 I'm Ron Newman and it's my pleasure to welcome you on behalf of the American Academy of Diplomacy, which was a co-sponsor of the project. The American Academy is a small organization comprised of most of America's now retired distinguished and senior diplomats and its purpose is strengthening American diplomacy and it works fairly hard at that and so we were delighted to have the opportunity to work with USIP in sponsoring this project which is certainly right in the mainstream of issues of American diplomacy particularly since there are a great many special envoys and a great many people who have strong opinions about that subject and we thought it would be an interesting challenge to add fact to opinion and so I congratulate Princeton Lyman who was the the progenitor of this project and of course it's very appropriate that Princeton is also a member of the Academy so as many of you who work in Washington know there is a incestuous intertwining of personalities across the non-governmental organization of international affairs and we represent that here but this was a this was a match that was if not made in heaven certainly well made. I want to say special thanks to first of all Amy Stoltz on my own staff who did a lot of backup and legwork and particularly to Hannah Borsch of USIP who coaxed and prodded and got us all here among a great many other tasks and we're very grateful to her. I'm not going to introduce the individuals because that would use up the entire time of the panel but I will turn it over to Bob Beecroft and let them get started with serious... No, Tom, yeah, I turn it over to you first. Okay, to Tom Perriello. Thank you very much, Ambassador. My name is Tom Perriello. I'm a special representative at the State Department for the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review and both USIP and the American Academy of Diplomats have been invaluable partners as we've been looking at a series of strategic questions relating to the State Department and USAID and this is certainly a topic that has come up from a few angles both the issue of proper use of special envoys and representatives and also the issue about overall operations in areas of conflict has certainly been a topic that's come up a great deal. I'm going to hand it over with very brief bios to the authors starting with Ambassador Lyman, former ambassador to many places including Nigeria and assistant secretary for African Affairs and with that I will let you tell us the findings and the wisdom. Well, thanks very much. Tom, I'm Princeton Lyman. I'm a senior advisor here at USIP, assistant secretary of IO. I want to talk about the origin of this study a little bit in the methodology and then we'll get into the substance but as both Ron and Tom have mentioned the use of special envoys particularly in conflict situations is a fact of life it is something that administrations have used in the past they will use it in the future and while there is some controversy over the amount of effort the use or overuse of special envoys the fact is they're an important instrument of US foreign policy and what we wanted to get at this study together are two institutions was how to make that more effective what are the issues that arise how do you make the use of envoys more effective I came off of two years as the US special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan so I had some thoughts on this but in our doing this study what we did together Bob and I was to first develop a set of issues that we thought were the relevant issues we then convene two roundtables of diplomats the former envoys some military officers etc to review those terms of reference if you will and make sure that we were targeting the right issues and then following that and revising it we then set out to interview more than 20 people former envoys people who had worked or selected envoys and others and then we reviewed a lot of the memoirs of envoys who had worked on conflict situations now I want to mention that we focused on special envoys in conflict situations there are a lot of other special envoys some for Islamic outreach for climate change etc some of our recommendations may be relevant to those but we focus on conflict ones because there are some special characteristics they're dealing with life and death situations and they usually attract a very high level of both political and public attention the we after we we are interviewed and our review of memoirs of several of the envoys covered a lot of conflict areas from Northern Ireland Ireland the Middle East the Balkans South Asia and several situations in Africa so we tried to reach out and get a perspective from people dealing with these issues over more than one administration and in various parts of the world so let me turn to Bob we'll talk about the basic elements of the study thank you let me begin by thanking the US Institute of Peace and Princeton the opportunity to work with him has been really great and I do appreciate it just touching briefly on the structure of the report and what we tried to cover and I served as special envoy to the Bosnian Federation at the end of the Bosnian war just a little under 20 years ago now I later went back to Bosnia as ambassador and head of the OSCE mission we began by looking at purpose empowerment and policy authority what this means in brief terms is what's the mandate is it broad or narrow is it clear or vague are the goals evident and we looked at a number of cases we then looked at empowerment what's the authority that the special envoy has or wishes that he or she had what is the relationship to foreign governments and what are the relationships with the US government after empowerment we turn to policy authority what is the role in policy formulation that the special envoy has or does not have what are his or her channels into the decision-making process the next issue we looked at was dealing with what we called unfavorables sometimes it's the special envoy's responsibility to deal with people that the US government ordinarily would not touch with a 10-foot pole but when you're in a in immediate post-conflict situation these are the people who are are still relevant and the question is how you define the relationship with these people and how much you tell Washington about what you're doing I dealt with some later indicted war criminals in Bosnia but it was necessary to get past the the conflict we go into that at some length then there's the issue of structure and turf battles exactly what kind of team can the special envoy put together if any where is the special envoy going to be working from we say in the report that in almost every case special envoys are physically located at the State Department I was physical physically located in a broom closet in Sarajevo but I did have a window and I got to know everybody at the embassy because my broom closet was the only access to the bathroom so either you have a staff in in my case I served both as special envoy and a charge at a fair so there was some gray area between what the embassy staff did for me and what the embassy staff did for the special envoy we played that game I think pretty well so turf battles there are turf battles taking place in Washington there are turf battles between authorities in Washington and in the field and there are turf battles locally all of this required a certain amount of creativity and fast-footwork at times and then there's the question of state NSC rivalry which is another kind of turf battle which we can talk about later finally outreach whom do we reach out to there's Congress there are advocacy groups and there is civil society when there is civil society in the conflict areas the concept of civil society basically doesn't play very well or didn't 20 years ago in the former Yugoslavia but we had to work with all of these people and in some cases create at least the the bases of a civil society which would then we hope take root on its own so those were the areas that the report covered as Princeton said we had the opportunity to talk to current and former special envoys and learn from them about how they did their jobs and compare it against our own experiences I thought if you agree what Bob and I might just share some of our experiences and then to ask Dan and David do the same excellent well let me start with this questions of empowerment and mandate and authority if you're a presidential envoy what everybody wants to know is are you really the president's envoy that is are you being speaking for the president do you have the president's backing are it does the president look to you as the key person in that regard and that comes from from both the substantive relationship but also comes from appearances one of the first things I did when I even before became the full envoy but the assistant envoy is one president Obama went up to New York General Assembly was important I was sitting right behind you the visit the the visible characteristics are important we know cases where envoys are appointed and not empowered they're forgotten they don't you they don't show up but then the question of authority and mandate because authority comes yes in part from empowerment but it comes from much more if you're going to have authority as the leader in the policy situation you have to have credibility you have to show respect for all the other actors in that situation the bureaucratic actors the substantive actors and then you have to come up with credible policy recommendations in sedan case we had two policies running at the same time on the one hand the president and several senior people in the Sudan government were indicted war criminals I wasn't even allowed to talk to the president or those so indicted on the other hand my mandate as the president repeated every time he introduced me this is Princeton Lyman he's working to prevent Sudan and South Sudan from going back to war and to do that we had to get Sudan's cooperation to allow for the independence of South Sudan walking those two lines of policy meant we had a lot of differences overshading etc and it was important to respect the interests of the war crimes office in the department the DR or the democracy people the human rights people and at the same time give me enough leeway to be credible with the Sudanese government that what we were looking for was going to be in the long-term interests of that country as well as the South Sudan so how you get authority use authority and create authority has a lot to do with how you act in those situations but also starting with the empowerment you get from the president or in some cases from the secretary state and that contrasts interestingly with the situation that I encountered in Sarajevo when I arrived there in the summer of 1996 the war had just ended there was still some some shooting going on the US military had come in heavy we had 50,000 American troops in Bosnia Herzegovina a country about the size of West Virginia with a population of 4 million also 1 million refugees and 200,000 casualties we also had a holy writ it's called the Dayton Accords the Dayton Accords which were the product of the will of one single person the very special envoy Dick Holbrook had in effect defined the outlines of a government which did not exist in fact the Dayton Accords were signed in two cases out of three by non Bosnians they were signed by Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade and Franjo Tudjman in Zagreb the only Bosnian to sign them was the Muslim Bosniak leader Alia Izetbegovic so basically what we had done was given ourselves cover because the neighbor the neighbors signed it but we didn't want to deal with the local war criminals at least as a government I however was in a position where I dealt with indictables as we call them all the time and a number of them were later indicted and ended up in the Hague which in most cases was a richly deserved location for them but in other words we had a structure we the United States we the so-called peace implementation Council which was the US plus Canada plus the European Union plus Russia and Turkey representing the organization of the Islamic conference to put together a country which did not exist and so we didn't have to worry much about purpose the purpose was to well we in this country tend to call it nation building I prefer to call it state building to build a viable state as for empowerment the State Department led the process working hand-in-hand with the US military I worked very closely with a then two-star general named David Petraeus who was the first one in to enforce the peace and prevent a reigniting of the conflict as for policy authority it was all here we had the authority dick Holbrook called the shots from Washington and once a month would come out to Sarajevo and scare everybody but we worked together very well and I was his man on the ground and spent my time shuttling between mainly the Croats and the Bosniaks that is to say between the Catholics and the Muslims and then when I became Sharjah as well added the Serbs to the list of people to shuttle to there was a job boning exercise because there was no resistance we called all the shots very different let talk a little bit more about this question of dealing with what we call unfavorables it's a one of the chapters in the report that I think is one of the most important there are there are risks in dealing with people who are either indicted or war criminals or in some cases terrorists and and it is important to weigh those risks and have an understanding of whether it's worthwhile or not to engage so it's not it's not necessarily the thing to do in every case I was not allowed to speak to the president of Sudan it clearly limited to a large extent our role in in the situation I reserve the right to ask for that policy to be reviewed if I felt that essential I never reached that point because there were risks in opening that door but I think it had to be an issue on the table there were others out there who were also indicted that I found it necessary to be engaged with and that comes to another question if you're going to be a special on well you have to take some risks if you feel you have the right authority and you feel this is necessary you have to take some risks doing things that may not have received all the blessings in the world if you take those risks you ought to be ready to take the blowback if they go sour but I think some risk and giving the special envoy some latitude in that regard is one of the uses you could make of a special envoy because that person is not in the line of normal diplomatic representation and activity and therefore it doesn't convey the same necessarily recognition of the interlocutor and with whom you're engaging let me go on to this question of relationships within the bureaucracy that this comes up all the time and one of the most sensitive areas with the special envoy especially a presidential one but even sometimes the secretarial special envoy is the relationship to the Department of State to those mechanisms that are there all the time dealing with that conflict and our diplomacy and particularly the regional assistant secretary and the regional bureau there's no cookie cutter way to resolve those issues it depends a lot on the structure of the of the situation etc what we found in all our interviews was chemistry matters in chemistry means that you respect each other you respect the importance roles that embassies play and there's it's as we indicate in the report where people and boys did not involve the embassies and paid a price for it respecting the role of the department and in my case I was recruited by the assistant secretary Africa saying I know this guy you won't give me too much trouble and we were very very closely the other thing that we were able to do at the request of the department was actually to help in the state White House rivalry over who controls Sudan policy and after we made it clear I made it clear that I wasn't going to engage in that very much in one side or the other the state department said well then would you coordinate our representation at the NSC on these issues which I did and that facilitated the State Department's role with the NSC and I worked very closely of course with the assistant secretary it's important that that relationship be understood that it has inherent rivalries but they can be overcome if people really make an effort to do so again an interesting contrast in the case of Bosnia there was little NSC or White House direct engagement I think it's fair to say that President Clinton had hesitated to engage in the Balkan Wars until the events of the summer of 1995 Srebrenica and the bombing of the market in Sarajevo in that at that point it became the first television war and we saw a whole lot of Christian I'm on poor all the time the consequence was that there was pressure to quote do something on quote and that's when dick Holbrook got the the players together in in at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio so the objectives were basically defined by Holbrook and his people he was the assistant secretary of state for European Affairs and execution was left to him based in Washington mostly in general terms and to me on the ground for the specific specific execution of what what we had envisaged this changed when John Cornblum succeeded dick Holbrook in 1996 dick stayed on for a while as special envoy but John Cornblum was the assistant secretary Holbrook came out once in a while every couple of months in a seat 20 my job was to create what was called the Federation Forum which was a group of Croats and Bosniaks so Catholics and Muslims because these things are always seen in confessional terms in the Balkans who had been fighting each other having started out as allies they ended up fighting each other and this was to get that half of Bosnia working again and the Federation Forum met virtually every week and my staff as I said consisted mainly of me and embassy officers I'll leave it at that for now let me just deal with one more and then we'll go beyond and that's question of the structure of the Envoy's office within the State Department and as Bob mentioned he had very few staff we looked at various envoy situation some had staff from the regional bureau some had little there are three instances we deal with in the report of of significantly autonomous offices under the special envoy currently the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and the office that I directed the US office on South Sudan and South Sudan and in my case the desk officers were under my office as well as a cadre of regional specialists and others contracted by the conflict and stabilization bureau I had tens of millions of dollars of resources to dispense I had a lot of control over the machinery of policy and and support which was very helpful but there's a danger in that degree of autonomy you can get separated too much from the rest of the structure as I mentioned the importance of the embassies role in my case I found strong embassies were critical but in some cases those offices don't pay enough attention and second resources are helpful they were helpful in my case but I found we also strayed into areas that were better done by USAID and that we sometimes didn't lack the oversight for running projects in the fields from Washington so I think there are pluses to that kind of an office but there are warnings as well Dan why don't we shift to you and get some reaction to the report and a little bit of your own experience of how we might be thinking about this sure first of all this is a very important report and I want to commend USIP Princeton and Bob for giving us something to work with that's now organized and very well structured it raises the issues that need to be thought about and in a sense can provide a guide path for an administration thinking about deploying an envoy what it also needs to do however is to stimulate case studies because what we've had today even are two examples of successful envoys but they're successful in part I would think because both of these gentlemen came up through the system they were both experts before being appointed envoys they were experts in the areas in the fields that they were asked to focus on they had experience in the field and they knew how Washington and the Department of State and the interagency system worked that has not always been the case in all of the conflict situations where on both envoys have been appointed as suggested in the report itself and so therefore a series of case studies on the way envoys worked in different situations could be quite helpful as some of you know I spent most of my career in the Middle East particularly focused in the Arab-Israeli conflict area bassiter to Egypt ambassador to Israel and I saw 15 count them 15 envoys over the course of about 30 years and if you review the names of those envoys you're talking about what we would call an all-star list Roy Atherton Bob Strauss Saul Linowitz Don Rumsfeld Jim Leonard Watclavarius Maury Draper Richard Fairbanks Dick Murphy Dennis Ross Tony Zinney John Wolfe George Mitchell Martin and Dick and now Frank Lowenstein now you would expect with this kind of a lineup if we're using our baseball analogy that the scoreboard would look pretty good but the scoreboard actually shows no hits no runs and lots of errors which suggests that this is one of the case studies which needs to be undertaken to find out whether or not it's the idea of an envoy in this situation or the individual selected as the envoy the conflict itself or the criteria that the report has suggested was it an absence of empowerment by a president was it an absence of authority were there turf battles in Washington and I think you'd find if we did this case study and we haven't done it yet but it certainly this report should simulate it and I may grab the opportunity and do it myself I think you'd find that there are a combination of factors at play here that suggests that even some of the smartest and most senior people selected for this job were not necessarily the right choice and not necessarily the right choice for this conflict after all if you look back at the last 35 little more than 35 years in the Arab Israeli conflict resolution process there have been three American successes but they have all been shepherded by secretaries of states and by presidents they have not been shepherded by envoys now part of this may be a problem that we have created ourselves we have raised the level of engagement in this conflict to a point where the parties simply don't pay much attention to an envoy below the level of secretary state and sometimes not even to a secretary state waiting for the president and that may be a major factor at play in the Arab Israeli conflict but it also suggests that context specific specificity and I would add and I want to say this carefully because we're talking about smart envoys understanding of nuance and details not all of our envoys entered the job knowing what the Arab Israeli conflict is all about and many of them left the job not knowing what the Arab Israeli conflict was all about and what that does is not only represent a waste of an American asset which is the power to do diplomacy but it also weakens our ability to then pick up the conflict resolution process once that envoy has left the job I had an experience when I was serving as ambassador in Israel we had an envoy who was appointed to monitor the compliance of the parties with the road map I can mention his name John Wolf he is a senior state department official who was asked to drop his job in political military affairs and come out for a few months and John was a strong diplomat but had no background at all in the Arab Israeli conflict and no background at all in trying to resolve the Arab Israeli conflict and it was a series of errors and problems over the course of three months some of which actually impeded the efforts of Israelis and Palestinians to reach small agreements on what we called then the roadmap that President George W. Bush had unveiled a short time before now during that period I came back to Washington for a couple of days went in to see the then Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage and I said Rich I like John Wolf why did you appoint somebody who didn't know anything at all about this conflict for this job and for those of you know Rich Armitage he said that was exactly why I did it he wanted somebody who would be Tabula Rasa now in some situations maybe Tabula Rasa works it doesn't work when you're dealing with two entrenched parties in a protracted conflict they've been at this thing for decades they know each other far better than they know us and they deal with each other far better than we assume they deal with each other and in walks somebody a babe in the woods and doesn't really help resolve issues I could go on we've had other situations referenced in this report for example was the fact that when Dennis Ross was appointed the special Middle East coordinator one of the things that he demanded was that that office be taken out of the normal bureaucracy of the State Department and in fact in 1992 93 93 actually when that office was created I was serving as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Near East Bureau and the day of the announcement when I went in to see Ed Geregian who was our Assistant Secretary I said Ed I'm sorry you're leaving your post and Ed said to me why I'm not leaving my post I said wait they just taken one of the heartbeats one of the jewels of your portfolio away from you why would you remain as the Assistant Secretary when you no longer have responsibility for one of the most critical issues in the portfolio and it suggests to you that there this bifurcation of responsibilities was a problem from the outset and it became a more pronounced problem over time because what NEA had to offer was the expertise and experience of a lot of very good officers who had served in the field but who now became separated from the conflict resolution process and it it I think ended up hurting that process over time on the issue of latitude to deal with unfavorables we're still living with this problem we had envoys who for many years could not deal with the representative the Palestinian people Palestine Liberation Organization because of American policy in fact the United States government for many of these years was talking to the PLO but through the CIA not through the State Department so we had a channel with an organization that was an unfavorable but it was a channel that was not helping us at all deal with the conflict resolution process we have the same issue today with Hamas where if you're going to appoint an envoy to deal with the Arab Israeli issue for example as Martin Indyk was appointed or now Frank Lohenstein is acting does it make sense for that envoy not to be able to talk to all Palestinians doesn't mean we like them it doesn't mean we support those who are engaged in terrorism which Hamas is engaged in terrorism but if the envoy doesn't have the mandate or the scope of responsibility to reach out to all elements within the two societies in which he or she is working how effective is that going to be in trying to produce an agreement that can be agreed and implemented so there are a number of issues taking the Arab Israeli case as a case study which suggests that using the five categories or five criteria that this very useful report has given us could be very important in understanding whether or not this thing works whether the envoy process works in particular conflict situations I would add as a closing sentence my own bias which is that in the Arab Israeli conflict presidents and secretaries of state will be fooling themselves to believe that they can outsource this conflict resolution process to an envoy that doesn't mean that the secretary has to run out to the region every week or two may want to comprise a team of his own experts to pursue this but we've created a situation in which Arabs and Israelis are waiting to see that the president and the secretary of state are engaged in that process and an envoy is simply not going to substitute for the presidential power and the secretary's prestige thank you thank you thank you so much David we'll go to you you've seen this from the inside you've seen this from the advocacy community you know some of the health dynamics on it as well talk a little bit about what lessons you feel like we've learned over the last however many years and looking at this and any reactions to the court as well thanks so much and thanks so much to USIP for inviting me to participate in this panel and thanks to the authors for laying out some very interesting ideas and I actually came away from the report feeling someone like Dan did that there was a lot of very interesting nuggets and descriptions of case studies but to really understand some of these issues you really have to go more in depth and I think that one issue that really needs to be on the table is why do we have special representatives and special envoys the report does talk about that to some degree but if you go back and look at diplomatic history we've always had special envoys and special representatives if you go back to 1789 George Washington had a personal representative who to who went to the court of St. James to represent the United States with what had to be the most important relationship that the US had at the time and Congress didn't even know about it until a year and a half later similarly you could go to Woodrow Wilson who had a bad relationship with his Secretary of State and who sent Colonel Edward House to try to negotiate peace in Europe in 1915 this was a central issue to try to keep the US out of the war and the president sent a basically a private figure someone who was working for the White House but who did not have relationships with the State Department any significant way of course Harry Hopkins is an example that you know we I won't spend time talking about I think that the report does raise a number of issues and Dan I think that while I accept what you say about trying to dig deeply into the Arab-Israeli conflict but I think that the Arab-Israeli conflict in some ways is unique in this kind of context because of the very deep domestic political dynamics that are involved the great deal of energy that has been invested by the United States and over the time since the 70s at least in particular so I think that it it's it it's an important one to look at but perhaps not the best one to measure these criteria again so for example one of the areas that I was have been involved with was the Democratic Republic of Congo and the appointment of Senator Feingold as a special envoy there if you look at what was happening before that the our policy with respect to the DRC was somewhat in disarray we had very conflicting views within the administration regarding what was the role of Rwanda how do we approach President Kagami what was the the right view and approach and you had some significant dysfunction and in that context as pressure was building from the advocacy community and the congressional members of Congress who were interested in this issue to appoint a special advisor yet as was reflected Ambassador Johnny Carson who was assistant secretary at the time appointed a very skilled diplomat but someone who was not very well known in the region he had served there didn't have a huge amount of stature and was considered a special advisor and was frankly not the kind of dynamic individual that was needed so there was a big push to have a more significant individual brought in line and in fact people were very surprised when Senator Feingold agreed to take on that position and I think that someone like Senator Feingold in that position can do things that are important so if you look at the Africa Affairs Bureau and their scope of jurisdiction there are some huge problems that the Assistant Secretary has to deal with they've got Nigeria which could collapse the entire continent if it if it if it goes down it's got Zimbabwe which is a huge human rights problem we've historically spent a lot of time on Kenya was on the the cusp of violence and then came on the cusp of violence again of course you have Sudan South Sudan and look what happened to the Central African Republic just last year so in the context where an assistant secretary has multiple crises that have significant political attention bringing in a special envoy can sometimes I think be a constructive approach to try to deal with it in the case of the RC though I think something that the report indicated happened that was very important which was when Senator Feingold came in he had a policy structure to go forward with similar to what Bob Beercroft was saying you had the peace and security cooperation framework that basically was the roadmap was it a detailed roadmap no implementation of that roadmap was going to be critical in order for it to succeed and therefore someone having someone who could go in with a stature indicate that he had a personal relationship with the president and to dance point had been studying these issues for a long time as a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did understand the building at least to some degree and was able to fit in within the bureaucracy in a way which I think most people see as fairly constructive so I think that that contrast between the before and the after in a context where there are multiple different pieces is important to think about on the other hand we've seen envoys who have had mandates constructed for them in part because of advocacy from the advocacy community that were real failures so it's interesting to look at the list of envoys that are on the American Foreign Service Association's list of 25 on boys and you know we have two envoys for North Korea we have an envoy that's supposed to negotiate on the issues around the North Korean nuclear section but because Congress felt that there was not enough attention for human rights you have a North Korean ambassador for human rights special representative for human rights so how does that work or in the case of Sudan is I'm sure Princeton will remember the in the context of the North South negotiations that was the real focus of the special envoy's view there was very little attention being played to Darfur which was kind of an intractable situation in many ways at that time and so there was a big push to have a senior advisor or special representative on Darfur that was not a very successful or wise advocacy push in my mind in hindsight there were reasons for it I think that you could reasonable people could differ about whether it was a good idea when we were pushing for it and at the end there was a good result because the US when pressing for implementation of the separate Darfur peace agreement saw that that was never go anywhere actually helped I think get the United States to the point where it was looking at what the right solution was in with respect to Sudan which was a comprehensive approach to deal with all its conflicts nonetheless I think that there was a significant waste of beer crack time and effort and I really am not sure that that it was it was a positive thing there is something strange about the whole special envoy field so people come in and say look the State Department doesn't have enough focus on this issue that such a fragmented system we need someone to bring you know people together and the White House and the DoD are fighting so our answer is to create more fragmentation by create a new office with a new person with new staff who may not actually be very significantly knowledgeable about the area latitude so latitude is very interesting and I was interested to hear the emphasis that our presenters put on it today I think that there's a challenge or there's an internal tension in the paper about this so if you believe that the only way to have an effective envoy is to have someone who's really empowered who's someone seen as important who's sitting behind the president at the meetings and who has the policy authority then how is it that they're really outside of the chain of command or outside of the political challenges that can be faced if they meet with the unfavorables and I think that this points to you know a challenge that I think goes very much I agree with Princeton in his analysis that there's a risk-reward issue here so we had a big debate between the two of us about the visit of one of president Bashir's advisors this is the advisor Nafi who was an advisor to the president who had been involved in or we believe most people believe was involved in the Darfur genocide Princeton had met him in in cartoon and most of us I don't know if I can't speak for everyone in the advocacy community because it's a very fragmented community but most of us had no problem with him meeting with with with Nafi but when there was a suggestion that they would the administration would invite Nafi to the United States people got very much in arms and in fact the founder of my organization called me in an irate fashion and I think that the the question in in meeting with unfavorables is what's the risk or the reward what and our questions were what's the strategy here okay if you're gonna bring it unfavorable here to the United States what are we getting for it are you gonna be able to actually do something constructive and productive with them because it is gonna confer legitimacy on that individual it is going to be a be a propaganda coup for regime that the whole strategy is around isolation so I think that this that these are this is a tough issue and I think that the it's one of the reasons why I think there has to be some significant conversations around what are the right kind of individuals for these kinds of positions who are willing to take these risks because it isn't is it the case that it's only the foreign policy professionals who have been in the field and so on who are able to do these jobs because of all the things that Dan Dan said you need people who have an inside knowledge of the department you need people who've had negotiating experience you need to have people that field or international experience you need people who are willing to collaborate you have you need people who have had multinational experience I think one of the things that Princeton benefited from was his time as assistant secretary for international organizations because in the context of the of the very complicated way Sudan was being dealt with the UN system had a very important role peacekeeping missions in both countries of very capable special representative in Haley Mankarios and so the that that experience which is often very common not in the Arab-Israeli context because there the notion was let's keep the UN out because of various political dynamics but in most of these conflict situations the UN is really critical due a lot of foreign first service experts career ambassadors or retired ambassadors have that kind of experience but on the same time individuals who are outside the system as we say also lack some of those key experiences that I mentioned the front part so I think it really goes to how do we select in individuals I I don't know I maybe I'll just make a couple of brief comments is with respect to turf battles I really think there's no right answer on structure and so on it really is very personal I think the chemistry matters issue is very big I think there is something very interesting about where there are complex tonight dynamics between the White House and the State Department over an issue because of its political volatility because of its importance domestically and so on it is a real question about whether it's an addition or a subtraction to have a special investor I mean I was in meetings in during the peace process when Dan was deputy assistant secretary by the way if you see smoke coming on my out of my ears because I'm not sure whether to talk about my experience in state or in the hill or on an in the advocacy community but there were some very frosty meetings and they weren't just frosty because the State Department chafed that Dennis Ross had responsibilities in this area it was also because those at the NSC who had responsibility in those areas were chafing under the that that the kind of structure that Dennis was able to build for himself and sometimes it could work out because you had three sort of power centers and you could kind of negotiate through sometimes it didn't so I think that those that there's a lot of personality issues that really need to be thought through and the kind of tethering that has been talked about we can perhaps talk more about more about that I think the outreach issue is significant I think it's another piece of if you're going to have a very spent effective special envoy particularly in an area that's politically volatile or there's a lot of political interest or a huge amount of civic interest being able to negotiate the halls of Congress is really critical on being able to talk to the members of Congress on in both the House and the Senate as well as civil society that's a skill set that not everyone has that you know I think that Scott Gratian who was a special envoy when I first started working you had his challenges on both those scores and that really undermined his role in being able to be effective and so that having the right skills in that area can can be really really critical let me just leave it at that and see whether you have any questions Tom to kick us off or you want to go to the audience I do but I have some questions but I really want to open it up and give folks a chance because before before we end and I want to come back to again this issue of turf that there's a certain sense I'll just ask one question and then hand it over is it too simplistic to say that part of the message here is when it comes to envoys go big or go home that this this tension of saying if it's just another seat at the table I mean there seems to be an inherent tension here which is it's a building these are buildings that really believe in working things up through the building working through a clearance process etc sort of consensus or what sometimes seems like faux consensus building up through and that to be effective as you've noted you've got to be able to sit down with the head of state or foreign minister and people know that you're in charge and so is this one of these things where if you're not willing to give it that authority you may end up just with the another another cook in the kitchen well if you if you're gonna point an envoy you don't give them authority you shouldn't bother I mean I don't know what the point would be to do that and we have cases and we allude to them in the report where that's happened where the authority or the empowerment has been undercut by the secretary or the president or or other ways I think in dealing with this question of turf and structures it depends a lot on the nature of the conflict you're dealing with in the Sudan case the the the issues on the ground bilaterally were as integral to the peace process in other cases that isn't necessarily the case so in the Sudan case I found it very valuable that the death structures and the outreach to the ambassadors was coming through from my office but there may be other cases where that is not quite the case and that the bureau support to the envoy is sufficient so I think one has to look at that in terms of what is the nature of the conflict and the mandate you know I would go along with that my experience was that the European Bureau played a very big role in the post-conflict situation in Bosnia for example and that was fine secretary of state was comfortable with it the president and the NSC were very comfortable with it and as I said before we had a clear roadmap on what we were supposed to be doing there and it was a situation in which the United States largely called the shots so in that situation it was more executing a policy but doing it on the ground and understanding the issues and in effect building a country which didn't exist in 1996 so I'll make it very quick question asked you with Cuba and Iran do you think in those two cases well I would get I don't I don't pretend to be an expert in those two areas but I would have thought on the question of Iran where you already have a major negotiation underway on the nuclear that they have a separate envoy on the overall relationship probably gets in the way but beyond that you're leading up to that perhaps and a special envoy might have been useful a special envoy in Cuba might have been useful beforehand but now that we are in the process of establishing a regular structure and diplomatic relations I'm not sure that that would be necessary well I I would just underscore what Princeton said you're talking two different types of issues the Cuba issue seems to me is a Nixon China question it's reversing a many decades long policy and so in a sense there had to be not only complete coherence in how you're going to run it but the policy issues really did do need to be run out of the White House until the point where the president has now announced the change where it can enter into a more normal building of a diplomatic infrastructure with Iran and we're still in the middle of that you've had so far an interesting case study of the utility of multiple tracks that are very well integrated at the source you had the professional negotiations through the feet P5 plus one that we're proceeding along a certain track and you had a secret channel also run out of the State Department by the Deputy Secretary State Bill Burns with White House involvement and the two were we're connected at the hip so if we did our case studies this might prove to be one of the most efficient uses of a variety of envoy types but it would also I think prove the idea that you need people with the experience the expertise and familiarity within the system to be able to maintain that integrity of the effort just let me put a punctuation point on that particular comment because I think it's something that we haven't talked about there was a special envoy for Cuba it just was an unnamed National Security Council official until we found out about it and that's what that's what happened is that they ran it out of the National Security Council there was obviously some coordination with the State Department Secretary Kerry was involved but in terms of some of the key meetings that were at sort of the operating level it was really the NSE that did it I think that the Iran example I agree with Dan there was a special envoy for Iran his name was Bill Burns he was within the system he was not named he had you know all the authority he had the Undersecretary for for political affairs also backing up we had a huge amount of senior attention there and I think that it was an effective model that that you have to look at I just don't think that every situation in which the US can make a real difference can have that kind of involvement from senior officials but I think that's a it's a it's a it's a really important case and you see this in other cases I think that one of the the the warnings that is in the paper is about just don't do something because Congress says you should do it that you really need to look at how you do it but I think there is a way of dealing with those issues through the double hadding concept that is mentioned in the paper so for example in our China relations of course to bat always get short-tripped that is the nature of the US relationship with China there aren't isn't that there aren't people who think it's important there aren't people who are working on it within the US government but it always gets short-tripped so the US got the US Congress said there has to be a special coordinator on Tibet what did the Bush administration do when that happened they have put it all up Paula Dobriansky the undersecretary of state for global affairs as the special coordinator for Tibet and I think that did help both politically for the administration as well as internally to say yes we need to think more about these issues and how we deal with those issues so I think that kind of fusion approach is something that is useful to consider there has to be a decision taken at the outset is the special envoy especially when it's a publicly known envoy therefore symbolic purposes or to actually do stuff which you can see that there can be some value in the symbolic depends on the situation yeah but it's also it's also it's also somewhat deceptive to your international interlocutors you're pretending to have a stake in it you're going to deliver something and you really don't have the the support behind it to do so you know it highlights an issue but you know I've known people in that situation and I describe it like walking naked into the jungle I mean you're out there with nothing behind you and I don't recommend it you know Princeton there is a reality show about that so I think Tom Tom I'm a little bit of diplomatic experience in the back Tom if I could just add one thing to Princeton I and when the 2006 Lebanon Israel war broke out I was asked to go on CNN in one of those cases where they had four little boxes you know for talking heads three from Congress and me and the three from Congress were all very upset that we had not appointed an envoy to solve the problem and they got to me I said I don't have a problem of pointing an envoy I first would like to see what our policy is and it kind of struck everybody is strange that we would ask that question but I think that gets the point Princeton made what is the envoy being asked to do and if it's symbolic just to kind of wave the flag then it's a it actually hurts our interests in these conflicts I may address the Congress question but we'll go with this question first thank you Tom very much Tom Pickering from Hills & Company I just had two brief points and question one is I'm very supportive the idea that Dan Kertzer raised that you've now opened the door it's an excellent report but it's very clear that there is a next level if I could put it this way of understanding and indeed of detail it would be enormously valuable as this process goes ahead and particularly in the area of conflict resolution and I was strongly seconded and I think that the rest of you up there are probably tilted in that direction the second question is a broader question for a number of you have slid into the question of envoys who are not there to deal with conflicts is we understand the word conflict and they raise a different sort of set of situations some of which are very much parallel to what the report is considered and some go beyond that and some of them I think transgress a number of the lines that you have drawn that in some ways would be very useful and so I raised the question isn't it time now for somebody whether it's the Institute of Peace the Academy of Diplomacy the QDDR process contracted people from outside whatever we want to do obviously paying attention to the knowledge to do that in many ways over the years there was a process in the State Department of being light on these kinds of people and often gathering them up to create a new bureau and in some cases the absorption of these people into the structure was the natural element of what had to be done if people think the State Department wasn't paying attention and wanted a special envoy over a period of time we probably needed a bureau with deep experience working in the subject rather than the what I would call attention light factor of the special envoy there is also finally the question of how does the special envoy relationship particularly in conflict resolution accord with the rest of our policies you've touched on some of that in the natural conflict of I could put it this way between the functional bureaus particularly those that deal with democracy and human rights and some of the more difficult questions that arise in conflict resolution but I'd be grateful to if you'd address the two questions the broadening question to other special kinds of appointments and the other question of how and in what way the special envoys have to take care and attention to look at the rest of US foreign policy and how it fits into the context in which they work thank you well I hope you will comment on it from your work on the QDDR in particular and you know we didn't try to take on the whole envoy question for good for because the conflict ones had special characteristics but Tom you're putting your finger on a problem because if you looked at the number of special envoys and it's almost the same from one administration to another you're talking about 25 or more special envoys and if they're all supposed to report to the Secretary of State you realize you've or in addition to all the regular structures you really have an unworkable structure I yeah so it's not bad to put these under some of them under a a structured Bureau and and therefore have an undersecretary was handling more of that and I think we have to be very careful about the proliferation into areas that again sometimes become more symbolic and I think it deserves more attention on the conflict with other policies is very important we try to deal with a little bit Richard Haas's experience working on Cyprus in relationship to our relationship with Turkey and NATO and we touch on that in the in the in the report I experienced it in in needing the cooperation of Ethiopia absolutely critical to our policy but we had other issues with Ethiopia over democracy and human rights and balancing that with the rest of the the US government those are legitimate concerns these aren't illegitimate when you're running up against it was a challenge and we had to work it out and find out where the balance should be but those those happen all the time and that's where you need a policy process that will get at those address it and come to an agreement I'll just give you one quick example sorry we needed a tough police peacekeeping operation in the area of OBA the UN had failed there and the only ones we could go to were Ethiopia now you know for people who had all these other issues these open my god you could even one more thing that we are dependent on but we've worked it through we we looked at it secretary and everybody was involved and said look the balance is right we need them so you have to go through a process and assess it I'll just I'll just say briefly about the badic and voice I think it's a great point and I was left thinking about whether I should talk about the madic and boys or not I decide not to because of the focus of the paper but I think it's a it's a challenge if you look at the 25 envoys alone who are on the AFSA page you know they're for all kinds of different things we were very much I come to this issue in the context of the human rights issues where the Bureau of Democracy human rights and labor which some would challenge shouldn't exist in any case and should be there should be part of the thematic piece of every regional Bureau but they themselves were very upset about the the fragmentation of the various human rights issue and for example the Office of Religious Freedom or the Trafficking Office which is something that I know most about and I think that it's it's it's difficult because you know the the you know Mike Posner used to complain to me that you know he would come to New Delhi and the first thing that the ambassador would complain about was that damn trafficking office and why were they creating such problems and he was it was unable to talk about his agenda at the same time if the trafficking office didn't exist I wonder where the human trafficking modern slavery issue would be on his talking points with the ambassador like never mentioned so you know I think that this is the kind of challenge that has to be worked through and thought about in and I think that it's it's it's tough and you know you probably have to look on it a case-by-case basis to try to figure out what's the right answer and I agree with you that we should broaden this conversation to try to figure out when it makes sense and when it doesn't so a couple of quick comments and I appear to be losing my voice somehow in the middle of this panel I'm just so moved by the wisdom one I think to pick up this theme of case studies we actually thought about doing the QDDR on a case study model it's really much more effective and useful I think from the outside then from the inside there is a tendency for every after-action report to say nothing went wrong everything was perfect nothing to see here and these are really only useful if we're going to be honest and really even getting willing to talk about individuals because I think there can be a tendency to not want to criticize folks and we if we're going to learn from this and this is something we're looking at with QDDR how do we become more of a learning institution at state where you are more capable of taking some risks if you understand that if things don't go right it's an opportunity to learn and be better the next time and this is of course the essence of what we preach in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation in the private sector it's not about succeeding 100% of the time it's about taking risks and having them pay off over time and we know all the reasons in terms of we don't know all the reasons but we know many of the reasons in terms of internal bureaucracy in terms of how the Hill reacts with and the media often with gotcha kind of things if you're basically trying to manage against failure instead of manage for success it's an it is a deadening environment and we know we still attract the best and the brightest into this into these institutions but how do we do that and I think that being able to get more comfortable inside and out with case studies and and being able to say yes this was the right thing to try it did not work out but here's why it was the right thing to try as you learn from it so we're really trying to look look at that I want to echo on the policy issue I mean something I wrote some about when I was in the think tank world before I came in so it's a matter of public record you look at something like Syria emerging for that first year and a half and structurally speaking you not only have a state in SC and all the other equities you have something that snack smack dab between any a any you are you have Jordan Turkey and Israel and Lebanon all having slightly different attitudes towards this so and I think there was not I think it's fair to say clarity from the White House and what the policy was so that question of was the problem a structural problem was you know Rob Ford and power to do it etc I think we can look at these case studies both where an envoy came in and where they didn't come in on the Congress thing for those who don't know I am a former member of Congress so let me speak both ill of my kind and defend them a little bit I think Congress is bored they don't pass a lot of laws anymore and when they do it's usually at midnight in December when they're trying to go home and so I think this makes the ability to play in some of these sandboxes more appealing and so whether that's calling people up for oversight or issues or whether it's you know wanting to show that they're doing something on a particular crisis around the world in their defense however and I've made this clear with my colleagues at state state does not always do the best job of really engaging with the Hill respectfully and substantively I think that it can be sort of I you know we're trying to save the world here and you're going to call us up for the 37th hearing so we're going to give vague answers and try to get back to doing what we're doing well when Congress acts in a way that they're essentially only showing up for their three minutes of questioning to be able to show they were tough on state and wait for you to possibly misstate something and then that becomes the headline of course you start again to manage against failure instead of for success so I think that cycle is not great there's also been a history over the years of feeling like particularly on some of the issues of human rights and corruption that state has sometimes aired on the side of a favorable bilateral relationship and from the standpoint of the Hill that there has been more and more attempts to leverage in whether it's DRL or envoys or other things because the sense is this is getting short shrift which of course then means that you are having you you're having some policy coherence because a set of elected officials who write your budget have basically made a decision that you're not getting the balance right and those who are actually running the policy from state believe that this is the right policy so you know we use we often think about the NSC state split or a functional regional split on this but we do preach democracy around the world and members of Congress were elected granted some of that is for the highest bidder and then totally manufactured redistricted mayhem but nonetheless elected and there and you see this come up in other contexts I mean one issue that certainly come up a lot in the QDDR for obvious reasons has been the issue of physical security and this is relevant in this context because obviously we're talking about conflict areas to some extent this is an issue before Benghazi before the Kenyum all attack but it certainly spiked up you can see from humanitarian organizations the complex risk even outside of the political dynamics has gone up considerably in the last few years number of countries and facing complex complex conflict etc and how we operate and then you have again with the Hill relationship if I were still up there and the people were wise enough to not have that be the case of people in my district and I was being asked to vote to train in a group of people I'd probably want to go meet them I'd want to look them in the eye and say are these people that I want to support I'm the one who has to cast that vote I'm the one who has to effectively write that check and at the same time if you're state I understand why the last thing you want is a bunch of Yahoo! Congress people coming down and playing around on the Syrian border so I think in all of these things you know there really is genuine understanding there there are good arguments on both sides and I think the attitude probably has not has been DS has been escalating and and I think that is part of where the special rep phenomenon comes from more reports because the fact is Congress only has a limited set of tools in a tool set we can name a special envoy we can demand a report you know to some extent we can earmark funding but that actually requires them to get a budget passed so you know it this is I think something where again I as someone who did have to represent people and people work their tails off to pay their taxes and those are the taxes that pay for state operations and aid operations you know that's and that's got to be an important part of the conversation QDDR, Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review I will say Tom just to push back a little bit I do think that there is an opportunity for a special envoy you know I think one of the things that you know Princeton could talk about was he had good relations on the hill he had good relations in civil society and you can make those places a force multiplier if you use them in the right way and I think that a lot of times the secretary even a deputy assistant secretary which we haven't talked about deputy assistant secretaries are effective special envoys some of these smaller cases might be good to talk about that at some point but you know there are a lot of issues with an assistant secretary that a particular member has that they want to raise with them that they want to talk about their own pet rock and a special envoy can go up and talk to members of Congress and they do travel they can reinforce messages and so there is utility that that can be done and I think you're right that sometimes state doesn't always use that in the most effective way no and I will echo that I I find it surprising the more chiefs of mission don't see every special rep as an opportunity it's an opportunity to bring someone in you can get press coverage you can get meetings with civil society you can emphasize an issue in a world where government to government traditional diplomatic contact is less and less the whole equation and how things are play out in the media how they play out in social media you know I do think there is an opportunity to use each one of these offices and say hey I'm you know and the ambassador to Sri Lanka did a lot of this and saying hey you know I I see 12 assets there that I can bring in and use creatively to push a message that I'm proactively doing now it's different than when you've actually decided on a message in your country and then someone wants to come in and mess with that strategy but you know these these can be I think a huge opportunity so I did one other point and it cuts to your your current work and that is the the State Department being decades behind in internal structural reform as David said earlier in today's program the tendency has been always just to add on additional layers rather than take a hard look at the way the building is structured to do what we're supposed to do so that if an ambassador feels that he or she is being bothered by the work that has been decided is important for policy then it's a reflection both of the ambassador's failure but also of the building's failure years ago there was a discussion about doing in the State Department what the military had done in the 80s which is to empower regional assistance secretaries to become kind of undersecretaries who would then be able to make policy choices on how conflict resolution human rights labor issues trafficking all fit in and to be able to call on resources the way that our regional commanders do in the military and I think until we we start to take a look at that we're going to be confronted not only with problems in the department but problems with special envoys because they all in a sense almost need to proliferate when you haven't made basic policy priority choices and that made that I think the connection between policy priorities and structure has not been looked at sufficiently let me make one in which the United States is viewed by both of the labor ligerents as so biased in favor of one that it has insignificant influence with both and that if our real interest is peace we might refrain from diplomatic initiatives which are likely to prove futile and give quiet support to others that might have more some chance of success I'll let Dan talk about that and turn to the Middle East that to some extent that that that existed in the South Sudan situation since there was a great deal of sympathy in the United States in the Congress in the administration for South Sudan's long war and and desire for independence and problems on the other side with what had happened in Darfur et cetera in Sudan and so it posed an issue but on the other hand it was not a conflict in which we could really step back entirely we did in that case in part because we didn't talk to the president of Sudan rely as the principal negotiating body the Africa Union's panel for this purpose headed by South Africa forum president tabo and Becky so we did in that case need to in effect use our diplomacy in support of that process but we had spent as I testified before Congress at between 2005 and 2010 spent ten billion dollars on the Sudan South Sudan conflict and we had a big stake in it we couldn't quite just walk away the Bosnia side it was a different situation most of our diplomacy was aimed at other Europeans we had a situation we had a created what was called the office of the high representative the first one of whom was Carl built former foreign minister of Sweden and our problem was not so much keeping the Bosnians in line as it was making sure we were more or less on the same page with the Europeans and since that also involved Russia that was at times very difficult in the office of the high representative people still call him the UN high representative he was not the UN high representative because EU are and the government the US government in general had a healthy distrust of UN peacekeeping operations in the past so it was intentionally kept separate from the United Nations and still is I would add usually when people ask the question they are thinking about the Arab Israeli conflicts I'm not trying to read your mind but I think it's probably a fair reading of the question and my own view has always been that the United States should get involved in this conflict resolution process to the extent that both sides want us involved and the reality has been even though we have a special relationship with the state of Israel that we do not have with the Palestine Liberation Organization the reality has always been that both sides have wanted us to be at least involved if not actually the primary third party now that may be changing and I think today we're now coping with dealing with a Palestinian move to the United Nations I think it's healthy for this issue to take be taken up in multilateral fora but when it comes down to actual negotiating between Israelis and Palestinians the go-to party has been the United States my complaint substantively on the issue has been that as much as we talk about being serious as a third-party mediator we really haven't been and we have a policy problem where we haven't imbued the Secretary of State or the envoy with enough authority and power to actually go out and do what a United States national interest would dictate our envoy trying to do I want to give the authors the last word here but I will say one thing and team that up which is you know I think that one of the things that I am hopeful about with special envoys and with the State Department in general is getting people and this is going to sound a little cheesy getting people excited about peace building we are a war weary country you see that on the right and the left I think the we the isolationist fever isn't as bad as it was a year ago but people I think it is an important moment for us to talk about diplomacy and development as part of the answer to the question well is there just going to be another ISIS five years and from now or ten years from now diplomacy and development as part of the answer to that in the context of individual conflicts and and otherwise in some cases that can be the deputy secretary it can be a DAS but this is something where I actually want to capture the imagination of the American people a little bit to believe in this and I think there has been a tendency of at state and aid probably less so in aid in the last few years that if your name is in the paper that somehow wrong that you're not supposed to bring attention to yourself etc but we live in a world that actually can be in part about personnel aiming Holbrook wrote a book to end a war people like me read it and it had a huge impact on our lives right and that's not because he was a perfect man and everyone got along with him perfectly it was about a an aspiration in this way and I think you know one of things we're looking at in the broader context that I think this can be a piece of is getting people excited about diplomacy I've joked with the secretary that the state should have a Hollywood liaison that all of my nieces and nephews know exactly what or think they know exactly what a soldier in a spy is they do not know what a diplomat is now there've been some TV shows in the last year and some other things that have started to play that out but I think you know we we want to look at case studies not just to learn from them but we also want to celebrate I mean it's been the most enjoyable part of my job has been to go around and see amazing work that nobody ever hears about that our folks are doing every day in countries to try to build peace to try to pull people out of poverty and so you know for me I think this is part of getting better we got to get better we got to be honest when things aren't working but we also want to tell the story about the fact that to the American people that one of the things they support is this kind of effort I'm with that I'll hand it to you all with with our thanks for the report yes this very quickly I couldn't agree more and and peace-making and conflict resolution is tough work I mean people wouldn't have gone to war if it was if it if there weren't some very difficult issues at stake and while I think the use of special envoys or senior members of the department so empowered is important it really takes a lot of people involved to get this done that's why the the using the full instruments of the department if an envoy doesn't do that it's a mistake but beyond that the point about multilateral institutions and other allies absolutely critical and you have to be engaged and engaged heavily and sometimes it takes a very long time but I I couldn't agree more that this is an area that the US can invest a great deal more in and I think will will serve us very well in the future I'd make about six points the first is don't take the job if you don't know the issues the second is know the local players you have to reach out to them in Sarajevo that meant not only the politicians in fact it meant politicians not very much but to know the grand mufti to know the cardinal to know the head of the Jewish community these were the people who were really making policy in cultural terms and cultural terms are key third and this has been said in one way or another know the dynamics in Washington if you haven't got that game down it's not going to work know the interests of other players I mentioned the Europeans the organization of the Islamic conference NATO all of these elements have to be factored into the mix if you're going to do your job know the limits of the possible the early stages in Bosnia not much was possible except preventing starvation and preventing any more mass executions and finally take the long view ask yourself how would I like this place to look in 10 years and how can we get there when I was in the army we had a sergeant who said if you don't know where you're going you're never going to get there it's also true for special invoice thank you all very much thanks to us IP and have a wonderful holiday