Casts. More now about the 2007 surge of troops in eric with a foe cuss on the planning by the Bush Administration. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is stef, it is my great pleasure this afternoon to introduce our distinguished panel of speakers. We have ambassador edelman who has served in the department of state and the white house, and u. S. Ambassador to finland, turkey, and was Vice President dick cheneys deputy assistance. He has a department of defense medal for distinguished public service. From the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and a distinguished service award. To my far left we have general lute, he retired in 2017, previously he had a distinguished 25 year career in the u. S. Army and he served for a total of sick years in the white house under both president s, george w. Bush, and barack obama. And in 2007 he was named to coordinate the wars in iraq and afghanistan. It was both on the joint staff in washington dc and on the United States central command. Then, we have, on the panel, former director mcgurk. Previously mcgurk served in senior positions including inin the bush white house, a senior director for iraq and afghanistan, and iraq, iron, he lead several missions over the middle east. He lead talks with russia over the syrian conflict. And finally the Panel Discussion this afternoon will be moderated by professor brands. He is the distinguished professor of Global Affairs of the school of advanced international studies. He is the author and editor of many books including american grand strategy in the age of trump. And what good is grand strategy power and purpose. He was part of the strategic planning. So goin me in welcoming these scholars a this afternoon. Thank you, i would also like to thank our osts here for putting on this event today. So many of the policy makers that share their time and insights with us. It is a pleasure to be up here with three gentleman that are importantly involved in the Decision Making, later in its implementation, but were also generous with their time and their insights. So the basic run of the show is that each of them will have a chance to make some comments and i will ask a couple questions of the group, so i will go head and hand it to my friend eric. Thank you, it is agree to be here this morning thank you to msu for hosting this and i want to say it is really a pleasure to be up here on this panel. With two great public servants. We have been running a competition to see who is the most hated Government Official in turkey. Both of us wear it as a badge of honor right now. And i had to yield uply among long grown in recent years to brett, but that is only a compliment to his great work. And 13th annual surge reunion tshirts, but i they highlights something that speakers in the first panel mentioned which is the intensely human nature of the Decision Making process that is not often captured in scholarly studies of this. And the truth is, a lot of us actually became good friends through this process and i cant see megan, i dont see her. We did not know each other very well, we became friends and i think that there is something about these governmental processes when youre involves in them from is long hours, but there is also a lot of time and political pressure, a lott of stress, all of this, and managing all of this is very difficult, and for that i do want to take my hat off to steve. And you know if you go around the sit room, if there is a bubble over everyones head and their iq, you would be surprised how high the average would be. You would say 129, if there was emotional iqs the variance would be much greater. And i think that highlights some of the difficulty of this. So thanks to megan and to peter and to will and to hal, for managing this project to completion. I think the brojts and the book is very important to the historical record and the effort to provide an early assessment. Of the process and the surge itself. Im going to be leaving to catch a plane tomorrow, so i dont want my absence, my departure to be seen as a political comment on the next babble. Because i was struck by the incredibly constructive measured criticism they provided. And i agree with some of it, i disagree with some of it, but what struck me about consistently through all of the essays was an empathy for the incredibly different problems that the parties panss were wrestling with. And the con trains under which they operated and the difficulties of reaching a decision with very incomplete information, you know, under excruciating time pressure. And i think that is all too often missing. I would like to just register that. I could go further and say that i think that it is important to do projects like this across the board on ski decisions made in president ial administrations. I say that because speaking now in a dual hatted nature, because i had a misspent youth in academia and one of the things that strikes me is a i understand now that the documents dont tell the whole story. There are just too many of them being generated now. I think the Bush Administration emails, there was two billion of them. The record is becoming just too great for any sol lar to actually get their hands around in its entirety. More over because of the persistent problem of leaks, but also the increasing partisan nature of our politics, and the criminalization from time to time, documents are more self sensored now. But to the fact they might be subpoenaed. Emails, a lot of business in emails, they are frekly vequen very cryptic. And there is a ton that goes on in phone calls that dont show up in the documentary record at all. Steve and i were talking about the fact that we had a number of phone calls, frequently on secure lines in the summer of 2006 as we were wrestling with the fact that there were some folks in the defendant partment defense that we needed to have reconstruction teams in iraq just like afghanistan, but a boss that didnt agree and we had to try to work through that. None of that shows up in the written record. More over in megans comments this morning, we dont have a great record of briefings which are crucial. I have a very vivid recollection of briefing him at 6 00 in the morning. After he was returning from a fishing hole that he described as a place you had to fly to, then take a helicopter, then a bus, and then walk to. There is no record of that briefing in the documentary record. And briefing is a art that not everyone understands very well. I got to see steves from time to time. You never know how much time you will have and there is a great story about that which i will recount which is from the reagan administration. He was National Security advisor. One day he saw something in the president s daily brief about a gorilla movement and he got interested in that. So hank cohen spoke to him and said i need you to brief president reagan. He said how much time do you have and he said ten minutes. He saw him in the hall day later, he said how much time do you have and they said cut it down to five. They ran in the next day and he looked at him and cut it down to two minutes. He sees him in the hall the next day and he says i got the briefing down to two words, he stops and he says give me the briefing, and he said ronamo sucks. So briefings i think are extremely important and there were a lot of briefings that went on in this process at various points. Some that were part of the effort and some that were not and they were extremely important and they need to be captured. So i need to nominate a couple of cases. People talked about it in the first panel. The original decision to go to war, and i firmly believe the documentary evidence ought to be did classified. I think that is one of them, and i hope it happens soon enough to allow mel to complete his book on the Bush Administration. I want to just add a little granularity from my point of view. From the point of view of the dod and osd. The office of the secretary of defense that figures a lot in the book. And frequently you will see references that we could not do this or that because of opposition in osd. As much as in the vietnam time there was a lot of views about what was going on. And i think in part of the then assistant secretary for interNational Security affairs, he was in some sense my prez ses sor, because they did not exist at that time. They had very strong views, but there was a lot of us with an enormous amount of simpty with the idea that we needed to change the mission from train and transition to protection of the population. And it wasnt just me, i think, a lot of people in osd are sympathetic to this notion. There was a lot of back channel situations. The deputy which both of us worked in this administration and we wanted to help this process along. We cosponsored with the state department a conference on Counter Insurgency and we wrote about that and i gave a speech talking about the importance of thinking about population security. And here i think sf something that gets a little bit lost. There is a lot of focus on the increase of numbers. And i dont mean to suggest that Additional Forces did not make a difference because they did. But as secretary rice says in her interviews if you look at the peak of the number of boots we had on the grount,d, i thinkt was 165 we were almost at that in december of 2005 into the number, i think, was less important here than the change in the mission was. And that was really the crucial thing that steve and megaen an, brett, and colleagues pushed us to that made a difference. And i think another person that doesnt get enough credit here is ray. There is a lot of discussion about David Petraeus and the field manual 3. 5, the counter insurgence si manual that foc focused on population security. And they worked on that and the mfi commander, the core commander that turned this into operational art on the field, i think that ought to be noted. It is not counter insurgence si, a insurgency, but not everyone spoke coin fluntently. There was a lot of people that spoke pigeon coin. I think for a lot of folks the emphasis of the counter insurgence insu insurgency doctrine was more on the government part and we had a lot of discussions as we went through this in our defense Senior Leader meetings about the whole of government and where was the rest of the government in all of this. Steve got pulled into some of those on occasion by secretary rumsfeld. I came to really loathe these conferences because we would have a review of what was going on in iraq, and usually pretty quickly into it, they would say were the only department in the u. S. Government at war, what where is the rest of the government. And the interagency process is screwed up, and who is in charge of that. And we solved that problem with the surge. Because we sent doug luke over to the white house. And as the czar to try to pull all of this effort together. And it was a pleasure working with doug after he went over there. So i think maybe ly stop there. A and. A most to my fellow panelists here. I have a set of four observations that i want to share with you. Some of them are sort of memories or flash backs. Let me share this first one with you. The natural expeer cease, george bush was not a new president , he was six years into eight years. He benefitted from literally hundreds of engagements on iraq. He knew iraq. The germans have a great german phrase, a fingertip feel, is that close . Does anyone speak german . He knew the texture and he got this from hundreds of daily intelligence briefings. He got them from probably 100 plus meetings of his war console. He got this from hundreds of nightly briefing notes that megan mentioned in her remarks. These were called potus notes. I and for the iraq and afghanistan team, this was a chore. Those dealing with iraq and afghanistan, we gathered the most recent, most current developments, and put them in a memo to the president. This went on for years. He got this expertise from personal close engagements from all of the participants and also his iraqi counter parts. So following the sectarian violence, he was not an amateur. The power gets lost and it is not as explicit as it should be, but it under pins his ability to ask the right questions, challenge the assumptions, and to sort of nurse made this project and this process to its conclusion. And i think that is really important. The other thing that was not there, in the president s office, by 2006, was a sense of hubrus. By 2006, thee years into the iraq war, we didnt have starry eyed visions. We had been through a period, the president was very, sort of, soaper and prudent and experienced in a way that brought a level headed humility to the Decision Making process. We should not miss that. This could have percolated below any president but it was connected to a president who was an 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, was largely the central figure and running the process of the National Security council so the war council if you will and the deputies and subdeputies of the war council principles, so one or two levels deep into 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 . Its important, first of all, because it best serves the president. It gives the president the full range of policy options, when everyone trusts that his and her voice, that their bureaucratic voices will be heard. But it also is hugely important, and the book doesnt take this on, but is hugely important for the next book, which is the implementation of the surge, because a trusting decisionmaking process, where everyone feels heard and everyone feels respected enables successful execution. And you can imagine a process that isnt trusted, that features a lot of backstabbing and a lot of second guessing and is played out in the press, right, and how difficult that process would be to execute, because people would feel they werent heard and essentially would take the somewhat teenager approach of, well, now ill be heard in the execution process, right . And there are execution insurgencies that take place and so forth. The surge decision did not have to deal with that at execution and that was largely a product of the decisionmaking process itself. 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, right . Its the implementation phase. I saw this firsthand as a more central figure in the implementation a few months later. And my job, as an implementer of the surge, when i left the joint staff and came to the white houseworking for steve and president bush, was vastly simplified and enabled by the fact that it was the product of a trusting decisionmaking process so i think the process deserves attention. My third point, third observation, is a it reflects on a subplot that is sort of woven throughout the book. This is the plot between in the relationship between the policies in iraq and the securi relationship in iraq. We had prioritized the assumption that improved politics and increasingly inclusive iraqi political process would deliver security. So, in short, the first approach was politics first. And this had to do with turning sovereignty over to the Iraqi Government, creating an iraqi constitution, holding electrics, forming governments and all this sort of thing. And the sense was, if we could get sunnis, shia and kurds to Work Together politically, there would knob reason to fight and 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. Explicit by way of my own observation, what the surge decision actually did was invert. It turned on its head this relationship between security in iraq and politics in iraq. Security threshold must first be obtained to enable the politics. In a way we turned from politics first to security now. I think this actually played out in a year or so after the surge decision. We saw that once sectarian violence was quelled, Prime Minister maliki was able to take some pretty bold, political steps. It was maliki, after all who, within a year of the surge decision marched on bashra, shia militia, his own political allies, former allies when he went to quell shiaprompted violence in basra. Within 18 months of the surge decision that maliki signed a Framework Agreement with president bush, one of the last things president bush did before leaving office in late 2008, that enabled u. S. Forces to stay for another three years. And it was maliki who was able to get that political decision through a twothirds majority in the iraqi parliament. Those political moves were enabled by the improved security that was delivered by the surge. So theres a bigger strategic move here. Its not just about 30,000 troops but strategic inversion that put security first. Ive come to believe theres a certain sufficiency, a certain requirement, minimum requirement for security that then enables politics and i call 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. The book were all americans. I suppose most of us are americans in this room, right . So we have, i think maybe naturally, assumed that this american decision delivered a particular effect on the ground, dramatic decrease in sectarian violence within a couple of months of the surge hitting the ground in iraq. I think its worth thinking about maybe this is along erics line of the next book, another book thinking about the other effects that caused a decrease in sectarian violence, which are not american effects, fundamentally. Let me list a couple that come to the top of my list, right . First is al sadr, with his own militia, jm as we acronymized it, took to the sidelines. He took his shia militia off the battlefield. Number two, on the sunni side, Sunni Awakening predated the surge by probably about a year, well into 2006, you began to get the swinging of the sunni arab tribes, especially in anbar, and that was obviously before the surge. I think theres an argument to be made that a lot of the sectarian violence was beginning to burn out. That mixed sectarian neighborhoods especially in baghdad had been essentially been cleansed by 2007 when the last surge brigade arrived. Thats not a very attractive policy option, to cleanse these mixed neighborhoods but i think a lot of that had already taken place by the time the surge got there. And, finally, i think we fwiv too little credit to Stan Mcchrystal and the joint special Operations Command impact on the major accelerant to sectarian violence, and that was the jsoc campaign against zarqawi and al qaeda in iraq. These are the folks who were pouring gasoline, essentially, on the sectarian fires. All of these other effects or causes have a role to play in what petraeus was able to observe when they went back september 2007. Thats 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 to the American People, were seeing the early sign signs of a decrease in sectarian violence. I would be cautious among the historians in the room that we have a cause and effect between the surge itself and what we saw on the ground. I think its a multivariable equation. Thank you, doug. Im really honored to be here. Its great to see eric and be on this panel with hal and be here with steve and all of you. Let me first say, i am not in the book, despite being conversations with peter and i in 15, 16, 17, 18, i was spending a lot of time in iraq and syria in this campaign against isis, particularly in syria. The events of what just happen rd particularly on my mind. I think this is very timely because its about what can we really do as a country . We talk about ends, ways and means. The means being not just the brigades. Its our will as a country and capacity for leadership. Its such an open question now. Its very troubling. I always put up front the cost of the surge. About 1,000 americans were killed in the first year of the surge and i dont think we can ever forget that. And certainly president bush this is about these decisions, i talk a little stanford about Decision Making and people in Silicon Valley talk about how they make decisions. Its hard to even see them as comparable. These decisions are the most important, the weightiest, the most consequential for our country, for our history, for men and women who volunteer to wear the cloth of our country. And president bush felt that. And im just going to tell some stories, so indulge me for my experience in this, but just one. The day after the speech, announcing hes sending what became 30,000 more american troops to iraq, which was a wildly unpopular decision, if you put yourself in that time. We went to ft. Benning, and the president spoke with a number of americans who would be heading over to iraq. It was a pretty draining day. We had worked on this policy. I felt very strongly that it was the right policy. Ill talk about why. Youve read it in the book. But even after all those meetings, we had president bush then went and spent about an hour with gold star families behind closed doors. And so this was a president who was living and breathing this war as he has written since every day but until the surge decision, i think its fair to say hes living it, hes breathing it, hes struggling it, as steve saw every day, more and more than i saw in those days, but he wasnt really commanding the war. And the surge, as doug gets to, it wasnt just the decision. It was how complete change in the management of the conflict in iraq. So, let me just go through a little bit of my experience, and i will do an interview. It will be up on the web so you can see. On september 11th, 2001, i was a law clerk for chief justice rehnquist. I learned about those attacks from him. I was on the path to be a lawyer and have a nice career in the 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 in the fall of 2003, a former colleague of mine, who had just come out of an interagency meeting, which i didnt even know what that meant at the time and said theyre looking for people to go to iraq to help with their political process, constitutional process. Would you be willing to go . This was in the fall of 2003, four or five months into the war. And i said yes immediately i got to iraq early in january 2004, and as many people who went to iraq in that period, it was p t pretty clear very early on that we were into something we didnt fully understand, we didnt fully anticipate. I felt immediately that we didnt have enough resources to deal with this problem from the airport the drive from the airport to Coalition Headquarters was a very harrowing ride, the highway of death. Megan and i worked on the political process in that year. So, this is 2004. A lot of major decisions have already been made. We made a lot of progress on the political process, transitioned from the paul bremer era, set up an interim Iraqi Government. The politics were kind of working but the violence was not getting any better. And there was a debate among very senior officials in baghdad, which i witnessed, a very young person, 32 years old 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, frankly, of us working the politics, we said there is no politics. Security problem is a security problem. In any event, megan became a senior director at the nsc and asked me to join her staff, and i joined the white house in 2005, and i think its 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 theres going to be an election, theres going to be a constitutional referendum, that this will turn the corner. There was enough to not really force a fundamental reassessment. I was also, as a young guy, director at the time, i was always wondering how is the president seeing this . What he was saying publicly, he wants to succeed, nothing more important. It seemed we were so focused on transitioning to the iraqis, it was a policy we were not making any significant progress. My first time in the oval with him as a notetaker for a meeting with a senior iraqi official, megan and steve, i was shocked. First of all, you walk into the oval for the first time, your shoulders kind of snap back. I had never seen the president in person. So you feel like youre kind of on a movie set. I have been in there a lot now with obama, too. He was so demanding, and like inquisitive of megan, like a ruthless inquisiter. I said wow, this president is not only living and breathing this thing, asking all the right questions and he wants to succeed. As we got into 2006 and the situation deteriorated after the bombing. The historical record ive been working on a book project for ten years on this some day this will come out. The archives have been very friendly with me. Ive gone back and look at some of the potus notes. I think ive gotten a couple of them, at least for my own use. They hold up. And we were 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 reporting stream from the ambassador in baghdad, from some of the commanding generals at the time. And there was always this question, how does the president reconcile these different streams of information . And i think the way he saw as the commander in chief kind of the classical model delegating to the command, to the chain of command. And i think thats 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 was really critical here. We had 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. We would sometimes write reports and go see steve hadley. And i remember, steve, you said to us once before we started the formal review, are you guys sure about this . And we said steve, weve really done the work. Weve talked to all these people. This is months of work. Were sure. And i never knew where you stood actually until the very end, because you held your cards very close. But the only time ive ever heard steve say a bad word, he said you better be damn sure, because this think of what youre 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 to what were seeing now. The night the president made the speech on january 7th, we were in steve hadleys office. Myself, megan, and we watched the speech on tv. We had done a poll about would the American People support sending 20,000 troops to iraq . Came back like 28 , very low number. There was a poll that same week, i happen to remember, that americans who believe in ali alienpiloted ufos and it was ten points higher than this decision. So this was a really unpopular decision. We watched the speech. It was a very somber speech. You might remember the president did it in the library room with the books behind him. And then the senators came out and gave their reviews and the reviews were pretty rough. And josh bolton came in, because he had been with the president. He came in the office and said the president feels very good about the process. He said thank you. And josh said something to the effect, and the president is taking charge of this. Something to that effect. I dont remember 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 is extraordinary from what ive been able to see, nothing comparable other than eisenhower, the way he ran the nsc. Personal handson management of this war over the last two years. And that is why a lot of this succeeded, bringing in doug lute as an assistant to the president for the daytoday management, constant engagement from the president with Senior Leaders in iraq and in the region at critical times. This played out a number of ways. There was a time in the fall where myself, ryan crocker, Dave Petraeus decided were done with maliki. Some iraqis wanted to get rid of maliki. We wrote a memo, its time for maliki to go, as if we could make that happen. And doug is absolutely right. We tend to forget about the agency of other countries. The president asked us some hard questions. And he asked us the hardest one, who is going to come after maliki . And we said, well, actually, the iraqis havent figured that out. And the president completely shut down that entire conversation, not just with us, but with some of the iraqis who were maneuvering against maliki. That was the right call. Had we lost maliki, we would have had six months without a government at a critical time. We had some issues with the cent com commander and Dave Petraeus, which were intense and the president helped to manage and the battle of basra, maliki goes into basra without planning it, gets himself into trouble. Doug, you may have been overseas. I was kind of manning the fort at the white house and ryan crocker and Dave Petraeus both told me, you have to tell the president that maliki needs to he bit off more than he can chew. He needs to get out of basra and get back to baghdad. This is a disaster. I walked in the oval office that morning with steve to explain, here is what our people are saying, here is the desperate situation. And the president , without even a briefing, said the cat everyone told me this cat, maliki, isnt going to go after the shia militias. Hes going after the shia militias and were going to make sure he wins, and thats what we did. We sent forces down there. It was a key turning point in the campaign. And that was not the advice of his senior people. The sofa also, which we were able this is an untold story but a very smooth transition to a president who ran against the war and came in, and the first thing he said i was there. You were there. President obama said i dont want to mess this up, which was a tribute to all the work that had been done. And we can talk about whether, later on, it was messed up but that was another story. The way this 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 an interesting debate that had this surge review happened in the runup to the war how the war might have been differently resourced, differently managed. Thats an interesting question for historians. I was not there at the time. Its a very worthy project. Im honored to be here. Im sorry i was not in the book but i promise i will get my interview done so you can see it. Thank you. [ applause ] those were very three rich comments that triggered a number of questions on my part. So ill ask a couple of questions that have to do with process, with content and a question that has to do with outcomes, all of which you gentlemen have touched on a little bit. I would like to go a little bit deeper. The first question has to do with what were actually talking about when we talk about the surge review. If you look at the book, when people talk about the surge review, theyre 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 adviser who, of course, reported to steefb 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. There was an effort to do this within the nsc. There was an effort to do this at the joint staff. There was an effort there were efforts in other parts of the government as well. Im curious, because you three were all in different places within the bureaucracy, osd, the nsc, 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 iraqs strategy . Were you aware that was happening . Was there cooperation between different groups that were thinking about the same questions, or was this something that remained pretty closely stove piped until the formal interagency review began . Its a hard its a good question, hal. Its a little hard to answer for the reason that megan gave in her comments, which is there was a lot of conversations about this issue. For instance certainly i was aware of the effort in june to have the meeting at camp david. I will confess i, myself, at that point was a little unsure after what happened in february at the mosque, about 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 dont think we touch enough on it in the book, but the absence of an iraq government from january to june might have been okay absent the bombing. Once the bombing happened and theres no government, obviously, people feel they have to protect themselves, and its in that period you see the sky rock rocketing enrollment in various militias, particularly shia militias thats 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 his jsoc guys killed zarqawi. Zarqawi gets killed. We now have a government in iraq. So i think the natural tendency that certainly i had i cant speak for others was okay, maybe this was a turning point. As brett just said correctly, there were a lot of times when people felt weve got a development now or theres one coming that will change the direction of this. Youve got to go through that probably a few times and then realize, okay, theres not going to be some thats going to save us. Well have to do some things differently. We were very constrained in osd by the secretarys views. And that was just a reality. I was aware that the council of colonels was going on. That was not kept secret with us. I was having conversations with megan, with jd crouch. I remember specifically, we had these devices i dont know if they exist anymore. Theyre kind of a video telephone. 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 you. How are we going to get there . He would say were working on some things. I knew vaguely it was going on. I wasnt aware of all the specific dimensions of it. Its a great question. Camp david, this is reflective in the book, we thought that was going to be a key moment, that hard questions would be asked but it ended up being a cover for a secret trip for the president to see maliki and the new government and things were moving. Its reflected in the book but nobody supported sending more forces to iraq. It was like a very small number. Some of the colonels in the council of colonels, not the consensus. State Department Clear hold build in 2005 which would have been a counterinsurgency type thing. That didnt go anywhere. The state department really swung totally against any real talk of more resources. So from our perch, it was frustrating. And then there were things out of my purview even next door to me. Steve hadley has bill lute who is a military planner, to actually look at this to see if it was feasible militarily. I didnt know bill was working on that. Theres a lot going on outside our purview. A lot of it reflected conversations that the National Security adviser is having with the president , as it should. But from our perch, we were doing the work as best we could. And i think everybody was also dealing with their own principles and their own views. So, it was complex. But as it came out and everything came together and i remember the first time i met you, doug, i said hey, could we send five more brigades to iraq . You said you could, but you wouldnt really have much of an army left. The view Something Like that. The view was that for those who might say we should send more forces to iraq, the risks that might take on elsewhere in the world were going to be extremely, extremely high. Just from my vantage point, it gets to how controversial this was and how difficult this was. There wasnt much going on that would have led to this result until we had the formalized review. There were compartmented, segregated decisions happening and didnt come together until the jd crouch hosted review in, what 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 bureaucracies. For example, the joint staff version of this review, independent review was this council of colonels. Thats interesting. Why were they colonels . They were colonels because there were generals above them that opposed a formal review of the status quo option to include a couple four stars. So, this was sort of done as an offthecharts, 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 cent com commander and commander in iraq favored and i think the same is true in the nsc. The same is true 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 thats what inside the joint staff the council of colonels did. They eventually briefed the joint chiefs of staff. This is the committee of this four Service Chiefs plus the chairman and vice chairman in this famous windowless Conference Room called the tank, and the council of colonels briefed this out. And thats when the serious discussion began inside the joint staff. I think that sort of mimics or parallels the process elsewhere in the bureaucracies. It had to sort of start at the Grassroots Level and become serious, gain gravity, and then it could be brought up into the equivalent of the tank. So, it was segregated initially. Just to add quickly, so as i recall, steve will correct me if im wrong, but bill lutes study was probably one of the last big projects he did before he left the nsc. 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 outcall on me at the pentagon. And as he was walking out the door he said oh, by the way, if the joint staff tells you that you dont have any more brigades to send to iraq, weve got five more brigades to send. Dont listen to anything they will tell you. And that was roughly about the same time that diorno came to see me on his way out to become the core commander in baghdad under george casey, and he came to me and said eric, i think i need more troops. He was then the core commander at ft. Hood at three corps. He said i think im going to need more troops. This was after secretary rumsfeld had resigned, but before secretary gates had been sworn in, because he didnt get sworn in until he presided over the a m graduation, just for you folks in texas, to show how important that is. And so i was living with this very uncomfortable situation where i had the outgoing secretary of defense on the third floor of the ering and incoming secretary of defense on the fourth floor and said ray, im very, very sympathetic about you getting these troops but ive got a secretary who is leaving who is against it and i got a new secretary coming in, who i havent had a chance to brief yet. Well have to see where all that goes. So, just because a couple of you have mentioned this now, one of the very fine grain but interesting stories that emerges at this broader tale involves a question whether there were additional troops available for the surge. And whats remarkable is that you get widely different answers to this question depending where you were. The official dod answer is no, troops are not available. Nsc staff came up with a different answer. Im curious, why were people coming up with different answers to this question . Was it based on different methodolo methodologies . Was it reflecting policy disagreements within the government . Was it based on different assessments of how much risk the United States could take on in other theaters, with other commitments . What was driving these widely divergent outcomes . I think thats a question for the j3. Okay. So this is a case where its important to get inside the question being asked. And to probe the assumptions inherent with the question. So at that time, we had 15 brigades in iraq. I think we had two in afghanistan. And we probably had maybe 50 brigades on the books overall in the four structure. If you simply ask the question, are there five more brigades available, well, theres 15 here, there, couple in decree krarks couple in germany. Aents is, yeah, sure. Purely mathematical answer. The joint staff, however, was working under an assumption when we gave the answer that were out of shlitz. I dont think they make schlitz anymore. The use of that phrase may have retired the schlitz company, im not sure. We said we were out of schlitz and there were not five brigades available. Our assumption was that we were going to retain the basic operating principles of one year deployed and one year not deployed for a bringigade. And in order to set up that rotation schedule, you needed three brigades to put one in iraq, okay . You needed the one that was there. The one that was preparing to go, and the one that had just come back. And you couldnt sort of change that simple rotation math. So, when we said youre out of schlitz, we were saying, if you we were implying that if you hold to the one year in of combat and one year out of combat, that we were, in fact, out. Now, what having read the book and now thought about this, what i should have said, right, is youre out of schlitz if we stick to one year, one year, right, for a particular brigade. However, if you change that 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 oneyear break. So we went to a 15 12 rotation, you could, in fact, squeeze the last five brigades out of the fourth structure. But this is very much a question of, you know, probing the question being asked and making sure that you uncover underlying assumptions. And i wish if i had something i wish i could have contributed to a different book, it would be that early on in the process, i said of course you can get five more brigades. In fact, you can get 50 brigades if you want to send them all over there at once forever, right . In sort of a world war ii model, but lets probe the assumptions. And what the joint chiefs were most concerned about is that in this first war with the allvolunteer force these are all volunteers. Nobody is drafted in this equation were talking about, right . And it was largely a married force, a familybased force, that violating the 12 in and 12 out model would have fundamental repercussions on the health of the force and, quite candidly, im not sure that when we went to 15 months that we began to erode that confidence in the force, but i think theres still a lot of research to be done about the stress of not just the surge decision, but sustained combat over these, what you might call, the bin laden decade plus on the allvolunteer force. You see this in things like ptsd. You see this in things like retention rates in the services. And you see this by way of traumatic brain injury, you know, exposure to multiple concussions that tend to be the most common effects on the battlefield. And i think some of these longterm, physical and Mental Health impacts this isnt directly related to the surge, but it is related to employing an allvolunteer force as we have for so long, and really sort of the human experimenting thats going on with this exposure of this force to sustain combat. Now, very gratefully in recent years, our numbers are much lower in these sort of combat situations. And in particular, largely to brett mcgurk and his military colleagues in the war against isis, in the fight against isis, weve happened on a different model, where we dont have to americanize the effort. And were not dealing with 15 brigades or 20 brigades. Were dealing with much smaller, more sustainable forces key to partnership with capable indigenous partners. Thats a very different model. But thats not the model we were talking about here in iraq. We had very much american soldiers in the lead. So, thats the lesson, personal lesson for me is probe the question. Make sure you understand the assumptions that are based on the question at hand. Two quick points. I think global risk is an interesting one. I do remember discussions in the tank with the president and the chiefs. The chiefs would say youre taking a lot more risk of p potential if theres a conflict in korea or somewhere else, and the president always made clear we win the wars were in to help us stay out of future wars. He was very clear on that in terms of priority settings. Thats a conversation that goes on in any relationship between, i think, the chiefs and the president. On this last point doug made because its in the news, counterisis campaign was deliberately, completely different. We relied on local actors in syria, local force we built a force of 60,000 syrians, they took 10,000, 11,000 casualties. Five or six americans were killed in syria. And the cost to u. S. Taxpayer, the surge about 250 billion total. The entire four or fiveyear campaign against isis, about 25 billion. Plus we had a huge coalition sharing those costs, which is why i dont want to get off topic but when President Trump says hes ending endless wars, and it doesnt make any sense. This was a totally sustainable model. Totally sustainable. Theres no clamor in congress, no clamor it was working. We werent fighting. We werent losing american lives. We werent spending much money. For the consensus to build, theres a pushback to this, that we cant even do that, i think the repercussions are quite serious. Just a footnote. Doug, correct me if im wrong. We all talk about five brigades going to the surge. As i recall as they went out, Dave Petraeus really had like six. [ inaudible ] so, eric, maybe this is a question for you. Brett wasnt the only one who managed to dodge us for this book. Secretary rumsfeld also does not appear as much as he might because he declined to be interviewed or rather said yes but then said no a number of times. But his presence is here, and so i think the traditional narrative about secretary rumsfelds role is that he was an obstructive presence in this story, that he was opposed to any change of strategy in iraq, and it was only when he was when he departed from the administration that this change was possible. And so given that you had a pretty good window into dod thinking, given your perch heading osdp, is that an accurate view of secretary rumsfelds role . And, if so, why did he play this role, or is it mistaken in some way . Secretary rumsfeld had a reputation for writing roughshod over his general officers in the pentagon. And my view of it was slightly different. I viewed him as a kind of equal opportunity abuser. I mean, he didnt just rough up, you know, general officers. Doug had been on the receiving end of this. So was i, multiple times. That was his, you know, sort of m. O. In reality, at least during the time i was there, from summer of 2005 on, i never saw him overrule a four star. And in particular, he shared, i think genuinely, general abizaids view that it was our presence that was driving the animosity among iraqis and driving the violence, and we had to train and transition and turn this over to iraqis. It occurs repeatedly in the book, our phrase we have to take our hand off the bicycle seat and let the iraqis handle this on their own. We cant do this for them forever. And he and general casy and general abizaid, i think, all very genuinely shared that view. For those of us who had a slightly different view, that made life a little complicated, because, you know, you work for one secretary at a time. And i had to execute what the secretary thought was the right thing to do. Now, that didnt stop me from, you know, getting a copy of the counterinsurgency field manual. My military assistant had been general petraeus chief strategist when he was running the training mission. So, he was in touch with petraeus. I got a copy of that field manual and got it at john hannas request for Vice President cheney so he could read the field manual. I got john nagle, expert in counterinsurgency, working for the deputy secretary of defense gordon england, down the hall for me. First i got him to get me a copy of the classic book on counterinsurgency, french general who fought in algeria, which had just been reprinted. I got john first to get it to me when i first got to d. O. D. In august of 05. His book came out. I had him take a copy over and brief Vice President cheney on that. Some of us were trying to work within the system to try to get some of these ideas percolating, but, you know, we had to, you know, abide by the secretarys view. Which he came by honestly. The other view he had was the one that doug was just talking about, which was about the health of the force and the rotation base and sustaining it. So, he had his own, you know, good and sufficient reasons for the positions that he took. I just had come to the conclusion that we were beyond the point where those views were going to get us a successful outcom outcome. So, one of the themes thats come up in a number of remarks so far, but i would like to ask about it more systematically is the question of whether the surge had to happen when it did or whether it might have come about earlier. There are widely diversion of what the surge accomplished and ill ask about that in a second. One of the points of consensus is that it came about quite late in the game, after about 3 1 2 years of war and quite a lot of cost had been incurred. And so would it have been possible to come to a similar policy with a similar outcome six months earlier, a year earlier, or even three months earlier, or did the surge depend on a convergence of circumstances that was only possible at the very end of 2006 . Its a hard question to answer but i incline to the latter. One of the things you have to remember, this is not addressed that much in the book, but the Iraqi Security forces we were training in 04 and 05 were not the or in 03 and 04, i should say, sorry, when paul eaton was handling the mission, were not trained to do any defense. Its meant to be a Mechanized Army outside predatory powers but not be available to do what saddam had the military do domestically in iraq. And it was only when dave petreaus took over and started to train a force that was capable of carrying out counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism Missions that we would have had the iraqi partners to be able to execute the surge, in my view. You know, we needed to take the time to build up that iraqi force with which we could partner because doing this by ourselves would have been, you know, not a sustainable thing. We had to do it with iraqis who we could pass it off to. And i dont think the Iraqi Counterterrorism force gets nearly enough credit. Brett knows more about this than i do, but we fought those guys crazy in the fight to take iraq back from isil. They carried an enormous amount of the burden. But you had to train them. They had to be there first in sufficient numbers. We were up to 150,000 or Something Like that, Iraqi Security forces by the summer of 06. I doubt we could have done this with less than that. I think the interesting question is, when do you, in any campaign strategy, have you to adapt as it runs into the real world. The question is, when do you have a process to adapt . You cant constantly have Strategic Reviews. It was a confluence of events in 2006 that kind of forced this, but i think it was pretty clear pretty early, a lot of the assumptions with which we went into iraq were not correct. The support of the local population, the resilience of existing institutions and then with the disbandment of the army and other things, Strategic Review might have led to some adaptation. From our vantage point, what was frustrating was that secretary rumsfeld did have a very broad mandate in the cpa area and others. We got the nsc sense that the president had limited Maneuvering Room to adapt because of the reviews of the cent com commander, general abizaid, who was incredibly knowledgeable about the region, a fixed set of views reflected by the secretary of defense and thats the chain of command. The president is either going to overrule or redirect his chain of command or think his i think any president i saw this with obama, too. Not all the time, but youre delegating to the chain of command. These are your people. For the president to redirect that, thats a very unnatural instinct for a president. The question is, when do you actually adapt . The last two years, once we did the surge, the president , very seasoned president , taking command of the war, we adapt eda lot throughout the campaign. We made a lot of decisions and i dont think we would have succeeded in those two years without that constant reevaluation with the president directly handson management of the war. I have concluded after three administrations, at the risk of repeating myself, if a president is going to send his men and women overseas to be involved in a big war or little war, he has to be directly involved in this. That doesnt lot of things to do, but regularly briefed, know whats going on so when a crisis happens, which is inevitable, he kind of understands the situation and you can adapt effectively. President bush did that quite well from the surge on. Yes . I think it was a combination of events on several fronts in 2006 that led us to look at this more fundamentally. First of all, the spiking of sectarian violence was, of course, inflamed by the czzarqa attack on the mosque. Violence spiked in 2006. The second was that we actually did show progress after the december 2005 iraqi elections, and then maliki by, what, june of 2006, had finally formed a government, right . I remember for months we didnt have an iraqi minister of defense. Well, how incapable is that, right . But he actually formed a government. So, we thought we were still on track, right, with the politics first model. Here you have a newly seated government. Hes got, you know, sort of sectarian representation across the government, somewhat inclusive. It looks like were on track. And then finally you have this impact of, you know, both the cent com commander, theater commander and the commander in iraq, two four stars, who were very influential, saying stay the course, that we should continue prioritizing the military effort, the training of the iraqis. Well, that argument began to fall apart when we tried to send, on three different occasions, iraqi brigades to do what the surge eventually did, which was secure baghdad. And with together forward roman numeral one, roman numeral two and roman numeral three where iraqi buss were supposed to transport iraqi brigades to baghdad to secure baghdad and quell the sectarian violence. The buses arrived and they were empty, okay . And so you had some very fundamental events in the first sort of nine months of 06 which conspired to cast doubt on the current approach on the existing approach. And therefore, i think, made rather obvious that it was time to review the bidding. Hal, i hope youll ask us a bit more, though, about sort of this dimension of it and in particular, if i were in your seat i would ask why were the Iraqi Security forces, after three years of billions of dollars of investment and such a central they played such a central role in our strategy, right . We will stand down when they stand up depended on their standing up. Right . And together forward, one, two, and three depended on them arriving in baghdad. And i think theres a bigger strategic lesson here, which beyond the scope of the book about our ability as americans and our forestructure, our army, our marines in particular, to build reliable, capable indigenous forces on a timeline that is strategically relevant to us. And i think if you look at iraq in the early days, iraq in the later days. Remember, it was about a third of the iraqi army that crumbled in 2014 when al baghdadi declared the isis caliphate in mosul. And 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 this study is so what for future policy. And that would be a so what on the top of my list. So this actually relates to where i want to go in my final question, coincidentally enough. Well open it up to the floor for questions as well. In the book we didnt explicitly seek to address the question of whether the surge war you cant really talk about the surge without getting at that question. We were unsuccessful in constraining our contributors from going after that question as well. And even today there are a wide variety of answers, which are reflected in the essays that people contributed to the book, everywhere from it was a success to it was a failure or to it was an operational success, but a strategic failure and various gradations in between that. So im curious how the three of you would assess that question. And what factors produced in your view the outcome that you attribute to the surge . It strikes me, if you look forward beyond the bush presidency, beyond 2007, beyond 2008, its clear that whatever gains there were were not sustained to the degree that the people involved with this would have hoped. And so how should we think about the success of american policy in 2007, 2008 and the relationship of the surge to what eventually comes later . How much time do we have . [ laughter ] so im in the camp of people who think the surge largely worked on its own terms. The list of forces that doug mentioned earlier, i think you know, you cant disaggregate the reaction of the iraqis from what we did. So when you say that muqtada stood down. Thats true. Thats because he was scared we were going to kill him, which is why he went off to, you know, study theology for the better part of two years. And so i think that was directly related to our decision to put Additional Forces in and to go after shia militias. The city awakening, yes, but we had that discussion before. I remember having discussions with megan in 2005 about the desert protectors, who were out there. We kept saying theres nothing we can do to reinforce this. How can we reinforce it . Until we actually went in and put Additional Forces into anbar. And if you talk to guys like dave kilkullen, who were out there with the general and the marines, they were taking tenyear leases. They had never had any intention of staying for ten years, but they were trying to convey were here, were going to support you. Were going to change things around. Of leverage and the discussion that megan and peter had about what kind of bet we were making. And on the question of did he have secotarian instincts . All these things. To me, he was all of the above. We knew from intelligence he had people literally whispering in his ear. You know, he should be more sectarian. We knew he had sort of sectarian instinct. We knew he had an unhappy experience in iran because he decamped and lived in syria for 20 years. He was also dependent on iranian support to stay in power. So the point was and until you just told me that you guys had written this paper about getting rid of him in the fall, i never understood the context for our conversation i had with the president during one of the breaks in the s. I was off in the corner with secretary rice, two former academics having a very academic conversation about vietnam when the president came up. I said to him, mr. President , if you really thinking about this option of getting rid of maliki, i have three words for you. No dien ziem. The president said, yeah, thats what i think too. Maliki was able to do things. There was discussion earlier of him going after the shia militias. Ryan crocker and Dave Petraeus had the leverage because of our presence and the role we played as the balance wheel among the communities in iraq to get him to do things that he probably wouldnt have done otherwise. And to me, the tragedy of the early exit in 2011 is we lost that. And, you know, would have, could have, should have. What will happen had we stayed . Well never know. We certainly got an incredible decrease in the violence and some progress on the political side and theres, i think, a pretty good argument to have been had. We could have had more had we stayed longer in greater numbers. And it wasnt just, i think, the question of would we stay on. We assumed there would be some follow on agreement including iraqis that assume there is some follow on agreement. There is a chart that goes like this like a cliff. And also, i completely agree with eric. There is like a romanticism about the awakening. Guys had some tea with shakes and turned and revolted against al qaeda. No. We were fighting with them. We put the numbers in and significant numbers to really make clear thats when it really, really started to pick up. The awakening that turned against al qaeda. We decimated iraq and the networks because of the surnl and the information that drove and the intelligence value and everything. And the whole thing fed on itself. The question is, is the sustainability and whether the new administration and everything. I lived through some of that. There say threshold question of our ability as a country. Doug is getting that to kind of after a regime falls to come in and prove the situation. This is the question that is a threshold one. 2011 it wasnt just withdraw from iraq. It was the announced u. S. Policy that assad must go. Which if you were in the region at that time created a fever in the region. And foreign fighters and jihadies and tens of thousands flowing into syria and money and weapons and all sorts of things from all over the region. And then all the atrocities of the assad regime and high ran coming in. This that created this called ron. So i think the big lesson is just be very careful before president declares a u. S. Policy objective. Because very am busbitious objectives are difficult to achieve. I think the surge gave iraq a chance. Having been involved in the counter isis campaign which was so catastrophic with wh it began. We built the campaign from the units we had built during the iraq war and particularly during the surge. We were talking about a evacuating our embassy in baghdad. It was costly. I dont think we can ever forget that. And what we can do as a country to sustain these things is the big question hovering over us right now. So im a little different on this front. Something worked. Okay . I mean, with he know by data that sectarian violence, the incidence of sectarian violence took a fall. The last brigade of the five in question here hit baghdad in june of 2007. About 60 days later, crocker and petraeus were able to testify before the u. S. Congress that they saw early indicators of a decrease in the sectarian violence trends. Okay . Look, ill tell you, theres very little you can accomplish in two months with an additional five brigades. So that leads me to wonder what else was contributing here . So something worked. And i think its a combination of the surge, almadi, at wakening, jsock, ethnic cleansing, some combination of those. My only spoipoint is as americae should be cautious not assign the greatest weight to the shiny object, right . The shiny object here is the 30,000 troops discussed by the book. It had a role. Im not denying that. Im just not sure it was the dominant role. And to the extent that we might draw lessons from this experience for future experiences, we should be a little suspect of assigning to ourselves too much responsibility for a positive outcome. I think the factors, i count five, were interrelated as eric says. But i dont think weve actually gone through the sort of serious professional investigation of where the weight should fall across these five factors. I actually i suspect, and im not a political scientist, but i suspect if you just compared the physical effect of the surge to the psychological impact of the surge which was were not caving, were not leaving, were going to be with you in anbar. Good move going to the sidelines. Right . Were not caving on this. That psychological impact might actually, if we could effectively measure it, it might actually be greater than the physical presence of another 30,000 troops. That is only a 20 incremental change on what we had on the ground anyway. Right . So a lot of variables. We should be cautious about assigning cause and infect. Just to respond to doug for a second, i think for me, there was a metric for measuring the psychological change. And its one that i looked at closely in the quarterly reports that we used to do for congress which was the tips. Coming in from iraqis about and they starting in late spring of 07 soshg, sort of may and j. Thats the psychological infect y effect that youre describing. Okay. We have time for a few questions. If you stick your hand up, i think a microphone will find you. Please identify yourself prior to the question. Hello. My name is laura. I just want to say its 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. Professor, you brought up the fact that this might be different than what were seeing today. What do you think is different in how the administration is working back when you made this decision on the surge . Yeah, thank you. I worked for two years in the tru Trump Administration. I defended the policies when i was executing them. The first year the Trump Administration came in. We have a decent transition on the war. A lot of continuity and a good Strategic Review. He made the decisions. We executed. That moved faster. But the nature of the president himself is what a lot of this comes down to in any administration. Tlaen and there is no process to make the decisions. Mcmaster is now the security adviser. He tried to establish a process. It didnt connect to the president. So i think the president of the United States makes major historic decisions that harness our country on a certain path without any deliberation or consultation with allies, with experts, with military commanders. Its happened twice now just on syria in the last eight months. And, you know, i teach im not really a professor. Im a lecturer at stanford. But i teach president ial Decision Making in wartime. So im not an expert on this. But we do a lot of case studies. Eisenhower said good process is not guaranteed good policy. But bad process plus incompetence guarantees a disaster. And right now there is no process plus what i would say is frankly incompetence. I cant speak for domestic policies, thats different. On National Security making, there is no process. Im concerned its going to get worse. Our adversaries and allies know this. And i was in the middle east last week. The anxiety like is sky high. So bottom line, the process that led to the surge, a very difficult, very difficult decision for a president was serious, was extensive, harnessed all the expertise of the u. S. Government. And there is no process now on major decisions. And then the administration and you see everybody, i respect the people snil there tryi people still in there trying to fix decisions that are not thought through. This is not how it should work. Thank you. Thank you to the entire panel. Going i think mostly off ambassador, im going to ask a question. And i ask for a key response. The agency of the Iraqi Government and iraqi participants. Is it possible that the actions and actors are as important if not more and the process of the surge. Ill address it briefly. Almost by definition and it was the most important factor. So i agree with doug that we should be kind of, you know, humble about what we can do. But since we were there and were able to play a particular kind of balancing role as i said among the ethnic and sectarian communities, i think we could be disproportionately influential in how it came out. Iraqi agency is really critical. I think if youre involved in these things. But we had to act militarily against those element thats were committed to the total failure failure of the entire enterprise in al qaeda and iraq. If you have 100 car bombs going off a month in baghdad, theres not going to be much real politics going on. And so this gets to what we gdi against al qaeda in iraq. Before the surge, he told maliki, hey, if we do this youre going after all killers. That means sun yni and shia. We wont have any handcuffs if we want to go after on the shia side. Maliki gave him that commitment. I have to say, he looked up to that commitment. That he really reduce the effect of the extremist actors that were fueling the sectarian conflict. So what ive learned over the last 15 years in this region in particular is as ive alresa be humble about what we can do and have a sense of humility about our ability to force outcomes and deliver outcomes. And rather to try to adopt and its hard for an american, right . Were so privileged. Were so damn wealthy and so powerful. This is hard, right . But try to adopt an approach that defers to the local conditions, in your case in the case of your question, to the iraqi conditions. Because in the long run, it is their country, eric. In the long run, the effects that are organic to the maliki government, the organic to the iraqi political scene will be much more durable unless we are in colonization. The classic case is the Counterterrorism Force that is literally unmatched in the world today. It is unmatched anywhere in the world. So iraq doesnt have one of those. Iraq didnt get zarqawi. Iraq didnt get bin laden or afghanistan or pakistan didnt get bin laden. There is some high end sort of niche uch. S. Capability thats n matched. We should bring those into the fight. But in the long run, i very much am in favor of trying to find an indigenous answer here. Those are the ones that are going to be durable. Can i tell one quick anecdote . Were in iraq at the end of 2008. Steve, doug, myself and president bush. And culmination that were handing off and the obama administration. The president had a state welcome. He had a great meeting with maliki. En with the out to sign the security agreements. Were all sitting on the side. And remember thats when the guy stands up and throws two shoes at the president. It was such chaos in that small move. When they stood up screaming, i spent too much time in iraq. That was my first thought. I thought my goodness. The second one of which president bush almost caught. But the president was gracious in that moment if you watch hin behind the scenes and calming it down. But he is getting whaled on by the iraqis. If you had a quote, was it somewhere i read . Doug said this shows we can do all we possibly can. Iraqis are trying to whale on each other. Its really up to the iraqis and that moment and the shoe thrower was quite a moment. This is a funny story. Turned out to be funny. So were all sitting at the u. S. Delegation and bret and i as loyal National Security council staffers were at the end of the u. S. Row and the president is up there and hes standing next to maliki, twin podiums. The table and the agreements ared are signed. It wakes me and bret up. I think bret said, i think that guy just threw his shoe at the president. So meanwhile, the secret Service Agent comes out to interpose himself between the shoe thrower, probably not in secret service training, right . And the president. Protect the president. The guy winds up, checks the man on first and throws the second shoe. President bush is directing the secret Service Agent to just go back and be quiet. Only has two shoes, after all. Right . So hes now out of ammunition. Dont make a bigger thing of this than necessary. As the secret Service Agent jumped out to get in front of the shoe thrower, he hit the boom mike of the u. S. Interpreter who was interpreting the arabic. The boom mike swings around and hits the most innocent person in the room, dana perino in the eye. So the only casualty aside from malikis ego and all this was dana prinos black eye. This is for bret. I read in the local news that kurds affectionately refer to you baba mckirk which means father of the kurds and your guidance is surely missed right now on all the matters going on right now on the ground. The Syrian Organization for human rights reported that you extensively talked about in the counter ice is Campaign Recently that was joer taken by turkish forces, there were ice is reportedly back in the city. So i was wondering if, one, you could comment on that. And second, if you could detatch yourself as an american for a second and did some type of what would you do if you were general, the head of the sdf force nouz on the ground. How would you proceed forward with the regional actors . And that second question, because of extensive work with turkey. Thats a little bit off topic. We have a couple minutes. Just real quick. Yeah. The Opposition Forces that turkey works with are interwoven with extremist groups. That was the main highway for ice is and fed iraq and the war machine. We used to discuss this with the turks. I talked about this on the record. Can you go read it. Putin and they sat down and carved it up. They saw the regime as coming back to areas other than those we seeded in the pence trip. Its assad regime will come back to koban aveni and all the area. And this was all done in a room in sochi. The consequence of this decision that President Trump made without any consultation or anything for general for the kurds and the people in these areas. The protector of the areas is now of putin. Im concerned that this will get worse. And we have already collapsed our position over the entire perimeter of northeast syria that we had pretty stable built over four years. I think our influence meaningfully direct the course of events. You talk about humility now. If you hear anything in the u. S. Administration say we still have tremendous influence to do this or that, theyre kidding themselves. This is now in the hands of others. The fate is in the hands of other powerbrokers. And the iranians. So just two points on this. One, there are some people who have been arguing and some in the administration are arguing that we, you know, have not really done right by our allies in turkey. And that the sfa was somehow some alternative to the work that bret did with sdf. I think the events of the last two weeks have completely given the lie to that because as bret just said, these are in many cases former jihadists themselves who were repurpd ose by the turkish government for their own reasons. Its the rn theason that centco tried to examine the turkish options and concluded that these were not the kind of people we wanted to go to war with and fight w and the second point is that somehow the turkish government is bound and determined to do this. There is nothing we can do to stop it. That i think is equally false. I do not believe that erdogan wanted to get in a fight us with. I think had we made that point clear to him in the call that President Trump had on the 6th of october, none of this would have happened. All of us up here have been through previous examples of this. The turks were threatening to go in, steve may recall the black reign operation which was they wanted to do right as we were going into iraq. President bush dissuaded them from doing. That we had been talking on this panel about the exercise of president ial leadership and the unite of president ial power. And this was, in this instance, im sorry to say, a total abdecation of both those things. We have time for one more question. On the lighter note this is for ambassador edelman. You just mentioned earlier that you bought a book from a french general about Counter Intelligence insurance in algeria. Was this a book on how not to . This is a very sensitive top nick france. I actually have very good relations with my french counterparts. And in 2008 when we were having a Counter Insurgency conference in germany, i asked my french counterpart if they would like to come and do a presentation on their campaign in algeria and he leaked at me and said, this is still way this scab is well, you know, really too sensitive to pick at in france. So, yes, his book was actually, he has more than one. But his books are really about the lessons he learned as a french officer in the losing effort the french waged to defeat the fln Counter Insurgency ini insurgency in algeria. They still bear reading to day. Their very powerful books. Lother one he did has been reprinted. You can find it actually online and download it. It has one tlin recaline that i very well. It applies to us in this context of efforts against terrorists and if there is one area where we french were totally deficient against our adversaries, it was in the area of Strategic Communications and public information. Well, this has been a wonderfully informative set of comments. Were going to take a break and then let the scholars weigh in. Before that, please join me in thanking our panelists. [ applause ] youre watching a special edition of American History tv. Tonight at 8 00 eastern, a look at todays Fighter Pilot culture and the origins from more than 100 years ago on world war ifrmen i. Military historian describes how legendary pilots like Eddie Rickenbacker influenced movies, comics and culture. The world war i museum hosted this event in kansas city. Enjoy American History tv now and also watch over the weekend on cspan3. Every saturday night, American History tv takes you to College Classrooms around the country for lectures in history. 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