failed to convince them, he was not allowed to employ violence or personal abuse." so in thomas moore's utopia, a policy of religious freedom was the effective solution for the problem of religious extremism, religious conflict and religious violence. well, that was utopia. what about the real world? to discuss that question, we are delighted that we have an all-star panel of experienced policymakers who between them in my rough calculation of something like 50 or so years of experience making policy not for utopia but for the united states government. and to lead us in the discussion of this crucial issue, we are thrilled that we have willie bowden, a policy all-star and

who we're proud to say is a fellow with our religious freedom project. so let me introduce will. he is assistant professor at the lbj school of public affairs and distinguished scholar at the strauss center for international security and law at the university of texas austin. he's also a non-resident fellow of the german marshall fund of the united states, previously he served as senior vice president of the lagotum institute and senior director for strategic planning on the national security council at the white house. will has also worked at the department of state as a member of the policy planning staff, and as a special adviser in the office of international religious freedom, and also has significant experience on capitol hill. so it's our great pleasure to have will, moderating the discussion right now. take away. >> thank you, till. for turning out on this

lunchtime on a friday for what we hope will be a stimulating and insightful question. as the moderator i'm humbled to be in the presence of these three. i won't go through their lengthy bios. suffice to say any could deliver the keynote address on their own. they've agreed to come together for a conversation is enriching. tim mentioned, there's a tremendous amount of experience represent and this panel. by my calculation, our members together have served in seven presidential administrations, everyone, literally, every one since the ford administration, and during that time, they presided over some tremendously significant geopolitical events, and also relevant to our purposes today, worked on some profound democratic transitions, whether the democratic transitions in asia, democratic transitions in latin america. certainly in eastern europe at the end of the cold war and now more recently the arab spring.

lest that thing they are, they're in their prime and have many of their best years still ahead of them. started in the ford administration when they were about 8 years old. anyway. so -- anyway -- so what we'll be doing is a structured conversation here. i'll put a number of questions to our panelists as whole as well as to individual ones and then after a suitable amount of time we're turn it over to the audience for questions from the audience as well. so -- first question is for steve hadley. steve, during his presidency, president bush spoke often of his belief that the peoples of the arab world both desired and deserved democracy. i want to know, would you view the events of the arab spring as a vindication or perhaps a cautionary tale for some of the vision that president bush laid out which you were very involved in as well? >> well, i think the place we

have to start is that the revolutions in the middle east are being made by the people of the middle east. this is their revolution. this is not made in america. this is not made by george bush. the one thing i think we can claim for president bush is that he, looking at 9/11, was willing to say, and articulate it clearly, publicly, that u.s. policy has been wrong for about 50 years. that it was premised on the notion that you could support tyrants and authoritarians in the middle east and get stability, and we thought we needed that stability over 50 years for oil and to keep out the soviets and all kinds of reasons, and he, one of the lessons he dprew from 9/11 that was a bad deal. supporting authoritarians instead of getting a stability really got terrorism, because it -- it created a culture of

despair and lack of hope that made the middle east a recruiting ground for extremism, and he came out and said that very clearly, and that the united states had to have a different policy. it had to have a policy that supported freedom, democracy, human dignity. the right to people to take control of their own future, and that that was not only the right of people, but also would over time lead to a real kind of stability. a stability based on democracy and freedom, and i think he was right. and i know i think -- he -- takes some, celebrates with the people of the middle east that freedom and democracy are fine finally coming to the middle east. people talked about arab spring and someone said, this isn't arab spring. his is an arab awakening and we're going to have spring, fall, winter, summer, ups,

downs. it's going to take a long time, but at least we can say that freedom and democracy are beginning to be on the march in the middle east, and that's a very good thing. >> thanks. for dennis, it appeared at times from the outside like the obama administration was caught by surprise by the initial advent of the arab spring, i don't mean that in an accusatory way. i think all of us were caught by surprise. can you reflect from your time there on the inside how this played out within the obama administration? what do you think the administration got right? what do you think they maybe got wrong in responding to these events in realtime? >> well, first, i think you're right about the fact that everybody was caught by surprise. the truth is that nobody predicted what would happen, and i, tell you a little story, because it tends to validate

this point. in the summer of 2010, the president signed out a decision memorandum that was to launch a whole of government review of our approach to the middle east on the question of reform. and it was based on the premise, basically, that, steve, you were describing that president bush articulated, that the kind of -- the reality of the region was creating maybe an illusion of stability, but not the fact of stability. and that you couldn't -- the formula that existed was not one that was going to be sustainable over time. and that in a sense, our relationship with some of our arab friends that were authoritarian regimes that were rooted in traditional strategic sets of interest were understandable at one level, but the cost of association with them was going to go up, because their ability to sustain themselves in power was going to become increasingly more problematic. now, i tell you this, not simply

have to create a background, but in the course of doing this review and taking a hard look at a lot of the questions associated with our relations, we not only had a lot of internal discussions. we brought in some people from some of the think tanks around town, around the country. but we also at one point brought in 30 activists from the region, and i met with them, and this was six weeks before mohammed azizy set himself on fire and effectively set the region on fire, and they were from everywhere in the region. when i say activists, almost every one of them had been arrested. they all had a huge state and belief and commitment in transforming the realities in the region and to changing what was the authoritarian situations they found themselves in. and at one point i asked the question, how soon do you think change could come? and 30 of them, and they were from morocco, tunisia, egypt,

yemen, bahrain. meaning they covered the whole breadth of the region. not one of them thought change could come soon. this is six weeks before mohammed azizy sets himself on fire. it's not a criticism of them. they looked at the situation like many of us did anded is as we look at this in the abstract we say this is not a sustainable reality. but when they looked at the reality of changing the government on the means of violence, no hesitancy to use it, a determination to keep themselves in power, a sense that they themselves were not organized in a way that would necessarily produce change, they drew the conclusion that you wouldn't see change happen very quickly. so people who had the greatest stake in change themselves, and by the way, it wasn't just that they represented geographically the breadth of the region. they also represent wlad i would

say demographically different age group, and they didn't see it coming. and we can go through all of the reasons why it eventually erupted. so the fact that they didn't see it coming is, it doesn't then become a huge surprise that we didn't see it coming when it came. when it came, the administration was confronted with a lot of very immediate dilemmas and there were debates within the inside, which wouldn't surprise you, between those that said, look, this is not only the right thing from a value standpoint, it also represents kind of the sweep of history and we should be on the right side of history. there were those who felt that particularly when you looked at egypt and saw the relationship with mubarak, their focus was okay. we see that you know, change is coming, but you can't simply sweep away 30 years of friendship and how we'd be seen by the rest of the region? what about our other friends?

how will they interpret this and it won't surprise thaw many of our friends from different parts of the region were at the highest levels we're calling them saying, for god's sakes if you're got to jettison mubarak what does that mean for jus in the real world you have to make choices between options, many of which are not all that desirable and sometimes you choose the ones that you think are least bad. in this particular case, a judgment was made as it related particularly to egypt to try to convince mubarak that his own desire to preserve a kind of egypt that he himself, you know, put a premium on which was stability, the only answer to that was to create a transition, and there was a transition where he would leave. and where his son would replace him, and so we -- and even, i have to say, even within the context of what i just described there was a debate about how hard to push that versus how to

manage this. and the basic decision that in the end was made was a decision that would have us, actually have the president speak to mubarak, in addition to the fact a decision was made to send an emissary, frank wisner, to try to manage a transition. and, again, when you look at the debates, you can imagine the debates between those who were saying, it's not only the strategic interests of some of our friends in the region, who are going to be highly unsettled if it suddenly looks like you're walking away from a friend of 30 years. but, also, there's the question of, all right, what's going to replace him? and what is the, what's the reality about trying to manage the transition and frankly to take the point that steve made earlier. we're not the ones who are driving this. we're not the ones creating this. we're not the people who -- you know, 2 million people in the

street. how much influence do we have, and what's the best way to try to exercise it? and you know, there was a conversation that the president had with mubarak that can only be sdroibed described as -- a dialogue of the deaf, because the president was saying to mubarak, you know, you -- you were -- you know, you were a child of egypt, you're a patriot. you're -- you know, you've -- you've suffered through a great deal for your country and now the greatest thing you can do for your country is to help to manage that transition, and mubarak said that, i have to say, this was words that echoed in my ears, because over the years when i had served a different administration, and i had dealt with mubarak, even though my main responsibility when dealing with mubarak was on the peace issue, there were a number of time ice would raise the issue of reform with him and

even i would raise the issue of what was in his media with him, and he would tell me, i was naive. that i didn't understand. and that i didn't understand his people. he did. and you know, if he wasn't there to preserve stability, that chaos would emerge, the muslim brotherhood take over, and he would paint these scary scenarios, and i would explain to him, it's hard to see how if things didn't change, that he wouldn't face that anyway, or wouldn't face it anyway. in this particular case, in this particular conversation, you know, the president was trying to persuade him and he came back to the president and said, you don't understand my people. you will see. this will all blow away in a few days. and the president literally said, was saying to him, you know what if you're wrong? you know? you could be wrong. and he said, mubarak said, no, no. you don't understand. the president said let's talk again in 24 hours. let's just see. and he said, no. let's do several days.

and, you know, there was just -- he was living in a world of complete denial. i will say this -- that after he made his initial speech, we got a lot of feedback from a lot of the people in the opposition that that night after he made the initial speech where he talked about leaving, talked about waiting until september. he made it clear the family wouldn't succeed him. we had a lot of feedback that indicated that actually the mood was, all right. let's not humiliate him. and you know, in effect, we have you know, we've succeeded, because he's actually going to leave and there's actually going to be a trn iansition and the l, and everything changed the next day when suddenly those identified with him descended on tahrir square, descended on the demonstrators and wielded violence, and at that everything switched and the game was over. but he still didn't understand it and was still living in

denial. so what i think is as a broad principle, i think the administration got right the fact that you had to manage transitions. but you also had to realize the limits of how much we would be able to manage the transitions. the effort to identify with the spirit of what was illustrated was, i think, right. one can debate the question of, should we have done more sooner? there's the question of, what it is exactly that we could have done more sooner. you know, there was an effort made where, that i think was right, to realize that we ourselves were unlikely to have the kind of credibility that others there, people on the street, basically, who looked to us as being a symbol of change. we were too associate ford too long with the mubarak regime to have that kind of credibility. i can also tell you that i had -- i spoke to a number of

egyptians who basically were saying, what does the united states know about transitions? you know? hungary knows, poland knows something about transitions. indonesia knows something about transitions, but when did you have your transition? and one of the things we did try to focus early on, was not just working with the eu but working with a number of those countries that had had transitions to see if we could develop what were a common set of themes that we all would be using, because that would have a greater likelihood of receptivity and a greater degree of credibility. could we have bun more to -- done more to try to help the forces that needed, i think, greater identity, and organization, we certainly could have tried and i think we did do some extent. you know, i think that the -- in retrospect, i'm not sure that -- you know, i think on the issue

of what we could have been doing and saying publicly, i think we were basically right. i think on the issue of how we could have tried to orchestrate with others more sooner, maybe we could have done more. on the issue of how we dealt with the, how we dealt with the staff, how the obama administration dealt with them, here again, they were a lot of high-level, and previous to them, the question was, maybe more could have been done with them sooner to impress upon them the need to adopt not just the words of civilian transition, bus much more credibility when it came to how they were responding to, you know, real freedom of speech. i mean, some of what they did, the people they nut prison early on just undercut their own credibility, and i think they were also creatures of habit, and it was hard for them to break with that.

the short answer is getting this exactly right is maybe easy to describe theoretically and lard to do practically. >> thanks. all right. a question for elliott. elliott, during a good part of the bush administration you had the unique dual roles of being the white house point man on democracy, human rights and religious freedom promotion and point man for middle east policy, and steve reflect a little on some of president bush's strategic vision and new calculations for the order in the region. as you look back now on your time with the bush administration, if you could engage if reflection and self-criticism, perhaps. what do you think the administration got right and what do you think the administration could have gotten better on these issues of democracy, reform shg, human ri, religious freedom in the broader middle east? >> self-criticism is very chinese. you get up -- this is a hard chair. >> the panel here from the -- >> yeah. >> 1962. >> and head out to the

countryside. dig ditches. >> i don't think so. >> they may look like undergrads out there, but they're peasants. >> i see. well, i think that after 9/11, president bush began an effort to understand what happened. why did it happen? why this hatred, and hatred of what? and why from saudi arabia? in particular. so many of the -- of the bombers. and i think he came to review, which you describe, that is that it was -- and it was a view that was beginning to be more broadly expressed in the region. the famous 2002 arab human development report from undp that there was a freedom deficit in the region. that is, that what the -- what the, bin laden, for example, was

most against the whole world was against the saudi regime, and that you could -- you could see this as a -- as a, a problem in the political, especially political organization of these regimes. and he -- we saw this term freedom deficit. and i think that analysis was correct. and it led the president to the view that these regimes were not actually stable. now, he said you know, change is the work of generations. he did not say, you mark my words. in a year this will all be gone. we thought it would take a lot longer. but i think the fundamental analysis that these were not stable regimes, because they relied exclusively on force was correct. i would make an exception leer to some extent for the monarchies which have some, the

legitimacy. varies degrees of legitimacy but not zero. in these what i would call fake republicans what did they have to say for themselves? they didn't have an arctic legitimacy. they were repressive, violent and weren't producing if you compare it to china. you couldn't say look over a generation the number of people moved out poverty. no arguments in favor of these regimes except inertia, which, after all, had worked. i remember in discussions of this you could talk about why in theory they were all going to fall, but we'd been hearing about that for a long time, and in the arab world, the only regime that had fallen was the one that we brought down in iraq. the others, decade after decade, after decade. now, i think the president began to act on this. you remember the ned speech, the

20niversary in 2003 i think. his second inaugural. and condi rice's speech in 2005. now, could we have done more? yes. and the pressures against -- dennis referred to some of them. they're very great, because we, you know -- the united states government is not an ngo. an ngo which has the luxury of having one interest, religious freedom, political freedom, anti-slavery, whatever it is, the united states government has a number of interests. dennis mentioned that, in a number of his conversations with president mubarak were in the context of seeking arab-israeli peace. we had the same, i'll call it a, problem. once in 2007 and '08, the administration was pushing hard again after annapolis for an

israeli-palestinian peace treaty. the view of president mubarak softened because he was in fact very useful and indeed the egyptians still are useful. now it's the staff in the israeli-palestinian context. so i would say in the long run i think this was a mistake. someone who saw some, was in cairo recently, and met with secularists, liberals, and muslim brotherhood officials said to me that all of them said we remember very fondly 2004, '05, '06 when you were really pushing mubarak, because he did respond by opening up the political space some. i think had we reviewed a policy over 35, 40 years of greater pressure on these regimes, more political space would have been created, which would have benefited us in the sense that people would not just remember

2004, '05, '06 but say you were always on our side through these regimes. and it would benefit them. what's happened now is, regimes where there was no politics. tunisia, libya, egypt. now are open for politics, and they have no practice. they haven't moved slowly and steadily into greater degrees of political activity. they go from zero to 100 miles an hour, and maybe if the united states had over five or six presidents, go back to ford, if you want to, general grant. maybe had we been pushing harder all along, maybe there would have been greater political space, and the shock of trying to develop it from -- from

nothing would be less, and i guess i have to make one more point, and that is, it would be especially useful for the people who the united states tends to view as the most, the closest to us, which is to say liberals in the general sense. people who want a kind of secular, liberal state, because they're the one whose have had, who have zero experience. whereas the brotherhood's and various countries seem to. when i argue with friends who bemoan the passing politically of president mubarak, one of the things i pouint out is we are where we are and they are where they are due to mubarak who did not cross the muslim brotherhood. he played footsies with them. want 80 seats in parliament. can only have 70.

well, can you have 90. he crushed the center. and that's one of the reasons, admittedly not the reason, but one of the reasons that the center is quite weak and got, what, 20% in the recent election. >> thank you. well, we've heard each of our panelists reflect in some ways on his own experiences and assessment of his time in office. one thing i've been struck by is the existential sympathy policymakers often have for each other. even if there may be significant policy differences, usually for the man or woman who sat there in the office, had to make tough decisions that all three have referred to, the existential, yeah, it's really hard and one thing to sound popoff end page blaut you think should be done but for those who actually have fwln it's another thing altogether. for those who held the position sometimes critiques can be more pointed because you feel you have a sense of what actually can and can't be done. with that preface i'd like to give our panelist as chance to

assess each other's administrations. not personal rating, but stephen, if we could start with you what would be your assessment of the obama administration thus far on democracy, religious freedom, and arab spring. dennis, you'll get your chance as well. >> again, a couple questions that will's going to ask and i see this one and i laugh out loud. you know? sorry, will. we're not going to do that. you know, look, these are very difficult issues, and i want to give you one more vignette that is relevant to what elliott talked about, and it's not been written a whole lot about it. in 2005, and i -- you know, there are experts here who can correct the dates. egypt goes through elections and the first is the presidential election and the second is parliamentary in 2005-'06 and it's two stage. so i as national security

adviser invite omar suleiman, president mubarak's right-hand man and kand condi and i have dinner at condi's favorite restaurant. no, john bolt. interestingly enough. a u.n. convention, i think. >> oh, really? >> yeah. for a lot of reasons. and we said to general suleiman, this is your chance. this is mubarak's chance. let ayman out of jail. let him run and run an open, free and fair election. mubarak is going to win. he's going to win with 69% of the vote. who cares that it's not 73% or 85%. but have a free and fair election, and have him campaign. and have him describe to the egyptian people what he's going to do, and we sat there for about 2.5 hours, and he said, well what about the security service? we said there's going to be