Effort the president took in iraq to the level of doctrine. We will have to see how history treats this issue over time. I think it was a reaction to the circumstances that arose after 9 11, possibly some legacy issues from having bush 41 deal with iraq as well. Examples where mr. Obama felt very comfortable carrying on the policies that his predecessor had bequeathed him. Thank you. [applause] prof. Eisenberg i am hoping that they will finally find a microphone i can use. As a professor, i want to welcome director goss and ambassador negroponte for coming here today, and expressing willingness to come here and talk about the issues. I do not think it has been openly acknowledged here, but the reality is that those members very few members of the administration have been willing to come here and talk about these issues. I really appreciate your presence here. Some of you may have forgotten dean firestones introduction. And case there is any confusion, i want to make it clear that i am not now, nor have i ever been a member of, the Bush Administration. I thought you might be confused. I am a historian at this university, completing a book on the nixon administration. Before that, i wrote a book on the early cold war. For both of those projects, i spent thousands of hours reading topsecret government documents. These are records that were declassified after the fact. I reading all these documents in reading all these document, it makes you seriously weird for one thing. There are also certain expressions that you get. Some of them are pretty obvious. One is that very often Public Officials say thinks to the public that are not true. Actually, i have to say, sometimes i reading something in a document that is secret, and then i look at present nixon or secretary kissinger, and they come and say the exact opposite that they said one hour ago. Im always amazed when this happens. Sometimes, officials are not truthful, or they exaggerate, or deceive themselves, or they can be misled by advisers. From reading all these documents, the most important impression that i have gotten i have been struggling on how to articulate it is when you look at the deliberations of people at the very top level, the use of language, and have a way of talking sort of a National Security vernacular that has the effect of actually insulating them from the human reality that they are talking about. Somehow, that does not even enter the room. You can read minutes of meetings and memos about cambodia, laos south vietnam, or wherever, and what is happening in those places is like a million miles away from what is going on in this room. One of our speakers earlier was talking about the president at the top of his game, with all the information that he needs to have. Bush was familiar with all the world leaders. Actually, i think bush would have benefited from going to a village in afghanistan, which we accidentally bombed, and talking to the people there. I think it would have been helpful to him and our country. Those deliberations at that high level have the effect of making those realities may obscure to the people who are sitting in those rooms. It also has the effect of generating a kind of grandiosity by the people in those rooms who have a tendency to say things that are actually fairly simple, and make them sound profound. I think investor negroponte was getting ambassador mega party was getting at that. The bush doctrine, i am not entirely sure what it is. I tried to look it up online. One, the military of the United States needs to be stronger than any other in the world. Two, we need to retain the right to attack any country. Three, we not be bound by the pressure of allies or the United Nations for, a threat does not have to be imminent to attack the country. Boiled down to the essentials, we are the only world superpower, and we can do what we want. This does not originate with bush. This goes back to 400 bc. One group told another comment you know as we do, right in the world is only in question between the equals of power, while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. My initial point, that is the bush doctrine in that it is much less than what meets the eye. That does not imply that it is meaningless. What it signaled was a newly aggressive militarized Foreign Policy, which came into its own after 9 11. We are told that is what the American People wanted. How brilliant of president bush to stand in the middle of the rubble on ground zero with a bullhorn and yell, i can hear you, and soon the whole world will hear from us. There was another choice on an 911 and a different mood in new york city. I cannot make generalizations about the whole United States, boy what i can say is i was in new york during the entire time. The city of new york was still sad, incredibly compassionate. Everywhere, people were seeking to help one another. We will hear about apple corps for an eternity. I want to tell you a little story about my book the neighborhood, right across from the World Trade Center. Our homes were covered in ashes, but our neighborhood was diverse with muslims, christians, and jews. The arabamerican families in our neighborhood reached out to a synagogue and proposed a candlelight vigil to honor the dead, first responders, and pray for peace. It was organized very heard in the hurriedly, and it was unclear how many people would come, but wendy moment arrived hundreds of people came streaming wendy moment arrived, hundreds of people came streaming down the streets. It sounds like kind of a corny thing that a professor might bring up in contrast to the harsh realities of fighting terrorists out to destroy us. To shift grounds for a moment, in opting for war, invading iraq and afghanistan, creating secret prisons in locations around the world, torturing detainees insights around the world there was nothing very realistic about the way the bush and Administration Responded to 9 11. Keeping us safe from terrorism we all think that is important, which illustrates the choices that were made. I will give another story. I want to talk about firehouses, the ones in my neighborhood, just across the river from the World Trade Center. The trucks were called in right from the beginning of the attack. They drove across the Brooklyn Bridge and rushed into burning buildings, and help to save hundreds of lives. Many of our firemen died and those buildings collapse including one of my friends. What happened a year later is that our firehouse closed because there was no money in york city to pay for firehouses. They did not have enough money to keep them open. Meanwhile, the bush and administration was sending millions of dollars to iraq in suitcases, for which there was never any accountant. The unbelievable sloppiness of handling this money, millions disappearing into iraq, millions to pay warlords in afghanistan millions to private contractors schools never built and hospitals never finished. But, not enough money for firehouses, and frankly not enough for our Veterans Health services either. What does that say about keeping america safe . Whatever it meant, the bush doctrine found its culmination in the war in iraq. A war of choice. For the purpose of saving us from weapons of mass destruction which it turns out did not exist. This episode is now described as a fake, a failure of intelligence. We did not know that the weapons were not there, we did not know the invasion would cost so many lives, we did not know that we would spend more than 1 trillion to. People make mistakes, but in this instance, people did know these things. There were weapons inspectors in iraq saying, wait, there might not be anything here. There were military people saying, we cannot run an operation like this on a shoestring. There were middle east expert saying over and over again, if you try to occupy this country these warnings were ignored. Can i get some water . Thank you. What are the results of this realistic choice i would say, unrealistic choice . Waste as many as 5 million iraqis were driven from their home. By any calculation, the decision to invade iraq can be counted among the most disastrous in modern history. I have to say at a little bit incredible to me see here in the context of the truly disastrous decision that he made with the horrendous human cost that was involved. One my story. On september 12, 2001, rescue workers pulled out a woman aged 30. She was the last person to be saved in the devastation. Most of you are too young to remember as those last people were pulled from the rubble, it was an incredible moment. Somebody was saved. One person was saved. People wept when they pulled that one person out of the rubble. Why was that . Because one of the things we werent on 9 11 is that every single persons life is important and precious. And that points to the tragic legacy of the bush doctrine. The Bush Administration which was so profligate about the taking of human life whether the afghans or rockies or our own soldiers in unbelievable ways, the Bush Administration never caught osama bin laden, but he did immense damage. We are still living with that now. The responsibilities for these mistakes no longer rest of here. Rests with all of us. When we forget or minimize the gravity of the mistakes that we may over those years, we will continue to make those missed a into the future. Many many many more people will die. Thank you. I too would like to thank you for hosting this. I appreciate you all for coming today. Let me just begin by saying that the accusation that president bush abused his power and presided over a lawless administration which is frequently leveled against this administration, is certainly nothing new for partisans on both sides of proverbial displays of hypocrisy regarding president ial power will tend to criticize the sitting president. Whether hes a member of their party or not. On partisan grounds. Putting that aside, i can say that george w. Bush has been suggested to some of the worst in the gallery. Unfortunately he comes from a number of my scholarly comrade. Especially historians and law professors who consider themselves experts on the president. I find this particularly disturbing and that historians especially are supposed to wait for documents to come out. They are supposed to wait for oral history interviews to be conducted. They are supposed to wait for memoirs from figures. Theyre supposed to do the unsexy work of going to an archive and spending lots of time looking at boring documents. Unfortunately, far too many historians abandoned any pretense of objectivity and seemed unwilling to place the president s actions into historical context. That the bush presidency was already an epic disaster. Im not standing up here saying that george w. Bush was a great president. Hurricane katrina, the economic collapse. The war in iraq. There are a number of issues that need to be put into the equation when assessing a presidency. But at the very least, it struck me that my scholarly comrade had an obligation to wait until presidency was over before proclaiming it is one of the worst ever. I would even argue that here we are 567 years out. Its still very early to make sweeping judgments about any presidency. Just as a reminder, if this thing after Harry Trumans departure, he was still a remarkably unpopular figure. And certainly in scholarly circles at this point, after eisenhowers departure nonetheless, this conventional antibush narrative which also sometimes suggest that Vice President cheney was pulling the strings which is a myth persists to this day. It persists among people who should know better. Im referring to my fellow scholars who have avoided the hardworking history. In terms of doing some actual digging as opposed to reading the oped page of the New York Times. Curiously, many of the same scholars who have condemned george w. Bush as a lawless presidency celebrate the presidency of john f. Kennedy who plotted the assassination of fidel castro. Many of these folks not all, there is some consistency but its a set shouldnt. They also celebrated fdr use the fbi as is evident detective agency. To make matters worse, many of my fellow activists dollars abandoned the precepts of their craft by pronouncing this judgment prior to examining a single document or conducting a solitary interview. I think this deep scholarly animosity towards president bush and Vice President cheney was the result of the fact that bush was the first president to face a serious challenge to americas security since the enactment of a new regime postwatergate. These reforms have the effect of enhancing the power of congress to check the executive. And produce the kind of permanent hostility to executive secrecy that Alexander Hamilton called secrecy and dispatch. Since the founding of the nation, congress is deferred to the executive branch on these issues. The courts expand the role in National Security, they would frequently lie themselves with congress in order to check the executive branch. In a sense, bush and cheney tried to play by the old rules. By the prewatergate and prechurch committee rules. As of 2014, we can at least say that they appear to loss in their effort to restore the system back to its prefrank church prewatergate committee mode. I would warn you that history can be fickle. At least in regards to bushs war on terror, i believe that someday they will come to be seen in more favorable light. I dont expect that to occur fast. I dont ever expect the bush for bush to emerge in that top 10 list of president ial greatness. Where harry truman resides. If we want to talk about torture we can have a very lengthy debate over the truman administrations use of hundreds of thousands of xmen number of the ss as intelligence sources in dealing with the new cold war. If were going to look at waterboarding. If we are going to look at rendition, we also then need to do with history justice and reexamine the president sees of harry truman or jfk or any number of progressive president s who unfortunately are frequently caught cut a lot of slack by my fellow academics precisely because they are progressive president s. George w. Bushs loan standing i believe among academics reflects in part the rise of partisan scholarship. The use of history and theology and as a political weapon. Which in my view means the corruption of history is history. Again i dont believe that george w. Bush was a great president. In fact he is probably going to come out at some point either is below average or average. But the conventional wisdom regarding the presidency of george w. Bush i believe is ms. Target. And a revisionist account of this presidency at least in regards to his National Security. Ultimately new with this. We. Were not too far from the World Trade Center site. Put yourself in bushs position. But 9 11 aside for a minute. Put yourself in his seat on 912. Ask what you would have done. I know what he did you know that they are the next, he told his fbi director and his attorney general to do whatever it took to make sure that this did not happen again. I have to say had i been in that seat i probably wouldve said the same thing. 9 11 was clearly defining moment. Close to 3000 people were incinerated. The question was once a rock have to do with 9 11. If you ask yourself is the last week are suggested, what would you done on september 12 . Why would you attack a country that had nothing to do with this terrific attack on the United States . Just today, a report has come out from the nobel prizewinning International Physicians for the prevention of nuclear war. Theyve done some calculations. They released a report saying this investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has directly or the killed around one Million People in iraq, 220,000 in afghanistan. 80,000 in pakistan, a total of around 1. 3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as human. That figure is approximately 10 times greater than that that we are aware of. This is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths and the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million whereas figure below one million is extremely unlikely. One Million Deaths in iraq. In the last a bit more than a decade. In a country the Bush Administration said there were going to say. That would as they famously said creates u. S. Soldiers with flowers and sweets. As the Vice President that were going to liberate the people of iraq. Sadly, the Bush Administration exploited 9 11. The blueprint for what happened and i think its important to go back even not so far history. Was drawn up years earlier. By the project for the new american century. Im reading for my first book. The exception to the rulers. The think tank formed in 1997 to quote promote American Global leadership. Its founders are a whos who of the Neoconservative Movement which seamlessly more into the top officialdom of the bush to administration. Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld as president jake cheney. Cheneys chief of staff. Deputy secretary of defense. National Security Council staff member. Among others. The members had a reputation around washington explained the retired cia analyst as he did it for president george h he observed. When we saw these people, coming back in town all of a sudden. We said the crazies are back. Mcgovern said their wild eyed geopolitical schemes would typically typically go right into the circular file. In 2000, he issued a report that called on the United States to dominate global resources. The key to realizing this was a catastrophic and events like a new pearl harbor. Until you have the allegations of weapons of mass destruction the pretext for larger scheme, while the unresolved conflict with iraq provides the immediate justification, the n