Good morning or afternoon however you decide to part this time of day. Thank you for coming audience to this book event and thank you audience on cspan for watching us in what would be a fascinating hour and a half discussing new Book Strategic failure. Strategic failure, i think a book that every republican candidate ought to be reading and whose staff ought to be examining chapter by chapter to see how we got in this terrible six that we got in right now the United States position there, and also some key ideas of how we get ourselves out. Mark has written a book which i think comes of kindliness for understanding whats happening around the world couldnt have been in tune with the American Public today. Poll after poll shows that the American Public is deeply disquieted with our position as visavis other powers inalluding including russia and china and allies and are worried about increasing instability and violence around the world particularly with the rise of the radical terrorist organization isis. A lot of people were thinking that when we elected on barack obama in 2008 this is not where we were supposed to be. Todays paper, wall street journal, big front page article why obama doesnt seem to be getting a break. He came wanting to build a new relationship with iran in the middle east, wanting to deal with climate change, restore relations with cuba and also to deemphasis the role of military power and military presence around the world and emphasissing in diplomatic engagement with powers great and small that encompass the globe. Despite obamas great hope for the future, bright new future, instead what hes been hit with is the rise of russia, of china as aggressive power t rise of isis iraq and the possible december dis disdis his book as youll find out strategic failure deals with the root causes between those areas. I welcome to this session in Hudson Institute he brings an understanding of military history and also a keying grasp as to how it applies to actual policy and shaping of policy. In marks particular case both in iraq and after afghanistan mark moy er professional, also formerly, also formerly from the joint special Operations University in which he was teaching he has worked as a consultant to both central demand and also to the International Security a book that rewhere i say the history rewrites the history of the vietnam war. It has had an impact in asia, relationship to our past ventures in a future role of asia. Im really delighted and a chance to ask not just about his book but also how he sees it fitting into the world of the United States in world. So mark, let me ask you as i mentioned, were talking about the wall street journal article that sense that we have that the relationship between a the Obama Administration of americas military presence, military spending and also that the relationship to the sudden growing instability around the world that these things are quite of a coincidence. Do you agree . I do agree with that. I do have competing impulses in the Obama Administration which i think together has lead us to this point. One thing that you always have to keep in mind was this administration is that from the beginning it has been focused more on domestic issues than international issues. I spent a lot of time looking at. Early on we see him getting in afghanistan. Like him and johnson had ambitious relations. We see as also occurred with Lyndon Johnson over time policy issues keep creeping in more and more. One of the reasons for is that was for the crisis keep off the front page. Youre not proactively pursuing some kind of strategy which over time will come back to bite you. We also have certainly within the Obama Administration impulse that says e we dont need to spend. We are going to do less of the hard power. Thats been part of this administrations policies, also the idea that we could use drones as the instrument, that we could afford down to cut down on forces has been central to this approach. And weve seen finally come to go recognize that may not have worked so well, so were try to go get back. Military spending and we can reduce. We saw in world war i and world war ii. Okay we dont need this and we have a korean war five years later. I think what also is at work that by cutting defense spending we are reducing capability, we are inviting further aggression. The nation we cannot afford to go through defense and then catch up. Unfortunately that usually results in deaths of lots of america that are not well prepared for the next war. We owe it to those people who maintain prepareness in addition to have power. Lets talk about military spending tanned obamas administration. Not just the Obama Administration but the impact, what reductions when obama and congress could not reach an agreement on deficit reduction. Why should we be worried about reducing military spending. And why should we worry about this as an ongoing part of doing business and how the pentagon had to sustain forces. Good question. One thing certainly is we have enjoyed its technological edge that that has slipped through espionage. We certainly see a rising threat from china and russia but looking long term we want to keep investing and with sequestration, the uncertainty in the environment has undermined what has been going on in the Defense Sector and in terms of Ground Forces there is a real concern we dont have enough, we of the worlds only global power and part of the administrations approach, their view was we were going to get a lot of other countries to pick up the slack for us. Nato tried to get as involved in afghanistan and they let establish nato defense spending is paltry and even though we cut our own spending they are not acting. We cant get the middle Eastern Countries to do the things we would like. There isnt really a viable substitute for American Power and if you look at iran there is certainly a lot for us to be concerned about. Land forces are so relevant as a deterrent also we have to deal with Iranian Nuclear weapons. At Eastern Europe, the situation is very troubling we have belatedly seen the Obama Administration send token forces on a temporary basis, but there is clearly a recognition that we need more forces in Eastern Europe and afghanistan it is not clear what we are going to do but we need forces given how small Ground Forces are, we really do need to to do the sorts of things that need to be done today. The last extensive ground operation the United States conducted was iraq. One of the most significant changes in the Obama Administration is a shift in policy and how to deal with iraq and the role of american president s there and the question which you see debated in the media which is who is to blame for the growing mass and instability not just in iraq but the entire region but also the role of isis, how do you assess those issues . In iraq you can question the wisdom of going in in 2003, given what we know about wm d, there is a strong case that if we had it to do over again, we would have left Saddam Hussein in power but that is 20 20 hindsight. When president obama comes to office that is long past. He is faced with a situation where we have expended a great deal of american blood and treasure this is after president obama during that 2007 surge was saying wasnt going to work but by 2009 he agrees iraq brought pretty well, sunni, shiite, kurd slipping together. And at that point iraq was on the road to being a potentially groundbreaking development in the arab worlds where you have a democracy that was functioning, different groups largely getting along and so what ever else happened before that, we had an opportunity in iraq, at relatively low cost to see this through, and the military at the time was arguing the situation is fragile in iraq, we need american troops here in the long term to preserve this and if you look at what is going on in iraq 2009, 2010 you can see clearly the value of the american footprint, military footprint in iraq. We have lingering tensions between shiites and sunnis, arabs and kurds, the forces are there some times on the ground preventing forces from coming to blows. We have u. S. Military presence allowing us to influence the Iraqi Government, Prime Minister malady maliki had his shiite predilections early on. We wanted to make this work, we were able to tell him back off on provocative actions you are taking. This was in 20092010. In 2010 we had a disputed parliamentary elections. To interrupt and remind everybody, that was about the time the Obama Administration was touting the peace and stability in iraq as one of his leading Foreign Policy accomplishments. That is absolutely wright. You get to this election in 2010 where sunnis and some secular shiites have a slight majority over maliki and there is an impasse where neither side can get at majority and the u. S. Has in its power the ability to decide who is going to be the Prime Minister and a dispute within the administration, joe biden is the president s point man pushing for maliki and we think maliki is not the best candidate, seems to be moving too close to iran, too sectarian but joe biden and his camp win the day they keep maliki to ensure he is the Prime Minister and stays on and you now hear the administration blaming everything on maliki is a little disingenuous because they are responsible for keeping him in there. 2011 lot of debate over what the u. S. Future is going to be like. For the most part joy biden and others think we will have some presence, most of the debate is how big a presence after 2011 the u. S. Will have and the Obama Administration late in the day brings up claims that the Iraqi Parliament to approve our presence and give them immunity give troops immunity from prosecution and this will later be used by the administration to say we were forced out of iraq because the iraqis put conditions on it. This was 2013 when things were in 2014 if you recall we send our troops back in without getting those grants approval from parliament. That is pretax, obama himself did not want to keep troops there partly just because he didnt think it was necessary. He was going around telling everyone i ended the war in iraq but wanted to claim we were out, and the last troops at the end of 2011, maliki is unleashed, arrest warrant for his own Vice President , the leading see any politician and others get arrested and in the ensuing period and 12 starts to kick a lot of sunnis out of the armed forces which americans are wondering, 2014 why is the iraqi army so bad . We let maliki kick out a lot of sunni officers and a lot of sunnis went over to isis. So i think agree recruiting tool for isis. Perhaps the biggest biggest single blunder of his presidency which there have been of you. The decision not to keep american troops in iraq. Lets probe a little bit why we did this and why the Obama Administration was reluctant to push on an agreement some people arguing they never had any intention, they wanted all american troops out. Didnt it rest on a fundamental assumption which you have seen very often in certain Foreign Policy circles, that a u. S. Military presence is almost a provocative presence that tends to foment confrontation to stir up animosity, stirrup antiamerican feeling, destabilize countries and regions when we have fought robust military presence and on the converse, when you pull back American Forces people talk about the obama retreat, the american retreat, when you pull back the American Military presence, as the terminology goes, as small footprint even an invisible footprints, then in fact you are actually doing well in terms of Foreign Policy and in terms of an American Security policy that encourages stability and discourages conflict. Is your thesis in this book, what were seeing is the opposite . That is right. That is a debt that the Obama Administration made in several key places. Iraq certainly is part of their argument. You dont need to look far within iraq to see that argument is false. And early occupation under general katie from 20042006, general casey and others were arguing the biggest cause of conflict in iraq is a is enough of a reaction against the american president so lets pull our troops back there is a conscious effort to pull american troops into bases away from the population and the premise that once we do that the iraqis are going to calm down. The Iraqi Government kept failing and general David Petraeus comes in in 2007 and we realize the answer to these problems are americans because the iraqis cant do it so we see americans coming and senator obama in 2007 was saying the americans, we send more troops to will just stir up joy thats nest more and that turns out not to be the case. It proved false in iraq and there was a sense of pulling out in 2011 things will be better in iraq and we saw the rise of isis didnt work out the Administration Made the same argument, pull our troops out of afghanistan and in libya the administration said wont sent troops into libya after we destroy their government because it will stir up insurgency. Air may be certain cases people dont like americans and it may incite violence but as a general principle arguing this should be a driving force, the truth is most of these enemies are not driven by the american presence, you are better off in some cases using americans, it is necessary because our allies cannot do what we would like him to do. Lets talk about afghanistan. The most fascinating parts of your book deal with afghanistan. That is a war, an operation with which we are intimately familiar adviser to asap on that. Give your assessment on the trajectory of the obama policy starting from 2009 when they put together strategy in dealing with afghanistan to where we are now and give some idea where you think things are going to go if Current Trends continue. Afghanistan has a lot to do with how i came to write the book. I spent a fair amount of time in afghanistan working on afghan issues. President obama came in in 2009, he promised he was going to ramp up what he called the smart work in iraq, afghanistan was seen as being the war that was popular, the 9 11 attackers came from there. He was going to show he was tough on National Security and he does agree to increase troops which i thought at the time was a good idea. Most of the military was part of that. He put short time frame on participation against the advice of the military. And many others saw a lot of afghans dredging their bets. Not siding with the United States in 20102011 and we were going to sell them out as we had in the 1990s. I and others were dissatisfied with this timeline president obama put upon which seemed to be motivated by politics and the more we know about, the more that is true. The decision to go in was driven by this political selfinterest rather than merits of the situation. More troubling for me and a lot of others, in 2011 pull out counterinsurgency campaign. The joint chiefs were saying can i pacify southern afghanistan, and do other hotbeds of insurgency which is eastern afghanistan. Obama administration decided it is costly and expensive, and we dont need to do that. And we do with the military says and we are now saying all these people got killed in southern afghanistan we didnt need to do at and so the way that was presented to the public was misleading. A lot of that let me to write this book along with pulling out of iraq. All lost in the earlier ones, to support things and in 2012, the administration with its own political gains. We have seen as mentioned before, if we pull out of afghanistan the afghans were going to to stop fighting so much against us, the taliban to be reconciled because america was there and once it was afghans they get together and intensified violence and earlier this year we had of leading the u. S. Journal saying Afghan Forces were taking casualties at a rate that was unsustainable and we have clearly mismanaged relations with pakistan. They continue to support the taliban. We had an opportunity, this was another from with the rapid pullout, pakistani came to the view that america was not in for the long haul so they wanted the taliban to come back they think we are going to leave and india will fill the void and they cant stand for that. It looks like we were not going to have troops in afghanistan. We saw how bad it was in iraq. If we continue to diaz the late under current plans, afghanistan is going to fall apart and that will have tremendously damaging ramifications in pakistan where we have great interest. Critic would say it was a hopeless case from the start. We put in the wrong person, hamid karzai, is hopelessly corrupt, the government is hopelessly corrupt. The Afghan National army was corrupt and incompetent like its iraqi counterpart. What we look at and look over what is happening in the middle east, what we are saying is societies and countries which are in a state of extensive collapse and failure there is nothing the United Sta