Studies, Johns Hopkins university, in d. C. Ambassador edelman has served in senior positions at the department of state and defense as well as the white house. Hes served as u. S. Ambassador to finland and turkey and was Vice President dick cheneys Principal Deputy assistant for National Security affairs. Ambassador edelman has received several awards including a department of defense medal for distinguished public service, a distinguished civilian Service Award from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and a president ial distinguished Service Award. Then to my far left, we have general doug lute. General lute has served most recently as the United States permanent representative to the north atlantic council, a position in which he retired in 2017. Previously general lute had a distinguished 35year career in the u. S. Army. He also served for a total of six years in the white house under both president s george w. Bush and barack obama. And in 2007, president bush named him deputy National Security adviser to coordinate the wars in iraq and afghanistan. Before being assign today the white house, general lute served as director of operations both on the joint staff in washington, d. C. , and under the United States central command. Then we have on the panel professor brett mcgurk. Hes currently based at the freeman Spaulding Institute at stanford university. Before moving to stanford, mcgurk served as a special president ial envoy for the Global Coalition to defeat isis and he helped build and lead a Broad International coalition to fight against the terrorist network. Previously mcgurk served in senior positions in the george w. Bush and Barack Obama Administration including in the Bush White House senior director for iraq and afghanistan and then as Deputy Assistant secretary of state for iraq and iran under president obama. Mcgurk has led several sensitive Diplomatic Missions in the middle east. Over the last decade, for example, he led talks with russia over the syria conflict under both president s obama and donald trump. And finally, the Panel Discussion this afternoon will be moderated by professor hal brands. Dr. Brands is the Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins school of advanced international studies. Hes also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a scholar at the American Enterprise institute. Dr. Brands is the author and editor of many books including american grand strategy in the age of trump published just a year ago and what good is grand strategy power and purpose in american state craft from harry truman to george w. Bush. Professor brand served as special assistant to the secretary of defense for Strategic Planning from 2015 to 2016. So please join me in welcoming a very distinguished panel of scholars, practitioners this afternoon. [ applause ] thank you very much. And i would also like to thank our hosts here at smu for putting on this event today. Its a lot of fun to get together with the folks who work to bring this book to fruition and so many of the policymakers who share their time and insights for us and its a pleasure for me to be up here on the stage with three gentleman who are not only importantly involved in decisionmaking that led to the surge and later in its implementation, but were also very generation with their time and insights as we told the story. So the basic run of show is that each of them will have a chance to make some comments and then i will ask a couple of questions of the group and we will open it up to general questions and discussion. And so with that out of the way, i will hand it off to my friend eric. Thank you, hal. Its great to be here this morning. Thanks to smu for hosting this and i want to say its really a pleasure to be up here on this panel, first with hal who is a colleague at Johns Hopkins nitze but also with two great public servants, brett mcgurk and doug lute. Brett and i have been running a composition to see who is the most hated u. S. Government official in turkey which both of us think ill speak for myself. I think both of us wear it as a badge of honor right now. Ive had to yield up my long crown to in recent years to brett, but thats only a complement to his great work that he did for the campaign. I would also note that there is a kind of reunion quality to this for all of us. I was surprised we didnt get tshirts that said 13th annual surge reunion. But i do think that that highlights something that speakers in the first panel mentioned which is the human nature of the decisionmaking process that is not often captured in scholarly studies of this. And the truth is, a lot of us actually became, you know, good friends through this process and i cant see meghan where she is out there, but meghan and i did not really know each other that well. She had been at cpa while i was ambassador at turkey. But during the course of this process we became friends and i think there is something about these governmental processes when youre involved in them, theyre as she said, theres long hours, but theres also a lot of time and political pressure. A lot of stress in all of this and in managing all of this is very difficult and for that i do want to take my hat off to steve who managed this whole process. He and i have known each other longer than each one of us want to admit. If you go around the sit room and if there were a bubble over everybodys head with their iq, you would be at how high the average would be. You would go around the room and you would say, well, 129, 135, 148, 118, 120. If you had their emotional iqs in a bubble over their head, the variance would be much greater and i think that highlights some of the difficulty of managing this. Thanks, first of all, to meghan, to peter, to will, to hal, to jeff engle and timothy sale for managing this project to completion. When they first asked me to do an interview, i was skeptical, but i think the project and book that resulted is a useful and important contribution to both the historical record and the effort to provide an early assessment of both the decisionmaking process and of the surge itself. I was also struck, i want to say im going to be leaving a little bit early because i have to catch a plane back to washington this evening because i teach tomorrow, so i dont want my absence to be seen as a political comment on the next panel among the academic contributors to this project because i was actually struck by the incredibly i thought, constructive, i would say measured criticism that they provided. And i agree with some of it. I disagree with some of it. What struck me about consistently through all of the essays was a fundamental empathy, not a sympathy, but an empathy for the incredibly difficult problems gnat participants were wrestling with and the constraints under which they operated and the difficulties of reaching a decision with incomplete information under excruciating time pressure when a lot of lives were at stake. And i think thats missing from the academic literature. I would like to register that. I would go further and say, i think that it is important to do projects like this across the board on key decisions made in president ial administrations. And i say that because speaking now with somewhat dualhatted nation because i had a misspent youth in academia. One of the things that strikes me, i have a greater appreciation of how the documents dont tell the whole story. And that is becoming more acute in the modern era. The documents dont tell the story the whole story because theyre too damn many of them now being generated. When the bush administrations emails were held by the national archives, there were 2 billion of them. The record is becoming just too great for any scholar to actually get their hands around in its entirely. Moreover, because of the persistent problem of leaks but about the increasing partisan nature of our politics and the criminalization from time to time of policy differences, documents are much more selfcensored now. People write them not just with an eye to what historians might write, but to the fact that they might be subpoenaed. Emails which a lot of business meghan was making the point. Emails, a lot of the business gets transacted in email. Emails are frequently very cryptic and will be extremely difficult for historians to sort of decrypt. And then theres a ton of stuff that goes on in phone calls that doesnt show up in the documentary record at all. Steve and i were talking about the fact that he and i had a number of phone calls frequently on secure lines in the summer of 2006 as we were wrestling with the fact that there were some folks in the department of defense who agreed with steve and meghan that we needed to have reconstruction teams in iraq but had a boss that didnt agree. None of that shows up in the written record. Moreover, meghans comments this morning triggered this thought, we frequently dont have a good record of briefings which are very crucial. I have a very vivid recollection of steve and i briefing the secretary of defense at 6 00 in the morning on the day after the coup in moscow in 1991 after he was returning from a fishing hole that he described as a place that you had to fly too, take a helicopter and then take a bus and then walk to. Theres no record of that briefing in the documentary record and briefing is an art that not everybody understands very well. Meghan clearly did an excellent job, i know steve did in briefing president bush. I got to see not meghans, but steves from time to time. You never know how much time youre going to have and theres a great story about that which ill recount here which is from the Reagan Administration actually, that was told, one day president reagan saw something in the president s daily brief about a Guerrilla Movement in moe ad mozambique. They were talked to the senior director and said, hank, i need you to brief president reagan. And cohen said, how much time do i have . He said you have ten minutes. Cohen went off and did the briefing. He saw him in the hall a day later. He said i have the briefings. He said, how long is it . Ten minutes. Cut it down. He said cut it down to two minutes. Cohen goes back and does the briefing. He says him in the hall the next day and he says, ive got the briefing down to two words. He stops and says, well, give me the briefing. Cohen said, ranammo 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 official u. S. Government effort and some that were not. And those briefings were extremely important and they need to be captured. I would like to nominate a couple of additional cases. One that comes up a lot in this project which is the original decision to go to war to begin with in 2003. And im i firmly believe that all the documentary evidence ought to be ought to be declassified because if ever there were a subject thats right for revision, i think that is one of them and i hope it happens soon enough to allow mel to complete his book that hes working on on the bush administration. With regard to the surge itself and the story told in the book. I want to add a little bit from my point of view, from the point of view of dod and osd, the office of the secretary of defense which figures a lot in the book. And frequently, youll see references in the book to say, we couldnt do this or couldnt do that because of opposition in osd. And much as i think in the vietnam era there were a lot of views about what was going on under the secretary on vietnam, i think in part of then assistant secretary for interNational Security affairs who was in some sense my predecessor because the undersecretary position didnt exist at that time, there was not a unanimity of view in osd about this. Secretary rumsfeld had very strong views. There are a lot of us who had enormous amount of sympathy with the idea that we needed to change the mission from train and transition to protection of the population. And it wasnt just me. I think the late peter rodman, mary beth long, a lot of people in osd were sympathic to this notion. And there were a lot of backchannel conversations going on, not just between me and steve, but between me and meghan and me and j. D. To try and help that process along. In fact, in september of 2006, we cosponsored with the state department a conference on Counter Insurgency in which we spoke specifically about that and i gave a speech talking about the importance of actually thinking about population security and here i think is something that gets a little bit lost. Theres a lot of focus on the increase in numbers, the five brigades, how many brigades were going to have. I dont mean to suggest that Additional Forces didnt make a difference here. They did. Clearly the commanders thought they needed Additional Forces. But as secretary rice says in her interviews throughout the book, Additional Forces doing is same thing would not have made a difference. And if you theres a wonderful chart in the book, actually, if you look at the peak of the number of boots on the ground we had in the surge in 07 which i believe peaked out doug will correct me. 165. We were almost at that in december of 05 when we arranged for overlap for the election in december of 2005. So the number i think was less important here than the change in mission. And that was really the crucial thing that steve and meghan and brett and colleagues at the nsc i think helped push us to that made all the difference and i think another person who doesnt get enough credit here is ray. Theres a lot of discussion about dave and the field manual 3. 5 which focused on population security and dave of course, you know, along with jim mattis and others worked on that. But it was really ray as the commander, the corps commander, who turned this into operational art on the battlefield with the joint Security Locations and all of that. And i think that ought to be noted. Now, its not like a lot of people werent focusing on Counter Insurgency or coin as we like to call it. But not everybody really spoke c. O. I. N. Fluently. There were a lot of people in the government who spoke pigeon c. O. I. N. For a lot of folks, the emphasize of the Counter Insurgency doctrine wasnt so much on the security part as it was on the all of government part. And we had lots of discussions inside the pentagon as we went through this particularly in our defense Senior Leader meetings about the whole of government and where was the rest of the government in all of this. Steve got pulled into some of those on occasion. By secretary rumsfield. I came to loathe these conferences because almost inevitably, we would have a review of what was going on in iraq and usually quickly into it, someone, usually the general, but not only, would say, were the only department of the u. S. Government thats at war. Wheres the rest of the government . And the interagency process is not delivering for us and the interagency process is all screwed up. Who is in charge of the interagency process at which point all eyes would turn on the undersecretary for defense. But we solved that problem with the surge because we sent doug lute over to the white house because the whole of government. You saw how that worked. And as the czar to try and pull all of this effort together and it was a pleasure working with doug after he went over there. So i think i will stop there and is doug next . Yes, doug is next. Okay. Thanks again to our hosts and my fellow panelists here. As i read this book, literally finishing it on the flight down from washington yesterday, to be honest, i have a set of four observations that i want to share with you. Some of this is sort of some of them are sort of memories or sort of flashbacks to very intense period of policy making, but let me just share these with you. The first one is about the president himself. And i think the book and the reflections of the 28 contributors reflect the power of president ial expertise. George bush in late 2006 was not a new president. He was six years into an eightyear administration. He had benefitted from literally hundreds of engagements on iraq. He knew iraq. The germans have a great word for it. A fingertip feel, is that close . He knew the texture of the war in iraq. And he got this from literally hundreds of daily intelligence briefings, the famous pdb, the president ial daily briefing. After 2003, most of them were dominated by the topic on iraq. He got them from probably a hundredplus meetings of his war council. He got this from hundreds of nightly briefing notes that meghan mentioned in her remarks. These were called inside the National Security council potus notes. President of the United States notes. For the iraqafghanistan team, this was a daily chore. We put out an allhands call and we gathered the most recent, most current developments and put them in a one, two, threepage memo to the president. This went on for years. He got this expertise from personal close engagements with all the participants on the u. S. Side, to include the military commanders, but also with his counterparts. By 2006, when he was struggling with this question of sectarian violence that was spinning out of control, he was not an amateur on iraq. And the power of president ial expertise, i think, gets lost a little and its not made as explicit as it should be in the telling of the story. But it underpins his ability to ask the right questions, to challenge the assumptions, and to sort of nurse maid this project, this process to its conclusion. And i think its really important. The other thing that was not there in the president s office by 2006 was a sense of we didnt harbor sort of starry eyed visions of what was possible in iraq. We had been through that period, if there was such a time. I w i wasnt there at the time. The president was very sort of sober and prudent and experienced in a way that brought, i think, a certain sense of levelheaded, sort of humanitariaility. It was connected to a president who was increasingly expert on the issue at hand. And was humble about our ability to affect things on the ground. All of that sets the stage for the decision process that the book covers. Second observation has to do with the process to. It was mentioned earlier that steve hadly was largely the central figure running the process of the National Security councilel so the war counsel if you will, and deputies and subdeputies of the war counsel principles one or two levels deep of the bureaucracy. Bup 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 its hugely important for the next book, which is the implementation of the search. 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 back stabbing and second guessing an bd is played out in the press, right, and how difficult that process would be to execute. Because people would feel they werent heard and they essentially take the somewhat teenager approach of, well, now ill be heard in the execution process, right. And theres execution insurgencies that take place, so forth. The surge decision did not have to deal with that in execution. That was largely a product of the decisionmaking process itself. So that kind of process run by steve and nurtured by the president was very important to the success of the surge which is actually the next book. Right. Its the implementation phase. I saw this actually firsthand as a minor participant in the surge decision but as a more central figure in the implementation a few months later and my job as an implementer of the surge when i left the joint staff and came to the white house to work 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 reflects on my sub plot that sort of is woven throughout the book. This is the plot between, in the relationship between the security situation in iraq and the politics in iraq. Up to the point of the surge, so for roughly the first three years of the war in iraq we had prioritized the a assumption that improved politics and increasingly inclusive iraqi political process would deliver security. So in short, the first approach was politics first. This had to do with turning sovereignty to the iraq government and forming elections all these things. In a sense if we could get sunni, shea and kurds to Work Together politically theyd have no reason to fight. Right. And we could contain any violence while the political process matured. By 2006 it was clear the sectarian vial enls was overwhelming that approach and the politics were insufficient to quail the violence. Olence w overwhelming that approach and the politics were insufficient to quail the violence. And we were on a downward spiral. What the surge decision actually did was invert. It turned on its head this relationship between politics in iraq and security in iraq. And the surge essentially admitted that theres a security threshold that must first be obtained to enable the politics. So in a way we turned from politics first to security now. Security first. Now i think this actually played out in the year or so after the surge decision. Because we saw that once secretary yan violence was quailed the Prime Minister was able to take some pretty bold politic steps. Within a year of the decision he marched on shiaa marched on shia militia. His own allies. Within 18 months of that surge decision that same Prime Minister maliki signed with president bush in 20078 that enabled u. S. Forces to stay another three years and it was violence maliki. Theres a big strategic move. Its not just about 30,000 troops, its about a strategic inversion that put security first. Ive come to believe theres a certain sufficiency, requirement, minimum requirement for security that then enables politics, i call that the security threshold. The fourth and final ejt 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, look, were all americans. Most of us are americans in this room, right. And so we have, i think, maybe naturally assumed that this american decision delivered a particular effect on the ground. That is, a dramatic decrease in secretary yian violence of coup months of the surge hitting the ground in iraq. Of couple months hitting the ground in iraq. Secr months of the surge hitting the ground in iraq. I think its worth thinking about other effects in sectarian violen violence, first is the head of the solderism with his own millish jm as we acronymized it. Took to the side lines. Itia jm it. Took to the side lines. S he took his shia militia off the battle field. Number two. The Sunni Awakening predated the surge by probably a year, well into 2006, you began to get the swinging of the sunni arab tribes, especially in in bar. I think a lot of the secretatar violence was essentially cleansed by the summer of 2007 when the last surge brigade arrived. Thats not a very attractive policy option to essentially cleanse these mixed neighborhoods, but i think a lot of that had already taken place by the time the surge got there. And then finally, i think we give too little credit to Stan Mccrystal and joint special Operations Command impact on the major access seller ant to sectarian violence that was the j saw campaign against the guys pouring gasoline on the secretary tear ytarian fires. All these effects have a role to play when they went back on Labor Day Weekend in 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 signs of the decrease in sectarian violence so id be a little cautious among the historians in the room that we have a cause and effect relationship between the surge itself an what did we saw on the ground. I think it is a multi variable equation. Thank you. Im really honored to be here. Its great to see eric on the panel and be here with steve and all of you. First of all, i am not in the book despite many conversations with peter and i, in 15, 16, 17, 18, i was spending a lot of time in iraq and syria and particularly in syria so the events of what just happened are particularly on my mind and its timely because its about what 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 our capacity for leadership. Its such an open question now its very troubling. I also, before i talk about the surge, i always put up front the cost of the surge. About a thousand 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 about Decision Making with guys in Silicon Valley how they make decisions, its hard to see them as comparable. These decisions are the most important. The weightiest. The most consequential for our country and history and for the men and women who wear the cloth for our country and president bush felt that and im just going to tell some stories so indulge me in my experience, this one, the day after his speech announcing he is sending 30,000 american troops to iraq which was a wildly unpopular decision if you put yourself in that time. We went to fort benning and the president spoke with a number of americans who would be heading over to iraq. It was a pretty draining day. We worked on the policy. I felt strongly about this policy and ill talk about why. Talked about is it in the book. Even after all those meetings, president bush went and spent about an hour with goldstar families behind closed doors. So this was a president who was living and breathing this war as he has written since every day. And but until the surge decision, i think its fair to say, he is living it, hes breathing it, hes struggling with it, as steve saw every day, far more than i did obviously in those days. But he wasnt really commanding the war. And the surge, has doug gets to, it wasnt just a 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 and i will be on the web so you can see. On september 11, 2001 i was a law clerk on the 9 11 attacks, and learned about the attacks from chief justice lundquist. I was on the path to being a lawyer and have a 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 got a call from a former colleague of mine who had just come out of an interagency meeting which i didnt know what that meant at the time, and said theyre looking for people to go to iraq and help with their political, constitutional process, would you be willing to go. This was the fall 2003, four or five months into the war. And i said yes immediately and i got to iraq in early january 2004. And as many people who went to iraq in that period, it was 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 the Coalition Headquarters was a very hairoing ride. The highway of death. Meghan and i worked on the political process in that year, so this is 2004. A lot of major decisions had already been made and we made a lot of progression, we did an interim constitution which was successful and we set up an embassy and an in the Iraqi Government. The politics were kind of working but violence was not getting any better. And there was a debate among very senior officials in baghdad which i witnessed as a very young person, 32 years old at the time b this debate doug talked about, is it security or politics . And the idea that politics would drive security gains and those frankly of those working the politics were saying no without security it will is no politics. Security problem is a security problem. In any event, meghan 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 it is safe to say in our office we all spent a lot of time in iraq and we believed there was this disconnect between security and politics, but theres always a hope theres going to be an election, theres going to be a constitutional referendum that this will turn the corner. So there was enough to not really force a fundamental reassessment. I was also as a young guy, a director at the time, in iraq, i was always wondering, how is the president seeing this. Because what he was saying publicly he wants to succeed, nothing more important, but it seemed we were so focused on transitioning the iraqis as a policy we were not making any significant progress. My first time with him i was a note taker for the senior official and i was shocked to meet him for the first time. Shoulders snapped back. I never seen the president in person. You feel like youre kind of in a movie set. Ive been in there a lot now with obama too. He was so demanding and inquisitive of meghan, ruthlessly asking whats going on, i thought wow this president is not only living and breathing this thing, hes asking all the right questions and wants to succeed. And as we got into 2006 and the situation deteriorated after the sierra moss bombing, im working on a book project for ten years on this, some day it will come out but the archives have been friendly with me and ive gone back and looked at some of the potus notes and ive got couple of them for my own use. They hold up. And we were reporting, this is a very serious situation, his deteriorating. And steve would send handwritten notes to the president every night. And the president was getting somewhat different reporting stream from the ambassador in baghdad and commanding generals at the time. And the question is how does the president reconcile these different streams of information. I think the way he saw, as the commanderinchief, kind of a classical model delegating to the command, the chain of command, thats the traditional model, the first gulf war model. But its a situation that deteriorated and steve pushed us very hard eventually to relook at everything. It began very quietly. And meghan, myself, the Intelligence Community was really critical here. We had great end roads 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 will sometimes write reports and go see steve hadly and i remember, steve, you said to us once before we started the former review, are you guys sure about this and we said steve weve done the work and talked to all of the people and 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. Only time i ever heard steve say i 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 this was the right thing to do. And i feel that was the right process. I have concluded after working in three administration is 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 steves office, myself, and meghan and we watched the speech on tv, we had done a poll about, with the American People supports sending 30,000 troops to iraq. I think it came back 28 . Which is a pretty low number. There was a poll that same week, i just happen to remember, that americans that believe in alienpiloted ufos was Something Like ten points higher than this decision. So this was a really unpopular decision. But we w5u67 watched but we watched the speech. A very somber speech. The president was in the library and the senators came out and gave their reviews. And the reviews were pretty rough. And josh bolden came in. He had been with the president and said the president feels very good about the process. He said thank you. And josh said something to the effect, and the president s taking charge of this. 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 hand handson manageme this war over the last two years. And that is why a lot of it succeeded. Bringing in doug lute as assistant to the president for daytoday management. Constant seenor leaders in iraq and in the region at critical times. This played out in a number of ways. There was a time in the fall myself and ryan crocker and dave decided were done with maliki. Some iraqis wanted to to go to maliki and 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. President asked us some hard questions. He asked us the hardest one, whos going to come after maliki. We said actually the iraqis havent really 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 because had we lost maliki wed have six months without a government at a critical time. We had same issues with send com commander and Dave Petraeus that was intense and finally going to bosser and gets in trouble for some reason, doug, you might have been overseas and i was manning the for the in the white house and ryan crocker and Dave Petraeus told me to tell the president to get out of maliki and this is a disaster after. I walked in the oval office with steve to explain, heres what people are saying, heres the desperation 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. 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 of the work that had been done. We can talk about later on whats messed up but thats another story. But the way this decision was made, the process, what it says about being a commanderinchief, what it says about the care, when you send young men and women overseas, i think it is an interesting debate had this surge review happened in the run up to the war had you the war might have been differently resourced, differently managed. Thats an interesting question for historians. I was not there at that time. This is a very worthy project and im very honored to be here. Im sorry i was not in the book but i promise i will get my italian view done so you can see it. Interview done so you can see it. Thank you. [ applause ] interview done so y it. Thank you. [ applause ] so those were three very rich sets of comments that have triggered a number of questions on my part. Im going to ask couple questions that had to do with process. Couple questions had to do with content and then a question that has to do with outcomes all of which you gentlemen have touched on a little bit. But id like to go a little bit deeper. So the first question has to do with what were actually talking about when we talk about the surge review. Because if you look at the book and some of the interviews for folks who havent had a chance to take a look at it, when people talk about the surge review, theyre sometimes talking about a few different things. There was the formal interagency review which happened late in the fall of 2006 under the direction of the deputy National Security advisor who of course reported to steve hadley but that came late in the game but there was an effort to relook at the strategy in the nsc and at interjo staff and joint staff and other parts of the government as well. Im curious because you three were in different places within the boourks, osd, nsc, joint staff, what level of visibility did you have on the fact that there was this broader ferment happening at different places within the government with respect to iraqs strategy . Were you aware of what was happening . Was there cooperation between different groups thinking about the same question or is this something is that remained closely stove piped until the former interagency review began . Its a hard its a good question. Now its a little bit hard to answer for the reason that meghan gave in her comments, which is, you know, there was a lot of conversation and exchanges going on constantly about this set of issues. So, for instance, i certainly i was aware of the effort in june to have the meeting at camp david. I will confess that i myself at that point was a little bit unsure after what happened in february at the the you mosque about whether or not we needed to change course policy p or this is something we could manage because we had no government innic oork the absence of an government in iraq, the absence of the government, once the bombing happens and theres no Government People feel they have to protect themselves and if that period you see the sky rocketing enrollment in various militias, particularly shia militias thats taking place. But in june, just as the camp david meeting was happening i happen to be in baghdad having dinner the night zark arcy gets killed and tendency i had was okay maybe this is a turning point. A lot of people felt this would change direction, you got to go through that couple times and then realize, okay, theres not going to be some one save us, were going to have to do things differently. We were very constrain in osd by the secretarys views. That was just a reality. I was aware that the counsel of colonels was going on. That was not something that was kept secret from us. And i was having conversations, some with meghan, mostly with jd crouch. I remember very distinctly. We had these devices. I dont know if they exist any more. Tanburg devices which were kind of a video telephone. I know it was very late in the day and quite frequently j d i would get on jrks d and i are jd said we need to do something different. I said how are we going to get there. He said were working on things. Hard questions would be asked butnded to be a cover d there was a sense thered be a new government and things were moving. Nobody nobody supported sending new forces to iraq. It was a very small number. State department had a debate about clear hold bill in 2005 would have been counter surgeonsy thing. That didnt go anywhere. From our perch it was frustrating. And there were things outside my purview even next door to me, steve hadley asked bill moody to look at this if it was feasible militarily. I didnt know bill was working on that a lot was going on outside our purview including conversations with the security advisor as should. But we were doing the work the best we could. Everyone was dealing with their own principles and views. As it came out, i remember the first time i met you, doug, at j 3, i said can we send p five more brigades to iraq, you said, you could but you wouldnt have much of an army left. It was kind of like, view Something Like that. Yeah Something Like that. The view was, for those who might say we should send more forces to iraq, the risk that might take on elsewhere around the world were going to be extremely high. So, just from my Vantage Point, it just gets to how controversial this was and how difficult this was. Because theres a lot going on but there wasnt that much going on that would have led to this result until very late in the day we had the formalized review. Yeah, i think the short answer to this is that there were compartmented segregate add approaches happening at different pockets of the boourks bureaucracy and they didnt really come together until the jd crouch hosted review in sort of the last six weeks or two months of 2006. Until the jd cro review in sort of the last six weeks or two months of 2006. There was a a reason these were isolated they were even isolated within the bureaucracy. The joint staff of the version of this independent review of this counsel of colonels. Thats interesting why were they colonels, because there were generals above them that opposed to status quo option to include a couple four stars. So this was done as on off the charts in the basement, pentagon, study among knowledgeable colonels but was also reasonably deniable and isolated and segregated because there were antibodies in the military reviewing a strategy that both the send com commandser and the commander in iraq favored. And i think the same is true in nsc and same is true at state, so forth. So, we had to gettive so, we had to get sufficient understanding of the problem internal to the pockets of 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 p inside the joint staff, the counsel of colonels did. They eventually briefed the joint chiefs of staff. The committee of four Service Chiefs and vice chair man and chair man in the tank and they briefed this out and thats when serious discussion began inside the joint staff. That sort of mimics or parallels the process elsewhere in the bureaucracies. They had to sort of start at the grass roots level and become serious, gain gravity and it could be brought up into the equivalent of the tank. So it was segregate the initially. Just to add quickly. So, as i recall, steve will correct me if im wrong, bills study was probably one of the last big projects he did before he left the nsc because i think he left that full to go to the private sector. And i found out about his study when he came to pay his out call on me at the pentagon and as he was walking out the door said by the way if the joint staff tells you we dont have any more brigades to send to iraq i just did a study we have five more brigades we can send. Dont listen to anything you hear. So i knew that happened. Roughly same time ernie came out to become 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 fort hood, i think, three core, and he said i think im going to need more troops. And this was after secretary rumsfeld had resigned but before secretary gates had been swore in, he didnt get swore in until he was presiding over the a m graduation, for you folks in texas to show how important that is. So i was living with this very uncomfortable situation where i had the outgoing secretary of defense on the third floor of and i have a secretary leaving and a new secretary coming in i havent had a chance to brief yet. Were going to have to see where it all goes. Just because couple of you mentioned this, one of the very fine grain and interesting story thats emerges out of the broader tale involves the question of whether there were additional troops available for the surge. Whats remarkable is you get widely different answers to this question. Depending where you were in the government. The official dodd answer was that no troops were not avail. But 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 methodologies, was it deflecting policy agreements or based on different assessments of how much risk United States could take on, 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 br s brigades the in iraq and two in afghanistan and make 50 brigades on the books overall in the four structure. So if you simply ask the question are there five more brigades available, you say theres 15 here, 2 there, couple in korea, couple in germany, you know, the answer is, yeah, sure. I mean, the purely mathematical answer. The joint staff however was working under an assumption when we gave the answer were out of slits i dont think they make slits any more, in fact this use of that phrase may have retired the shlitz not sure. We said there were not five brigades available because our assumption was we would retake the basic operating principles of one year deployed and one year not deployed for a brigade 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 shlitz we were saying, if you we were implying that if you hold to the one year in combat and one year out of combat that we were in fact out. Now, ha, ha having read the book, and now thought about this, what i should have said, right, is youre out of shlitz 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 force structure. So this is very much a question of probing the question being asked and making sure 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. 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 an allvolunteer force. These are all volunteers. Nobodys drafted in this equation were talking about. Right. He 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. Right. On the allvolunteer force. You see this in things like ptsd, in retention rates in the services, and you see this by way of traumatic brain injury, exposure to multiple concusses that tend to be concussions that tend to be the most common effects on the battle field. I think some of the longterm physical and Mental Health impacts is not directly related to the surge but is related to employing an allvolunteer force as we have so long. And the human experimenting going on with the exposure of this force to sustained combat. Now very gratefully in recent years our numbers are much lower in these sort of combat situatio situations, largely to brett mcgirk and his military colleagues in the war against isis in the fight against isis we have it on a different modificationsel and dont have model and dont have to deal with 15 or 20 brigades we are dealing with smaller sustainable forces key to capable indigenous partners. Thats a very different model but is not the model we talked about in iraq. We very much had american soldiers in the lead. Thats the personal lesson for me, you know, probe the question, and make sure you understand the assumptions that are based on the question at hand. Two question points, i think global risk is an interesting one. I do remember discussions in the tank with the president and chiefs. Chiefs would say youre taking a lot more risk of 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 in terms of priority settings. Thats a conversation that goes on in any relationship between the chiefs and the president. On the last point doug made, because its in the news, the counter isis campaign was deliberately completely different. We relied on local actors. So in syria the local force we built a force of 60,000 syrians they took 10,000 casualties. Five or six americans were killed in syria. The cost to the u. S. Tax payer, the surge, about 250 billion total. The entire four or five Year Campaign against isis about 25 billion. Plus we had a huge coalition sharing the cost. I dont want to get off topic but when President Trump says hes ending endless wars, doesnt make sense, this was a totally sustainable model. Theres no clamor in congress. It was working. We werent fighting. We werent losing american lives. We werent spending much money. Thats why i think for the consensus to build theres a push back of this, 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 in the surge as i recall as he went out Dave Petraeus also wedled a support element that was brigade equivalent so he really had like six. So, eric, maybe this is a question for you. Brett wasnt the only one who managed to dodge us for this book. Secretary rumsfeld doesnt appear as much as he might, he declined to interview, said yes and then no a number of times. But his presence is here. So i think the traditional narrative about secretary rumsfeld role is that he was an obstructive presence in this story, that he was opposed to if i change of strategy in iraq and it was only 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 rumsfeld role, if so, why did he play this role . Or is it mistaken in some way . Secretary rumsfeld had a reputation for riding roughshod over his general officers in the pentagon. And my view of it was slightly different, i viewed him as avenue equal opportunity abuser. [ laughter ] he didnt just rough up general officers. And doug had been on the receiving end of this. So was i. Multiple times. That was his, you know, sort of mo. In reality at least during the time i was there from summer of 2005 on. I never saw him overrule a four star. In particular, he shared, i think genuinely, general ab zades view that it was our presence that was driving the an animosity among iraqis and driving the violence and we had to train and transition and turn this over to iraqis. It recurs repeatedly in the book, the phrase we got to take our hand off the bicycle seat let the iraqis handle this on their own. We cant do this forever. He and the generals all very genuinely shared that view. Now, for those of us who had a slightly different view, that made life a little complicated. Because 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 getting a copy of the Counter Insurgency field manual. My military assistant had been general petraeuss chief strategists when he was running the training mission. He was in touch with petraeus. I got a copy of that field manual and got it so Vice President cheney could read the field manual. I got john nothinger working for nogger working with the secretary of defense gordon ingle working down the hall from me. Got me the book on Counter Insurgency, about a french general that fought in nigeria that had been reprinted. I got john first to get it to me when i first got to dod in august of 05. But then his book on Counter Insurgency came out and i had him take a copy over and brief Vice President cheney on that. Some of us were working within the system to get some of the ideas percolating. But we had to abide by the secretarys view which he came by honestly. The other view doug was just talking about, which was the health of the force, the rotation base, and sustaining it. He had his own good and sufficient reasons for the positions he took. I just had come to the conclusion that we were beyond the point where those views were going to get us, you know, a successful outcome. So one of the themes thats come up in a number of remarks so far but id like to ask about it more system attically whether the surge had to happen when it did or whether it might have come about earlier. Theres wide appraisals what the surge accomplished i will ask about in a second but one point of consensus is it came quite late in the game, after three and half years of the war and lot of cost had been incurred. Would it have been possible to come to similar policy or similar outcome six months or year earlier, or even three months earlier. Did the surge depend on a convergence of circumstances that was only possible at the very end of 2006 . I i incline to the latter, hal. I think its a hard question to really answer. But i incline to the latter. I think one of the things you have to remember, this is not really address that much in the book but the Iraqi Security forces we were training in 04 and 05 were not or in 03 and 04, sorry, when paul eaton was handling the mission. Were not trained to do any kind of internal defense or deal with in terrible issues it internal issues, it was not been available to do what saddam had the military do domestically if iraq. It was only when Dave Petraeus took over minute sticky to try to train the force and Marty Dempsey that was capable of carrying out Counter Insurgency and Counter Terrorism missions that we would have had iraqi partners to execute the surge, in my view. I dont think the iraq terrorist force get enough credit. We fought them and they carried an enormous amount of the burden but he you had to train them and be there in sufficient numbers, we were up to 350,000 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, you have to adapt, as it runs into the real world when do you have process to adapt and you cant have constant streetic reviews Strategic Reviews. Events in 2006 forced this but it was clear early that assumptions were not correct. The support of the local population. Restill yns of existing institutions. Resilience Strategic Review may is not have led to the surge but have led to adaptation. From our Vantage Point which was frustrating was that secretary rumsfeld had a broad mandate p p a very fixed set of views were deflected by the secretary of defense thats the chain of command. The president will overrule his chain of command or with any president , i saw this with obama, not all the time, but youre delegating to the chain of command. These are your people, so for the president to redirect that is very unnatural instinct the for the president. Question is when do you adapt. Last two years we adapted a lot throughout the campaign. We made a lot of decisions. And i dont think we would have succeeded in the two years without that constant reevaluation with the president , directly, hands on management of the war. Ive concluded after three administration. At risk of repeating myself. A president is going to send his men and women overseas to be involved in a big or little war he has to be directly involved in this. He has a lot to do but regularly brief, no whats going on so when crisis happens he understands the situation and can adapt effectively. I think president bush did that quite well from the surge on. So 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 spike of sectarian violence this of course was inflamed by the zarky attack on the mosque. So forth. You can plot sectarian violence spiking in 2006. The second was we actually did show progress after september 2005 iraqi elections and then maliki by, what, june of 2006, had finally formed a government. For months we didnt have an iraq minister of defense. How incapable is that. Cite. Right. But he actually formed a government. Here you vary a newly seeded government. Hes got sort of secretariarin somewhat inclusive. And it looks like were on track. So you have the command two four stars were very influential saying stay the course and prioritize the military effort, training the iraqis, that arch argument fell apart when we tried to send three occasions to send iraqi brigades to surge baghdad and it was together forward roman numeral one two and three, had three iraqi efforts where trucks and busses were supposed to transport iraqi brigades to bag dade to squal the sectarian violence and the busses arrived and were empty. So you had very fundamental events in the first nine months of 06 which conspired to cast doubt on the current on the existing approach. And therefore i think made rather obvious that it was time to review the bidding. Ha hal, i hope you will ask us a bit more about this dimensionitf and in particular if i were in your seat id ask why were the Iraqi Security forces, after three years of billions of dollars investment and they played such a central role in our strategy. We will stand down when they stand up. Depending on their standing up. And together forward, 1, 2, 3, depending on them arriving in baghdad. I think theres a bigger strategic lesson beyond the scope of the book about our ability as americans and our forestructure, our army and marines, in particular, to build reliable, capable indigenous forces on a timeline thats strategically relevant to us. I think if you look at iraq in the early days, iraq in the later days. Remember it was a third of the iraqi army that crumbled in 2014 when they declared isis in mogul. So you look at afghanistan not a Success Story in terms of building indigenous forces. One other thing to come out of the study is so what for future policy. That would be a so what at the top of my list. P. So this actually relates to my final question coincidentally enough and then well open it to the floor for questions as well. In the book we didnt explicitly seek to address the question of whether the surge worked. Although you cant really talk about the surge without getting at that question. Were unsuccessful at restraining our contributors going after that question as well. Even today theres a wide variety of answers reflected in the essays that people contributed to the book. Everywhere from it was a success to a failure, to a Operational Success but strategic failure and various gradations. Im curious how the three of you would assess that question. What factors produced in your view the outcome you attribute to the surge. Because it strikes me that if you look forward beyond the bush presidency, beyond 2007, beyond 2008, its clear whatever gains there were were not sustained to the degree people involved in this would have hoped so how should we think about the success of american policy in 2007, 2008 and the relationship to the surge to eventually comes later. How much time do we have . [ laughter ] so, is im in the camp of people who think that the surge largely worked on its only terms. P the list of forced that doug mentioned earlier, i think you cant disaggregate the reaction of iraqis from what we did. So when you say muck tada stood down thats true because he was scared we were going to kill him, which is why he went off to study theology for the better part of two years. I think it was directly related to go after shia militia. The Sunni Awakening, yes. But we had that discussion before. I remember having discussions with meghan in 2005 about the desert protectors out there. How can we reenforce it. Until we went in mutt additionan al anbar, if you talk to the marines taking tenyear leases. They had never any attention of staying for ten years but they were trying to convey, were here, were going to support you and change things around. And this gets back to the question of leverage, and, you know, the discussion that megan and peter had about mauiaky. And what kind of bet. Did he have a circle of people around him counseling him to be more sectarian. You know, all of these things. To me, he was all of the above. We knew from intelligence he had people literally whispering in his ear that he should be more sectarian. We knew he had sort of sectarian instincts. On the question of iran, we knew hed had an unhappy experience in iran because he decamped and lived in syria for 20 years but he was also dependant to some degree on iranian power. Until you guys had told me about the paper of getting rid of maliki, and i was off in the corner with secretary rice who is two former academics, a very academic conversation about vietnam when the president came up. I said to him, mr. President , if youre really thinking about this option of getting rid of maliki, i have three words for you now dim zm. The president said, yes, thats what i think, too. But maliki was able to do certain things there was discussion about going after the shia milts because ryan crocker and David Petraeus had the presence, because of the wheel of the balance with the communities in iraq to get him to do things that he probably wouldnt have done otherwise. To me, the tragedy of the early exit in 2011 is we lost that. And you know, would have, could have, should have. What would have happened, had he stayed . Well never know, but we certainly got an incredible decrease in the violence and some progress on the political side. I think theres a pretty good argument to be had. We could have had more had we stayed longer in greater numbers. And it wasnt just, i think, the question of would we say on, i think all of us involved in the sfa agreement, assumed there be won a followon agreement but it was the process that whittled down the numbers that center com1 that sent maliki who decided that the juice wasnt worth the squeeze and let us down the path. I think theres no question of work, if you just look at statistically, theres no question, Something Like a chart, it goes like this, a cliff. And also, i completely agree with eric theres reich a ro romanticism about the awakening. Thats when it started to pick up is the awakening that turned against al qaeda. He completely decimated al qaeda and iraq and the surge and everything else. And jsok. The whole thing fed on itself. The question with the sustainability and the new administration, i lived through some of that. But theres a threshold question of our ability as a country, and dougs getting at this kind of, after a regime falls to come in and prove the situation. This is the this is the question that is a threshold one. And in 2011 it wasnt just the withdrawal from iraq it was the announced u. S. Policy that al assad must go. Which if youre in the region at that time created a fever in the region. And foreign fighters and jihadis in the tens of thousands flowing into syria and money and weapons and all sorts of things from all over the region. And all of the atrocities of the al assad regime and iran. That created this cauldron. So, i think the big lesson is to be very careful, before a president declares a u. S. Policy octave. Because very ambitious policy objective, particularly in that part of the world are very difficult to achieve. But i think the surge gave iraq a chance having been involved in a counterisis campaign. We built the units that we had built during the iraq war and particularly during the surge. We were talking about evacuating our embassy in baghdad but it was because of the cts units that we knew were willing to actually fight and the special forces able to get out of bed with them and able to have some traction to begin to claw back. So, yeah, i think it worked but it was costly. I dont think well 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, right . Something worked, okay . I mean, we know by data that the incidence of sectarian violence took a dramatic fall. So, 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 come back and testify before the u. S. Congress that they saw early indicators of a decrease in the sectarian violence trip. 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, well, what else was contributing here . So something worked. And i think its a combination of the surge, the awakening, jsoc, sectarian cleansing some combination of those. My only point is, as americans we should be cautious not to assign the greatest weight to the shiny object, right . And 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 to future experiences we should be a little suspect of assigning to ourselves too much responsibility for a positive outcome. I think the factor, i count five, were entinterrelated as e says, but i dont think weve gone through the Serious Investigation of where the weight should fall across these five factor. 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. Muqtada, good move, going to the sideline, right . Were not caving on this. But 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. Its only a 20 incremental change on what we had on the ground anyway, right . So, a lot of variables. We should just be a little cautious about assigning cause and effect. Just to respond to doug for a second, you know, i do think, at least for me, there was a metric, you know, for measuring the psychological change. And its one that i looked at very closely in those quarterly reports that we used to do for congress, which was the tips coming in from iraqis about and they starting in the late spring of 07, through may, june, really go up dramatically, and thats, i think, because of the psychological effect youre describing. Okay. So, we have time for a few questions. So if you stick your hand up, i think a microphone will find you. And please, identify yourself prior to your question. Hello. My name is laura hind. Its fascinating to listen to the process and how all of the various agencies worked together and interacted together to come up with what appears to be a successful solution. Professor mcgurk, you brought up the fact that this might be different than what were seeing today in the Current Administration and how thats working. You know, the hope would be that theres people just like these organizations that Work Together to come up with a solution to leave syria. But that sounds like that may not be the case. What do you see is different today in how the organization is working under the administration, than it was back when you made this decision on the surge . Yeah, thank you. So, i worked for two years in the trump administration. I defended the administration, the policies when i was executing them. I thought the first year, the trump administration, when trump came in, we actually had a decent transition on the war. We teed up three decisions for him to make. He made them. We executed. You know, that actually moved faster. But the nature of the president himself is what a lot of this comes down to in any administration, and there is no process to make these decisions. And h. R. Mcmaster, National Security adviser tried to establish a process but it doesnt connect to the president. So the president of the United States makes major quenconsequel 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 a professor. Im a lecturer at stanford. But i teach president ial decisionmaking in wartime. So, im not an expert on this, but we do a lot of case studies. We look at eisenhower. We look at the surge. We look at all sorts of things, we look at korea. Eisenhower said, to paraphrase, good processes do not guarantee good policy but bad process, plus, incompetence pretty much guarantees that disaster. Right now there is no process and plus what i would say is frankly incompetence. I cant speak to the policies that the president does different but on National Security making there is no process. And im very concerned its going to get worse. Because now our adversaries and our allies know this. I was in the middle east last week and the anxiety is like sky high. So, bottom line, the process that led to the surge, very difficult, very difficult decision for a president. It was serious, extensive, harnessed all of the guarantees of the u. S. Government and there is no process now on major decisions. And then the administration, you see everybody, i respect the people in there trying to catch, make sense of the mallstrelstrm trying to fix the decisions. This is not how it should work. Thank you. Thank you very much. To the entire panel, this was a fascinating conversation. Going, i think, mostly off of ambassador lutes comments im going to ask a question and perhaps phrase it provocatively to get a response. The question is about agency. The agency of the Iraqi Government and iraqi participants at this time. Youve mentioned maliki, you mentioned Muqtada Al Sadr in his role. Is it possible that the cooperations of iraqi actors were as important, if not more important, than the actions of the u. S. Government in the process of the surge and in its and you could say in its initial successes . Thank you. Well, i mean, just ill just address it briefly. And brett and doug can talk to greater length. Almost by definition, because since its their country, you know, what iraqis did was the most important factor. So, i mean, i agree with doug that we should be kind of humble about, you know, 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 elements that were committed to the total failure of the entire enterprise. In particular, al qaeda and iraq. So, if you have 100 car bombs a month going off in baghdad, theres not going to be much real politics going on. And so this gets to what we did against al qaeda until iraq. And tm surge. Before the surge, he told malicky, hey, if you do this, youre going after all killers that means sunni and shia. And were not going to have any handcuffs on the shia side. And maliki gave him that commitment and ive got to say, he looked up to that commitment. So the idea was population security in key areas and really reduce the effectiveness of extremist actors on both sides that were fuelling the sectarian conflict. So, what ive learned over the last sort of 15 years in this region in particular is, as ive already said, be humble about what we can do. And have a sense of humility about our ability to actually force outcomes and deliver outcomes. And rather to try to adopt and its hard for an american, right, because were so privileged. Were so damn wealthy, were so powerful. This is hard, right . But try to adopt an approach that defers to the local conditions, in the case of your question, to the iraqi conditions. Because in the long run, it is their country, eric. And in the long run, the effects that are organic to the maliki government that are organic to the political scene will be much more durable unless were into colonization, it will be much more ndur ashl. The classic case is jsoc, the highend Counterterrorism Force that is literally unmatched in the world. What Stan Mcchrystal did to transform jsoc into a terrorism machine is unmatched anywhere in the world so iraq doesnt have one of those, and iraq didnt get zarqawi, and pakistan didnt get bin laden. That was jsoc. So theres some sort of high d highend, sort of niche capabilities that are unmatched so we should bring those into the fight. But in the long run, im very much in favor of trying to find an indigenous answer here because those are. On the ones t are going to be durable. Can i tell one quick anecdote. Were in iraq in the end of 2008, steve and myself and bred bush. Its a handingoff into the obama administration. Better shape than ever could have imagined. The president had a great welcome, a great meeting with maliki, went out to sign the security agreements, were all sitting on the side. Remember, thats when the guy stands up and throws two shoes at the president. And i honestly it was such chaos in that small room when he stood up screaming, i had spent too much time in iraq, i thought it was a suicide bomber. I mean, that was my first thought. I thought, my goodness it ended up being two shoes. The second one of which president bush almost caught, i think with the intent to throw back. [ laughter ] but the president , first, was so gracious in that moment. If you watch it behind the scenes in calming everybody down. But the guy who threw the shoes was taken out back, and we could just kind of hear him getting whaled on by the iraqis. And i think, doug i think you had was it in this book or somewhere i read, correct me, doug says Something Like, this shows we can do all we possibly can and give these guys a chance but iraqis are going to wail on each other. And there is an element to that, that it is really up to the iraqis at the end of the day. But that moment with the shoe thrower was quite a moment. I was sitting right next to doug when it happened. This is a funny story. It turned out to be funny, it wasnt funny at the time. So were all sitting there, the u. S. Delegation and brett and i as loyal staffers were at the end of the u. S. Row. And the president s up there, hes standing next to maliki, this fellow throws his shoes sort of wakes brett and me up. And i think brett said i think that guy just threw a shoe at the president. Meanwhile, the secret Service Agent in charge jumps out to interpose himself between the shoe thrower and 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. Hes only got two shoes, after all, right, hes now out of ammunition and dont make a bigger thing of this as necessary. As the secret Service Agent jumped out to get in front of the shoe thrower. He hit the boom mic of the u. S. Interpreter interpreting the arabic. The boom mic swings around and hits the most innocent person in the room, dana perino, the press secretary. So the only casualty aside from malikis ego was dana perinos black eye. This is for brett. Brett, i read in the local news that kurds affectionately refer to you as baba the kurd. Meaning father of the kurds. And all thats going on the ground. The Syrian Organization for human rights reported that ta talibiad. There are isis reportedly back in the city. I wonder if, one, you could comment on that. And second, if you could detach yourself, what would you do if you were general on the ground with everything going on, how would you proceed forward in your relations with the regional actors . And that second question, ambassador edelman can also answer because of his extensive work with turkey. Its a little bit off topic. If we have a couple minutes, just real quick. Yeah, the Opposition Forces that turkey works with are interwoven with extremist groups and extremist actors. It was the main highway for isis, if tfed iraq, we used to discuss this with the turks. I talked about this on the record so you can go read it so that wouldnt particularly surprise me. What happened today, i feel like were living in 1921, putin and erdogan sat down with the map and basically carved it up. So the al asad regime will come back. And russian and turkish patrols will begin in five days in these areas. And this was all done in a room in sochi, partially a decision that President Trump made without any consultation or anything. For the kurds and people in these areas, these decisions are now out of their hands what is sad, the protector of these areas is now vladimir putin. And its tragic. And so, again, i have concern that this will get worse. And we have already collapsed our positions over the entire northeast perimeter of northeast syria that we have built over four years. And i think our influence now to meaningfully direct the course of events, you talk about humility now. I think if you hear anyone in the u. S. Administration say we have tremendous influence to do this and that, theyre kidding themselves. This is now in the hands of others and the kurd, and the syrian arabs and all the others that live in these areas. The fate is in the hands of other power brokers. And the iranians, i mean. 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 brett did with fds. I think the events of the last two weeks have completely given a lie to that because as brett just said, these are in many cases, former jihadists themselves who were repurposed by the turkish government for their own reasons. Its the reason why centcom on at least one occasion, i think maybe two, tried to examine the turkish options and concluded that these are not the kind of people we wanted to go to war with and fight with. The second point is now the turkish government was bound and determined to do this and there was nothing to stop it. That, i think, is equally fault. I do not believe that erdogan had wanted to get into a fight with us. And i think had we made that point clear to him in the call that President Trump had in the 6th of october none of this would have happened. All of us had been through previous examples of this where the turks were threatening to go in. Steve may recall the black rain operation which they wanted to do right as we were going into iss iraq. President bush dissuaded them from doing that. This was weve been talking on this panel about the exercise of president ial leadership and the use of president ial power and this was, in this instance, im sorry to say a total about abdication of both of those things. I think we have time for one more question. On a lighter note, this is for ambassador edelman, you just mentioned earlier that you bought a book from the french general about counterinsurance in algeria, was that a book on how not to . This is still a very sensitive topic in france. I actually have very good relations with my french counterparts. And in 2008, when we were having a counterinsurgency conference in garmisch, germany, i asked my french counterpart if they would like to come and do a presentation on their campaign in algeria, and he looked at me, and he said, no, this scab is you know, really, too sensitive to pick at in france. So, yes, galulas book, and he actually has more than one, his books are really about the lessons he learned as a french officer in the losing effort, the french wage to defeat the fln insurgency in algeria. And they still bear reading today. Theyre very transient and very powerful books. In fact, the longer one he did about the french in algeria has been reprinted by rand and you can find it actually online and download it. But it has one line that i recall very well because i think it applies to us in this context of efforts against terrorists and insurgents. Its 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 let the scholars weigh in. Before that, please join me in thanking our panelists. [ applause ] youre watching a special edition of American History tv airing now during the week while members 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 in world war i. In the first of several programs, length dear pilot describes how influenced Popular Culture in that in kansas city, missouri hosted this event. And 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 Lizzie Borden is . And raise your hand if you ever heard about this murder, the jean harris murder case before this class . The deepest clause was in the transformation that took place in the minds the American People. So, were going to talk about both of these sides of the story here, the tools and techniques of slave owner power. And also the tools and techniques of power that was practiced by enslaved people. Watch the topic ranging from American Revolution to september 11th. Lectures in history on c span 3. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. And lectures in history is available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. In our final program, looking back at president george w. Bushs decision to increase troop levels in iraq. Scholars offered their analysis the surge from the center of the president ial history at Southern Methodist university. This is almost two hours. So, without further ado, its my pleasure to introduce the chair of this panel dr. William inboden who is the executive director at the university of texas in austin. He has, i think, not unique, but