing it, he is struggling with it, as steve saw everyday. far more than i did in those days. but he was not really commanding the war. and the surge, as doug s2, it was not just a decision, it was about a complete change in the management of the conflict in iraq. let me just go through a little bit of my experience. and i will do an interview so i will up on the web so you can see. was --ember 11, 2001 i i learned about the attacks from him. i was on a path to be a lawyer and have a nice career in law, which i really enjoyed. that obviously changed the course of our history. and in 2003 i was in private practice and i got a call from a friend, and former colleague of mine, who just came out of an interagency meeting, which i did not even know what that meant at the time. said they are looking for people to go to iraq to help with their constitutional process. would you be willing to go? this was in the fall 2003, four or five months into the war. and i said yes immediately. i got to iraq in early january 2004. as many people who went to iraq in that period, it was pretty clear very early on that we were into something we did not fully understand, did not fully anticipate. i felt immediately that we did not have enough resources to deal with this problem. the drive from the airport to the coalition headquarters was a very harrowing ride. the highway of death. megan and i worked on the political process in that year. so this was 2004, so a lot of major decisions had already been made. but we made a lot of progress. transitioned, we set up an embassy, an interim iraqi government. the politics were kind of working, but the violence was not getting any better. and there was a debate among senior officials in baghdad, which i witnessed as a young person, i am 32 at the time, about this debate that doug talked about. is it security or politics? and the idea that politics would drive security gains, and those are saying no, the baseline of security, there is no politics. security problem is a security problem. sicky event, megan became -- senior director at nsc and asked me to join her staff. i joined the white house in 2005. and i think it is safe to say that in our office, we all spent a lot of time in iraq, and we believed there was this disconnect between security and politics. but there was always a hope they would be an election, a constitutional referendum, that this will turn the corner. there was enough to not really force a fundamental reassessment. guy, theo the young director at the time, you do not interact with the president that much. i was always wondering, how is the president seeing this? because what he was saying publicly, he wants to succeed, nothing poor and put -- nothing so important. it seemed we were so focused on transitioning to the iraqis, we were not making significant progress. my first time in the oval with him, --otetaker with first of all, you walk in first time, your shoulders kind of snapback. i had never seen a president in person. you feel like you are kind of in a movie set. i have been in there a lot now with obama too. he was so demanding. and inquisitive of megan, a ruthless inquisitor about the situation, what is going on. i thought, wow, this president is not only living and breathing this thing, he is asking all the right questions and wants to succeed. and thee got into 2006, situation deteriorated after the bombing, and i think the historical record -- i have been working on a book project for 10 years on this, so someday this'll come out. but the ark days -- the archives have been very fairly with me. i have looked at some footage, and i think i have gotten a couple of them for my own use, they hold up. reporting, this is a very serious situation, it is deteriorating. and steve would send those to the president every night, sometimes with his handwritten notes, and the president would read them every night with his handwritten notes. the president was getting somewhat different recording streams from the ambassador in baghdad, from some of the commanding generals at the time. there is always this question, how does the president reconcile these different streams of information. and i think the way he saw the commander-in-chief, kind of the classical model delegating to the command, the chain of command. i think that is the traditional model, the first gulf war model. but as the situation deteriorated, steve pushed us very hard eventually to relook at everything. it began very quietly. megan, myself, the intelligence community, it was very critical here, we made great inroads there, became pretty convinced after a lot of work that we had to do something radically different, and that would require more resources, it would require a very different strategy focused on securing the population in key areas, and that would be costly. reports sometimes write and go see steve hadley. steve, this was before we started the formal review, are you guys sure about this? we said we have really done the work and talked to all these people and this is months of work. we are sure. and i never knew where you stood until the very end, because you held your cards very close. the only time i had ever heard steve say about word, he said becauseer be damn sure, think about what you are asking the president to do. and he was right. and steve not only drove us, he drove the entire interagency once we began the review. so if we did this, we were all certain that this was the right thing to do. and i feel that that was the right process. i have concluded after working in three administrations that these decisions of war and peace, the model is the surge review. and it is the opposite of what we are seeing now. the night the president made the speech on january 7, we were in steve hadley's office, myself, i think megan, and we watched the speech on tv. with thene a poll american people supporting troops. it came back 27%, which was a pretty low number. there was a poll that same week, i just happen to remember, that americans who believe in alien-piloted ufo's was about 10 points higher than this position, so this was a really unpopular position. we watched the speech, it was a very somber speech. you might room or the president did it i think in the library room with the books behind him. then the senators came out and gave their reviews, and the reviews were pretty rough. in, becauseton came he had been with the president and he came in the office, and he said the president feels very good about the process. he said thank you. josh says something to the effect, and the president has taken charge of this. i don't member the exact quote. but the last two years, the president, his first briefing every morning was on iraq. every monday morning for two years there was an nsc meeting on iraq, which was extraordinary. i have seen nothing comparable other than eisenhower and the way he ran the nsc. personal hands-on management of this war over the last two years. and that is why a lot of the -- bringing in doug lute as assistant to the president, the constant engagement with the president with senior leaders in iraq at cricket times. -- critical times. this played out a number of ways. there was a time in the fall when we decided we are done with maliki. some iraqis wanted to get rid of maliki. and we wrote a memo. it is time for maliki to go, as if we could make that happen. doug is absolutely right. we tend to forget about the agency of other countries. the president asked us some hard questions. he asked us the hardest one, who is going to come after maliki? well, the iraqis have not really figured that out. and the president complete the shut down that entire conversation, not just with us, but was some of the iraqis who were maneuvering against maliki. that was a direct call. had we lost maliki would have had six months without a government at a critical time. a had some issues with commander and dave petraeus were tense, which the president helped manage. and the battle of bassar at where maliki went in without planning it, gets himself in trouble. for some reason, doug, you might have been overseas, so i was kind of manning the fort in the white house. ryan, crocker, and dave for traceable told me you have to tell the president that maliki, he bit off more than he can chew, you need to get out or get back to baghdad. it was a disaster. i walked into the oval office that morning was steve to explain, here is what our people are saying, here is the disparate -- desperate situation. briefing, heen a everyone told-- me this cat maliki will not go after the she militia. -- shia militia. he is going after the shia militias and we are going to make sure he wins. and that is what we did. it was a key turning point in the campaign. and that was not the advice of his senior people. the sopa, this is an untold story, but a very smooth transition to a president who ran against the war and came in. the first thing he said, you are there, president obama said i do not wanting him this up, which was a tribute to all the work that had been done. and we can talk later on if it was messed up, but that is another story. but the way the decision was made, the process, what it says about being a commander-in-chief, what it says about the care when you send young men and women overseas, i think it is interesting debate that had the surge review happened in the run-up to the war, how the war might have been disparate -- differently resource and managed, that was an interesting question for historians. i was not there at that time. i am very honored to be here. i am sorry i was not in the book, but i promise i will get my interview done so you can see it. thank you. [applause] mr. brands: so those were three very rich sets of comments which have drug -- triggered a number of questions on my part. i'm going to ask a couple of questions that have to do with process, a couple of questions that have to do with content, and then a cap -- question has to do with outcomes, all of which you gentlemen have touched on a little bit but i would like to go deeper. the first question has to do with what we are actually talking about when we talk about the surge review. because i think if you look at the book and you look at some of the interviews, for folks who have not had a chance to look at it, when people talk about the surge review, they are sometimes talking about a few different things. there was the formal interagency review, which happened late in the fall of 2006 under the direction of the deputy national security advisor, who of course reported to steve hadley and the president. but that actually came relatively late in the game. prior to that there were a variety of efforts to relook at the iraq strategy in different parts of the government. so there was an effort to do this within the nsc, an effort to do this at the joint staff, an effort to do this and other parts of the government as well. so i am curious, because you three were all in different places within the bureaucracy. osd, nsc, the joint staff. what level of visibility did you have on the fact that there was this broader ferment happening at different places within the government with respect to iraq's strategy? were you aware it is happening? was there cooperation between different groups that were thinking about the same questions? or was this something that remained stovepipes until the formal interagency route review began -- interagency review began? >> it is a good question. it is a little bit hard to answer for the reason that megan gave in her comments, which is there was a lot of conversation and the exchange is going on constantly about this set of issues. so, for instance, certainly i was aware of the effort in june to have the meeting at camp david. i will confess that i myself at that point was a little bit unsure after what happened in mosque abouthe whether we really needed to change course, or whether this was something we could manage, in part because we had no government in iraq, which was a big concern to me. and i still think that was one of the major factors, i do not think we touch enough on it in the book, but the absence of an iraqi government from january until june might have been ok, absent the bombing. but once the bombing happened and there is no government, i mean, obviously people feel that they have to protect themselves, and it is in that period you see this skyrocketing enrollment in various militias, particularly shia militias that is taking place. but in june, just as the camp david meeting was happening, i happened to be in baghdad. i happened to be having dinner with george casey the night that stan mcchrystal and jay soccer guys killed abu dzhokhar a. he gets killed and we now have a government in iraq. so, i think the natural tendency, that certainly i had, i cannot speak for others, was, ok, maybe this was a turning point. i think as brett just said correctly, there were a lot of times when people felt we have a development now or there is one coming that will change the direction of this. you have to go through that probably a couple of times and then realize, ok, there's not going to be some deus ex machina that is going to save us. we are going to have to do some things differently. we were very constrained in osd by the secretary's views. and that was just a reality. i was aware that the council of colonels was going on. petewas not something that kept secret from us. and i was having conversations, some with megan, mostly with jd crouch. i remember very distinctly, we have these devices, i don't even know if they exist anymore, devices which were a kind of video telephone. and i know very late in the day, quite frequently jd and i would get on and talk about this. jd was saying we need to do something different. i said yeah, i agree with the. how are we going to get there? he said we are working on some things. i knew vaguely it was going on. i was not aware of all the specific dimensions of it. >> it is a great question. the camp david meeting is interesting because that is when we thought, and this is reflected somewhat in the book, but that would be a key moment that hard questions are going to be asked. it ended up being a cover for a a new sense of a new government and things are moving. i have to say, it is reflected in the book, but nobody supported sending more forces to iraq. it was a very small number. some of the kernels in the council of colonels, but not the consensus. state department. we had a debate about clear hold build in 2005, which would have been a counterinsurgency-type thing. that did not go anywhere, and the state department really swung totally against any real talk of more resources. perch, it was frustrating. and then there were things outside of my purview, even next door to me. stephen hadley asked bill, two doors down from us, to actually look at this, is this even feasible militarily. i did not know bill was working on that. so there was a lot going on outside of our purview. a lot of privately reflected conversations of national security advisor's having with the president. from our perch we were doing the worst -- work as best we could. everyone was dealing with their own principles and their own views. so what was complex. but as it came out and every thing came together -- our memo the first time i met you, doug, was the j3. i said could we send five more brigades to iraq? you said you could, but you would not have much of an army left. it was kind of like, the view , for those who might say we should send more forces to iraq, the risk it might take on elsewhere around the world would be extremely high. so, just from my vantage point, it just gets to how controversial this was and how difficult this was. because there is a lot going on. but there was not that much going on that would have led to this result until very late in the day when we had the formalized review. >> i think the short answer to this is there were compartment compartmented, segmented approaches happening within needed -- within the bureaucracy. they did not come together until the jd couch hosted review until the last six weeks or two months of 2006. there was a reason that these were isolated and segregated. they were even isolated within the bureaucracy. so for example, the joint staff version of this independent review with this -- was this council of colonels. that is interesting, why were they colonels? they were because there were generals above them who opposed a formal review of the status quo option, to include a couple four stars. so, this was sort of done as an off the charts, quiet, in the basement of the pentagon study among knowledgeable colonels, but it was also reasonably deniable and isolated and segregated, because there were antibodies within the uniformed military to reviewing a strategy that both the centcom commander and the commander in iraq favorite. and i think the same is true in the nsc, at state, and so forth. so, we had to get sufficient understanding of the problem, internal to these little pockets of the bureaucracy, so that the position of the department, the position of the joint staff, had sufficient gravity, or maybe it was sufficiently organic, so that it could be brought out into the open. and that is what inside the joint staff eventually did. they briefed the joint chief of staff, so, this is this committee of four service chiefs from -- plus the chairman and vice chairman in a conference room called the tank. and the council of colonels briefed this out. that is when serious discussions began. but i think that sort of mimics or parallels the process elsewhere in the bureaucracies. had its start at the grassroots level and became serious, gained gravity, and then brought up into the equivalent of the tack. so it was segregated initially. so, as io add quickly, recall, steve will correct me if i'm wrong, but bill's study was probably one of the last big projects he did before he left the nsc, because i think he left that fall to go to the private sector. and i found out about his study when he came to pay his out call at the pentagon. as he was walking out the door he said, by the way, if the joint staff tells you that we do not have any more brigades to send to iraq, i just did a study, we have five more brigades to send. so i knew that what happened. that was roughly the same time that rey came to see me on his way out to become the core commander in baghdad under george casey. eric, iame and said think we need more troops. he was then the core commander in fort hood, three core. he said i think we are going to need more troops. this was after secretary rumsfeld had resigned, but before secretary gates had been sworn in, because he did not get sworn in until he presided over the was when in. all of you folks in texas to show how important that is. i was living with this uncomfortable situation where i had the outgoing secretary of defense on the third floor and the incoming secretary of defense on the fourth floor. i said, i am very sympathetic about you getting these troops, but i have a secretary who is leaving who is against it a new secretary coming in who i have not had a chance to brief it. -- brief yet. >> because a couple of you have mentioned this, one of the interesting stories that emerges out of this broader tale involves whether there were additional troops available. answerswidely different . answer is thatd no, troops are not available. the nsc staff came up with a different answer. up with people coming different answers? is it based on policy disagreements. what was driving these widely divergent outcomes? the questionat is for the j3. this is a case where it is important to get inside the question being asked into probe assumptions in karen -- inherent from the questions. had 15 brigades in iraq. we had two in afghanistan. we probably had 50 for gates on the books. if you asked the question, are there five more brigades available, there are, two their. there. the joint staff was working under an assumption when we gave the answer. of the phrase, we are out of schlitz may have retired the company. we said we were out of schlitz. there were not five brigades available because our assumption retain the going to basic operating principles of one year deployed and when you're not deployed. up that rotation schedule, you needed three brigades to put one in iraq. re,ded the one that was the the one that was preparing to go, and the one that was coming back. when we said you are out of schlitz, we were saying, -- we were implying that if you hold to the one year in combat and when you're out of combat, that we were in fact out. having read the book and thought about this, what i should have said was, you are out of schlitz if we stick to one year one year for a particular brigade. the math as we eventually were forced to do to sponsor the surge and kept u.s. troops in combat for 15 months and allowed them to come back and take a one-year break, so we went to a 15-12 rotation, we could squeeze the last five brigades out of the structure. ofs is very much a question probing the question eating asked and making sure you uncover -- the question being asked and making sure you uncover. by said, of on course you can get five more brigades. if you want to send them all of their -- all over at once forever. it's probe the assumptions. what the joint chiefs were most concerned about was that in this first war was an all volunteer force. nobody is drafted in this equation. largely a married force. a family-based force. violating the 12 in and 12 out model would have fundamental repercussions on the health of the forest. sure candidly, i am not that -- when we went to 15 months -- we began to erode that confidence in the force. i think there is still a lot of research to be done about the stress of not just the surge decision but sustained combat over the bin laden decades. youhe all volunteer force, see this in things like ptsd, retention rates in the services. you see this way way of traumatic pain -- traumatic brain injury, exposure to all the bull -- exposure to multiple concussions. i think some of these long-term physical and mental health impacts -- and this is not directly related to the surge -- but it is related to employing an all volunteer force as we have for so long and really sort of the human experimenting that is going on with this exposure of this force to sustained combat. in recent years, our numbers are much lower in these combat situations. to brett and his military colleagues in the fight against isis, which happened on a different model. we do not have to americanize the effort. we are not dealing with 15 or 20 brigades. we are dealing with smaller more d towinable forces keye partnership with capable indigenous partners. that was not the model we were talking about in iraq. that is the personal lesson for me. probe the question and make sure you understand the assumptions that are based on the question at hand. i think global risk is an interesting one. i do remember discussions in the tank with the president and the chiefs. the chief would say, you are taking a lot more risk if there is a conflict in korea or somewhere else. the president made clear, we win the wars we are in to help us stay out of future wars. that is a conversation that goes on in any relationship between the chiefs and the president. this last point doug made, the counter isis point was deliberate. we relied on local actors. force of we built a 60,000 syrians. five or six americans were killed in syria. u.s. taxpayer, the surge, $250 billion total. about 25 plan dollars. we had a coalition sharing the cost. i do not want to get out of topic, -- get off topic, but when president trump says he is wars, that is not sustainable. we were not fighting. we were not losing american lives. we were not spending much american money. we cannot even do that. i think the repercussions are quite serious. >> just a footnote. correct me if i am wrong. we talk about five for gates going to the surge. when he went out, dave petraeus wheedled a rotary winning lament. he really had like six. [indiscernible] >> maybe this is a question for you. brett was not the only one who managed to dodge us. secretary rumsfeld does not appear as much as he might. his presence is here. the traditional narrative about secretary rumsfeld's role is that he was an obstructive presence in the story. he was opposed to any change of strategy. it was only when he departed from the administration that this change was possible. given that you had a pretty good dod thinking, given p, iserch heading osd that accurate view of secretary rumsfeld's role. if so, why did he play this role? or is it mistaken? rumsfeld had a iding roughshodr over his general officers in the pentagon. it was slightly different. i viewed him as an equal opportunity abuser. he did not just rough up general officers. doug had been on the receiving end. so was i multiple times. .hat was his ammo -- that was his mo. during the time i was there from the summer of 2005 on, i never saw him overrule a four-star. genuinely general lab view. it was our presence that was driving animosity. driving the violence. we had to train and transition and turn this over to iraqis. repeatedly in the book. we need to let the iraqis handle this on their own. we cannot do this for them forever. veryd general casey all genuinely shared the view. for those of us who had a different view, that made life complicated. you work for one secretary at a time. i had to execute what the secretary thought was the right thing to do. that did not stop me from getting a copy of the counterinsurgency field manual. my military assistant had been general petraeus's chief strategist when he was running the training mission. i got a copy of the field manual and got it at john hannah's request. naugle, who was an expert in counterinsurgency working for the defense core in england. a copy ofto get me the classic book on counterinsurgency. a french general who had fought in of julia. -- in algeria. i got john to give it to me and ofirst got to dod in august 2005. his book on counterinsurgency came out. some of us were trying to work to getthe system to try some of these ideas percolating. we had to abide by the secretary's view, which he came by honestly. the other view was the one doug was talking about, which was the health of the force. he had his own good and sufficient reasons for the positions he took. i had come to the conclusion we were beyond the point where those views were going to get us a successful outcome. hal: so one of the themes that have come up in a number of remarks is whether the surge had to happen when a did or if it might have come about earlier. that, but ibout think one of the points of consensus was a came about quite late in the game after about three and a half years of war. would have been possible to come to a -- would it have been possible to come to a similar policy with a similar outcome a year over three months earlier? acer --surge depend on a convergence of circumstances that was only possible at the end of 2006? i incline to the latter. i think it is a hard question to answer. this is not addressed that much in the book, with the iraqi security forces we were training or in 2003 or05 2004 when paul eaton was handling the mission were not trained to do any kind of internal defense or deal with security issues. it was meant to be an mechanized army that would protect iraq from outside predatory powers in its neighborhood but not be hadlable to do with saddam the military do domestically in iraq. it was only one david betrays took over and started to train a force that was capable of carrying out counter terrorism missions that we had the iraqi partners to be able to execute the surge. needed to take the time to build up the iraqi force with which we could partner. doing this by ourselves would have been not a sustainable thing. we had to do it with iraqis we could pass it off too. i do not think the iraqi counterterrorism force gets enough credit. we fought those guys crazy in the fight to take iraq back from isil. you had to train them. they had to be there first. 350,000 iraqiund security forces by the summer of 2006. i doubt we could have done that with less than that. is,he interesting question in any campaign strategy, you have to adapt. the question is when do you have a process to adapt? you cannot constantly have strategic reviews. inwas a confluence of events 2006 that forced this. it was clear early that a lot of the assumptions with which we went into iraq were not correct. the armydisbandment of and everything else, a strategic review earlier on might not have led to the surge, but might have led to some adaptation. which wasantage point frustrating was that secretary rumsfeld did have a broad mandate. was i got to the nsc, there the sense the president had limited new bring room to adapt -- imitated maneuvering room to adapt. theviews were reflected by secretary of defense. that is the chain of command. the president is either going to overrule or redirect his chain of command. i saw this with obama too. you are delegating to the chain of command. for the president to redirect that, that is an unnatural instinct for a president. the question is, when do you actually adapt? years, we adapted a lot. decisions -- af lot of decisions. i do not think we would have succeeded without the constant reevaluation with the president's hands-on management of the war. if a president is going to send his men and women overseas to be involved in a big war or little work, he has to be directly involved in this. regularly briefed, know what is going on so that when a crisis happened, he understands the situation and he can adapt effectively. a think president bush did that quite well from the surge on should >> i think it was a common it -- from the surge on. i think it was a combination of events. it was the spiking of sectarian violence. sectarian violence and the spike in 2006. we actually did show some progress after the iraqi elections. june of 2006 had finally formed a government. for a month, we did not have an iraqi ministry of defense. how is -- how incapable is that? we thought we were still on track with the politics first model. you have a newly seated government. acrossan representation the government and somewhat inclusive. looks like we are on track. finally, you have this impact of both the centcom commanders. both the theater commander and the commander in iraq who were both influential saying, stay the course. that we should continue prioritizing the military effort. that argument began to follow ont when we tried to send three different occasions, iraqi brigades to do what the surge eventually did, which was secure baghdad. i, iii. trucksraqi efforts where and buses were supposed to transfer iraqi brigades to baghdad and quell the sectarian violence. the buses arrived and were empty. you had some very fundamental events in the first nine months of 2006, which conspired to cast doubt on the existing approach. that made rather obvious it was .ime to review the bidding i hope you will ask us a bit more about this dimension of the if i were inular, your seat, i would ask, why were the iraqi security forces after three years of billions of dollars of investment -- they played such a central will in our strategy. we will stand down when they stand up. depended on them standing up. 3,ether forward, 1, 2, depended on them arriving in baghdad there is a bigger strategic lesson. americansability as and our army and marines to capable andle, indigenous forces on a timeline that is strategically relevant to us. if you look at iraq in the early days, iraq in the later days. it was a third of the iraqi army whencrumbled in 2014 al-baghdadi declared the isis caliphate. you look at our capacity elsewhere. afghanistan is not a success story in terms of our ability to build indigenous forces. one of the things that ought to come out of the study is, so what for a future policy. that would be a solo -- a so what for the top of my list. hal: this relates to where i want to go in my final question. we will open it up to the floor for questions as well. seek toook, we did not address the question of whether the surge worked. you cannot really talk about the surge without getting to that question. today, there are a wide variety of answers which are reflected in the essays people contributed to the book. successre from it was a to it was a failure to it was a operational success but a strategic failure. i'm curious how the three of you would assess that question and what factors produced the outcome you attribute to the surge. it strikes me that if you look forward beyond the bush presidency, it is clear that whatever gains there were were not sustained to the degree people involved with this would have hoped. how can we think about the success of american policy in 2007 and 2008 to the relationship of the surge that comes later. >> how much time do we have? [laughter] of people the camp who think the surge worked on its own terms. the list of forces doug mentioned earlier -- you cannot disaggregate the action of the iraqis from what we did. when you say that they stood down, that is because macau to was scared we were going to kill him. that is why he went to study theology for the better part of two years. that was directly related to our decision to put additional forces in and go after she militias. shia militias. our member having discussions with megan about the desert protectors. we kept saying, is there something we can do? until we actually went in and put additional forces in -- if you talk to guys like dave kilcullen -- they were doing things like taking 10 year leases. never had any intention of staying for 10 years, but they were trying to convey, we are going to support you. this gets back to the question of leverage. the discussion that megan and peter had about maliki and what kind of that we were making. it ae question of, was circle of people around him were counseling him to be more sectarian, to me, he was all of the above. we knew from intelligence that he had people literally whispering in his ear that he should be more sectarian. we knew he had sectarian instinct. knewe question of iran, we we had an unhappy experience because he lived in syria for 20 years. he was also dependent to some degree on iranian support to stay in power. until you just told me you guys had written this paper about getting would've maliki in the fall, i never understood the context for a conversation i had with the president during one of the breaks in the solarium. we were having this conversation about maliki. i was off in the corner with secretary rice. having an academic conversation about vietnam. the president came up, and i said, if you're thinking about getting rid of maliki, i have three words for you. the president said, that is what i think. was able to do things. there was a discussion of him militiaser the shia because ryan crocker and david petraeus had the leverage. the role we played as the balance wheel among the communities of iraq to get him to do things he probably would not have done otherwise. the tragedy of the early exit -- anthony --early exit in 2011 is we lost that. got an incredible decrease in the violence. some progress on the political side. there is a good argument to be had, we could have had more if we stayed longer in greater numbers. of,as not just the question would we stay on? all of us involved in the agreement assumed they would be some follow on agreement. it was the process that whittled down the numbers to the point where maliki decided the juice was not worth the squeeze that let us us down the path that we ended up on. i think there is no question it worked. the chart that goes like this like a cliff. with eric.ee there is a romanticism about the weakening. againstned and revolted al qaeda. no. we were fighting with them. we put the numbers in to make clear. that is when it started to pick up. decimated al qaeda in iraq because of the surge and information it drove. itself.e thing fed on the question of the sustainability and with the new administration and everything, but there is a threshold question of our ability as a question and doug was getting at this. after a regime falls to come in and prove the situation. this is the question that is a threshold one. in 2011, it was not just the withdrawal from iraq. it was the announced u.s. policy that assad must go. that created a fever in the region. counties --ters and and jihadis from all over the region. all of the atrocities of the assad regime, that created a cauldron. the big lesson is, be very careful before a president declares a u.s. policy objective. very ambitious policy objectives are very epochal to achieve. -- a very difficult to achieve. the counter isis campaign was catastrophic when it began. he built the campaign from the units we built during the iraq war and the surge. we were talking about evacuating our embassy in baghdad. it is because of the c.t.s. units that were willing to fight and special forces could get out with them, they were able to have some traction to clawback. it was costly. i do not think we can never forget that. what we can do as a country to sustain these things is the big question hovering over us. >> i am a little different on this. something worked. we know by data that sectarian violence took a dramatic fall. hitlast brigade of the five baghdad in june of 2007. about 60 days later, crocker and petraeus were coming back to testify before the u.s. congress that they sell early indicators of a decrease in sectarian violence. i will tell you, there is very little you can accomplish in two months with an additional five brigades. that leads me to wonder, what else was contributing? something worked. i think it is a combination of the search. awakening, jason -- jso c, some combination of those. as americans, we should be cautious not to assign the greatest weight to the shiny object. the shiny object is the 30,000 troops. it had a role. i am just not sure it was the dominant role. to the extent we might draw lessons from this experience, we should be a little suspect of assigning to ourselves too much responsibility for a positive outcome. i think these factors were interrelated. i do not think we have gone through the serious professional investigation of where the weight should fall. i suspect -- and i am not a political scientist -- but i suspect that if you just compared the physical effect of the surge to the psychological impact of the surge, which was, we are not caving. we are going to be with you. good move going to the sideline. we are not caving on this. the psychological impact might than thebe greater physical presence of another 30,000 troops. it is only a 20% incremental change of what we had on the ground. a lot of variables. we should be cautious about assigning cause and effect. doug, i dorespond to metricor me, there was a for measuring psychological change. it is one i looked at closely in those quarterly reports we used to do for congress, which was the tips coming in from iraq these -- iraqis. starting in the late spring of 2007, may and june, go up dramatically because of the psychological effect you are describing. hal: we have time for a few questions. if you stick your hand up, a microphone will find you. please identify yourself prior to your question. >> hello. i would like to say, it has been fascinating to listen to the process and how all the various agencies work together and interacted together to come up with what appears to be a successful solution. mcgurk, you brought up how this might be different from what we are seeing today. the hope is that there are these organizations that worked together to come up with a solution to leave syria. what do you see as different today on how the organization as working under the administration back when you made this decision? i worked for two years i have a chubby administration. i thought we actually had a decent transition. teed up three decisions for him to make. nature of the president himself is what a lot of this comes down to in any administration. there is no process to make these decisions. the national security advisor tried to establish a process, but it did not connect to the president. the president of the united states makes major, consequential story decisions that harness our country on a historic path. now onhappened twice syria and the last a much -- on syria in the last eight months. i am a lecturer at stanford. i teach presidential decision-making in wartime. i am not an expert, but we do a lot of case studies. we look at eisenhower. we look at all sorts of things. we look at korea. eisenhower said, to paraphrase, good process does not guarantee good policy, but bad process plus incompetence to much guarantees disaster. right now, there is no process plus what i would say is frankly, incompetence. domesticspeak to policies. on national security making, there is no process. i am concerned it is going to get worse because our adversaries and allies know this. i was in the middle east last week. the anxiety is sky high. the process that led to the search, a very difficult decision for a president. extensiveious, harnessed all of the expertise of the u.s. government. there is no process now on major decisions. administration, i respect everyone trying to make sense of the maelstrom. this is not how it should work. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. it was a fascinating conversation. going mostly off of ambassador lute's comments, i'm going to ask a question and perhaps phrase it in pocket of late. the question is about agency, the agency of the iraqi government and participants. you have mentioned maliki. exit possible -- is it possible the actions or cooperations of iraqi actors were as important if not more important than the actions of the u.s. government in the process of the surge and its initial successes. thank you. i will address it briefly. brett and doug can talk at greater length. because it is their country, what iraqis did with the most important factor. i agree with doug that we should be humble about what we can do. and werewere there, able to play a particular kind of balancing role, the ethnic communities, i think we could be disproportionately influential in how it came out. is reallygency critical if you are involved in these things. we had to act like terribly against the elements that were committed to the total failure of the entire enterprise. if you have 100 car bombs a month going off in baghdad, there is not going to be much real politics going on. this gets to what we did against al qaeda and iraq. this is president bush again. before the surge, he told maliki, if we do this, you are going after all killers. shia.eans sunni and we are not going to have any handcuffs we go after on the shia. maliki lived up to that commitment. population security in key areas and reduce the effectiveness of the extremes actors fueling the sectarian conflict. have learned over the last 15 years in this region is to be humble about what we can do. have a sense of humility about our ability to force outcomes and deliver outcomes. an americanor because we are so privileged. we are so powerful. it is hard. thato adopt an approach confers to the local conditions. in the long run, it is their country. in the long run, the effects that are organic to the maliki government, organic said the iraqi political scene will be much -- organic to the iraqi political scene will be much more durable. that does not mean we do not have a role. -- the classic case is jay suck. this is a national counterterrorism force that is unmatched. did toanley mcchrystal form it into a hunting machine is unmatched. iraq does not have one of those. iraq did not get surry county. iraq did not get bin laden. pakistan did not get bin laden. there is some high end niche u.s. capabilities that are unmatched. we should bring those in to the fight. on the long run, i am very much in favor of trying to find an indigenous answer because those are the ones that are going to be durable. i tell one anecdote? ofare in iraq at the end 2008. it is a culmination we are handing off to the incoming obama administration. things are in better shape than we could have imagined. the president had a state welcome. had a great meeting with maliki. we are all sitting on the side. stands up and guy throws two shoes at the president. it was such chaos in that small room, when he stood up screaming, i thought it was a suicide bomber. that was my first thought i thought, my goodness. it ended up being two shoes. >> one of which president bush almost caught i think with the intent to throwback. >> the president first was so gracious in that moment. behind the scenes, coming everyone down. the guy who threw the shoes was taken out back. we could hear him getting willed on by the iraqis. i think you had a quote. was it in this book? doug said something like, we can do all we possibly can. and give these guys a chance, on eachre going to wail other. there is an element to that. it is up to the iraqis at the end of the day. that moment was quite a moment. i was sitting next to doug when it happened. >> this was a funny story. it turned out to be funny. it was not funny at the time. brett and i as loyal national security staffers were at the end of the row. the president is standing next to maliki. a velvet covered table with the agreements ready to be signed. this fellow throws issues. brett says, i think that guy just threw a shoe at the president. the secret service agent in charge jumps out to interpose himself between the shoe thrower , probably not in secret service training, and the president. ends up throwing the second shoe. president bush is directing the secret service agent to go back and be quiet. he only has two shoes after all. he is now out of ammunition. do not make a bigger thing of this. the secret surgeon -- the secret service agent jumped out. he hit the boom mic of the u.s. interpreter who was interpreting the arabic. the boom mic swings around and hits the most innocent person in the pressdana perino, secretary, in the ip the only casualty was her blackeye. this is for brett. i read in the local news that kurds refer to- mcgurk.aba the syrian organization for --an rights reported that which you have talked extensively about -- reportedly back in the city. i was wondering if you could comment on that. second, if you could detach yourself as an american for a second and give some type of -- if you -- what would you do if you were head of the stf forces on the ground with everything going on? how would you proceed forward in your relations with the regional actors? ambassador question, edelman can also answer. >> that is a little bit off topic should just real -- off-topic. the opposition, forces that turkey works with are interwoven with extremist groups and extremist actors. that was the main highway for isis that fed the war machine. we used to discuss this with the turks. i talked about this on the record. feelhappened today -- i like we're are living in 1921. in 1921. living erdogan basically carved it up. the assad regime will come back to these areas. russian and turkish patrols will begin in five days. in a room indone sochi, partially the consequence of the decision president trump made without any consultation or anything. these decisions are now out of their hands. what is sad is that the protector of these areas is vladimir putin. it is tragic. i am concerned this will get worse. we have already collapsed our position entirely over the perimeter we have had. now -- her influence talk about humility, if you're anyone say we have tremendous influence to do this and that, they are kidding themselves. this is in the hands of others. the fate is in the hands of other powerbrokers. >> and the iranians. just two points on this. have are some people who been arguing and some in the administration arguing that we have not really done right by our allies in turkey and that the ffa was some kind of alternative to the work that didt did with -- that brett with fdf. the last three weeks have given the line to that because these are in many cases, former jihadists themselves were repurposed by the turkish government for their own reasons. it is the reason why centcom on at least one occasion tried to examine the turkish options and concluded these were not the kind of people we wanted to go to war with. the second point is that somehow, the turkish government was bound to do this. that is equally false. erdogan believe that wanted to get in a fight with eyes. had we made that point clear to him in the call president trump had, none of this would have happened. all of us have been through previous examples of this where the turks were threatening to go in. steve may recall the black rain operation. they wanted to do that right as we were going into iraq. president bush dissuaded them from doing that. this -- we have been talking on this panel about the exercise of presidential leadership in the use of presidential power. this was a total abdication of both of those things. hal: we may have time for one more question. >> on a lighter note, this is for ambassador edelman. you mentioned earlier that you bought a book from a french general about in algeria.ligence was that a book on how not to? this is still a very sensitive topic in france. i actually have very good relations with my french counterparts. in 2008 when we were having a counterinsurgency conference in germany, i asked my french counterpart if they would like to do a presentation on their campaign in algeria. he looked at me and said, this atb is too sensitive to pick in france. -- he has more than 1 --, but both of the books are about the lessons he learned as a french officer. the losing effort the french flnd to defeat the insurgency in algeria. they still bear reading today. they are very transient and -- enchant.nsi the longer one was reprinted. it has one line i recall very well. it really -- it applies to us very well in this context. if there was one area where we french were totally deficient against our adversaries, it was in the area of strategic communication and public information. hal: this has been a wonderfully informative set of comments. we will take a break and let the in.lars weigh please join me in thanking our panelists. [applause] >> from george washington to george w. bush, every sunday at 8:00 p.m. on the night -- to midnight eastern, we explore the presidency. you are watching american history tv all weekend, every weekend on c-span three. >> c-span

Related Keywords

Moscow , Moskva , Russia , Afghanistan , United States , Texas , Iran , Algeria , Washington , Vietnam , Republic Of , Whitehouse , District Of Columbia , Fort Hood , Syria , Mozambique , Togo , Pakistan , Reunion , Germany , Iraq , Baghdad , Dallas , South Korea , France , Turkey , Macau , Americans , Turkish , Russian , Iraqis , Syrians , Iranians , Korea , Turks , Iranian , French , Iraqi , German , Syrian , American , Elliot Cohen , Eddie Vietnamera , Abu Dzhokhar , John Hannah , Mary Beth , Steve May , Stephen Hadley , Johns Hopkins , Paul Eaton , George Washington , Jason Jso , Casey Eric , Steve Hadley , John Mcnaughton , Barack Obama , Al Qaeda , Dick Cheney , Ryan Crocker , Frank Carlucci , Obama Mcgurk , George Casey , Dave Petraeus ,