Studies, Johns Hopkins university, in d. C. Ambassador edelman has served in senior positions at the department of state and defense as well as the white house. Hes served as u. S. Ambassador to finland and turkey and was Vice President dick cheneys Principal Deputy assistant for National Security affairs. Ambassador edelman has received several awards including a department of defense medal for distinguished public service, a distinguished civilian Service Award from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and a president ial distinguished Service Award. Then to my far left, we have general doug lute. General lute has served most recently as the United States permanent representative to the north atlantic council, a position in which he retired in 2017. Previously general lute had a distinguished 35year career in the u. S. Army. He also served for a total of six years in the white house under both president s george w. Bush and barack obama. And in 2007, president bush named him deputy National Security adviser to coordinate the wars in iraq and afghanistan. Before being assign today the white house, general lute served as director of operations both on the joint staff in washington, d. C. , and under the United States central command. Then we have on the panel professor brett mcgurk. Hes currently based at the freeman Spaulding Institute at stanford university. Before moving to stanford, mcgurk served as a special president ial envoy for the Global Coalition to defeat isis and he helped build and lead a Broad International coalition to fight against the terrorist network. Previously mcgurk served in senior positions in the george w. Bush and Barack Obama Administration including in the Bush White House senior director for iraq and afghanistan and then as Deputy Assistant secretary of state for iraq and iran under president obama. Mcgurk has led several sensitive Diplomatic Missions in the middle east. Over the last decade, for example, he led talks with russia over the syria conflict under both president s obama and donald trump. And finally, the Panel Discussion this afternoon will be moderated by professor hal brands. Dr. Brands is the Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins school of advanced international studies. Hes also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a scholar at the American Enterprise institute. Dr. Brands is the author and editor of many books including american grand strategy in the age of trump published just a year ago and what good is grand strategy power and purpose in american state craft from harry truman to george w. Bush. Professor brand served as special assistant to the secretary of defense for Strategic Planning from 2015 to 2016. So please join me in welcoming a very distinguished panel of scholars, practitioners this afternoon. [ applause ] thank you very much. And i would also like to thank our hosts here at smu for putting on this event today. Its a lot of fun to get together with the folks who work to bring this book to fruition and so many of the policymakers who share their time and insights for us and its a pleasure for me to be up here on the stage with three gentleman who are not only importantly involved in decisionmaking that led to the surge and later in its implementation, but were also very generation with their time and insights as we told the story. So the basic run of show is that each of them will have a chance to make some comments and then i will ask a couple of questions of the group and we will open it up to general questions and discussion. And so with that out of the way, i will hand it off to my friend eric. Thank you, hal. Its great to be here this morning. Thanks to smu for hosting this and i want to say its really a pleasure to be up here on this panel, first with hal who is a colleague at Johns Hopkins nitze but also with two great public servants, brett mcgurk and doug lute. Brett and i have been running a composition to see who is the most hated u. S. Government official in turkey which both of us think ill speak for myself. I think both of us wear it as a badge of honor right now. Ive had to yield up my long crown to in recent years to brett, but thats only a complement to his great work that he did for the campaign. I would also note that there is a kind of reunion quality to this for all of us. I was surprised we didnt get tshirts that said 13th annual surge reunion. But i do think that that highlights something that speakers in the first panel mentioned which is the human nature of the decisionmaking process that is not often captured in scholarly studies of this. And the truth is, a lot of us actually became, you know, good friends through this process and i cant see meghan where she is out there, but meghan and i did not really know each other that well. She had been at cpa while i was ambassador at turkey. But during the course of this process we became friends and i think there is something about these governmental processes when youre involved in them, theyre as she said, theres long hours, but theres also a lot of time and political pressure. A lot of stress in all of this and in managing all of this is very difficult and for that i do want to take my hat off to steve who managed this whole process. He and i have known each other longer than each one of us want to admit. If you go around the sit room and if there were a bubble over everybodys head with their iq, you would be at how high the average would be. You would go around the room and you would say, well, 129, 135, 148, 118, 120. If you had their emotional iqs in a bubble over their head, the variance would be much greater and i think that highlights some of the difficulty of managing this. Thanks, first of all, to meghan, to peter, to will, to hal, to jeff engle and timothy sale for managing this project to completion. When they first asked me to do an interview, i was skeptical, but i think the project and book that resulted is a useful and important contribution to both the historical record and the effort to provide an early assessment of both the decisionmaking process and of the surge itself. I was also struck, i want to say im going to be leaving a little bit early because i have to catch a plane back to washington this evening because i teach tomorrow, so i dont want my absence to be seen as a political comment on the next panel among the academic contributors to this project because i was actually struck by the incredibly i thought, constructive, i would say measured criticism that they provided. And i agree with some of it. I disagree with some of it. What struck me about consistently through all of the essays was a fundamental empathy, not a sympathy, but an empathy for the incredibly difficult problems gnat participants were wrestling with and the constraints under which they operated and the difficulties of reaching a decision with incomplete information under excruciating time pressure when a lot of lives were at stake. And i think thats missing from the academic literature. I would like to register that. I would go further and say, i think that it is important to do projects like this across the board on key decisions made in president ial administrations. And i say that because speaking now with somewhat dualhatted nation because i had a misspent youth in academia. One of the things that strikes me, i have a greater appreciation of how the documents dont tell the whole story. And that is becoming more acute in the modern era. The documents dont tell the story the whole story because theyre too damn many of them now being generated. When the bush administrations emails were held by the national archives, there were 2 billion of them. The record is becoming just too great for any scholar to actually get their hands around in its entirely. Moreover, because of the persistent problem of leaks but about the increasing partisan nature of our politics and the criminalization from time to time of policy differences, documents are much more selfcensored now. People write them not just with an eye to what historians might write, but to the fact that they might be subpoenaed. Emails which a lot of business meghan was making the point. Emails, a lot of the business gets transacted in email. Emails are frequently very cryptic and will be extremely difficult for historians to sort of decrypt. And then theres a ton of stuff that goes on in phone calls that doesnt show up in the documentary record at all. Steve and i were talking about the fact that he and i 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 department of defense who agreed with steve and meghan that we needed to have reconstruction teams in iraq but had a boss that didnt agree. None of that shows up in the written record. Moreover, meghans comments this morning triggered this thought, we frequently dont have a good record of briefings which are very crucial. I have a very vivid recollection of steve and i briefing the secretary of defense at 6 00 in the morning on the day after the coup in moscow in 1991 after he was returning from a fishing hole that he described as a place that you had to fly too, take a helicopter and then take a bus and then walk to. Theres no record of that briefing in the documentary record and briefing is an art that not everybody understands very well. Meghan clearly did an excellent job, i know steve did in briefing president bush. I got to see not meghans, but steves from time to time. You never know how much time youre going to have and theres a great story about that which ill recount here which is from the Reagan Administration actually, that was told, one day president reagan saw something in the president s daily brief about a Guerrilla Movement in moe ad mozambique. They were talked to the senior director and said, hank, i need you to brief president reagan. And cohen said, how much time do i have . He said you have ten minutes. Cohen went off and did the briefing. He saw him in the hall a day later. He said i have the briefings. He said, how long is it . Ten minutes. Cut it down. He said cut it down to two minutes. Cohen goes back and does the briefing. He says him in the hall the next day and he says, ive got the briefing down to two words. He stops and says, well, give me the briefing. Cohen said, ranammo 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 official u. S. Government effort and some that were not. And those briefings were extremely important and they need to be captured. I would like to nominate a couple of additional cases. One that comes up a lot in this project which is the original decision to go to war to begin with in 2003. And im i firmly believe that all the documentary evidence ought to be ought to be declassified because if ever there were a subject thats right for revision, i think that is one of them and i hope it happens soon enough to allow mel to complete his book that hes working on on the bush administration. With regard to the surge itself and the story told in the book. I want to add a little bit from my point of view, from the point of view of dod and osd, the office of the secretary of defense which figures a lot in the book. And frequently, youll see references in the book to say, we couldnt do this or couldnt do that because of opposition in osd. And much as i think in the vietnam era there were a lot of views about what was going on under the secretary on vietnam, i think in part of then assistant secretary for interNational Security affairs who was in some sense my predecessor because the undersecretary position didnt exist at that time, there was not a unanimity of view in osd about this. Secretary rumsfeld had very strong views. There are a lot of us who had enormous amount of sympathy 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 the late peter rodman, mary beth long, a lot of people in osd were sympathic to this notion. And there were a lot of backchannel conversations going on, not just between me and steve, but between me and meghan and me and j. D. To try and help that process along. In fact, in september of 2006, we cosponsored with the state department a conference on Counter Insurgency in which we spoke specifically about that and i gave a speech talking about the importance of actually thinking about population security and here i think is something that gets a little bit lost. Theres a lot of focus on the increase in numbers, the five brigades, how many brigades were going to have. I dont mean to suggest that Additional Forces didnt make a difference here. They did. Clearly the commanders thought they needed Additional Forces. But as secretary rice says in her interviews throughout the book, Additional Forces doing is same thing would not have made a difference. And if you theres a wonderful chart in the book, actually, if you look at the peak of the number of boots on the ground we had in the surge in 07 which i believe peaked out doug will correct me. 165. We were almost at that in december of 05 when we arranged for overlap for the election in december of 2005. So the number i think was less important here than the change in mission. And that was really the crucial thing that steve and meghan and brett and colleagues at the nsc i think helped push us to that made all the difference and i think another person who doesnt get enough credit here is ray. Theres a lot of discussion about dave and the field manual 3. 5 which focused on population security and dave of course, you know, along with jim mattis and others worked on that. But it was really ray as the commander, the corps commander, who turned this into operational art on the battlefield with the joint Security Locations and all of that. And i think that ought to be noted. Now, its not like a lot of people werent focusing on Counter Insurgency or coin as we like to call it. But not everybody really spoke c. O. I. N. Fluently. There were a lot of people in the government who spoke pigeon c. O. I. N. For a lot of folks, the emphasize of the Counter Insurgency doctrine wasnt so much on the security part as it was on the all of government part. And we had lots of discussions inside the pentagon as we went through this particularly 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 rumsfield. I came to loathe these conferences because almost inevitably, we would have a review of what was going on in iraq and usually quickly into it, someone, usually the general, but not only, would say, were the only department of the u. S. Government thats at war. Wheres the rest of the government . And the interagency process is not delivering for us and the interagency process is all screwed up. Who is in charge of the interagency process at which point all eyes would turn on the undersecretary for defense. But we solved that problem with the surge because we sent doug lute over to the white house because the whole of government. You saw how that worked. And as the czar to try and pull all of this effort together and it was a pleasure working with doug after he went over there. So i think i will stop there and is doug next . Yes, doug is next. Okay. Thanks again to our hosts and my fellow panelists here. As i read this book, literally finishing it on the flight down from washington yesterday, to be honest, i have a set of four observations that i want to share with you. Some of this is sort of some of them are sort of memories or sort of flashbacks to very intense period of policy making, but let me just share these with you. The first one is about the president himself. And i think the book and the reflections of the 28 contributors reflect the power of president ial expertise. George bush in late 2006 was not a new president. He was six years into an eightyear administration. He had benefitted from literally hundreds of engagements on iraq. He knew iraq. The germans have a great word for it. A fingertip feel, is that close . He knew the texture of the war in iraq. And he got this from literally hundreds of daily intelligence briefings, the famous pdb, the president ial daily briefing. After 2003, most of them were dominated by the topic on iraq. He got them from probably a hundredplus meetings of his war council. He got this from hundreds of nightly briefing notes that meghan mentioned in her remarks. These were called inside the National Security council potus notes. President of the United States notes. For the iraqafghanistan team, this was a daily chore. We put out an allhands call and we gathered the most recent, most current developments and put them in a one, two, threepage memo to the president. This went on for years. He got this expertise from personal close engagements with all the participants on the u. S. Side, to include the military commanders, but also with his counterparts. By 2006, when he was struggling with this question of sectarian violence that was spinning out of control, he was not an amateur on iraq. And the power of president ial expertise, i think, gets lost a little and its not made as explicit as it should be in the telling of the story. But it underpins his ability to ask the right questions, to challenge the assumptions, and to sort of nurse maid this project, this process to its conclusion. And i think its really important. The other thing that was not there in the president