 Good afternoon. Welcome to the New America Foundation. My name is Peter Bergen. I run the National Security Program here. It's with great pleasure that I get to welcome Colonel Pete Mansour, the author of a stunning new book, The Surge, which is going to be one of the key books about the Iraq War. Deep, deep research and of course General Colonel Mansour was there for so much of the key events that he describes in the book. So it's both a real history, but also with an element of memoir. Colonel Mansour is also a professor at Ohio State. He was executive officer to General Petraeus. He has a PhD. He holds the Raymond Mason chair in military history at Ohio State. So we're really pleased to have you here, sir. And after Colonel Mansour gives his presentation, we're going to have Lieutenant Colonel Joel Rayburn, who's long been a friend of the New America Foundation, who will sort of produce some responses to what Colonel Mansour says. Lieutenant Colonel Rayburn is writing an operational study, leading an operational study of the Iraq War for the U.S. Army. He is also studying for his PhD at Texas A&M University. His PhD concerns the British experience in Iraq, which I think is probably worse than the American experience in Iraq, I hope. And we're really pleased to have both of you here. So welcome to both of you. Colonel Mansour is going to give his presentation to the podium now. Thank you. Well, thank you, Peter, for that kind introduction and thank you all for coming today. I really appreciate the New America Foundation sponsoring this talk. I was not going to write this book. I retired from the military in 2008 and although I knew that there was a story to be told there, I was going to let it take some time to digest and develop. And I was thinking maybe 10, 20 years down the road, I would write a history of the Iraq War. But a couple years later, in the summer of 2010, I was at a conference with a veritable who's who of counter-insurgency experts in the United States. And we were talking about what to do in Iraq. Of course, the Iraq War, or I'm sorry, in Afghanistan. And of course, what to do in Afghanistan in 2010 was an issue of major concern in the United States. And invariably, the discussion devolved into what had happened in Iraq, especially what had happened during the surge and why ethno-sectarian violence was reduced so much in that period. And in listening to what the various experts had to say, it was clear to me that not one of them had a holistic understanding of the Iraq War, and especially the surge. And right then and there, I decided to put aside the research I was conducting on the liberation of the Philippines in 1944-45, which will be the subject of my next book. Much nicer writing about people who are thoroughly dead and therefore can't disagree with what you have to say about them. And I decided to write this book. So this is three years in the making now, and I understood where the sources were for it since we had developed and collected an archive of documents for General Petraeus while the surge was ongoing, with an eye towards history eventually. Those documents went to Central Command and then to the National Defense University, and I'm indebted to the folks there in both those places for declassifying so many of the documents that I used to write this history. It would not have been possible without their assistance. So what went wrong in Iraq, the subject of the first very long chapter in the book? Bush administration made some assumptions going into the Iraq War, that it would be a war of liberation, that the Iraqi people by and large would support the taking down Saddam Hussein, a very brutal and hated dictator, and that since they would cooperate with the American forces, the government and the infrastructure would largely remain intact, and therefore the United States didn't need to plan for a long occupation or an extended rehabilitation of the country. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also looked on Iraq as a laboratory to test his theories and to validate really the revolution in military affairs, the idea that high-tech forces with precision-guided munitions and robust intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets could collapse an enemy state relatively quickly at the center of gravity and then wind up the war fairly rapidly and with fewer casualties and that this was the sort of wave of the future, the Revolution military affairs that the US military was so was going to take advantage of. Unfortunately, the enemy didn't cooperate. Lieutenant General Scott Wallace, commander of V-Core as he's marching up country towards Baghdad, his supply lines are being attacked by guerrillas by the Saddam Fadayeen and he makes a comment to the press that this is not the enemy we war-gamed against. And for his candidness, he was nearly relieved of command. And this is sort of part and parcel with how the Secretary of Defense and the administration dealt with things that went against their preconceived notions. They simply stuck their head in the sand and said it's not happening. So when there was evidence that an insurgency was developing, well, it wasn't an insurgency. It was merely dead-enders, the last remnants of the Saddam Hussein administration. And once we got rid of them, then everything would be okay. As late as November 2003, President Bush in a meeting of the National Security Council said, don't tell me that there's a insurgency in Iraq, I'm not there yet. And this in the midst of the first insurgent Ramadan offensive, which my brigade and others in Iraq were busy combating. In addition to these assumptions that were made, which proved incorrect, there were two really key decisions made in the first ten days of Ambassador El-Paul Bremer, the third's tenure as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. He gets to Baghdad in May of 2003, and the first decision he makes is to debathify Iraqi society. Now, some debathification was going to have to take place. If you had lopped off several hundred or maybe up to a thousand of the top bathists, it probably would have been okay. But instead, Bremer decided to debath by all the way down to the FERCAL level or the division level of the Bath Party and thereby got rid of not just the top leaders of the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein, his family and their immediate advisors, but tens of thousands of Iraqis who had joined the Bath Party because it was the only way to get a decent job. So who were these people? They were doctors, lawyers, engineers, university professors, civil servants, all the same people that our own war plans assumed would remain in place to let to make sure that Iraq continued to function in the post-war period. And with one stroke of the pen, he got rid of them. Not only that, but since many of these people were Sunni and that they were now denied their jobs, pensions, participation in the political life of the country, what they viewed as the desunification of Iraq, they started to, instead of agreeing that Saddam Hussein was bad and it was good to get rid of him and they would help us with the new Iraq, which I think initially I got that sense being on the ground that some people were willing to give us the benefit of doubt. Instead, we alienated them. And with one stroke of the pen, L. Paul Bremer III created the political basis. The second decision was to disband the Iraqi army. A national institution that had fought for eight years against Iran, many Shia in the Iraqi army. And it wasn't an instrument of regime control the way that the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard, the Fadiyin Saddam were. And we had to eliminate those instruments of regime control, but not the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army was an institution that could have been rehabilitated under new leadership and used to help stabilize post-war Iraq. And instead, Bremer disbanded it. Now in his memoirs, he says, I was just acknowledging the obvious because the soldiers had taken off their uniforms and had gone home. But it's a pretty disingenuous statement because they had also, what he doesn't say is they had taken their weapons home with them. And that had we wanted to bring them back and call them back to the colors we could have. Why do I know this? Because when it was pointed out to Bremer that we had now had several hundred thousand armed young men without jobs on the street, he decided that we would offer them back pay and that they could come and collect their back pay and a stipend. And that would give them something with which to start their new lives. They all showed up. It would have been very easy to have a recruiting table right there saying you want to continue your job, help guard your country, prevent the looting, and so forth. And we wouldn't have gotten them all of them, but we would have gotten a significant portion and we wouldn't have had to start to recreate the Iraqi security forces out of whole cloth. What this did is not only put hundreds of thousands of armed young men on the streets, but tens of thousands of officers. Now most of them were Sunni and they were denied their jobs, their pensions, political future, and most importantly in Iraqi society they were deprived of their honor. And many of these officers decided at that point to take their not inconsiderable military talents with them into the insurgency. With a second stroke of the pen, El Paul Bremer the third created the military basis for the insurgency. And we capped off these two disastrous decisions by empowering a highly sectarian group of Iraqi politicians, the Iraqi Governing Council, 24 of them, and they proceeded to divide up the Iraqi government among themselves. There weren't 24 ministries. They actually had to create three new ministries so that each member of the council could have a ministry he could control. And then they proceeded to fire everyone in there who wasn't a member of their particular political party and then packed the ministries with their political adherents to give them jobs. And what little competence had remained in the Iraqi government was done away with by this decision. So these were the, this set the political basis for the downturn in Iraq. I think that it's my contention we created the mess. We created it first by a ill-considered invasion, but then by our decisions in the immediate postwar period. I love Gary Larson. This is the American Generals in Iraq. I guess that would be Tommy Franks. Planning out their campaign on the calendar, as you notice, every day says kill something and eat it. But it really says something about the American Army in the beginning of the war. It was very offensively focused, is very tactically and operationally excellent. And it did know a lot about counterinsurgency. And so the idea that you'd go out and kill and capture insurgent terrorist operatives and it would be raids after raids after raids. And not a lot of thought putting into the other aspects of counterinsurgency that we eventually became very good at, but not in 2003. The, so what, so we were there now and things were spiraling downward, although not rapidly. What were we going to do? Well, that was a good question and I don't think we had a good answer to it. We lacked a strategy to guide the way forward and down at the troop level. I know I was a brigade commander in that first year. We lacked an operational concept that drove operations of each unit in Iraq in a uniform and coherent manner. And we lacked enough resources. Certainly lacked troop strength on the ground. Even though, even with these headwinds, there was some good things that were done. Unit by unit, there was a lot of learning that went on. And I think the Army history of the first stage of the Iraq War covers this pretty well. But it was a hit or miss. It depended upon the unit commander. And there was a lot of learning when a unit came into Iraq and then by the time they left, they were trained up and they were pretty good. But then new units came in and you had that learning process all over again. Even so, there were some successes, but we failed to capitalize on them. We killed Uday and Kuse Hussain. We defeated that first Ramadan offensive in October, November 2003. Right after that, we captured Saddam Hussain. And these three events in succession really took the wind out of the sails of the very early Bathis-led insurgency. And it's my contention that had we reached out to the Sunnis at this point with a reform of the debathification decree and some other political outreach that we could have brought them back into support of a way forward. The period from January to March of 2004 was fairly peaceful. There was a downturn in security incidents in Iraq, but we didn't take advantage of it. Instead, we created a transitional administrative law that was crafted really without a lot of Sunni input and therefore they resisted it. This period ended with the April 2004 uprisings in Fallujah and across south-central Iraq. Uprisings that were, in the case of the south-central Iraq, was put down by the 1st Armored Division, the unit of which I was Brigade Commander. And we dealt the Jai Shalmadi, the Madi Army, a fairly significant blow. In Fallujah, the Marines were on the way to dealing a blow to the insurgents when they were told to stop because the press, especially the Arab press, was firmly against what was happening and there was a lot of misinformation about civilian casualties and so forth. And when they were ordered to stop, then the situation in Fallujah spiraled downward. And in fact, the insurgents ended up seizing the city and holding it until the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004, which killed 2,000 insurgents and destroyed about a third to a half of the city in the process. We didn't take advantage of the opportunities that we had there in the spring of 2004 for military success on the battlefield. Instead, we withdrew from the cities and we withdrew our forces from their bases inside Baghdad and other cities and put them on the periphery. I know in Baghdad we went to four major forward operating bases on the periphery of the city. This was a major mistake and it was predicated on General John Abizade's belief, he was head of US Central Command, his belief that we were a virus that had infected Iraqi society. And the longer that we were positioned among the Iraqis in their cities, the more antibodies in the form of insurgents we would create, that we were the problem. It wasn't the Iraqis. And the problem is, is when we withdrew from the cities, no matter how many mounted patrols we launched from those forward operating bases, we could not control the neighborhoods from the periphery. And the result is that the people with the power who were positioned locally rose up then and began to control the urban terrain of Iraq. And that was increasingly the insurgency and the Shia militias that were gaining in strength and power. A real study in contrast, again showing how different units had different approaches to counterinsurgency. I've described one approach and that was the massive invasion of Fallujah in 2004. Another approach was HR McMaster's approach with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment up in Tel Afar in 2005. Faced with a similar problem, insurgents that controlled the center of the city, he didn't attack it. Instead he surrounded it, he isolated it, and then slowly bit by bit he cleared it. And then to hold it, he positioned his forces and Iraqi police and army inside the city in smaller combat outposts to make sure that the insurgents could not rise up again and control the terrain. And by doing this, he substantially altered the dynamic of the battle in Tel Afar. It was a great example of counterinsurgency warfare, but it was just one unit among many. Nevertheless, it was pretty clear that attacking Iraqi cities to save them was not the answer. In Fallujah, the Second Battle of Fallujah was the end of that, what I call the kinetic road. This period of the war spiraling downward, but not at a crisis point, ended in February of 2006, with the destruction of the Alaskari Shrine in Samara, probably the fourth holiest shrine in Shia Islam. Up to this point, the Shia had been fairly responsive to calls to not make the situation worse. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani understood that the Shia of Iraq outnumbered the other ethnicities and therefore they could outvote everyone else and they would eventually gain power in Iraq. But after this incident with this major shrine now destroyed, Sistani said if the government, the Iraqi security forces, can't defend our religion, the faithful will. And that was all that the Jashal Madi needed to rise up and begin sectarian cleansing in Baghdad and elsewhere. They torched Sunni mosques, invaded Sunni neighborhoods, kidnapped, tortured and killed Sunnis and drove them out of their homes. This campaign that began in February 2006 gained force and strength throughout the year. In the western part of Iraq, al-Qaeda was gaining control of Al-Anbar province. This according to the intelligence report of a Marine colonel who said we're no longer in control of Al-Anbar al-Qaeda is. But even then there's a glimmer of hope in the city of Ramadi and we'll talk about that later. Nevertheless by December 2006 more than 3,500 Iraqis were being killed every month due to ethno-sectarian violence. The problem is that multinational force Iraq failed to adjust its strategic approach which was focused on killing and capturing insurgent and terrorist operatives and on a rapid transition of security responsibilities to Iraqi security forces. Forces that were fundamentally unready to accept those responsibilities in most cases and in some cases especially in terms of the Iraqi national police were complicit in the sectarian violence that was ongoing. Part of the problem in multinational force Iraq is they simply didn't understand what was going on on the ground. I know this because I got a hold of General Casey's documents as well as General Petraeus's and if you look at the campaign plan review in April of 2006 this is now two months after the Al-Asqari shrine bombing it has a list of wild cards things that could go wrong and on that list of wild cards is Sunni terrorists destroy a major Shia shrine thereby sparking sectarian violence throughout Iraq and it's like glad it happened two months ago and now you're still putting it in your plan not as a fact on the ground but something that could happen it's just an unwillingness to recognize the reality of what was happening this shows what was happening the civilian deaths the purple is Iraqi data plus coalition data the blue is just coalition data obviously the Iraqis are in more places than we are so they count more bodies but you can see this trend upward throughout 2006 of the number of civilians dying and by December it had reached critical proportions this would be equivalent to more than 35,000 US citizens dying every month to ethnic sectarian violence a pretty significant number and here is where we are as the surge is announced we don't understand that this is going to happen all we can see is that this is happening and if that's a stock chart you're a buyer what did I just do this shows in geographical terms what was happening the darker orange areas are areas where insurgents and terrorists have more sway and you can see that the Tigris River Valley the Euphrates River Valley and of course portions of Baghdad are significant concentrations of insurgent terrorist forces it was a fairly significant challenge by late summer of 2006 it was clear that the United States was headed for defeat we put it, I was on the council of colonels that worked for the joint chiefs and we put it to them this way we were winning so we are losing in time it's not on our side parallel strategic reviews were undertaken by the national security council the joint chiefs, the state department but to his credit President Bush is the one who made the decision to surge victory has a thousand fathers and everyone has been writing saying oh it was really General Odierno, no it was really General Keane, no it was really David Petraeus well guess what it was President Bush he's the one that decided to surge against every political headwind blowing against him to include members of his own party saying get out but more important than the surge was how those forces would be used in accordance with the new counterinsurgency doctrine that was published in December 2006 so what was the surge? well first it was the provision of more forces that enabled a change in the strategic approach but more importantly again the movement of those forces back off those big bases positioning them within the communities that they would protect that protecting the Iraqi population from ethno-sectarian violence was the only way to drive down that violence and thereby enable politics at least the politics that doesn't use bombs and bullets as its grammar to move forward the Iraqis surged along with us we added twenty to thirty thousand troops to the mix they added a hundred and thirty five thousand troops during the same time period increasingly those forces were better trained as our advisory effort took hold more importantly or as importantly they were partnered with U.S. forces side by side so that they could model their behavior after that of the disciplined U.S. troops and U.S. troops could keep an eye on the Iraqi security forces to moderate their baser instincts we improved techniques of population control blast barriers segmented Baghdad into a number of isolated or rather gated communities we used biometric scanners to figure out who belonged in neighborhoods and who was planting the IEDs and so forth there was better synergy between conventional and special operations forces rather than being two separate elements on the same battle space they were now working better together we finally had enough forces to pursue the enemy throughout the breadth and depth of Iraq and to eliminate the safe havens that had cropped up in the previous three years of the war we created a force strategic engagement cell to seek out opportunities to cleave off portions of the insurgency and the Shia militias and bring them into support of the government because you can never defeat them all if you have to fight them all and beat them all that's a pretty tall order especially in a virulent insurgency such as that which we faced there was learning and adapting going on but now it was more systematic and because you had a counterinsurgency doctrine that everyone had to follow you had two leaders in General Odierno and General Petraeus who mandated that the entire force operate under the same doctrine it wasn't the hit or miss affair that had been since 2003 and finally we revamped our detention procedures to make sure that the jihadists didn't control the inside of the detention facilities and that they weren't simply turned into jihadist universities so what did the Surge do? it acted as a catalyst to impel a lot of other factors that were taking place the most important of which was the tribal rebellion against al-Qaeda which began in Ramadi Surge wasn't the cause of the tribal rebellion it predated the Surge by several months but the Surge was the reason that the awakening spread as rapidly and as fast as it did but most people don't know in which I catalog in my book General Petraeus went to Ramadi the week after he took command and he saw what was going on and he ordered all of his subordinate commanders to support the awakening with all the forces and tools at their disposal and this is what allowed the awakening to take off absent the Surge the awakening in my belief is confined to Ramadi maybe Al Anbar province at most but given the force of the Surge and General Petraeus' orders it expands well beyond that and becomes a major factor in the defeat of al-Qaeda the creation of the Sons of Iraq program that was clearly part of the Surge these were armed neighborhood watch units that reported to US military leaders General Petraeus learned about one such opportunity in Amaria and when he learned about that he basically in his usual manner said this is a great idea we're going to implement it throughout multinational force Iraq and so as these insurgent and various militias came in and offered to secure their own communities because they were tired of the depredations on their communities by other folks we would bring them in to a coherent chain of command we would make them wear a Geneva convention compliant uniform and only later did we agree to pay them and we did this to prevent backsliding to make sure that they wouldn't turn back to the people who could outbid us the J. Shomadi ceasefire in August of 2007 would never have been declared or accepted had the Surge not already improved security dramatically in the country and finally the Iraqi government's willingness to confront the J. Shomadi and Basra and Sotter City and Amara would not have been accomplished or attempted had the Surge not provided the wherewithal and again the environment in which Muriel Maliki felt emboldened enough to do it so I'm going to cover real quickly ten myths of the Surge and I'll end with these ten myths and then we'll have some conversation the first myth is that the change in counterinsurgency doctrine did not matter that U.S. forces had already adapted to the environment and in any case security was already improving in Iraq well I think this is patently false the counterinsurgency manual that was produced and published in December 2006 finally put a uniform stamp on the operational construct and the tactics used by U.S. forces in Iraq before then it had been very hit or miss and as far as security being good before the Surge or I'm sorry that the violence had already ebbed well here is a graph of the violent incidents in Iraq laser pointer is not working but you can see that as the Surge begins in January of 2007 the number of incidents is at an all-time high and it remains high for several months it isn't until June of 2007 Operation Phantom Thunder and the Surge of Offensive Operations after all the Surge troops are finally on the ground does violence begin to ebb and ebb substantially so you can see right here and then right here how it drops but the Surge begins right here so violence had not ebbed myth number two the awakening was the real reason for the improvement in security well it was a huge reason here's General Petraeus with Sheikh Sader one of the primary sheikhs involved in the awakening right out of central casting of Lawrence of Arabia and I think I described this it's General Petraeus's push that he gave to the awakening that really allowed it to expand beyond the confines of Ramadi myth number three all we did was put the insurgents on our payroll well I think I've already addressed this there's their Geneva Convention Compliant uniforms by the way the Orange Road Guard vests works for me by the way we only paid them 16 million dollars a month and that's cheap at about five times the price given the amount of security they gave to their local communities at their height there's 103,000 of these sons of Iraq that's 103,000 light infantrymen that we added to our force structure for a fraction of the cost of putting US forces on the ground myth number four the Surge wasn't a strategic shift it was merely a tactical adaptation that did little to change the situation on the ground well it was a strategic shift here's the if strategy is the application of ways and means to achieve an end here's the ways and the means that were adjusted during the Surge in the middle of this diagram is everything Al-Qaeda needs to survive and on the outside is everything we did to counter that and that is a significant amount of actions and it's not all just tactical adaptations on the ground General Petraeus called this the Anaconda plan after the Civil War plan of the same name and in terms of ends this was there was a change in that as well the ultimate goal was still a representative Iraq, a democratic Iraq that could be a US ally in the heart of the Middle East against the war on terror but in the near term what we decided is that sustainable security was probably the best we were going to do and that we'd knit together local initiatives and eventually get to a long term situation where reconciliation was possible myth number five the Surge was merely a hearts and minds campaign well if that's the case then why is the first six months of the Surge the deadliest period of the war for US forces the fact is that this was not a campaign to win hearts and minds this was a campaign to control and protect the population in order to defeat the insurgency and there was a heck of a lot of fighting involved myth number six, sectarian cleansing and Baghdad had already stabilized the city prior to the Surge well here's a map of the ethno-sectarian violence the more orange, the blob, the more violence there is and at the beginning of the Surge in January of 2007 there was a heck of a lot of ethno-sectarian violence sectarian cleansing had not solved the problem by July 2008 when the Surge ends there is no violence to speak of ethno-sectarian violence to speak of and thus my contention it's the Surge that caused the ethno-sectarian violence to ebb myth number seven, the J. Shomadi ceasefire of 2007 was the real reason for the improvement of security I've already covered this, here's McTahdel Sotter again he would not have offered his ceasefire had the Surge not already improved security myth number eight, General George Casey's strategy of accelerating transition to the Iraqi security forces could have achieved the same outcome as the Surge had we given it more time well this is a quote right from General Casey's own joint campaign progress review the last one conducted under his watch which he signed and it basically says we are losing many of the risks identified in the campaign plan have materialized the assumptions did not hold we are failing to achieve our objectives we need to protect the Iraqi population from sectarian violence well yes, true so he didn't believe that his strategy was succeeding and neither did the folks that worked on the creation of the Surge and the Iraq study group report were caught in a mission that has no foreseeable end and at that point in time unfortunately they were right myth number nine, the real reason for the improvement in security was the improvement in capabilities of special operations forces this is what Bob Woodward contends in his book The War Within General McChrystal would disagree with this I know General Patreus disagrees with this it was the synergy between the conventional and the special operations forces the conventional forces taking and holding ground and the special operations forces then being able to target insurgent and terrorist operatives that created the dynamic that helped to improve the situation on the ground if you have a pure counter-terrorist campaign and a virulent insurgency such as that that existed in Iraq there's no way that it can solve the problem and the final myth all the Surge did was create a decent interval for the orderly withdrawal of US forces from Iraq that's all it was designed to do well that's not what it was designed to do that may be the way it turned out perhaps we'll see but this goes to the perspective of two presidents George Bush looked on Iraq as and his model would have been South Korea where US forces now 60 years on are still there helping that country stabilize after a very difficult war South Korea wasn't South Korea for several decades it only became a vibrant democracy with a vibrant economy several decades after the end of the Korean War but President Bush wasn't able to see this through to its end President Obama was elected on an anti-war platform and his vision of Iraq in my view was more of that of Vietnam an unwinnable quagmire that US troops needed to get out of as soon as they could and allow the locals on the ground to sort it out among themselves and unfortunately by removing US forces in my view it removed the glue that was holding the security situation together and when you remove that glue then the political dynamics that we had helped to tamp down raised their ugly heads again and it has to do a lot with how we handled the election of 2010 which I won't get into but the situation now unfortunately is spiraling back downhill and it remains to be seen what is the future end of the war in Iraq and that's it there I am watching General Petraeus' back and I'd be happy to have a conversation now Thank you Colonel Mansour Lieutenant Colonel Rabin Well, thank you Colonel Mansour for those remarks and my thanks to everyone who's here today and it was just slightly over seven years ago that walking across the deserted food court of the Pentagon City Mall the night after General Petraeus' confirmation hearings where he went out to Baghdad that then Colonel Mansour who was on the phone to someone motioned me to walk over to him as I was heading to the Metro and said CG wants you to come out to Iraq and so began about four solid years of working for with General Petraeus There are some themes that you've talked about today some themes that you cover in Surge that I'd like to tease out a little more fully and maybe open a little more ground for discussion Reading Surge with military eyes first as someone who was there just a smaller cog in the machine it was a reminder of just how much activity the level of very complex activity was going on in the headquarters in Iraq at the different levels, at the force level, at the core level liaison to the U.S. Embassy liaison to the Iraqi government to the United Nations and so on it's an amazingly complex landscape that General Petraeus and General Odin Erdogan and Ambassador Crocker have to manage and synchronize which is an incredibly difficult thing to do and so it's among other things your book reminds us of the complexity of an endeavor like that reading it with military eyes it also reads like a cookbook to me because every few pages as I turn every few pages I'm reminded of ah yes, the strategic counter-insurgency command has to be prepared to deal with this particular kind of problem and it has to fulfill this kind of role it has to execute this kind of responsibility and it's dozens of different strategic functions that have not yet been captured in military doctrine and I think it would be important for us to take a book like yours and to begin the process of getting it into military doctrine so that we don't have to relearn this every time we do a major contingency campaign in some foreign country which as little as we would want it to happen it's certain to happen again at some point in time and I hope we're better equipped so that we can have the knowledge of how a counter-insurgency command like MNFI, multinational force Iraq and the US mission in Iraq worked so that we can be in a more advantageous starting point the next time we have to do this kind of thing and it's also a reminder as you flip through the pages with military eyes of the different levers that a strategic commander like General Petraeus has to pull so that he has an operations command which is overseeing tactical operations on a day-to-day basis and he has a training and equipment command under Lieutenant General Jim Dubic which is generating those 135,000 Iraqi forces that you mentioned joined us on the battlefield during the course of the surge there's a detention command that is trying to do what General Petraeus termed counter-insurgency inside the wire so that no longer are your detention centers for the insurgency terrorist academies but you're actually using intelligence to map out the insurgent networks inside the detention command so that you can have an effect on those that are still out on the battlefield and on and on and on there are so many different functional levers that the strategic and the operational commanders have to pull and the ability to synchronize all of those is a rare trait to say in a strategic and operational leader and luckily we had two and General Petraeus and General Odierno who could pull that off now a lot of those levers did not exist early on in the war and a lot of those functional commands were not present early in the war so it's really only, I would argue as you get into the latter stages of General Casey's tenure and command and General Petraeus's had to create some of his own levers General Odierno had to create some of his own levers in order to have those tools to fully address the complexity of the problem and this goes to a second theme that I'd like to touch upon which is could you pick the surge up from 2007 and 2008 and put it down some other point in the war could you have done in 2003 what was done in 2007 and 2008 could you have done it earlier if you could you have fully exploited the opportunities that might have existed in 2003, four, five and six in the way that they were exploited in 2007 and 2008 and there are some precursors for the surge that I'd argue unfortunately weren't present earlier in the war the first is that there's a change in Secretary of Defense in December of 2006 and it's a sea change between Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Gates and I think senior military leaders at the time would say that the surge probably couldn't have taken place without that change secondly one of the things that you get in the pages of surge or that you get in the pages of Michael Gordon's book The Endgame and some others is a near encyclopedic knowledge of Iraqi politics Iraqi society, Iraqi culture and the interrelationships of the various political factions ethnic and sectarian groups and it tells you it shows just how little we knew about Iraq that Iraq was such a black box to us in 2003 when the invasion took place and it was a very hard learning process it was one that we unfortunately had to pay for between 2003 and 2006 just to get the knowledge so that you'd know for example that Abu Risha in Ramadi is a shake or as you put it he's a minor shake of a minor tribe but he's stepping into a larger role why because the major shakes have fled from al-Qaeda pressure in there now in Amman Jordan would we have known that kind of thing in 2003 the level the level of knowledge that you had to gain to be able to see where the seams were that you could exploit is extraordinary one of the things also let's say in your opening chapter where you describe what went before the surge the major the major development that's missed I think in the campaign the campaign as it's planned for in 2004 to 2006 is the indicators of an emerging ethno-sectarian war it's we conceive in 2004 I think that the major problem there's an insurgent problem and there's a problem of an incapacitated state so you have to build the capacity of the state to be able to handle the insurgent problem on its own but along the way when you get to the point where you're helping to build the capacity of a government that is itself a party in an ethno-sectarian war then you have to ask whether your strategy isn't defeating itself I think that's the point that you come to by the end of 2006 and I think General Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad that's the that's the major fact that they're confronting that's the pulling out pulling the rug out from under the assumptions that underpin their campaign plan of 2004, 2005 and 2006 I would also emphasize one of the points you make is that General Petraeus in 2007 codifies and expands to the entirety of his command across the country some things that are being learned by trial and error in 2004, 2005 and 2006 in places like Tulloff or in places like Al Qaim out in Anbar and as one former senior coalition general officer put it to me more recently that it's the adaptability of those tactical units, US units and some other coalition units in 2003 to 2006 that's a process of buying time so that their seniors could eventually do the thinking they should have done in the first place and the codifying that they should have done in the first place third point I'd make one of the takeaways I think from your book, Colonel Mansour is that the Iraqis are dealing with the nature of the problem that the Iraqis are dealing with is an ethno-sectarian struggle for power and resources as you put it and I would add in many cases survival to fill a vacuum that's created when the Saddam regime disappears a political vacuum but they're also dealing with the aftermath of complete state collapse and it's difficult to overstate I think the extent to which the disappearance the collapse of the Iraqi state is a cataclysm in Iraq politically, socially, economically that touches every Iraqi and then the difficulties that a foreign army has in trying to restore order to stabilize an environment like that absent all infrastructure of a modern state a modern functioning state whose infrastructure disappears just as completely gone that's something that I think was difficult to appreciate from outside Iraq but the people who are on the ground like you in Baghdad and in Najaf and later in the search can understand what I'm talking about there were places in West Baghdad in 2007 that I remember seeing that had been turned into other wastelands were separated from the rest of the city cordoned off by mounds of trash and burnout cars and barbed wire that the residents themselves had put in place in some sort of post apocalyptic scene and I thought to myself well what would Beverly Hills California look like if you turned off the electricity if you removed all police if you picked up no trash if you had no running water and had that situation for four years and that's what parts of Baghdad and other major cities of Iraq looks like that was the extent of the problem not an easy problem set and I'd also say that let me to draw another to draw another analogy about the unnecessary collapse of the state in 2003 or let's say the finishing off of the job of collapsing the state in 2003 with the disbanding of the Iraqi army to pronounce the Iraqi army had disbanded itself in the spring of 2003 would be sort of like going to a deserted Pentagon on Friday evening and declaring that the Department of Defense had disbanded itself they're going to come back you can order them back to work and that's probably what should have been done in my opinion and having said that let me add that I'm not speaking on behalf of the US Army or the Department of Defense in any way this is only my opinion as I should have preface everything that I've said lastly to extrapolate from your book to the situation today I think unfortunately you give us the key to understanding the violence that's racking Iraq today because the various strategic problems that you describe being resolved or at least being tackled in the course of the surge and I'm talking about the awakening and the splitting of the Sunni mainstream away from al-Qaeda and other insurgents and elite power sharing pact that takes place amongst the major political parties and insulation of Iraq from terrorist sanctuaries in Syria and in Iran and the containing of the Shia militant groups all of those things those are the exact things that have been eroded that have unraveled to create the situation as it stands today and unfortunately if we were to continue on with the violence chart that we would see it creeping back up today to probably we're back in 2006 in Iraq probably in the early part of 2006 and so hopefully some sort of forces will intervene to keep it from going to where it was at the end of 2006 because at a certain point it's corrosive and there's nothing to stop it but you identified very well the things that need to be done in Iraq to prevent that kind of outcome and unfortunately the dynamics are moving in the opposite direction now. Well that naturally segues into how you ended your talk so which is is it entirely fair to blame the Obama administration for the lack of the deal to keep American forces in Iraq after all the negotiator was Brett McGurk who as you know played a key role on the Bush NSC and he obviously made a big effort to try and make it work and it seemed that the Iraqi parliament was really a problem or how would you assess that negotiation? In two ways. The first I'd point out that President Bush personally got involved with discussing negotiations with Prime Minister Maliki almost on a bi-weekly basis and President Obama never developed a relationship with him instead they gave the portfolio to his vice president who just didn't have the clout and the Iraqis know the difference between a vice president and a president so they understood where they where they stood. But if you backtrack before that I think the reason we weren't able to extend the SOFA goes to how we mishandled the outcome of the election of 2010 and what just for our audience what is a SOFA? A status of forces agreement that allows US forces to operate in a foreign country so the election of 2010 was a presidential election in Iraq and it was one by Ayat Alawi who was a Shia but he was running in a party that was supported by most of the Sunnis in Iraq as well as many Shia and non-sectarian people. We had been telling the Sunnis just enter the political process things will be okay your voice will be heard through politics through the ballot box while they won the election and was their voice heard? No. We didn't back the winner of the election. We didn't see if even give him an opportunity to try to form a government now he might have failed but we didn't even allow the process to go to fruition instead our ambassador on the ground said no Maliki's our guy we need to back Maliki and eventually the deal was cut in Tehran in you know the equivalent of the smoke filled rooms in Iran a deal in which the office of the martyr Sotter OMS the party the holding the McDonald Sotter supported Maliki for another term and Alawi was sidelined and so what do the Sunnis learn from this that no matter if we win at the ballot box or not it doesn't matter because who's going to be the next prime minister who's going to be decided in Tehran and maybe Washington and we're going to be left out of the process and this is the reason why no one would support the extension of U.S. forces in Iraq the next year because what good were we we were supporting the other side and what was our reasoning presumably wasn't completely irrational when I say are the U.S. government I believe that that he thought that Maliki was a good ally and that he was the best hope for a stable Iraq going forward I think the best hope for a stable Iraq going forward was a system in which Iraq rules and the rule of law was respected and it wasn't and it's kind of Raven indicated we're now back at the situation where we were in 2008 with 8,000 and you know civilian deaths every year and the number could go up not maybe to 35,000 or whatever it was in 2006 but clearly the it's all going in the wrong direction what if anything the United States do in your view to kind of tamping that down I don't think we should do anything I've written an op-ed to this effect that Maliki needs to stew in his own juices for a while until he reverses the political decisions that have suppressed and alienated the Sunnis in Iraq and until he does that until he agrees to share power because there was an agreement in 2010 where he would share power and he didn't divide by it until he agrees to stop persecuting Sunni politicians which he's done on a number of occasions until he allows legitimate protest against his government then why should we help him with the problem of his own creation how would you assess the strength and all weaknesses of al-Qaeda in Iraq now obviously it's disturbing to see them back in Fallujah and Ramadi and other places where they were pushed out well clearly they're making a comeback but the tribes have not aligned with them the way they did before 2006 this is the good news the tribes know that al-Qaeda nothing good will come of al-Qaeda again so what's happened is the alliance that we created with the tribes has broken down but they haven't gone back to supporting al-Qaeda either they're more on the sidelines or they're fighting for themselves survival I don't think al-Qaeda will ever be able to create a safe haven in western Iraq every time they try to take and hold ground they position themselves such that they can be combated with conventional military force and defeated on the other hand the situation throughout Iraq will continue to spiral downward with car bombs and suicide bombings and political violence until you have again come among the elites and buy in among the elites that the best way forward is a political way forward and not a violent way forward in your presentation you were somewhat critical of General Abizay who obviously was sitting in Tampa during the war there's a whole concept of a war that is administered out of St. Com several thousand miles away does that even make sense are there some lessons to be learned about how he had a sort of different level of authority partly because he was talking to the president all the time are there any lessons to be learned and obviously Admiral Fallon who was in charge of St. Com was trying to sort of undercut him it seems does that structure make sense it does because Central Command has a wider responsibilities the problem we had in 2004 with General Abizay and then again during the surge with General Fallon they should have been focusing on the wider region they had a four star general in Iraq who could fight the war and instead it was like magnet balls like kids playing soccer everyone wanted to follow the ball and they didn't want to look at the wider field and what we felt Central Command should be doing during the surge is looking at the wider region do something about all of the suicide bombers for instance flocking in from all of these Arab countries into Iraq you as a Central Command commander can probably have an influence with those and it was General Del Daly and Hank Crumpton who really kind of dealt with that from a diplomatic point of view and General Petraeus actually ended up doing some interagency video teleconferences to discuss the issue why is the commander in Baghdad doing that with General Commander in Tampa who has the time really to focus on the wider region so we felt there was too much emphasis on looking at what we were doing and not enough emphasis on the rest of the region obviously the US military has gone through major experiences where lessons were unlearned because they were too difficult to kind of process for one region another obviously Vietnam was the big one which is we're never going to do that or we don't need to learn about it again how is the US military positioned this time around not to unlearn the lessons the very hard one lessons that you write about in your book and how would you assess I mean clearly there's an effort underway by people like Lieutenant Colonel Rabin to make sure that the lessons are learned but what's your assessment you said that lessons were too difficult to learn and I would disagree with that characterization emotionally difficult for some people there was unwillingness to learn the lessons because they didn't we like to fight the Normandy invasion and the campaign across France and Germany if we could do that like every half century the army would be happy but those aren't the wars that we've been handed and we have to learn how to fight the wars that we have to fight and I agree with Joel none of us want to do a long term counterinsurgency big unit campaign again I hope it doesn't happen but it would be nice to be ready in case it does and I am a little bit encouraged that the army is undertaking this operational study of the Iraq war while the lessons are still fresh it reminds me of the lessons learned coming out of World War I for instance British army doesn't look at the lessons of World War I for 14 years after the war then they produce the study and it's too critical of army performance so it's suppressed and they never publish it the French army cherry picked a couple of battles and they developed their doctrine based on an incomplete view of World War I the only army that actually well the American army does a pretty good job but the army that really does the best job in World War I is the German army 400 officers on a number of committees for two years right after the end of the war study what went on and as a result they create a tactical doctrine whatever you can say about their strategy in World War II their tactical doctrine was sound and it was firmly rooted in looking at the experience of the past war you know it's a it's an untrue statement that the militaries that look at the last war are doomed to fight the last war and aren't ready for the next one it's when you are able to look at the last war and get the right context for the experiences and understand what went on in the last war that you can then prepare your forces much better for what they might face in the future and this would be the case looking at Iraq and Afghanistan and the lessons they have to offer and Vietnam and the lessons they have to offer if we ever have to do an industrial strength counter-insurgency war again before you open it to the audience a final question about how you proceeded in terms of the how you think about it I what I really needed were the primary source documents that were in General Petraeus papers at the National Defense University so a lot of it was requesting declassification of chunks of his archive which thankfully the folks there did and they did in a timely manner and that really helped I was able of course the contacts with my associates I had my own notes from the campaign and then I had all the plethora of published secondary sources that I could look at so it was really sort of an easy research for me I didn't have to spend extended time in an archive somewhere and dig through papers because I already knew what I was looking for and I knew where it was in fact it ended up being sent to me on a CD so no archive time at all great well if you have a question can you wait for the mic and identify yourself and we'll take this gentleman here to begin with Tony Smith it should be on Tony Smith I'm a retired army like you on your opening slide in which you look at sort of the overarching reasons for the lack of success the assumptions that going in are you being a little rough on Jerry Bremer and a little easy on Donald Rumsfeld on the issue of debathification the dismantling of the Iraqi army having done a couple of tours in the Pentagon it's inconceivable to me to believe that those decisions were made in isolation from leaders in the Defense Department it's a good question and I think there is probably a good book yet to be written when actually we have some hardened fast facts but I won't hold my breath that they'll ever come out because a lot of people now want to hide what actually occurred I do know that Ambassador Bremer was the president's representative and he used to tell Secretary Rumsfeld I am the president's representative and if he was ordered to do something that he felt was not right he could have gone to the president and said you know Secretary Rumsfeld says debathify Iraqi society extensively all on Nazi Germany and disband the army and I think this is a really bad idea can we tee this up at least for discussion at the level of the National Security Council and in fact President Bush in his memoirs says we should have discussed it the National Security Council we didn't and I take responsibility for that and we might have come to the same conclusion but at least we would have discussed what could have gone wrong with those decisions so you might be right but we don't know but Bremer in my view he didn't he clearly didn't push back at all Tara Merlin thank you Tara Merlin I'm a research fellow with the National Security Program here and I'm also at the Aspen Institute I just have a question in terms of the other myths that you painted you never mentioned the population displacement trends that were happening at the time so after the Samara mass bombing in 2006 there was significant displacement both internally and out of the country segregation of populations separate from sectarian deaths and I mean I'd argue that A that was one of the other variables that contributed to some of the drops we saw in violence because the populations were self-segregating themselves and not returning home so Shias were moving out of mixed neighborhoods into Shia areas Sunnis are moving out of mixed areas into Sunni areas so I was wondering if you could comment on that dynamic and also I'm not sure I really disagree with the general argument you're making that the search helped I just I wonder the monocausal story and I think it's an interesting point about if the search happened at another point in time without those other variables that you were presenting as myths would it have been possible and my take was that all of those other conditions the awakening the solder ceasefire the displacement the sectarian violence reaching a saturation point almost had to have been there for the search to have had the impact that it had so I was just wondering if you could respond to that. It goes to the slide I showed on sectarian ethno sectarian violence during the surge if it was population displacement that was making matters better then why was there so much ethno sectarian violence at the beginning of the surge and why did it continue we actually took censuses commanders on the ground went door to door and figured out who was living in their neighborhoods and at least in Baghdad and this is the only place I have knowledge of in this granularity there was a lot more mixing of the sex even as even throughout the surge even by the end of the surge then that narrative would have you believe that there was some sort of a clean separation of the population but that was not what our commanders on the ground were reporting in their the censuses that they were taking that there was still a lot of mixing of the population I believe it it wasn't the segregation of the populations it was the gating of Baghdad into gated communities with these blast barriers and the biometric scanners and security checkpoints that basically stopped Shia militias from praying on Sunnis and likewise made it more difficult for Sunni terrorists to inject car bombs suicide bombers into Shia neighborhoods on the other point I would agree with you I don't think I've presented a monocosal explanation of why the surge succeeded and in fact in the book in the conclusion I say the surge transplanted to a different time and a different place would not have worked so I never make the claim that it was the way to go before before 2006 and I fully acknowledge that all these other factors came into play and were extremely important my point is that without the surge there isn't that catalyst to bring them to fruition and I don't think that Iraq is in a better place in 2008 than it was in 2006 had we not in fact I think absent the surge Iraq would have split broken apart as a country the way it was trending was it an important signal to the Iraqi population that the United States was there a sort of Psyops not using that a majority of term but simply saying hey we're staying absolutely in fact I mention that I talked about that in the book I didn't mention it in the talk but the psychological impact of we're not withdrawing it's not we're not turning this over we're here with you partnering to the end to take their cue off of what the president of the United States was saying and when he said basically we're all in then that meant something and it meant something to the Sunni tribes it meant something to the general population of Iraq it meant something to the Iraqi political leaders and going again to why the sofa wasn't renewed in 2011 when there was no indication that President Obama was all in in Iraq in fact he had been turned over to his vice president and the last picture on the screen is you sitting here in Washington behind General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker when they're testifying I think on September 10th 2007 tell us the atmosphere of that that was probably one of the most important hearings of the post-World War II era it was it was tense it was surreal you know there had been the New York Times add by moveon.org General Petraeus' character and personality they called him General Petraeus yes that he was a mouthpiece for the White House it was it was a high stakes two days and I thought that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker handled themselves marvelously given the amount of pressure they were under and scrutiny it was a wonderful experience there's an entire chapter in the book there's nothing but that testimony what were the stakes? there was a move of foot to force a withdrawal timeline on the administration and when those hearings were over I knew that the way they had gone that General Petraeus had squashed that basically wasn't necessarily his intent to create a political dynamic but it was certainly the outcome of him giving his forthright testimony of what was happening on the ground and when the hearings ended I looked at him as we were walking down the corridor and I said you just bought us six more months and it was true this gentleman over here my name is Mike Boris I was with the Baghdad PRT in January 2007 when General Petraeus and then later Ambassador Crocker showed up I'm retired from the Marine Corps so I have a couple of comments first of all there was another operational doctor and that was very successful it's called amphibious warfare that we used after that we learned from World War I and it was extensively World War II by the Army you took all our boats but we forgave you the second thing is General Schumacher I hope you know goes as a unheralded element for your success in Iraq because of the introduction of the brigade modules is an amazing transformation of how the Army brought in 10 different brigades under General Phil they made them all work together I was very very impressed by that and I'm just saying that as a person who was used to joint task organizations but the fact that you could have almost a core size group of units from different parts of the United States and Europe come together and Baghdad and work almost with one focus that was a significant achievement by the Army and I commend all of you for doing that you did a great job in doing that what would you say to the State Department because one of the things that I found amazed when I showed up there was that it was part of a Baghdad PRT that was unfunded so how in the world were we supposed to complement much of supplement your effort in Baghdad with both lack of funding and quite honestly very poor leadership in the part of the State Department I recognize that that's not their job to do nation building responsibility and if it wasn't for the fact that you had SERP funding and other sources of money for them that we could use we wouldn't be able to do any kind of work at all so how would you given the fact that the Defense Department that it had significant resources and the State Department still hasn't figured out how to get to that money through Congress what would you say to the State Department's role in this kind of warfare and how you could use it to complement your programs or military programs in this kind of warfare well it's sort of a truism that we were we wanted a civilian surge as well as a military surge we clearly needed the capacity that civilians could bring to the counterinsurgency campaign one of the things that was done during the surge and done very effectively was to give brigade commanders embedded provincial reconstruction teams so that a brigade commander who had resources through the commander's emergency response program had people that could secure civilians then had embedded capability in his brigade area that helped him with the reconstruction aspect of counterinsurgency war fighting and you know it wasn't perfect and did we get as many civilians as we needed to know in fact a lot of the PRTs were retired military as you know and thank you for your service by the way I'm not sure how to do this better other than you take an agency like the US Agency for International Development and you put it on steroids it was much much larger than it is today during the Vietnam conflict for instance and was much more of a force during Vietnam as a result in the cords program I don't see that happening there's no really political energy to to give the State Department more resources in that regard because again most people don't think we're going to fight a war like this again and maybe in our lifetimes we won't but it certainly would be nice to create that capability at least have it in germination and be able to ramp it up when needed but anyway you're right I would say though that the civilian capacities that the State Department brought were absolutely critical I point to the introduction of the new currency in Iraq which could not have happened without the Treasury Department officials that made it happen and it worked wonderfully to stabilize the Iraqi Dinar the military didn't have that kind of capability so State Department folks and the broader civilian capacities really crucial they weren't perfect but they were desperately needed we have a few more minutes left so let's gather some questions together because Colonel Mansour has to leave after he does his book signing the State Department retired there's an old saying at State that you make policy by your personnel policy could we have picked better you went through all the mistakes that were made early by General Senpai Ambassador Bremmer could we have picked better people at the beginning and if one of those mistakes or did people like Petraeus and Crocker came on later learn from those mistakes and that's why they were so good later good question okay General Ben in front of you Siran Hamas-Aid from the US Insider Peace I have a comment but I'll probably ask it later but the question is if you advise counterparts in the Iraqi Army today people who are involved in the violence and bar in Mosul what would you advise them from the lessons that you have applied okay and the lady behind you hi thanks very much Margaret Polsky, George Mason University I'm an Analyst and a Wargamer I appreciate very much what both of you are trying to do and the importance of it I think that your presentations underscore two problems one is a policy making problem and the other is a planning problem and I wonder if you could talk about the role of your organizations in better informing the policy decisions that were made at the outset to even go into the war because as we know there was wargaming that was done in the 90s that did a pretty good job of anticipating the kinds of problems that would arise from an invasion in Iraq and then secondly so better informing the policy making process and then the planning process itself okay and then one final question in back I am I was admiring your memory Hello my name is Phil Karotta from Retired State Department and I want to ask you about that map of President Bush and his commitment to South Korea and Obama to Vietnam well a big rationale for maintaining a 60-70 year occupation of South Korea was the defense of Japan is there a parallel strategic rationale for maintaining a 60-70 year occupation of Iraq thank you alright so we'll begin with the great man theory that if we just had better people in place that things would have gone more smoothly and I reject that notion now we didn't have the right people in charge I believe in 2003 at either the military or the political level but we also didn't have the right organization we had the most junior three star in the United States Army with an organization that was not designed to conduct theater responsibilities as well as operational responsibilities and it wasn't until the spring of 2004 that we had a four star command and a three star command side by side and the division of those responsibilities it was too much for any one person to handle to be able to focus on countering abutting insurgency and dealing with the political military interface in both Baghdad and Washington at the same time and the person you can imagine and that he wouldn't have been able to complete that job now in terms of had say Ambassador Crocker been in Ambassador Bremer's position in 2003 with things have gone better possibly I think in my view that's a better analogy the problem is that he would still have to have worked for Donald Grumsfeld isn't going to allow him a lot of leeway and it's going to steer things in a certain direction as we know as the previous question indicated you know didn't Secretary Grumsfeld want the abatification to occur and didn't want and wanted the army to be disbanded and isn't this just like Germany in 1945 which was the vision they had which was an inaccurate historical analogy and so I'm not sure that better people would have resulted in a better outcome but you know that's the fun thing about history we don't know the second one was lessons to well the big lesson is really a political one the problems that Iraq is facing today in Anbar are a result of political impasse at the highest level and if you can get over the political impasse and bring in all sex and ethnicities and factions and parties into a political way forward then dealing with the military aspects of countering terrorism in Anbar will be easy but the provision of specific tactics, techniques, procedures Apache helicopters, Hellfire missiles that's all noise you know you can plink away at these terrorists all day long but they will continue to rear their ugly heads until the root causes of the problem are addressed and the root causes are political so that would be my unfortunately that advice has to go to the top to the prime minister and then policymaking yeah you know it's really interesting that a lot of people say boy I wish the military had intervened and give them a piece of their mind I think now I haven't studied the run up to the war with primary sources but in reading all that I've read I think the military bought in to what was being espoused by secretary Rumsfeld yes there were plans on the shelf at sent com that said we needed 300,000 troops and so forth but that was under a different sent com commander the current sent com commander Tommy Franks he was okay with so I think that the military did give their best advice and it wasn't very good advice I think the bigger issue to me is how can we train and educate our leaders such that when they pin on four stars they give better advice and this goes to the professional military education system in this country and the need to have very rigorous extensive professional military education that counts in an officer's career and isn't sort of a way station between assignments and final South Korea Iraq we're still in South Korea the need to defend Japan I can give you a strategic reason for having a strong ally in Iraq and that's that the Middle East has a lot of oil and it is going to have a lot of oil for decades to come and I know we all love green energy but for decades to come we are going to be dependent on hydrocarbons to fuel the world's economy and therefore the Middle East is going to matter and continue to matter so when you fly back to Ohio very shortly you're not going to take an electric plane and Ohio is becoming the new Saudi Arabia we've got shale oil deposits in southeastern Ohio we're good thank you very much and I'll read them thank you