Conversations with History - Thomas E. Ricks

you you welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Thomas Rix who is a senior fellow at the Center for a new American security he is contributing editor at foreign policy where he also blogs he's the author of a number of books including two books on the Iraq war Fiasco the American military adventure in Iraq and the gamble General Petraeus and the American military adventure in Iraq 2006 to 2008 he is on the Berkeley campus in the spring this year as the Nimitz lecturer Tom welcome to our program thank you for having me where were you born and raised I was born in Beverly Massachusetts my father was a professor at the time at Harvard and then later moved to Brandeis and then I was raised there in New York when my father moved to Columbia University and then later on in Afghanistan from 1969 to 1971 I was a teenager there and and looking back how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world mainly through the extraordinary freedom they gave me but my parents had six kids and in military terms they were vastly outnumbered it was the 1960s I think was also was kind of overwhelming well I had older brothers and sisters who are off doing crazy things and calling my parents in the middle of the night from California we were in New York the result was when we lived in Afghanistan I was 13 14 15 I was young enough to really not be noticed by adults much old enough to absorb the language very quickly and smart enough to skip school all the time so I spent a lot of time down in the bazaar hanging out in the old city in Kabul exploring Kabul I made it my ambition to get to every town in Afghanistan with the population of more than 5,000 I made it everyone except FISA baud in the Northeast I would hop on buses go to Kandahar go to Herat go down Pakistan which the nearest bookstore my parents a lot of time had no idea where I was I actually took a bus once from Kabul to Germany through Iran and Turkey and so on and this would have been what years 1969 1970 1971 which is kind of an Afghans can look back on it as the golden era it really was kind of thriving the u.s. and the Soviets were both pouring aid into the country in Kabul had actually become kind of an intellectual refuge both for Pakistanis and for Iranians Kabul got some new hotels up and so on it was once talking to the assassinated Prime Minister of our Pakistan benazir bhutto and she told me that was a teenager she used to go up to Kabul the party had a reputation of her partying pretty hard but they go up to the Intercontinental Hotel the dance and stop think she couldn't do in Pakistan at the time no no how do you explain your your adventuresome streak was it because your father has was an academic what and what was his field and but what was the what was the impetus for your already becoming a sounds like a reporter in about to be it's interesting ears later actually I picked up the novel Kim by Roger Kipling and it's oh this was the life I was leading knocking around the bazaar talking local language I actually dressed in Afghan clothes a lot just because it made a life easier as you're moving around maybe your reporter to be but also a writer to be we had no television then Afghanistan wasn't the last countries without a television because I skipped school I read a lot of books I tended to read a book a day there and so that's one reason I went down to the shower my parents would give me a hundred bucks books were cheap data - our I'd go down and buy 20 books go back a month later remind other 20 mm-hmm and and what was the state of Islam in Afghanistan at that time was there evidence of the of the extreme religiosity or was it really a dynamic place where the modern world was meeting the traditional world you had all those elements there yeah Kabul was a very cosmopolitan city a sense of sort of being an open city at the same time there are a lot of women who are not wearing the chaudhary the cover and there were incidents of acid being thrown in their faces my sister and I when we were new they were walking down Johnny Mae Wan which is a main road in the old city in Kabul she was 18 at the time she was wearing long pants but I think her arms were uncovered from the elbow down and she was hit by a rock so there were elements out there but I felt extraordinarily safe in the country really just I would literally hop on buses I think it was 75 cents 50 Afghan he's at the time I take the bus from Kabul to Kandahar Check Into a chai Hana a teahouse usually ten offs there 15 cents for the night and then hop another Buster Herat really is knock around the country go hiking in the hills and so on it was a lovely lovely time and then where were you educated I went to the American International School of Kabul which was a State Department sponsored school showed up frequently sometimes didn't do particularly well but in retrospect got a pretty good education at the time because of my reading I came back in 1971 where we'd lived before my father was still attached to Columbia University and went to Scarsdale high school and found that while I had read a lot I didn't have the discipline the background the facts and so I didn't do particularly well graduated with a 2.75 average but did a lot of writing and publishing some writing and by the skin of my teeth got into the University of Rochester and found that everything I'd read for the last six years suddenly kicked in and I get straight A's without a problem and a professor took me aside one day there and said you really need to go somewhere else now you got everything you got here I said where should I go he said Yale I said okay okay so I transferred applied and transfer was used and I loved yell was a really a fun place after Yale I taught at Yale China through the Yale China program I taught it leaned on University in Hong Kong and realized one day I was teaching English and American literature as preparing a lecture and realized most of what I was teaching were things I'd learn from my peers at Yale not from my classes sitting around the dining room table it really was a vibrant interesting place to be and and so I think you helped us understand why the trajectory leading to be journalist the conditions that that pushed you in that direction question now is you're also a writer you've written several books even a novel about life in Afghanistan I guess before an American invasion let's talk about writing what led you to become a writer what how did that piece come together fundamentally I think I have a writing gene I come from a very verbal family all of us mom seemed to be writers all the kids and the families would have had different aspects of writing the younger sister who just published a book on constitutional law another younger sister wrote a funny book about medicine once so I think that's the first thing just coming from this huge turbulent family where our dining room table was always covered with books newspapers and magazines where I started reading The New Yorker I think when I was three or four for the cartoons because it was lying around so I think before I was a journalist I was a writer I went to college assuming I become a professor of English literature teaching English and American literature in Hong Kong I found that no what I really liked was writing that was the attraction to me when I compared what I was doing to what my young American friends in Hong Kong were doing which mainly were journalists they were having more fun first of all people gave them credit cards to go places and that seemed like such a nice racket I mean you get to get on an airplane check in a hotel buy your meals rent the car and they pay for everything sounds good to me so I went to the Wilson quarterly a magazine published by the Smithsonian went from there to eventually the Wall Street Journal enjoyed the Wall Street Journal it really was that credit card Knockaround type of thing spent 17 years there then moved to the Washington Post I was there for eight years I have to say though in retrospect I was never entirely comfortable as a journalist I always sense the limitations of journalism I was really struck by a line in evylyn Hua's novel scoop news is what people who don't care much about anything read it really is about the ephemeral and frequently about the trivial and I would find myself at odds with those demands a lot remember one day an editor of mine walked up with a sad look on his face of the Washington Post consent Tom your lead on this story the first sentence he said it's just not a Washington Post lead I look up said thank you that's not what I'm trying to do here is write typical what what did tell us what what does it mean to be somebody who gives over their life to writing what what what is that experience like for the person who is the writer you know I'm always sort of puzzled when people talk about how painful writing is a friend of mine used to have a poster on us while writing is easy you just stare at a typewriter until bees of blood up here in your forehead I just never got that I've always liked to write I used to think about this when I was interviewing David Petraeus a lot in Iraq Petraeus has to run every day some people need to run five miles a day I really need to write a thousand words a day it's one reason I do a blog because sometimes when I'm doing book research you really don't do much writing for a week or two it a spell so for me there's a simple joy just a sitting and writing and putting stuff together yesterday afternoon I took three hours and wrote an introduction to a book about TE Lawrence that a friend of mine is writing and asked me to help them out with the introduction it was a pleasure i sat down now they go around 1:30 I stood up at 5:30 and I had 980 words on the page he'd asked for 800 supports for me it's just it's the most natural process in the world recently on a Monday morning I woke up at 5:00 a.m. with my wife said why are you getting up so early nice I haven't written since Friday mm-hmm so so do is it it is as if the what you write just flows through you or it doesn't sound like for you it's a struggle to joy it that's right it is a joy and the funny thing was the newspaper were a struggle with me I was never mean and I want a couple of Pulitzer Prizes I was part of teams than when Pulitzer Prizes but journalism was never easy for me it always was kind of feeling like my shoulders were hitting the box I'd never feel that way book-writing book-writing to me is almost like taking dictation I mean especially with Fiasco which was written in a 360-day frenzy where I just worked non-stop I mean I literally it was 360 days of 18-hour days without up without a break but for me that that book especially was just boom sit down and write with very little looking back in fact very little revision on it I finished writing at I remember in December and I went downstairs to the basement where my wife was writing her own book and I said I finished him she said what do you think I said I don't care if it doesn't sell a single copy I've written what I set out to write for me it was just here's my testimony about what's going on and I was talking about this last night in my lecture the only reason I can think of to write a book is because you really are compelled to you have to get out of your head it's something that's nagging you and you can either have all these thoughts and words chasing around inside your skull or you can get them out so for me it was kind of almost a process to what the hell happened in Iraq with us to us were puzzled through here's this US military which I've covered for a long time I have a lot of friends and the military a lot of people I admire in the military how could this magnificent institution screw it up so badly and that was the driving question from behind Fiasco before we talk about you works on Iraq i'm curious what what was the factor of factors that led to your interest in the military it actually goes back to the 1970s and to events that really struck me 1975 I was in college and Saigon fell and for me that was a real timeout moment wait a second you know all those demonstrations my parents hauled me to when I was little kid about Vietnam nobody ever said the result of this is going to be a communist takeover of South Vietnam and watching that unfold with the Cambodian Holocaust with the boat people fleeing Vietnam I think America especially American left has never really come to terms with what that meant were we really right including you know the US government I actually think the assassination of Jam in 1963 in Vietnam was a disastrous moment in the Vietnam War and really was something we should keep in mind so the first event is the fall of Saigon the second event was the fall of Kabul in December 1979 again wait a second this is not how it's supposed to be there are not supposed to be Soviet tanks rolling through my old neighborhood and so those two events were a real kind of political awakening for me that made me think what I've been taught to assume about the world about the US military isn't really accurate so I need to study this more myself what I found I was by accident before the Wall Street Journal in the neighborhood of Grenada when that we invented that country so I was kind of just thrown into it and then subsequently was thrown in as a backup reporter into Central America what I found covering the military was I really enjoyed it one of the problems of newspaper reporting in Washington DC is there's a certain bloodless nough stew it you cover the State Department it's just policy with it's not really real the White House is very constrained and what you can cover but you can talk to Congress actually is a bit more lively because there's a lot of different people doing things and intelligence is a horrible be because every always lies to you what I found was covering the military is you have real people doing real things and so you don't just have policy at the tactical level you can actually go out and see things you can compare what's the policy what's the theory what's the practice what's the reality on the ground which endlessly intrigued me you can write about foreign policy technology demographics it's a great way of looking at America as I did in using the book making the core to look not just at the Marines but also the eighteen-year-old American who I found to my surprise to be the most articulate of critics once he trusted you and his discussion of American society so I came to really enjoy the military just as a broad subject of endlessly interesting and also I love history and I found before I wrote about anything there was always a good book of history you're going to go in on aircraft carrier read about the history of aircraft carriers we'd have read about how carriers operate and so on so so in in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War in the aftermath of 9/11 you actually were as a journalist were going around to a lot of the hotspots and getting a feel on the ground for how the military was adapting to essentially the the new world that that they had to act in in ways that call for a very different mission when I took the Pentagon be I've been an editor at the Pentagon beat and 1991 I think I'm think it was and I'm were my boss took me aside and said you know the Cold War is over and so what you're really going to do is cover the conversion of the US military into other things like airplane manufacturers are not going to make refrigerators you said remember that phrase that's going to be what you write about ok turn on he was obviously entirely wrong what I found myself wasn't a non-stop run for several years some all all your Bosma Haiti Kosovo Iraq Afghanistan and it was an adaptive process and in fact I was in Mogadishu with the 1st battalion 7th Marines in December 1991 and wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal about the Marines adapting to this mission but I'm were walking along a dusty road near the Mogadishu Airport with corporal Armando Rodriguez who was an acting squad leader and he was I said how did you get to a situation where year this young man in the strange country in a difficult environment and you're leading this squad through this I said a guy your age your background your education we wouldn't trust her on the Xerox machine in my office and here we are essentially trusting you with national policy they said it's all about Paris island I said ok I got to look into that made a mental note went down to Parris Island and said yeah there's going to be a book in this about this and so really as the military was adapting I was looking at that constantly and writing books about that over the course of 20 years mm-hmm now you talked about the fall of Saigon the fall of Kabul and so as a person who both loved respected and analyzed and could be critical about the military what what were your feelings as the Iraq war unfolded especially in its its first phase because it it seemed to be a breakdown of almost all of our institutions I had a feeling of deep unease actually 2000 304 no five were actually a very difficult time for me personally it was just an enormous strain and sort of looking at this I had actually thought that invading Afghanistan after 9/11 was exactly the right thing to do you know al-qaeda came out of there sure they were all Saudi Arabians but they were almost all but they were based in Afghanistan from the beginning Iraq just puzzled me why are we doing this and when I would go two people I knew at the Pentagon senior officers names people knowing I had well I don't understand what's going on here and they say needed a way and I wrote about this in fiasco actually so many officers on the combatant commands around the world the senior tuss military headquarters had queried the Joint Staff why are we doing this drive to Iraq that a really unusual order was issued you will consider any invasion of Iraq to be part of the Global War on Terror well okay the military got the message and that's right for them to get the message in our system you do want a civilian oversight of the military a military consciously subordinate possibly in control and so when the civilians say you know this is part of the war on terror they said okay it's part of the war on terror but the screw up in Iraq was far deeper than that I'm a being in Baghdad in the spring of three in the media aftermath of the invasion this is May and being struck by the enormous discrepancy between what the Americans said and thought and what the Iraqis did by luck one of my colleagues was Anthony Shadid at the Washington Post he's now at the New York Times terrific report a really nice guy I was embedded with the first Armored Division then commanded by Major General Ricardo Sanchez who went on to become the American commander in the first year he was essentially embedded in Sadr City with the sadhus every couple of days Anthony and I would meet at the Washington Post bureau have a few beers sit out back and talk and I got the sense in those weeks this is the only place in Baghdad where these two very different views are being brought together and compared I think my all-time favorite story was on Memorial Day of 2003 Anthony and I went out with the first Armored Division and the first Armored Division patrol though the name is armored it was an infantry patrol in West Baghdad we had talked to the lieutenant and his commanders before this I embedded into patrol and walked with them and talked with them we were in a section of Baghdad called Yarmouk and West West a very badass Sooni and actually very much about military retirees section about bad debt anthony walked along behind the patrol talking to the iraqis and it was painfully evident at the end of the patrol anthony I sat down and the American soldiers were saying they love us see the kids they stopped off they visited an orphanage they were very careful to take off their sunglasses before going in they put their weapons outside left them under guard with another soldier and their point was the kids loved us we visited the orphanage we're protecting people and Anthony said well when I talked to the Iraqi men outside the orphanage they said you went inside to have sex with the teachers and one of the young soldier said but what about the kids he said well you're seeing some of the kids I went over and talked to a 15 year old who said when they walk by they walk on my heart this was just stunning shocking to the Americans and we sat down I wrote that story and opting about being a military correspondent is the bettering material the easier it is to write combat is the easiest thing in the world to cover you just sit and write it down and it goes BAM I was one sampling an ambushed and destroyed took 20 minutes to write right on the front page of the post the next day Anthony I sat down wrote that story and it just sailed on to the front page to the next day's post and to me that really captured the essence of the problem just fundamental misunderstandings about what we thought we were doing there and how the Iraqis perceived it this raises the interesting question about the whole problem of embedding and how one navigates you know on the one hand really reporting and analyzing what's going on and doing that in a context where you you're not becoming a servant of the Pentagon propaganda machine but on the other hand as you just pointed out if you're doing your job well and you're you're getting sources of information from different places you can really reveal both the good on our side and in the bed yeah I'm a big fan of embedding I've always thought first of all it's a great way to educate a reporter and one of the problems we have in nowadays with reporters is none of them not a lot of enough military experience or understanding being embedded first of all just teaches you a lot I would never have an idle moment and in bed I mean if I'm just sitting there and it's boring I would turn to a soldier and say you're the 50 Cal gunner explained the 50 Cal to me when you look at this piece of machinery what do you think I've done this with pilots walk me around your aircraft when you look at this what does this mean to you how does this work what do you like about it what do you dislike about it so it's endlessly educating the second thing is the military of you is a legitimate view you want to represent it in fact my readers it was the most important thing these were their wives husbands sons brothers sisters in the field and that's a crucial story for the American we don't to understand my third thought in being an embed was I'm running for several audiences the Washington Post I'm running for a huge military establishment around Washington and every story I write there's somebody who actually knows the subject better than me so a little bit of humility helps I'm also writing for members of Congress and the 20,000 people who work for them and the hundred thousand people who Lobby them who have a lot of influence over the military but generally know nothing about it third I'm writing for people who know nothing about any of this and I need to make them understand it and care about it also so these several different audiences really struck me in Iraq there was another audience that began to worry me one day I was talking to an intelligence officer and he said Tom just thought you should know we were going into an Iraqi military headquarters and one of your stories was printed out and pinned up on the wall interesting okay so people who are the enemy are now reading me in real time what does that mean how do you take that into account so embedding to me was you'll get it's like the blind men and the elephant yeah you'll feel the leg of the elephant is it the whole elephant no but it's an important part of that and one that my readers really cared about now in addition to as you were embedded and walking the streets of Baghdad as you just described what was what were your other sources of information about what was going on because you had a situation where our military was now wired how did that impact on the conversation you could have with different levels of the military to sort of ultimately reveal the the absolute terrible situation that we placed our soldiers and in fiasco you had you clearly were reading a lot of the battlefield reports and there was one report that you quote by a soldier or an officer saying that what we were doing there was pasting feathers hoping for a duck and amazing quote up I had a fairly conscious intellectualized approach to reporting which is there is always a level of action there's a level at which there's a guy who knows what the theory is but also knows what the practice is in different Wars it's different levels of our covering World War one it's probably the division or even the core level World War two on a certainly the division or the regimental combat team level in small Wars frequently it's the Petunia a company commander level I found in Iraq it was the battalion level these guys knew what the theory was sometimes the division commander was just clueless never got out of his headquarters frequently the top commanders of Petraeus would be very well informed then you had a couple of levels of profound ignorance and then some really informed levels what I found in Iraq was that was the battalion commander level so I spent a lot of time with battalion commanders what I typically would do was a common country and say to the military give me all the briefings you want hit me with your best shot so you get all the theory and then I would descend every echelon down Corps division Brigade battalion company platoon squad fireteam and when I got down to the bottom I'd say okay now I'm going to go back up to the level where reality meets meets meets theory and that would again take me back up to battalion then at the end I usually would go back to the very top people and say this is what you told me this is what I saw this is the discrepancy I perceived how would you explain that in kind of an iterative process really almost a galleon synthesis coming out of it then when I wrote Fiasco I took all my reporting and I sat down to write and discovered something I hadn't expected hadn't really come home to me yet which was all the people I had talked to in Iraq and by that point I think I had talked to what my colleague were in low but talked almost every single battalion commander there that year and knew them word contact them as I finished each section of the book I would email it to everybody who was mentioned cuz I had all their email addresses and you can figure out what their email addresses are if they're in the military pretty easily and so I would email and say here's what I'm writing speak now or forever hold your peace and guys would write back to me sorry Tom look I was in a firefight all yesterday I really whipped but give me till tomorrow and I'll write to you the next day a thoughtful note would come frequently with attachments and here's the significant incident report I filed and then I got into some nastier stuff and people would say well look here's the affidavit I filed so I go through the affidavit and put that in the book and I'd send it to everybody who was in the affidavit guys would write back look I don't know how you found out who I am but clearly you've been talking to my battalion commander let me tell you you know here's here's my take on it here's what here's the statement I gave to investigators I wound up going through about 32,000 pages of documents I'm compiling them and sending people again and again here's the chapter as it stands now most interesting that this was general Odierno who is criticized very heavily in fiasco but actually praised quite well in Gambel interesting difference he initially declined talk to me I said fine you know that's that's your privilege then I said on the chapter about his division and he came hustling over to my office with a pile of documents I said here when he can yell and we sat and talked for most of a day with his side of the story interestingly when I did the gamble he was very open with me despite my being having been very critical of him in fiasco and I think it's because he thought he did he disagreed with it but he got in a fair shot he'd had his chance to get tell this on a story give his response let me very briefly show the two books Fiasco is the story of the the first phase of the war and your second book the gamble is the story of the turnaround under General Petraeus and in Fiasco you really do more than what was going on in Iraq it's really an analysis of the strategic debate in Washington the failure of the press the failure of the Congress talk a little about that and because it seems absolutely essential to understand the failure in Washington to understand the failure in Iraq because we didn't have the resources on the battlefield we met it needed and and we were very unclear what we were doing there and this was not a something that the military should be providing it really should be the civilian leadership you write a book for one reason we thought ideas because you have to and Fiasco is very much figuring out how did we have this massive failure since I wrote for you ask oh I've actually come to I think achieve or get to an even sort of broader understanding I think actually what happened was after 9/11 we had a national panic the role of our leaders should be to tamp down panic and I think the Bush administration President Bush vice president Cheney instead fed that panic I think they panicked personally partly because even the White House was perceived to have been under attack Donald Rumsfeld had the panic was in the Pentagon when it was hit by the airliner so I think this is very purse for them and I do think they were knocked off balance and I think the whole country was knocked off balance and remember we invaded Iraq just two years after 9/11 and I think it took us several years to regain our equilibrium and when the country was off balance people were not thinking clearly but it wasn't just the press it was the a massive failure of Congress to deal with this there was an air of confusion about the entire enterprise I was constantly struck in Iraq that the civilians and the military the u.s. civilians like Bremer and the military were at odds in their understanding of the mission Bremer was trying to carry out revolutionary operations let's transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy the military on its own redefined the mission and stability well those two missions are in odds and they never resolved that and so we had these sort of people just butting heads together in the Iraqis wondering what are these people trying to do here and and going back to your earlier experiences after the end of the Cold War it seems that this was these questions were never resolved in our own mind I mean do we enter they intervene in places like Kosovo or Somalia for humanitarian concerns are we doing it for our security interests and it seems that as the Bush administration was trying to figure out what it had gotten itself into that they were constantly changing in their own mind what what they wanted to accomplish there well actually I would disagree with that a bit I think the Bush administration was very clear in what it thought it was doing it was responding on to 9/11 in a repeal Wolfowitz was in many ways the intellectual architect of this we're going to drain the swamp of terror and their whole attitude anytime anybody brought up an objection that's old thick that's pre 9/11 thinking Wolfowitz like to say well that's exactly the type of thing that led to 9/11 although State Department Erebus talking about the Arab Street saying you know you can't do that now this everything was new it was almost a sukhiya it's sort of this is you know year zero history has nothing to tell us here and so they were very clear about what they thought they were doing in retrospect it was an insane mission the world's youngest culture is going to go in and change the world's oldest oldest culture at the point of a gun and we're going to get out quickly remember the original plan was to be down to 30,000 troops in Iraq by September 2003 this was going to be a six-month mission the you press the insanity of this is just striking to me in retrospect the problem I have with the military is the military instead of saying timeout this is the same mission so well when you get a crazy mission let's just redefine it without telling anybody and so you have them carrying out missions that are directly at odds with what the US officials are trying to do the Fallujah brick factory really stands out in my mind on this Bremer says we're going to have a free market flat tax sort of neoconservative Society right here in the middle of the Arab world and so he starts among other things he shuts down the Baptist Party all you people with power you got no future here dissolves the Iraqi army which we told them we wouldn't do when we drop leaflets and closes down inefficient government factories well one of the inefficient government factories they closed down was the Fallujah brick factory suddenly there's a lot of young men in Fallujah looking for work we're not providing it go to the free market we said you know the free market was al-qaeda they had money and they were hiring and they killed American troops so this approach the Americans had confused and free market led directly to the killing of American troops and so American commanders say this is nuts and so you get things like Petraeus up in Mosul basically ignoring the American civilians down at Baghdad he's hiring Baptist he is an independent foreign policy with Syria he's very effective but the US military doesn't like Petraeus particularly is kind of ignoring what he's doing they want to keep on sort of fighting more conventionally if we had recognized Petraeus successes early on and the spring of oh four you could have put them in charge that's what we would have done in world war two let's put that guy in charge he's figured this out instead it took the military another three or four years of really being mired in an unproductive wasteful approach before they finally said ah this isn't working let Dave try the second book the gamble is really about how d'Arnaud and Petraeus turn things around what what are the key factors there as and I know you're interested in this broader question of what makes for great leaders in our our military I'll give you an answer that may surprise you it certainly surprises me I actually think the beginning of wisdom was humility we finally after several years we shut up and started asking Iraqis you know you guys have been here a couple of thousand years what do you think we should do and even putting our power subordinate to Iraqis what do you want to do and how can we help you do it and when we started asking some questions the answer started getting interesting which is you know we really don't like these all kind of guys if you would just kind of get off our backs you know we'd like to deal with them and you had these little signs and the spring oh six now bar early on seven at Baghdad a key moment is a local insurgent came to an American commander and West Baghdad and said you know you and I've been fighting here but tomorrow I'm going to be attacking an al-qaeda guys because we really don't like them and if you could just like not bother us we'd really appreciate it and say something okay well stand back well he the American commander battalion commander stands back to watch this it doesn't go quite right the al Qaeda fighters are tougher opponent than the insurgents that thought and the surgeons start to lose the fight in the middle of this they asked for American aid these are the people have been blown us up a week earlier well you need some real good intellectual flexibility in strategic understanding the American commander goes to their aid Petraeus hears about this and someone's the battalion commander you know this guy must have thought whoa here goes my career Petraeus says this is really interesting tell me what you do it the same thing is happening out in Anbar province where people we had consider the enemy we're saying you know we could actually work out something here we ended up putting the Americans ended up putting the Sunni insurgency on the American payroll 100,000 fighters 30 million dollars a month sounds like a lot of money but it's you know about what George Steinbrenner used to pay a bad second baseman could deal from mine to my mind we did it behind the backs of the Iraqi government and that really was the beginning of the turn around so humility realizing we don't understand it in a bang warren buffett's key insight if you've been playing poker for half an hour and you don't know who the patsy at the table is you're the Patsy we stopped making ourselves the Patsy we started asking some questions and that was the beginning of wisdom I think empathy humility and drive are the three things that really were key in beginning the turnaround but I want emphasize I think the Turner I was only tactical it was not strategic the purpose of the surge was not only to overcome the difficulties but also to change the politics of Iraq those politics have not changed what's happening in Iraq is is I actually think quite worried quite worrisome right now and I think Iraq is in the long run has a lot of trouble ahead of it we still have a very small understanding of how much the Iraq war is going to cost us this is going to play out over another decade or two the there's an interesting point I want to make which was one of the aspects of the Bush administration was well we don't do that because Clinton did it so that is rejecting the past part of what Petraeus and oderno did was to go back to what the military knew about counterinsurgency is that is that correct I mean that so the a doctrine that was dismissed because of the outcome of the Vietnam War Willie was brought back that is you need to protect the population listen to the people and the primary mission is not to protect your own soldiers yeah the conventional US military view had been we're all about the annihilation of the enemy and that was pretty much the lesson of World War two you know go kill Nazis that's the road the road home goes through Berlin Petraeus is in sight and this comes partly out of his having done it at PhD dissertation at Princeton on the Vietnam War was know this is really about making the enemy irrelevant and they got in some really good foreign experts David Kilcullen out of Australia Emma Skye out of Britain and Kilcullen said you know the worst thing you can do with your enemy is kill them then you're just walking into blood feuds the second but the best thing you can do with your enemy is to flip him to get him to come over to your side he knows the whole situation he knows everybody he knows how these things work the second best thing is to capture him and get some intelligence information the third best thing is to demoralize him so he just stops fighting and the worst thing is to to kill them and that really required a reorientation let's not focus on the enemy because all we're doing every time we kill people is make more enemies let's focus on the people and so the Petraeus and Odierno move their troops off the big bases where they've been out driving in Humvee patrols for one hour a day and the enemy controlling the neighborhood for the other 23 moving them out into the neighborhoods the platoon sized a little outpost in a platoon usually you have three squads and they'd always try to have one squad out one squad resting once caught preparing and once caught out on a 24-hour cycle that suddenly met you in the neighborhoods constantly and you began to develop a sense of what's right what's wrong even if you don't speak the language you can say you know that truck is there every morning or hey I've never seen that truck and you can turn to interpreters I find out where that trucks from oh it's from Fallujah oh that's bad that's where the bombs come from and so finally these people started actually understanding their microenvironment which is what you have to do and that's how to war now now you were saying that and I did you think the future of Iraq is dicey I guess in part we still haven't addressed the problems of tribalism sectarian ISM you know political solutions division of the oil and so on so so I guess the the question is what is an outcome that we should want basically is it to stabilize to the extent possible so that we can withdraw or or obviously we're not going to transform Iraq into the democracy that was the original Wolfowitz goal all the basic questions they're vexed Iraq before the surge are still there the only difference is the Americans got out more or less with their dignity intact though I think will be blamed for this for a long time but the basic questions how do you divide oil revenue what's the fundamental relationship between Kurds Sunni Shiite where does power reside in Iraq will you have a strong central government or a loose confederation all those questions led to violence in the past and Iraq before the surge de surge solved none of them all of them are still there all of them are likely to lead to violence again the dominating question I thought would be oil at the time I was right in the gamble I actually think now it's probably is the sectarian question when we invaded Iraq we knocked down with the Arab saw is their barrier against Persian power and they fear Persian power for 2,000 years it has loomed over them and we've knocked that apart we essentially have moved Shiite power a few hundred miles west of the Euphrates River doesn't seem like a lot to us it's huge in the Arab world I think what you're seeing for example today in Bahrain is in many ways probably a Sunni Shiite proxy conflict and so I think we've intensified this division the Sunnis are not reconciled to the ascendancy of the Shiites who have been dominated by them for 500 years a friend of mine of the US government recently said he expected the first nuclear exchange in history to be between a Sunni and Shiite power which each side has nuclear weapons and use of them if that happens I think historians might well back look back of the evasion of Iraq as the lighting of that fuse and and what what has this Fiasco turn into a gamble what are the consequences for the US military because the question we learned something in Iraq we change course it's not going to deliver the ideal outcome as you just explained but it has the learning experience impacted the military so we won't do another Iraq in the way we did the first phase of this war the US military learned enormous amounts in Vietnam and then in the mid-1970s threw it all out the door partly because they were so sick of that war partly because the American people who said we're not going to do that again and then it seems like we lost that lesson over the course of a generation and we did do it again so while we've learned a lot in Iraq and the US military's adapted enormous ly it's so different than it was on September 10th 2001 I'm not sure that what those lessons will be retained what we've seen especially in Petraeus no tierno with the importance of critical thinking and that's actually one reason I really like and admire things like the Berkeley ROTC program you really want well educated thoughtful officers able to bring to bear some intellectual firepower on these problems I worry though that these lessons are discarded very quickly we're not going to do that again well guess what we probably end up doing that again the trace is not a popular figure within the US Army and in many ways deeply resented you know Princeton intellectual PhD likes reporters successful in Iraq you know three strikes in the eyes of a lot of other generals and he is kind of an outlier you always had these sort of officers in the military but the question is whether they're put in positions of command before the tray is HR McMaster some of the other people that Petraeus brought in before they were put in a position to actually affect the war in Iraq the US Army fought there for several years fought in Iraq longer than a fought in World War two before it very grudgingly said okay let them have a try so I don't know I think the jury is very much out as to whether these lessons will be taken assimilated my bet is know the bureaucracy does not like to absorb change the military mindset is very conservative the Army especially has a very cautious mindset either the Army is mired in 20th century industrial era ways of management and I think this could be very damaging in the long run to them you have a feel for Afghanistan based on your experience with the country you clearly have a feel of kind of a change within the military at the same time you you have a great respect for it as an institution what you haven't really covered the Afghan war in the recent period but but how do you put those two things together help us think tell us the questions we should be asking about what we're doing in Afghanistan the problem question um in my mind is we've never sorted out in our counterinsurgency theory the problem of the host government our kind of insurgency approach is based on the British and French colonial experience and they generally were fighting to stay there in Iraq and Afghanistan I do genuinely believe we are fighting to leave we're trying to get out and so we've never resolved that fundamental contradiction you just don't want to establish a colonial government that's beholden to you like theirs were beholden to London and Paris and so both in Iraq and Afghanistan I actually see conflict with the host government is a good thing when Karzai attacks that's a sign of power on his part he has to if he's going to establish his Street credibility as an independent actor if he's going to move beyond puppet hood so I think in both cases I'm looking at the host government's not actually that there's a great academic study to be done of host nation relations Korea Vietnam Iraq and Afghanistan when I was studying the Korea Korean War in Vietnam as well you noticed there's an enormous amounts of friction between the Americans and the local government I mean we we killed the leader of South Vietnam complicit lean is killing in Arcona 1963 so that's the first question on my mind is basically how do we get kicked out and how do we recognize getting kicked out is victory for us that's the only way I think we really get out of these things the other big question in my mind is the state of the US military we're in an unprecedented sit State here we've been fighting now for almost 10 years continuously with really a small fraction of the population the US military is about one piece of the population 1.5 percent with dependence of the US military only about half is Army in Marine Corps and only about half of them have actually been fighting the war so it really is like 0.25 percent that we've thrown in again and again the typical infantryman now has a lot more combat experience than any people we had in World War two they've been there on their fifth six tours and so on I think it's unconscionable what we're doing to these people what we're doing to these families we've never done this sort of thing before and the burden we're putting on that that 1% of society and the other 99% ignoring it worries me first as a democracy but also just as a moral issue the Middle East is changing and we're not controlling the change you talked about the Sunni see a conflict we have the emergence of democratization movements in places like Egypt but we don't we don't really know what the outcome will be because there there are no institutions are we now in a bind where there we really don't have a strategy to deal with that region and until we have a strategy if that's possible given the complexity then our military is going to find itself as a football Cup I actually think we do have a strategy but we're not willing to put our money where our mouth is we're explicitly on the side of democracy ization that's the President Obama's statement he's just not wanted to do anything to support as far as I can tell so what you're seeing is us acting like a second-rate power we're willing to make recommendations but not want to do anything about it and we've kind of reduced ourselves to the level of France and Britain who are saying no you should do something so I think we're right now seeing an experiment and the absence of American leadership mm-hmm and what will change that are we too weak in economic terms and in other respects to to be able to do all that we might give no actually I actually don't think you know a no-fly zone for example or other sorts of intervention in Libya would be that expensive first of all I would expect a lot of the forces involved to be Arab Saudi Arabian air force Egyptian Air Force maybe the Moroccans what we bring to the table is know how how you actually do one of these things and command and control this this is it's a complex thing what's the rules of engagement what do you do when a surface-to-air missile is fired from the courtyard of a mosque how do you deal with helicopters this can get very messy very quickly and we have a lot of experience in that so I don't think it no I actually think it's a President Obama's reluctance I think is a considered one I think he's a very thoughtful man but it's not economic it's not like we can't afford this in fact I actually think the Arab League probably have asked to pay for it right something he really does not want to do it as my personal one final question and that is this you do two sectors of our audience journalism students and ROTC students how would you suggest that they prepare for the future in both cases what what kind of what do they do with their education what what kind of experience should they generate so that they will be effective actors in in this kind of world that's emerging the two things that have really helped me that I generally recommend is learn a foreign culture and a foreign language together or in that culture in it that really is just intellectual expansion of the most basic sort it's it's an endlessly fertile approach the second thing is read history we deeply read widely in history it's a it's a it's a bottomless well of knowledge for us history does not operate by parallels I think someone famously say history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme um there are ways of informing us I mean I was really struck I just happened I was looking thinking about Libya and went back in Roman history one of the Roman Emperor one of the greatest ones came out of eastern Libya the the word the name Tripoli is actually Greek from try polis the three cities that were closed together on the coast I was start to see that eastern Libya and Crete together or a Roman province and so just a little bit of Roman history sort of informed by my view of eastern Libya so I think just really foreign cultures foreign languages and reading history of all sorts really great approaches for either journalist or Rossi students let me show you two books again the gamble about the turnaround in Iraq and fiasco about the first phases of the war and the title says it all and kama want to thank you for for taking the time to come on our programs a very informative discussion you're welcome I enjoyed it and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history by travelpod you you

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Length: 58min 27sec (3507 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2011