Members and guests tonight had the honor of introducing a friend and academic colleague who happens to be a best selling author, call miss, speaker, commentator, senior Level Management strategists are key has worked with president s from here at home to south asia to iraq and for more than 20 years our speaker has provided strategic and Crisis Committee k should counsel to companies, policy organizations, government agencies, not for profits, advocacy campaigns and grassroots groups. He is served in many roles including executive director of the Republican Party in new york state, advisor to the us chief of protocol at the vatican, planner to the department of state of former president s bush and clinton to the tsunami ravaged south asia and director of communications for the Environment Protection agency. Our speaker is currently an adjunct professor. A charter member of the board of advisors at college of liberal arts and sciences and a opinion contributor to forbes in the hopes of 47 months in 2004, he served as the Senior Press Advisor to the coalition for iraq where he earned the department of Defense JointCivil Service commendation. His experiences gained during those seven months form the basis of his book, tough sell fighting the media war in iraq. Please help me give a warm welcome to best selling author tom basile. [applause]. Thank you. Really appreciate that warm introduction and this is a wonderful turnout and im honored to be here with all of you given the state of new york city subway trains i said i dont know if anyone can make it tonight, but we have a great room and again its a privilege. As you know ron is a pretty quiet guy, very modest, but for those of you that dont know he is tasks with some of the most complex security challenges facing new york particularly after 911 is a great Public Servant and someone committed to keeping this city safe, so thank you, ron, for everything you do. [applause]. I would like to take a minute if all of our veterans and those who served in the United States armed forces would just stand and be recognized. [applause]. [applause]. Thank you for your service to the country and i would be remiss if i did not also thank ambassador john bolton, former Us Ambassador to the un to give me a wonderful forward for the book and i really appreciate his support for the book and for this Important Message. Its a great privilege to be here at this wonderful institution, the Union League Club of new york. 15 member president s have been members of this institution since its founding. Its members have played an Important Role in the National Discourse on the wide range of issues and as ron mentioned they manage to construct a man statue of liberty, so its a great privilege to be here and its fitting we are in this historic room to talk about tough sell tough sell fighting the media war in iraq because this book is about history. How we make history and how that history is shaped and perceived not only by ordinarily people, but by people who have the Great Fortune in many respects of being thrust into extraordinary circumstances on behalf of our country. Also, increasingly the business of journalism, technology and politics. How we perceive the iraq war today was shaped by those things at a time in history when we are seeing several profound shifts in the way people view the media , government and war is self. Most common question i get is why do you write it, why did you write this book, why did you put it out now . First, the ships shifts ive mentioned in the governments ability or inability to counter that has ensured that the great work of thousands of americans who went over to iraq who sacrificed much and took great risk to create a Better Future for the country in many respects have been lost to history. Second, if policymakers in todays day and age dont effectively articulate policy, manage their message and counter the editorial filter their will soon find themselves unable to access it execute and sustain the policy and in the case of our National Security policy, that places america and the rest of the world at great risk. Certainly what was lost in the wall to wall Media Coverage of the worst of the war was the very best of people. The real story about what happened during the critical first year after the fall of Saddam Hussein gives us a glimpse into the glory and imperfection of humanity as well as the very real evil that exists in the world and the face of god that can be seen even in our darkest moments. Third, over the last number of years i have watched as the Coalition Provisional authority has been lambasted by the media socalled opinion leaders and politicians on both sides of the aisle in my view very and fairly. The civilian story and the story of that civilian coalition in the first year has largely never been a great vote focus of attention. What happened behind the scenes in the palace has really really been discussed. My perspective as a civilian bush appointee being thrust into the middle of the fight for the peace in the fight to committee about the war as well as the work of so many hundreds of my colleagues on a range of issues i felt the need for it to be told at this time. After all, our heroes in uniform are not really folks who purchase a weighted in that iraq mission. Civilians played key roles often left unseen. Of their boot camp was the battlefront, their bullets their expertise, digging up on their and its my hope that by fairly evaluating the successes and the failures of the iraq mission, history would ultimately record the purpose of many civilians at the triumph of american spirit and sacrifice. The book is chronological and also very personal, so it tells the story from the day i got my phone call when i was sitting in my office on pennsylvania avenue and 10 days later sitting on my luggage and 130 degrees heat in kuwait waiting to go into baghdad and i kind of made up the fact i would only be gone for about four months and convinced my family it would be an okay thing to support. But, its very personal and i thought about writing a straight policy book about public diplomacy, how you communicate about war in the age of 24 hour news, social media etc. , but it seemed too impersonal. It almost seemed inappropriate given the work that was done because we were all so personally and emotionally invested in what we were doing and the environment was for into so many of us that not injecting a heavy dose of what it was like for me personally and going through that experience it just didnt seem authentic. I also one of the book to be accessible to a broad range of audiences, so i wanted to write it in such a way that it told the story and it was chronological and very, station oh, so there are plenty of stories. When you read the book there are plenty of stories about this guy who with no training on 10 days notice found himself in baghdad with no place in his vest and no weapons training trying to craft a message for missed middle eastern and western media about the work that thousands of americans were doing to rebuild the country in an increasingly dangerous environment. I talk about the brightly clad kurdish children running in the dirt being told by special forces member to remember to roll down the car window before throwing out the grenade. Middle age contractors dancing at the now infamous disco. Said children of the arabs and the victims of the gas attacks, seeing women draped in black at the mask read clutching the pictures and photos of their families dealing with death, dealing with rocket attacks, feeling real fear and of course seen glimpses of hope. Those are all part of the experience, but embedded in the pages is also a running commentary and for the first time a real analysis of not just the news media and this is not a book that just beefs up on the news media and media bias, but political, institutional and philosophical challenges that hamper the administrations ability to what was really going on in a rock against the demands of the business of journalism. The lessons about fighting the media war are even more relevant today than they were then in our time of social media and fake news, cable wars and a president that were with the press and a press at war with the president. The indisputable truth in this is that the government still has to make policy. Our communications change in our Technology Changes the way we talk to each other, the way our influencers try to influence policy. It changes, but at the end of the day the government so as to make a policy, executed and sustain it and that requires public support. What we experienced in iraq was an erosion of that support because of a failure to fight and win the home front war in the press. Policymaking is now more than ever about our willingness to push back, her willingness to purchase a paid in that daily block and tackle on every medium, not just twitter against the business of journalism and increasing number of Information Sources of varying degrees of credibility here would we do this analysis, what we learn is that iraq was really a war within a war within a war. What we witness in the rise of al qaeda and the decisionmaking of the us in aftermath of 911 was a sharp departure from the usual warmaking paradigm. I believe we are still in many respects in a transitional phase as it relates to the way this country handles both its military and diplomatic strategy to account for the shift work of the administration of George W Bush was the first such administration to deal with this paradigm shifts. The challenges were philosophical and compounded by this battle for audience mind chair at home. The tensions made the tough sell of the iraq policy even tougher. There was the philosophical war that we spent a great deal of time of the last number of years debating whether or not we should have gone into iraq, but the more relevant conversation for us and our country moving forward remains once you make the decision to the war what is the principal purpose or desired outcome and how do you get there you have several choices in the case of a rock. One, remove Saddam Hussein and leave, which i believe what you been a false choice. Two, remove the leadership and grant some ex patriot and post them with absolute authority trading one dictator for another. Three, you attempt to secure the country and build institutions that could support not what some people have suggested some kind of american style democracy, but more the posted participatory structure. The Coalition Authority in iraq was developed to execute the third option and they tackled this extreme are with passion and commitment sacrificing much for their efforts largely going unnoticed as the security situation worsened due to the rise of al qaeda in iraq and sectarian violence and unfortunately a government that as the mission went on often failed to aggressively defend its own policy. The issue of competing philosophies was apparent virtually every day. Secretary rumsfeld had a vision of hightech smaller fleet footed military, but that happened to be incompatible with the mission we had at the time dealing with lawlessness and looters and insurgency in a Civil Affairs operations that needed to be done at the same time. On my first data rock either off the plane, put on my helmet, got in a bus and they said by the way the road between Baghdad International airport and at the palaces close because there have been too many ied attacks on it and i said great this is exactly what i wouldnt see. First day i get it they tell me its the road of death and it wasnt particularly a original name, but it got the point across we had a problem in securing the road between the airport and where our headquarters were. One of the ambassadors first conversation and i talk about the book was posing anonymous but astute question how do we get the us military to start shooting the looters because we needed to demonstrate that we were going to use force in order to ensure the country would be secure and restore some sense of lawful behavior. You also clearly had philosophical differences between the military and the state department whose Foreign Service officers while they clearly had their own important priority often didnt play well in the sandbox with the folks in the department of defense and also the Bush Administration appointees there is operationally the challenge that were a mess, the cpa was unique combination of the department of defense, department of state, nsc, white house, cia Intelligence Agency all operating under our feet at all times. It was a textbook lesson in building in a short amount of time and managing a bureaucracy. No one had really done this before. This impact on what i do for instance is part of being able to craft a coherent outbound communication strategy requires that for planning purposes you have good internal communication as well. When we give you an example. Of the establishment of Iraqi Security forces is one of the most important things we try to do during the first year and the press were instructed in our progress. They obsessed over it. Of course they didnt understand , report or seem interested in the complexity of trying to put cops on the street and build an army and various Security Forces, but getting the facts from the different parts of the operation was a difficult that at one point in one week the president , secretary of defense and ambassador or going on tv using different numbers. You have to have message consistency or you damage the credibility. The military also didnt have a tight rein on its people. I was shocked when data where it was military it was the militarys policy that if a soldier was asked a question from the member of the press they could answer it, which pose a significant problem when you see a field commander doing an interview on tv in your office and they are giving incomplete information. Young enlisted soldiers were a particular victim of the press who loved to ask questions about dont you miss home and dont you wish you were back with your family. It was a pretty disgraceful type of type of tactic on the media, but they wanted to get these young guys to say demands miss home. Of course they miss home. When a soldier stops missing home and stops complaining about conditions, you may have a problem on your hands. You are supposed to do that. No one really wants to be in the desert. We were there to put ourselves out of a job. Of course, you had the reporters themselves who had long decided that even the administration of the military had no credible the , so they crafted the story they wanted often without regard to the facts or sources. Organizations also compete for resources and ownership and im sure you see this in your organizations in your businesses everyday and we dealt with that shocking jockeying for position in a rocket impacted our ability to connecticut about the war. Having credibility to say i was there and i saw it with my own eyes was critical to being able to deliver the message back in the state and it very rarely happened. In 20032004 i worked on developing a certain operation and a hometown media project that booked soldiers in civilians both here and those overseas on local television and radio stations around the country to try to get the message out about what they experienced about their commitment to the mission and what was actually going on and we used a military deduction attachment in the country to use shoot footage of these folks doing their job, building a school, working together working together with it Advisory Council or just out fighting terrorists. We would package them up and send them off for distribution to television stations. White house couldnt figure out who take ownership of the mechanics. No one wanted to own that. Would be the office of local communications, someone at the Defense Department or someone in the office of Public Affairs i should do this and no one could figure it out, so the program failed. The operational war was impacting our ability to articulate a better fairer more aggressive message about our progress during the first year, but the operational war to be fair was impacting the quality of the joan m journalism and by the end of 2003 the press corps in baghdad had pretty much been stripped. We always had a saying in the office that the one thing that all of the baghdad reporters had in common was that for the most part you had never heard of any of them. They had stripped baghdad bureaus leaving only a token presence in the bureaus and those personnel then were told they were not permitted to travel around the country. That meant they sat in hotels and waited for the daily car bomb to go off. They sent a crew out. They got their footage. Daily to their footage on the evening news or 24 hour cable news and that became the story that we started to see and we started seeing that as early as the summer of 2003. Then, there was this larger war perception. The white house is overreliance on the wmd issue as a justification for war to annoy her dark red ability with press and the public from the start. You have to couple that with newsrooms full of executive and editors who came from the vietnam era and the sad part of human nature and i dont know if its developed because of our information system, our technology, but the sad part of human nature that will always be more interested in what went wrong and what to write and who died as opposed to who lived in achieved and you see how these battlelines come into specific relief pretty quickly we were dealing with the media that simply didnt believe the family said. It was hostile to the president and would report rumors on the street over the governments explanation for virtually anythin