Recognize my great friend and colleague, the best president of the best World Affairs council in the United States. I know we have a lot of World Affairs Council Members here. Gym falk, very, very grateful to jim for his help in this. As ive said, weve got the players, including stephen hadley, who will be speaking tonight, a truly great Public Servant who is the director of the nsc under bush, and i say Public Servant in days when that meant something and it really mattered. We respected people who hold these high positions. Were going to look forward to hearing from him tonight. And i think without even leaving the stage, im going to get the first panel under way so we can start this. As a college professor, i would say get your notepads out. There are going to be questions, discussion, so were going to start with our first panel, and i want to invite the panelists to come up to the stage. Tim sayle from the university of toronto is going to chair the panel and lead the discussion. He works on among other things, nato, i think that nato has been in the news quite a bit, so make a note of that. Meghan osullivan, the kirkpatrick professor at the Kennedy School at harvard, an expert on north america, among other things, and one of the officials of the trilateral commission. And also former member of the Bush National security council, and finally, of course, peter feaver, happy to welcome peter back to smu and to the hilltop. Peter is a professor at duke, the director of the grand strategy program, also former white house official nsc person in the Bush Administration. If you all wouldnt mind joining me in giving a big round of welcome for our panelists. Tim . [ applause ] thanks very much, jim for that warm invitation. Its a pleasure to be back here and its a pleasure to be on stage with one of the interviewed teams and also some of the policymakers from the surge decision. The three of us spent a lot of time asking questions of others and so its my pleasure to ask you some questions today. As we moved around the country interviewing all of the 28 people that are interviewed for the book, we often began with the question, how did the surge story begin for you . We ask the interviewees to set the stage with when they started thinking about what we came to know as the surge. I want to ask you a variation on that question, which is sort of the origin story of this project itself. Where did this project come from . You have the mic. 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 phenomenon that success has a thousand parents, and i was not one who could lay claim to having come up with the idea for the surge, but i will lay claim to having come 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, and as harvard was preparing to do the oral history of the cuban missile crisis, missile crisis,. They wanted to they wanted to pioneer the technique with a smaller project and asked me and another person to do that on p. A. L. S. P. A. L. S were a great idea that turned out to have four or five people who invented the idea and had been telling their grandchildren for decades they had made the p. A. L. S, and until we interviewed them and brought them on stage together that they discovered we were not the only ones. It turned into almost a comical exchange we brought them all together. I said to meghan, there were so many consequential decisions that the Bush Administration made, it would be interesting to do the same kind of study of Bush Administration decisions where we would interview folks separately to see their individual role and then bring them together collectively to see how the roles fit together, and meghan said great idea. We thought this would be easy to pull off and wed 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 than we expected and taken longer than we thought. But i am very proud of what we were able to accomplish at the end. 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. I think thats a good sign. You and i had that conversation and agreed on this. This was maybe eight years ago. When i left the government in 2008, i started teaching a class at harvard teaching my students how to National Security decisionmaking happened in the government and i structured a course around 15 additions based on iraq, so deep dive, and the surge was one of them. This was a meeting of minds around some useful projects we might do. And like peter, its not exactly how i expected it would all unfold, but i am very glad that so many people devoted so much time and energy to putting this together. Something that i think will have some real historical import. I think that makes a lot of sense and success can have a thousand parents and so we have lots of things. It was interesting how that balanced in our conversations with people learning where their role fit in the broader scheme of the decisionmaking. So one question i want to ask you both. Your resources for the project, 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 different 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 . The honest answer is not the best answer. I learned that i have a face for radio, is what i i learned because the original plan was we were just going to do interviews, and not thats what meghan and i thought, and the important piece that jeff and smu added was, lets make it a video record of peoples interviews which will then make it more useful for other scholars but also as a teaching tool for other colleges and courses. In hindsight, jeff was right. That does magnify its use and its reach. But it made the whole process so much more complicated. There were some really amazing moments when we realized we needed to travel all the way to jackson hole to interview Vice President cheney and thought we had an agreement to do the interview and it was not until we were all sitting there that we had to renegotiate the agreement. I was already not looking forward to submitting my travel claim for the hotel i was staying at and if i had nothing to show for it. I learned that doing an interview on video does change the dynamic of the person that you are interviewing, and makes it harder for them to sort of Say Something and as they are saying it realize no, thats not what i meant. I meant something else, and when you do a written interview as is done at the miller center, mels here, and they do that, you get a chance to fix those, because you realize five minutes after you have said it, no, no, i thought that was in october, but now i realize that was really in november. When youre doing it in a video, you cant do that, and that makes people more cautious maybe, and so theres a program called 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 the challenge. Let me add two things. First i think your question might have been if we learned anything about the process we didnt know. Certainly there were things that were new to me in reading the accounts and doing the interviews but i would say my larger takeaway as a whole was we at the nsc had remarkable visibility over what was going on, so there werent any big shocks or surprises to me, and that in fact was a surprise in itself, which again, doesnt mean that we knew everything that was going on. The council of colonels which has become fairly wellknown, i was not aware that was going on at the time. I did learn about it subsequent to the decision of the surge, but you know, we saw what came out of the pentagon was more what came up through official channels but i do think it underscores the point and the value of oral histories, because everything was embedded in a constant conversation. People in this room, i look out and i think about the endless numbers of phone calls, conversations, emails. There was a constant conversation going on with people working 16 to 18 hours a day. There was a lot of visibility over what we were doing, and i think the people who were working on the issue from every agency, that we had some really good relationships there and there was a lot of sharing. So i think that was good. In terms of learning a little bit about this process, one of my regrets, of course, is that we did not do this earlier. I think that is a pretty common regret, but it made me think about as a policymaker, did i ever for a minute think about, is there something i could do for historians that would make this more transparent later on . I have to confess, it did not cross my mind, but i think were i ever to be in a position again as a policymaker, that it is something worth thinking about. I know in the coalition professionitional authority in iraq, where i spent a little bit more than a year, we did have a resident historian. I was trying to remember his name. Its gordon i dont remember his last name but he was someone who i dont think got the time and attention of people because it felt like everything was pressing, and it was. Everything was pressing. But in retrospect, having those people there at that time, it is worth trying to prioritize that a little bit more so that we can capture peoples insights and feelings but not do it a decade later, which is what we ended up doing. Thank you. On the issue of the video transcripts or the videos and then the transcripts themselves, i should say they are now available on the cph website. People can watch the videos and read the transcripts. Some of them are annotated with footnotes so theres some catch for that, but weve made this material available for teaching and for scholarship, but of course in academia, this comes with the secondary question, when are you going to get the documents, you know . What about the primary sources . We have this oral History Collection and in some ways the oral histories let us capture some of that constant conversation or know the conversation is occurring outside the written record, but im curious, you both wrote a lot of memos in government, what will change in the surge story when the primary documents are released . Will the story change . Do you think . I was going to suggest just that. So thats a great question, tim, and im excited for the day the documents are public because i do think that they will help really flesh out the story. A lot of official government documents might be a little less revealing than i think the surge documents will be, because many official documents are the product of as those of us in government know a long clearance process and people trying to forge consensus and put forward consensus views. Theres some of that in the surge policy but a lot of the surge documents especially when it got to the level of the president were actually written to try to clarify different positions and different options and to clarify the differences and consequences of them and to move those to the president. So i think it will be useful. There are two things i hope come out of it that i think are still part of the conversation or the emerging narrative around the surge. The first s and this shows up in the book quite a bit, the idea that the president s decision was a gamble. That phrase i think suggests that, and there is a lot in the book and even in some of the interviews that there were two options, you know, withdraw or double down, and basically the president didnt like the first so he went for the second. I really dont think thats a representation of what happened and the complexity of the decision i think is very or the process is very difficult to capture, even in multiple interviews and i think the documents will show that president bushs decision to go with the surge is really the product of some deep analysis, right, that it wasnt that he didnt like the alternative so he decided on the surge and then there was all this effort to sort of create a justification for it. It very much was a project of analysis. What are the dynamics on the ground in iraq . How have they changed from when we made our first strategy . What are those dynamics and what are our abilities to affect those 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, largie sunni and shia, stoking violence among a broader population. If that analysis was right if we could get the extremist groups, we could deflate the widespread violence very quickly. However, if the violence was a product of historical animosities and was not being stoked by external extremist groups, then that solution wasnt going to work. It turned out it was the first and we did see this dramatic deflation of violence in the fall of 2007. So i guess again my point is not that president bush was just saying, i refuse to accept the option of defeat and therefore im going for the alternative. It really and the papers will show this. There was a very extensive process to look at the drivers of the conflict, how they might be changed, what our capabilities were, what the iraq iraqis capabilities were. I think while we certainly couldnt know the outcome, i think we can feel confident the strategy was based on more than a gamble. The second thing, and ill make this very brief and peter may have more to say on this as well. I think naturally a lot of the focus has been on the military component of the surge. This is true and the book gives a lot of attention. Some people have gone so far as to say there was no strategy. I think what people find is when they see the documents, there is a lot more attention than has been revealed thus far on the political dynamic, on the diplomatic side, on the economics, on changing our own structure, our bureaucracy. All of these pieces that came together with the military piece to be a strategy were there, they are just less glamorous, less visible and i think someone who is really looking over those documents will be able to see this much more clarity. One of the things meghan and i hoped wed be able to do is get more of the documents released in time to be used in this. We got some, but not as many as we hoped. I do believe that some of those will be revealing. I was struck by my memory of what the document said was different from, say someone i was interviewing, what they remembered about the documents and i was pretty sure i was right, but the person i was interviewing thought it was Something Different and i thought, we have to wait until the document comes out to see which of us has the better memory of it. I also think that if i could wave a magic wand and release just one of the documents three years ago in time to be chewed on for this project, it would be the state memo, which was when weve when steve hadley convened the separate strategy reviews that have been done in the different departments into an interagency one chaired by j. D. Crouch, at that moment, we were trying to figure out as an inner agency combined what are the options were presenting to the president , and there was an option coming from the jcs. There was an option coming from the state department, and it was a very powerfully mem row that phil zeleko and David Satterfield had written that proposed a very dramatic change in strategy, change in mission set, change in goals really. We spent a lot of time as a collective wrestling with this option. State tedepartment is a powerfu player in the agency. It wasnt random. 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 presentist goal of understanding what its like to make policy when you dont know what the outcome is going to be, knowing the president chose the surge and that it worked out so much better than the critics thought it would, makes that whole line seem more inevitable than it did at the time. And wrestling more faithfully with what the options were, as we thought they were, as the protagonist in the strategy review were arguing for, that that would be more useful for Lessons Learned kinds of studies. So i look forward to that. Selfishly, i do hope that one of the memos i wrote finally gets out, because it was this was after the president had more or less decided on it and steve asked me, what could go wrong . Red team the decision. I came up with a list of 12 things are something that could go wrong. The idea was task the interagency address each one and as we were addressing each one of these, about three or four of them happened over the course of the next six months, and i thought holy this may not work out, and you know, the baby and the cradle moment. Fortunately the team, david petraeus, ambassador crocker and doug lute and everybody else were more adept at dealing with these situations as they arose. But i feel as an analytic product, i rarely guess correctly, but there was a time when i guessed correctly about three or four things that could happen, and so, you know, so for my grandchildren, i hope that one sees the light of day one day. If i could sum up what youre both saying, we need more historians. Its a prohistory argument. It is more work for historians to do. It raises my next question. Peter, you alluded to the academic section, the scholarly section. The book is divided in two essentially with an oral history component of the beginning and policymakers on record and then scholars examining this. I think the chapter you wrote with mr. Hadley shows there is a distinction between policy and scholarship and you both are great examples of this. We heard about your incredible academic training but also policy experience. Can you talk about how we bridge that gap, whether we should bridge that gap, what academic scholars can bring to policymaking and what policymakers can bring to academia . Okay. So i thought that one of the most revealing moments in the project was the statement made by dick betts, who is a dear friend and really distinguished scholar at columbia Civil Military relations, among many other things. Hes really one of the giants in my personal area field of study. We were at a workshop, we were workshoping his chapter and he eni were arguing over a statement or something, and he revealed how much of a struggle it was to wrestle with these issues, in part because he had been himself shaped as a scholar in the wake of the vietnam war. He was one of the first generation of security scholars just as the vietnam war was ending in mid late 70s and of course he had been one of the most prominent critics of the decision to invade iraq. Signed the academic letter, et cetera. So he was telling me emotionally invested in the iraq war debate, on one side of it, and in some ways, and now im projecting, he didnt say this, but as i heard him, i thought, you are as much invested in a particular narrative of iraq as any of the policymakers who had worked on the issue, and i realized that the design of the project had a was built on an assumption that probably was not true, namely that there were policymakers who were biased because they had worked on the issue and thus, you know, had insights but you had to recognize that they had a skew and so you had to filter what they said in light of their obvious professional bias. On the one hand, and then there were scholars who were objective truth seekers who could stand apart from it, separate from it, and evaluate what 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 selfawareness and admit when they got it wrong and it was harder for the academics. In particular if you had gone on record as saying the decision to invade iraq was bad or more to the point, if you had gone on record that the decision to surge is a mistake, so many of the academics vocally opposed the surge, it was very hard for those academics to then step back and say, you know what, maybe the surge was a better idea than i realized. So develop that objectivity and this is a question for my friends on the Academic Panel later this afternoon. Am i overstating this case, i might be, i dont know, but it i do think there is this, at least on an issue like the iraq war, where it has become so politicized in the academy, it is likely there is not an objective perspective. Everybody has a stake, and so thats an important difference. The other difference of course is something that historians know very well, political scientists ignore more regularly, and that is the Human Element to the context of a decision. By which i mean these are human beings making the decisions with all of the strengths and weaknesses that human relations produce. Meghan mentioned it just in passing but i want to emphasize it here. One reason the surge strategy emerged was because of the trust that steve hadley was able to cultivate across the team. And of course, steve is going to it wasnt 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 that the president was engaged in might not succeed. That is a very hard thing to talk about inside the white house. And to have that, the freedom to do that and to wrestle with alternatives requires a lot of trust. It requires the person youre talking to is not going to be writing a memoir that stabs you in the back and makes you look like a fool. One time i can vividly recall it, steve was about to 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 didnt do it in a way that was sticking a schive in someone. 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 wonderful about allowing people to work on it. And brett did not get as much credit in the contemporary accounts. We now know what a great Public Servant he has been across several ministrations. Several administrations. He was tireless on this issue at the time, and many others i could mention. So the Human Element is important. Political scientists abstract all of that out and produce a number. Okay, this is a seven, but it loses the Human Element. Historians are better at capturing that. At the risk of not disagreeing, continuing on this question but i think it is actually at the heart of this project, the difference between policymakers and academics. Let me add to what peter said. I was struck in the course of this project 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. I realized you had academics who kept saying sanctions dont work and you had policymakers who kept using sanctions with abandon. I thought what explains this . Policymakers and academics are just asking different questions and interested in different questions. I think this project reveals that in some fashion. As a policymaker or at the time, the question that i was interested in, and still interested in was, was this process, did this process provide advice and recommendations and a decision that was the best one open to the president at that time . Thats what im interested in. I think as we snee many of the academic chapter, which were really useful and interesting, theres a lot of other questions at play, and one of the things that i think animates a lot of the scholarly take on it is, how does this process compare to some kind of ideal . And again, i think as a policymaker, youre much less interested in that, because you realize, well, theres no one ideal that works in every circumstance, and if youre asking the question im asking, you know, does this process produce the best decision for this president at this moment, you realize the process will differ from president to president. Let me give you one example of what im talking about. Foreign policy community about the importance of the honest broker role about the National Security adviser and Brent Scowcroft embodies that idea of the honest broker, and when i think about this particular moment in history, this surge process, i think steve hadley played that role of the honest broker, but that wouldnt have been enough. If he had only played that role, of honest broker, we wouldnt have gotten to where we got to, and this is another topic we could talk about, but i think something not elucidated in the book, where we got to the surge compared to the alternatives. You might have quibbles over the surge but we have to ask, how does it compare to the alternatives. Going back to steves role, he very adeptly managed to play that role of honest broker in the sense that the president had access and was aware of all of the views and opinions and recommendations of everyone in his National Security team. He had this awareness and steve made sure it was the case but steve also played additional roles. He played the role of being an adviser and played the role of helping the president after that decision had been made to ensure that the government was going to be in a position to implement the change in strategy. Being an honest broker was essential but wasnt enough this this case. A lot of academics would disagree with that based on the idea that the honest broker is the entirety of the job of the National Security adviser. So its a shout out to steve for managing an incredibly complex process and such a professional and gracious way, but its also an example of how some academics might be looking at was the National Security adviser playing this role of honest broker, but me as a participant and as a policymakers, i policy interested is the National Security adviser, one, making sure the president has all the information he need to make a good decision and two, providing advice to the president at a very lonely and dark moment, and three, making sure that any decision made by the president actually can be implemented. Im going to turn to the floor in a moment for questions. We do have microphones if people would like to ask meghan and peter questions. Let me ask one final question before we open it up. I think its appropriate here on the University Campus and thanks very much to the tower center and obviously the center for president ial history. My question is about president ial power. Its one of these abstractions that you mentioned, peter. Another person who crossed between academia and the policy world, richard newsag famous why i said, the power of the president is the power to persuade. We see that in this book. There are times when the president understands that his comments or questions might shape policy options that are presented to him so he stays back from the process at certain times. Other times he decides it is the right moment to persuade, he goes famously to the tank to meet with the joint chiefs and others. For those of us who have not worked for a president , and i understand actually the balance in this room maybe tilts for the one time to people who have worked for a president , but for those of us who havent, can you talk about what it is like to work in that environment, how important the individual of the president , whoever is serving as president is to that exercise of president ial power . How you saw it exercised in this time . What it means to work for a president essentially . Meghan worked for a president much longer than i did. This is something ive thought a lot about obviously since ive come back, and also reading the daily newspapers the last several years. I had the privilege of working for two president s president clinton i was a junior nsc staffer early on in his administration and somewhat more senior in the Bush Administration. They were very different personalities. Your interactions with them, at least my interactions with them were very different. I had less access than meghan or certainly than steve had to president bush, but particularly with president bush, the overwhelming impression i had was how different he was from the cartoon caricature my academic friends back at duke held of him. Their version of him was not smart, not thoughtful, not wellread, inarticulate and reflexive, sort of making impetuous decisions, and that was not the person that i saw. I saw someone who was deeply committed to the integrity of the office of the president , and the notion that he was a custodian of something greater than himself, that he was temporarily a steward of that he had to hand on to 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. There was im not saying that he didnt 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, his own the way people thought of him, and that was inspiring. He also was so much smarter than people gave him credit for. I will never forget one day he came to the nsc give an all hands meeting. This is the piece few people realize. Many people work at the white house and never see the president. Right . Er this working at a level where they dont have interaction, and that was my role in the clinton administration, so one of my jobs was to always beg for opportunities to at least be in the same room as the president. This was a moment in the Bush Administration where the president came and spoke to everybody at the nsc. These are most of them, this was their first time in the room with the president , and he went around the world, with no notes, just went around the world and said heres what im trying to do in southeast asia. Heres what im trying to do in qua ata qatar. Heres what im trying to do in latin america, and my job in Strategic Planning was to be able to see the big picture and try to see how the different pieces fit. I could not have done as good a job as he did in the 30,000 foot and the granular in regions, and i realized, this president knows so much more than, about the guts of what hes trying to do than my academic friends would believe, and i do think that causes staff to be loyal up, and so the Bush Administration has the team still has a high degree of camaraderie, and we just got together a couple of weeks ago for a reunion. It was striking to see the level of camaraderie. And this is the last point ill say. My friends say what do you miss most about working in d. C. . And i say its the teamwork, the sense you are all working on something thats bigger than yourself, that matters. In academia, you are mostly working on yourself, and in government you have a chance to work for something bigger. That is something the president i think conveyed well. I agree with everything peter said and certainly that is my impression and memory of the president , without a doubt, so ill be very brief, but to add one more thing, and i think it gets to the heart of your question, which is about the president and not just the president but 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 the president , and not just his explicit verbal direction to me but i was one of those people when i would walk into the oval office, if i was prebriefing the president before a phone call or a meeting, i would look for every cue in the room to see how much time i actually did. Did i actualry have two minutes or maybe did i have ten minutes and i would rely on all kinds of things, what kind of shoes is he wearing . Hes in a better mood if hes wearing cowboy boots, i have longer. If the Vice President is in the room, maybe theres other things going on, i have shorter. So youre constantly looking for cues, and i think its part of being an effective person in government, but the downside can be that if youre a president , any, you know, joke, muttering under the breath, could actually shape what you get in your next briefing or what people give you because there is that natural desire to please the president. So i think the president was very conscious of that and i would say and ill sort of end here, but i would say that he explicitly, you know, made it clear to me that he was open to me telling him things he did not want to hear. When i left the white house, i got this wonderful cd with 400 pictures of me with the president over the years i was there and my mothers flipping through it, and she said, why is he making that face at new almost all of these photos . And i said, because i am giving him bad news in every single one of these photographs, and that was true. Actually, when we come to the surge decision, i remember a moment and i think he may have said this to others but it weighed on me very heavily. I still think about it. He said to me, you know, meghan, im looking to you to tell me how we can change the trajectory in iraq but im also looking for to you tell me if we cant. Thats a big idea. He was saying, you know i want to win and if there is any way to do it, i want to know how to do it. But he wasnt saying, dont bring me any other conclusions. And i remember reflecting saying, i think im capable of, if there is a way to be successful, i think i am capable of working with this Amazing Group of people of finding it and advocating for it. But am i capable of walking in there and saying, theres no steps we can take to change this trajectory . Fortunately we didnt have to go there. But the president was explicit about that, and i think that is out of the character that most people would expect, given some of the caricatures. What an incredible responsibility. Thanks. Id like to open it up now to the floor, if anyone has questions for peter and meghan their experience about the making of the project. And i believe there is a microphone. A microphone will come over to the gentleman in the middle. Thanks, brian. Welcome. Yes, sir, please. 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, 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 some process things that we did not do as well and we need to refine our process to do that. Thats in fact how my job got created at the nsc, was to do more of a certain kind of processing. So i suspect in all administrations, grow over time. I can say, having not been in the white house in 2003 or 2006, that this is something that does come up in the oral history volume. There are people reflecting on the learning process, so it is very much a part of the story. This is actually, i realize corys paper, cory shockey, who worked in the first term and then wrote one of the papers, and are you on a panel later on this afternoon . Yes. Well, i suspect this topic will come up, because this is something she wrote about. Great. Yes, sir . 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 . I guess both of you. Did your academic career push you there or you had a colleague there or just luck you got in . Part of the lottery. I came to the white house after being in the Bush Administration for a couple of years previously. I joined the Bush Administration right after 9 11 as part of a wave of people who joined government. I went over to work at the state department, and i then volunteered to go with our military to iraq as a civilian, before the war, and ended up being in iraq for the first 16 or 17 months. When we transferred sovereignty to the iraqis, it would have been normal that i wouldve gone back to the state department but at that point, i was offered a job by condi rice at the time who was National Security adviser to come to the white house. That was a reflection of the fact that iraq was still a very difficult policy issue for the United States 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. Ive just connected a you question and me sitting next to meghan. 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, the guy i did most of the work for says you get one bullet. Your bullet is an interview with richard haas. I flubbed the interview and he hired meghan instead. I just realized that you got the job that i was not good enough to get. So i was, you know, in the bleachers, in the cheap seats for the first term in the second term when steve took over for condi, he took over this new office. And i remember him saying this, he says he didnt say it. Im going to tell my version of the story. Hes interviewing and he says i want an office of someone who will look at the big picture and only in academic would be arrogant enough to work across all the issues i want you to work on. He was looking for an academic who could pass political muster in the white house, academics are not were not bushs core constituency, so i probably had an advantage in the interview and i was able to come in at that point. But did not know steve until i think the first time i met him was in the job interview. So it was something of a risk for him to hire me. Although i had many other friends in the administration. Somewhat technical question, and maybe better for the later panel, im interested in how you make decisions and how the quality and accuracy of the intelligence that feeds the system affects the answer and i know that youve painted a really surprisingly positive picture of the decisionmaking around the surge and im aware that in the early stages the office of special plans was sort of set up to negate some of the stuff coming out of the Intelligence Community in general. A general question about what you felt about the quality of intelligence and how important that was. Sure. I know peter has something he wants to say about this. The intelligence was an integral part of our process. Im talking about the surge process. Not going back to the 2003. And as not everybody always appreciates, intelligence is i always think about it as an input into the process. Policymakers dont 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 the intelligence is an input into the process and the policymakers job is to determine given the nature of the problem what should we do about it. We used the Intelligence Community input in a variety of ways and i can give you one example in which i think it was critical. One of the debates that was occurring in the surge process was what would happen, is it a viable strategy or part of a strategic to turn over the responsibility for quelling sectarian violence to iraqi forces. There was an Iraq Study Group that came out with a recommendation that was largely along those lines and it had a certain appeal to people, let the iraqis deal with the sectarian violence, well deal with al qaeda and well have this division of labor. And so this was a serious proposal by many and we investigated it and we asked a number of different bodies to give us their assessment of what happens in that instance, are the iraqis Strong Enough to actually beat back the sectarian violence on their own without american or Coalition Assistance . And so we asked a whole variety of actors to give us their opinion, but i remember the Intelligence Community assessment on this was particularly important. Actually, all of the assessments, if i memory serves me correctly, all of the assessment said the iraqis are completely incapable of taking this on their own and we should expect more violence. We turned to the Intelligence Community for evaluations along those lines which i remember to be very useful. The one i remember that was the sharp point on what meghan was describing was the question came down, what kind of leader was malaky. Would he lead as a sectarian, divisive figure, or was is that who he really was or was he just surrounded by people who were giving him Bad Information or was he just insecure in his position and he needed bolstering. Of course that was an important unknown. But the viability of the surge depended in part on the bet that you would make on who he was. We asked the Intelligence Community to make their assessment which they did. But it was not confident enough in the judgment. And the president sent steve to personally meet with malaky and take the measure of the man and that was my first and only trip on to iraq. But the three of us went and the purpose of that trip was for steve to take an assessment of it. And i can tell you about this because his trip memo showed up in the New York Times a couple weeks later and it was the scariest moment of my professional career because there were only like three or four people who had access to that memo, or so i thought. I knew i was one of them. I knew i hasnt leaked them but i wasnt sure i could persuade anyone else that i wasnt the one that leaked it. The version that was leaked was the one who had distributed more widely so i lived to fight another day. If you read the memo you can see steve wrestling with this intelligence question, who is malaky and what can we do to change the trajectory of the way he governors . And the success of the surge hinged on the president and steve and others getting that right. And i think they did get it right. Theres no question that malachi governed iraq in a way that better suited the u. S. Steve got the analysis right. It was an intelligence question. At the end of the day, as meghan said, intelligence couldnt give us a guarantee that it would be one or the other. You had to take a bet. It wasnt a wild gamble, but it was a bet based on the best evidence that steve had been able to gather. This will be our second to last question. I worked for the Bush Administration also and i was at the pentagon during 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 that we couldnt give them. They wrote stories anyway, jumped to conclusions, came up with their own thoughts of what probably was going on. Im wondering, looking back and at all the papers, you kind of piqued my interest with the historian, what role did what the media said play, did you have to fight on another front or, you know, how did that kind of affect the whole decisionmaking and moving forward and being able to sure. Im going to use this very specifically, and this has been said about president bush throughout the interviews i think and its fairly well known that the press, obviously, we were all aware of the environment we were living in, our families were reading the press, our friends were reading the press. But i think it was remarkable in the way that president bush was not driven by the press. I cannot even remember a single day in the many years that i worked on this issue in the white house where i came in the office and had to respond had to respond to something that had been in the press, that i had to explain what soandso was talking about in the press. There were many mornings i came in and there were questions, but they generally related to something called the iraq night note which my office, brett mcgurk who is here, our team, we did for the president every night which was not things in the press but things diplomatic reporting and those types of things. I dont feel like the media drove the people who were in the policymaking world in a very considerable way. But it also affected the overall environment in which we were trying to operate. And this allows me to make a point that 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 also to save, what didnt happen in this 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, very well, i can remember the president s face exactly. I was in the oval office and it was during this time and i forget what i said to him exactly, but it was something about the actual policy in iraq and then i made some comment about the politics and how it would play at home. And i remember he said to me, meghan, stop. Hes like, i dont need your political advice. Hes like, just tell me what you think in terms of policy. The politics, thats my job. He was very right about that. Nobody needs my political advice. So the domestic piece, it was incredible how little it intruded into our deliberations. There were certainly conversations about this elsewhere. But it was not a big driver. I certainly didnt feel the burden of putting forward something that was going to be domestically palletable. I knew that had to be true at the end of the day, but that wasnt part of my calculations and what we would put forward to steve and to the president. So i had a slightly different role than meghan and so i had more interactions, i think, with the arguments that were alive in the press but also in the think tank community, the public commentary and there was an office that worked for karl rove whose job it was was to listen to the critics of the administration, who were supporters of the president but worried about this, that and the other thing. And that office would send me, hey, were hearing this is going wrong. Whats the ground truth . And that particular pete wanner was the head of the office. He played a role as the internal team b asker of inconvenient questions. Its one thing if someone on cnn is shouting at the administration from afar. Its another thing if someone who has the unquestioned trust of the president and is loyal to the president but asks the inconvenient question. And it was useful as a way of reflecting on how strong is our arguments . Can i persuade pete on the merits of this or that. And if not, i could go back to meghan and say are we sure about this or that . And it was a way of improving the rigor of our analysis. I think of several occasions where outside critics were able to sharpen our analysis. There were a couple other ways in which they reassured us. Wed bring in the sharpest critics of the administration who were on tv, et cetera. They came and talked to us and we realized as they were telling us what they would do, that they did not have a better idea of what to do than what we were doing. That somewhat reassured us that we had considered all of the alternatives. There wasnt a good idea that somehow because of group think 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 ill say is i know there are some members of the press who had it in for the president and, you know, were not fair. But many of the what i would say the a Team Reporters who covered the white house, i think we are trying to get the story accurately and trying to understand and so i was within the white house one of those people who said, you know, lets engage these folks because i think they are trying to tell the story accurately and so i dont really agree with president trumps posture of theyre the enemy of the people and you have to treat them as an enemy. I think thats a mistake. Most of the folks i interacted with and saw and read were trying to get it right. Im told we have a little bit more time. But im anxious of protecting your voices too. Im curious about how difficult it was to work with at the pentagon to generate options for decisions that they many of the Senior Leadership within that organization may have opposed and whether there was any concern when the president was seeming to lean towards a surge decision about the potential risks of being perceived of overruling the military advice that he had received from maybe his top advisers. I cant tell if peter wants to jump in here 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 wont deny that. Particularly on questions about, well, what would it take if we did decide that the objective was to secure baghdad . What would be required . These kinds of questions which may sound hypothetical but wanting to get a sense of is it possible . Are the resources there . Because these are questions that people at the nsc and other places cant possibly answers. In some regards, this is where we did look 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 lewdy look. Steve may talk about that tonight. To ask the question of what kind of resources do we have . I would say it was difficult. The point that i think 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 for the president making a decision that the military had gone against . And the president and steve hadley were very, very consideration of this and very conscious of the fact to make a decision that the military didnt want to implement or there heart wasnt in implementing it was not going to be in no ones interest. This i dont think comes out in this project and hopefully it will come out in subsequent projects and with the benefit of documents, there was really a i think 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 show stoppers. So the two things that come to mind, first is the strain on the force. And that was something that of course was a widespread concern and a very legitimate one and youve read about or heard about the president going to the tank at the pentagon on december 13th and being in a position to hear the concerns, to express his views, but also to be able to hold out address some of those concerns by increasing the end strength of some of the forces. I think that was done in a way to acknowledge these are legitimate concerns that the military has about moving in this direction and here are ways that we can address them. The other one which was even more critical in my mind, which doesnt get virtually any play at this point, was something that peter alluded to which was this question, is malachi, the Prime Minister of iraq, is he somebody that we want to bet on that, we want to, you know, put our confidence in and the military had a strong view on this and the answer was no. They viewed that his way of governor governing was overly sectarian. It had a lot to do with target sets that were given by the government to our military which were almost exclusively sunni. He was engaged over and over again on vtc and person in jordan and other places and the message was clear, if america was going to make this commitment to iraq, malachi needed to make the commitment to treat everyone who proek tbrokew the same. This is difficult for an iraqi leader to do at this time, particularly a leader who had been put into place by a shia leader. And so until we got that commitment from malachi i dont think our forces were going to have confidence in putting more force behind him. Theres a lot of work that went into it. History shows he went before the Iraqi Parliament and made the this statement, im going to treat everyone who breaks the law equally, and he did. To the point where he had to basically build a different Political Coalition because he lost the support of that shia group because he started to arrest them. There was no halfway for him h. A and he made that shift. Those are thats an example of how that decision or this process wasnt only about making the decision. It was also about creating the circumstances in which that decision could be implemented successfully and a lot of the skill of the president and steve hadley in bringing people along not by convincing them or twisting their arms or threatening them but actually identifying concerns that were legitimate and ways in which those concerns 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 was to be a dill la taunt working on many issues. But on Civil Military relations, thats something that i did know something about. The only article i wrote while i was working at the nsc was an article and i remember steve was like, youre not going to write an article while youre working for me. I have like, i have to do this one. Its going to cause political problems. And he read the article, that is so boring, no one is going to read it. Go ahead, you can publish it. [ laughter ] but i had a precommitment academic theory on how Civil Military relations ought to go and it was different from the way sam thought it ought to go. And i was arguing that it should go this way and not that way. In the process of the surge, i remember trying to structure it to the extent that i could in the direction that i my own Prior Research said this leads to Better Outcomes than that. And this is how you manage the flaws in sams approach. I remember doing that and what we ended up doing was Something Different. And it was painful for me as an academic to see my theory semi not tests, semifound not wanting and us going a different way and doing better than my argument would have said. The only consolation that i had was that sams way was worse than mine. I was less wrong than my academic opponents were. But this was one of the key potential Failure Modes for the surge. I would say late december of 06. One of the ways that the surge could have been stillborn is if it had in reaching this decision, the president had inadvertently or the team inadvertently created a Civil Military crisis where the senior militaries 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 is middecember 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 10th that all of his advisers agreed. That was not true in october. All of his advisers did not agree. It was true by january 10th. But it was a process to get everyone there and the Civil Military dynamic was a key bit of it. I remember showing steve the final version im going to throw you under the bus one last time. I showed him the final version of my article that said theres this academic version that didnt work. We did a hybrid. And steve said, yeah, obviously. Academic models thats not what youre going to do in a pragmatic situation. Were fortunate that the president and steve and pete pace and bob gates, they managed that process very effectively to avert what could have been a crisis. Well take one more. Youve mentioned a couple of times, a little bit, about the decisionmaking process and having the ability to see, you talked about how bush was really knew what was going on, wanted to hear different opinions and things like that. You talked about youre getting opinions from a lot of places from the Intelligence Community, defense, from academics, from nonacademics, from policymakers, from people on the ground over there. So the question if you can talk a little bit about it, is with getting so much of that information, how did you really go about sifting through that and, you know, you have to distill this is presented to the president and how did you sift through this, this is a legitimate concern, this is something particularly with those things that you agreed with but also with the things that this is contrary to anything ive seen. Is this something i bring up . I guess the sifting through that and figuring out what is really concern, whats not, you can talk a little bit about that process, that would be really interesting, i think. Ill try to be brief. So i think, again, this is a point that will be illuminated when documents come out. As people are well aware now and its captured in this project, there were a series of meetings that consider add variety of things that culminated and a series of meetings with president bush himself. Now, i think one of the things that will be obvious to people looking at the documents is in those meetings, we werent having the same conversation about options from day one. We did not begin with options. That we began and this is something that peter really i think 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. We began by saying, what are the assumptions that we have made about iraq and that we based our strategy on . And we kind of listed those and it was a pretty shocking exercise because when you list those, we looked at them and we said, well, some of those might have once been true, but theyre not true now. What is the nature of the violence . What is the driver of violence . Is it the foreign occupiers in iraq or is it a sectarian dimension . We did not begin that process by just starting at options. Theres always pressure in a situation where things are not going well. People want to know what should we be doing . But i think that steve and others gave us enough space to construct a process that actually started with assumptions and moved its way through. And so youll 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 predicates to getting there. Ill give you an example of one of the most critical decisions he made before the big decision of the surge is i remember this paper. Of papers that youre interested in seeing again. Which is this question about should the United States take responsibility for quelling sectarian violence in iraq. There were very, very strong views from his teams that we cannot take responsibility for this, this is not something that americans can solve, this is not something we have the capacity to resolve, and i remember very distinctly those arguments that happened in an nsc setting and the president making a decision saying, i know this isnt going to be popular, but, yes, were going to assume responsibility for this. It was the fact the reason i find it so significant is because, once he made that decision, it closed off some options. It was a decisionmaking tree, in some respects. Once he made that decision, there were certain options that were not consistent with that. So the reason im saying this and answering your questions is, that the debates were not just about funneling everything into an 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. 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 tims 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. And so that made me the most expendable member of the staff because if the as the chief said, if you serve at the pleasure of the president , when the pleasure is gone, so are you. And i realized that that meant that on some issues, i could be the person thrown into the mix to make it 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 when one time with a very significant powerful player who was arguing something that i that the nsc team thought was wrong and i looked around the room and i realized im the one who is going to have to jump on this grenade and argue against it. The other time was with the state paper and the state paper was powerfully argued. So it was a compelling story of how we could perhaps do Something Different. But what we we on the nsc team did, lets look at it as if this were a scholarly argument. What are the assumptions that are driving this . The assumptions under which the state paper produced good outcomes, if those assumptions were true, lets plug those values into the other options and we realize if those things are true, then the other options work even better. So that the this proposal was dominated in a logical way by the alternatives. It was a very academic exercise that we did. And i think it that carried the day along of that with the politics where they said were not going to go along with that. That also helped carry the day. The point was that that kind of analysis that we try to teach our students how to do, they need that in government, particularly in thorny policy situations. Its not always the case that youre trying to assess whats the most popular thing, whats easiest to sell. There is a basic piece of analysis that needs to be done and i think much of that comes out in the book and hopefully even more of that will come out when the documents come out. Its been a wonderful day to start the event. I just want to say when you think about this project and you think of the book and 28 interviews, you realize how much we relied on the generosity of interviewees to take their time. For those of you who agreed to be interviewed, thank you so much for participating. You participated as interviewees, interviewers, as a great resource as we developed questions and i learned quite a lot from you. We needed to get Interview Questions to somebody by cbo. As a historian you dont have any due dates that are real. I learned an enormous amount from you. Thanks so much for everything. [ applause ] youre watching a special edition of American History tv airing now during the week while members of congress are working their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight at 8 00 eastern, a look at todays Fighter Pilot culture and its origins from more than 100 years ago. Legendary pilots influenced movie and pop culture. 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. Why do you all know who lizzy boarden is . Raise your hand if you ever heard of this murder before the class . The deepest cause was in this transformation that took place in the minds of the american people. Well talk about both sides of the story here. The tools and techniques and well talk about the tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. Which history professors lead discussions with their students. Lectures in history on cspan3, every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv and lectures in history is available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. More now about the 2007 surge of american troops in iraq with a focus on the planning by the Bush Administration. The discussion was hosted by the center for president ial history at Southern Methodist university. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is stef recchia. I hold a chair in International Politics here at smu and it is my great pleasure this afternoon to introduce our distinguished panel of speakers. Second to my left, we have ambassador eric edelman. Hes the residence at the school for dv