Not only did jump up but it had a really long lasting effect. It change the way they lived for generations. By 1970 that moment ended, and we saw not a gradual float down but really the fertility rate dropping down. Jonathan last and have changing demographics and birthrates could change the way the u. S. Is a leader. Look for more booktv online, like is on facebook. Georgia okeeffe was really the first wellknown woman artist. And even well into her life in the 1970s. There was no one who could match her. She became a feminist icon, and i grew up under the influence. My first recognition of her work was not as an art historian but as a bunning feminist whose attention was drawn to the fact those paintings. And ive lived in colorado and people talk about this woman, it was the way she lived. The fact that from 1929 forward, she came to new mexico for months out of the year, living apart from her husband. In the 30s and foresee continued to do this until her husbands death. And then she moved to mexico fulltime. So she lights up our imagination as an artist because she was famous so young and so famously young, ma but secondly she lived the life she wanted to live. And was a very disciplined woman. And i think that stands out as women make choices even right through to the 70s, they make choices that accommodate family and other pursuits in their life. Georgia okeeffe at one driving passion in her life, and it was her art. The Georgia Okeeffe museum in santa fe, new mexico, just one of the places youll see this weekend as booktv, American History deviancy spans local content vehicles look behind the scenes at the history and literary life of santa fe. Saturday at an eastern on cspan2s booktv. General Stanley Mcchrystal commanded special Operation Forces in iraq, and later was u. S. Command in afghanistan until his resignation in 2010. He was at the Brookings Institution on monday where he discussed u. S. Strategy in afghanistan and his newly published memoir. This is an hour and a half. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to brookings. Thank you very much for coming out on this particular day. Although its an unusual treat with such an amazing events of general Stan Mcchrystal are today. Im mike ohanlon, one of the members of the 21st Century Center for security and intelligence. We are hosting this event with bruce riedel who runs the intelligence project within our center. And todays topic, as you know, is general mcchrystals experience, particularly of the joint special Operations Command where, for five years, essentially lived in iraq most of the time and build an organization that was already an Impressive Organization into what was the stateoftheart capability. It led not to our top of today but the tracking and ultimate killing of the al qaeda terrorist alzarqawi. But even to me the procedures that led to define and killing of bin laden a couple of years later. So the success of joint special Operations Command is one of the most important stories in the broader war on terror and we are honored that bruce riedel will be interesting general mcchrystal about this this month. Of course, this is based on general mcchrystals recent book, which hope you all purchased and which were all very proud to be discussing as well today, my share of the task which comes i think describes the role not only of his own command but of many soldiers and other American Military personnel, International Personal that he worked with. Just a couple more words but each of our panelists today. Bruce was a 30 year cia veteran before joining brookings in 2006. At the cia he did a number of things, including working at the nsc on detail and nato headquarters, the middle east and the pentagon. Pentagon. He was adviser to four president s, president obama asked them to lead his afghanistanpakistan paulas review in early 2009, and do that for a couple of months before apple first returning to brookings. Bruce has written two books in the time has been a, a third is about to come out and i will mention that in the second of the first two were about al qaeda and then about the is pakistan relationship. So the search for al qaeda, the deadly embrace, his new book coming out next month is avoiding armageddon. Its a story by the u. S. India pakistan relationship and Crisis Management over the last halfcentury or so. General Stan Mcchrystal is a 1976 graduate of west point, spent 34 years in u. S. Army, retiring as a fourstar general the summer 2010. He has been command in afghanistan. Use the correct of the joint staff but perhaps the military circles most of all as i mentioned this five year period at joint special Operations Command makes a memorable and historic. General casey at his Retirement Ceremony in 2010 said of general stand, the thrill is stand has done more to carry the fight of al qaeda since 2001 than any other person in the department and possibly in the country. After that bob gates got up and the secretary of defense called him one of the finest men at arms this country has ever produced. Then continued, over the past decade no single american has inflicted more fear and more loss of life on our countrys most vicious and violent enemies than Stan Mcchrystal. But before i allow them to talk about this fight i also want to underscore because that makes stan sound pretty scary, while he was scary to our enemy, hes an amazing american who is in so much in a positive way to reach out and help build here at home, working with veterans. But in afghanistan i want to share a very brief vignette, which is his emphasis on reducing civilian casualties was one of i think the most important aspects of the Strategic Initiatives that he brought to bear when he was commander. I had the honor of seeing president karzai in the spring of 2011, i said i would be seeing general stand center after. President karzai said to me, he pumped my hand and he said please tell Stan Mcchrystal that we so appreciate his service that is such a thing of the Afghan People, but always appreciated the concern yet for the Afghan People as he did his job as a general dealing with will with this enemy. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming general Stan Mcchrystal to brookings. [applause] thank all of you. Thank you, general mcchrystal for coming as well. It is an honor and privilege to be on a platform with you. 90, mike, for the very generous introduction. What were going to do is have a conversation up here for the first half or so of the hour and a half we have. Im going to ask the general a bunch of questions, and then about 10 45, maybe a little later, we will open up for questions from you. Its particularly an honor to have you here today because this is also the Maiden Voyage of the brookings intelligence project. The brookings intelligence project is a new effort to try to resolve the riddle of intelligence successes and failures, or the enigma of what intelligence is sometimes brilliantly successful, and many of the times, much more publicly, spectacularly of failure. Theres no better case study of intelligence success and failure, i think, the counterterrorism effort over the last decade and one of the great successes of that period is the hunt for Abu Musab Alzarqawi. Now, some of you will say heres a brookings stuck in the path. Abu musab alzarqawi was killed six years ago. Why should we care about a dead jordanian . The answer is because Abu Musab Alzarqawis legacy, unfortunately, remains with us today. The terrorists who this month attacked a natural gas facility in algeria, al qaeda, glorified indeed almost worshiped Abu Musab Alzarqawi. We know that because several hostages that were captured by this group in the past purport his most popular icon of the al qaeda group, is more popular than osama bin laden. He carried out and planned the attack in a jury is a selfdescribed ecoti of Abu Musab Alzarqawi. He sees himself as very much an acolyte of the late zarqawi. And zarqawis organization, al qaeda in iraq, has today produced an offshoot, the front in syria which promises i think to be one of the most dangerous al qaeda fronts weve ever seen. So he may be dead but his legacy is still with us. So id like to start the conversation, general, by asking you for your impressions of zarqawi looking back now, how serious and dangerous figure he was have a decade ago, and why he was at the top of the list of people to go after during the war in iraq. Let me first thank michael hanlon. Thanks for being here. And its great, bruce, to see you. One heroes in terms of intelligence. And to be interrogated by the cia. Ill try not to break. Yeah, Abu Musab Alzarqawi was a relatively young jordanian from a lower, or upper, lower upper class background our lord middleclass background i guess youd say, upper lower class, who became radicalized while in prison, and then became associated with al qaeda, right to the end of the period in afghanistan. He then later when he appeared after the invasion of iraq, he had been there before but he appeared wrote on our radar screen at the end of 2003. It already started to build an al qaeda and iraq infrastructure that leveraged fear. Its pretty important to you how we saw it. I took over in the fall of 2003, as i went to iraq and i got there in october. And immediately it was obvious to me that the situation in iraq was much worse than it. From afar. I was coming out of the pentagon. It was clearly unsettled but it looked much worse than we thought. The first hope was that if we would get Saddam Hussein and the former regime extremists that i would solve the problem. And so weve made an effort to do that december. We picked up saddam but also became pretty obvious that as one of my describes one of my guys described, they really werent running back, the beginning of the resistance there, the beginning of the insurgency. And instead what was, was zarqawi had started to build a network that took trained people, iraqi sunnis have been essentially dislocated from their position in society can sometimes position in government, sometimes position in the military in iraq, and they were terrified of the shia peralta which was going to clearly be dominant in iraq and the future. So you have this combination of factors that was fear the future, frustration against foreign invaders, and then not as much religious extremism as sometimes is perceived. It was really an al qaeda religious movement. It was a Political Movement that it can leverage by some very clever work by people like Abu Musab Alzarqawi fairly early, at the beginning of 2004 we were sure he was there. We started to track his work, and, of course, in the spring of 2004 when falluja essentially highlighted the meltdown of iraq. You had violence all around the country but falluja became the first but in the country where they held ground. And actually, al qaeda and the sunni elements that were working with them at that point held at Bay Coalition and iraqi forces from the city of falluja for a number of months. At that point it was clear that what they have built, not only was fairly passionate, but it was also extensive. The network work around most of the country. And zarqawi was an interesting role to really get to the heart of bruces question. It was a question about, there was an issue about did he really matter. And the answer is yes, he did. He mattered in a big way, because zarqawi became an organizational leader. He also became an iconic leader. He leveraged both very well. At one point we would watch them move around the country and deal with groups, and he was very lowkey, very charismatic leader. Not bluster us. He was an effective in your face leader in terms of a positive sense, but he would also leverages ability to use mass media. He would put out these radio or internet talks where he would praise groups around the country. I remember one time we captured one of these different groups to the lines of show marked the essentially was going Geographic Area to Geographic Area and pumping up the morale of the to those areas. It was pretty powerful because one, it made him look like he was solo, which he was indirectly doing but also very motivational. It made them feel like they were part of a bigger entity and he would lash into that very, very effectively. And we started to become the actual operational leader and the moral leader. And that increased over time. His goal was to create a civil war. Is strategy was to get a sunnishia schism to erupt into a civil war. And arguably he succeeded before we, in fact, killed him with a bombing of a mosque in the spring of 2006. That was the fuse that actually started what, what looked and felt up close like a civil war. So he became hugely powerful. Although we killed him in midjune, what he has done carried on after that. You just described as you do in the book, he created a network, or a network of networks. And in the book you lay out how your task force had to create a network to go after the network. Your network was a classic example of intelligence cycle at work. Collecting information, analyzing information. Can you give us kind of a sense of how that network work, how it evolves, how the pieces of the work . And ultimately the speed at which you were turning things around, from collection to exploitation . Sure. I had grown up in an error when we thought of terrorist groups as fairly bounded, narrowly focused entities with a certain number of people in them and if you are able to get those people or decapitated, you would essentially cause the problem to stop. At the beginning of the war against al qaeda, as bruce knows very well, we started with the decapitation strategy. It was called two plus seven, and that was osama bin laden, Abu Musab Alzarqawi, the next seven. If we could decapitate those organization would collapse. In reality that doesnt usually happen come as a tongue in cheek tell people, if you take out the top two people in any order they shoulshould we are apart of, wee actually collapse. In some cases i would argue you would get stronger. I used to say that in the pentagon. Its not a recommendation. [laughter] i used to say that in the pentagon and everyone would have not. The reality is if you have a very bounded organization of x number of people, you go after them and you sort of deck of cards id, you take them off and eliminate them. Problem solver that doesnt apply to a networked enemy. He think what a Big Organization and network terrorists or decision has to do, if you see a car bomb go off in baghdad against a target, somebody had to chosen to target, somebody had to build the car bomb, somebody had to assemble all the components of the car bomb. Somebody had to find somebody to place the car bomb and if its going to be driven, had to find a suicide bomber. Somebody had to make the car bomb worthwhile. So what it means a worthwhile is typically they would film it and they would immediately put that them out so they got much greater value out of the explosion. So if you start to think of all these come youre talking about leadership at the top, command and control, communications, fairly rapid, logistics, sometimes very, very significant amount of logistics. When you have 14 car bombs a day going off in baghdad, its a big logistic chain. Youre talking about recruiting, assessing, training, and moving people into position. So if youve got Human Resources part of this thing. Youre talking about security element that are doing your counterintelligence work to make sure youre not its a Big Organization thats got all the functions of a very complex organism. To do that it becomes this leading organizations that has to operate but it becomes extraordinary effective because theres a reach everywhere. And so to defeat that if you think all of got to do is get mr. Big, you have missed the point. Youre just not going to have the effect you think. Nor can you just say im going to stop car bombs or and going to do this, because no single part of the. We actually back and look at the Strategic Bombing survey of germany after world war ii, because there was an attempt there to figure a critical note of which is get the ball bearings come if we just get the feel. What we came to the conclusion is theres no single thing. You cant just stop this and stop this problem but instead what you got to do is destroy the enemys network, which meant for us you had to go not at the very top but you have to go down to people who actually do work. In the military equivalen equivt would the field grade officer and senior ngos, and you had to claw that out, destroy that and then let the network collapse. Now, to do that youve got to have a network, essentially that layers on top of that. We dont naturally do that in u. S. Organizations. We have a tendency to be more stoked by. Theres intelligence agencies of different types. Theres military organizations special operations. This conventional organization, political part, public affairs. And we tend to be fairly bounded, special operations more traditional debit public affairs. So we would never talk about what we did. So unlike al qaeda, who would do inaction and then leverage that action to influence peoples thinking, we sort of dont do that actually. We like not to talk about. So sometimes we dont get the value of that. Similarly, parts of the intelligence, we would gather information and know about it, we are loath to share that with the other parts of the four so i said you were the operations because the idea is weve got to protect