Casts. More now about the 2007 surge of troops in eric with a foe cuss on the planning by the Bush Administration. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is stef, it is my great pleasure this afternoon to introduce our distinguished panel of speakers. We have ambassador edelman who has served in the department of state and the white house, and u. S. Ambassador to finland, turkey, and was Vice President dick cheneys deputy assistance. He has a department of defense medal for distinguished public service. From the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and a distinguished service award. To my far left we have general lute, he retired in 2017, previously he had a distinguished 25 year career in the u. S. Army and he served for a total of sick years in the white house under both president s, george w. Bush, and barack obama. And in 2007 he was named to coordinate the wars in iraq and afghanistan. It was both on the joint staff in washington dc and on the United States central command. Then, we have, on the panel, former director mcgurk. Previously mcgurk served in senior positions including inin the bush white house, a senior director for iraq and afghanistan, and iraq, iron, he lead several missions over the middle east. He lead talks with russia over the syrian conflict. And finally the Panel Discussion this afternoon will be moderated by professor brands. He is the distinguished professor of Global Affairs of the school of advanced international studies. He is the author and editor of many books including american grand strategy in the age of trump. And what good is grand strategy power and purpose. He was part of the strategic planning. So goin me in welcoming these scholars a this afternoon. Thank you, i would also like to thank our osts here for putting on this event today. So many of the policy makers that share their time and insights with us. It is a pleasure to be up here with three gentleman that are importantly involved in the Decision Making, later in its implementation, but were also generous with their time and their insights. So the basic run of the show is that each of them will have a chance to make some comments and i will ask a couple questions of the group, so i will go head and hand it to my friend eric. Thank you, it is agree to be here this morning thank you to msu for hosting this and i want to say it is really a pleasure to be up here on this panel. With two great public servants. We have been running a competition to see who is the most hated Government Official in turkey. Both of us wear it as a badge of honor right now. And i had to yield uply among long grown in recent years to brett, but that is only a compliment to his great work. And 13th annual surge reunion tshirts, but i they highlights something that speakers in the first panel mentioned which is the intensely human nature of the Decision Making process that is not often captured in scholarly studies of this. And the truth is, a lot of us actually became good friends through this process and i cant see megan, i dont see her. We did not know each other very well, we became friends and i think that there is something about these governmental processes when youre involves in them from is long hours, but there is also a lot of time and political pressure, a lott of stress, all of this, and managing all of this is very difficult, and for that i do want to take my hat off to steve. And you know if you go around the sit room, if there is a bubble over everyones head and their iq, you would be surprised how high the average would be. You would say 129, if there was emotional iqs the variance would be much greater. And i think that highlights some of the difficulty of this. So thanks to megan and to peter and to will and to hal, for managing this project to completion. I think the brojts and the book is very important to the historical record and the effort to provide an early assessment. Of the process and the surge itself. Im going to be leaving to catch a plane tomorrow, so i dont want my absence, my departure to be seen as a political comment on the next babble. Because i was struck by the incredibly constructive measured criticism they provided. And i agree with some of it, i disagree with some of it, but what struck me about consistently through all of the essays was an empathy for the incredibly different problems that the parties panss were wrestling with. And the con trains under which they operated and the difficulties of reaching a decision with very incomplete information, you know, under excruciating time pressure. And i think that is all too often missing. I would like to just register that. I could go further and say that i think that it is important to do projects like this across the board on ski decisions made in president ial administrations. I say that because speaking now in a dual hatted nature, because i had a misspent youth in academia and one of the things that strikes me is a i understand now that the documents dont tell the whole story. There are just too many of them being generated now. I think the Bush Administration emails, there was two billion of them. The record is becoming just too great for any sol lar to actually get their hands around in its entirety. More over because of the persistent problem of leaks, but also the increasing partisan nature of our politics, and the criminalization from time to time, documents are more self sensored now. But to the fact they might be subpoenaed. Emails, a lot of business in emails, they are frekly vequen very cryptic. And there is a ton that goes on in phone calls that dont show up in the documentary record at all. Steve and i were talking about the fact that we 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 defendant partment defense that we needed to have reconstruction teams in iraq just like afghanistan, but a boss that didnt agree and we had to try to work through that. None of that shows up in the written record. More over in megans comments this morning, we dont have a great record of briefings which are crucial. I have a very vivid recollection of briefing him at 6 00 in the morning. After he was returning from a fishing hole that he described as a place you had to fly to, then take a helicopter, then a bus, and then walk to. There is no record of that briefing in the documentary record. And briefing is a art that not everyone understands very well. I got to see steves from time to time. You never know how much time you will have and there is a great story about that which i will recount which is from the reagan administration. He was National Security advisor. One day he saw something in the president s daily brief about a gorilla movement and he got interested in that. So hank cohen spoke to him and said i need you to brief president reagan. He said how much time do you have and he said ten minutes. He saw him in the hall day later, he said how much time do you have and they said cut it down to five. They ran in the next day and he looked at him and cut it down to two minutes. He sees him in the hall the next day and he says i got the briefing down to two words, he stops and he says give me the briefing, and he said ronamo 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 effort and some that were not and they were extremely important and they need to be captured. So i need to nominate a couple of cases. People talked about it in the first panel. The original decision to go to war, and i firmly believe the documentary evidence ought to be did classified. I think that is one of them, and i hope it happens soon enough to allow mel to complete his book on the Bush Administration. I want to just add a little granularity from my point of view. From the point of view of the dod and osd. The office of the secretary of defense that figures a lot in the book. And frequently you will see references that we could not do this or that because of opposition in osd. As much as in the vietnam time there was a lot of views about what was going on. And i think in part of the then assistant secretary for interNational Security affairs, he was in some sense my prez ses sor, because they did not exist at that time. They had very strong views, but there was a lot of us with an enormous amount of simpty 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, a lot of people in osd are sympathetic to this notion. There was a lot of back channel situations. The deputy which both of us worked in this administration and we wanted to help this process along. We cosponsored with the state department a conference on Counter Insurgency and we wrote about that and i gave a speech talking about the importance of thinking about population security. And here i think sf something that gets a little bit lost. There is a lot of focus on the increase of numbers. And i dont mean to suggest that Additional Forces did not make a difference because they did. But as secretary rice says in her interviews if you look at the peak of the number of boots we had on the grount,d, i thinkt was 165 we were almost at that in december of 2005 into the number, i think, was less important here than the change in the mission was. And that was really the crucial thing that steve and megaen an, brett, and colleagues pushed us to that made a difference. And i think another person that doesnt get enough credit here is ray. There is a lot of discussion about David Petraeus and the field manual 3. 5, the counter insurgence si manual that foc focused on population security. And they worked on that and the mfi commander, the core commander that turned this into operational art on the field, i think that ought to be noted. It is not counter insurgence si, a insurgency, but not everyone spoke coin fluntently. There was a lot of people that spoke pigeon coin. I think for a lot of folks the emphasis of the counter insurgence insu insurgency doctrine was more on the government part and we had a lot of discussions as we went through this 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 rumsfeld. I came to really loathe these conferences because we would have a review of what was going on in iraq, and usually pretty quickly into it, they would say were the only department in the u. S. Government at war, what where is the rest of the government. And the interagency process is screwed up, and who is in charge of that. And we solved that problem with the surge. Because we sent doug luke over to the white house. And as the czar to try to pull all of this effort together. And it was a pleasure working with doug after he went over there. So i think maybe ly stop there. A and. A most to my fellow panelists here. I have a set of four observations that i want to share with you. Some of them are sort of memories or flash backs. Let me share this first one with you. The natural expeer cease, george bush was not a new president , he was six years into eight years. He benefitted from literally hundreds of engagements on iraq. He knew iraq. The germans have a great german phrase, a fingertip feel, is that close . Does anyone speak german . He knew the texture and he got this from hundreds of daily intelligence briefings. He got them from probably 100 plus meetings of his war console. He got this from hundreds of nightly briefing notes that megan mentioned in her remarks. These were called potus notes. I and for the iraq and afghanistan team, this was a chore. Those dealing with iraq and afghanistan, we gathered the most recent, most current developments, and put them in a memo to the president. This went on for years. He got this expertise from personal close engagements from all of the participants and also his iraqi counter parts. So following the sectarian violence, he was not an amateur. The power gets lost and it is not as explicit as it should be, but it under pins his ability to ask the right questions, challenge the assumptions, and to sort of nurse made this project and this process to its conclusion. And i think that is really important. The other thing that was not there, in the president s office, by 2006, was a sense of hubrus. By 2006, thee years into the iraq war, we didnt have starry eyed visions. We had been through a period, the president was very, sort of, soaper and prudent and experienced in a way that brought a level headed humility to the Decision Making process. We should not miss that. This could have percolated below any president but it was connected to a president who was an 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. It was mentioned earlier that steve hadley, i think, was largely the central figure and running the process of the National Security council so the war council if you will and the deputies and subdeputies of the war council principles, so one or two levels deep into the National Security bureaucracy. But 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 is hugely important for the next book, which is the implementation of the surge, 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 backstabbing and a lot of second guessing and is played out in the press, right, and how difficult that process would be to execute, because people would feel they werent heard and essentially would take the somewhat teenager approach of, well, now ill be heard in the execution process, right . And there are execution insurgencies that take place and so forth. The surge decision did not have to deal with that at execution and that was largely a product of the decisionmaking process itself. 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 firsthand 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 houseworking 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, is a it reflects on a subplot that is sort of woven throughout the book. This is the plot between in the relationship between the policies in iraq and the securi relationship in iraq. We had prioritized the assumption that improved politics and increasingly inclusive iraqi political process would deliver security. So, in short, the first approach was politics first. And this had to do with turning sovereignty over to the Iraqi Government, creating an iraqi constitution, holding electrics, forming governments and all this sort of thing. And the sense was, if we could get sunnis, shia and kurds to Work Together politically, there would knob reason to fight and by 2006 it was clear that the sectarian violence was overwhelming that approach. And it was insufficient. The politics were insufficient to quell the violence and we were on a downward spiral. Explicit by way of my own observation, what the surge decision actually did was invert. It turned on its head this relationship between security in iraq and politics in iraq. Security threshold must first be obtained to enable the politics. In a way we turned from politics first to security now. I think this actually played out in a year or so after the surge decision. We saw that once sectarian violence was quelled, Prime Minister maliki was able to take some pretty bold, political steps. It was maliki, after all who, within a year of the surge decision marched on bashra, shia militia, his own political allies, former allies when he went to quell shiaprompted violence in basra. Within 18 months of the surge decision that maliki signed a Framework Agreement with president bush, one of the last things president bush did before leaving office in late 2008, that enabled u. S. Forces to stay for another three years. And it was maliki who was able to get that political decision through a twothirds majority in the iraqi parliament. Those political moves were enabled by the improved security that was delivered by the surge. So theres a bigger strategic move here. Its not just about 30,000 troops but strategic inversion that put security first. Ive come to believe theres a certain sufficiency, a certain requirement, minimum requirement for security that then enables politics and i call that the security threshold. The fourth and final 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 were all americans. I suppose most of us are americans in this room, right . So we have, i think maybe naturally, assumed that this american decision delivered a particular effect on the ground, dramatic decrease in sectarian violence within a couple of months of the surge hitting the ground in iraq. I think its worth thinking about maybe this is along erics line of the next book, another book thinking about the other effects that caused a decrease in sectarian violence, which are not american effects, fundamentally. Let me list a couple that come to the top of my list, right . First is al sadr, with his own militia, jm as we acronymized it, took to the sidelines. He took his shia militia off the battlefield. Number two, on the sunni side, Sunni Awakening predated the surge by probably about a year, well into 2006, you began to get the swinging of the sunni arab tribes, especially