is we want to make sure we are not saying that two of us got right and that's why things changed. we benefited from sacrifices of countless others prior to our arrival. we benefited from a lot of social movements and things taking place in iraq with the anbar awakening had nothing to do with us individually but we are able to take advantage of that. we wanted to capture the sacrifices of people had come before us and to show their sacrifices were not for not. eventually we did achieve success and other things took it apart later on. what i thought i would just turn over to bill to talk about what fallujah was like before both served their together, give a sense of things, and he will share his perspective on how we started to change the city. >> how's everybody doing today? we're going to double team your. one of the things i wanted to add to what dan brought up i think one of things it's also

important to know, going on in the to right now a bit of a bifurcation. there are a lot of folks think using force, to what happens is the only answer to solving problems. so that's one of the reasons why we wrote this book, one of the reasons because in many cases use of force is not the appropriate answer. sometimes it should putting a blanket of foam over a fire over something that consumes everything down and gives people the opportunity to take a breath, look around and say hey, we could do something different. the argument still goes on. there are many who believe, many within the military believe the only reason we should ever go to war is kind of like putting a glass case, -- we don't have that option. wherever we are told you we're going to do to the best are building. and a some cases, using the weapons enhance the stop the best approach. and so that's one of the reasons i think we wrote this. coming in to fallujah itself

might explain started in us on the joint staff before actually join the second marine division. that's when the first battle of fallujah happened in april. the marines went back into anbar province less than a month before the battle happened, before the blackwater bridge incident where the four blackwater contractors were hung from the bridge. we kind of went in there pretty cocky. we also went in with the attitude that the marines went in there with the attitude that a, we're going to go in there, smile, work with people. we are not going to live up to the reputation we normally have of being a blunt instrument. unfortunately, when that event happened at force a lot of people's hand. a marine camp commander sense of what we should go into the city. we shouldn't do retribution to the city, and they were told to go in anyway. and then they were told to stop when things got fairly ugly and pull back and that's what was turned over to the fallujah

brigade, an experiment that didn't work. by november came around was when the decision was made we need to go back in and sort this thing out. i was in a city in december while the fighting was so annoyed on in 2004 because that's what we're doing our site survey to look great as he was going on because we knew we would inherit the entire area. so when the battle was over essentially it was our job to clean things up, get the city reestablish, get things back on their feet and keep the insurgents out. but the hardest part about that is we are iraqis. we can't sort them out. we can't sort out who is who. read-only people who can are the police, and, of course, you for the november ballot all the police in the entire anbar province have been disestablished by the government the time. that me thinks particularly difficult. so not only were we trying to keep people out we could identify, recommend reestablish

the police, working with iraqi military and the city, pretty unprofessional group of folks by the they have been disestablished and reestablished a quickly and set up very quickly so we had our work cut out for us. difficult process, very long deployment. year long, lost a lot of people. trying to keep things calm and quiet. over the course of the year we think we were able to get things tamp it down, but when we left and returned home, and thus assigned a battalion we are keeping a close eye on fallujah because i knew i would be coming back. i had a sense things were continued to get worse. and, of course, that the course of 2006 we had the drumbeat going on come we can of lost this poll outcome let's leave. we have a fairly senior marine intelligence officer write a report saying fallujah is loss, we will never get a ticket back. we will deal with it as long as possible and then leave. and, frankly, i was kind of hard to deal with, especially when

you're training young brains getting ready to go up there. looking at you like, why are we doing this? members of congress, the folks were losing on the tv news all the time. it was difficult to do with. the biggest thing you have to tell them was focus, we advocate job to do, due to the best of our ability to don't worry what other people are saying. that's not your job. it's not even my job. get back into the city and actually things are quite a bit worse. in many ways they were pretty much playing a game of whack-a-mole and going after folks. the biggest since you have a special after the first month or two is realizing we have to do something different. that's what this book is about, is doing something different. something radically different. i don't know if you want to pick up from there. >> sure. one of the key lessons we learned in iraq after multiple rotations was that we will always win any engagement

against the enemy. we can put any glitch, any valley, but what is the whole strategy? who would eventually take her place and prevent the insurgency from coming back and intimidating local population? it took a while to figure that out. in fallujah by 2007 you have a cadre of people done repeated tours who had cleared numerous villages and valleys so frequently they knew the area well. it's pretty incredible. the key missing dynamic was in listing the population and its own defense, getting it off the fence where it was part of the solution, not a bystander to the solution. so part of that with the anbar awakening which i can talk about later but those also in the city of fallujah organizing police and neighborhood watc watches st the committee wasn't just kind of stuck between insurgents on the one and u.s. forces on the other but were part of the solution. and, frankly, the villagers or people in neighborhoods, they know where the bad guys are. they could be a part of the solution.

that makes it easier for outside to figure out whenever local partner you can work with. this led to a was called operation -- which bill can talk about which was an attempt what we call population centric approach to the city of fallujah, an approach that hadn't been tried previously. in part because the violence was so great that the iraqi population wasn't ready for it. >> one of the things is necessary in a counterinsurgency is your people living in the area you have to have them get off the fence. for them is a very dangerous thing to do. if they join the government side to early, the insurgents will torture and kill them. if they join the insurgent side, even seem like they're joining insurgent side, potentially they get arrested and thrown in prison. so it's a very difficult problem for them to deal with. one of the things the marines were frustrated with the previous deployment was people never seem to help them. you would ask people can help us? they would look at you and you could almost see the wheels

turning in and like there's no way i'm going to help you. there's no way i'm going to do -- it your problem, not mine. we had the weapons, they didn't the insurgents had weapons. it's a pretty stark contrast. one of the other things we did before we deployed was spending time explaining to our brains this is what we're going to do, this is why we're going to do it. by the way, the iraqi people i just got caught in the middle. they live there. this is the rest of the life kind of issue that we are just there for a short period of time. for me if he took the time to explain that to them you could see the lightbulb come on getting didn't understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. pes a lot of frustration because many of them from hollywood war movies and other stuff they had an expectation of what might be happening when they get there in a war zone. and when it wasn't happening that way they were pretty frustrated by it. so we had to alleviate the

frustration. when they're frustrated they do dumb things. they're young people. we had to prevent don't things because you do one thing fight but if you do one thing wrong because someone is frustrated, that's what everybody remember. so it was an attempt to work with the police, work with iraqi army and to set up a neighborhood watch to get folks and the different precincts within the city involved in providing their own security. we put up barriers to keep a suicide bomber from pride in their neighborhoods which iraqis appreciate. in response to question his these bombs going off. spent the most important piece was a neighborhood watch because they saw everything to a no who belong in the neighborhood and you didn't. we hired 100 precincts, 200 says, 100 sets of eyeballs watching all the time. living in that neighborhood and

reporting. and insurgents couldn't deal with it. we thought it would be a stronger reaction to this sort of thing but it wasn't. the majority of them left. went somewhere else but read evidence because operations going on in other areas that hadn't been happening before. >> and intellect a good one thing against it is a lot of this was a product of being in the right place at the right time. and to some degree having the right attitude about what we needed to do about it. a lot of different things that came together that really helped us during that period in 2007 to really get things to calm down. for instance, we talk about this in the epilogue, the police chief. the former police chief was terrible. he was terrified, we can go outside the police station headquarters, wouldn't go out on patrol. i don't even think he ever left the building. you can't lead that way.

the iraqi army brigade commander was in charge of iraqi forces in the city was a member of the sadr militia. u.s. weapons to the sadr militia. he was she a. the guy counter produced and engineered his removal. the guy who took over for him was exceptionally good. the mayor when i went on the pre-deployment site survey for my second time in fallujah, the mayor was terrible. there were a lot of people focusing on the fact there was a level of corruption that is kind of acceptable in that culture. he was well above and beyond that. we also think he was working with the insurgents. somehow or other, he was engineered to lead and somebody else took over. we don't quite know how that happen. city councilman elected in the city tell them in appointing him. between the three of them, the new police chief was brought in, the iraqi army brigade command,

and the mayor, the combination of three, all three a ride right as dan and i were getting into the city. spin the thing a lot of people don't appreciate them for a long time the insurgency was unified the u.n. al-qaeda, the national insurgents. they frequent performer baathist to work with saddam hussein security forces of iraq which me people know where domino at least in the officer corps, sunni arabs to read a lot of experience with weapons, networks of fighters they could have been too. they knew how to fight. what develop over time is that al-qaeda had overreached. iraqi men love to smoke. they like to drink and they like the girls to go to school. they like these things. al-qaeda had a different vision. the brutality of al-qaeda, the brutality, they would burn warehouse of cigarettes, for example. they started to cut into the corruption of different tribes, which is just about money friendly. so eventually this split develops with the nationals

insurgent said the u.s., you're no longer our number one enemy. you may be number two or three now, which was good from our perspective. we had a local partner to work with and then we used them to crush al-qaeda essentially and that took a process, kind of a sense of collective amnesia. we knew they had been involved in operations against us. many of them probably have blood on their hands and vice versa. our guys have killed many other supporters. we will set that aside, focus on threat of al-qaeda. the threat of al-qaeda is multifaceted. a lot of discussion is about combat and raising local police forces but al-qaeda has a political program that is tactically proficient. there was an individual in the city of fallujah who was sort of the political head of al-qaeda locally. he would not forsake us. he said of a fallujah tribal sheikh council. from the western eye, if you're from iowa that sounds legitimate. he's wearing a robe, he has a beard, he must be a legitimate

sheikh. but when you start feeling that back and you start noticing that when he would enter a meeting at the city council, no one would stand a. everyone would consider continue the conversation. for example, bill has -- you may have picked up on. i'm trying to get some myself. you would notice these little things. when he enters a room, you should know that because the sector to detail has a right before. a bunch of guys with ak-47s. you're not sure what to do. but then when the talk, people listen to a stop talking and there's a serenity that comes with power, frankly, that you pick up on. we had a sheikh who is head of a tribe and they were largely west of the city fallujah on the banks of the euphrates. there were several thousand members of this tribe.

he had control of an egg that was i don't know, 70 square miles of something like this, of a mixture of farmland, waterfront, every on the euphrates and he could control that area. a lot of our engagement with working with these tribes and working through them. from an american's perspective, tribes on sunday is seen as anti-modern, antithetical, building a modern state of it took a while for us to understand how vitally important to social institution was to the iraqi culture and how family ties trumped political ties. we had a very robust tribal engagement program. i do and not particularly attractive mustache. and worked with these tribal leaders to help them recruit men from the villages to be part of the local protective force, in a way would be was trying to do in city of raising local police forces. we are just doing it with tribal forces. >> that was like, also and with regards to the bifurcation of

the insurgents, nationalist insurgents and then the more islamist extremist insurgents, very much driven by al-qaeda. the reason i'm kind of bring that up was it was important what's going on in the book but also a dynamic that's going going to go on today and was happy with isa to al-qaeda was bad. they did a lot of things. don't take their cigarettes way, that's bad but they are also saying your daughter, she is my wife know. the locals had no say in that matter. they were killing people in pretty graphic and violent ways. and i think the people of fallujah and the national insurgents started looking around going, we know the u.s. military is leaving. the last couple of years they've been very, very professional and that iraqis to me that the very balanced to approach to things. these al-qaeda folks, they are rabid dogs. they have to go. we can't live with them. that's why thing to some degree we may see similar type thing happen with isis because right

now, they have definitely overreached and they are worse than al-qaeda. al-qaeda has disowned them. like we don't do that. when you get one of the worst groups there is disowning it, that's pretty bad. so i think this group will also overreached, at some point i thinthink the people, the sunnis will turn on them. but the first thing you as a government they can trust, national unity government. i think we are starting to see that form right now, now that prime minister maliki has stood down. one of the other things have been irritating to me is whenever they talk about the iraqi militant, they say the u.s. trained iraqi military. that u.s. trained iraqi move to ended about 2012. when we left and there was nobody there anymore to try and keep them to be a balanced force of sunni kurds and shia. prime minister maliki took some very direct steps to push away from that, to push sunni and pushcarts out of the military and essentially became another

shia militia. so that's why many of the sunni areas alike they didn't trust them, that was referred to them as a rant anyway. even though they are not. so that kind of interesting dynamic and have been watching them very, very closely. spent one of things about lucius which vision of an iraqi on working with the local iraqi police working with local tribes and to the iraqi army capable has the firepower that doesn't have the willpower. the police how the press but they don't really have power. the tribes have the manpower and willpower but they don't have the firepower. when we secured fallujah you at all three kind of working together in concert. that kind of institutional resilience he was a crucial component of this. the political side was also important to understanding the fallujah council sheikhs council was a shadow government of al-qaeda using the placement to assassinate iraqis who wanted to do well for the city to understand that, marginalizing

them and supporting the mayor of fallujah. so the mayor had no budget whatsoever. all that money sloshing around and about but none of it ever ended up in his office. one of the things i tried to do with my very impressive mustache was to provide a temporary money to help kind of like a bridge almost to provide him funds so he could feed his men, i loaned him and hud because his had been blown up in an ied but even at my parents mail offices of school supplies from staples because he didn't have that in this album. but immature that he provided the crucial missing piece which was iraqi leadership and legitimacy. he was very proactive in going against al-qaeda. one name he did which was very useful i think for the city pacification was we had an attack that killed a prominent leader i in the city and of the car bomb that blew up at the funeral procession the next day. that car bomb sort of changed

things in the city. so the mayor and post a vehicle ban in the city. overnight no vehicles were allowed in the city. i think sometimes we don't appreciate this. the whole city of fallujah was fenced off by the marine corps. you can only enter through a small number of entry control point. every single house had a number assigned to it on an epic every person who entered the city have an id card and had the isis can and photos taken. there was a sense of population control that we have their that was very important. but that mayor, by imposing a vehicle ban, and he said the pacers up buses to move people around the city, you could imagine applying here in the state people may have a small revolt over those restrictions but the iraqis really surrender to because they knew that was part of a new strategy that things are going to change. and there was a central part of it spent an amazing book, he implemented it in late may. the heat was unbelievable there. during the summer it gets up to 130 degrees. we saw that several times.

when they told us that car bombing of the funeral was horrific. we don't know how many people were killed. it was a lot because the iraqi practices drive in, grab people, taken to the hospital as quickly as possible. we couldn't tell how many people have been injured. you went to the hospital and was an influx of people coming in but it was just a horrific event. when the mayor said he is going to pose a vehicle ban, pow/mia, okay, good luck with that because i couldn't see it working. it did work. it was a bit dicey for the first couple of days because the idea of stopping people from driving, the ones that didn't quite get the word, was to shoot at them. so there was a lot of shooting going on even more so than normal in the city try to get them to stop driving around. but they did it. the amazing thing was over the time that the vehicle ban was in place, we would stand at the control point for people walking in and to many other women are walking in wearing a head to toe black burgers in one of 20,

130 degrees heat. -- burkas. can imagine that going over very well here. we are asking them, what do you think? are you okay with all this? yeah. again, at least there are no bombs going off. it was just amazing. we're not talking walk a couple blocks. some of them had to walk miles. we just found absolute amazing. >> the thing about operation alljah, fallujah was divided up into 10 neighborhoods. the police when they first arrived was going to hunkered down in the center. loss of reinforcement, very secure. window go outside that center they were doing huge groups. they would wear masks to protect the identity. they knew if they would go home that might be killed. once we apply this approach that bill put together you it's 11 neighborhood at a time. it took like four months in a completely. you go in the middle of the

night, completely segment often neighborhood with concrete barriers. but it is a physically cut off from the rest of the city. you have a police captain move out of with 20 or 30 iraqi police to set up a new precinct. then you add to that a neighborhood watch. so, for example, a funny stories we have a neighborhood watch would be one man from every household. the mayor of fallujah wrote a letter commanding people to do this. so we have special shirts made up for them and hats, they would get food, the screen and one of the shirts that had neighborhood watch in ended up with three-inch letters, somebody would mr. inslee but it went from three installed u install o three-inch wide lives to get to squint to see -- just little things. but essentially what you're doing is employment sponge. all these mails getting a job, there's honor in wearing a uniform because the insurgency had so overreached that he was no longer considered sort of cool to be with the insurgency. it was no considered better to

be with the police force. one neighborhood at a time. eventually that squeeze al-qaeda out of the city so they started serving and working in rural areas. and that's where the security changed. >> and the place to go out there, inside each precinct was iraqi army, marines and police. as long as we were there, we could prevent the iraqi army and theithe iraqi police providing, which was a consistent problem. we could give them the confidence that somebody tried to blow up that precinct or attack the precinct we were there to help defend. that gave them a lot of confidence. in many cases the only reason they would stay is because we were there with them. answer getting off of the big ford fashion afford operating bases, getting out there and mixing in with these people, and a lot more for patrolling instead of vehicle control. the barriers we put around were not all -- you could walk through them which is fine but you just couldn't drive a car through them. we set of each precinct would have to checkpoints that people have to stop. they were manned by the

neighborhood watch and the police supervising so the check to make sure who is coming in and who was and. this gave them a sense of ownership. all of these things come to think about it from an american context images can imagine doing that here in an american city. just can't begin to imagine that. >> i think want to add is why did it take so long to do this? why is the resting place of her military institutions about combat and conventional warfare? how is it the institution change over time to deal with challenges they weren't designed to handle? across the spectrum not just the marines by the army, state department, usaid, they were generally designed to fight nationstates work with capitals and national governments. the problems, predominately outside the capital, it's frequently tribal, not formal institutions. it's often in very dangerous areas. so force protection concerns ara just personal trumps a coaching ambition sometimes.

part of this is trying to capture input from the visited way of doing this and that's not always that killing people and breaking things but it's about enlisting them in their own defense, about empowering them at the local level. these are things you do for your from marines or mid-level officer. is to different from the crypt have but we wanted to capture that, at least at one point. the bias in publishing is towards combat. there are plenty of books by junior officers or druggable been combat. i like them but that somehow you way more at the end of the day. as part of the solution about the fundamental solution. >> that is, again going back to my comments at the beginning, a lot of folks in the military that think if you can do the high-end type war, you can do anything else. you can easily adjust into the low end. one of my favorite quotes is it the only tool you know how to use as a hammer, it's amazing how many things look like a nail.

i think that's why it took us as long today because there's a lot of units over there. the only tool for new hub to use was a hammer. everything else was too slow, too frustrating. it wasn't a real deployment. it was about combat to them. how do you win? you don't win by depopulating an area. you win by getting people to decide okay, we've had enough, we will get involved, take the neighborhood back and we'll calm everything down and get the military out of the neighborhood. one of the problems we had when i'd gotten there was iraqi army had been given space in the city for them in charge of, and it just happened maybe a month before we arrived. saudi go and tell them that we have a plan to get you out of the city and we're going to put the police in your place? they didn't trust the police at all. that wasn't what they wanted to hear. the way i explained to them, look, the role of iraqi mr. is to defend iraq. external enemies. it's not keep control of the cities. the final result in the city is

police in charge of the city, enforcing the rule of law in that city. that's it. we don't belong to the young documentary doesn't belong to us we have to find ways to end a single to please, give them enough confidence that they can take control. because as dan brought up earlier, the police were outgunned. they were terrified to go in the city. we were worried every time they went out because they wished anything and everything. and many times at us. not purposely but if they get hit by an ied or so we shot an rpg at them or somebody shot at them, we call it the death blossom. murphy's rule of combat. when in doubt into your magazine. they fired anywhere and never. that made things difficult to work with them. the biggest pieces how to get them to be more professional, more focus on the job which is to protect and serve, which is not a concept they believed in the. >> i'll talk about isis and what possible strategy might look like going forward.

i know the president has remarks on this less eating. there are a lot of things we tried to learn from her expenses in anbar province. to be the key, but of the key elements is you have to have the army, the police and the tribes working together in concert. that's only in the service of a broader political strategy which is to say how do you convince sunni arab who doesn't like isis that is an alliance of convenience right now to turn against isis and work with a government that is not native of people from his eye the religious background or from his part of the country? ..

>> the best thing to do would be to open it up for questions. [applause] use the microphone, please. yes commissary. >> i'm curious -- [inaudible] -- the d.c. talk about today carbajal prevalent this way of looking at the insurgencies in the military now and sorry of ignorant about this, what is this status of falluja right now? >> the status of falluja right now is that it is under isis right now. we got controlled and they don't

trust the government. the previous government you could say now. how much control they really haven't not sure. i expect the things i've seen in reading that at a certain point they will say you guys thereat appear in all make it happen just like they did before. but they have somebody help them. as far as the prevalence of the abuse in the military, it is very much he makes because you have a lot of people arguing the counterinsurgency stuff is not real war. we don't do that. we are going to focus on trading up or weapons. we are going to focus on the big war. haven't seen any of those break at any time recently. i talked to the younger marines and that is what they join for. they want to go do something that a lot of them are frustrated. peace isn't exactly breaking out. it may not be that big war that you saw in tv or in the movies, but when you look at the course of history, especially if the

united states, the majority of the things that we've done has been these types of operations. they haven't been the big worse than lot of people don't understand it. it was actually have to do what we are told to do, not what we think we to do. >> dan, you mentioned, correct me if i'm wrong, the former leaders of the baath party were active in the insurgency at the time. do we know if the kurds situation with trade to the simulator like what you know today headed by former vice president, are they act david isis? that is one question. the other one is how do you expect volusia to be taken back to the iraqi forces? is it going to be similar to

what happened recently by the americans area and controlled the city? after all, you have difficulty in getting the city in 2007. so how the iraqi army would be able to win falluja again after almost nine months. >> i think the reason isis was so easy to take over western iraq was in part because there's a alliance that they can place of convenience right now between armor boxes, some tribal leaders colluded with isis in part for the internal politics of pressuring the maliki government and trying to either reform and enclave. i think that's pretty clear. isis had a smart game. before we saw them in a radar

screen militarily, rest assured they are making -- reaching out to tribal leaders and networks to help facilitate this kind of return. i think that is what happened here. i think eventually we experienced in our own tours the alliance will start to fray as it becomes a daily reality. so that is for sure. i don't know exactly how iraqis will pacify these areas. i don't think it will be frankly a sophisticated and sensitive to civilian casualties as we were when we were there. >> invites you that i don't think you will be real violence either. one of the things we saw, especially the young guys who aren't employed, a bandwagon. looks like somebody had success. they had to jump around in front of the cameras. when things start going south, they just kind has melts away. i think what is going to happen when you can't a national government going into the center

and bring it back to sydney and the kurds into the military, they overstayed their welcome. they are overreaching, you know, you don't do things like that if you expect that, so what is going to happen if the tide is going to turn and it will turn pretty quickly because we think about it, they are fighting lebanon, syria, iraq. they've got a lot of people working against them and i don't think they will last very long. as soon as the tide starts to turn come i think the folks putting up flags in downtown falluja will take a flight to leave as quickly as possible. >> there are so many dynamics. one of the huge dynamics is the military comes in and is unable to speak the language of the street and needs translators

from past experience where they don't say the right thing. you've alluded to some of the problems that creep up, but in reality the dynamic of boss poverty and it involves good governance. it means corruption and security -- proper security and then there's the other problem with drugs and of course oil. the huge problem is the suicide killer and how you deal with that. i wonder -- i know a little bit about what they did in the philippines and i wondered if he would be bold enough to deal with fanatic killers. >> and the philippines not to acceptable. >> all say since we are going onto the internet, purging essentially took the bodies of fanatics and have been dumped in a common grave, contaminated them with blood and dumped in

the pigs. >> yes, that is essentially yet. >> unfortunately, the media has made a mess too by taking this out of proportion because most people in the military are pretty decent, but then there are some clowns who create panic like the saw the bodies. the big top on this proper security with the fanatic killers in the revenge killers in how you deal with it. >> the interpreters versus translators. something to focus pretty hard on the people i work with and the people out on the streets. the translators repeat what they hear kind of like a computer and in many ways get the context on. if you have an interpreter, someone who understands what they're doing about which i have the benefit of having, you can tell they are trying to get the answer. i can kind of understand some of

what they were saying to communicate with folks who get their point across. that interpreter is key. they are worth the way. >> somebody special to me as a russian mormon and some kids they greeted her by stating i didn't realize that it means -- [inaudible] >> right. that would be a problem. >> in the west we are suicide armor is incredibly jarring to our values in the world, but when he went back through the suicide bombers are, they come in many different flavors. some people are suicide attackers unknowingly. as a famous case of a saudi who came into iraq and was instructed that you will eventually part the martyrdom operations but in the meantime you need to pay your dues. so he was instructed to move a sharp turn into places as part of the dues paying and little

did he know the truck was a truck bomb. he survived that, but as an example there are things that are done to them that creates such a sense of shame that they become suicide bombers. they run together. there are a lot of different people. it is by no means all of them. >> any other aspect is you have to have your head on a swivel. you have to be focused because they only need one second to succeed in what they are doing in one second if not paid enough attention. and that is hard when there's a lot of heat out there. so how do you protect yourself because a very difficult problem we had was we do escalation of force and in many ways it's a cultural misunderstanding in cases like that.

but if you get a marine city is afraid to himself and you let somebody in that's an enormous problem. >> that's why it's so to their local allies to partner with. a notice from the neighborhood come loose from the village of you with them. they can spot the people well before hand. if you've got local community organizer in the city will provide endless amounts of information on what is going on. they will hear two people who don't know the move into the house down the road. great, those are the marines and the navy we wouldn't know that. with an 18-year-old with a badge on his best today's holding mak in his own neighborhood. that'll do it. >> i worked for usaid in iraq and the kurdistan region and so i certainly approve the your approach either. but one of the things that has bothered me about this search

can make out what you've been saying, too. a lot of this success relied on financing, biting off in a sense, local people to do good games. but clearly this is not very sustainable. how did you deal with that issue? >> you're exactly correct. not a good solution but when you are faced with bad solutions you have to pick the least bad one. that was the least bad one. you had a lot of unemployed youth. in many cases and surgeons who pay 50 bucks. my first appointment we had a lot of bad. there's a much there's a mention of there's a much an emphasis on we are not going to pay them. we are not going to give them jobs. of course when you don't have security come you don't have an economy. so how do you deal with?

the amount of money we pay the neighborhood watch wasn't very much for more than they're getting before which is nothing. the other aspect is if you do a good job, your chances of becoming a police officer are much better. you approved yourself. that kind of resonated also. some of them were doing it because it's what i want to do. as things started calming down, shut started opening back a tour is the employment of the kentucky fried chicken opened. that's winning. so with that kind of -- it starts snowballing and it has that effect. but you have to get something started. that was the hardest part. >> were you able to work on any measures to try to get local government better financed to use things? speed might the key thing was

getting security to where they can take place. in april we had a previous city council with a brand-new head of the falluja city council mayor. the beginning of a new change. we added new iraqi army leader. we have an iraqi police chief. parts of the iraqi government were meeting in other places of getting it together, getting a red devastating regularly and unfortunately within two weeks at the arrival they had been assassinated. i had a meeting with him and a few of the marines there. as you walk home he was gunned down. then we had another city council member who is teaching teacher who represents the teachers was gunned down in his home. there were assassinated. you look around the room and say who is willing to stand up and be a leader now?

there is the empty chair sitting there. at those moments you ask yourself what is the insurgency trying to have a duplex he just persists an enduring push on. so for me i finally found someone you seem to be a local partner. you are recessed in the relationship. we didn't have the outset. we supported them publicly where we could. i would give them advice on who to talk to. you need to talk to colonel mullen. so just troubleshooting and try to help him. he didn't need much encouragement. he had standing in the city. once things started happy with how the reconstruction team of five with usaid who partnered with the mayor, start to work with the government to

regularize these temporary measures they use. >> one of the things is the usaid was working with us around the deployment of we are starting projects to make a check on the projects and if things turn into the city into october we started seeing other projects and you say who's doing now with? it turns out the people themselves were because they were starting to clean the area up, starting to do things that were amazing. that was a good decision. >> i have a suggestion for your next project. from falluja to park in san. you'll even have the same equipment, unfortunately. [laughter] >> hi, i'm stephanie coming soon from american university. first i want to ask from your experience, what do you want for

us readers to take away from the inspiring story like what you guys left behind in iraq even though isis has taken over the city of falluja? as my other question, how did she wind up winning the trust of the city in order to change it and make it more prosperous even though two is taking over the city? >> i think for a lot of americans is the isis taken over racketeer about al qaeda facilities in just a sense of what can we do about it? is this something we have to live with as a permanent condition. one way is to show success is possible. it's not by accident and it's a process that takes place that there's some learning that has to take place as well that this is not an intractable problem. you can do it but it requires local partnerships. the problem is so much of how we remember war is clearly about

combat. i like that as much as the next person. but that is not how wars are fundamentally finished in this type of warfare. that is the big take away i would say. >> i would like to add on that that is one of the reasons we wrote this is to get people to understand what the united states military left iraq for the most part in 2009, 2010, we left on good terms. it was a very. in the job we were giving to do had been achieved because you hear nowadays like we lost that whole thing and a lot of that has to do with the way people thought about it to begin with, which wasn't good. but the job was done. one of the things i could've lockstep to prime minister maliki and if you do this come of this goodness coming out of the big problem. which was absolutely amazing. that's what i think what happened here. one game you will notice and ken

pollack from brookings has talked about this a lot. they haven't taken over any shiite areas. they can't. they are not strong enough to do that. like most low. they've haven't got into those areas at all. they hated the central government because the accused them of being shia. they preyed on television. they got equipment. that doesn't mean they don't have used it. they wave the flags around, copy both had a comic yakov and their officers aldrin of may, which is unfortunate. but the tide is turning and i suspect this will go back with the national unity government to be what it was before all this started about a year, year and a half ago. >> hour you guys able to win the trust of the city of falluja

during that time? >> part of it was his discussion of her time they've seen how u.s. military dealt with them in the city. professional balanced in that kind of thing. i have more impact than i thought it would. in discussion that's one of the things they talk about. that doesn't mean they like best. for 30 years we were told they were the bogeyman and they didn't like us very much but they didn't have to like us. you have to respect us and work with us and that's what they did. try us. i don't know if you could say they trust us. we showed them that. the other folks couldn't be around with us because they have a we have now. they clearly did not want that. >> though was there for two tours in multiple multiple tours. wanted for tours at the same base in afghanistan. eventually become part of the local scene. everybody knows you. when you were living the problems every day for two

tours, you know the city that are frequently than some of the residents. you start to become part of your own life in your own hometown in a weird way. it's part of dealing fairly with people and honestly and i think that is sometimes than usual care or a stick. >> are small things that help build the trust because of you do something small, word gets around quickly. one of the council members came up and said the neighbor's son had been arrested by the previous unit and was not a troublemaker. can i get them back? got lost in the iraqi prison system. it took me a while, but i got them back. very emotional scene. but you can begin to calculate how much of an effect that has. it didn't take that much effort on my part. there was a combination of all those things going on to help reinforce and pushed the mayor out in front. the city council get them

motivated when they were very much under threat he had a couple meetings we went to rite aid and i were the only two that showed up, looking at each other and saying this is not work. it takes persistence and they saw that. >> thank you. >> the pacification is a very difficult process. empowering people is just chapter one. the question is how you internalize changes in the population that relies after the last u.s. soldier evacuates. it seems to me that tasking marines and military force for this process is almost unfair. it is really required a cover of

specialties that knows language, but no sculpture, which is very different because in the middle east, money is important. but for instance, honor and shame is much more powerful than money. and also, these people have to be schooled in some kind of area of psychological warfare. so, since involvement of the united states in the middle east is not going to be bright, does anybody see about training a special force that will be attached? you know, part of forces that come to these countries and do a job that is a job to gather and

handstands synthesized by the military of the marines? >> entered the u.s. army special forces is organized around different regions, so the soldiers are focused enough rocket that language and cultural training and that is at least good in terms of working with local security forces. on the civil side coming frequently usaid is he posting for multiple years so you eventually get the wisdom. the state department often has a challenge with manning austere locations about locations with people who have a set of skill sets. they also sent people to foreign services. one of the things we have in afghanistan, something called the afghan hands program was an attempt to sort of get out of this robot list careerism aboveboard promotions of getting

people to eventually get out of a country or region and have someone focus on afghanistan for multiple tours and language training. it took award in afghanistan of a certain size to set the band personnel rules to have the program created. now the institutions refer back to the resting place, which is to say good for you for having been a mask in and come up your done. thank you are a match. we will be posted to someplace so never get the promotion. places like iraq, you can iraq, yemen, somalia, edges of empire need these types of subject matter expertise, but also the relationships. most countries are based on relationships, not an formalist additions we have in the west. we need to have the unenhanced program. this needs to be mirrored in other countries. >> although backed by their first questions about whether it's fair or not.

in many ways especially when there's a complete lack of security, who else is going to do it? part of the issue is you have to establish security first. we have to hand it off to somebody because our presence there is an antibody and we understand that correctly. >> this is what i meant. >> you hear that from their brains like this is unfair. why did they get to do things we don't? so why do we have to do this? why can't we have more state department oaks and folks from other agencies? well, they are kind of allergic to getting shot at. those are the things when you don't have security come you have to have something that can go back to calm things down and the inclination has to be to hand this off to somebody. someone fails to have come in here to do this for the long term because we know we don't

belong. hope that answers your question. [applause] >> thank you, both. they will stick around and sign copies of their book, which is available at the checkout counter. thank you all again for coming. [inaudible conversations]

>> bank robbers were seen as kind of antiheroes who were either name to score after the depression, which is totally untrue. there were killers who wanted money, but the public saw the gangsters in a more romantic light. and you knew as you drink with them that they wouldn't kill you because st. paul had to deal between the cops and crooks.

>> f. scott fitzgerald was so complex in dealing with the complexity of american life and that still resonates today. >> st. paul had a huge impact on its gerald and his job had an impact on saint paul. st. paul is the most important legacy. he lived all over the world, but the vast majority of experiences used in the novels and writing either directly came from st. paul, written in saint paul, so st. paul had this huge impact on his life up until he was probably about 40 in the hollywood years. so if you read its gerald stories, they are awash in st. paul imagery. as scott fitzgerald was born in the apartment.

he was considered a luxury apartment back then befitting the daughter who was one of the richest men in st. paul. unfortunately he died pretty young and so the family was living off the legacy of money. but still, the mcclellan sport while respect it around the town of st. paul. its gerald took his first steps here. there were two sisters that died right before he was born. ..

his father couldn't even keep the family together because of finances, but they still wanted to thrust them into this sinkhole society. so what do you do? you send into the most prestigious private school in st. paul, st. paul academy. you sink into dancing lessons just a couple blocks away on grand avenue. and so he was still rubbing shoulders of course with the elite of summit avenue, even though his folks weren't quite there. it's not that he was a poor boy. it was like, today we think of

him as like a millionaire amongst billionaires. you don't feel sorry for the millionaire. many of his stories are about the influence of money. and i wouldn't say the worst of the money but just the fact that money was such a big driver in the united states. he came back to st. paul as i said just on the cusp of being a teenager. he was very handsome. he was very, very smart, and he was a leader, a natural leader. but sometimes he was probably a little overaggressive. so in the st. paul academy magazine, one of his friends said somebody -- will somebody poisoned sky to shut him up? he wanted to play sports but he wasn't very big. he was a little bit taller than i am. he weighed a lot less than

ideal. but he was like on the third string a small team. how many students were here? probably not that many. said was a great athlete and to realize he wasn't going to be the kind of hero athlete. pics we thought about the ways to kind of gain notoriety. he found it through writing. he was writing detective stories. he liked to read them and so he would write them. he was writing westerns. he was writing mysteries. said he was writing about the civil war because his father was alive of course during the civil war and lived in maryland. and his relatives, you know, hear stories about his relatives in the civil war. so he was doing a lot of different kinds of genres. he was writing plays. the plays were being performed around the town. and he was kind of gaining a little bit of notoriety in st.

paul. this row of townhomes is really important because f. scott fitzgerald and his parents live in a couple of to do what's, believe it or not. not only did they move from block to block, they literally moved from town to town home in the same row of townhomes. they are associated with the two great loves of his life, and he was going east to school when there was a part here and he fell in love with her, and his parents were living out one of the townhomes here where he kind of moped about because of her. eventually joined the army and went south and met zelda. and when she rejected him because he wasn't making enough money, he came back to this townhome at 599 summit. this is where magic struck. up in the third floor, space up

there, he rewrote the book that he written while he was in the army. it was called the romantic egotistic eventually was published by scribner's, this side of paradise, but he literally, you know, a compact in parts of chapters and worked really hard to rewrite the book. max perkins liked it. supposedly, after he learned that the book was going to be published, he ran out onto summit have an accent my book is going to be published, my book is going to be published. his parents were giving him a last chance, you know, future novel published or go out and get a job. and so he literally, ma one of his friends got him a job on the railroad. he didn't last very long as a manual laborer, but then this book was published and this world completely change. he got the girl of his dreams.

you know, zelda agreed to marry him. his book was published. he became, he became literally the 21st century self promoter. the difference between the victorian age and the jazz age, you know, fitzgerald example i'd that kind of exuberance -- exemplified that exuberance you see continuing today. his peers wouldn't have done the kind of things he did, and so they probably looked down on him a little bit. but he got a lot of publicity at the time to give it a pretty famous letter about being half black irish, you know, and then a half of his father from the old southern family. and he said he would grovel in front of kitchen maids and

insult of the rich. so i suspect through his whole life a little bit of an inferiority complex, especially when he went out east to school and he saw some people who made vast amounts of money, and that, of course, came out in tom buchanan in "the great gatsby." it's gerald had a really interesting relationship with people with money. they were his friends but i don't think he worshiped money. he was too frivolous with it. in order to be frivolous with money you had to have some so obviously, but he made a lot of money during his lifetime. he did make some money off his books. he made money off the motion picture. he made money while he was in hollywood. he made a pot load of money selling short stories. and so he worked really hard became it a lot of money but he didn't kind of like worship. i think he really felt the biblical, you know, it's the worship of money that's the root of all money -- people, n