(audience voices overlapping) (tapping on microphone) - Good afternoon. I'm Daniel Benjamin, the
director of the Dickey Center, and I want to welcome you to this lecture by General James Mattis, this year's Class of 1950 senior
foreign affairs fellow. And I'd like to begin by
thanking the Class of 1950 for their great generosity in
making this event possible. The Class of 1950 was the very first class that had John Sloan Dickey preside over their entire time at Dartmouth. And I know many of them were inspired by him to lead lives
engaged in world affairs. I particularly want to welcome members of the class who are here, Doug Smith, Jim Strickler, David Taylor, Joe Medlicott. Thank you so much for coming today. And I hope I haven't mangled
any of your names. (laughs) I am really delighted that Jim Mattis could join us at the Dickey
Center for two weeks this fall. Over the course of a 41-year career, that began when he was
commissioned as a lieutenant, he has commanded platoons, companies, battalions, and divisions. Many of you may have
read about General Mattis in the best-seller Generation Kill, or in One Bullet Away: The
Making of a Marine Officer by Dartmouth trustee
Nate Fick, Class of '99. And those are very good places to start to get a sense of his innovation
as a military commander, his dedication to those he led in combat, and into his bravery. And if you see Nate Fick,
ask him what it was like to slide into a forward fighting hole in the desert outside of
Kandahar one freezing night and find then-Brigadier
General Jim Mattis leaning against sandbags, checking up
on a corporal and a sergeant. As Nate wrote in his book, this was real leadership. It's safe to say, and I think that some of the attendees
here will confirm this, that there's no living Marine who's had a more distinguished career or illustrious record
than General Jim Mattis. And the reverence in which he is held in the US military is truly extraordinary. The capstone on his remarkable career was his service as the
four-star combatant command, or as they say in the
land of endless acronyms and abbreviations, the
COCOM, of Central Command. For those of you unfamiliar with the way the military is organized, the
COCOM is the senior commander of regions that are roughly
as large as continents. As head of Central Command,
which comprehends the busiest and most troubled of all
regions of the world, General Mattis oversaw military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and relationships with 18 other countries, ranging from Pakistan to Egypt. He commanded more than
200,000 men and women. At least as important, as The Washington Post's Dana
Priest wrote some years ago, commanders like General
Mattis have become, in her word, proconsuls,
wielding enormous influence among the governments of the regions. In an era of resource-starved diplomacy, the COCOMs have become some of our most important emissaries, and they play a pivotal role
in the policy process, as well. More often than not,
they have relationships with foreign leaders of
a depth and a quality that are unsurpassed. On a personal note, I
can say that in my time, as the head of the Counterterrorism Bureau at the State Department,
I couldn't have asked for a better colleague on the military side than General Mattis. And when it came to
dealing with such hot-spots and headaches as Pakistan and Yemen, he was the ideal partner, thoughtful, constructive,
always energetic, and perhaps most amazingly at
that level of the universe, a good listener. I'm incredibly pleased that
he agreed to come to Dartmouth before taking up the position at Stanford's Hoover
Institution later this fall, and I want to thank him
for making so many visits to so many classes, meetings
with so many different student and faculty groups, and
individuals here at Dartmouth. The last three years have been
arguably the most eventful in the history of the broader Middle East. And, as we look across the
region, we see a civil war, and the worst humanitarian
crisis in a generation in Syria. Revolution and repression in Egypt. The prospect of a nuclear-armed
Iran looming closer. An uncertain Iraq and a major transformation in Afghanistan. So I can't think of anyone
better to give a tour of the horizon, a tormented
horizon, I might add, than General James Mattis. He's told me he's going to
give a comprehensive view of the region, and then afterwards, we'll have plenty of time to drill down during questions and answers. It's my great pleasure to
welcome General James Mattis. (audience applause) - Well, thanks very much, Ambassador Dan, and thanks all of you
for having me up here. Something that glowing
could only have been written if you conspired with my mother. I don't think anyone else would come up with something that nice. And it is a pleasure to
be here at Dartmouth. It's been the rigor,
it's been the reputation of the Dartmouth faculty, of
the Dartmouth student body, that brought me here. I had many different offers,
and I chose this one. Part of the reason is a sense of guilt, since 95% of Ambassador Dan's problems grew out of my region
that when he asked me, I kind of felt I had to put
him at the front of the line. It's also a privilege to be here, because, frankly, ladies and gentlemen, after some of my publicized remarks, it's a pleasure and honor to be invited to any polite company to speak anymore. (audience laughter) So, thank you, thanks very much. And I do have an affiliation with the Class of 1950, as well. I was born that year. So thanks very much for having me here. (audience laughter) But, I do appreciate y'all taking the time to meet out of your schedules, also those of you out in virtual land. This is streaming live, I understand, and even there to where
I once on the faculty at the Naval Academy
Prep School in Newport. They're watching. They're probably going to grade
me on this, unfortunately, so I'm going to have to
be alert to the potential that once again, I could
be in academic trouble, as I was when I was your young ages. I think, though, for those of us who've been modestly successful
in our chosen line of work, we owe it to you to run
the elevator back down, open the door, invite
you on board, and say these are the mistakes I made. We're no smarter than you. We have a little bit more confidence about what we can do in the world, because you just haven't been there yet, but we certainly owe it to you to explain where we went right, where we went wrong, and we'll really get into some of that in the question and answer period where you can challenge me, because during the tour of the horizon, as Ambassador put it, this is a very contentious area. I've served out here since
I sailed into these waters as an infantry company commander on a Navy amphibious ship in 1979. And that's before some of
you were born, young lady. So I would just tell you that, I'd try and give you a tour of this very tumultuous zone that's in
more upset than anytime that I've served out there. We're gonna have to go a little
lightly as I speak to it, hopefully give you
enough to prime the pump, and then you come back at me here. And I'll talk just long enough, I think, to close the gap between
you and I a little bit. And speak about basically three things. The Middle East situation, certainly, and our enduring interest
in something I think, sir, based on our discussion in
the boys' room ahead of time, I wanna convince you that we
do have enduring interests out here that keep us locked on. Our military's role in the Middle East. I mean, where does it fit into all this? Perhaps some of you think, and there's certainly
an argument to be made that we've over-militarized
our foreign policies. So where does the military fit, what's its proper role? And certainly I wanna talk
about our military itself in the face of reduced budgets. And then we'll open it up
to whatever's on your minds, go wherever you wanna take it. First, the situation. One person I said Sir to in
Washington about two years ago, had called me in, and the way he put it was, what in the heck is
going on in your region? As if I was responsible for it. So it is quite a place. The Mid-East as we know it today, though, one of the challenges we face, is some people became
aware of it intellectually at a certain point. And the Middle East did not
start with the Arab Spring. Okay, y'all say we understand that. Well it didn't start with 9/11 either. And it also didn't start with the birth of the modern state of Israel, it didn't start with the colonial era. It goes back, I'll give you an example, the Sunni and Shia tensions you see violently displayed in Syria today, are what, 13, 1400 years old right now? So as the more you narrow
your understand the situation, the less understanding
you'll have of the situation. And it is a very, very complex region. So let me start with a quick tour just to remind ourselves of the extent of some of the challenges. I won't even be able to hit them all. And if I took the entire
time, no question and answer, I still couldn't cover it all. So some of you will come back at me, say, why didn't you? And I'll address it if
that's your interest. Starting with Libya, Gaddafi's gone. Gaddafi's long gone, and
yet the political Islam, the Jihadists are still running around. There's no reconciliation between them. It's had a very rocky start
on its route toward democracy, if, in fact, that's where it goes. Egypt. Egypt is absolutely critical. A third of the Arab people live in Egypt. And where Egypt goes with the Arab Spring, you watch them as a barometer. That's probably gonna tell
you where the Arab Spring is going to go across the region. It's that critical a country. There are a lot of reasons for that, more than just population
and demographics. But they're experiencing right now, a very long and winding
road toward democracy. They're in the midst of a setback, and the sooner they get back onto a democratic election
schedule, the better. But it's unsurprising that
they would take some time. There's a lot of people
that say it took us probably about 60 years to get our
democracy on the right road. And we're still working on it right now. So the idea that somehow
after a long, long winter, if this is an Arab Spring, it was going to be over in six months or in the first election, I think that was highly unrealistic, and I'll touch on that in just a moment. But the Muslim Brotherhood, they lost any kind of confidence because of economic
and political mistakes. The largest mass demonstrations, probably in the world, millions
of people in the street as a result, and at that point, the military muscled
the Muslim Brothers out. I think there was never
any love lost there anyway. And right now, you see
the situation as it lies. Lebanon. The Cedar Revolution there was stillborn. The Iranians' Lebanese Hezbollah killed Prime Minister Hariri some years ago, and they
did that with Syria's help. And now you've got
Syria's bloody civil war going on right next door, and these refugees
pouring over the border, and you can imagine what
that's doing to any kind of stability in that tiny country, squeezed between Israel on the
south, Turkey on the north. It's a very, or to the
north of Syria there. So it's a very, very difficult situation. And it is probably as precarious now as it has been in the last 15 years. And you all know what
happened in Lebanon before. Once known as the Switzerland
of the Middle East, and most of us even of
my age in this room, now remember it as a place
torn apart by civil war. You actually see something of
value come out of a situation as bloody awful as their civil
war, ladies and gentlemen. It's almost like an inoculation, where not Lebanese
Hezbollah, not the Sunni, not the Christians, not the Druze, nobody wants to go back to that right now, because they saw how horrible it was. So there's a little bit of a moderator, a little bit of a governor, on the hate engine in Lebanon. But it's a pretty thin veneer right now, and it could get scraped through by what's going on in Syria next door. Talk about Syria for a minute, it's at the geopolitical
heart of the Middle East. It's destabilizing the entire region. And it's good to remember how this starts, this current civil war starts, 'cause Assad and his
regime were ready for this. This was not a surprise. They were completely ready
to fight this kind of a war. And the people come out in the streets are demonstrating they're fed up, and they get shot down. And to their everlasting credit, they go out day after day, unarmed, demonstrating and get shot down, until finally they've had enough, and now they recoil violently. And you see what's happened
is this magnet of violence has drawn in all sorts of people into the fray. The savagery is increasing. I met with refugees on two occasions up on the Jordanian border. And ladies and gentlemen, I've dealt with refugees
on the Dalmatian Coast, in Kosovo, Bosnia, in southeast Asia, boat people and fished
them out of the water. I've seen them in Africa. I have never seen refugees as traumatized at what's coming out of Syria right now. It is worse than BBC or CNN
or Al Jazeera can show you. So it's a war, it's been enabled by Russia's regrettable
veto in the United Nations, and the only way Assad has stayed in power is because the Iranians
have kept him there. With fighters, weapons, money, ammunition, everything he needs, full-throated support,
it's been Iranian support that has kept Assad in power. In regards to Iran, and some
of you are probably gonna wanna ask more questions about Iran afterwards, I will touch on it. There is some opportunity right now, we've seen it develop
with President Rouhani who's come in, replacing Ahmadinejad, the guy we used to joke about calling I'm A Dinner Jacket, actually, he's a little bit of a nutcase, but he was a pragmatic
fellow too, in his own way. He was a danger, and I'm
not sure how much freedom President Rouhani, who was
allowed to run, as you know, by the Supreme Leader,
how much freedom he has to maneuver diplomatically. He is not a reformist himself. People are saying he is,
I don't believe he is. He was elected with the reformist vote, and certainly we should engage. I'm absolutely convinced we
should diplomatically engage, but I would have very modest expectations. I don't know that the
internal dynamics in Tehran will permit him the freedom he needs, even if he was convinced this was the right way to go, to diplomatically solve the situation Iran
has gotten itself into. I'm not sure he'd be given the
freedom to go that direction. The Iranians are
fomenting, I would call it, mayhem and mischief across the region, but even beyond, from
Thailand to Bulgaria. Believe it or not, I've
seen the intelligence. I thought not even the
Iranians would be dumb enough to try to set off a
bomb in Washington, D.C. In fact, but for one mistake,
they would have succeeded in killing the Saudi ambassador less than two miles from the White House. They made one fundamental mistake. It was not a rogue intelligence
agent who did this. It was decided at the
highest levels in Tehran. And they decided they
would kill an ambassador. Now, ambassadors are
men and women of peace, but it's a reminder of just how roughshod this country can be when it
comes to international norms, that they would even consider
doing something like that. And considering that restaurant would have been full of Americans, they were unconcerned with the potential collateral damage of even their primary target going down and a lot of other innocent
people being killed. But if Assad falls, that'll be
the biggest strategic setback for Iran in the last 25 years, so you can understand why they
are fully supporting Assad, and why they're not going to pull back. Economic sanctions will not stop them. This is going to be a very
challenging situation. And from our perspective, we, in talking to our friends and allies and partners and all out
there, more about them later, Iran must not be allowed
to dominate this region. Must not. The Turks aren't going to stand for it, the Saudis aren't, the Israelis aren't. This would lead to a
very difficult situation. And right now, as Henry
Kissinger's pointed out, Iran is acting like a revolutionary cause, not like a nation. In other words, we're dealing
with Iran as if it's a nation, but it's acting like
a revolutionary cause, defending the Shia, whatever they can do in order to try to keep
their unpopular government with the support of the people. And, so long as they do that, they're going to do dumb things. For example, they're going to say that, well, we have enemies in Turkey and Saudi, maybe that's why they say
they need a nuclear weapon, I don't know, in their
private discussions. The problem is, if they
develop a nuclear weapon, then they're going to have two countries that don't like them right
now, but don't have nukes, and those two countries will get nuked. I guarantee you if Iran gets a nuke, Saudi and Turkey will get nukes. They're not going to stay unarmed. So proliferation will go on, and now Iran will be in worse shape, because they'll have enemies out there, adversaries who are nuclear-armed. So they're actually doing
things that are not, that is not even logical in this regard. Please jump down to Yemen. Very unusual little country. Impoverished, millions of refugees
from the horn of Africa, and the drought-stricken areas there, Somalia, those kinds of areas. And yet there at the Arab Spring protests, against a president, I guess for life, because he's been there
for 30-odd years, Saleh, they were successful in forcing him out with no small thanks to
a group of ambassadors from unlikely partners. United States, France, Britain, Russia, working together in the GCC,
the Gulf Cooperation Council, and President Hadi is in there now, and somehow, they've had
an election, he's in. Now the problem for Yemen,
besides its economic situation, the refugee situation, is
Al-Qaeda and the Iranians are both pouring in weapons and money and that sort of
thing to try to destabilize, so President Hadi has his hands full. But a surprising, I think, a very surprising success
story out of the Arab Spring, where skeptics in many cases saying ah, it's all bad, it's all horrible. Well, it's not all horrible. There's been more change, for example, in Yemen, thanks to the Arab Spring than all of Al-Qaeda's
murders have ever led to. So they're also seeing,
the people in the region, that there are political ways
to change what's going on. You don't have to go to using the bomb. Pakistan. It's got a radicalizing
society in a country, I think it was a country, of course, it was born out of a
very bloody partition, but it was a country,
ladies and gentlemen, that was born with very
little affection for itself. And, as a result, it's been hard for them to really come together as a country. They're in such strong
factions there in that country. They have the fastest-growing
nuclear arsenal in the world. Their economy's in tatters. They're either unable
or unwilling to remove the terrorists' safe havens
there along the border. And in that war, by the
way, this is arithmetic, you can have whatever
opinion you wish of Pakistan, but the Pakistan army has lost more troops fighting the terrorists in that area than all of NATO combined,
including the United States. So it's a very, again,
it's a very complex issue, it's a federally administered tribal area. In other words, it's not a place where they have full sovereignty over it, and obviously they've been unable to maintain sovereignty over it. In Afghanistan next door, we're seeing almost 50, and
I think we're at 48 nations right now, the French
polled and some others, one other, but right now,
the largest wartime coalition in recent modern history. Largest wartime coalition
in the world's history is fighting right now
alongside each other. Sometimes, when I used to go up to testify in front of the House or the Senate, I used to wish that we
could put the 50 flags on the bridge going into Washington so they could all see
it's not just Americans. Three countries have lost more boys per capita than our
country has in this fight, three of the NATO nations. So I would just tell you that we're going to continue our strategy there, protecting the people as best we can against an enemy that is apocalyptically opening who is a legitimate target,
men, women, children, old men, whatever, they go after all of 'em. We're going to try and protect them while we're mentoring the
Afghan army, to stand up. Right now, we are seldom
even patrolling anymore. There's a reason why our
casualties have plummeted. The Afghan army's casualties are higher. But they are fighting the Taliban, they are winning against the Taliban. And the Taliban know they
can't win at the ballot box, that's why they refuse to go
into the democratic process. Secretary Clinton was very clear. If they ceased using violence, if they said they would
live by the Constitution, and deal with it politically, and if they would break with Al-Qaeda, just those three things, they were welcome to come
into the political process. They know what awaits them if they come into the political process, so they say no, we'll stick with bombs. When you get two
irreconcilable wills like that, they only thing you can do is fight them. And so the fighting now is
almost all Afghan military, Afghan police doing the fighting. We'll be there for yet
another year in our training and mentoring role, and at some point all of our combat troops will come out and we'll leave only
trainers and mentors there under the NATO command. We have made some real progress. Probably one of the most
challenging things I tried to explain when I was giving testimony, was how could you have
progress and violence coexist. The violence is so, so disheartening when it's women and children being killed. You say how can you say there's progress? We just had another school
bombed or something. And that's understandable, that emotion, that psychological effect is real, but at the same time, just the fact that there's girls going to school. When the Taliban was
there, there were not any. The Taliban who were keenly
aware of what education does for people and would not
permit girls to go to school. The fact that this is going on, that the education is going on, is going to work in the long run to do what no soldier or
Marine with an M-16 can do, and that's go to the root
causes of this ignorance that allows this, what happened on 9/11 to take root there in that area. Let me just touch on Iraq for a minute. I wasn't even gonna touch on Iraq, and I thought I'd add it. I was watching, you know
obviously in my headquarters, I'm traveling around the region, I was watching as the
Arab Spring broke out. Did you notice there was one capital that didn't have big crowds demonstrating and demanding a voice in the government? Yeah. And it was Iraq, in Baghdad. There weren't any. And I wondered why could it be that there they thought they had some voice. Imperfect, no history of democracy, an imperfect democracy, and
yet, ladies and gentlemen, the Sunnis and the Kurds
at times get together to try to offset the Prime Minister, Shia, Malikis, policies and all. It's not perfect, it doesn't
look like Switzerland, but the different groups are still trying to settle their issues politically. At the same time, Al-Qaeda
has redoubled its efforts to murder innocent people,
really going after the Shia and trying to destroy them. Any kind of sense of collaboration across these sectarian lines. And the Al-Qaeda, for all those who say that we've beaten them or they've had some real
bad blows, that's true. There's a lot of Al-Qaeda
leaders, ladies and gentlemen, who are not gonna collect
their 401K programs, okay? That's a fact. But the franchise, the
philosophy continues, it lives on, and when you run into this, this level of hatred,
don't think it's gonna be over quickly. I'm from the American West, and the worst forest fires
in our history out there were those where you pulled the fire crews off the fire line early,
and they broke back out. So you have to be very careful
about declaring victory. It's not gonna be like on
the deck of a battleship, Missouri and Tokyo Harbor,
or something like this. It's not gonna be like that. If I was to give you a
model, look at the US Army and the American Plains
Indians, 1850 to 1905, and the constant skirmishing
that goes on there. We're going to be continuing this skirmish back and forth, and
we're gonna have to make some decisions within our own country, what level of risk are
we willing to live with, what level of constitutional
rights and civil rights do we wanna surrender, what level are we unwilling to surrender, even if it means once in a
while, an enemy gets through. And if we make that decision, let's make sure we don't
then look at the guy in the White House, say
it's all your fault. I mean we have to live with our decisions, but this reality that Iraq is dealing with shows you that it can resurface even after it's been beaten down,
and the Iraqi people have a pretty good police force
right now, pretty good army. And it's got its hands full trying to keep this under control. Talk about the Arab
Spring for a moment here. We have to be careful because
we like living in a democracy, here in this country, of assuming, well, that must be what is good for everybody. There are millions and millions of Arabs who want to live in democracy. They believe that's the
best form of government to give them what they're looking for. Millions of them. But there are also many
people there who see democracy as majority rule, everybody else loses. Well that's not what democracy is, and there's a lot of decisions to be made. If you were to take Cairo, 2011, and replace for the crowds in the streets, the same motivations of Paris, 1789, you might find, echoing
across the centuries, the same human yearnings. That people are not rushing
perhaps pell-mell to democracy, remember what came out of the Revolution, Napoleon, things like that, but they were fleeing from
unjust, unresponsive government. And, in this regard, you've
gotta be very careful to think that every
decision is somehow going to track neatly towards democracy, that every obstacle will be
overcome in a couple hours, with time out for commercials. I wouldn't exaggerate what
happens when you get a setback. I would call what happened
right now in Egypt a setback. I think the military leaders
would call it a setback. I think in their own way, they wanted to keep the love of the Egyptian people. They're very highly
thought of in the country. They refused during the big riots, you remember, to fire on their people. And I think they did not
want to get into this thing, but at the same time they see themselves, the military as the protectors
of the Egyptian character. And when the Muslim
Brothers did what they did, we see this setback. I would be honest, I
would call it a setback, but I would not overreact
and say that the military is not out to try and get
those elections going again. They have their own internal interests to push them in that direction. Let me talk for a minute
about our interests there in the region. First of all, we have
friends, we have partners, we have allies out there
that have stood by us, Arab and Israeli, and we need to stand with them in tough times,
because it's in our interest, because one of these days
we're going to need them. I'll give you the example
of United Arab Emirates. United Arab Emirates has stood with us going all the way back to
Desert Shield, Desert Storm. They stood by us then,
they fought alongside us. When we went into Kosovo, Bosnia, United Arab Emirates were there. When we went into Somalia, the Emirates were there
with their military. We went into Libya. They joined the NATO campaign there, along with Qatar and Jordan, and they supported the NATO effort, United Nations sanctioned, sort of, to dump Gaddafi out. In Afghanistan, they have stood by us. In fact, as some of our traditional allies have pulled their troops
out or started reducing, they have added fighter
aircraft and special forces to take up the slack, so I didn't have to, as CENTCOM commander, go back to the US Army, the
US Marine Corps, and say, by the way, I need more
people coming in here. They actually picked up the slack. Another ally, a guy I call Your Majesty when I would be meeting with him, we were done talking one day, and we were just shooting
the breeze about democracy and what he was up to
and that sort of thing, and he said, "You know,
I want you to know," he said, "that we'll be
with you in Afghanistan "until the last American
soldier goes home to America." Now, you can't buy allies like that. So when you look at our enduring interest in the Middle East, certainly
our allies, our partners, our friends out there
who have stood with us, are very, very important,
and increasingly so. So friends, partners,
allies, there's one reason. Economic interest. Now we all know that probably
between Mexico, Canada, and the United States, we will be close to energy independence,
close as you can probably technically be, I dunno, 2019? Somewhere around there. People say, well, doesn't that mean we can turn our back on the Middle East? Oil is a globally-traded commodity. So the price at the pump for oil will still continue to be set where most of it comes out of the ground. And that's the Middle East. The rest of the world's economies
are too fragile right now, and our own included,
to take the disruption of the free flow of commerce
coming out of the Middle East. The Crown Prince of the
United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed, said, look, if the world's economy depends on oil, then it's an international responsibility to try to keep stability
in the Middle East. So we have our friends and
our allies and our partners who've been standing with us, we've got the economic interest, and the third one, of course,
is the violent extremists. We're going to have to stand united. No country can stand alone
in this globalized world. We don't need another 9/11, we don't another 7/7 in London, or what happened in Madrid. We've seen the bombs go off in Egypt killing Egyptian police and soldiers, and the internecine fights
that are going on in places. This cannot be handled by any one country, and the country with the
most aircraft carriers does not necessarily have
all the right answers. We're gonna have to listen to others. We're gonna have to work with others and get law enforcement and
militaries to work together. So those are what I believe are the three anchors we
have in the Middle East. What's the framework
within which I operated? I had about 200,000 troops in CENTCOM, ships, soldiers, sailors, Airmen, Coast Guardsmen, Marines. What did I do with them? How did I work them? I worked very closely
with State Department, and State Department gave me four basic framing principles. America is going to help support the political reform in
countries that need it at their own pace. At their own pace. Another framing principle
is we want economic reforms that spread the fruits of
what's coming out of over there so that more people feel
ownership of their country, like they have a promise for a future. They deserve that. We're going to support them when it comes to a re-energized Middle
East peace process. The problem, do the
protagonists want peace as much as we do, and therein lies the rub. But we should not pass this
problem to the next generation. We've lived it, us old
guys with gray hair, our entire lives, and this is something that's got to be addressed, and the chances for a two-state solution supported by Republican and
Democrat administrations for many, many years, are actually going backwards right now. I can get into more of that
in the Q and A if you want. And the last point, and this is where I actually had the lead
in State Department deferred to me, guided
me, but deferred to me on much of it, and that
was how do we protect the territorial integrity
against any country, there's only one, Iran, that would choose to go
after some of the others, and help work with them
against terrorists. So those are the framework within, the foreign policy frameworks, within which I operated, and why I worked so closely
with Ambassador Dan here. In all of this, Iran remains the single most destabilizing
influence in the area. But I would tell you, too, that Iran probably will remain, even if Assad leaves power,
ladies and gentlemen, Iran will still remain
probably the near-term danger, and somehow we've got
to find a way for them to start acting like a country,
and we can perhaps deal with their legitimate security interests, so they don't have to
do illegitimate things, like setting off bombs
in Washington, D.C., or in Bulgaria, or making a nuclear weapon. I'm gonna shift gears now
for just a couple minutes, and talk about the military's role in a few more particulars. With the drawdown in Afghanistan and our pullout from Iraq, this an increasingly naval theater. We're going back kind of the future. Back in the 1940s, '50s, we
kept a few ships out there. We probably will need more
ships to reassure our friends but it would become a more naval theater as far as the American military role. The role itself is to
maintain a military presence in the Middle East. Professor Jennifer Lind here at Dartmouth, writing about another
theater, the Pacific, has written that friends
have got to see us, they have to know we will be there, and I would just point out
that after 40-odd years of wearing a uniform for our country, you cannot surge trust. You can't surge it. Now there are some people who enjoy, they are inclined to distrust. Don't worry about them, those
people exist everywhere. They enjoy their life I guess. But most things that happen
that are good in this world are done on faith and trust. And we have got a level of trust out there despite what have been,
I think, by any measures, some significant mistakes. Our willingness to call out our mistakes, to admit them, has
strengthened us enormously, and if you can't surge trust and you think you may
have to fight together, because the only way to deter a war is to be ready to fight it, at
least one of the primary ways in my line of work,
then you have to be able to work together from day one. How many of you would like
to watch the Super Bowl game if the team didn't get together until they got in the locker room just before they got on the playing field? I mean, it'd look like a
bunch of bozos out there. Now, we're serious
enough about our football to recognize you've got to work together and train together and rehearse together if you're ever gonna
play in the Super Bowl. When you're in a role where
you're going to sign orders sending young men and women into a fight, you wanna make certain you've
set them up to fight well, so we're going to have to be out there, we're going to have to
have a presence out there, if in fact these enduring
anchors, these interests, mean that we have an
interest in preventing war. And we can do that. We can have that effect. Some of the biggest skeptics
of this, by the way I dress, are in America. Out in the region, many few are skeptics. Certainly we can say that
among our friends and all, but even among some of
the people I dealt with that were clearly adversarial,
even they admitted that we had a stabilizing presence. And so on the one hand if you
want to reassure your friends and you wanna temper your ally's, your adversary's designs, then you're going to have to be present. You can't just say, well, we
could come if there's trouble. So we maintain our own presence, we have to enhance our allies'. There is no reason the American military and the American taxpayer should continue to carry
the heaviest burden. We're going to have to allow them to do what they want to do,
and work with them to do it. We cannot continue to go to
the people in this country and say we're going to
take money from healthcare, from education, from infrastructure. The patience level and the
lack of political unity in our own country on this issue is such that we simply have got to accept we can't do it on our own,
we must work with others. I think that if we do
this, maintain a presence, we help our friends out there and promote regional stability. It's also to ensure the free
flow of commerce, of course. You could say, well what
about the fighting in Syria? Of course we want the
fighting in Syria to end, and there's things we can do about that but not a whole lot at times. And I suggest to you that
America has no moral imperative to do the impossible. I mean, as upsetting as it
is, as distressing as it is, and again, I've met with these refugees, just have to be very, very careful about giving yourself Mission Impossible. How does the military do it? I hope there's some
skeptics in the room here about what the military can
do to provide stability. A couple years ago,
you remember when Iran, you kept hearing we're gonna
mine the Straits of Hormuz, remember it was in the news constantly. It was daily. It was on the TV. So I was sitting in the
back of a plane one day, I said, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna have an international counter mine-clearing exercise. Not an anti-Iran exercise,
an anti-mine exercise. So we put the word out in my
Fifth Fleet, my Navy element. Went to work on it, good sailors. And I thought maybe we'd
get a dozen countries. France, Britain, Italy, the NATO countries, maybe a couple others. We ended up with 29
nations in the first one. 29 nations from five continents. Included Canada, Estonia,
Japan, Singapore, Djibouti, not necessarily
bellicose nations. They weren't anti-Iran,
they were just telling whatever nation wanted to
put mines in the water, here were 29 nations in an
exercise going to do it, and Iran, in Tehran, in the regime, they suddenly realized they were creating their own international
community against them with this kind of talk. Since then, we've run one more of these exercises to remind them. Had even more countries
show up, 35 the next time. We have not heard, how many
of you have heard about them threatening to mine the Straits lately? Pretty quiet on it. There are ways for military forces to be used ethically and
morally in a stabilizing role. And if we don't do that, as
expensive as the exercise is, it's still expensive to
steam ships out there and bring everybody together, what would be a lot more expensive is somebody dropping mines in the water shutting down the oil that
certain countries need, from China to Japan, from
Europe to other areas, and then have to deal with that situation. I would tell you, too,
that we made other offers at that time to include
having direct communications on mil-to-mil levels to see
if they wanted to reduce any kind of anxieties or
potential for miscalculation. They turned that down. It's a regime truly at war within itself. I was at the Manama Dialogues when our Secretary of
State, two years ago, three years ago now, was there and she ran into the
Foreign Minister of Iran. Big crowded room, looked like something out of
Hollywood Central Casting, people with all sorts of robes on, and uniforms, fancy glittering things, anything guys can wear
to impress the girls, you know what I mean? And she turned around, she happened to be right
next to me, and said, oh, Foreign Minister, so good to see you, and put her hand up. And like a petulant little schoolboy he turned around and walked off. And immediately it showed
where they're at on this thing. You can say anything you
want about whether or not our policies have been great, but the offers have been
made and continue to be made to try and sort this out somewhat short of the old-fashioned ugly way. Let me shift one last subject
here about your military. It's a national treasure
as far as I'm concerned. I'm still amazed the Marine Corps allowed me to stay in its
ranks and serve alongside those young sailors and Marines so long, but it's a military very much defined by ethical performance in
the grimmest circumstances. Young men and women, young patriots, who look far beyond the
hot political rhetoric, all volunteers, a very
poorly-explained war, and yet they've continued to come in. They've seen the war, this isn't something they're unaware of, they've grown up with
it, they've seen CNN. They've seen the wounded,
the photos of casualties, and that sort of thing,
and yet they certainly, fighting alongside these very self-deprecating, very
high-spirited young folks has been an absolute privilege, humbling privilege all along. And they kept a wonderful sense of humor. I remember on one occasion
I'm walking down the street in Ramadi, a very hot
day, extraordinarily hot, over 120 degrees, and it's
one of those terrible days. Our boys are shooting down the street and they're shooting back
down the street at us, and I walked up behind the
young 19-year-old corporal and I asked him the
single most inane question ever asked of a corporal in combat in the illustrious 235 years
of history of the Marine Corps. I said hey guys, what's going on? (audience laughter) And I think, convinced that
some village had lost its idiot, he dropped his rifle for a minute. He said, well General,
we're just taking the fun out of fundamentalism over here. (audience laughter) And I give you this because,
don't underestimate the level of stress that young
man was under right then as he took his infantry boys against them. But I bring it up because
someone who's keeping his sense of cool like that is gonna keep his ethical sense too. He's still in touch with
reality, he's not losing it. And that's what represents them. Now every so often we've
had disappointments. We've had court martials,
we've had people thrown in jail because we hold ourselves accountable. But for those people that think that the bad guys, the few bad incidents, represent what hundreds
of thousands of troops have been doing, that is objectively false and I would just remind
you that Jesus of Nazareth had one out of 12 go to crap on him, so you don't take the one
(audience laughter) out of 1,000 that went
and did something bad here as defining or representing
your beautiful military. Now the budget realities mean that we are going to do less
with a smaller military. That's not necessarily bad. That's not a bad thing, that's a choice. But then I hope that the
people who are supporting that choice will also recognize
that when they get offended by someone's criminal activity somewhere, we may not have the strength to just say, well let's just rotate our
soldiers back out there, they've been home two months. Let's send 'em out for another year. In other words, we're going to do less, but here's the message to our enemies, and I made it very clear on Capitol Hill when I know my testimony's
recorded and all. We are going to do less with our military, we will not do it less well. If the President orders us into action, it will be our adversary's longest day and it will be their worst day, and that's the way it's going to be. They're going to find
that free men and women can fight like the
dickens if we get pressed. I think that what we
do with this military, and looking forward on a strategic level, we try to create a military that's agile so we have the fewest regrets
when the big surprises hit, whether it be a Pearl
Harbor or whatever it is, we want to have a military that, from the time the surprise hits 'til we take effective
action, is very short time. So you don't want to create a military that's only made for one kind of warfare, like only counterinsurgency. It must be able to fight across the board because at this point in your young lives, for you students, fate
has given you America in a role that you will help shape, but you cannot completely abrogate it and still be the hope that
many, many people in the world, including across the
Mid-East, want it to be. So our military presence in
the region, it is evolving to primarily naval, but our
interests and our relations and our partners, those are enduring. Those are going to continue. And there's big strategic
questions we need you to answer. And you look at John
Sloan Dickey's challenge that hey, these aren't
impossible problems. These problems can be solved as long as we have people
to do the rigorous research. Strategic questions, how much engagement do the American people want? I don't know. I'm not in the Marine Corps,
I wasn't in the Marine Corps, I was in the U.S. Marine Corps. We answer to you. You tell us what you want. You run that by who
you send to Washington. How much should we commit? I'll tell you right now there's a perceived lack of commitment by the Americans in the region. And if that's in Riyadh and Tel Aviv and everywhere else out there, that in itself can be destabilizing. As much as you and I may say, I'd rather stay in the New
Hampshire woods, go on a hike, and hit the library at night,
that's a lot better way to live your life, you can't
shut out the rest of the world, and we saw that on 9/11, I think, pretty effectively brought home to us. A big question I would
have is, political Islam is practiced by the
Muslim Brothers in Cairo, is practiced by the Mullahs in Tehran, is that in our best interest? If not, what's our
strategy to deal with it? The larger question,
Lord Robertson of the UK recently summed up, I think he said, do we today have the
farsightedness and the boldness to look at today's threats and come up with the vision and
leadership that brought us through past threats? And his view, and I agree
with him, is I believe we do have the capacity but
we're failing to carry it out, and I'm looking directly
at my generation right now, and for you in the younger generation unburdened by 43 years, unburdened by 30-odd
years in the Middle East, we need your mission to pick this up in John Sloan Dickey's challenge and come up with solutions. Let me stop there, 'cause I want to leave
time for questions, okay? Go ahead. (audience applause) - [Student] Hello, my name's (mumbles) and I'm a freshman
undergraduate here at Dartmouth. I'd just like to ask, what's your position on Vladimir Putin and his
administration's foreign policy, in respect to two things? One, his op-ed in the New York Times calling the United States out, and two, on Russia's continual
veto on Security Council? How do we react within that, and what do you think are their motives and the history behind
their foreign policy dealing with us, Syria,
and the Middle East? - You did good, because the Ambassador was going to ask the first question. You beat him and I like
that kind of initiative, that's great. Look, Putin's living in the past, but he's frozen in it. As a Russian friend of mine put it, he's stuck on stupid (audience laughter) and he is still a Cold War warrior. That's not to dismiss him, he is the leader of a
still-powerful country, but one who's demographics
are going to force Russia to get closer to Europe and NATO, or not do that and watch his country
continue to slide backwards. So he is on a no-win path right now, even a chance for Merkel,
who moved heaven and earth to try to keep some kind of
collaboration with the Russians long after they had probably
worn out their welcome everywhere else, even she has now said, this guy, you just can't work with him. And when she loses her patience, I think that's the
canary in the mine shaft. We're just gonna have
to see what we can do to work with them in the future when the reality comes home to roost. Good enough? I gotta pass it over
to the Ambassador here. Civilian control to military, okay? (Ambassador laughs) - Well I just wanted to put one or two follow-up questions to
you, and I wanna thank you first of all for a great presentation, you gave us more than enough to work on for the next few years,
not to say a few minutes. I'm asking you this one because you speak to a lot of the leaders in
the region and have a view that I think very, very few will have. When we look at the Arab Spring, and I share your long-term optimism, one of the things that's
striking is it seems as if some pro-democracy demonstrators set off a small explosion and the world rally didn't,
and got very excited, but what we saw happen then
was that in the small fissure, in the pothole, that was created by that, a volcano erupted of sectarian hatred. And when we look at Syria, this is, it seems to many observers, the big showdown between Sunni and Shia, that they've been certainly waiting for since the Iranian Revolution
and possibly a lot longer. When you talk to these leaders, do you get a sense that
there is an off-ramp, that this is going to stop somewhere, or is it not gonna stop certainly before there's a
change of power in Syria, and the Sunnis come to power, or what? Is there a sense of realism? I mean, for a while we thought Bahrain was gonna be the place where
the world came to the end, again because of Sunni-Shia tensions. But I'd like your view on that. - Well, Iran has been throwing
gasoline on the fire of this, and the most thoughtful people
I dealt with in the region, including ones who were very, very mature in their understanding
the history of this, say this is something
they wanted to leave lie. It scares them all if this
Sunni-Shia hatred comes out and gains traction. They realize that this is something that's very hard to
restrain once it begins, and they are very, very
pessimistic right now. Ladies and gentlemen, I've seen someone sell out their country for $600 worth of beer and party favors for their daughter's
Sweet Sixteen birthday. That's pretty low level, okay? I have never seen someone
sell out their religion. And I'll just tell you
that many of the people who start thinking like this,
once they drink from this cup, this poisoned cup, it
is very hard for them to understand the humanity
that crosses any lines. They draw very narrowly who is okay and who's beyond the pale. I'm afraid in this case it
may depend more on exhaustion. - Okay, well, one more
question that I'll put to you, and then we'll open it up to the audience. Pakistan, you had some
depressing words about Pakistan. You and I shared a lot
of depressing exchanges about our relationship with
Pakistan and where it was going, and there were times when
we felt like Pakistan, the US relationship with Pakistan, was the elevator that had no bottom floor. Will our withdrawal from Afghanistan lead the Pakistanis to play a more constructive
role with Afghanistan? Are they going to see it in their interest to build stability there? The relationship that
we have with Pakistan has been conducted so much
through military channels because of the strength
of the Pakistani military. I think you'll have a
unique insight into that. - Even during the worst days when you would hear that we were frozen, that we weren't talking with each other, any of those days I could push a button and talk to the Chief
of the Pakistan Army. He would take the call. They were non-adversarial,
non-antagonistic discussions, that sort of thing. I think that as we draw down,
there will be less, fewer, opportunities for the
military-to-military chain to work that issue. But if we can get, (coughs) Excuse me. If we can get India and Pakistan to start opening some economic relations, start with some social exchanges, there may be a way for Pakistan to sense they don't have to be as
worried about their back door as they confront big
India in the front door. I think we're going to
have to work that issue and watch, and right
now there's some reason for optimism there between
India and Pakistan. At the same time, I think,
I hope we learned a lesson to never again cut off
a country's officers from coming to our schools. We'd had a senator, by
his name is Pressler, and Senator Pressler decided
that because Pakistan, he didn't like Pakistan, we
wouldn't allow their officers to come to our schools. After 9/11 I was sent in
to work with the Pakistanis in order to get freedom to fly in. We needed to fly over their country in order to get into Afghanistan. All the generals who were talking to me, I was a one star, they were
all two, three, four stars, they all told me the
best year of their life was at Leavenworth, Kansas. Best year of their life was at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. They'd come over on exchange tours, they'd gone to our schools. And then around the wall were their aides, majors and lieutenant colonels, and if looks could have killed, as these generals smiled and
we found some common ground where it was not based on
strangers or something, we actually knew each other,
and up against the wall were these young officers,
and if looks coulda killed, they'da killed me. 'Cause they were not
allowed to come to America and so we had forced them away. Well who do you think's
going to influence them if we force them away? I'll guarantee you one thing, it's not us. So we need to bring more of
their students to our schools. We need to send more of our officers and our students to theirs. Very hard, I realize, to do the ladder because it's not a safe area, but there's a way to keep this together. - Okay, well there are a
lot of questions I know, so why don't I yield the microphone. It is essential that
you have the microphone when you answer a question. Please make sure there's a question mark at the end of the question. Go ahead over here. - [Karlos] Hello, and thank you. My name is Karlos
Santos-Coy, I work on campus in, basically, diversity
programs and leadership programs, and you've alluded to what I'm
gonna ask about in many ways, but maybe a little more directly, what role has cultural competence played in your experience
and in your development as a leader, and then,
if you could turn that, what cultural competence
development opportunities would you recommend for,
obviously, young up-and-coming military as well as just student
leaders all the way around? - Yeah, great question. It's critical that you
understand where they're at. They don't expect you to act like them, they don't expect you to be them. They do like to be understood. As soon as I'd get an
expert come into my office and say, I'm gonna tell
you about the Middle East, I mean, the Middle East is 30 things. You've got a good 30
different countries, whatever. I knew right away it
was gonna be something not worth listening to, and I'd get people in there like that. At the level I was at, it
was personal relations, more than anything else, that worked, and some of us had known each other since we were young officers, laughing, going to a place
to have dinner one night 'cause they want to show
me what it's like to eat goat and yogurt, that sort of thing. So I'd sit there and
neither one of us knew that 25 years later he'd
be the Chief of Defense of his country and I'd
be the CENTCOM commander. And now when I walk in and
say we got a problem in Libya, I need your air force
to help fly with NATO, I was able to start from something. I'd say what you do is you
travel as much as you can, you try to live with the folks, not just go to the four-star hotel but actually live amongst them. Language skills are very important, but more and more people over in
my region speak English now, so I was given a bye on that, frankly. I think that would be a poor excuse not to have foreign languages prioritized. But travel, foreign language, do a lot of reading about their history. Most of these countries
have very rich histories. They're very proud of them. And when I walk in and
I start with something that it has to do with
something they're proud of, again, they call it
drinking three cups of tea but it's closer to 18 cups of tea, and have a nice long talk.
(student laughs) But I consider it critical. - Okay, over there. You'll be next. - Hi, I'm Michelle and I'm a '17 here at Dartmouth, and recently I've been reading a lot more about how outside terrorist organizations like the ISIS, have been
playing bigger roles in Syria, so how much of a role are
these outside organizations actually playing in the Syrian civil war? - It's a great question, young lady, because as we look at what our options are to try to end this fighting, you have to look at the opposition. Because Assad has killed too
many of his people to stay in. So if you look at the opposition
you find organizations, like you just highlighted there. In this case, there are
dozens of organizations but the two most effective are radical, jihadist, anti-American. That is a reality, and one of them is the one you just mentioned. So it's operant, and we're
going to have to deal with what is a very complex situation. There's ways to deal with it, but you certainly would want
to be very, very careful about who you arm. When I hear about arming the opposition, you don't want to give weapons to people that you're going to regret. That answer your question? - [Michelle] Yeah. - Yeah, okay. Thanks, good question. - There was a young
man up there with them, who had his hand up before. - [Student] He can go first. - [Student] So, I was just gonna ask how you feel Israel is gonna react as Iran gets closer to having the bomb? - Yeah. Israel will act in her own best interest. To be more direct, they will do what they have to do to survive, and I believe
that that will involve whatever it takes to prevent
Iran from getting the bomb. I take them at their word when the Prime Minister
says they won't tolerate it. - [Ambassador] I think
someone has the mic already. - [Student] Yeah, so as you mentioned that India and Pakistan
need to work together for stability in Afghanistan. So I was just wondering that,
how legitimate do you think Pakistan's claims are, based
on the Indian involvement, increased influence in
Afghanistan, and the claims that India has been funding
violence in parts of Pakistan? And, secondly, how
legitimate those claims are, and secondly, what role we can, the United States, play in that? - Say that last part again. - [Student] What role we can, United States, play in that? As the two countries
debate about the influence they have in Afghanistan,
and with both countries have doubts about the
military involvement, sorry, how they're funding the violence, like Pakistan claims
India is involved in that. So what kind of a role
can US play in terms of resolving those issues? (Ambassador and General mumble) - The reason I'm struggling
for a minute here is there's a public
role and a private role that India's played, okay? The public role is heavily, it's aid and that sort of thing. But I would be much more comfortable if India moved its consulates, instead of Jalalabad and Kandahar, perhaps to Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif. Okay? You see what I'm driving at? Because I think no matter
what India is doing, because of the location
of a diplomatic outpost they may be seen as fomenting insurrection in Pakistan's backyard. I don't think India has any interest in doing this right now, for
reasons that have changed over the last couple of years between Islamabad and New Delhi, but I think that the residue,
that the background is such that that is a sticking point. And does that address your one question? - [Student] Yes it does. And the second one was what role we, can the United States play? - With Pakistan you mean? - [Student] Yes, with Pakistan and India with respect to Afghanistan. - Oh, Pakistan and Afghanistan,
not Pakistan and India? - [Student] What role can the US play in the diplomacy between
Pakistan and India, with respect to Afghanistan, and influence in Afghanistan
after the forces withdraw? - Well let me start by saying
one thing I think we can't do. I don't think there's anything the Americans can do about Kashmir. I think until the two countries decide they want to resolve it, I don't think the Americans
have some secret solution to what these two countries are facing. I think what we can do, though, is encourage that the Glacier
and Sir Creek be resolved. So you start with things that can be. Nobody wants to fight
on that glacier anymore. They're stuck there, both countries. Sir Creek, I'm convinced
both Pakistan and India could solve that one. It's just not that
significant to either one. So I think we could
help on those two issues and reducing tensions there, but primarily through anything we can do with the World Trade Organization to open the economic bounds
between India and Pakistan. As that concern goes down in Islamabad, that there could be another war, I think they would be more
willing to be flexible on what's going on in Afghanistan, so long as the Afghan army can keep the insurgents down, and they're not using
Afghanistan to attack Pakistan. Best answer I can give you. If you've got better ideas
come see me afterwards. (audience chuckles) But good question. - Let's go over to this side. Up there. You better be careful, you may make news. - Spare me. I hope not. - [Student] Hi, I'm a
undergraduate here at Dartmouth, and I've heard a lot,
especially in the news, about this word commitment or credibility, especially in terms of
the US strike on Syria, and in general we've seen
that in the recent UN speech made by Barack Obama and
as well as the recent foreign policy article, that there seems to be a worldwide sentiment that the
American quote-unquote empire seems to be pulling back. From your perspective,
what is the world's view on American credibility and commitment, and how are some ways that we can perhaps push back against such a notion? - Yeah, I think there is
a lot more question today about our level of commitment to engagement around the world. I think that what the
discussion about the Syria engagement down in the Congress obviously brought it
out in the public sphere in an even more blunt way perhaps, but I think that one thing
is we'd better all talk about staying engaged, that would be one thing. We better remain engaged,
would be a second. But the third thing, the
most important I think, is to get America's
economy on a true recovery, because right now we're on a fiscally unsustainable path in America. That's a reality. And history is very unkind to nations, as far as their military strength, if they don't keep their
economic house in order. So I think the most important thing, for those of you going into business, that you keep an ethical, innovative way of doing business in the word so that we become competitive
in all aspects of industry and that, as much as anything else, will keep our education strong, that'll keep our military strong. But you can't do this just by saying we're going to build more battleships. That is not the answer to this question that's being bandied about right now. - Actually, can I, let me ask a follow-on, because it's a very important question about commitment and credibility. You said, you had some
very positive remarks, encouraging remarks, about
our allies and partners standing with us, and yet, if
you look at our traditional allies in Europe, they continue
to cut defense spending almost annually, and it's
way below the targets that they set for themselves through NATO. America has always managed to
do a good job, or do a job, advancing its interests around the world because we had lots of partners
who shared those interests, but it seems harder and harder to imagine a lot of those countries standing with us. Does that give you pause? Is that something that you
worry about as we go forward? - You know, if you look back
through history and what FDR did to coalesce the United
Nations against fascism, or if you look at what
John F. Kennedy did, or if you look what Ronald Reagan did, or you look at what happened when you had to bring people together. There was a very well-articulated threat, and the kind of enemies
we're up against today don't lend themselves to that. Further, mass militaries
probably aren't the answers. So what we have to do is recognize we no longer defend
just a geographic realm, we defend a realm of ideas, and for many of us in this room they grew out of the enlightenment, and if those ideas are
going to be defended we're going to have to find nations who share those interests
and make a compelling, persuasive argument for it. And if we don't make that argument, then we're going to be
more and more alone. Right now I don't know how
well we're able to convey the nobility of what
it is we're defending. We have people who are
skeptical of it themselves, who are self-conscious about it. I'll give you an example,
we're in downtown Kandahar and it's just fallen a
couple of weeks before and the old guys come up and say, you wanna open the school,
and I said of course. They said, well we wanna
open the girls' schools, I said absolutely. So out came these girls,
boys, all dressed, it was like we had dehydrated students and they poured water
into a bag and shook it up and poof, they all popped out. One day they took me downtown,
they were so proud of it, and here all these little
girls with long white shirts coming out of muddy houses, and ankle-length skirts
and little white socks and everything, and little head scarves, and boys with little backpacks
and they're all proud. And on the street corners are
US Marines, US Navy SEALs, US Army Special Forces with
automatic rifles standing there settling the score if
anybody wants to interrupt the school day, the first day of school. And these little kids, how
many of you would have wanted your children walking by foreign soldiers with automatic weapons standing
on the streets of Hanover? Pretty disconcerting. And yet somehow, those
eight-year-old boys and girls had figured out who was the good guys and who was the bad guys, and some of our more literate, more intellectual people had
better start figuring out who's the good guys and who's the bad guys as well as, at least, the eight-year-old boys
and girls in Afghanistan, and start representing it. Because we are now
defending not just a realm, a geographic realm, we're
defending a realm of ideas, and it is worth defending. And the very unpersuasive
spokesman in Washington, D.C., I'm surprised the American
people have stuck with this war as long as they have,
and even more surprised that some other countries
have stuck with us as long as they have. But that's all I think of that. - Okay. So I don't think people in
the middle should be penalized for sitting in the middle. It always takes a long time
to get the mic to them. Right there, and why don't
we give the mic right here while the mic is getting over there? Why don't you go ahead? It should be coming your way. - [Student] Okay, thank you General. This is kind of a follow-up
to the most recent question, but it refers not to allies
we're trying to engage with, but to our current NATO allies. Earlier this year I read the book about former general McChrystal that was written by the Vanity Fair author who wrote the takedown article, or what became the takedown article, of General McChrystal in Afghanistan. And a lot of his account about McChrystal and his fellow commanders
in Afghanistan talked about their scathing contempt for our NATO allies in Afghanistan, and how little our European
friends were really willing to commit on the battlefield
when push came to shove. And I'm somebody who, I like
to think I'm pretty idealistic. I would love us to have
an effective NATO alliance where our European allies, going forward, were willing to commit,
maybe not as much as we do 'cause we're a very large country with a very large military,
but at least their part. What do you think we can do going forward, as somebody who's dealt
with our so-called allies over the years, to
maybe get them to engage on the same level, if
that's even possible? Thank you. - It's absolutely possible,
it's a great question. Let me tell you that
Winston Churchill said the only thing harder
than fighting with allies is fighting without allies. And if you read, this is nothing new. If you read Winston Churchill's
book on Marlborough, he spends more time dealing
with his political problems than he does fighting his enemies. Eisenhower spend more
time seeming to make peace between the French and
the British and the Polish and the Americans than
fighting Mr. Hitler at times. So this is normal. However, from you young people coming up who have a chance to link with the world, you can never tolerate
this sort of arrogance. As a general, you have
to maintain what we call a firing squad, and if I had any officer that spoke like you
just referred to there, where they denigrate some other unit, I would remove him, because he's a bigger asset
to the enemy than to us. The bottom line is, there is room for everyone
on the battlefield. My headquarters in Iraq
was guarded by Tongans. Tongan Marines. And the Tongan Marines, now
were they capable of going out and calling for artillery fire and jets and maneuvering to get
to an enemy using tanks, they didn't have tanks. Of course they couldn't. But let me tell you, every time I drove back
through their perimeter with their boys laying
behind machine guns, and they would very
tenderly take our wounded off the vehicles, I
thanked God for those guys. In Kandahar, in December of 2001, when we knew we were gonna be attacked and I didn't have enough
Marines holding the airfield, the Princess Patricia Light
Infantry from Canada showed up and came off and were it not
for don't ask, don't tell I'd have been hugging and kissing every one of those boys, okay? (audience laughter) But my point to you is, you use forces for the level
of capability they have. How about when we had our
revolution and the French forces gave us a few young generals,
Lafayette and others, and the Polish von Steuben, and others trained our
irregulars, and the regulars, who had a fair amount of contempt at times for the Americans, were
the French soldiers. And that's how we fought then. This is the cycle of history,
but what we need today from you young people is the willingness to sleep alongside people
who dress differently, smell differently, eat
differently, talk differently, and to respect them for the
common humanity they have, and find the common ground. Let me give you a real quick example, 'cause I love your question here. One night before the Canadians got there we were going to get hit, so my counterpart was
an Afghan named Jalali. If you've read The Bear
Went Over the Mountain, he's a 13-year-old boy
who's fighting the Russians. He's much older by 2001,
and Jalali brings his men in to help reinforce my Marine perimeter. A young man from Iowa,
I talked to him later, was laying behind the light machine gun, and Jalali's people come by, and they point to one of
their guys, point to the hole. An Afghan boy gets in. They're both about the same age. Neither speaks the other's language. The Afghan boy's got an AK. And they're sitting there
and he looks at the Marine, he brings his rifle up,
and the Marine goes. And he points at the belt and
he puts his hands like this. The Afghan kid knows what
he's doing, he's got it. So the Marine swings the
barrel back and forth and then he points to two cans of ammo, all the ammo he has. And he shows him, when that's all gone, he picks up his rifle and
he's gonna go to his rifle. The Afghan boy brings his rifle, he puts it up against the stake so after dark he knows where to shoot, so it doesn't just shoot wildly. He nods. They both sit back, the Afghan
boy picks up the paintbrush and starts dusting off
the machine gun links and it's getting dark,
and I'm sitting there watching two boys from the
opposite side of the earth, don't speak their own language, and they're going to spend
all night alone in a hole, 30 meters on each side from anybody else, and who knows what's gonna happen. Now if those two young teenage
boys can figure it out, I hope the rest of us can figure out how to work alongside each other, and maybe not just in a war, but how do you keep from
putting 18-year-old boys into a war in the first place? Now I'm not into nirvana and I realize we're gonna have to fight
to keep this experiment you and I call America alive. But because we're America and
we think we're exceptional, okay, but we're not arrogant. We're not dismissive of others. We should have, it should
build even more respect from us for other human beings. So sorry I went on at length there but I needed to really hit on that. - [Student] Thank you. - [Ambassador] Okay, so you have the mic and then the gentleman
back there after you. - [Audience Member] Okay, can you hear me? - Yes. - [Audience Member] I come
from a slightly different generation than these young men and women, and when I was in college
here there were enough people in ROTC to fill this room twice over. Now we have a dozen. Do the military academies provide enough trained leaders to manage our needs, or are there needs for more people going
through programs like ROTC, which supported a great number of people 40 or 50 years ago at this institution,
but that was interrupted by the rejection of the Vietnam War. - Well, you went to the
heart of the problem, sir. I'd just tell you, I
don't, as a commander, and I didn't go to a military academy, I wouldn't want all of my officers to come out of military academies. I want some of them to come out of that, I want many to come out
of liberal arts colleges, and what you need is a
disciplined, intellectual approach, but you need an unregimented
intellectual approach in the military,
especially in today's age, probably always but especially now when problems aren't solved
by military means alone. The problem is, coming out of
Vietnam, and I came of age, I joined, I enlisted in
the Marine Corps in 1969, at that point, and I won't go into my own political background
but it would not be one that would be found in some of the more conservative circles, to say the least, my family background. What happened was there was
a divorce between liberalism and patriotism and only in some areas has that divorce been mended. If we don't pull more people
from the liberal arts schools, if we continue to take from a
narrower and narrower slice, then we are not living
up to really the tone of this democracy when it was established, which was of shared sacrifice, and right now I've got a
lot of concerns about it. Matter of fact, one of the reasons I'm going out to Stanford, Hoover, is I wanna study this gap and try and figure out what it means. Is it hurtful that it exists? I wanna put some thinking to it, 'cause I share your concern
but I'm not comfortable, and absolutely know,
the military academies cannot meet our need. - [Student] Can you talk about or briefly go through all of the factions that are fighting in Syria right now? (audience chuckles) Because I know that it's
certainly more than just people trying to overthrow the Assad regime. - Yeah, on both sides there
are numerous factions. Everything on Assad's side
is his own regime forces or Lebanese Hezbollah, and
Iranian Republican Guards. Pretty clean on the Assad side. But I cannot go through all of them, because there are dozens and dozens on the opposition's side. It's a very loosely, I wouldn't
even call it organized, it's almost incoherent
and very challenging to try to get it all tied together. There is some structure
that's been given to it, but out of it you've
got the very murderous Al-Qaeda, the one that
was brought up earlier, coming out of Iraq. There are a number of
ones that we do support. They're relatively ethical,
they grew out of demonstrations, they're fighting Assad's forces. But as the savagery increases in war and that veneer of
civilization gets rubbed off, it is going to be, I think there are some very
bleak outcomes to face here, because when these
groups, when Assad falls, these groups could very well
turn this into another Fatah. There are so many, and
some of them are so anti, I don't care what you call
it, anti-Shia, or anti-Sunni, or anti-Christian, or
anti-West, or anti-Israel, this could be a real witch's brew there. But I can't, it would take me an hour just to read the names to you. - Don't do that. Okay. We are running out of time
so what I propose to do is collect the last two questions. Two people, this gentleman right here's been sitting patiently, (students speak off microphone) oh, you're going first, don't worry. We'll collect the last two questions, you can answer them
and then we'll wrap up. - All right. - [John] General, my name's
John Day, former Marine officer and number of years volunteer
at Navy Relief San Onofre, when you were out there at first MEF. I watched the Wolf Blitzer interview before I came up here, and that was fascinating
and I find it fascinating to hear you speak, and because I hear a unifying message, a very strong unifying message throughout, and without any specificity
I wondered if you planned to stay in the public eye
and continue that message in one form or another? - No, I think it's time,
John, that we turn it over to the younger folks. I'm not shy, just got
back from the Middle East. I was in Budapest last
week to speak quietly to all the Chiefs of Defense of NATO, General Dempsey and his counterparts. I will do things where I can be additive but I have great, great
confidence in the younger leaders, and they're all young compared to me now, the younger leaders coming up, and I think if I can just
pass on the lessons learned, that's really what my role is now, to try to mentor them and not try to live beyond my useful shelf life, so to speak. (audience chuckles) - [Ambassador] So much for
collecting them, here we go. - [Jerry] General, good afternoon and thank you for being with us. I'm Jerry Mitchell, Class
of '51 here at Dartmouth. I spent my junior year abroad in Korea. I was there when you were born, so. (audience chuckles) I would appreciate, but in today's world, President Obama has a goal
of maintaining world peace. Did you and do the president,
commanders of the areas, have specified, defined
goals and objectives, and did your subcommanders
and your various units have goals to achieve that
they could be measured by or are they just floundering around? - It's a good question, now
the goal of world peace, as you know, has been eluding us for a couple thousand years,
but that's not a reason. Because the efforts for world
peace means that you stop some of the fights that
could have happened, so I stay kind of all in on this thing. I believe you can do
it, I gave the example of how the anti-mine exercise, the international mine-clearing exercise was a way to just calm
the water, don't do this, but what you get is that
sort of guidance from above and then down in my region
what do you do about it? And I mentioned we wanna
have countries strong enough to arm themselves so we don't
have to fight with them, because if you don't have to,
if they can defend themselves, nobody wants to take them on, that's another way of deterring. I don't think you're going to achieve it through pacifism or disarmament. I don't think it's going to work. I have dealt with these guys since 1979, they mean every word they say when they say girls don't go to school, when they say we're
going to blow up schools, and this sort of thing. So I think you have to be pretty pragmatic while you follow that ideal, and you try to just keep a balance there where you work with the people who are out for the same goal and make
a big enough collaboration that you help checkmate
the people who think the proper way to do it is to
go around setting off bombs. But you also have to make
certain your diplomats are supported by the people like me. - [Ambassador] Okay, and on that- - Oh, and not quantified goals. The one with the international
mine clearing exercise, all of a sudden they stopped talking. That was a surprisingly
quantifiable achievement, but most of what I dealt
with was non-quantifiable and subjective in the human domain. - I liked it when you were stopping on supporting diplomats at the end, but (audience laughter) I want to give you a huge hand, thank you so much for joining us here. (audience applause) - Thank you everybody. - [General] Okay, Henrika, how 'bout you? Thanks very much. (audience voices overlapping)
