Country. Next, two authors talk about their work on the conditions that cause the rise of isis. They look at whether different american policy choices could have thwarted the rise of the socalled islamic state. Good. Welcome to the Americas Office for strategic studies. My name is dana allen. Im a senior fellow at our London Office and also editor of the iiss journal, survival, which is the reason that were here tonight. Because i have next to me the coauthors of the lead article in our june july issue. Professor peter fever and professor hal brands. Peter fever is professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University and he also directs the american grand strategy program. From june 2005 to june 2007, peter was on leave as a special adviser for Strategic Planning and institutional reform on the National Security staff staff of the george w. Bush white house. Hes the author or coauthor of five books including pain, the human costs of war. Published by princeton in 2009. And to my far left, dr. Hal brands is the Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of Global Affairs at Johns HopkinsUniversity School of advanced international studies. Hes also a senior fellow at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments. His most recent book is making the unipolar moment, u. S. Foreign policy and the rise of the post cold war order from cornell. The title of their article is, was the rise isis inevitable and its a counterfactual question that touches on some actually the most contentious issue of u. S. Foreign policy in this century. These include whether it was a good idea for the Bush Administration to decide to invade iraq and whether it was a good idea for the Obama Administration to withdraw almost all u. S. Troops in 2011. And i think the impressive achievement of this essay is that, you know, the authors dont see simple answers to any of these questions or any of the other counterfactuals but they dont let themselves off the hook. They still provide answers. And its a really fascinating and from our point of view a very important article. Well hear first from the two authors and well have a discussion starting with professor fever. Thank you. Its good to be here and its also fun to talk about work that ive done with hal. Its been a wonderful ride working with hal closely over the last seven or eight years or so. And this article in particular came out of teaching that we were doing together. We cotaught a court on american grand strategy which is mostly an opportunity for him to see how many times he could trick me into telling the same war story over and over again. He and the students were in cahoots on this. But we also were trying to teach our students how to do policy analysis, how to evaluate policy choices and along the way became clear that the students were uncomfortable with the idea counterfactual analysis even though counterfactual analysis is at the very heart of policy. If youre making a policy recommendation youre saying do x so as to cause y to happen and if you dont do x, you wont get y to huh happen. And, of course, that policy recommendation is making a counterfactual claim about what wont happen if you dont take a certain action. And when youre looking back in time evaluating policy choices, youre necessarily doing counterfactual analysis and students struggled to do to do it well. The discipline of history treats it as a parlor game. Eleanor roosevelt could fly how would world war ii turn out, these kinds of crazy fake history. And thats not what policy versions of counter factual analysis are about. And so we wanted to set about doing it right. The importance of getting it right is making your counterfactuals explicit. Everybody is doing counterfactual analysis but most people are doing it implicitly. Theyre not explicitly laying it out so thats what we wanted to do an exercise in doing that. Now, theyre hard to do because once you change one thing then of course you have to think seriously about the implications of that and you can quickly unravel the analytical sweater. And so to make it tractable, we tried to pick events that were relatively approximate to the question, the rise of isis. You could go back to the split between sunni and shia a thousand years ago. That kind of counter factual analysis is not very useful, because so much would have changed. But decisions that were more proximate to our current situation, that was a more useful form. You try to minimize the number of changes you make. You try to pick alternatives that are plausible but that were plausible, and maybe even seriously debated inside the administration at the time so you could credible say that the president couldve made this other choice and then you look at the good and the bad consequences of it. Its easy to get counterfactual analysis wrong. Its easy to mischaracterize it and were trying to be very clear that we are not blaming president bush or president obama for the atrocities committed by isis. Isis deserves the blame for everything they have done but we are asking the question could different policy choices have positioned the u. S. To confront isis in a more effective manner than we were able to. We look at four pivot points. We look at the decision to invade iraq, 2002, 2003. We look at the obamas decision 2010 to 2011 that led up to the withdrawal of the u. S. Forces from iraq. We look at the decision to intervening with a larger arming of Syrian Rebels in 2011 but not with the invasion, but with more forwardleaning arming of the rebels. And then the last one is the decision not to strike isis when it was on the highway approaching mosul. And so look at these and ill briefly summarize the iraq 2002 decision analysis and hal will do the more interesting ones. He gets to do the more interesting ones. I say more interesting, because where we come down on iraq is pretty close to where the conventional wisdom, i think, does. Which is that if the United States had not invaded iraq, and if the occupation had and post phase four conflict sorry. Stability ops phase of the war had gone better. Either you didnt invade or youre able to rebuild order faster. If you changed those, then its unlikely that we wouldve seen isis in the form that we did by 2014, 2015. Isis al qaeda was there, al qaeda preexisted the decision to invade iraq, of course, but the form that isis took in 2014 where they were controlling large swaths of territory is hard to get there without the collapse of iraq and the problems that emerged. We dont follow the conventional wisdom perfectly because i think when you dig into it its a little more nuanced. The conventional story makes it seem pretty easy but there were a number of things that we wouldve had to deal with if we hadnt invaded iraq. Wed have to deal with the fact that Saddam Hussein has large stock piles of weapons of mass destruction. We only learned after we had invaded that he had gotten rid of them. And the invasion itself had a pernicious effect on al qaeda. It became a rallying cry. But then it also became a death trap. And so al qaeda flooded troops, their troops into iraq theater and through the course of the war and particularly the surge they are they are killed and dealt a very, very serious blow. And so our analysis of iraq is a little more nuanced, maybe, be than the conventional wisdom. But we come down basically saying that if you had not invaded iraq, and dealt with it, had the problems that followed that, its hard to see isis arriving at the stage it did. However, and this is an important pivot to hand it off to hal, that does not mean that the rise of isis was inevitable circa 2008, 2009 because there were at least three other pivot points that hal will tell you about. Ill just note that peter and i are deliberately playing peter served in the Bush Administration and got to tell you the things that the Bush Administration did wrong. I served briefly in the Obama Administration and get to catalog the incidents that occurred under obama. So ill just briefly focus on the three that peter mentioned. So the iraq draw down decisions in 2010, 2011, really in 2011 and stretching into 2012 and the decision essentially not to preempt isis before it took mosul in late 2013, early 2014 and im not going to go into Chronological Order in discussing these. Im actually going to do something different. Ill go in order of the likelihood of achieving a different and better outcome had we followed different but plausible policies in these situations. And the case that we actually consider least promising in the sense that we have our assessment leads us to the least confidence that this would have changed events for the better is the syria 2011 2012. I think theres a strand of thinking that argues that the United States easily could have prevented the emergence of isis had it moved in a bigger way to bring about the fall of the assad regime or to intervene in a more significant way in this period. We having looked at this and dug into the evidence and thought about the counterfactual think that this is a relatively weak counterfactual. There were various options considered by the administration in 2011, 2012 period. Everything from no fly zones to safe zones to alleviate civilian suffering, providing more support sooner to the moderate Syrian Rebels, cratering the runways so Assads Air Force couldnt operate. Even doing leadership targeting of regime elements. All of these things were rejected or downgraded and so the question is if the Obama Administration had pursued a more Robust Program of intervention in syria, could it have been altered the dynamics of the conflict in a way that would have precluded the rise of isis, perhaps even brought the conflict to an end there by joking off the ideological fuel supply that assads repression was causing. The argument that this comes up with that this is probably not that likely. These forms of intervention might have alleviated civilian suffering, they would have been given the United States a better in so they might have yielded some down stream benefits in terms of greater context, greater credibility when the United States ultimately did intervene in 2014. But we think its unlikely that these events would have produced say a settlement of the civil war or forced assad to deescalate. And the major reason for this is basically twofold. The first is that it seems likely in light of later events that assads external patrons would have matched any u. S. Escalation in syria and perhaps exceeded it which was, in fact, what happened in 2015. And second is that it seems that most of the options that were considered at the time fundamentally underestimated assads tenacity. The fact that he was really willing to fight to the death in syria. This was a consistent challenge fight for him. And so intervention might have put us in a better position it might have yielded some humanitarian benefits, but we dont think the effect would have been decisive. A slightly different case when you look at the 2013 2014 decisions involving iraq. This was the last opportunity to block isis before it emerged in its fullest and most dangerous form before it gobbled up about a third of iraq. And this was a time when the iraqis were, in fact, asking for greater assistance. They were asking first for military aid in late 2013, and then for a direct American Military intervention, including air strikes to block isis. Now the administration held back from doing this for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was that it worried that nouri al maliki, iraqs Prime Minister was part of the problem rather than the solution and the United States would become complicit if it got involved at this point. So the question was could a more Robust Program have had a mitigating effect on isils rise. Militarily, the answer is yes. This is a time when isil, they would have been sitting ducks for a program of american air strikes, and there were sufficient American Military assets in the region to carry these out. The problem here essentially is twofold, though. First intervening in iraq in 2014, early 2014 for instance, wouldnt have done anything about the syrian problem. Syria was really isis home base and that would have been most likely remained a safe haven. The second and arguably bigger problem is political. Which is that it was only when isil reached an hours drive from baghdad that we finally got maliki to get out of the way and make way for an Iraqi Government that was committed, at least in principle, to a meaningful reform program. It seems unlikely we would have been able to do that in 2014 and before the wolf was fully at the door. So we might have been ended up with precisely the Obama Administration worried about where the United States was the shia air force conducting strikes. On behalf of a sectarian regime. We would have had military gains. It wouldnt have been nothing to prevent isis from taking mosul, which you can see just by looking at how hard it was to retake mosul in 2016 and 2017. But there would have been a high price to pay. And that just leaves the last counterfactual which are the 2010 and 2011 decisions. This is actually a double counterfactual. So first, could the United States have better influenced the Iraqi Government formation process in 2010 after the elections were deadlocked . Could it have prevented maliki from taking another term . If the United States had left a stay behind force in iraq after 2011 as was initially the plan, as maliki was initially willing to accept, would that meaningfully have impeded isis rise . We actually think this is the most plausible counter factual. I wont go into all the details here. We can discuss these in the q a but we think there was sufficient u. S. Leverage to bring about a different Iraqi Government formation scenario in 2010 whether that would have involved maliki stepping aside or simply doing a real power sharing agreement with his rivals. We also think there was sufficient u. S. Leverage and goodwill on the iraqi side to bring about a Status Force Agreement that would have been kept u. S. Forces in iraq after 2011. It would have required some flexibility in the negotiation certainly. But we think there was basically a possible agreement there and we identified about six or seven different ways in which such a force if it were between ten and 15,000 troops actually would have meaningfully affected the trajectory of events. Providing better situational we wearness through better intelligence and a number of other things, as well. We dont claim that this is a Silver Bullet because one of the things we have to acknowledge is that a u. S. Presence in iraq would have brought risks of its own. It would have been made United States vulnerable. By shiite militias, for instance. We argue this was actually the most crucial juncture in the sense that this was the opportunity to forstall or mitigate the rise of isis at a reasonable cost. So in conclusion ill make three points here, which build a little bit on what peter said and what dana said. So the first is that we do argue that the rise of isis was a tragedy. We think that had u. S. Policy makers taken different policy choices isis probably would not have emerged as the full blown threat that it ultimately became and we can debate amongst ourselves which of these was most promising one. We think 2003 and 2011 were the critical ones. There were opportunities to shift the trajectory of events. The second point is that we have to acknowledge that all the counterfactuals here are messier than they first appear and in some cases thats because changing the u. S. Decision changes the subsequent course of history, so profoundly that its hard to know how better off you actually are. This is certainly the case had the United States not invaded iraq, for instance. And in some cases because the counterfactuals that we posit bring costs and risks of their own. Leaving a stabilize force in 2011 for instance. Either way the point is that its a mistake to think that there was a Silver Bullet. There were better and worse policy decisions but there wasnt something that was so blindingly obvious that any fool should have done it. And the third and final point is that in light of all this, the debate over isis and the rise of isis needs to shift. Its really not that useful to focus on assigning blame because i think as our article argues, administrations of both parties made fairly significant errors. I think the key rather is to use counterfactual analysis seriously to get a more rigorous understanding of the options and alternatives and there by help us to better think about Decision Making in the future. Were going to confront dilemmas similar to the ones that american policy makers confronted in this period, right now. There are discussions ongoing about what type of presence the United States will have in iraq after isis is defeated. To the extent we understand the past and we think seriously about the counterfactuals that we present and the counterfactuals we argue that american policy will be better off for it. Thank you very much. As i say its a really excellent article and i commend to everyone in the room and everyone whose watching. Before i open it up to the floo