of the best world affairs council in the united states. i know we have a lot of world affairs council members here. jim faulk, very grateful to jim for his help on this. we have players, including stephen hadley, who will be speaking tonight, a truly great public servant who was the director of the nsc under bush, and i say public servant in days when that meant something and it really mattered and we respected people who hold these high positions, so we look forward to hearing from him tonight. and i think now without even leaving the stage, i will get the first panel underway so that we can start this. if i was a college professor, i would say, get your notepads out, there will be questions. we will start with our first panel, and i want to invite the panelists to come up to the stage. tim sale from the university of toronto who was here at smu as a postdoc. he is going to chair panel and lead the discussion. he works on nato, which has been in the news quite a bit. meghan o'sullivan, the kirkpatrick professor at the kennedy school at harvard, an expert on north america, among other things, and one of the officials of the trilateral commission and former member of the. and peter feaver, bush nsc. and 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? >> thank you. it is a pleasure to be back here and to be on stage with one of the interview the teams and some of the policymakers from the surge decision. 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 sort of set the stage with when they started thinking about what we would come to know as the surge. i want to ask you a variation. tell us the story of the project itself. where did this project come from? >> so i will observe that when we did the interviews, we ran into a lot of people who had come up with the idea of the surge. this is one of the phenomena -- success has 1000 parents. i cannot lay claim to coming up with the surge but i can lay claim to coming up with the idea for this project. it actually grew out of work i did as a graduate student on the oral history of permissive action links, which was a device that protected nuclear weapons from unauthorized use that was invented in the late 50s early 60s. as harvard was preparing 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 on pals. it was a great idea that turned out to have four or five people who invented the idea and it was not until we had interviewed them and brought them on stage together that they discovered they weren't the only ones. it turned into almost a comical exchange when we brought them all together. i said to meghan, there were so 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 together collectively to see how the roles fit together and meghan said, great idea. let's start with an easy one, the surge. we would have so much momentum we would do one after the other. it turned out to be more difficult to pull off and has taken longer than we thought. but i am very proud of what we were able to accomplish. that is how the project started for me. meghan, what would you add? >> i would confirm your thesis that everyone believes it begins with them. you and i had that conversation and agreed. this was maybe eight years ago. when i left the government in 2008, i started teaching a class at harvard teaching my students how national security decision-making happens in the u.s. government and i structured of course that was around 15 decisions based on iraq, a deep dive. the surge was one of them so i felt like this would be useful, so it is a meeting of minds 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 in something that will have real historical import. >> it makes a lot of sense and success can have 1000 parents. one question i want to ask you both, your resources, you were able to tell us about what was happening in within the white house and we also learned about different levels of departmentalization, different initiatives and parts of government. was there anything new for you in this project? what did you learn as we went through these interviews and pulled them all together. >> i learned that i have a face for radio,. the original plan as we were going to do interviews. the important piece jeff and smu added was, let's make it a video record of people's interviews which will then make it more useful for other scholars but also as a teaching tool for other courses. in hindsight, jeff was right. that magnify its use and reach, but it made the whole process so much more complicated and 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 thought we had an agreement to do the interview and it wasn't until we were all sitting there that we had to renegotiate that agreement and i was already not looking forward to submitting my travel claim for the hotel if i had nothing to show for it, so i learned that doing an interview on video does change the dynamic of the person that you're interviewing and it makes it harder for them to say something and as they're saying it, say, that is not what i meant, i meant something else and when you do a written interview as is done at the miller center, you get a chance to fix those because you realize five minutes after you've said it, i thought that was october, but now i realize it was november. when you're doing it in a video, you can't do that and makes people more cautious maybe and so my solution to that was that we would give everyone the option to say something off-camera afterwards and occasionally we learned something from those sessions, but that was not a perfect fix for this challenge. >> let me add two things. i think your question might have been if we learned anything about the process that we didn't know. certainly there were things that were new to me and doing interviews but i would say my larger takeaway on thw whole was we at the nsc had remarkable visibility over what was going on, so there were no big shocks or surprises to me and that was a surprise in and of itself. that does not mean we knew everything going on. the council of colonels which has become fairly well-known, i was not aware that was going on at the time. i did learn about it subsequent to the decision of the surge. we saw what came out of the pentagon was more what came up through official channels. i think it underscores the point and the value of oral histories, because everything was invented in a constant conversation. people in this room, i look out and i think about the endless numbers of phone calls, hallway conversations, emails, there was a constant conversation going on with people working 16 to 18 hours a day and so there was a lot of visibility over what we were doing and i think the people who are working on the issue from every agency, we had some really good relationships and there was a lot of sharing, so i think that was good. in terms of learning a little bit about this process, one of my regrets of course is that we didn't do this earlier. i think that is a pretty common regret, but it made me think about as a policymaker, did i ever for a minute think about, is there something i could do for historians that would make this more transparent later? it did not cross my mind. were i ever to be in a position again as a policymaker, that it is definitely something worth thinking about. i know the coalition provisional authority in iraq where i spent for more than a year, we had a resident historian. i was trying to remember his name. gordon. i don't remember his last name. he did not get really 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 capture people's insights and feelings, but not a decade later, as we ended up doing. >> on the issue of the video transcripts, i should say they are now available on the cph website so people can watch the videos and read the transcripts. some have been annotated. 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 the oral history has let us capture some of the constant conversation or at leadt know the conversation is occurring outside the written record, but i'm curious, you both wrote a lot of memos in government, what will change in the surge story when the primary documents are released? will the story change, do you think? >> that's a great question and i'm excited for the day they documents are public because they will help flesh out the story. a lot of official governmetns 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 views. there's some of that in the surge policy, 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 those differences and consequences of them and to move those to the president. there are two things i hope come out of it that are still part of the emerging narrative on the surge. i think -- said the options withdraw or double down and basically the president didn't like the first and went with the second. i don't think that's a representation of what happened and i think the process is very difficult to capture, in multiple interviews. i think documents will show that president bush's 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 on the ground in 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 extremist groups, largely sunni and shia, stoking violence among broader population, and if that analysis was right, if we could get at the extremist groups, we could deflate the widespread violence. however, if the violence 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 we did see this dramatic deflation of violence in the fall of 2007. my point is not that bush was saying, i refuse to accept the option of defeat, so i'm going for the alternative, the papers show 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 even gone so far as to say there waan't a strategy. i think what people find is there is a lot more attention than has been revealed on the political dynamics, even on the diplomatic side, on the economic dynamics, changing our 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. >> one of the things meghan and i hoped to be able to do is get more documents released in time to be used in this. we got some, but not as many as we hoped. i do believe some of those will be revealing. i was struck by my memory of what the documents said was different from day, someone i was interviewing, their memory 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 which of us has the better memory of it. i think that if i could wave a magic want and release just one, it would be the state memo, when steve hadley convened the separate strategy reviews that had been done in different deparments 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, there was an option coming from the state department, very powerfully written memo that had been written that proposed a very dramatic change in goals and strategy. we 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 crucial for the goal of 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 much better makes the whole line 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. that would be more useful for lessons learned. so i look forward to that. i hope one of the memos i wrote finally gets out, because this was after the president had more or less decided on it and steve asked me, what could go wrong? i came up with a list of 12 things are something that could go wrong. the idea was half the interagency address each one and as we were, three or four of them 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. >> if i could sum up what i think you're 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. incredible academic training but also policy experience. can you talk about how we bridge the gap, whether we should, what 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 by dingbats dick bets, and established scholar and one of the giants in my area of study. we will work shopping his chapter and we were arguing over statement 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 vietnam war was ending and he 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 project was built on an assumption that probably was not sure, namely, there were policymakers who were biased because they had worked on the issue they had insights but you had to recognize that they had a skew and you had to filter for 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 actually, it was probably easier for the policymakers to be candid about ways they had called it wrong at the time. it seemed to me many of the policymakers found it easier to have some self-awareness 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 invade iraq was bad or that the decision 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 don't know. but i do think 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. the other difference, some of the historians know very well, political scientists ignore more regularly, and that is the human element to the context of a decision. these are humans making the decisions with all of the strengths and weaknesses that human relations produce. meghan mentioned this, one 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 of credit for growing the trust 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. i'm to have the freedom to wrestle with alternatives required a lot of trust. it requires the person you're 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. and i ended up writing about it, but i did not do it in a way that is the human element. if you do not have level of trust, i think certain policy options might not have survived long enough to be incubated to the point where they would work. steve was great. meghan was really wonderful about allowing people outside her office to work on it and brett mcgurk did not get as much credit in the contemporary accounts. we now know what a great public servant he has been across several administrations, but he was tireless on this issue at the time any many others. so the human elemtn is important. political scientists abstract all of it out and give a number but it loses the human element. historians are better at capturing that. >> at the heart of this project is the difference between policymakers and academics is at the heart of the project. let me add to what peter said. i was struck in the course of 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 a fellow at the brookings institution. academics kits kept saying sanctions don't work in policymakers used sanctions with abandon. i realised policymakers and academics are just asking different questions and interested in different questions. i think this project reveals that in some fashion. at the time, the question i was interested in and and still am was, was with this process provide advice and recommendation and a decision that was the best one open to the president at that time? as we see in many of the academic chapters, which were really useful and interesting, there were a lot of other questions at play and one of the things that animates a lot of the scholarly take on it is how does this process compared to some kind of ideal? as a a you're policymaker 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 this president at the moment, you realize the process will differ from president to president. there was a lot of talk in general in the foreign policy about the importance of the honest broker role of the national security advisor. when i think about this particular moment in history, this surge process, i think steve hadley played that role as the honest broker. but it would not have been enough. if he had only played the role of honest broker, it wouldn't have gotten to where he got to. i think something not elucidated enough in the book is where the surge compares to the alternative. we have to ask how it compares. steve managed to play the role of honest broker in the sense that the president had access and was aware of all of the views and opinions and recommendations of everyone in his national security team. he had this awareness and steve made sure it was the case but steve also played additional roles. he played the role of an advisor and helped the president after the decision had been made to ensure the government would be in a position to implement the change in strategy. being an honest broker was essential but not enough in this case and i think a lot of academics would disagree based on the idea that the honest broker is the entirety of the job of the national security advisor. so this is a shout out to steve for managing an incredibly complex process in such a gracious way and also an example of how some academics might be looking at was he playing that role but i am much more interested in did the national security advisor make sure the president has all the information needed and also providing advice to the president at a very lonely and dark moment and making sure any decision made by the present can be implemented. >> i'm going to turn to the floor in a moment for questions. we have microphones. thank you very much for the towers center and the center for presidential history. my question is about presidential power, one of these that you mentioned. the power of the president, it has been said, is the power to persuade. we see this in the book. there are times when the president understands that his comments and questions might shape policy options that are presented to him and so he stays back from the process at certain times. other times he decides it's the right moment to persuage. for those of us who have not worked for a president, and i understand the -- but for those of us who havent, what it is like to work in that environment, how important the individuals working for the president, how influential they are? >> meghan worked for president much longer than i did. i have thought a lot about this since coming back and also reading the daily newspapers in the last several years, i worked for two presidents, president clinton, i was a jr nsc staffer and then somewhat more senior in the bush administration. they were very different personalities. your interactions with them, at least mine, were very different. i had less access than meghan or steve had to president bush, but particularly with president bush, the overwhelming impression i had was how different he was from the cartoon caricature that my academic friends back at duke held of him. their version of him was not smart, not thoughtful, not well-read, inarticulate and reflexive, making impetuous decisions. and that was not the person that i saw. i saw someone who was deeply committed to the integrity of the office and the notion that he was a custodian of something greater than himself, that he was temporarily a steward of that he had to hand onto the next person and he did make sure he left the next person better off than he had been. that was the job of the president, to leave the next person better off if you could. i'm not saying he did not make mistakes. of course he made mistakes. but there was a commitment to something that was greater than just his own legacy, his own standing, the way people thought of him. that was inspiring. he also was so much smarter than people give him credit for. i will never forget one day he came to the nsc given all hands meeting. many people work at the white house and never see the president. they are working at a level where they do not have interaction. that was my role in the clinton administration, so one of my jobs was to always beg for opportunities to at least be in the same room with the president. this was a moment in the bush administration where the president came and spoke to everybody at the nsc. for most of them, it was the first time in the room with the president. he went around the world, with no notes and said come this is what i am trying to do in southeast asia, in qatar, in latin america, and my job in strategic planning was to be able to see the big picture and the different pieces. i could not have done as good a job as he did. and i realized this president know so much more about the guts of what he's trying to do then my academic friends would believe i do think that causes staff to be loyal up. the bush administration, the team still has a high degree of camaraderie and we just got together a couple of weeks ago for a reunion and it was striking to see the level of camaraderie. my friends asked me what i miss most about working in d.c. and i say it's the teamwork, the sense that you are all working on something bigger than yourself. in academia, you are mostly working by yourself and in government you have a chance to work for something bigger. that is something the president conveyed well. >> i agree with everything peter said and certainly that is my memory of the president, without a doubt. i will add one more thing and i think it gets to the heart of your question, which is about the president and anyone in authority and their ability to affect the information that comes to them by just a minute gesture. president bush talks about this in his interview about how he was conscious of that. i thought a lot about this during my time in the white house, because i would watch how carefully i watched president. not just his verbal direction to me, but when i would walk into the oval office, for a pre-briefing, i was looking for every queue in the room to see how much time i had. do i have two minutes or 10 minutes? i would rely on all sorts of things. what sort of shoes is he wearing? if he's in a good mood he is wearing cowboy boots and maybe i have longer. is the vice president in the room? you're constantly looking for cues. the downside can be, if you are president, any joke, muttering under the breath, could actually shape what you get in your next briefing or what people give you, because there is a natural desire to please the president. so i think the president was very conscious of that and i would say he explicitly made it clear to me that he was open to me telling him things he did not want to hear. when i left the white house, i got this wonderful cd with about 400 pictures of me with the president over the years i was there and my mother was flipping through it and said, why is he making the space you in almost every photo? and i said, because i am giving him bad news in every single one of these photographs. it was true. in coming to the surge decision, this weight on me heavily. he said to me, i am looking to you to tell me how we can change the trajectory in a rack in iraq, but i am also looking to you to tell me if we can't. he was saying, you know i want to win and if there is any way to do it, i want to know how to do it. but he was not saying, don't bring me any other conclusions. and i remember saying, i think i am capable. if there is a way to be successful, i think i am capable of working with this amazing group of people are finding it and advocating for it. what am i capable of walking in their and saying, there is no step to take to change the trajectory? fortunately, we did not have to go there. but the president was explicit about it and i think that is out of the character most people would expect. >> i would like to open it up to the floor if anyone has any questions for peter and meghan, about their experience, about the making of the project. a microphone will come over to the gentleman in the middle. thanks, brian. >> thank you for that excellent analysis of the surge and the process that was used. do you know whether a similar process was used at the time the decision was made to go into iraq? >> neither of us were in the government at the time and so that is a great question to ask of our keynote speaker tonight at dinner, who is our friend and former boss, steve hadley. i do know the administrations learn over time and remember when steve took over for condi, he said, there are some things we did well in the first term and we need to build on that and there are things that we did not do as well and we need to refine our process to do that. that's how my job got created, to do more of a certain kind of processing. so i suspect that all administrations grow over time. >> having not been there, this is something that comes up in the oral history volume. there are people reflecting on the learning paper. >> cory shockey, who wrote one of the papers, are you on a panel later this afternoon? i suspect this topic will come up because this is something she wrote about. >> it is really great to hear about the inner workings in the white house and what goes on behind the scenes. how did you get into that? did your academic career push you there or you had a colleague there or just luck? >> part of a lottery. so i came to the white house after being in the bush administration for a couple of years previously. i joined the bush administration right after 9/11 as part of a wave of people who joined government. i worked at the state department. i then volunteered to go with our military to iraq as a civilian, before the war, and ended up being there for the first 16 or 17 months. when we transferred sovereignty to the iraqis, it would've been normal that i would've gone back to the state department but at that point, i was offered a job by condi rice to come to the white house. that was i think a reflection of the fact that iraq was still a very difficult policy issue for the united states, that a lot of time and attention was being focused on it, that there were a lot of things that needed to be adjusted. i had been there for quite a long time and had developed some key relationships with people and hopefully a pretty good understanding of the dynamics on the ground there. so there certainly was a big element of luck involved, but that was the path that got me to the white house. >> i just connected a dot. i did a little bit of work on the 2000 campaign for some of the foreign policy advisers to then governor bush and in exchange, i got an interview with richard haas, incoming director of policy planning. i flubbed the interview and he hired meghan instead. i just realized, you got the job i was not good enough to get. i was in the cheap seats so the first term and in the second term, and steve took over for condi, he moved into a new office and i remember him saying, he wanted an office of someone who would look at the big picture and only an academic would be arrogant enough to work across all of the issues that i want you to work on. so he was looking for an academic who could pass political muster in the white house. academics are not bush's core constituency and so i had an advantage in the interview. i did not know steve, the first time i met him was in the job interview. there was a somewhat of a risk for him to hire me although i had other friends in the administration. >> a somewhat technical question and maybe better for the later panel. i am interested in how you made decisions and how the quality and accuracy of the intelligence that feeds the system affects the answer. you've painted a suprisingly positive picture of the decision-making around the surge and i'm aware in the early stages, the office of special plans was sort of set up to negate some of the stuff coming out of the intelligence community in general. so a general question about what you felt while you were there about the quality of intelligence and how important that was. >> i know peter has something he wants to say about this, but breifly, the intelligence was an integral part of our process. so we had the director of national intelligence, director of the cia -- i'm talking about the surge process. intelligence, i always think about it as an input into the process. policymakers do not spend a huge amount of time focusing on, could this intelligence be right, was this particular source considered to be accurate? these are all new questions that generally -- intelligence is an input into the process to determine, given the nature of the problem, what should we do about it? so we used the intelligence community input in a variety of ways. one of the debates occurring in the surge process was, what would happen -- is it a viable strategy to turn over the responsibility for quelling sectarian violence to iraqi forces? there was in a iraq study group and it had a certain appeal to people. let the iraqis deal with sectarian violence and we will deal with al-qaeda and have a division of labor. it was a serious proposal by many and we investigated it and asked a number of different bodies to give us their assessment of what happens in that instance. are the iraqis strong enough to beat back the sectarian violence on their own without american or coalition assistance? so we asked for a variety of opinions but i remember the intelligence community assessment was important. all of the assessments said the iraqis are completely incapable of taking this on their own and we should expect much larger-scale sectarian violence if we go that direction. we turned to the intelligence community for evaluations along those lines, which i remember to be very useful. >> the one i remember that was sharp point on what meghan was describing was, the question came down, what kind of leader was he? when he lead as a sectarian or was he just surrounded by people giving him that information? was he just insecure in his position and he needed bolstering? that was an important unknown, but the viability of the surge depended in part on the bet you would make about who maliki was. of course we asked the intelligence community to make their assessment, but it was not confident enough in the judgment and the president sent steve to personally meet with maliki and take the measure of the man. and that was my first and only trip to iraq. the three of us went. the purpose of the trip was for steve to take an assessment of it. i can tell you about this because his trip memo showed up in the new york times a couple of weeks later and it was the scariest moment of my professional career, because there were only three or four people who had access to that memo, or so i thought. i was one of them and i knew i had not leaked it but i was not sure i could persuade anyone else that i was not the one who heavily did. fortunately the person who did was known and i live to fight another day. but if you read the memo, you can see steve wrestling with this intelligence question. who is maliki and what can we do to change the trajectory of the way he governs? the success of the surge hinged on the president, and steve, and others getting that right, and i think they did get it right. no question maliki, under the surge, governed iraq in a way more effectively in a way that better the u.s. so steve got the analysis right, but it was an intelligence question. at the end of the day, intelligence cannot give us guaranty it would be one of the other. you had to bet. it was not a wild gamble, but it was at that based on the best evidence steve had been able to gather. >> this will be our second to last question. >> i work for the bush administration of the last seven years and i was at the pentagon during the surge during communication the surge doing communications and was detailed to the white house at one point and we were asked by the media for a lot of information we cannot give them. anyway. i'm wondering, looking back at all of the papers, what role did what the media said play? how did that affect the decision-making and moving forward? and being able to -- >> specifically, this has been said about president bush throughout the interviews i think and is fairly well-known that the press, obviously we were all aware of the environment we were living in. our families were reading the press, our friends, but i think it was remarkable in the way president bush was not driven by the press. i cannot even remember a single day in the many years i worked on this issue in the white house where i came in the office and had to respond to something that had been in the press, that i had to explain what so-and-so was talking about in the press. there were many mornings i came in and there were questions, but they generally related to something called the iraq night note, which my office and our team did for the president every night, which was not things in the press but diplomatic and intelligence reporting, so i do not feel like the media drove the people in the policymaking world in a very considerable way, but it obviously affected the overall environment in which we were trying to operate. this allows me to make a point i was hoping to make, which is about -- i think one of the things that is useful in doing a project like this oral history is to also say, what didn't happen in the process that so often happens in other processes? and it is remarkable how little domestic politics intruded into these deliberations. i have a specific memory. i was in the oval office and i forget what i said to him exactly, but it was something about the actual policy in iraq and i made some comment about the politics and how would play at home and i remember him saying, stop. i do not need your political advice. just tell me what you think in terms of policy. the politics are my job. and he was right. no one needs my political advice. it was incredible how little it intruded into our deliberations. there were certainly conversations but it was not a big driver. i didn't feel the burden of putting forward something that was going to be domestically palatable. >> i had a slightly different role than megan and so i had more interactions i think with the arguments that were alive in the press but also in the thing tank community, the public commentariat. there was an office that worked for karl rove whose job it was to listen to the critics of the administration who were maybe supporters of the president but worried about this, that, or the other thing, and then that office would send me hey, we are hearing that this is going wrong. what is the ground truth? and that particular -- pete wainer was the head of that office. he played an incredibly valuable role as the internal team b asker of it inconvenient questions. it's one thing if someone from cnn is shouting at the administration from afar. it is another thing when someone has the unquestioned trust of the president and his loyal to the president but asks the inconvenient questions. it was useful as a way to reflect on how strong is our argument? can i persuade pete on the merits of this or that? and if not, then i can to go back to megan and say are we sure about this or that? and it was a way of improving the rigor of our analysis, and i can think of several occasions where outside critics were able to sharpen our analysis. there are a couple of other ways in which they reassured us because we would bring in the sharpest and most knowledgeable critics on tv. they came and talked to us and as they were telling us what they would do, they did not have a better idea to do than we did and that reassured us that we had considered all of the alternatives and there was not a good idea that somehow, because of groupthink, we were not hearing, and so i found the press to be a more useful sounding board in that way, intellectually. and the last thing i will say is i know that there are some members of the press who had it in for the president and were not fair, but, many of the what i would say, the a-team reporters who covered the white house i think were trying to get the story accurately and trying to understand. and so, within the white house, i was one of those people that said let's engage these folks because i do think they are trying to tell the story accurately and so i don't really agree with president trump's posture of they're the enemy of the people and you have to treat them as an enemy. i think that's a mistake. most of the folks i interacted with and saw and read were trying to get it right. >> i'm told we have a little more time but i am anxious of protecting your voices too. maybe this will be the second to last question. >> i'm curious about how difficult it was to work with the pentagon to generate options for decisions that many of the senior leadership within that organization may have opposed and whether there was any concern when the president was seeming to listen lean towards a surge decision, about the potential risks of being perceived as overruling the military advice that he had received maybe from his top advisers. >> ms. o'sullivan: i can't tell if peter wants to jump first. i would say that there was a lot of care taken in this regard, that it was difficult to get options from the pentagon. i won't deny that. particularly on questions about what would it take if we did decide that the objective was to secure baghdad? what would be required? so these kinds of questions which may sound sort of hypothetical, but wanting to get a sense of is this possible? are the resources there? becaese these are questions that people cannot possibly answer at the nsc and in some regards, this is when we did look at to get fidelity from our judgments from people outside of the pentagon. but we did have a second sort of strategy review going on. the bill lindy look. that was done out of the nsc and steve hadley may talk about that tonight, to ask the question what kinds of resources do we have? the point i think that is even more interesting was your second bit about what kind of care was given to managing this? and the potential damage that could be done with the president making the decision that the military had gone against? and the president and steve hadley were i think very conscious of this and conscious of the fact that to make a decision that the military did not want to implement was not going to be in anyone's interest. and so, there is really, and this does not come out in this project and hopefully will come out in subsequent projects and with the benefit of documents, there was really a very intensive effort to identify what are the issues that the military has with this approach? and what might be done to mitigate those concerns? or are those concerns truly showstoppers? so the two things that come to mind first, is just the strain on the force. that was of course a widespread concern and a legitimate one. and you have heard about the president going to the tank at the pentagon on december 13 and being in position to hear the concerns, to express his views, but also to be able to hold out -- not an olive of branch, but to address some of those concerns about that by increasing the strength of the forces. it was done in a way to acknowledge that these are legitimate concerns the military has and these aare ways that we can address them. the otherwise in which was even more critical in my mind which does not get virtually any play at this point was something that peter alluded to which was the question is maliki someone that we want to bet on? that we want to put our confidence in? the military had a strong view on this and the answer was no. they had a view that his way of governing was overly sectarian and there were good reasons for that judgment. it had a lot to do with target sets given by the maliki government to our military that were almost exclusively sunni. there was a long period where steve engaged maliki as did the president over and over agian and the message was very clear if america was going to make this commitment to iraq, maliki needed to make the commitment to treat everyone that broke the law the same whether you were a sunni, a shia, or a kurd. this was very difficult at that time for an iraqi leader. and so, until we got that commitment from maliki, i don't think our forces were going to have confidence in putting more force behind him and so there was a lot of work that went into it. history shows maliki went before the iraqi parliament and made this statement i'm going to treat everyone that breaks the law equally and he did to the point that he had to build a different political coalition because he lost the support of that shia group. there was no halfway for maliki. either you are going after these guys or you're not. and he made the shift and our military saw that immediately. those -- that is an example of how that decision, or this process, was not only about making the decision. it was about creating the circumstances in which those decisions could be implemented successfully. and the skill of the president and steve hadley in bringing people along, not by convincing them or threatening them or bulldozing them but identifying legitimate concerns and ways in which they could be mitigated. >> i was smiling because my friend and former colleague would have paid you $20 not to ask that question. that is my personal hobby horse. my job on the nsc was to be a dilettante working on many issues where i had no academic bona fides. but on military relations, that was something i did know something about. the only article i wrote while i was working at the nsc was an article for sam huntington. i remember steve was like you're not going to write an article while you're working for me. i said i had to do it. he read the article and said that is so boring, no one will read that. go ahead. but, i had a precommitment academic theory on how civil-military relations ought to go and it was different from the way that sam huntington thought it should go. and then in the process of the surge, i remember trying to structure it to the extent that i could in the direction that my own prior research has said leads to better outcomes than that. and this is how you manage the flaws in sam huntington's approach. so i remember doing that and we ended up doing was something different and it was exquisitely painful for me as an academic and practitioner of civil mil to see my theory semi not tested, semi-found not wanting and us going in a different way than my argument would've said. the only consolation i had was that sam's way was worse than mine. so i was less wrong than my academic opponents were. but, this was one of the key potential failure modes for the surge. especially, i would say, late december of 2006, that one of the ways that the surge could have been stillborn is if in reaching this decision, the president had inadvertently or the team inadvertently had created a civil-military crisis where the senior military say, this is such a bad idea, we can no longer support it. and that -- a key portion of the president's efforts during that phase of the decision, this was mid-december of 2006, was getting the rest of the team, the military part of the team, on the same page that he was arriving at. so that he could say on january 10 that all of his advisers agreed. that was not true in october. that all of his did not agree. but it was true by january 10. it was a process to get there. i remember showing steve the final version of my article which said there is this academic version that did not work. we did a hybrid. steve said yes, obviously. academic models is not are not what you are going to do in a pragmatic, messy situation. i give a lot of credit to pete pays and the incoming secretary of defense, bob gates. they managed that process very effectively to avert what could have been a civil-mil crisis. >> we will take one more. >> you've mentioned a couple of times a bit about the decision-making process and having the ability you talked about how bush was wanting to here different opinions. you have also talked about gaining different opinions from the intelligence community, from the the feds, from academics, from non-academics, from people on the ground over there. the question i have which with getting so much of that information, how did you go about sifting through that? this is legitimate. this is something particularly with the things that you agreed with but also those that you thought was contrary to everything you've seen. the sifting through that and figuring out what was a concern and what was not. if you could talk about that process that would be really interesting. >> i'll go first and i will be brief. this is a point that will be illuminated when documents come out. as people are now well aware now and it's captured in this project, there were a whole series of meetings that considered a variety of things that culminated in a very intensive series of national security council meetings with president bush himself. now, i think, one of the things that will be obvious to people looking at the documents is in the meetings, we were not having the same conversation about options from day one. we did not begin with options. we began, and this is something that peter really reinforced with me early on before this became a public effort and it was really more of an internal effort, we began by looking at assumptions. where are the assumptions we have made about iraq and that we based our strategy on? we listed those. it was a pretty shocking exercise because when you list those, we said some of these might have been true but they are not true now. what is the nature of the violence? what is the driver of violence? is it foreign occupiers in iraq? or is it a sectarian dimension? so we did not begin that process by starting with options. there is always pressure in a situation where things are not going well. i think that steve and others gave us ato construct the process that actually started with assumptions and moved its way through. you will see in the documents that president bush actually spent a lot of time hearing about different issues, different perspectives on different issues that were not about specific options. but they were predicates to getting there. the one example i will give you as an example because it stands out in my mind as one of the most critical decisions he made before the big decision, the surge. and i remember this paper. it was a question about should the united states takes risk take responsibility for quelling sectarian violence in iraq? senior leaders felt strongly about that that we cannot accept responsibility. i remember very distinctly those arguments that happened in an nsc setting and the president said i know this will not be popular with everyone but we will assume some responsibility for this. it was the fact -- and the reason i find that so significant is once he made that decision, it closed off some options. the decision-making tree in some respects so there were certain options that just were not consistent with that. the reason i'm saying this in answering your questions is that the debates were not just about funneling everything into options. do we go home? do we stay? do we go bigger? it was a whole series of analysis that created a knowledge base upon which then the options could be debated so there was a lot of opportunity to feed in information from a variety of sources as we went. >> so my answer allows me to link back to tim's first question about the bridge between the academy and the policy world. i was one of the few people in government who could be fired and still feed his family the next day. i had tenure at duke. that made me the most expendable member of the nsc staff. as the chief said, if you serve at the pleasure of the president, when the pleasure is gone, so are you. i realized that meant that on some issues, i could be the person thrown into the mix to make an unpopular argument or mount an unpopular fight and if i got crushed in the process, my family was still taken care of. that came up twice, one time with a significant and powerful player who was arguing something that the nsc team thought was wrong and i looked around the room and i realized i'm the one that will have to jump on this grenade and argue against it. the other time gets directly to the heart of your question, was with the state paper. the state paper was powerfully argued. it was a compelling story of how we could perhaps do something different. but, what we what we on the nsc team did was, let's look at this as if it was a scholarly argument. what are the assumptions under which -- that are driving this? the assumptions under which the state paper produced good outcomes, if these assumptions were true, let us plug those assumptions into other option and we realized that if those things are true, the other options were even better. this proposal is dominated in a logical way by the alternatives. it was a very academic exercise that we did. and, i think that carried the day, that along with the politics where the jcs said hell no, we are not going along with that and that also helped carry the day. the point is that that kind of analysis that we try to teach our students how to do, they need it in government, particularly in thorny policy issues. it is always it is not always the case that you are trying to assess what is the most popular thing? what's easiest to sell? there is a basic piece of analysis that also needs to be done and much of that comes out in the book and hopefully come even more of it will come out when the documents come out. >> it's been a wonderful day to start the event. when you think about this project and the book, and interviews, you realize how much we relied on the generosity and good will of interviewees to take their time. for those of you that are here today that agreed to be interviewed, thank you so much for participating. megan and peter, you participated as interviewers and interviewees, as a great resource as we developed the questions. i had to google what cob meant. close of business. ok. i learned an enormous amount from you as well our students. thank you. >> watching american history tv with archival films, lectures in college classrooms and visits to museums and historic places, all weekend every weekend on c-span 3. in december 19 79, the soviet union invaded afghanistan, beginning a nine-year war against its mountainous neighbor. next, afghanistan: the gallant struggle, a 20-minute central intelligence video produced for president ronald reagan about one year after the invasion. the documentary details events that led to the invasion, the final role of islam in the country, and the status of the fight against the soviets. >> it has been called the hidden kingdom, isolated for centuries from much of the world, but since the second millennium before christ, history has recorded the movements of people for the towering un
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