three questions. but to start with the on the ground but yes, you are right two you have to approach the right response and it seems to be something very difficult to achieve in the modern world that has become very god. . .

>> very bad at allowing people to spend five years in the >> on the arab spring issue, i think the central point is this, we should think more symbolically. the point is not gadhafi. the point is the whole mideast

over the next 20 years and how the united states, and its allies relate to those countries. do we get off on the right foot in our relationship? are we on the side of progress or the side of oil rich dictators, do we witch to be seen as making some strange neoimperial move. i thought what was smart about what the president did is he was very limited. what he said was, we're interested in protecting the civilian population, we're going to have a no-fly zone that's it. the problem is that other countries, such as france, and indeed my country, britain, began to push and push and push, and we lost our patience, and it all became, let's get gadhafi. why isn't -- and the ability of even the united states to say, patience, relax, it's trending in the right direction, we protected the civilian population. this is better than it was in northern iraq 15 years ago, better than boss knea.

things are going the right direction. our tools are limited. this is an international operation, et cetera. so, what i think we need to regain is a sense of intermediate tools, that we need to get out of this black and white world of either engagement or isolation. either we put 135,000 troops on the ground or don't touch them. that's why the no-fly zones are powerful instruments. there are things you can do that steps short of going in with a full intervention, and one thing that was so impressive in bosnia is the way in which that actually worked. the story about bosnia has tended to be, we were a bunch of wimps. we went into bosnia in '95 and didn't do enough. we didn't grip the station. we should have gripped it. we should have stomped on the criminals: stomped on the war

criminals. and that was the mood in which we went into iraq and afghanistan. actually, the reverse is true. what made bosnia work was the moderation of the community once they decided to act. we were disgraced, but once we decided to act we barely put a foot wrong. it was the correct thing to do. we got those war criminals into the hague. but we didn't do it immediately. we dealt with and negotiated with those people. we didn't scare them initially. '96, '97, took it very gently. we had strategic patience. we ended up with those people on trial and in the process we took armed forces which, in the bosnian era were 410,000 armed people down to the region of 15,000. all the frontier lines between the bosnia muslim areas i

traveled through in 1999 have disappeared. one million refugees returned. 200,000 houses have been returned. not in the way that we thought. not because in '95 and '96 we screamed and shouted and insisted on immediate return. we allowed bosnians to take the lead. we put our energy behind them the way young ideailistache working alongside them, but it was all done in a context that was regional. a lot of the secret was the croatia change, the serbia change, that the european union was offering in the future for the balkans. we played it very well and we should take away a message not of despair but of hope. but we should also learn very, very much -- this relates to the lady's final point -- to

understand when the time it's come to leave, understand when there's a limit to how much more you can do. i agree with this lady very much. seizing the moment of bin laden's death would have been important. not because of course it made total sense. it would have been symbolic. everybody could stand up and say it doesn't matter. this is about -- this is what politicians do. this is the world in which we swim. seizing those moments, seizing those opportunities in order to follow what you believe is the right path, is the correct answer. on which i conclude. with many, many thanks to you all. and have a great evening. [applause]

>> up next, former vice president cheney talks about his experienced during 9/11 and the lessons he learned since then. mr. cheney is interviewed by stephen hayes, senior writer and the author of "cheney." [applause] >> good morning, everybody, welcome to the american enterprise institute. i'm the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies here at aei. let me first remind everybody, please, to turn off their telephones or put them on

vibrate. and ask everybody, when the session ends, to please row remain seated in order to allow our speakers to leave the room. book severals are available with the book in the reception after the end of the event. >> when aei president arthur brookes, who unfortunately couldn't be here, invited vice president cheney to join us today, it was with a view to remembering the attacks of 9/11, ten years later, and considering some of the lessons learned, and those that were not since that day. but the first thing to recall about 9/11, and about the long war that we are still fighting, is the many who gave their lives. the families who sacrificed loved ones, and the awful loss. first and foremost, now is the time to remember those many brave americans who died at

home, our fighting men and women who risked everything so that we can live in freedom, and our invaluable allies from too many countries to name who share our cause. as some of you know, vice president cheney recently published a memoir. "in my time." written with his daughter, liz cheney. we understand it will debut at number one on "the new york times" bestseller list. [applause] >> today, he joins us with weekly standard's senior writer and best selling author steve hayes, for a conversation about the attack on our nation, about decisions made since then, and reflections on an amazing life in politics and pretty much whatever else he and steve choose to talk about today in the hour we have in the time remaining after the

conversation, we'll have a q & a session moderated by steve. lynn cheney has been a scholar at aei for many years. dick cheney is a member of our board of trustees, we're so glad to have them part of our aei family, and we thank you and them for joining us here today. [applause] >> well, thank you -- >> i won't interrupt. >> remember, you're a reporter, ]xa you're a

>> the last half of the book focused on the bush-cheney administration, and the book opens in the prologue with the recounting the event as i saw them on 9/11. and then much of that last half of the book deals with what we had to do during the course of our subsequent seven and a half years in order to keep the country safe. the controversies we were involved in on things like the terrorist surveillance program and enhanced interrogation and so forth. that's a large part of the book is relevant with respect to 9/11 and the aftermath, although i don't want to mislead anybody there's an awful lot of other subjects, going back to -- been five republican administrations since eisenhower. i worked in four of them.

worked closely with the fifth, the reagan administration, as part of the house republican leadership so i try to cover all of that period of time, and obviously there's a lot we had to leave out, but there's enough there that steve is trying to make a living writing articles about me. so, i'm going to turn it over to him. >> excellent. thank you, and thanks to danny and aei for having us, just to give you an idea what i thought i would do this morning, i'm going to start with questions about 9/11 specifically and push you in particular about your personal views on these things, because i know you love to put yourself on the couch like that. public self-reflection. and then i'm going to go and talk about a number of different ways in which the policies that emanated from 9/11 that you, i think in large part helped drive, and try to fill in some gaps. i spent a lot of time looking at the interviews you've done since

the book came out. i read it now twice. and some questions i have remaining for you. so, i think that's how i'd like to proceed, and then as danny mentioned, we'll throw it open to everybody for additional questions that will probably be much better than mine. so i thought the first place we would start is on the morning of 9/11. i would be interested to know when you first knew we were under attack. not when you first heard about it. when did you know we were under attack, and what were your very first thoughts at that moment? >> well, i was in my office in the west wing, working with me speech writer, when my secretary called in to report that a plane had struck the world trade center? new york, and we turned on the television after the first plane had gone in but before anything else happened, and immediate reaction, how is this possible? this is a really weird accident.

perfectly clear weather. no way to account for it. then as we watched we saw the second plane hit, and that immediately, in my mind, triggered the notion that this had to be a terrorist attack. couldn't have two airliners fly into the world trade center within minutes of each other and not have it be anything but a terrorist attack. shortly after that, i talked to the president down in florida, and we talked about a statement he was getting ready to issue a statement, and that was whether or not it was proper to talk about terrorism within that context of that statement, and we both agreed it definitely was, and the words he used was, probably a terrorist attack on the united states. within the relatively short period of time, people began to gather in my office. secretary rice and national

security adviser was there, scooter libby, my chief of staff, seven or eight people in the room, and then all of a sudden the door burst open, and my lead secret service agent came in and came over to the desk where i was sitting, and he said, sir, we have to leave immediately. i said, -- didn't say, please come with me. he said, we have to leave immediately, put one hand on the back of my belt and one hand on my shoulder and literally propelled me out of my office. i didn't have the option of not going where he wanted me to go. and the cause for that, the reason he'd done that, he explained to me as he was taking me down to the presidential emergency operations century under the white house, was that heed received a report over the secret service radio net that there was a hijack aircraft out

at dulles headed towards crane at 500 miles an hour, crown being the code word for the white house. and that turned out to be american 77, which of course came in and made a circle and then went into the pentagon. at that point i was down in partway to the pioc. part away way to the pioc, and i immediately used a telephone that was there to place another call to the president, and that was our second or third call that morning. and i let him know that washington was under attack as well as new york. and the secret service strongly recommended he not come back. i also recommended that he not come back. believing it was very important for us to stay apart so that we didn't become a riper target, and we didn't know at that stage what was happening. >> he didn't like to hear that?

>> guest: he didn't like that at all for understandable reasons but he agreed to it. saw he wisdom of it. now asked what our reaction that morning was, steve. i went from that spot after i talked to the president, went into the peoc itself, and there i was presented by norm ma net a, our secretary of transportation, and norm had a list of six aircraft that they believed had been hijacked at that point. actually had flight numbers on them. and of course it was only four, but for a while we thought it was six. and there were two major drivers in terms of what i thought about that morning, and as we worked through the crisis that day. number one was we had to get all the planes down out of the sky, so we could isolate whatever had been hijacked, and account for all the aircraft, including the list we had of ones we thought had been hijacked.

at that point we could account for three of them. two in new york and one at the pentagon. and so that was a major part of the effort. the other thing that was very important, that i focused on, was the continuity of government. some of you probably familiar with over the years, especially during the cold war, we had developed programs and procedures for preserving the continuity of government in the event of an all-out global conflict with the soviet union. that was always a scenario. and we'd actually exercised that system on many occasions, and it focused on having ways of taking steps to ensure that somebody in the line of succession survived whatever attack we were under so when the dust settled, we would have a president and a government that functioned.

that day it took the form basically of -- one was to recommend the president and i not bunch up. it was very important for us to stay separated. but secondly was to get ahold of denny hastert. the speaker, who was out at andrews air force base, where his security detail relocated him, and we were arranged for him to be moved from there to a secure undisclosed location, because he was next in line to the presidency, and if something happened to the president and me, then denny was in a position to take over the function as president. those were the two sort of major concerns that occupied most of our time. one was getting all the airplanes down out of the sky, and the other was guaranteeing there would be somebody in the line of succession in a position to be able to take over. >> host: speaking of the secure undisclosed location, much of

the time when the media was reporting you were in a secure undisclosed location, you were actually at camp david, and that's where you went the evening of september 11th. i remember having a conversation with you much later in which you described what that was like, being at camp david, late that evening. the way you described it to me was that the family gathered around the television. you sat basically in silence for a couple hours watching reruns of the planes hitting the towers and the horror that day. what was that like? how long did you do that? and what were you thinking at that point? >> guest: it was -- after the president returned, we'd done -- we had national security council meeting, he addressed the nation, and when we finished that, then we got on the helicopter on the south lawn and were flown to camp david. it's the only time i've ever taken off in a helicopter off

the south lawn without being with the president. i've done it a lot over the years but you don't fly off the south lawn except in those extraordinary circumstances. when we got to camp david, they took to us aspen lodge, which is the presidential lodge, but for security reasons, the secret service was obviously totally focused on and concerned about possibility of follow-on attacks and so forth, and as spend was the most secure facility at camp david. so we spent a couple of days there at aspen lodge. we sat in the living room, watched the television. i was accompanied by my wife, lynn, and daughter, liz. daughter marie was out of the country in route back by then. but i can remember sitting there, focused, obviously, like i think people were all over the

country, watching the towers come down, the fires at the pentagon and so forth, and began to think about what we needed to do by way of policy, what steps we might take, in order to deal with this new situation, and the thought that came to mind were, first and foremost, this wasn't just a terrorist attack. we had had a lot of terrorist attacks over the years. we tended to treat them as law enforcement problems. we would go out and find the bad guys, arrest them, put them on trial, lock them up. this was an act of war. we had 3,000 dead americans in a matter of minutes that morning, and we needed to treat it as an act of war, and that meant obviously you marshal all the resources of the federal government to be able to deal with -- to prevent a follow-on

attack and to deal with those who were responsible for what happened. we had a pretty good idea the afternoon of the attack this was al qaeda related. that was the advice we were getting from the intelligence community. so it wasn't a big mystery about who was behind it. by then pretty well focused in on osama bin laden. but there was a lot we didn't know about al qaeda. now we know -- we have heard so much about it for ten year there's a bit of a temptation to say, we know everything there is to know about al qaeda. but the day of the attack, this was a group of terrorists, but there was a lot of key questions that we couldn't answer. we didn't know how big they were, who was financing them. we didn't know where they were operating and there was a lot we needed to learn, and at that time partly drove our search for

intelligence that generated some of the policies that we put in place, and -- but i sat as i recall and made a series of notes on a legal tab let that night as i thought about what we were faced with and how we might begin to deal with it. i chewed over in my open mind what we needed to be doing. ultimately we all met up at camp david, all of us, the national security council, that weekend. the attack was on tuesday, and by friday night we pretty well gathered up at camp david, spent saturday and sunday up there with the president, and pulled together what ultimately emerged as our strategy for the global war on terror. >> host: in the days of the attacks, we saw various public officials in very public displays of emotion.

we saw president bush almost come to tears in the oval office. we saw -- heard about condoleezza rice going back to the watergate and breaking down at one point because of the emotional toll this was taking. on a personal note, i remember coming back from new york, driving across the roosevelt bridge, hearing martin section sex toptop's version of america the beautiful, and i broke down right. -- down crying. did you ever have a moment? >> guest: not really. [laughter] >> host: you understand people will fine that -- >> guest: strange. >> host: 're peculiar. >> guest: my wife and daughter with me. lynn was with me all -- she had been downtown that morning when the attack started, and the secret service brought her over to the west wing, and then she

really sat beside me throughout the day. she'd probably be the best person to comment on what my mental attitude was. i was focused very much on what we had to do. i was thinking of it in terms of what this meant with respect to policy and our military forces and what the targets were out there we might go after and how we might go after them and so forth, what kind of intelligence we were going to need in or the to be able to cope with this. but that's what i recall. it wasn't that it wasn't a deeply moving event. clearly was. but the other thing that influenced me from a personal standpoint was i had spent a good deal of time over the years on the continuity of government program, and i'd been through exercises where the nature of the attack on the u.s. was far in excess of what we actually faced on 9/11. hundreds of thousands, maybe

even millions of people killed. so i had the benefit of having gone through those exercises over the years, and training just sort of kicked in, in terms of thinking about what we had to do that morning and the next day. >> host: let's get to those policies. specifically let's talk about the two that everybody, i think, thinks of as the most controversial, the terrorist surveillance program and enhanced interrogations. can you describe -- i think there's a general sense among the public that you sort of brain stormed these ideas. you came up with them. they were your ideas. you've been the most fierce public advocate of them. can you describe how the terrorist surveillance program came to be? >> guest: sure. at it important to keep in mind they were initiated at different

times. the terrorist surveillance program is something we moved to within days of our time with -- after 9/11. the enhanced interrogation techniques came in a year or two later when we were in the business by then of capturing people like sheikh mohamed, and i believe we caught him in the spring of '03, and the capture of certain kinds of individuals that led us to the point where we needed enhanced interrogation. but coming back to your basic question on the terrorist surveillance program, the origin of the program came really from mike hayden and his people at the national security agency, and george ten tenet was involved as well there had been a conversation between the two of them, within a couple of days of 9/11. the two of them talked, and

george mentioned it to me. basic question being, are there additional things we can do with our capabilities, our capacity to read the mail, that would help us deal with the situation we then faced. that led to a meeting in my office, as i recall, where mike came in, then general hayden, then head of nsa, later head of the cia, and george tenet, and the three of us talked, and there were things that nsa thought they could do if they had additional authority. and i took that package, that proposal, basically, and went to see the president, and set down and went through it with him, and he signed up to it, but with a caveat that he wanted it very,

very carefully managed. he wanted to make certain he personally approved it each step of the way and they had to come in for approval on a regular basis. what emerged out of that was a significantly enhanced capacity for us to be able to intercept communications only -- originating out the united states, possibly what we referred to as a dirty number. you capture an al qaeda type. he's got a computer or role odesk or whatever it is, his group of phone numbers, and you wanted to know who he was talking to in the united states, for example. and the safeguards we built into it at the direction of the president, involved the fact that every 30 or 45 days -- varied from time to time -- the secretary of defense and the

director of the cia and the nsa all had to sign off on continuing the program. it didn't get renewed automatically. they all had to say, in writing to the president, that they thought we should continue the program from the standpoint of the nation's security, et cetera. the attorney general had to sign off on it. all of that then went to the president. dave addington, who worked for me, was responsible for carrying around and he would get all signatures, and the president, once he received input from his senior adviseddors, he would sign it and extend the program for another 30 or 45 days and that's the way we operated it for years. i briefed the key members of congress. i had the chairman and ranking member of the house and senate intelligence committees come down every come of months to my

office and mike hey depp would -- hayden and george tenet would come in, and we'd breath the key four members of congress who had jurisdiction in this area over what we were doing and what kind of results it was producing. so they were in from the gripping. later on when some controversy arose inside the program with the justice department, we expanded that group of four into nine. we added the speaker, majority and minority leaders of the house and senate, and had all of them in, briefed them as well, and then i went around at that point and asked them all at that point, nancy pelosi was in the group, jay rockefeller on the democratic side. asked. the if they thought we should continue the program. they said, absolutely. then i said, do you think we ought to go back to the congress and get additional legislative authority to continue to operate

the way we're operating? and the said, absolutely not. and they were unanimous on both points. they were concerned if we went up and asked congress for a vote on the subject, that the fact that we were doing it would leak, and we would in effect be telling the enemy how we were reading their mail. so, it was well noticed -- notified to the congress. there was some controversy later on internally that the president dealt with, but it was, i'm convinced, a key part of our success in terms of preventing further attacks against the united states. i think we saved thousands of lives by what we were doing. i think it's one of the great success stories, especially with respect to nsa, how they put the program together and developed the capable and a great success story of american intelligence. >> host: you made the statement

argument about enhanced interrogations. you're a strong believer that the policies, quote-unquote, worked. let's go beyond that part of the debate and talk about the effects of enhance it interrogations and the perceptions around the world that it is torture. that the things we did amounted to torture. and the sense that maybe the moral position of the united states was eroded because of the things that we did here in this country. how do you respond to those arguments. >> guest: is that a question or invitation to argue? >> i've always offered you an invitation to argue. >> guest: okay. >> host: they're sort of crazy critiques and more thoughtful critiques. i think that's a more thoughtful critique. do you? >> guest: i do not. i am persuaded that the way we

went about seeking the authority to be able to distract more intelligence from a handful of individuals -- we're talking here not about your rank-and-file enemy troop or soldier. this does not involve the military. this does not involve the department of defense. this is a program that was authorized by the president, signed up to by the national security council, carried oust with all kinds of safeguards by the central intelligence agencies. we had a case -- excuse me -- where we had a handful of individuals who clearly had knowledge of what was in the works from the standpoint of al qaeda. what they hoped to be able to do, how they functioned, who the key members were, what their plans were. it was people like sheikh mohamed, a man named nashery,

the notion that somehow the ute was wildly torturing anybody is not true. anybody who takes the time to look at the program, i think, will come to the same conclusion. obviously there are people out there who differ with respect to that perspective, but when we get into the whole area. the most controversial technique is waterboarding. there was a protester out front when i drove in commenting on waterboarding. three people were waterboardded. not dozens. not hundreds. three. and the one who was subjected most often to that was sheikh mohamed and it produced phenomenal results. there were reports that the intelligence committee did that were declassified at my request

and are on the internet, that talk about the quality of information we got as a result of our enhanced interrogation techniques applied to a handful of individualed. we're talking about only a handful of people who were indeed part of the al qaeda organization. and sheikh mohamed is the man who we correctly believed had beheaded daniel pearl, a reporter for the wall street journal, but also claimed credit for being the architect of 9/11 that killed 3,000 americans that morning. another key point that needs to be made was that the techniques that we used were all previously used on american military personnel. not all of them but all of them had been used in training for a lot of our own specialists, in

the military area. so, there wasn't any technique that we used on any al qaeda individual that hadn't been used on our own troops first. just to give you some idea whether or not we were, quote, torturing the people we captured. the way the program worked was that the agency came in, primarily george tenet, the director of the cia, talked to me, talked to a couple of other people, basically he wanted to know how far they could go in terms of interrogations of these individuals that we captured. and really needed to kind of sign off. one was a signoff by the president, and secondly was the ruling from the justice

department where that line was that you couldn't cross. and we sought and obtained both of those. the president signed up to it, as did the other members of the national security council. some of my colleagues may have forgotten that, but in fact everybody who was a member of the national security council was informed about the essence of the program, and signed up to it. so you had the proper governmental authorities agreeing that this was necessary, and worthwhile, and we had the key people over in the justice department, people like john yu, who has been severely harassed because of the fact of the legal opinion he and others issued, but they were legitimate legal opinions from the justice department, said this is okay and appropriate, this isn't, gave us a very clear

guide we could follow, and the folks at the agency insisted on that kind of guidance before they were willing to go forward. now, they -- one of the things i found most objectionable with respect to the obama administration, when they came in, was the initial decision by the president and attorney general holder that they were going to investigate and prosecute the people in the intelligence community who had carried out this interrogation program at our direction. and -- a terrible precedent. the president of the united states signed up to it, the legitimate authority. the justice department signed up to it. these guys went out on our authority and collected intelligence we badly needed to have, and the next thing you know you gate change in

administrations and the new crowd coming in says, we're going to prosecutor those guys who were responsible for carrying out those policies. well, i came here to aei at one point, about two years ago, and spoke on the subject. i will say the administration appears to have reversed course. all of those activities were investigated by career lawyers in the justice department at the tail end of the bush administration. it had all been looked at before to make sure it was copacetic, and the obama administration did finally -- and i think -- i hope the matter is now resolved. back off. and those people that frankly i think didn't deserve to be prosecuted. i don't think deserve to be decorate for the work they did for us that saved many, many lives. >> host: let's jump forward to that speech, which you say was may of 2001 here in aei and it

was in part a critique of the administration's decision on those things you mentioned, but it was also, at least the way i heard it, warning by stepping back from the kinds of things that your administration had done, you were in effect saying, we're putting -- we're choosing to put ourselves at greater risk, and yet here we are, some two and a half years later, we had, of course, the attack at ft. hood, but in spite of all the things you warned against, we haven't been attacked again. osama bin laden has been killed. another one has been taken out. you have had series of successes on al qaeda central in afghanistan and pakistan. that has by most conditions been decimated or thoroughly taken apart. were you wrong when you made those warnings in may of 2009?

>> guest: i don't think so, steve. i would argue that the policies we put in place back in those days that were available to us and were utilized over time, and i've seen some comment to this effect from current officials of the government -- helped produce, for example, the intelligence that allowed us to get osama bin laden. that it was out of the enhanced interrogation teak instincts that some of the leads came that ultimately produced the result when president obama was able to send in seal team six to kill bin laden. so i think it's been an a continuum, if you will, between administrations, focused especially on the part of the career folk inside the intelligence community, and in the special ops community in the military, that have worked it over time.

it wasn't just that the new administration came in and all of a sudden we got bin laden. they had the benefit of all the work that had been done -- >> host: but the terrorist surveillance program is not rating. there are no more enhanced interrogation. we're broadcasting to al qaeda and others exactly how we'll interrogate them. we read miranda warnings to others, all of these things you warned against, but we haven't been attacked again. we have had these major successes, and when the bush administration came to an end, i remember you making the argument that you should be judged by the fact that at least in large part that we hadn't been attacked again and that was a sign of success. why can't we use that same standard for the obama administration and say the things they're doing have been successful? >> guest: i guess i make the case they've been successful in part because of the capabilities we left them with, the intelligence we left them with, because of what we learned from

men like sheikh mohamed when he was subjected. i think it's a mistake, fraternal not to have an enfranced interrogation program available now. the president, when he cancelled our enhanced interrogation program, said they were going to set up their own for high-value detainees, but as best i can tell i don't think they ever have. i don't know what they would do today if they captured the equivalent of sheikh mohamed. probably read him his miranda rights. i don't know. that's a mistake for us to give up those capabilities. i hope there are no more attacks, but even as we meet here today, everybody drove to work with their car radio on this morning, heard there's a threat that's of sufficient credibility at least at this stage, that the authorities are saying, this is unconfirmed but we're taking it seriously.

so, i think -- i do think it was a mistake for them not to stay as actively and aggressively involved. there was a brilliant piece of the notion that somehow we overreacted. i don't think we did. i think we did exactly what we had to do and that the results speak for themselves. >> host: one or two more from me and then we'll open it up to questions from others. you made the case at that time iraq was a central front in the war on terror. looking back on iraq, one of the things that people have focused on in reading your book and in the reviews of your book, is the fact that you don't think that a lot of mistakes were made, that there's not much you would change about the way that the iraq war a was conducted, and i noticed in my reading of the book that in the criticism of what the state department did, you often focused on secretary

paul and later secretary rice but in the criticism of what the pentagon did you focused on generals casey and others and didn't focus on your friend, don rumsfeld. why is that? >> guest: well, i think i wrote a pretty good book. [laughter] >> guest: i thought it was relatively balanced. i chose not to dwell at length sort of on what transpired in the immediate aftermath of our going into iraq. i mean, we had -- there had been a lot of books written, some of them pretty good, i think -- about the policy in terms of setting up a new government in iraq, of jerry bedroom -- bremer has wherein one. several other books have been written.

rumsfeld has written extensively about it. i basically took the approach that i could focus on a few things, and what i really wanted to focus on was the surge and the counterinsurgence doctrine that accompanied the summer that we put in place at the beginning of '07. so there's a lot written about that in my book. but i didn't spend a lot of time going back over what the state department did with respect to managing situation in iraq or what the pentagon did outside normal military activities in terms of the -- >> host: if you read bremer's book and talk to other people. i talked to people on your staff and elsewhere, who said you were asking questions about the u.s. military strategy in iraq during those years, that things obviously weren't going well. asking tough questions. what is our strategy? do we know how to win? why are we doing the saming? is the training effective? and i guess i'm interested, on a

personal level, when did you start asking those questions? >> guest: well, on a personal level, at some point we'll sit down and talk about it. >> host: i thought now is as good a time as any. >> guest: i could have -- you had to make choices in the book. we wrote about a little less than 600 pages, and as i point out in my early remarks, i had material for four or five books. what i chose was to focus on the highlights as i saw them, and what i thought was vital in that regard, and obviously i wrote it from my perspective in terms of what i saw, what i believed. i exercised a certain amount of discretion. i didn't put down everything i know about what transpired in a

whole range of different areas. >> host: will there be a second volume? >> guest: i don't know. depends how this one does. there are things i didn't talk about, not just on iraq but throughout my 40-year career. when you're chief of staff to the president of the united states, there are things you're involved in where he expected discretion, and deserves it. and i didn't write about those things. that's generally true of lots of things in connection with my time with the president bushes. i think it's fair to say in both cases there are confidences they had in me and certain issues, and i've honored those, always would. >> host: on second term foreign policy, you write in the book quite a bit in a chapter you not

so subtly call setback, about iran, north korea, about syria, and nonproliferation issues issd you suggest that the bush administration lost its way, had essentially veered away from the bush doctrine that was so well established in the first term. i wonder if you think president bush himself sort of lost his nerve? >> guest: i didn't say that in my book, did i, steve? >> host: that's why i'm asking you now. >> guest: i did write a chapter called "setback." i thought it was important because it was -- well, it was a source of frustration for me. it also demonstrated pretty clearly that i didn't win all the arguments, and i thought that was important to convey that. and there were -- this was an area that had to do with north

korea's nuclear as at operations and activities, building a nuclear reactor for syria that would allow them to produce nuclear weapons and so forth. it was one where there were significant differences inside the administration. i think many of those were known. but part of my interest was in putting down the history of that period, and the policy debates, and i thought there were lessons to be learned. we weren't the first administration that had trouble figuring out how you get the north koreans not go nuclear. the clinton administration faced similar problems, and the obama administration will have similar problems as well, too. but i thought it was important to put down the record, if you will, of how we dealt with that. now, in the final analysis, the president made the decision. he had to make choices.

that's why we got the big bucks and lived in the big house. it's the responsibility of the president of the united states. obviously he didn't always agree with my advice. and in this particular case he opted pretty much for the state department view of how we should proceed, rather than what i was recommending. at it not the first time i've lost an argument with the president. >> host: do you think we're less safe because of those decisions? >> host: well, i think the way to put it would be i believed -- i gave an interview before 9/11, actually along mid-april or may of 2001. weed we'd only been in office a couple of months. it basically -- atlantic or new yorker -- where i cited as the biggest threat the nation faced the possibility of a terrorist organization acquiring weapons

of mass destruction. and al qaeda with nukes kind of thing. that i believe deeply, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, and i think it's important on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, to remind ourselves that threat is still out there, still very real, and one of the things i thought we did well, up to a point, was when we went in and we took down saddam hussein, obviously, eliminated one of the guys who had been a prime source of weapons of mass destruction previously and whether or not he had stockpiles at the time we went in, he clearly was a prolive rater, a potential prolive rater, we got rid of saddam hussein as a threat. five days after we went in and captured saddam, moammar gadhafi

had a press announcement that he was surrendering all of his nuclear materials. he had uranium stocks, weapons design, and he surrendered those and they're in the possession of the united states. so we took him out of the nuclear business. pretty good with what went on in libya. would not have been good if gadhafi had nuclear weapons. we took down the master mind of the pakistan nuclear materials, and was dealing with north korea and iraq. so saddam, gadhafi, khan put out of business from the standpoint

of worrying about them producing and or proliferating, using, those materials. the one we didn't get a happen on was north korea. and what the chapter you referred to, that i call "set back" is the story of how we did not deal effectively with north korean threat. so i think if you're keeping score, three out of four is not bad. but the problem is that threat is very real, and north korea is especially dangerous because they now tested two weapons. they have -- we caught them red-handed with respect to their providing a plutonium reactor to one of the worst terror sponsor ing regimes, syria, and fortunately the israelis took that out, but the north koreans

established they will prolive rate nuclear materials to terror sponsoring regimes, and the problem that we're faced with is there's still very much there, and we do not yet have a handle on north korea. the other problem is still iran. we haven't even talk about that. got to be front and center as well, as the north koreans in terms of our concerns about that threat, and i do believe still today, as we meet, that's the most dangerous threat the united states faces, is that that technology will fall into the hands of an al qaeda type organization, and then nuclear weapons will no longer be a deterrent, they'll be an incentive. >> host: maybe we can take few questions and maybe we'll get a question about iran. please, when you are called on, wait for the microphone, give your name, and your affiliation, and ask a question rather than

making a long statement. thank you. yes, ma'am? >> host: were -- >> were you surprised when you found out osama bin laden was in pakistan with the cooperation between both countries? did you feel that the pakistani authorities had been hiding something from the bush administration? >> guest: i never had reason to believe that president musharraf was involved in anything like that. there was -- i think there was a general view that bin laden was in remote -- some remote section of pakistan, not just a short ways from islamabad. i think what was startling was to find that he was living where he was. he wasn't hiding in a cave someplace. i think there was a lot of the

imagery that somehow he had gone underground figuratively. but i had no -- in my dealings with president musharraf -- and i dealt with him quite a bit -- to question his commitment to the work he was doing with us to help us deal with the threat that merged from pakistan. i think he came to believe that al qaeda types threatened him personally as well as his regime as much as they did the united states, and i think that was true. two or three attempts on his life in a matter of weeks by al qaeda, or al qaeda affiliated organizations while he was still president. >> another question? yes, sir.