During this career 9 11 and is a great Public Servant committed to keeping the city safe so thank you for everything that you do. [applause] and i would like to take a minute if the veterans and those that served in the forces could be stand and be recognized. [applause] i would be remiss at this point if i didnt also think the ambassador to the United Nations who honored me with a wonderful foreword for the buck, and i appreciate his support for the buck and this Important Message. It is a great privilege to be here in this wonderful institution of the Union League Club of new york. Since its founding in 1863 its members have played an Important Role in the National Discourse on a wide range of issues and as ron mentioned they constructed the statue of liberty and got rid of boss along the way so it is a great privilege to be here and it is fitting that we are in this historic room to talk about fighting the media war in iraq because this book is about history, how we make history and how the history has shaped and perceived not only by ordinary people, but by people who are just to have the Great Fortune in many respects of being thrust into extraordinary circumstances on behalf of the country and also increasing the business of journalism, technology and politics. How we perceive the iraq war was shaped by all those things that in the this time in history we are seeing several profound shifts in the way that people view the media, government and the war itself. Why did you put it out now . The ships i mentioned and the the governments ability or the inability to counter them has a great work of thousands of americans who went over to iraq and sacrificed great risk to help create a Better Future for that country. They do not effectively articulate policy and manage the message they would find themselves unexecuted to sustain the policy. What was lost in the coverage of the worst was the very best of people and what happened during that critical first year after the fall of Saddam Hussein gives us a glimpse into the imperfection of humanity as well as the very evil that exists in the world in the face of god that can be seen even in our darkest hours. Over the last number of years ive watched the Coalition Authority has been lamented by the media socalled opinion leaders and politicians on both sides of the aisle very unfairly. The civilian story and the story of the civilian coalition in the first year has largely never been a great focus of attention. What happened behind the scenes has rarely been discussed. As a civilian being thrust into the middle of the fight for peace and to communicate about the war as well as the work of so many hundreds of colleagues on a range of issues i felt we needed to be told at this time. After all our heroes in uniform are not the only folks participating in the iraq mission. Civilians played key roles often left unseen. The boot camp was the battlefront, the expertise, uniform and convictions. And it is my hope that by evaluating the successes and failures of the mission, history would record as a triumph of american spigot and sacrifice. The book is chronological and personal so i told that story from the day i got the phone call sitting in my office on pennsylvania avenue and then ten days later in the 130degree heat to go into baghdad for some indeterminate amount of time and i made up my mind i would be gone for four months and convinced my family this would be an okay thing to support. But, it is very personal and i thought about writing a policy book about the diplomacy, how you communicate about the war in the social media etc. , but its and impersonal and cold and almost inappropriate given the work that was done. We were also personally and emotionally vested in what we were doing and the environment was so smart of injecting a healthy dose of what it was like for me personally going through that experience didnt seem authentic. I also want wanted both to be accessible to a broad range of audiences so i wanted to write it in such a way that it told the story and was was chronological. There is plenty of stories about no weapons training trying to craft the message from the media about the work that thousands of americans were doing to rebuild the countries in an increasingly dangerous environment. We talked about the kurdish children running in the dirt, being told by special forces, a member of special forces to remember to roll down the car window before throwing out the grenade. Middle age contractors dancing in the famous disco the children and the victims of the attacks. Seeing women draped in black at the mass graves clutching the pictures and photos of their families dealing with death and rocket attacks, feeling fear and of course seeing glimpses of hope those were all part of the experience is. But theres also a running commentary and for the first time a real analysis of not just the news media but the political questions that hampered the administrations ability to deliver a balanced and realistic view of what was really going on in iraq against the demands of the business of journalism and media bias. The lessons about fighting the media war are more relevant today than they were back then in our time of social media and fake news and of course the president at war with the press and the press at war with the president. The indisputable truth in all of this is that the government still has to make policy. Our communications change, the Technology Changes in the way that we talk to each other and are influencers try to influence policy at all changes. But at the end of the day the government still has to make the policy and that requires public support. What we experience in iraq was an erosion of that support because of the failure to effectively fight and win the homefront war in the press. Policymaking is now more than ever about the willingness to push back and participate on every medium, not just twitter against the business of journalism and an increasing number of Information Sources of varying degrees of credibility. When we do this analysis, what weve learned is iraq was a war within a war. What we suggested the rise of al qaeda and the decisionmaking in the aftermath of 9 11 was a sharp departure from the usual paradigm and in fact i believe that in many respects it is as it relates to the way that this country handles both its military and diplomatic strategy to account for this shift. The administration of george w. Bush was the first to have to deal with this paradigm shift. The challenges were philosophical, operational and compounded by this battle for the audience mind share at home. But tensions need the tough sell of the iraq policy even tougher. There was the philosophical war and we expect a great deal of time over the last many years debating whether or not we should have gone into iraq but the more relevant conversation for all of us and the country moving forward remains once you make the decision to go to the war, what is the principal purpose of the desired outcome and how do you get there and you have several choices in the case one come you can remove Saddam Hussein and leave which would have been a false choice, or remove the leadership and grab some ex patriot and basically trade one dictator for another or attempt to secure the country and build institutions that could support them off with some people have suggested as an americanstyle democracy, but a more participatory tolerant governing structure. The coalition was developed to execute the third option and they tackled this with great passion and commitment sacrificing much with their efforts going unnoticed as the situation worsened due to the rise of al qaeda and sectarian violence and unfortunately, a government that as the mission and went on often failed to aggressively defend its own policy created the issue of competing philosophies was apparent the virtually everyday. Secretary rumsfeld had a hightech smaller fleet military which is fine but that happened to be incompatible with the mission we had at the time dealing with the insurgency and Civil Affairs of predation that needed to be done at the same time. On my first day in iraq, i got off the plane, put on my helmet because they told me too, got off the bus and then they said by the way, the road between Baghdad International airport and the palace is closed because thereve been too many attacks on it and i said great, this is exactly what i want to see the first day i get here they are telling me they called it the road of death road of death and it wasnt a particularly original name they got the point across that we have a problem securing the road between the airport and where our headquarters were going to be. One of the ambassadors first conversations i talk about in the book was posing the honest but the astute question how do we get the u. S. Military to start shooting the looters because we needed to demonstrate that we were going to use force to ensure the country would be secure and to restore some sense of behavior. So there were also clearly differences in the military and state department Whose Service officers while they have their own important had their own important priorities often didnt play well in the sandbox with the folks from the department of defense and also the Bush Administration appointees from the white house. There was an operational or bureaucratic word as well. Operationally, the challenges were immense. The cpa was a unique combination of the department of defense, the department of state, the nfc, the white house, the cia and intelligence agencies all operating under our feet at all times, and it is a textbook lesson in building and a short amount of time and managing a bureaucracy and by the way, nobody had done this before and by the way this impacted what i did for instance every day because part of being able to craft a coherent and credible communication strategy requires that for planning purposes you have Great Internal Communications as well. Let me give you an example. The establishment of the Iraqi Security forces was one of the most important things we tried to do during that first year and the press were interested in our progress and obsessed over it. So of course they didnt understand, report or seem interested in the complexities of trying to put cops on the street and build an army and build these various Security Forces but getting the facts from the different parts of the operation was so difficult that in fact at one point the secretary of defense and the ambassador were all going on tv using different numbers. You have to have a message consistency or you will damage your credibility. The military also didnt have a tight rein on its people. I was shocked one day to learn that it was the militarys policy that if a soldier got asked the question of a member of the press, they could answer it which posed a very significant problem when you see a field commander during an interview on tv and they are giving incomplete information. Young enlisted soldiers, a victim of the press who love to ask questions about dont you miss home and dont you wish that you were back with your family. It was a disgraceful type of tactic on the media, but they wanted to get them to say they missed home. Of course they did. When a soldier stops missing home and stops complaining about conditions, you may have a problem on your hands. Nobody wants to be in the desert. We were all there to put ourselves out of a job. Then you would have thought have the reporters themselves who have long decided that the administration and military have no credibility so they crafted the story they wanted often without regards to the fact or the sources. Organizations also compete for resources and ownership and im sure you see this in your organizations and businesses every day. We dont, but that position in iraq definitely impacted our ability to communicate about the war. Having the credibility for instance to say i was there and i saw it with my own eyes was critical to be able to deliver the message back in the states and the very rarely happened. In 2003, 2004 i worked on developing a National Search operation in a hometown media project that both soldiers and civilians both here and those overseas on local television and radio stations around the country and smaller markets to try to get the message out about what they experienced about their commitment to the mission and what was actually going on. We even used a military production attachment in the country to shoot footage of these folks doing their jobs, building a school, working together with the district advisory council, working on governance issues or just out fighting the terrorists. They package them up and send them off for distribution to television stations. The white house and the department of defense couldnt figure out who would take ownership of the mechanics. Would it be the office of global communications, somebody at the Defense Department or somebody in the office of Public Affairs that should be should be doing this. Nobody could figure it out and so the program failed. It didnt last very long so the operational war was impacting our ability to articulate a better, fairer and more aggressive message during the first year that the operational war was also impacting the quality of the journalism. By the end of 2003, the press corps had pretty much been stripped. We had a saying in the office that the one thing that all of the bad that reporters had in common is for the first part you never heard of any of them. They were leaving only a token presence and then they were told they were not permitted to travel around the country. That meant they sat in hotels and waited for a daily car bombs go bomb to go off, sent out the crew, got their footage, looked at on the we did on the evening news or 24 hour cable news and that became a story that we started seeing and we started seeing that as early as the summer of 2003. Then it was a larger perception. Of course the white house has an over reliance on the wmd issue as a justification for the war and it ultimately hurts our credibility with the press and the public from the start but you have to couple that with newsrooms full of executors that came from the vietnam era and the sad part of human nature, and i dont know if this is developed because the Information Systems and technology, but the sad part of human nature that is always going to be more interested in what went wrong and what went right and who died as opposed to lived and achieved and then you see how these battlelines come into specific relief pretty quickly. We were dealing with a media that simply didnt believe anything we said. It was hostile to the president and what report rumors on the street over the governments explanation for virtually anything. To make matters worse there were no senior Staff Members in the Public Affairs operations that spend any appreciable amount of time in baghdad while i was there. As the Public Opinion soured the administrations strategy was to limit the number of people talking about the Mission Rather than expanding the universe and i think that is a very important lesson for what we can take into the private sector and whatever fight we happen to be fighting for the different causes and organizations today that when the going gets tough, recoiling back is not necessarily the answer to the problem. You want to find ways to push through the filter. Of course lost in this complex set of relationships was with the members of the provisional authority together with our men in uniform did in those first 18 months of the functioning pluralistic government albeit adolescent in its infancy in a written and ratified the transitional administrative law, the framework for free elections and establishment of new political parties, the reopening of the central bank and a stabilized currency, the introduction of the improved Healthcare System we could use in washington today. [laughter] framework for the return of a strong judiciary to establish diplomatic relations with countries that used to be enemies, growing a new economy, the new Iraqi Security force that began within weeks of the creation of the cba. Hundreds of schools and government buildings including hospitals, Health Care Centers and by the time president bush left office, the most liberal constitution in the middle east have been developed with shia, sunni, kurds and turkmen at the table. Theyd been able to facilitate and election at an incredibly challenging security environment that saw participation by more than 8 million people. The economy of iraq have increased several times over from its time under Saddam Hussein and per capita income increased between six and four times. Life expectancy had increased and Security Forces much to the surprise of many people in this country have actually secured much of iraq with ongoing assistance of course from the United States. Perhaps most important, al qaeda in iraq by 2008 beginning of 2009 had been decimated. Our failure to win the Home Front Communications more to this date still in perils iraq more than any mistake or missteps that occurred. The erosion of support in the face of almost exclusively to news and a stilted strategy from the white house to communicate about the war became politically unattainable for president bush and inconvenient for president obama and that extended to how they dealt with isis to the detriment of now more than a dozen countries across the greater middle east and africa. Information is power and perception is created and become reality those are inextricably linked to the ability to implement policy particularly when it will require significant ties and resources at a cost. Our nation needs a citizen education about policy and that will be critical towards pus