Book Talk With Melvyn P. Leffler: Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush And The Invasion Of Iraq

>> Stephen Kotkin: Welcome, everyone. I'm Stephen Kotkin, the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and the director of our new Hoover History lab. And today I have the honor, actually, it's thrilling to be able to introduce Mel Leffler. Mel is an institution, and so an introduction could never do him justice.

He's professor of American History Emeritus at University of Virginia, and he's known to everyone as the living dean of US Cold War history. In addition to all the work up till now, that you'll know Mel is well known for. He's got a book on Confronting Saddam Hussein, George W Bush, and the invasion of Iraq.

Which has actually achieved considerable acclaim, despite the fact that it revises the story that we think we know the conventional wisdom. Meaning upending a lot of people's beliefs and interests in the story, that Mel's new evidence and argumentation address. I'm gonna pass around a copy of the book.

It's inscribed to me, so, I don't think you should try to walk away with it by accident.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Because you'll be found out when they turn to the title page. But anyway, today's talk on the book, without further ado, warm welcome, the giant Mel Leffler.

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: Thanks very much, Stephen.

It's really a great pleasure to be here. As I mentioned earlier this morning, my first work was on Herbert Hoover and American foreign policy long, long ago. So it's sort of, nice to come back to the Hoover Institution, a place where really some of not the place, but really focus on a man.

Or remember a man who's shaped a lot of my own scholarship during my early years, when I wrote about Republican foreign policy in the 1920s and early 1930s. My topic today, of course, is a very different one, very different from the many books I've written about the Cold War.

It's an effort to sort of explain and illuminate America's venture in Iraq under George W Bush. I think, talking about this today, literally is so salient to our own moment. When you think about the way Israeli policymakers are grappling with the challenges they face after a surprise, shocking attack, that they had not anticipated.

Just imagine, having studied the aftermath of 9-11 I can just imagine, the different fears, anxieties, emotions, the sense of humiliation. The quest for revenge that's shaping the thinking of policymakers in Israel today. And when I retell this story or summarize some of the most salient aspects of my book, I think it behooves us to think what lessons might be learned from this?

What can we extrapolate from this experience of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003? I think my book deals with what I consider and I think a lot of people consider, the most American foreign policy decision, since the end of the Cold War. The invasion of Iraq and the insurrection and counterinsurgency that followed the sectarian bloodletting inside Iraq.

The civil war that evolved inside Iraq, had a devastating impact. It led to a tragedy, the invasion of Iraq culminated in my view, in a tragedy. 200,000 Iraqis died. The ensuing conflict and civil war, 9 million Iraqis were displaced. 9,000 American soldiers and private contractors died. It's estimated now that the cost of the American adventure in Iraq, not in Iraq and Afghanistan but in Iraq itself, will cost about $2 trillion over the years.

There were serious geopolitical consequences that ensued from the invasion of Iraq. Most people would agree that the embroilment inside Iraq diverted attention from the reconstruction and stabilization of Afghanistan. The involvement in Iraq, and the civil strife inside that country, contributed to the ascendancy of Iran, in the Persian Gulf region.

The American embroilment in Iraq, the quagmire in Iraq divided the United States from its major European allies. It fueled the sense of grievance amongst Muslims around the world. It heightened anti Americanism, and it actually complicated George W Bush's so-called global war on terror. And just as importantly, the invasion and the war, the American people contributed enormously to partisan rifts inside the United States.

And had a tremendous impact, on Americans' faith in their own government. It clearly sundered faith in the American government amongst Americans. So, if the legacy of the war is, as I just summarized it, the essential question that has motivated so many of us is, why war? Why did the United States, why did the Bush administration go to war?

And why the tragedy that ensued, as a result of the occupation? Now, when writing this book, my purpose, unlike that of many other journalists and quite a few scholars. My purpose in writing this book was not to indict the Bush administration, nor was my purpose to acquit the Bush administration.

My book is really an effort to understand why the war happened, why the invasion happened, why the occupation got off to such a terrible start. I really want to explain rather than to indict or to acquit, and I hope that the explanation helps me and others extrapolate some key lessons I tried to follow in writing this book.

I tried to follow wherever the evidence led me. Sometimes the evidence led to some rather original and, I think, compelling conclusions. And sometimes the book reaffirms what people already know. Now, some of the most original conclusions of the book or important points of the book relate to my demonstration that George W Bush himself was the key decision maker on all matters regarding Iraq.

George W Bush was the key decision maker, not Vice President Cheney, not Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and certainly not the neocons in the administration like Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith. Bush was the key decision maker on all issues related to Iraq. I also demonstrate that regime change was not a key priority of President Bush's when he took office, in contrast to what so many others have written.

I think I demonstrate pretty persuasively that the invasion of Iraq was on nobody's mind in January, February, March 2001, when the Bush administration took office. And certainly not on Bush's mind, even though he did embrace, theoretically, the policy of regime change. It was not a priority, and no war planning took place prior to 9-11.

And I also show in my book what's pretty important, and often seen otherwise, was that the inauguration of war planning, which did occur in December of 2001, three months after 9-11, that the inauguration of war planning, I argue in the book, did not mean war. War planning did not mean that Bush was inevitably going to go to war.

And I also showed that there was a strategy, that what policymakers were engaged in was a strategy which Condi Rice herself liked to call coercive diplomacy. I show there was a strategy, but I also explain and analyze why that strategy was flawed. Now, I use a variety of sources to write this book.

I used as many declassified American documents as one could access at this point in time, which in the totality is a tiny percentage of what exists. There will be hundreds of thousands, millions of documents that will come out in the future. And right now, scholars like myself only have access to a limited number of declassified documents stemming from freedom of information acts and requests and mandatory declassification requests.

I try to use as many of these declassified US documents as I could. What's also very important in my book, however, were the documents and interviews that have emerged from the British parliamentary inquiry called the Chilcot Inquiry. Basically the British parliament sometime, I think it was around 2010, authorized an overall investigation of why did Tony Blair take great Britain into the war on the side of George W Bush.

The focus of the Chilcot inquiry, after Lord Chilcot, the chairman of the inquiry, the focus was not on American foreign policy at all. It was on British policy. But in the interviews and in the documents that were declassified and ultimately went up on a big website, British policymakers all the time talked about their interactions with their American counterparts.

Tony Blair's interview with the commission was something like 1,500 pages over several days. Jack Straw's, the foreign minister, about 1,000 pages. Many documents, as they alluded to documents, those documents were subsequently declassified. And Blair talks about his discussions with President Bush. David Manning, Blair's national security advisor, talks extensively about his very, very, very frequent telephone conversations with Condi Rice.

Jack Straw talks about his conversations and meetings with Secretary of State Powell and so on and so forth. So I use a lot of these British documents that were extremely helpful to me. I used some of the captured Iraqi documents, some of which are here at the Hoover Institution.

So I don't read Arabic. I use the ones that have been translated and have gone up on websites. I tried, in my last chapter of the book that deals a lot with the US inspection teams in Iraq in December, January, February 2003, I used UN sources. And finally, what's distinctive about my book is the set of interviews that I myself conducted with virtually every single leading member of the administration, except for President Bush himself, who never agreed to have an interview with me before I wrote the book.

Since writing the book, I have had an interview with him, but it did not inform the book itself. So, yes, I spoke at great length, maybe 10, 12, 13 hours with Paul Wolfowitz, three and a half hours with Vice President Cheney. I spoke to Condi Rice. I spoke to President Bush's daily CIA briefer, Michael Morell, for five or six hours.

I spoke to the deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin. I spoke to some lower level officials like Seth Karris, who was vice President Cheney's bioterrorist expert. So these interviews complemented the written documents that I had available. In general, I would say that there are four big themes to my book, four big themes, which each one can be stated with one word.

I emphasize fear. I emphasize the influence of power. I stress the significance of hubris, and I explain how important was dysfunction. Those are the four big themes of the book. Fear, power, hubris, dysfunction, fear of another attack, extreme worry and apprehension about another attack after 9-11. Power, the belief amongst policymakers that they possessed the military capabilities to deal with the threats that they perceived.

Hubris, the assumption that Iraqis would embrace American forces, the assumption that the United States represented an exemplary society with superior political institutions that others would want to embrace and follow. And then finally, dysfunction. The dysfunction inside the administration, the poor planning, the inability to determine foremost priorities. These four things, fear, power, hubris, dysfunction, are what contributed to the decision to go to war and what contributed to the dislocation and strife in the immediate aftermath of America's defeat of Iraqi military capabilities.

I stress complexity and contingency in the book. I stress complexity and contingency. I talk about the very complex set of factors that led to war and that contributed to tragedy. Unlike most books, it's not like oil was the defining factor or Israel. In fact, those two things hardly appear at all in my book because there's almost no evidence that oil and Israel were significant contributing factors to the decision to invade Iraq.

But I do talk at great length about the interactions between emotions, interests, ideals, and ideas. I try to weave these things together in a complex portrait of American decision-making. Emotions like fear of another attack, guilt over the fact that policymakers knew that 9-11 had happened on their watch and that they had not taken the warnings about the al-Qaeda threat with sufficient seriousness.

Not necessarily that they could have thwarted 9-11, but they knew inside their own minds, and they often said it, that they had not taken the threat seriously enough. Emotions, the sadness and the grief that truly engulfed the policymakers. Look at President Bush's face sometimes if you see videos or images of his meeting people in New York or Washington, at the Pentagon after 9-11, those from the families who had lost loved ones.

But along with fear and guilt and sadness and grief went anger, humiliation, a lust for revenge. And somehow the historian and scholar sort of grappling with the decision to invade Iraq needs to assimilate these very discordant emotions. Fear, revenge, grief, humiliation. But one also needs to sort of focus on the interests.

Policymakers were extraordinarily preoccupied after 9-11 with protecting American lives. The expectation that there would be another attack, and they had a responsibility to protect American lives. Interests, very significantly, in the belief that the United States had to preserve its power. The United States had to preserve its power, and that you had to thwart gathering threats.

Gathering threats, not necessarily imminent threats, but gathering threats. Iraq was a gathering threat, a looming threat. Should it develop atomic capabilities, should it possess and accelerate its chemical and weapons programs? Such efforts in the future would deter the United States from doing the things that policymakers believe they would need to do in future contingencies.

Thwarting the proliferation of weapons, stopping the proliferation of weapons, was explicitly perceived as an effort to avoid self-deterrence. Self-deterrence in the future so that the United States could preserve its power and its abilities to exert its influence. So you have interests, you have ideals. I show the extent to which notions of democracy, promotion, freedom, and peace, the democratic peace, the notions of the democratic peace that pervaded academic circles throughout the 1990s.

These ideals and values did not inspire, I write, did not inspire, did not motivate the intervention. But were critically important in the mind of President Bush in terms of what he wanted to accomplish and what he could accomplish, or what he thought he could accomplish if the United States invaded Iraq.

One needs to grapple with these ideals. And then there were ideas about credibility. And I show that during the end game, when Bush is making his last minute decisions to actually go into Iraq, notions of credibility and reputation were very important. Bush did not want it to be perpetuated that the United States would make threats and not carry out on them.

If you were threatening coercive diplomacy, you actually had to coerce ultimately, if you face defiance. Credibility and reputation are important factors in the story of the invasion of Iraq. But along with complexity, I stress contingency. I stress contingency. Succinctly stated, I think I show in the book that there would have been no war and no invasion of Iraq without 9-11.

There would have been no war and no invasion of Iraq if that country had not been led by Saddam Hussein. And in fact, I start my book with what I like to think is a compelling factor portraying the career and trajectory of Saddam Hussein, where I depict the successes he had actually achieved inside Iraq during the 1970s.

The nationalization of petroleum resources, the use of the revenues to promote education, public health, agricultural development, industrial growth, and, of course, also shaped the contours of his policies of weapons of mass destruction and military aggrandizement. I try to show his accomplishments, but I also portray and emphasize his brutality, his ruthlessness, his inconsistency, his opportunism, and indeed his megalomania.

There would have been no war, no invasion, in my opinion, if it weren't for Saddam Hussein and his persistent defiance. There would have been no invasion without the belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And no invasion, in my opinion, if the United States had not experienced in what was perceived at the time to have been a success in overthrowing the government of Taliban in Afghanistan.

The experience in Afghanistan empowered policymakers to think that they might emulate that elsewhere. I try in my book, as a result of the evidence I saw, I wouldn't say I tried, but I demonstrate in my book both empathy for the decision makers, and I also engage in a lot of criticism of the same decision makers.

I came to empathize based on the evidence. I came to empathize with their perception of threat. I came to understand why they felt as beleaguered as they did after 9-11. I discussed the so called threat matrix that was developed and presented to the president every single day, outlining all the threats that had come into the intelligence agencies just during the last 24 or 48 hours.

The threat matrix was a terrible idea. Everybody agrees in retrospect, it was a terrible idea. But at the time, it tremendously accentuated the sense of beleaguerment, the sense of threat. I talk about the anthrax scare in the United States during October and November of 2001, when anthrax spores circulated in the mail about a dozen Americans died.

Anthrax spores showed up in the Senate office building. And it was closed down, the Supreme Court moved its deliberations elsewhere. Inside the White House there were alarms of toxic threats. All of this created a tremendous sense of threat. And then this was accentuated again when American special forces actually moved into Afghanistan in late November and December in 2001.

And they took over the Al Qaeda training camps. And they found unmistakable evidence, incontrovertible evidence, that Al Qaeda was seeking chemical and biological weapons. So I came to understand the perception of threat. I also came to understand, and I tried to illuminate why attention gravitated to Iraq during November and December and January and February of late 2001, early 2002.

It had a lot to do with the behavior of Saddam Hussein himself. He expressed no remorse. Unlike any other leader in the world, he expressed no remorse about 9-11. His newspapers that he controlled inside Baghdad celebrated the attack and celebrated the spread of anthrax in the United States.

I talk about the ongoing intelligence reports in October, November, December 2001 that suggested that Iraq was either activating or reactivating or accelerating its chemical weapons and biological weapons programs. Some of this information came from informers who later turned out to be totally disingenuous. But what you found out subsequently did not shape the perception of threat at the time when policymakers genuinely believed that Saddam was accentuating biological and chemical weapons.

I talk about Saddam's ongoing defiance, his refusal to allow inspectors back into the country. His continual persistent violation of sanctions, the fact that he challenged the no fly zones in October, November, and December of 2001. So I came to understand both the perception of threat and why attention gravitated to Iraq.

But alongside the empathy, I offer an enormous amount of criticism of the decision makers and the decision making process. I show in the book that there was shockingly poor planning, especially with respect to what the military analysts called phase four. What would happen after combat ended, what would happen in the period of post war hostilities that was called phase four.

And there was shockingly little attention focused on what the United States would need to do during phase four. There was shocking discord over the goals of policy, over the goals. George W Bush did care about promoting freedom in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did not care about promoting freedom and democracy in Iraq.

There was huge discord amongst the two top policymakers in the United States about how the United States should be preparing for the post war period in terms of what you wanted to accomplish. Donald Rumsfeld cared about two things, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, making sure Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

That's what he cared about. President Bush actually cared about what would happen inside Iraq after Saddam's armies were defeated. He cared about promoting freedom. Rumsfeld did not and didn't really ensure that his own subordinates were systematically focusing on the goal the president himself cared about. But Bush himself sometimes failed to define his overriding priority.

And this beleaguered, in my opinion, the strategy of coercive diplomacy. He could never decide and resolve in his own mind whether his overriding priority was to remove Saddam Hussein. Or whether his overriding priority was to deal with Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. So in conclusion, my book really focuses on two leaders, Saddam Hussein and George W Bush.

And ultimately, Bush pitted his resolve, and that's the way he talked about it. He pitted his own resolve against Saddam Hussein's defiance. And by confronting Saddam Hussein without careful planning and without clarity about goals and priorities, Bush's strategy of coercive diplomacy led to tragedy. And they're all lessons that we can learn from this experience.

And if you wish, I will be happy to elaborate on them. Thank you.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you Mel for that overview, very succinct. And you express the clarity that we would like to see among policymakers. Before we open it up to our audience, our live studio audience, and also the one on Zoom, I'd just like to emphasize a few points with you.

So this is an evidence rich account. That's how you started your remarks today. And you'll see that when you read the book, or you've seen it already, having read the book. And it's also very fair minded, going overboard to try to understand what was in the minds of the people at the time.

So the big myth about Cheney actually being the president, although he was vice president, running the White House and determining the course for war. So when you put this question to Dick Cheney himself prior to writing the book, what was his response to you? Dick Cheney, did you do this?

Were you the president? What did he say?

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: Well, I actually raised this issue. I'd like to think a little bit more discreetly than was just.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We know that, Mel. We know.

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: I'm just pressed for time here, but I was sitting across from Dick Cheney in his dining room in Jackson, Wyoming.

And during the interview, I said to him something to the effect of, well, a lot of people think that you were making the key decisions. How would you characterize the impact that you were having on President Bush? And he sort of smiled at me wryly, and he said, I'm not going to elaborate on this, but I can tell you that President Bush was a big boy.

And so that's about all that he said. I think what he was telling me was that President Bush makes up his own mind. And what was striking to me, a researcher who went into this project thinking that people like Cheney, or alternatively, Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld really were the key decision makers.

What was striking to me was the unanimity amongst all of Bush's subordinates and advisors and certainly amongst the people who worked for Vice President Cheney himself, like Scooter Libby and Eric Adelman. They all emphasized the degree to which Bush was the decision maker. And you can see this right away.

And I narrate this in the two or three or four pages in which I describe Bush's reactions after 9/11 when he's flying around to different places in the aircraft, and literally in those hours when he's just with Michael Morell and a few of his speech writers are with him, and he instantly says, we're engaged in a global war on terror.

That notion of a global war on terror, of not only going after terrorists, but going after the states that support them, that became one the defining aspects was what Bush himself decided in the first minutes or hours after the attack on 911.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We're going to do one more and then open it up.

So let's go to the big boy himself then. There's no doubt that there's just a preponderance of the evidence about Bush's role. Something similar we've had with Ronald Reagan's presidency where people didn't think he was in charge. And it's very clear, obviously, that Reagan was completely in charge.

When you were able to meet President Bush after the book was done and you spoke to him about the battle plan, right. One of the mythologies or arguments about the war is that they were set to go to war already and therefore the battle plan was pretty much in place.

And once the battle plan's in place, the war is going to happen immediately after that. So you have this discussion with the president after the book, and there's the Afghanistan battle plan. Maybe you could illuminate this battle plan. It's a hinge moment in your book, the battle plan question.

 

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: Well, I mean, the so called war planning evolved, and I talk about this in several chapters of the book. I mean, there wasn't a specific battle plan. It evolves and takes different forms. But the war planning did begin in December of 2001, in which Bush calls General Franks down to Texas, to his ranch.

And General Franks presents the sort of first, very vague iteration of a war plan. And after franks had discussed this with Donald Rumsfeld and obviously with many of his own planners during the previous two or three weeks. And so in many books that have been written by journalists and by scholars, this engagement with the war planning is defined as, okay, we're going to war.

And I try to show in the book, you know, based on the evidence that that I gathered both interviews with other people and as well as the documentation that exists, that, you know, the war planning was not a commitment to go to war. But that's a very controversial statement.

And I'm aware that it's a controversial statement, it's controversial part of my book, and it's key to my whole book because it's a key to the entire strategy of coercive diplomacy. Condi Rice told President Bush that what he was engaged in was called coercive diplomacy. And that's the way it became discussed inside the administration.

And the development of the war plan and the deployment of the forces was an element, I claim, of coercive diplomacy. A lot of people disagree with that, and I can see why. So when I met with President Bush after my book was published, I just explicitly said to him, I said, a lot of my academic friends disagree with my claim that war planning did not mean war.

And President Bush just smiled at me and he said, your academic friends don't know what they're talking about. I assure you that war planning. Did not mean that I had made up my mind to go to war. Now I know when I say that to many of my academic friends, they're going to say, you really believe the president when he says something like that.

And I can see that there can be argumentation about it. But to me at least, it was reassuring to hear him say as categorically as he did that war planning did not mean war. I think that I substantiate that through many chapters of the book and another document, and this is what Steve was referring to.

I mentioned this to Steve last night. Another document just has emerged since I published my book, which was a memorandum of the discussion between President Bush and Vice President Cheney with the 9-11 commission. This interview took place in, I think it was 2004, when the 9-11 commission was interrogating every leading policymaker about what had happened.

And there was an extensive, went many hours of discussion with President Bush and Cheney together. And this document just was declassified in just about one year ago now, in November or so of last October, November, December of last year. And one of the interests, the interview is not about Iraq.

It's about 9-11 and Afghanistan and Taliban. But what is striking in this document is in 2004, is that many times Bush expresses to his inquisitors, the 9-11 commission, how exasperated he was right after 9-11 that there were no existing war plans to deal with the Taliban and how difficult it was for him as president, sort of grapple with this exigence situation when there was no plan that existed and how hard it was to get the CIA and the Pentagon to work together to resolve what should be the immediate reaction.

And as you may recall, in the United States, there was tremendous amount of controversy after a week or ten days that nothing was being done. Part of the reason nothing was being done because the plans had not been formulated in advance. And all of this suggested very clearly that what the president really wanted when he started war planning for Iraq in December of 2001 was to have plans ready should he decide in the future that it was actually necessary to take action against Iraq.

And one of the things that, that I didn't know when I wrote my book was an interview, not that I had with Tommy Franks, but that General Tommy Franks, the head of central command, had with other people, in which he was asked about these initial planning meetings that he had with Bush and Rumsfeld and others about the prospect of planning a war against Iraq.

And Tommy Franks himself explicitly says, and I quote in my book, I never had the feeling in talking with President Bush that his mind was made up to go to war. What I did know, Franks added in the next sentence, what I did know was that if we did go to war, we would be mightily well prepared to achieve our mission.

That's the way he presents it.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, we have 45 minutes for questions. I already have quite a number on Zoom. I see quite a lot of hands going up. Let's have David Kennedy first, Cole Bunzel, Jennifer, David Berkey, and then I'll go to Zoom, and then we'll come back.

I see Yumi Moon, David.

>> David Kennedy: So, Mel, thanks for the book and the lucidity of this presentation. Stephen, in his usual uncanny way, anticipated the question I had in mind about the post publication interview with President Bush, but your response to that actually prompts another question. Maybe you'll be too discomforted to answer this, but were there any of your interviewees from whom you had the sense they were shining you on or misleading you or were not reliable witnesses to what you were trying to get at?

And how did you assess the reliability of their testimony?

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: Actually, I always assume that very experienced policymakers who had talked for dozens of years to many probing journalists were probably more able to spin me than I was able to probe them. I mean, I sort of assume that as a fact of life.

I tried to engage and question all the interviewees as directly and thoughtfully as I could. I tried not to ask leading questions. I often frame my questions in a way that invited them to talk expansively, and then I could reflect on what they said. So, for example, I frequently asked people in the administration because I wanted to know how high a priority Iraq was when they first came into office, something that's talked about in so much of the literature.

But I didn't ask them the question of, I never asked the question, was Iraq your number one priority when you came into office? I always said, when you came into office, what did you most want to accomplish? What was most on your mind? I tried to ask open ended questions.

I think that I engaged all my interlocutors in ways that, over time, built up a lot of confidence. If you're asking did they try to present things that justified or explained what they did, of course they did. Were they telling the truth because they explained or they were seeking or trying to explain what they had done, they obviously presented it from their own perspective and their own recollection of what was going on.

Did I think they were intentionally misleading me. For the most part, I don't think that was the case. But keep in mind that almost all my book is written in my own view, with a focus on the fact that what was said to me needed to be illustrated in the documents that I had available, at the time.

Now, that wasn't always the case, but I believe that most of the key points that were made to me. That really shape the contours of my book and my thinking, the things that were said to me. There's compelling evidence in the written record as well. I thought, speaking to David, you know very well that my whole career is based on going to archives.

I'm a real archives guy. In fact, in all my previous books, I think I had only interviewed one policymaker in 40 years of academic life. And now I was talking to every leading policymaker. So I was aware then, I am aware now that what people tell you need to be verified in the written record.

I'm totally open to the proposition that in future years there are going to be millions of new documents. And yes, the documents demonstrate that I was wrong about this, that and the other thing. But I believe that at this moment in time, the documents and the interviews are really pretty complementary.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, I have a developing list here. It's got Cole, Jennifer, David Berkeley, Yumi, and Sam Helfont. And we also have a number of questions from Zoom. So I'll do my best, Cole.

>> Cole Bunzel: Thanks for this lovely talk. I had a question about the role of outside experts and intellectuals, different sorts of academic friends.

There were a number of prominent academics and intellectuals who became outspoken advocates and later defenders of the war in Iraq and were noted for their frequent visits to the White House and thinking in particular of Stephen's old colleague Bernard Lewis. And Hoover's, yeah, Hoover's own Fuad Ajimi. Of course they were close friends, but there were others.

There was Ken Pollock, Tom Friedman, Christopher Hitchens. I'm wondering, in your research, what did you discover about the role, if any, of these intellectuals, in shaping the decision making, going into the role, going into the war? And I guess the larger question is, do intellectuals matter?

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: I don't think the intellectuals mattered much in the nitty greedy weekly decision making.

And I would say that I think policymakers often called in the people who shared their predilections to begin with, although I think that predilections were more complicated than is often portrayed. So, I would say that intellectuals did shape the thinking of neoconservatives all through the 1990s. So if you're asking, did some of the important writings of neoconservative thinkers in the 1990s affect people like Wolfowitz and Doug Feith?

I think they did. Did the writings of the 1990s on the democratic peace affect the overall mindset of the policymakers? That if you created freedom in Iraq, you'd have a more peaceful Middle East? Those notions did reside broadly in the mindsets of the policymakers. So in these general ways, I would say that the scholars and experts had an impact.

Some scholars and experts had an impact. Of course, there are also scholars who at the very last minute, not so much the last minute, but during the last 18 months or so leading up to the war in Iraq, famous scholars, John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, other experts, strongly opposed going into Iraq.

They obviously had little impact on the final decision. So what I think maybe is most salient to what you're saying, I was struck, is that the policymakers often spoke to Iraqi emigres and who were incredibly intent on getting rid of Saddam Hussein's regime. And I do think the emigres, I think they believed what they said.

They certainly affected Bush's and Cheney's sort of instinctive feeling that if we overthrow Saddam, the Iraqis are going to embrace us. They really want to be, whatever this might mean, free, and that American troops would be embraced. I think the emigres made that case to policymakers very frequently, and I think the policymakers believed it, but not strictly because of what the emigres were saying to them.

In fact, I would say that far more important than what the emigres were saying was their own lived, was the lived experience of the policymakers themselves. What had a tremendous impact on them was their own perception of America's and the West's victory in the Cold War, that at the end of the Cold War, East Germans, East Europeans just embraced freedom and democracy, and we're so happy to get rid of totalitarian communism.

Those notions, however unnuanced they were, were dramatically important in terms of policymakers thinking about how Iraqis broadly defined inside Iraq would react to America's liberation. And, I mean, Condi Rice said numerous times about Iraqis are going to rise up and be as enthusiastic as the East Germans were at the end of the cold War, things of that sort.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Jennifer?

>> Jennifer Burns: Hi, now, Jennifer Burns, nice to see you.

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: Yeah, hi.

>> Jennifer Burns: I have a question that actually is a lot like Cole's, but I'll try to make it a little different. So on your theme of hubris, it strikes me there's probably a lot of ignorance kind of wound into that and just thinking long term.

On the one hand, this sounds familiar from the Vietnam War in terms of misunderstanding some of the dynamics on the ground. On the other hand, as you know, over the Cold War, there was this huge apparatus of area studies that was built up and that was funded and that was intended to generate knowledge about different cultures, potential adversaries, potential allies.

And that really diminished after the Cold War. Do you think, if that had been maintained, would that have made a difference in terms of state knowledge of these different areas, or in terms of a more realistic assessment of how this culture might respond or how United States presuppositions and assumptions might.

Might be really off.

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: No, I don't think so. I regret what happened, but I don't think in that respect it would have made a difference, because I think the hubris that I emphasize is a sense of american exceptionalism and american superiority that is truly inbred into most Americans.

I think President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, all really embraced those notions. And I think, frankly, most Americans embraced those notions of American superiority and American exceptionalism. And I call it hubris in my book because I think it is hubris rather than ideology. So some of my critics have said to me, Mel doesn't deal enough with ideology.

I think this was hubris. It was a sense of we have a system. I mean, in the national strategy statement of 2002, I think starts with a paragraph that says, we represent a society of democratic capitalism that has proved itself for all time as the only effective way of managing modernity.

That's a poor paraphrase, but that's sort of what the first paragraph of the National Security Strategy statement of 2002 stipulated. I think there's just an immense amount of hubris that shapes that type of thinking. Along with the hubris I show in my book was a pronounced sense of victimhood.

And President Bush, in many, many, many of his statements, in many of his press conference, talked about the United States as being innocent victims, that freedom and liberty were being assailed in the United States for no good reason, and so this sense of victimhood commingled with the hubris that I outlined.

So I don't think it's related to expert studies. I think this is, in the academic world in the 1990s, I think it's built deeply into the American psyche. And, of course, most nations think they're exceptional in their own specific ways. But American exceptionalism really did shape the mindset of almost all the key policymakers, regardless of their tactical differences.

I'm gonna go to our Zoom audience now, patiently waiting.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Roger Barnett asks, what, if any, effect on decision-making did the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 have? It passed the Congress with strong majorities and called for the removal of Saddam Hussein. After all, this Iraq Liberation act of 1998 was the law of the land.

 

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: Yeah, absolutely, the Iraq Liberation Act was passed in 1998. The sort of the Clinton administration, top policymakers in the Clinton administration accepted it. The attitudes towards Saddam Hussein in the top echelons of the Clinton administration during 1998, 1999, 2000 in my opinion, were identical to the attitudes toward Saddam Hussein that existed inside the Bush administration in the first months of 2001.

So there was a general view, democratic view and republican view, that it was the policy of the United States to bring about a change in Iraq. But what I tried to show in my book is one. First of all, this was not anything that really preoccupied President Bush during his first eight or ten months of the administration.

And I think that's absolutely unequivocal that his focus on Iraq during the first ten months of his administration was very, very minimal. I also show in that second chapter of my book that deals with american policy, Bush administration policy, prior to 9-11, that the champions of regime change in the administration, like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, although they discussed plans, they could never agree on anything prior to 9-11.

And I explicitly outlined the discussions as we have them thus far, that went on amongst the deputies and most importantly, the principals, so that some of Wolfowitz's own ideas about generating regime change, some of those never even reached the level of the principal, meaning the secretaries. And when the secretaries discussed, meaning Powell and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Rice.

When the principals discussed proposals for dealing with Iraq prior to 9-11, during the summer of 2001, during July and August, I show in the book that they simply could not agree on what should be done. There was, no planning was agreed on, no plan was agreed. They could not resolve what tactically was possible to do, and nothing was brought to the attention of the president of the United States himself prior to 9-11.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, we have one more from Zoom, and then we'll come back to the room. Asher ar Kabi asks, did President Bush see himself as upholding the chemical weapons taboo and the chemical weapons convention by targeting Saddam Hussein?

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: I think he felt that he was enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations that Saddam Hussein himself had agreed to in 1990 and 91, that's the way that President Bush and his advisors saw themselves.

They perceived that Iraq was in violation of the obligations that it had engaged in, and they were trying to ensure Iraqi compliance with resolutions that Iraq had signed on to.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, let's go back to the room. I have David Berkey, Yumi Moon, and then Sam Helfont, in that order.

 

>> David Berkey: Thank you, yeah. I also had a question on hubris and was hoping that you would discuss that, which you have in some measure here. Whether it grew out of a sort of a naivete, stories or accounts of people who had been oppressed in Iraq, whether it was American exceptionalism or what the origins of that.

And you've already discussed that. At what point, so I'll ask a slightly different question here, which is to say, at what point does it become clear to the administration, to President Bush, that these ideas are off the mark.

>> David Berkey: That this hubris-

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: I understand your question, and I'm trying to think of the appropriate answer to that.

I don't think that President Bush thought then, and I'm not sure that his top advisors even think today, that those ideas were off the mark, to use your word. The initial months of the occupation, I demonstrate in the book, were incredibly poorly executed. All the key issues were poorly handled.

And I think that the top policymakers might say that it was the failure of the execution of plans, the mistaken assumptions that they might have had about who, for example, should constitute the Iraqi interim authority, things of that sort. Rather than the basic conception of what you're saying to me, that other people would not want to emulate the United States.

I think that during the period that I'm focused on in this book, which more or less ends in August, September of 2003, when I think it became unmistakably clear that a big insurrection was emerging and that the initial plans were failing. I don't think at that point in time that even then, that these basic American assumptions were punctured.

I think they thought that they had made a lot of miserable errors in the execution of various policies.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, Yumi.

>> Yumi Moon: I'm Yumi Moon, I study US occupation of South Korea. So I'm a big fan of your book, Propulsion of Power. So in light of your book on this US global strategy after the World War II, I'd like to ask three questions.

The first one is that this Iraqi war, I think during the time the US lost the opportunity to consider the China or the rise of the problems of North Korea's nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons, but in fact, North Korea was able to develop nuclear weapons.

So when, I mean, reading these, the US decision makers documents and interviews, did US decision maker have an overview, a broader view of the world, and then somehow so called the global strategies? That's the first questions. And then if they had have done, maybe they might have been more prudent in going for the war.

So when did they lose this kind of insight, global insight? That's the first question. The second question is on intellectuals. You answered a lot of, I heard, learned a lot. But I remember at the time I was in the United States, so I remember the Sam Huntington's article and the sensational kind of impact of Sam Huntington's article on the defense of western civilization and the problems of Islamic civilization or something like that.

So somehow in light of the Iraqi Liberation act, wasn't that the case that US intellectuals at the time or establishment targeted Islam instead of having a more prudent view of what would be the real threats for the peace? That's the second question. The final question is, I mean, this is most important, the occupation and military intervention.

I'm sorry, so you just really critical of the Iraqi occupation. But when military intervention and occupation in the US foreign affairs were good, what was the desire or more kind of exemplary kind of case of US occupation? This is because you have Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, US might need to intervene in East Asia.

So then military intervention could be still an option for the United States? If so, when it is good? From your reading of Iraqi failures, I'd like to hear your wisdom, sorry.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Three questions per person might be above the quota, but Mel, you do your best there. You do your best.

 

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: I think the administration believed that it was formulating a global strategy when 9-11 occurred. I talk a little bit about it in the second chapter of my book. Condi Rice and her staff, the National Security Council staff, was in the midst of writing a National Security Strategy Statement in the middle of 2001.

I would say, broadly speaking, that national security strategy statement was totally compatible with what most democratic and republican administrations had been saying for the prior 30 years. It was a huge amount of continuity with the idea of creating a liberal capitalist international order. There was a tremendous emphasis on working with allies and there was a hope of engaging other great powers, China, and Russia.

The big threat that was now perceived, the global strategy was now perceived or America's role in the world. The notion of liberal capitalist hegemony was being challenged primarily by rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, and the threat of the proliferation of weapons. So that was the broad mindset of policymakers.

They state very clearly, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld state explicitly in many congressional hearings prior to 9-11 about their number one priority and preoccupation is with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Likely with the growing ability of rogue states like Iran, Iraq and North Korea to develop missiles, medium short range, medium range, and, quote, eventually global intercontinental missiles that will be able to carry chemical and biological weapons or even nuclear weapons.

In terms of strategy, that's the looming threat that hovers over the American global order in 2001. More than anything else, it's rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, the possibility of undermining the homeland through asymmetric initiatives. There is not a huge concern with great powers. There's not a perception of great rivalry with other powers.

There is a huge emphasis on enhancing alliances, strengthening the alliances that exist. By the way, that's surprising if you know that there's a big emphasis, that the administration came in with a bent on unilateralism and didn't care. You don't see it in these documents. So that's what I'd say is a thread of global strategy, in terms of overall global strategy.

What I would say about the thrust of your other questions is that what's compelling importance is that 9-11 reshapes the thinking about threat perception. And the revolutionized view, you might say, of the immediacy of the threat is what then reshapes the subsequent strategy statements where you have a much greater explicit emphasis.

But not the sole emphasis by any means, on taking preemptive or preventative actions to deal with rogue states that might eventually have weapons of mass destruction. So the events of 9-11 have a tremendous impact on overall strategic thinking, and they do contribute to the temptation to take preventative or preemptive actions.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: I'll just point out that one could talk about Japan and Germany as cases of American military intervention that led to positive outcomes. Other cases can be debated. I think that's a fair point.

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: And those successes hover over the minds of these policymakers tremendously. Germany and Japan and the end of the Cold War are the two big paradigms of American success.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: For the decision. We have Sam Helfont, and then we'll go back to the Zoom. There's a whole bunch waiting on Zoom, and then we'll get back to the room.

>> Sam Helfont: All right, I have a question, Mel, about your Bush interview. I actually have two questions. I don't want to get above the quota.

So at the end, if there's more time, come back. Come back. So the question about the Bush interview, one of my big unanswered questions in your book, right, is that you argue that this decision for war is late. But that nobody really knows when this decision was made or how, even senior people in the national security.

So did Bush tell you when he made this decision? It's a big mystery.

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: Sam, you're absolutely right. It is a big mystery. I remember when I was researching my book, I kept asking myself, when was the key decision made to go to war in Iraq? And then it became clear to me, as it becomes clear to anybody studying this closely, that so many different people say different dates.

And I once had a list of about 20 top advisors saying, so and so says August 2003 of 2002. So and so says July, so and so says October. So if you look at the oral histories and the interviews, not only mine but others, you'll see a great ambiguity.

So, yes, in my discussion with President Bush a couple of weeks ago, I did ask explicitly this question. And by the way, I should make clear that the entire interview was not about just my book. And I wasn't trying to recreate the interview process. It was a very engaging conversation that dealt with lots of things, including the New York Giants of the 1950s and who was playing which positions.

It was actually a wonderful discussion, but about 25 of the 60 minutes, I would say, focused on key issues of the book. And that was one of them. And I said to him exactly what you said to me, people say you made your decision at different times. When did you make your decision?

And then unfortunately, I said in asking this, unfortunately, because it wasn't the best way to frame a question, unfortunately, I then said, well, some of your closest advisors, like Condi Rice and Steve Hadley and Michael Gerson, your speech writer, they all say that you made your decision very, very late in the game.

And his response, and I think I specifically said January, February 2003, I wasn't taping this or anything. So I have no record of it, but I think that's what I said. And his response was, they are right. Hadley, Rice and Gerson, I made the decision very late in the game.

I wish I had not said that. I wish I had just said, people have very different views. When did you do it? And then I might have given him sort of carte blanche to sort of say, this is the answer. But that's what he said very late January, February 2003.

That comports with what I write in the book. So I was happy to hear it. But, I think pursuing that systematically in the future is a very worthwhile endeavor, I think it could turn out otherwise.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, from Heder Hadi, who is our library and archives curator in this area, did the administration have some thoughts and analysis, threat metrics, of toppling Saddam's regime and then potentially empowering the Shia in Iraq and Iran in the region?

What is the lesson of how history can help have better decision making in foreign policy? We haven't talked Iran yet the whole time, we're over an hour and 20 minutes in, so here it is.

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: Well, I think the big broad lesson is understanding the social fabric and the culture of other nations, in this case quote, target nations, is indispensable for good policy making.

I think that if you asked Condi Rice or Steve Hadley, were they aware of the potentiality of Sunni Shia struggle, they would say, yes of course we were aware of it. Did some of the intelligence analysis talk about these things? There are two really pretty decent studies put out by the National Intelligence Authority in January of 2003.

One was called something like regional consequences of regime change, and the second one was something like domestic challenges of regime change. In these two documents that roughly 15 or 20 pages, there's talk of their references to the potentiality of Sunni-Shia conflict. But I think what we all tend to believe, because of what actually happened, was that the intensity and fratricide of Sunni-Shia sectarian strife, that was inevitable, it happened, therefore we say it was inevitable.

I'm not sure that experts at the time would have said that it was inevitable. I think what the policymakers believe was that there was the potential for strife, but I think it was beyond their comprehension that it would turn into what happened. And I think there was good reason for it to be beyond their comprehension, because what happened was in fact shaped by contingent circumstances that were probably very hard to foresee.

The degree to which al Qaeda in Iraq would become a determining force, the degree to which they would purposefully foment sectarian strife and civil war. I think those things would have been very hard to foresee in advance. So yes, knowing more, the short answer to this very important question is we should try to know as much as we can about the social fabric and cultural life in political institutions, and we should try to convey this knowledge as best we can, as succinctly as we can to the policymakers who are making decisions.

I think in broad terms, people like Condi Rice and Steve Hadley knew about these issues, should they have been able to understand the ramifications? I don't know, I think those are judgment calls, I'm not sure if the answer.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, and the empowerment of Iran, is that in the documentation, in other words, foresight about the?

 

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: I see very little, I myself in the documents I've read, have seen very little focus on that, partly because I don't think the policymakers foresaw the weakening of Iraq to the extent that that occurred. When they moved into Iraq, they weren't thinking that they were going to foment a civil war and domestic economic devastation that actually occurred, they weren't thinking that that was going to happen.

So, they were not assuming that Iraq's power would so drastically diminish, and Iran would gain such great dominance in the Persian Gulf region.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, in the interest of time, I have three more questions in the room, we're gonna take them all. So, if you would note what they are, Peter Robinson is next, and then the gentleman.

 

>> Peter Robinson: I have three dozen questions, but since I live in fear of Stephen Kotkin, you just discussed Iran, at what point did Donald Rumsfeld check out? I can recall, I think it was 2005, a meeting of the Hoover institution in Washington, we were at war. The war was going badly, and the Secretary of Defense came and spoke to Hoover overseers and a few of us scholars, about reforming the requisition process.

It was just astounding, it was very clear this was no longer his main concern. If State wanted to invent a new nation, it was up to them, he was going to reform the Pentagon. How early did that happen, and why did the president put up with it as long as he did?

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, take that, hold that, yes sir?

>> J Deb: Hi, I'm J Dev, I'm a program associate here at Hoover for the Wargaming Initiative, and I wanted to ask about dysfunction. So, how did the bureaucratic conflicts and infighting impact the decision making? And you've studied many different presidential administrations, and I was wondering, how does this level of dysfunction and internal conflict compare to other administrations you've studied?

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, and one more.

>> Kelly Shannon: Hi, Kelly Shannon, hi Mel, so I'm asking a historically oriented question. A lot of ink has been spilled about the Iraq war, but as far as I know, you're the first historian to really do a historical study of this subject, doing the very careful research that you're known for, and you get to stake out a lot of the terrain on which future historians are going to be arguing about this topic.

So, what's the one big claim that you make in the book that you'd like future historians to have to grapple with when they're writing about the Iraq war, or the Bush administration, or 21st century policy in general.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, Mel.

>> Melvyn P. Leffler: These are great questions that really deserve a lot of time.

I know it. So, Peter, I have actually a precise answer for you, it would be a very controversial answer, and it will surprise you because it's so early in the process. So I believe that in many ways Donald Rumsfeld checked out on, I forget the exact date, but it's like May 5th or May 8th of 2003.

It happened in the following context because, this is really interesting. Paul Bremer has been appointed the head of the coalition provisional authority. He's not yet gone to Iraq. Rumsfeld, who didn't know Paul Bremer, signed on to this. He had met with Paul Bremer one time for maybe 20 minutes and then had recommended him to the president because others had recommended him to Rumsfeld.

Paul Bremer meets once with the president and president decides, yeah, you're the right guy. And then they organize a meeting. They agree to have lunch together on May 5th or May 8th, something like that, before Bremer goes to Iraq. And they both describe this. Bremer describes this lunch in his memoir.

And the president says to him, something like, what can I do to help you? What can I do to help you? Bremer says, it doesn't matter. The specifics aren't important. But Bremer says A, B, C. There were three things Bush said, fine. All three things. They have lunch.

They talk for about an hour and a half or something like that. They go directly from there into a meeting of the principals. And Bush, they walk in. Bremer walks in with President Bush, and Condi is there and Rumsfeld is there, and Secretary of State Pell is there.

And Bush starts the meeting by saying something like, I'm paraphrasing now, but it's something like, well, I don't know why we're having this meeting. I just talked to our new leader in Iraq and we've worked out all the issues. And it is clear from the memoir writing, and this comes from memoir writing, Bremer's and interviews and Rumsfeld too.

It's clear Rumsfeld was incensed, incensed that he had not been part of that lunch and that it seemed to Rumsfeld that Bremer would have a direct line to the president and that Rumsfeld would not be the key. And there's a lot in the literature about the friction that immediately developed.

But I think that at that meeting, as a result of that meeting, Rumsfeld was so exasperated, so angry that he had been left out that it was like, okay, you've appointed Bremer. Let him grapple with this. This was reinforced. And this part is significant and has nothing to do with that specific meeting.

But it was reinforced by the fact that already, already Condi Rice and Steve Hadley had decided to shut down national security decision making regarding Iraq in Washington and to let the folks inside Iraq deal with the issue. And it was done on the basis of that. The people inside Iraq, it's now April, May 2003.

They know the nitty gritty what's going on, let them handle the decision. Plus the fact, my God, there's so much acrimony here in Washington between Rumsfeld and Powell and Fife and the others already. And there was, I describe it in the book, really poisonous atmosphere. So in a sense, it's like, let's shut it down here.

Let the folks in Iraq handle it. So that was coupled now with Rumsfeld's checking out to use your word. And the problem was, of course, the people inside Baghdad, the Americans inside Baghdad, were feuding with one another as intensely there as they were in Washington. But I think there's no seminal moment to answer your very good question.

Almost everyone would say shares your view. I think a huge number of people, scholars and participants, Rumsfeld, quote, checked out, and I believe at least the beginning of it was in that very consequential meeting. The next question about bureaucratic dysfunction. How did it affect policy? It usually affected policy, and in the last chapter of my book, I show nitty gritty how it affected policy with regard to the disbandment of the Iraqi army.

Tremendous bureaucratic infighting on what the Iraqi interim authority, that's what it was called, the Iraqi interim authority, who should be a member of the Iraqi interim authority. Tremendous conflict between Defense Department officials like Doug Fife and State Department officials like Richard Armitage and Richard Haas. And so also a lot of dispute over the question of so called de-Ba'athification.

Different bureaucracies felt differently. How did it compare to dysfunction in other administrations? I think it was far more intense because it wasn't just a matter of the principals disagreeing. The discord and animosity really went down into the ranks of the departments where sort of high deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries.

They either engulfed these attitudes themselves or they were unfortunately enmeshed in them. But you can see tremendous amount of animosity that I think is much more intense. So, for example, in the Reagan years, it's often said that Shultz and Weinberger were at one another's throats, and they were often.

But actually lower down there were often efforts to sort of mediate those differences. In this administration, it was very, very hard for others to mediate them. Then finally, what's the biggest historiographical claim of the book? I think one, having trouble thinking. I think it's probably the most important overall historiographical claim of the book is that the decision to invade Iraq actually contingent.

It wasn't preordained. That to really understand why we invaded Iraq and why the invasion worked out as badly as it did is that you really need to understand a lot of interacting factors. And all of that illuminates that it was not a given that the administration would invade Iraq and not a given that the invasion would turn into a tragedy.

In fact, I'll just conclude on one last statement, and I think I am still beleaguered with the uncertainty in my own mind. Was the tragedy that I think undoubtedly occurred in Iraq, was that tragedy an inevitable one based on the conceptualization of the issue? Or did the tragedy of Iraq occur because of flawed, terrible execution?

Was it a conceptual problem or was it a problem of implementation? And I go back and forth on that, but I think it's one that really requires a lot of deep thinking.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We'll take contingency in history as the big lesson from your work, Mel, I apologize to those on Zoom.

Many more questions and others in the room, but I have to say, let's give it up, Mel Leffler.