million dollars creating a video called "it's never just hiv." you can find it online. it shows these young guys all very beautiful looking like characters out of "lost," and the message of the film is you get hiv, it's not just hiv, it's hiv and it's brain fog and it's anal cancer. and, yes, it can be all of those things, you know? ..

money with where the hive transmissions are happening. we will go over here now.

>> we will not have generation that is free of this? >> can you talk about your work on the criminalization? sure. >> i promised him a question. let me get that in. >> we do a lot of work with this so i am glad it is being brought up. i want to know what you feel is the biggest blind spot in the

activism sector? what do you think is the major blindspot? >> let me get to that. the senior cdc researcher producedidate thought showed the gates of college age gay men transmission, half of them will have hiv by the time they are 50. and people of color half by the time they are 35. it is hidden because the epidemic overall is static. the hetrosexual transmission has dropped and the male-to-male is increasing. the lgbt has abandoned the epidemic for the most part and went on to other opportunities. in terms of the question you

were asking about the biggest gap, the criminalization stuff, i think comes from a couple things, and criminalization is broadly the inappropriate use of someone's hiv status in a criminal prosecution. sometimes that is non-disclosure, sometimes that is a prostitute charge made more severe because of hiv, or assault charges, there is a guy who is in jail serving six years for spitting on someone. new york state and texas don't have hiv-specific statutes. 2/3rds of states do. some came from taking our eye off the ball and the stigma and human rights approach to the

epidemic. when a lot of our own community leadershipped rolled over on mandatory naming, it changed the stage of what led to criminalization. one of the biggest things i think we are missing around the stigma, first of all, i think almost of -- all of the money -- for the bill boards and such is useful to educate the public, but it isn't reducing stigma. im im impowering the stigmatized is

the way to fix this. in the early days of the epidemic, when you tested positive, you were hooked up with a support group or aids coaliti coalition. that is where you learned to disclose. many places told people not to disclose until you have that network because disclosure can be dangerous. it is more dangerous today than it was back then. but the networks and organizations that provided support where people learned to deal with the stigma, they found support, they got information, we got information from each other, and from places like paws and other places, increasingly someone is diagnosed today and

they don't think they will need to get information and they will use the information their doctor gives them which is made by company that makes the anti-virals. the networks are gone because the funding is gone. the money is all gone. i think it very important to restore those networks. we have an effort happening around that. the national association of people with aids shutdown because it stopped be a network of people with hiv. it was funded by the industry and cdc. and that created an opportunity. there is a new organization and it is collaboration between the national network, the positive women network and the campaign

to end aids, and the other projects, so there is a level of collaboration right now that i have not seen in several years. i would like to restore them at a local level. so criminalization. if you ask someone do you think it should be a criminal offense for someone with hiv not to disclose that fact prior to having sex with someone. about 2/3rds of gay men respond they believe it it should a criminal offense. the question i think people are answering -- and the younger a

person is the more likely they are to think that. i think the university of minnesota study, 79% of gay men in the youngest category believed it should be a criminal offense. the problem with that, and there are all sorts of problems, and the question is do you think a person should willingly put another person at harm and the answer no. that is not what these statues are about. they are about whether or not the person with hiv can prove they disclosed prior to having sex, independent of the risk or if harm was inflicted. so this is resulting in, we have documented more than a thousand instances of when charges have been filled under hiv statues. so nick rhodes in iowa, met a

gay online, had sex, everybody agrees he used a condom and he got 25 years in prison and life time sex offender registration. he was released after a year but still has the lifetime registration. we have kerry thomas in idaho and undedetectable viral load and he got 30 years in prison. robert suttle, my partner, was in a difficult relationship and his partner threatened to turn him in for not having disclosed to him and that is what the partner did and he served 16 months in prison and has to be a registered sex offender and 16 years and his license has big

red letters with the word sex offender on it. it is also a horific public health policy. you cannot be prosecute if you did not know. so it keeps people from taking the test. it is an arrogance thinking it is the rest of the world's job to protect your hiv negative status. the hiv-specific statues are the most extreme example of stigma. we create a different law for some part of the society based on a character that is immutable. if it was based on race, it would be a par tide.

it is wrong to create laws on things people cannot change. we are emcompassing people born with hiv. there is man who testified before the presidential advisory board he wasn't long out of prison, served for not disclosing to his girlfriend and not because she wanted him prosecuted, he said i was reading about the declaration of independence that says we are all born equal, but what about me? i guess i was born where before engaging in the most personal thing i can do, i have to get a legal obligation out of the way. we don't have similar laws or prosecution for people with hpv. and more women died of cervical

cancer than died from hiv. but hpv isn't stigmatized. it is associated with people of color, people who use drugs, and gay men. just this week there was a prosecution and they are wrong in case of the facts. talking about aids predators and have you seen this plan and 300 potential victims. there is one case in missouri where we have not done much help with but it is all over. may have infected 300 people. that number came from when he was charged and the guy tested

positive and he said ten years before and they asked him how often he had sex and he said maybe twice a month. so they did twice a month over ten years and came up with the headline. there is only one person who is claiming he infected him and hew took it back. so the media coverage is highly stigmatizing in this cases. it is discourageic people from getting tested. and there is a greater level of mistrust for public health issue like partner notification. i believe the criminalization

pr prosecuti prosecutions are a major factor in the stigma and ongoing epidemic. so often, public health measure, what happens after 1996 when combination therapy came out? i have been talking about this all day, so if i repeat myself, i apologize. but people with aids were starting to be seen different. before that it was assumed we would die and probably a horrible death. but as the broader public began to understand we will not die as quickly as before, and we started being seen as viral vect vectors and a dangerous population that needs to be sought out, identified, tested,

and a lot of the country said if you chose to go off your meds, you have a hard time getting health care services or someone from your county health department is knocking or posting something on your door because they are tracking viral loads and some cd-4 test. in mississippi, you had to sign a form saying you will not be pregnant or impregnant anybody and more jurisdictions are using these forms. think back to those of you with hiv, when you found out you were positive and what the moment was like, even if you are expecting it, you still have a degree of mild shock, it is a period of great distress, and now people are testing positive, a form is slipped across the table. a punked a testing center in

louisiana and went through this myself. you are told you have to sign this form and it says you were given your positive results and sites the statue in the state. those forms come back in prosecutions and importantly you are giving a legal document to sign and raising a sign of anger and the prosecution starts right there saying he didn't tell me anything. so that is the work i have been focused on the last few years with the, you know, the pennies

and the volunteers. we have a short film about it. and maybe two more questions. yes? >> the book is very good. finished it last night. very good. could you explain, and sort of i don't know, describe the background of the picture on the cover? >> well, first of all, last night after a lovely benefit i was at signing books and i signed a book and she said i love this picture. if you look closely, it looks like it could be you. [laughter] >> okay. the publisher has been terrific and asked me to bring in photographs. i had a thick enevelope and

pulled them out and the editor picked it up and said that is it. and wanted it for the cover. and i didn't get it. that is me kissing michael muso who i write about it in the book. it was a month before he died. he died after thanksgiving in 1988. i think why they thought that picture would work is it is sweet. it conveys more about love and affection than sex. the title of the book can be daunting and this helps, same with the hand writing font, c conv conveys it is a personal story.

>> we met in michigan a year ago. and when you were talking about the criminalization issues, it was making me riff, and first i would like you to say more about the sex offender registration. it was making me riff on how i heard about sex offender registration was when i was a queer activist and it was just guys getting busted for sex with other men in places where there wasn't hiv or a sodomy law change. and i don't think people in the community understand. when he hear sex offender registration we think creepy pedophile down the street. we don't realize how it is in the community like this for many years. >> through the criminalization work, i have become more

familiar with how horrific the sex offender registry is. there are more people in the united states as registered sex offenders than there are residents of alaska. it makes it impossible to get jobs, you cannot live in places. in louisiana, where robert is from, it is on the public registry where you work, so only thing available is minimum wage in restaurant. when robert suttle moved from to pennsylvania to live with me and my partner for a while, he had to register in pennsylvania. and he was mostly delighted it didn't charge big fees. in louisiana, there are big fees and some of fees were raised. $600 a year.

and that forced sex offenders to go somewhere else. because in louisiana his sex offender registration statute requires a level of public notification, he had to buy ads in the local newspaper and had to pay the state to send post cards in his immediate area. and regardless of the offense in pennsylvania if you have to do public notification where you were previlously lived they require it there. so we went to the police barracks and it was an easy process. mill ford is a town of 1100 people. i live in a village. and knock knock on the door a couple days later. the police was there and warning megan's law with the sex

notification and said he has to do this. and he went to the homes within a distance and all schools and day care within a mile or something. robert said at least he had family and friends and now he is an african-american man in a small rural town where he stoodout and now the sex offender thing. i was certain the newspaper would write about it. that level of notification in pennsylvania would have only been for predators or people that used a weapon. so robert and i each wrote a piece of this. it was very brief. but it was interesting. i saw people in the dining room looking at when we would have lunch out. but it serviced support for him

as well. there is a movement among people who are on sex offender registrations to create an effort to combat this. a lot of legislator are saying these are consenting adults, no weapon, why are we spending this incredible amount of money on that? on the other hand, what candidate for office wants to be the candidate who loosens the sex offender laws? thank you. [ applause ] ' >> and i have two great jobs who have done a great job on the

social media production. it has been amazing and important. if you are able to tweet or post something on facebook, they will not yell at me. thank you. [ applause ]

>> the one-time wife of the brother of napoleon, jerome, and a native of baltimore maryland. this is a little under an hour. >> thank you for coming out on a cold, cold night. we are talking about a legend walking down the street in the 1870s with her trade mark of a red pair saul held above her head to protect her from sun or rain. and on the other arm she had an enate bag that was rumored to

hold of all her jewels. her dress wasn't fashionable perhaps made in the era when napoleon dominated europe and america was nothing more than a fledging nation. it was clear she had been a beauty and in her old age she conveyed elegance that captured people. she started on doors -- knocking -- and demanding the money, passerbys recognized her as the first female celebrity. despite all of the property she

owned, she didn't set up a household but chose to live in a rented room on the top of a stranger's home. it was covered with souvenirs and a closet full of gowns that were wore back in the day. and there in the atmosphere they would have found her poised to tell the story with the same sense of irony and powers of observations that had always been as much a part of her as her extrodinary butambition and beauty. she lived a long and remarkable life and had a story to tell. she never got to tell the story. she left letters.

it is by beauty to tell the story for her. i realized i stumbled upon a story that begged to be told. but it was more than that. private live for elizabeth bonaparte was lived in public. newspapers carried accounts of what she wore and did and today's gossip columns would recognize this today. her story offered me the chance to re-create the drama, and there was a lot of drama, but to explore 19th century politics

and war. and betsy bonaparte struggled to be more than the gender of her day allowed officers to cost of opportunity and female superority. she was a 17-year-old who was desperate to escape what she considered the hum drum constricting society of her native baltimore as well as her very overbearing father. the two young people met and fell in love. the stories told of the first encounter between jerome and

betsy the stuff of romance. some repore he saw her at maryland's horse races and new me he was in love. others say they met at a fancy ball and her buttons became in betweened in his coat. a sign of their intertwined love. she saw him walking up and she said he is the man i will marry. which of the tales that is true is unknown. but her father was not willing to give the relationship his liking. jerome, i guess, this isn't the

technical term, but he was a weasel. and the council warned that napoleon would not approve of his brother's marrying a commoner. he had a weakness to poses beautiful things and me was ready to poses here. and betsy was ready to declare to had her father, if any of you have a teenage daughter you can recognize this, i would rather be the wife of jerome for an hour than another man a lifetime. they were married in 1803.

they were famous in america and feded and fussed over in the nation's capital. and newspapers carried accounts of their activities. jerome ran up debt purchasing fancy gifts all of which for his wife, which american can't afford, but america to be seen in the company and extend credit. in washington, betsy shocked the wives of congressman by appearing in the latest french fashion. dresses without layers of und undergarments and cat sleeves that revealed her arm. as one woman put it she has made a great noise and mobs of boys crowded around to see what i hope isn't often seen in the country, an almost naked woman.

another was offended they good see her boobies. what was fashion in paris was indecent exposure in america. we are not meant to be separated assured betsy. but soon they were. there is no happily ever after for this romantic tale. in 1805, betsy was pregnancy and they decide today sail to france hoping to win napoleon over but france's emperor had different orders. he issued ordered that betsy was forbidden to step foot on french soil and tried to get the pope to anull the marriage but they were married by the archbishop in baltimore and said it is a legal marriage and later

napoleon imprisoned the pope. he had the french senate anull the marriage. he said his brother come before him and said you abandon the american girl and marry someone i chose or i will disown you and cut off your allowance. jerome caved in at once. he was soon married to a stout, very nice, but unattractive prince prince princess. betsy didn't see him again until passing him in a gallery of the pity palace. while jerome couldn't find anywhere to welcome betsy she

went to england and named her son jerome. everyone in the family was named jerome. it was difficult to say which jerome was i talking about. the fairy tale ends here, but betsy's own story was beginning. her abandonment transformed here into an independent woman. she refused to play the person person who made amendez by marrying a second time. she declared to forever be governed by her own rules. she used marriage proposals that

she would not embarrass him by marry an english man if he would give her a pension. and he did. she invested the money so well that she did a millionaire. all she could do was wait to escape america and the city she deacce detested. when napoleon made his exile, betsy shocked everyone by leaving her son with relatives and departing unescorted to europe and spent much of the four decades abroad. here her tragic tale of betrayal, her beauty, and her intelligence and wit proved as a

powerful passport into the society as the ring of jerome bonaparte would have. she was in the nicest homes and had become just as napoleon once boasted of himself, the fabri t fabricator of her own destiny. brilliant women expressed

admiration for her. a museum is filled with love letters, and marriage proposals by men on both sides of the atlantic and with authors like lady sydney morgan and french leaders. during the course of her lifetime she met and was befriended by women like the duke of wellington, benjamin west a painter, and man who was chief leader and also with americans as well. but her personality is what mate her worthy of close ex examanination. she decried being narrow and

empty and forming to a society where men focus on money making and the women were destined to nothing more than accommodating their husbands and producing children. she embraced european aristocratic society with a leadership build not on marrying but blood lines. it was validation of a public role of women. but her own behavior often blithed her of all things american. in the same letters she carried for the contempt of american men, she reveals her own meticilous and focused attention to money and money making. she had an obsession with wealth and she was darn good at

acquiring it. and her behavior would have won admiriation from any american male. betsy never saw the embrace of the american spirit or the contradicti contradictions in the content for the internal sacrifices and her near obsession and devotion and sacrifice for her son and two grand son. today we would call her a helicopter mom. here dreams for them were grand and she devoted much of her energy as seen her son recognized as a legit bonaparte. she remained unaware of the con

t t trudictions. she took pain to provide him with aristocratic manners and attitu attitudes, but prepared him for life in the american life. making him go to harvard and telling him he should pick a profession that would ensure a path to economic independence. her son marries money. perhaps more tragically she never understood the contradictions inherent in her relationship with her father. her letters blister with condeming him for having marriage infidelities and there were many. he had a mistress in the house

while her mother was dying. jerome bonaparte was famous from a these infidelities as well. and he resents her for not conforming and for the demands he made upon her. his letters complain of her lifestyle and that she was diluted to seek happiness outside of baltimore. their private and public con deming of each other attested to their intense emotional connection. betsy always tried to win her father's approval. and william patterson always tried to win her respect. neither succeeded and the bond between them was forged from anger, bitterness and contempt.

after his death, betsy considered to do battle with his ghost writing a dialogue of the dead or dialogs between jerome and my father in hell. it would be an injustice to tell betsy's story as a feminine triumph. she paid a high price. she refused to ever marry again. this was a reflection with the disillusionment with romance and marriage. and it was because she could not have imagined settling for anything less after being a bonaparte. she was also worried her son might not be able to make his claim of being legit if she

married again. she became cynic over the jealousy of good fortune of other women. bitterness never marked her face. but it did in the end mark her spirit. as an aging woman she wrote her own history not as a triumph over diversity of endless betrayal. a reporter in 1870 found her to be a wounderous bougeauty about also wary and defensive. when elizabeth patterson bonaparte, the most beautiful

women in america and europe, summed up her own life she said i have lived alone and i will die alone. i knew the context in which this story played out was important. for elizabeth patterson bonaparte was one of the few women at the time whose life was lived in public. her marriage to jerome bonaparte shook the federalist and republican party alike. newspapers at home and abroad were filled with talk on what it would mean for american neutrality in the epic battle being waged between france and england.

did it signal a shift for jefferson's administration? the divorce had a similar affect. would napoleon's treatment play a part? should the american government take this as an insult to the sovereignty and law? disspite napoleon's anulling the marriage, it was valid in maryland and the english press lost no opportunity to offer the welcomi welcomi welcoming gestures to betsy. if she married either of her english suitor would this lead to closer ties to england? they were obsessed with whether they would have to make a

decision based on what happened to betsy bonaparte. when the rumor spread that napoleon had given betsy a pension and was considering given her and her son titles of nobility, people read this as trying to establish a beach head. this fear of a french duke and duchess within the united states boarders led to an amendment that would cancel citizenship to anyone that would accept this. much later in the 1850s, betsy and her son sued in french court

for recognition of jerome being legit and his right to recession in the thrown. the french court said you are right, he is the legit child but it is causing too much trouble so we are not going to say he is and he is entitled to secession of the thrown. the trial was the headline on "harper's weekly" "discover magazine." talking about civil war at home even. every significant event from the marriage, divorce, napoleon's do down fall, her trial, the death of napoleon, and finally to her death.

i found newspapers from tulsa, oklahoma who retold the story of her courtship, marriage and betray betrayal. a reader can trace the trojectory trojectory by following how these newspapers responded to the events of betsy's life. and finally her critique of american society was unforgi unforgiving. it was the letters between betsy and her father that constitute a dialogue of old values and new and between a gender idea that

allowed women a public identity and one that sought to confine women to the private spear. she deserves our attention by people who celebrate the quality and individuality. betsy it a woman's story in the end. it captured how difficult women in her era faced in trying to develop their own life. only a year after betsy died, henry james published his first chapters of "atlantic a lady" it

focused on the differences between the new world and world and it brought to fiction the dilemma thought was faced by a real american woman; elizabeth patterson bonaparte. they knew that in betsy, the historian would find a reality as compelling as their fiction. thank you. [ applause ] i usually tell my students i am ready to answer any question i know the answer to. otherwise i say what teachers everywhere say, see me after class. any questions? yes, sir? >> thank you were your talk.

was betsy's son a second cousin of luey napoleon? that the a weak claim to secession? >> yes, he was! the issue was that napoleon iii didn't have any children at the time they brought this. it is such a complicated story. at fist, napoleon iii welcomes betsy and her son bo and says yes, of course you are a member of the family and you belong. and then betsy's ex-husband, jerome, who has a nasty son, he makes ted cruz look nice i am

te tempted to say. this boys name was jerome, they couldn't think of another name. plum-plum is what they called him and it is was jerome's son had been a military office and went to exponent and resigned and joined the french army. in the warm in the crimea he was a hero and came home with medals and was made a member of the personal guard of the empress. and plum-plum went to war and got his name because they said as soon as he heard the cannon make the plum-plum noise, he

ran. so napoleon iii welcomes him and they are told they can stay in the palace. and plum-plum comes in and says i am going to raise holy hell if you acknowledge him. then the family pushes them aside. the court then says, yes, you are absolutely right, you are legitimately married and bo is a bonaparte and ought to be in secession to the throne and his son should be, but they can not be because it will cause too much crisis for your ex-husband's son and his family: they are told in essence you are absolutely right, but no. it is terrible blow to betsy who

never gets over it. >> this suggests a concern naive aspect to betsy because she is familiar with european ari aristocrat and should known you have to prepare. >> that is true. i would say she was always unrealistic -- not only did she hope beau would be the emperor of france, she put her steakstan him, and that jerome didn't want

to do it anymore. what is sad about both men is they married american women. and betsy, instead of being happy for them, saw this as the greatest betrayal her family would ever impose upon her. he was enraged. she wrote beau's son, and is he married daniel webster's daughter which isn't white bread in american aristocrat society. she wrote him the nastiest letter i have seen from a family member to another family. saying i hope to see you in hell, i hope you are miserable and never have a happy day in your life, and you ruined by

life and i will never talk to you. so because of her wishes for the family she separated herself from the family. and i considered that in the acknowledgments because this is dedicated to my son-in-law and daughter-in-law and i said it is shape, the greatest tragedy in betsy's life is she could not love her family in the same way i love mine. it is the worst side of betsy. that she wanted them to be what she wanted them to be. there are mothers like that everywhere. >> thank you for a greatpress presentati presentation. i have a lot of questions and a lot are probably answered in the book so i will not ask the ones i think are likely answered in the book. but i have three questions that

are probably not so i will ask those. >> okay. >> and you can -- you don't need to answer all three. but one is why would napoleon i been so upset about this youngest brother's choice of wife? >> he liked to marry family members off to european aristocratic society members. it was a way to shore up the empire. and he was furious with his other brother who married his mistress and napoleon said how dare you marry someone i didn't pick and then jerome died it, too, and that broke the camels

back. >> the second one is a smaller question. in baltimore in 1870 when betsy is wondering around and living in the upper floor of a stranger's home, i am wondering where the home is. any background you can give on that choice and idea. >> i probably have the address somewhere, but i didn't put it in the book. betsy never wanted to establish her own household. she didn't want to be a woman that ran a household. she owned real estate; but wouldn't live there.

... >> so is the house identified in the book? >> not in the book, no. i didn't think that that was -- except to people in baltimore -- really, really -- [laughter] zip code and all, no. >> so the parting question is are you going to write a screenplay? >> you know, now that is a great question. [laughter] i mean, this is a keira knightly

special, right? [laughter] i mean, it just absolutely has to be at least a masterpiece theater. and we tried to, you know, i'm not above -- my agent, sony pictures was faintly interested and then they said, no, we're not. i don't know why not. if any of you have connections, believe me -- [laughter] i've already cast the whole thing. you know, i've already got who i want in the -- but it is such a grand story. i mean, she's -- it's just filled with drama and excitement, and this fellow that i told you, the russian, they fall in love. that's the only man, i think, as an adult betsy ever loved. and he, he is as beautiful and as funny and as witty and as sharp and as intelligent as she is. and the people who see them together say this, real electricity. but he wants to rise, he's a

young diplomat at the time, and he wants to rise to power in russia, and he says, look, i can't marry you. i have to marry a rich member of the nobility, but will you be my mistress? and betty thinks, you know, live in russia as someone's mistress, no thank you. and they separate. and years later he writes her this letter, and he says we have both learned to be stoical in our unhappiness. he still, i guess, still lovedded her. yeah. >> just to follow up on that question of a screenplay, you know, there was a movie -- >> yes. [laughter] >> i know that there were various sort of fictional -- >> oh, yes. oh, yes. >> but the movie in the 20s, of course, they invented a happy ending. >> yes. and for some reason aaron burr appears in that -- i have no idea -- >> well, they did know each other, betsy and aaron burr, but

why he would be -- >> why he would be many there, the movie is hilarious. it's sort of "gone with the wind" without the wind. [laughter] >> i actually have read a lot of betty bone part's letter, but -- bonaparte's letter, but i found her to be such a repellant character, i just didn't want to spend that much time with her. i know you characterize jerome as a weasel. i'm not going to really defend his character, first of all, i think napoleon referenced prison at some -- >> only if he continued to communicate with her after he had agreed not to. not beforehand, yes. >> but, i mean, she was so obsessed with titles and aristocracy. >> yes, yes. >> i don't know if she would have been happy married to a jerome who did not have a title or married to anyone who did not

have a title. but my other question, really, fundamental question is she was of sup a bitter -- such a bitter person and so obsessed with things that to us in the 21st century seem ridiculous like getting a title. i just wonder, did you have any difficulty finding her to be a person you wanted to write about? >> no. >> did you -- >> no. no, that's a good question. and there are other people who said, ooh, she was an unpleasant person. i would have to get a little -- first of all, i love, i love witty people. i love sharp people, and she was one. i guess i sort of empathized with betsy. there was a high price, as i said, that she paid for what she wanted to be which was not just a member of the nobility. she wanted to be at one point she says i wanted to be a

person, not just a wife and mother. i grew up in mobile, alabama -- [laughter] yes. and in the 1950s if you were smart, liked to read books and were not wealthy, you were not the prom queen. and i picked myself up at 16 and a half, to to the amazement and horror of most of the people i knew, and i went to college at barnard in new york where i was without question the least prepared, you can imagine what school in mobile, alabama, was like, but i could tell you stories. one of my teachers put her hand on my shoulder and said think of it this way, carol, we haven't done any permanent damage. [laughter] i was all alone in new york. i was a scholarship kid. all these girls were smart and brassy and talent asked and had read all of shakespeare and read all the greek tragedies, and -- right? and i was lonely. and i thought, you know, i'm

going to stick it out because this is what i want. and that's what i found in betsy that made me really both empathize with her, but i think understand her. she, she knew what she wanted, and it's true that some of what she wanted wasn't, you know, was shallow. but basically what she wanted was to be her own person. and i really, i like that in a person. so -- and jerome was a weasel, okay? [laughter] >> lovely talk. >> thank you. >> two questions, and you can choose which to answer. >> ooh, okay. >> how did she, how did she make her money? i know baltimore is much more important than we think of it -- >> yes, yes -- >> in the early 18th and lateu(3 19th century, and the second question is what did her father,

what influence does her father have on the person she became? >> yes. the first, the answer to the first one is easy. she invested in real estate, but she also invested if stocks and bonds -- in stocks and bonds, and she followed currency rises and falls. you can tell i'm an academic, i don't understand any of this stuff really. but, and she would buy currency, and she made her final really big part of her fortune by investing in government bonds during the civil war. and just to hedge her bets, she invested both in northern and many -- and in southern bonds. [laughter] and she writes these meticulous letters to the people managing her money, i want you to do this, i don't want you to buy that. i mean, she really kept her eye

on what was making money and what wasn't. and she made a big fortune which she left to her remaining grandchild, charles bonaparte, who by the way, charles bonaparte -- >> [inaudible] >> the fbi. the precursor of the -- founded the precursor of the fbi. >> and i think his papers are in the library of congress. >> yeah. and he was, he restored the name bonaparte to the newspapers. this happened after betsy died. i mean, he was not so famous during her lifetime. she would have not thought much of his accomplishments. the single member of family that would have pleased her was jerome, her grandson, had a daughter who married a norwegian member of nobility. that betsy would have liked, right? [laughter] so that's -- now, there was a second question, was that the second question?

>> what -- how did her father's personality influence her personality? >> well, they were very similar, of course. i mean, he had come over to america when he was 14, a penniless irish kid, and he made a fortune. and he married not into nobility, but when he came -- moved to baltimore, he very carefully picked out one of of the most prestigious families, and he married into it. so he was a social climber in the same way that betsy was a social climber. he was as stubborn as she was stubborn. but what is more interesting is that napoleon and her father, different scale cans, were very -- scales, were very similar. william patterson never stopped telling people that he had made his own destiny, you know? he was rags to riches, and he had done it all by himself, just as napoleon said. and betty, who hated her father on some levels, never hated

napoleon. she admired him her entire life. [laughter] and what did she admire? that he had made his own destiny, that he was hard-nosed, that he was ambitious. and so, you know, the joys of biography is that people are so complicated, right? >> right, thank you. >> yeah. >> one more genealogical question. >> oh, dare. >> you said napoleon iii had no children. >> at that time. >> didn't he have a son that got killed by the british in the zulu war? >> yes. >> okay. >> but in 1858 and 1859, they did not have a child. whew. [laughter] didn't want to be caught up on a mistake. yes. >> i have sort of a pretty irrelevant real estate question, so excuse me for this. [laughter] there is an estate outside of baltimore in davidsville, and there is a statue, and there is a rumor that the statue is

jerome napoleon and that that estate was made for betsy. do you have any knowledge of that? >> that's probably very likely. that is, he built a huge, he built a huge home. >> yeah. >> and he, they had two carriages that were very ornate. and all kinds of fancy furniture that was brought in. and then, of course, yes roam, in essence, skips town. and betsy's father is left to pay all the bills. he feels it's a matter of personal honor, right? that his son-in-law -- and so he takes everything in the house, everything. and he tells betsy when she comes back to baltimore, it all belongs to me, and i'm selling it because i paid your rotten husband's debtsment -- debts. and she never got over that. when she's in her 80s, she's writing this the margins of her father's -- in the margins of

her father's letters, and she's saying he took my silver, he took my -- right? she feels betrayed by her father for that. but there was, that -- there was a country estate, there was a city home that they had. i'm not sure whether she, she ultimately wound up owning the city home. i can't, i can't swear to that. >> my sister-in-law lives there, and jerome ma poll on's bust is there, so we always think -- >> yeah, yeah. >> interesting. >> how nice that they live there. >> we're from sliceville, maryland, and there's a beautiful property, and it has the sign in front of it, the patterson home. >> there were lots of pattersons. that is, poor betsy's mother had 13 children. there was robert, edward,

george, there was a couple of girls who died young, i can't really name all of the whole family. i'm really two books past this book now, so concern. [laughter] i'm having a little trouble with the names. but they all had homes. so it was not necessarily hers. it could have belonged to -- the sons, william patterson wanted his entire family to stay, to live with him even when they got married. he wanted to keep an eye on everybody and run their lives. and so the sons, when they could, got out and built their own homes. one of the sons sided, had slaves and sided with the south, and one of the other sons sided with the north. of the three remaining sons when the civil war breaks out. so it probably wasn't betsy's home. she is sent to their country home when her father's trying to

break up jerome and betsy before they get married. he sends her to the country. and so that might have been the home that he sent her to, to get her out of town. meanwhile, swre roam -- who is a weasel -- [laughter] goes to philadelphia and courts, tries to seduce several women because, you know, when you're not near the one you're love, love the one you're near as crosby, stills, nash and young tell us. and william gets a letter from someone, anonymous letter saying do you know what your future son-in-law is like? and that's one of the reasons he sends her off to the country. so now i've told you the whole book. [laughter] no, there's more in it, i promise. yes. >> did her father leave her money when he died, and how long did napoleon provide a pension?

>> he provided it until he went to elba. she got a pension. it wasn't a big one, but she got a pension from 1805 -- no, she didn't get it until about 1807, 1808. and then until 1815. actually, bureaucracies being what bureaucracies are, she continued to get a couple of payments after napoleon had been deposed, because it was -- [laughter] you know, it was in the bureaucracy. william had signed an agreement that he would distribute his estate equally, equal portions to all children in the family. but when he died, his will -- because he was a very prominent person -- his will was published in the newspaper. and he had redone it. and it says publicly i had

pledged to -- i'm paraphrasing -- i had pledged to give all of my children equal shares, but my daughter betsy has been such plague in my life, she has never done what i wanted her to do, she abandoned her family, she has done terrible things, and so i'm not leaving her her full share. well, betsy was mortified. this was in the newspaper, right? and it's one of the reasons why she has the dialogue between her husband and her father in hell. and she, being betsy, calls a lawyer, and she says i want to sue for my share of the estate. and through a very complicated process that she might have lost something else, she finally withdraws the lawsuit. so she got some property. she got, actually, the family house. he left her the family house. but she never got her fair share. and when she asked her brother edward who was the only member

of the family she really still was close to to support her in the lawsuit, he said, no, she never spoke to him again. betsy did carry grudge, there's no question. and the most fun is reading her annotations on the letters that she put years and years later. and my favorites were the annotations on the love letters. she just had tremendous contempt for these men. [laughter] and there was one fellow who kept writing to her. i burn with love for you. and every one of the letters betsy would write, another letter from that idiot. [laughter] and on her father's letters, it's as if it had happened that very day. she's so furious. and what she's really furious about is how he treated her mother. and that's one of the reasons she so despises american gender

ideology, because her mother was treated -- who was very submissive and very obedient and -- and her father brought all these women into the house, and he was terrible to her mother. and that's what she writes in the annotations, you know? he brought whores into the house, and he was a hypocrite, and he was a liar, and he wasn't a good family man, and how dare he accuse me. and it's all in these annotations on the sides to have letters. of the letters. i don't know if you've ever done research, but it's really fun to find things like that, i must say. any other, have i worn you out with all of this? >> no. >> yeah? >> you said he was irish, patterson? and he had to marry in the church, in the roman catholic church in baltimore? was he roman catholic? >> no, oh, no. he immediately converted to be presbyterian because his wife, because the presbyterian church

was the more high-status church. he was a social climber. and so he married, got her married in the catholic church by the archbishop of baltimore to insure, because he's suspecting napoleon might not like this, to insure that it was legal in the eyes of the church as well as legal mt. eyes of the state. so he's very cunning, and he does it to protect her. and it didn't protect her really. she ultimately gets a divorce in maryland because as she's making all money, she realizes jerome -- who by now has gone through every penny of his wife and his wife's father -- might come and try to claim that they're still married in america, and he had possession of all of her wealth. so she divorces him finally. she's her father's daughter. she really is. [laughter]

well, thank you very much. [applause] thank you. >> [inaudible] if you wouldn't mind folding up your chairs, and we'll start our signing line. go ahead and take a seat. >> you know, i don't have -- [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> is there a nonfiction author or book like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at

booktv@cspan.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> next on booktv, peter monosoar, general david petraeus' executive officer from 2007 to 2008. he talks about the short and long-term impact of the surge in iraq. 20,000 additional troops were sent to the country in 2007 to stabilize it. this is about an hour and a half. >> well welcome to the new america foundation, my name's peter berg. it's with great pleasure that i get to welcome pete man soar, the -- monsoor, one of the key books about the iraq war. deep, deep research and, of course, colonel monsoor was there for so much of the key events that he describes in the book, so it's both a real history, but also with an

element of memoir. colonel monsoor is professor at ohio state, he was executive officer to general petraeus. he has a ph.d., he holds the raymond mason chair in military history, so we're very pleased to have you here. so after colonel monsoor gives his presentation, we're going to have lieutenant colonel nathan who will sort of produce some responses to what colonel monsoor says. lieutenant colonel rayburn is leading an operational study of the iraq war for the u.s. army. he is also studying more his ph.d. at texas a&m university concerning the british experience in iraq which i think was probably worse than the american experience in iraq, i hope. and we're really pleased to have both of you here, so welcome to both of you. colonel monsoor's going to give his presentation at the podium now. thank you.

>> well, thank you, peter, for that kind introduction, and thank you all for coming today. i really appreciate the new america foundation sponsoring this talk. i was not going to write this book. i retired from the military in 2008, and although i knew that there was a story to be told there, i was going to let it take some time to digest and develop. and i was thinking maybe 10, 20 years down the road i would write a history of the iraq war. but a couple years later mt. summer of 2010 -- in the summer of 2010 i was at a conscious with a veritable who's who of counterinsurgency experts in the united states, and we were talking about what to do in iraq. of course, the iraq war -- or, i'm sorry, be many afghanistan. and, of course, what to do in afghanistan in 2010 was an issue of major concern in the united states. and invariably, the discussion devolved into what had happened

in iraq, especially what had happened during the surge and why ethnosectarian violence was reduced so much in that period. and in listening to what the various experts had to say, it was clear to me that not one of them had a holistic understanding of the iraq war and especially the surge. and right then and there i decided to put aside the research i was conducting on the liberation of the philippines in 1944-'45, which'll be the subject of my next book. much nicer writing about people who are thoroughly dead and, therefore, can't disagree with what you have to say about them. and i decided to write this book. so this is three years in the making now, and i understood where the sources were for it since we had developed and collected an archive of documents for general petraeus while the surge was ongoing with an eye towards history. those documents went to the central command and the national

research university, and i'm indebted to both those places for declassifying so many of the documents that i used to write this history. it would not have been possible without their assistance. so what went wrong in iraq, the subject of the first very long chapter in the book. the bush administration made some assumptions going into the iraq war that it would be a war of liberation, that the iraqi people by and large would support taking down saddam hussein, a very brutal and hated dictator. and that since they would cooperate with the american forces, the government and the infrastructure would largely remain tact intact and, therefore, the united states didn't need to plan for a long occupation or an extended rehabilitation for the country. secretary of defense donald rumsfeld also looked on iraq as a laboratory to test his theories and to validate,

really, the revolution in military affairs; the idea that high-tech forces with precision-guided munitions and robust intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets could collapse an enemy state relatively quickly beginning at the center of gravity and then wind up the war fairly rapidly and with fewer casualties. and that, this was the sort of wave of the future, the revolution military feared that the u.s. military was going to take advantage of. unfortunately, the enemy didn't cooperate. general, lieutenant general scott wallace, commander of v corps as he's marching up country towards baghdad as the supply lines are being attacked by guerrillas, and he makes a comment to the press that this is not the enemy we war gamed against. and for his candidness, he was nearly relieved of command. and this is sort of part ask

parcel -- part and parcel with how the secretary of defense and the administration dealt with things that went against their preconceived notions, they simply stuck their head in the sand and said it's not happening. so when there was evidence that an insurgency was developing -- well, it wasn't an insurgency, it was merely dead enders, the last rem plants of the saddam -- remnants of the saddam hussein administration, and once we got rid of them, everything was okay. as late as november 2003, president bush in a meeting of the national security council said don't tell me that there's an insurgency in iraq, i'm not there yet. and this in the midst of the first insurgent ramadan offensive which my brigade and others if iraq were busy combating. in addition to these assumptions that were made, which proved incorrect, there were two really key decisions made in the first

ten days of ambassador l. paul bremer iii's tenure as head of the provisional authority. he gets to baghdad in may of 2003, and the first decision he makes is to debathfy iraqi society. now, some debaathification was going the to have of to take place. if you had lopped off several hundred or maybe a thousand of the top baathists, it probably would have been okay. but instead, bremer decided to debathfy all the way down to the division level of the paath -- baath party and, thereby, got rid of not just the top leaders in the iraqi government, saddam hussein, his family and their immediate advisers, but tens of thousands of iraqis who had joined the baath party because it was the only way to get a decent jock -- decent job. they were university professors, civil servants, all the same people that our own war plans assumed would remain in place to

insure that iraq continued to function in the postwar period. and with one stroke of the pen, he got rid of them. not only that, but since many of these people were sunni and they were now denied their jobs, pensions, participation in the political life of the country, what they viewed as the -- [inaudible] they started to instead of agreeing that saddam hussein was bad and it was good to get rid of him and they would help us with the new iraq which i think initially i got that sense being on the ground that some people were willing to give us the benefit of the doubt, instead we alienated them. and with one stroke of the pen, l. paul bremer iii created the political basis for the insurgency. the second decision was to disband the iraqi army. a national institution that had fought for eight years against iran, many shia in the iraqi army, and it wasn't an instrument of regime control the way that the republican guard,

the special republican guard were. and we had to eliminate those instruments of regime control but not the iraqi army. the iraqi army was an institution that could have been rehabilitated under new leadership and used to help stabilize postwar iraq. and instead, bremer disbanded it. now, in his memoirs he says i was just acknowledging the obvious because the soldiers had taken off their uniforms and had gone home. but it's a pretty disingenuous statement because they had also, what he doesn't say is they had taken their weapons home with them. and that had we wanted to call them back to the colors, we could have. how do i know that? because when it was pointed out to bremer that we now had several hundred thousand armed young men without jobs on the streets, he decided that we would offer them back pay and that they could come and collect their back pay and a stipend, and that would give them something with which to start

their new lives. they all showed up. it would have been very easy to have a recruiting table right there saying you want to continue your job, help guard your country, prevent the looting, so forth, and we wouldn't have gotten all of them, but we would have gotten a significant portion, and we wouldn't have had to start to recreate the iraqi security forces out of whole cloth. what this did not only put hundreds of thousands of armed young men on the streets, but tens of thousands of officers. now, most of them were sunni, and they were denied their jobs, their pensions, political future and most importantly this iraqi society, they were deprived of their honor. and many of these officers decided at that point to take their not inconsiderable military talents with them into the insurgency. with a second stroke of the pen, l. paul bremer iii created the military basis for the insurgency. and we capped off these two disastrous decisions by

empowering a highly sectarian group of iraqi politicians, the iraqi governing council. 24 of them. and they proceeded to divide up the iraqi government among themselves. there weren't 24 ministries, they actually had to create three new ministries so that each member of the council could have a ministry he could control, and can then they proceeded to fire everyone in there who wasn't a member of their particular political party and then packed the ministries with their political adherents to give them jobs. and what little competence that remained in the iraqi government was done away with by this decision. so these were the, this this see political basis for the downturn in iraq. i think that it's my contention we created the mess. we created it first by an ill-considered invasion, but then by our decisions in the immediate postwar period. i love gary larson.

this is american generals in iraq, i guess that would be tommy franks, planning out their campaign on the calendar. as you notice, every day says "kill something and eat it." but it really says something about the american army in the beginning of the war. it was very offensively focused, it was very tactically and operationally excellent. and it didn't know a lot about -- it did know a lot about counterinsurgency. so the idea that you'd go out and kill and capture operatives and raids after raids after raids and not a lot of thought putting into the other aspects of counterinsurgency that we eventually became very good at, but not in 2003. so what, so we were there now, and things were spiraling downward although not rapidly. what were we going to do? well, that was a good question, and i don't think we had a good answer to it. we lacked a strategy to guide

the way forward, and down at the troop level -- i know, i was a brigade commander. in that first year we lacked an operational concept that drove operations of each unit in iraq in a uniform and coherent manner. and we lacked enough resources. certainly lacked troop strength on the ground. even though, even with these headwinds there was some good things that were done. unit by unit there was a lot of learning that went on, and i think the army history of the first stage of the iraq war covers this pretty well. but it was hit or miss. it depended upon the unit commander. and there was a lot of learning when a unit came into iraq, and then by the time they left, they were trained up, and they were pretty good. but then new units came in. and you had that learning process all over again. even so, there were some successes. but we failed to capitalize on

them. we killed two hussein boys, right after that we captured saddam hussein. and these three events in succession really took the wind out of the sails of the early insurgency. and it's my contention that had we reached out to the sunnis with the reform of the debaathification decree and some other political outreach, that we could have brought them back into support of way forward. the period from january to march of 2004 was fairly peaceful. there was a downturn in security incidents in iraq. but we didn't take advantage of it. instead, we created a transitional administrative law that was crafted really without a lot of sunni input, and therefore, they resisted it. this period ended with the april 2004 uprisings in fallujah and across south-central barak.

uprisings that were this the case of the south central iraq were put down by the first armored division, the unit of which i was brigade commander, and we dealt with the army a fairly significant blow. in fallujah the marines were on the way to dealing a blow to the insurgents when they were told to stop. because the press, especially the arab press, was firmly against what was happening, and there was a lot of misinformation about civilian casualties ask so forth. and so forth. and when they were ordered to stop, then the situation in fallujah spiraled downward. and, in fact, insurgents ended up seizing the city and holding it until the second battle of fallujah in november 2004 which killed 2,000 insurgents and destroyed about a third to a half of the city in the process.

we didn't take advantage of the opportunities that we had there in the spring of 2004 for military success on the battlefield. instead, we withdrew from the cities, and we withdrew our forces from their bases inside baghdad and other cities and put them on the periphery. i know in baghdad we went to four major operating bases on the periphery of the city. this was major mistake, and it was predicated on general john abizaid's beliefs. he was head of central command. of his belief that we were a virus that had infected iraqi society, and the longer that we were positioned among the iraqis in their cities, the more antibodies in the form of insurgents we would create, that we were the problem. it wasn't the iraqis. and when -- the problem is when we withdrew from the cities, no matter how many mounted patrols we launched from those forward operating bases, we could not

control the neighborhoods from the periphery. and the result is that the people with the power who were positioned locally rose up then and began to control the urban terrain of iraq. and that was increasingly the insurgency and the shia militias that were baning in strength and power -- gains in strength and -- gaining in strength and power. real study in contrasts, again, showing how different units had different approaches to counterinsurgency. i've described one approach, and that was the massive invasion of fallujah in 2004. another approach was h.r. mcmasters' approach with the third army cavalry regiment in 2005. faced with a similar problem, insurgents that controlled the center of the city, he didn't attack it. instead, he surrounded it, he isolated it and then slowly, bit by bit, he cleared it. and then to hold it, he positioned his forces in iraqi

police and army inside the city in smaller outposts to make sure that the insurgents could not rise up again and control the terrain. and by doing this, he substantially altered the dynamic of the battle. it was great example of counterinsurgency warfare, but it was just one unit among many. nevertheless, it was pretty clear that attacking iraqi cities to save them was not the answer, and fallujah -- the second battle of fallujah -- was the end of that what i call the kinetic road. this period of the war spiraling downward but not be at a crisis point ended in february of 2006 with the destruction of the shrine, probably the fourth holiest shrine in shia islam. up to this point, the shia had been fairly responsive to calls to not make the situation worse.

eye toll ya ali -- ayatollah sistani knew that they could outvote everyone else and they would eventually gain power in iraq. but after this incident with this major shrine now destroyed, sistani said if the government, the iraqi security forces can't defend our religion, the faithful will. and that was all that al-mahdi needed to rise up in baghdad and elsewhere. they torched sunni mosques, invaded sunni neighborhoods, kidnapped, tortured and killed sunnies and drove them out of their homes. and this campaign that began in february 2006 gained force and strength throughout the year. this the western part of -- in the western part of iraq, al-qaeda was gaining control of el anbar province, this according to the intelligence report of a marine colonel who said we're no longer in control

of al anbar, al-qaeda is. but even then there's a glimmer of hope in the the city of ramadi, and we'll talk about that later. never less, but december 2006 more than 3,500 iraqis were being killed every month due to ethnosectarian violence. the problem is that the iraqi force failed to adjust its strategic approach which was focused on killing and capturing insurgent terrorist operatives and on a rapid transition of security responsibilities to iraqi security forces, forces that were fundamentally unready to accept those responsibilities in most cases. and in some cases, especially in terms of the iraqi national police, were complicit in the sectarian violence that was ongoing. part of the problem in multi-national force iraq is they simply didn't understand what was going on on the ground. i know this because i got ahold of general casey's documents as well as general petraeus', and you look at the campaign plan review in april of 2006 -- this

is now two months after the shrine bombing -- it has a list of wildcards, things that could go wrong. and on that list of wildcards is sunni terrorists destroy a major shia shrine, thereby sparking sectarian violence throughout iraq. and it's like, glad it happened two months ago and you're now -- you're still putting it in your plan not as a fact on the ground, but something that could happen. it's just an unwillingness to recognize the reality of what was happening. this shows what was happening. the civilian deaths, the purposing is iraqi data plus coalition data. the blue is just coalition data. obviously, the iraqis are in more places than we are, so they count more bodies. but you can see this trend upward throughout 2006 of the number of civilians dying. and by december it had reached critical proportions. this would be equivalent to more

than 35,000 u.s. citizens dying every month due to sectarian violence. pretty significant number. and here's where we are as the surge is announced. we don't understand that this is going to happen. all we can see is that this was happening. and that's a stock chart, you're a buyer. what did i just do? here we go. this shows in geographical terms what was happening. the darker orange areas are areas where insurgents and terrorists have more sway, and you can see that the tie depress

river -- tie depress river valley, the euphrates river valley and, of course, whole portions of baghdad are significant concentrations of insurgent terrorist forces. it was of a fairly significant challenge. by late summer of 2006, it was clear that the united states was headed for defeat. we put it, i was on the council of colonels that worked for the joint chiefs, and we put it this way: we are not winning, so we are losing, and time is not on our side. parallel strategic reviews were undertaken by the national be security council, the joint chiefs, the state department. but to his credit, president bush was the one who made the decision to surge. you know, victory has a thousand fathers, and everyone has been writing saying, oh, it was really general odierno. no, it was really general keane, no, it was really david petraeus. well, guess what?

it was president bush. he's the one that decided to surge against every political headwind blowing against him to include members of his own party saying to get out. but more important than the surge was how those forces would be used in accordance with the new counterinsurgency doctrine that was published in december 2006. so what was the surge? well, first it was the provision of more forces that enabled a change in the strategic approach. but more importantly again, the movement of those forces back off those big bases, positioning them within the communities that they would protect. that protecting the iraqi population from ethnosectarian violence was the only way to drive down that violence and thereby enable politics, at least the politics that doesn't use bomb withs and bullets -- bombs and bullets as its grammar to move forward. the iraqis surged along with it. we added 20 or 30,000 troops to the mix. they added 130,000 troops during

the same time period. increasingly, those forces were percent trained as our advisory efforts took hold. more importantly, they were partnered with u.s. forces side by side so that they could model their behavior after that of the disciplined u.s. troops and u.s. troops could keep an eye on the iraqi security forces to moderate their baser instincts. we improved techniques of population control, blast barriers, segmented baghdad into a number of isolated or, rather, gated communities. we used biometric scanners to figure out who belonged in neighborhoods and who was planting the ieds and so forth. there was better synergy between conventional and special operations forces rather than being two separate elements on the same battle space. they were now working better together. we finally had enough forces to pursue the enemy throughout the breadth and depth of iraq and to eliminate the safe havens that had cropped up in the previous three years of the war. be we created a -- we created a

strategic engagement cell to seek out opportunities to cleeve off portions of the insurgency and bring them into support of the government. because you can never defeat them all. you have to fight them all and beat them all, that's a pretty tall order especially in a virulent insurgency such as that which we faced. there was learning and adapting going on, but now it was more systematic. and because you had a counterinsurgency doctrine that everyone had to follow. you had two leaders in general odierno and general petraeus who mandated that the entire force operate under the same doctrine. it wasn't the hit or miss affair it had been since 2003. and finally, we revamped our detention procedures to make sure that the jihadists didn't control the inside of the detention facilities and that they weren't simply turned into jihadist universities. so what did the surge do? it acted as a catalyst to impel a lot of other factors taking

place. the most important of which was the able to rebellion against al-qaeda which began in ramadi. surgery wasn't the cause -- surge wasn't the cause of the trial rebellion, it predated the surge by several months, but surge was the reason the awakening spread as rapidly and as fast as it did. what most people don't know and which i catalog in my book, general petraeus went to ramadi the week after he took command, and he saw what was going on, and he ordered all of his subordinate commander toss support the awakening with all the tools at their disposal. and this is what allowed the awakening to take off. absent the surge, the awakening -- in my belief -- is confined to ramadi. maybe al anbar province at most. but given the force of the surge and general petraeus' orders, it expands well beyond that and becomes a major factor in the defeat of al-qaeda. the creation of the sons of iraq program, that was clearly part of the surge.

these were armed neighborhood watch units that reported to u.s. military leaders. general petraeus learned about one such opportunity in amrrhea, and when he learned about that he basically, in his usual manner, said this is a great idea. we're going to implement it throughout multi-national force iraq. and so as these insurgent and various militias came in and offered to secure tear own communities -- their own communities because they were tired of the depp rahations on their communities by other folks, we would make them wear a geneva convention-compliant uniform, and only later did we agree to pay them. and we did this to prevent backsliding, to pick sure that they wouldn't with -- to make sure that they wouldn't turn back to the people who could outbid us. the al-mahdi ceasefire in august of 2007 would never have

been declared or accepted had the surge not already improved security dramatically this the country. and finally, the iraqi government's willingness to confront al-mahdi in basra, sadr city and amara would not have been accomplished or attempted had the surge not provided the wherewithal and, again, the environment this whichal al-maliki felt emboldened enough to do it. so i'm going to cover real quickly ten myths of the surge, and i'll end with these ten myths, and then we'll have some consideration. of the first myth -- conversation. the first myth is that the change in counterinsurgency doctrine did not matter, that u.s. forces had already adapted to the environment. in my -- any case, security was already improving in iraq. i think this is patently false. the counterinsurgency manual in 2006 finally put a uniform stamp on the operational construct and

the tactics used by u.s. forces in iraq. before then it had been very hit or miss. and as far as security being good before the surge or, i'm sorry, violence had already ebbed, well, here's a graph of the violent incidents in iraq. laser pointer's not working. but you can see that as the surge begins in january of 2007, the thurm of incidents is at an all-time high, and it remains high for several months. it isn't until june of 2007, operation phantom thunder and the surge of offense i have operates -- offensive operations does violence begin to ebb and ebb substantially. so you can see right here and then right here. how it drops. but the surge begins right here. so violence had not ebbed.

number two, the awakening was real reason for the improvement in security. well, it was a huge reason. here's general petraeus with sheikh sadr, one of the primary sheikhs involved in the awakening right out of central casting of lawrence of arabia. and i think i describe this, it's general petraeus' push that he gave to the awakening that really allowed it to expand beyond the confines of ramadi. myth number three, all we did was put the insurgents on our payroll. i think i've already addressed this. there's their geneva convention-compliant uniforms, by the way, the orange road guard vests. works for me. by the way, we only paid them $16 million a month, and that's cheap at about five times price given the amount of security they gave to their local communities. at their height, there was 103,000 of these sons of iraq. that's 103,000 light infantrymen

that we added to our force structure for a fraction of the cost of putting u.s. forces on the ground. myth number four, the surgery was a tactical add dabbation that did little to change the scene on the ground. well, if strategy is the application of ways and means to achieve an end, here's the ways and the means that were adjusted during the surge. in the middle of this diagram is everything al-qaeda needs to survive, and on the outside is everything we did to counter that. and that is a significant amount of actions, and it's not all just tactical add dabbations -- adaptations on the ground. general petraeus called this the anaconda plan. and in terms of ends, this was, there was a change in that as well. the ultimate goal was still a representative iraq, a

democratic iraq that could be a u.s. ally in the heart of the middle east, an ally against the war on terror. but in the near term, what we decided is that sustainable security was probably the best we were going to do and that we'd knit together local initiatives and eventually get to a long-term situation where reconciliation was b possible. myth number five, the surge was merely a hearts and minds campaign. well, if that's the case, then why is the first six months of the surge the deadliest period of the war for u.s. forces? the fact is that this was not a campaign to win hearts and minds, this was the campaign to control and protect the population in order to defeat the insurgency, and there was a heck of a lot of fighting involved. myth number six, sectarian cleansing in baghdad had already stabilized the city prior to the surge. well, here's a map of the

ethnosectarian violence; the more orange the blob, the more violence there is. and at the beginning of the surge in january 2007, there's a heck of a lot of ethnosectarian violence. sectarian cleansing had not solved the problem. by july 2008 when the surge ends, there is no violence to speak of, ethnosectarian violence to speak of. and, thus, my contention is the surge that caused the ethnosectarian violence to ebb. myth number seven, the al-mahdi ceasefire of 2007 was the real reason for the improvement of security. i've already covered this. there's al-sadr. again, he would not have offered a ceasefire had the surge not already improved security. myth number eight, general george casey's strategy could have achieved the same outcome as the surge had we given it more time. well, this is a quote right from general casey's own joint program progress review, the

last one conducted under his watch which he signed. and it basically says we are losing. many of the risks identified in the campaign plan have materialized. the assumptions did not hold. we are failing to achieve our objectives. we immediate to protect the iraqi population -- we need to protect the iraqi population from sectarian violence. true. so he didn't believe that his strategy was succeeding and neither did the folks that worked on the creation of the surge. and the iraq study group report, we were caught in the mission that has -- we are caught in a mission that has no foreseeable end and, at that particular time, they were, unfortunately, right. myth number nine, the improvement capabilities of special operations forces, this is what bob woodward contends in his book, "the war within." general general mcchrystal would disagree with this. i know general petraeus disagrees with this.

it was the synergy between the conventional and the special operations forces, the conventional forces taking and holding ground and the special operations forces then being able to target insurgent terrorist operate toives that created the dynamic that improved, helped to improve the situation on the ground. if you have a pure counterterrorist campaign and a virulent insurgency such as that that existed in iraq, there is no way that it solve the proble. and the final myth all the surge did was create a decent interval for the order toly withdrawal of u.s. forces fromming iraq. that's all it was designed to do. that's not what it was designed to do. that may be the withdraw it turned out, perhaps. we'll see. but this goes to the perspective of two presidents. george bush looked on iraq as, and his model would have been south korea where u.s. forces now 60 years on are still there helping that country stabilize

after a very difficult war. south korea wasn't south korea or more several decades. it only became a vibrant democracy several decades after the end of korean war. but president bush wasn't able to see this through to its end. president obama was elected on a anti-war platform, and his vision of iraq, in my view, was more of that of vietnam; an unwinnable quagmire that u.s. troops needed to get out of as soon as they could and allow the locals on the ground to sort it out among themselves. ..