Days when that meant something and it really mattered. We respected people who hold these types of positions. We look forward to hearing from him tonight. Leavingink without even the stage, i will get the first panel underway so that we can start this. Professor, illege would say, get your notepads out. We will start with our first invite thei want to panelists to come up to the stage. Tim sale from the university of to chair theing panel and lead the discussion. , who has beento in the news quite a bit. 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. Peter feaver, welcome back to the hilltop. He is a professor at duke and director of the grant staff Strategy Program and former white house official in the Bush Administration. If you 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 with some ofstage the teams and policymakers from the search. The three of us spent a lot of time asking questions of others and i would like to ask you questions today. As we move around the country interviewing all of the 28 people for the book, we often began with the question, how did the surge story begin for you . We ask the interviewees to set when they started thinking about what we came to know as the search. I want to ask you a variation. Of the projectry 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 search. 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 theas a graduate student on oral history of permissive active action links, which was a device that protected Nuclear Weapons from unauthorized use that was invented in the 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 five people who and it was notea until we interviewed them and brought them on stage together that they discovered we were not the only ones. It turned into almost a comical exchange we brought them all together. , there were son many consequential decisions Bush Administration made. It would be interesting to do the same kind of study of Bush Administration decisions where we would interview people separately to see their individual role and then bring them and collectively to see how the roles fit together and she said, great idea. Easy one. T with an the search. 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. I would confirm your thesis that everyone believes it begins with that. You and i had that conversation and agreed. His was maybe eight years ago when i left the government in 2008, i started teaching a class at harvard teaching my students how to National Security decisionmaking happened in the government and i structured of course that was around 15 decisions based on a rack. Iraq. The surge was one of them. Mindsas a meeting of around some useful projects we might do. This is not how i expected it would unfold but i am very glad so many people devoted so much time and energy to putting this together. Something that will have real historical import. Mr. Feaver it makes a lot of sense and success can have 1000 parents. Tim one question i want to ask you both. Tell us abouto what was happening in within the white house and we also learned about Different Levels of departmentalization, different initiatives and parties of government. Was there anything new for you in this project . What did you learn as we went through and put them all together . I learned that i have a ice for radio mr. Feaver learned i have a face for radio. The original plan as we were going to do interviews. The important piece just added was lets make it a video record of peoples interviews which will then make it more useful for other scholars and a tool for other courses. In hindsight, jeff was right. Reach,ifies its use and 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 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 claims for the hotel if i did nothing to show for it. I learned that doing an interview on video does change the dynamic of the person. The person you are interviewing. Tomakes it harder for them 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 like at the miller center, you get a chance to fix those. You realize five minutes after you set it, i thought that was october, but now i realize it was november. When youre doing it in a video, you cannot do that and makes people more cautious. Was that weto that would give everyone the option to Say Something offcamera afterwards and occasionally we learn something from those sessions, but it was not a perfect fix for the challenge. I think yourn question might have been if we learned anything about the process we did not know. Certainly there were things that were new to me and doing interviews but i would say my larger take away as a whole was we at the nsc had remarkable visibility about what was going on. There were no shocks or surprises. That was a surprise in and of itself. That does not mean we knew everything going on. Whichuncil of colonels has become fairly wellknown, i was not aware that was going on at the time. I learned about it subsequent to the surge. We saw what came out of the pentagon was more what came up through official channels. Pointk it underscores the 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, conversations, emails. There was a constant conversation going on with people working 16 to 18 hours a day. There was a lot of visibility and i think the people who are working on the issue from every agency, we had some really good relationships 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. It made me think about him as a policymaker, did i ever for a minute think about, is there something i could do for a story that would make this more transparent later . It did not cross my mind. Were i ever to be in a position , it iss a policy maker something worth thinking about. Coalition for visual authority in iraq where i spent for more than a year, we had a resident historian. I was trying to remember his name. Gordon. He did not get the time and attention of people because it felt like everything was pressing, and it was. 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 andure peoples insights feelings, but not a decade later, as we ended up doing. On the issue of the transcripts, i should say they are now available on the website. People can watch the videos and read the transcripts. We have made this material available for teaching and scholarship. But what about the primary sources . We have this oral History Collection and in some ways it has led us to capture some of the constant conversation or know the conversation is occurring outside the written , youd, but im curious 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 im excited for the day they documents are public because they will help flesh out the story. I think some documents might be less revealing because many official documents of the product of the clearance process and people trying to forge consensus and put forward consensus. There is some of that in the surge but a lot of the 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 them to the president. There are two things i hope come out of it. In the book its said the options will withdraw or double down and i do not think that is a representation of what the process i think is very difficult to capture, in multiple interviews. I think documents will show that president bushs decision to go with the surge is really the product of deep analysis. It is not that he did not like the alternative so he decided on the surge. It very much was a project of analysis. The dynamics of iraq and how they had changed from making the first strategy. What are the dynamics and what are our abilities to affect the dynamics . How i was seeing it at the time was the violence which appeared to many as a civil war, that violence appeared to me to be two extreme list extremist groups stoking violence among broader population. If that analysis was right i we could get the extremist groups, we could deflate the widespread violence. But if it is a product of historical animosity and not being stoked by external extremist groups, that would not work. I turned out to be the first and ofsaw a dramatic deflation violence in 2007. My point is not that bush was saying, i refuse to accept there was an extensive process to look at the drivers of the conflict, how they might be changed, the capabilities were and iraqi capabilities, and what we cannot know the outcome, i think we can feel confident the strategy was based on more than a gamble. The second thing, i think naturally a lot of the focus has been on the military component of the surge. Some people have gone so far as to say it was no strategy. Find iswhat people there is a lot more tension that has been revealed on the political dynamic, the , changing oure own bureaucracy. All of these pieces that came together to be a strategy were there, they are just less visible and i think someone looking over the documents will see them with 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 believe some of them will be revealing. I was struck by my memory of what the document said was different from someone i was interviewing, what they remembered about the documents and 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 it comes out to see who has the better memory. If i could pick one to release, it would be the state memo. Several strategy reviews have been done in different departments and there was an interagency one. At that moment, we were trying to figure out as an interagency combined what options we presenting to the president and there was an option coming from the jcs, one from the state department, very powerfully that had been a very that proposed dramatic change in goals and strategy. Spent a lot of time as a collective wrestling with this. The interviews do not wrestle with the memo is much as they should have and as a consequence, i think the academic essay did not wrestle with the memo adequately. But i think doing so would be goal offor the understanding what it is like to make policy when you do not know what the outcome is going to be, knowing the president chose the surge and that it worked out so whole line makes the seem more inevitable than it did at the time. And rustling more faithfully with what the options were wrestling more faithfully with what the options were. Useful forbe more lessons learned. So i look forward to that. I hope one of the memos i wrote thisly gets out, because was after the president had more or less decided on it and steve asked me, what could go wrong . List of 12ith a things are something that could go wrong. Half thewas interagency address each one and as we were, three or four of happened over the course of the next six months and i thought this might not work out. Fortunately the team were more adept at dealing with these situations as they arose. As an analytic product, i rarely guess correctly but there it was, three or four things that happened. So for my grandchildren, i hope that one sees the light of day one day. Im if i could sum up what think youre both saying, we need more historians. It raises my next question. Peter, you alluded to the academic section, the scholarly section. The book is divided into with oral history component of the beginning and policymakers on record and then scholars examining mess. 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. Butedible academic training also policy experience. Can you talk about how we bridge whatap, whether we should, academic scholars can bring to policymaking and what policymakers can bring to academia . I thought one of the most revealing moments in the project was the statement made bets, ands dick and one of scholar the giants in my area of study. We will work shopping his chapter and we were arguing over and he revealed how much of a struggle it was to wrestle with these issues, in part because he had been shaped as a scholar, he was one of the first generations just when the and he war was ending had been one of the most prominent critics of the decision to invade iraq. 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, as i heard him, i thought, you are as much vested in this as any of the policymakers who had worked on the issue. And i realized the design of the built on an assumption that probably was not , there were policymakers who were biased because they had worked on the insights but you had to recognize that they had a for and you had to filter obvious professional bias. On the other hand, there were scholars who were objective truth seekers who can stand apart from it, separate from it, and evaluate what biased policymakers had said. I realized in that workshop that easiery, it was probably for the policymakers to be candid about ways they had called it wrong at the time. It seemed to me 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 as saying the decision to or that thewas bad ,ecision to surge is a mistake so many of the academics vocally opposed the search. It was very hard for those academics to step back and say, maybe the surge was a better idea than i realized. I might be overstating the case, i dont know. At least on an issue like the iraq war where it has become so politicized within the academy, it is likely there is not an objective perspective. Everyone has a stake. That is an important difference. , some of difference the historians know very well, political scientists ignore more regularly, and that is the Human Element to the context of a decision. Humans making the thesions with all of strengths and weaknesses that human relations produce. This, onetioned reason the surge strategy emerged was because of the trust that steve hadley was able to cultivate across the team. Steve is going to say it was not him, it was the president who was the primary trust generating engine, but i give steve a lot trustdit for growing the to be candid in the way we had to be. Because we were talking about 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. Im to have the freedom to wrestle with alternatives required a lot of trust. It requires the person youre talking to is not going to be writing a memoir that stabs you in the back and makes you look like a fool. One time steve was about to Say Something and he looked at me and said, you better not be writing a book about this. Writing about it, but i did not do it in a way that is the Human Element. If you do not have level of i think certain policy options might not have survived long enough to be incubated to the point where they would work. Steve was great. Wonderful about allowing people to work on it. Brett did not get as much credit in the contemporary accounts. Great publichat a servant he has been across several ministrations. He was tireless on this issue and others. So the Human Element is important. Apps l scientists abstract all of it out and loses a number but it loses the Human Element. Historians are better at capturing that. The difference between policy makers and academics is at the heart of the project. Let me add to what peter said. The course ofn this project and 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 at the brookings institution. Academics kits kept saying sanctions dont work in policymakers used sanctions with abandon. Arecymakers and academics just asking different questions and interested in different questions. I think this project reveals that in some fashion. Question i wase interested in and stella was and still am was with this process provide advice and recommendation and a decision that was the best one open to the president at that time . Academic in many chapters, which were really interesting, there are a lot of other questions at play and one of the things that animates a lot of the scholar to done it scullery take on it is how does this process compared to some kind of a deal . Some kind of ideal . A policymakers less interested in that because you know there is no one ideal that works in every circumstance and if you are asking if the process produces the best decision for the present at the moment, you realize the process will differ from president to president. Talk in thelot of Foreign Policy about the importance of the honest broker world role of the National Security advisor. When i think about this moment in history, i think steve hadl