the region, because of its aggressive posture towards its neighbors, and we could go on. the only place where iran's got a good thing going is in lebanon and in syria. it's got a good thing going in lebanon because hezbollah dominates the government and a good thing going in syria because syria is a client state of iran's. and bashar al assad does iran's bidding in every single way. they most importantly are the main conduit for iran's exercise of power including to supply weapons and arms, weapons and cash to hezbollah, to hamas, to palestinian islamic jihad and to other groups whose initials i can't remember. so if assad falls, that will be bad for iran. iran will be entirely isolated in the region. that seems to me to be a unique confluence of our moral interests and our national

interests to isolate iran. how do we do it? well, those are the kind of things that get discussed ad nauseum in washington. i'll give you three short bullet points not involving boots on the ground in much the same way we helped nato in libya, which by the way did not involve a confruns have national and moral interests but just a moral interest that at the time seemed more attractive to the president than apparently the moral interest of syria at this moment. we can help organize the syrian opposition. we can stop talking about the syrian opposition as if they were crap. we can bring them together. we can help them create constitution, we can help them form a transitional government, we can form safe havens, we can protect safe havens, we can protect safety core douridors f

people seeking to escape bombardment. those things aren't terribly difficult. do we run risks? yes. on the other hand, these are all imminently doable things for the united states, and if they weren't, by the way, you should be very worried because if we can't take on the syrian military, i don't know what enemy we can take on. so that's one important piece. here's a second important piece. what are our ideals for iran? well, they're the same as for everybody else. that the iranian people should live under a government that represents them, that doesn't owe press them, that doesn't kill people, doesn't murder women in the streets. i think we could go on. doesn't sponsor terrorism, doesn't seek nuclear weapons, doesn't share their work with syria as iran did or with north korea as it does to this today. if anybody saw the photos of north koreans in iran recently. so we want a better government in iran. how do we begin to get there?

we begin to get there first by action in syria, second, by having a clear vision of what it is we seek to achieve there. we haven't had a clear vision of what we seek to achieve in iran since the revolution in 1979. we could have that clear vision. does that mean that we can achieve it? no. does that mean that we can cause the green movement or the expatriate iranians or anybody else to be more serious about getting rid of their government than they are? perhaps a little bit more. one thing that we could do is we could stop talking about this as if the main challenge is to deter the israelis from attacking iran. that meeting that we had in istanbul with the p-5, the permanent five members of the security council plus one, the germans, was basically a meeting dedicated to the notion that we must stop the israelis from attacking iran this year at all costs. why this year? i don't know what you'll be doing in november, but i think that the white house is well aware what they're going to be doing in november. that's why this year is so important.

that's why november is so important. so that's really an important goal for us. and as we move to the next meeting in baghdad, the most important goal should be that we don't compromise with the iranians in advance. if you've seen the "washington post" this morning, you've seen that we already offered a compromise despite the fact that the i rain -- iranians haven't offered anything to us. that we don't offer a compromise, that we don't pay the iranians for complying with their international obligations, and that we allow the iranians to recognize that rather than july 1st being the end of the terrible sanctions that will be imposed on them, july 1st will be the beginning of the terrible sanctions that are going to be imposed on them. and if they think things hurt now, they're going to hurt a lot worse later. in addition, we could allow them to think that the united states might actually have all options on the table as opposed to consistently announcing that the united states doesn't really have all options on the table. why are those good things to do? because they're synonymous with our values. they're synonymous with our interests.

and that's a good framework in which i believe we should do everything. thanks. [ applause ] >> thank you all of you. those were very succinct remarks. you left out east from your calculations but otherwise got everything else. i wanted to -- beg your pardon? i wanted to start with a question -- i'll just ask one question. i'm going to ask you to relate what you've been talking about today particularly as it relates to iran and what david was describing as a convergence, but still having gaps within it between the united states and israel and iran. how would you tie in what's been happening over the last few days in terms of being very

bluntly critical of the prime minister and ehud barack in terms of their rhetoric on iran? what does what's going on in israel and yesterday in new york, in terms of -- how does that tie into the gaps between israel and the united states on iran? david? >> i would say we need a little historical perspective on this. if you go back to 1981, and there's a lot of differences between '81 and iran today, but if you look at israeli decision making in '81, there's much more similarity than you would think. the head of the massad was the head of the military intelligence, against the attack. you had leaders of the military defense establishment in israel that thought this was a mistake. and there was no defense

minister. he had resigned over differences over the autonomy talks. what i take from that story and again, not every -- analogies are never perfect, is that do not underestimate political leadership. at the end, it's a political decision. and bagen basically imposed his stature on the government and brought them around despite the head of the mossad and despite the head of military intelligence. there's a touching story in it this that the junior coalition partner said i'm against this, i think this is a big mistake and israel is going to -- it's going to hurt u.s./israel relations, it's going to hurt israel's position in the region, i'm against the strike. and bagen had the votes in the government on october 28th, a full -- but the strike ended up only being nine months later. but one of the key reasons was that he said i want you to be

happy with this decision. he also needed him as a junior coalition partner. and he said we're not doing anything until he is satisfied. and he had the military intel people flood him with intelligence information. in the end, he comes around and bagen does the strike. so for me the story is the importance of leadership at the top. and the ability of the leaders through galvanizing the political forces to basically overcome the opposition of his defense establishment. so i think here it's a little more pronounced because all this is spilled out into the public view. the former head of the shinbet, former head of the chief of staff, you've got to believe from my understanding that they reflect the current security establishment too.

ultimately if you have a determined prime minister and determined defense minister as you had, i would not underestimate this duo to overcome the objections within. but you point to something that's real. but if history is a guide, ultimately it's the politicianing that decide. >> go ahead. >> i have a different view. israel a tiny, tiny country 250 deliverable nuclear weapons notwithstanding with a dark past living on the edge. preemgs has been -- in this situation israel has the mentality of a super power. preemption has worked as a demonstrated success in '67, '81, '07. but that's where the similarities stop. the situation the israelis confront right now, nothing like those situations, seems to me. even '67. in large part because from the standpoint of the international community, even the united

states, this is a war of necessity right now for only one country. only one country believes right now this is a war of necessity. iran does not have enough material to create a bomb. it hasn't mastered the component parts of actually producing the weapon. it hasn't tested a weapon. it does not have a nuclear weapon. this is a war of discretion even from the perspective of israel's closest ally. under these circumstances, i don't think the issue is barak and netanyahu overcoming the concerns of the defense. it's barak and netanyahu overcoming their own fundamental insecurities and uncertainties about the risks involved in this operation and the prospects of what return justify those risks. right now an israeli attack is like mowing the grass. the grass will grow back and it will grow back with an intensity

and legitimacy and ferocity which will justify every single argument made as to why they need nuclear weapons. and under those circumstances, if you could even justify those risks, if in fact you could, a, justify the risks of failure, that is to say not succeeding, and the risks of reaping the whirlwind, including higher gas prices, royal financial markets, more attacks on americans in afghanistan the. so as far as i'm concerned, this is less -- they can say what they want. david is absolutely right, this is a political decision. but in my judgment, neither ehud barak nor benjamin netanyahu want to do this. what they want to do is create a strategy which minimizes our options and maximizes the prospects that we will do this.

i think they have been brilliant, the israelis have been absolutely brilliant in orchestrating this campaign. in fact even with the objections, if i believed in conspiracy theories, i would argue this is all part of a carefully orchestrated plan to force the american president to do exactly what he's doing, which is shifting the loek us of action from containment to prevention. our president is now on the hook for preventing iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. not even george w. bush on whose watch the iranians laid the basis for crossing the nuclear threshold was prepared to do that. so i think the israeli strategy frankly is working. if the israelis had a strike today, i think they would be hard pressed to justify it. zone of immunity or no zone of immunity, they would be hard

pressed to justify it. so let it play out for the next several months. [ applause ] >> anyone else want to applaud? i always think it's unseemly -- [ applause ] i always think it's unseemly when countries play out their domestic politics on foreign soil. which is exactly what the israelis are doing. we've dint done it too, plenty of times. and we shouldn't look at this as a great philosophical debate. this is a great debate about who is in power in israel. and who did what to whom. i think your description is absolutely spot on and i'm very glad that you did it. i think the history is less well written. but of course this is also what

happened in '07 when they said don't go there, you rotten leader, was in power and was told by the president of the united states don't do this. don't attack. and he chose to go forward despite objections from his military leaders, his military intelligence, and many more about the costs, the potential risks, look what's going to happen, the syrians, the heartland of terrorism. yes, the truth is that if you sit down and you calculate the risks, there are always myriad reasons not to do something. and i agree, there are many, many reasons not to attack iran. the real question is whether the reasons to outweigh the reasons not to. that's a very, very difficult calculus. only the iranians know what they want to do and maybe they don't know what they want to do. i do want to, though, make a little bit of an objection to this formula of wars of discretion, wars of choice, and wars of necessity.

all wars are wars of choice. the notion that somehow if you're attacked you need to retaliate doesn't seem to me to be correct, nor does it seem that somehow the legitimacy of a conflict should only derive from an attack on your soil. if a leader is not responsible for protecting his own people from an attack rather than after an attack, i don't know what a leader is good for. but that's just me. [ applause ] >> i'd like you to put any further rebuttals you have into answers from the audience because they have been anxiously awaiting, so i'd like to hear questions now. usually we have people lined up by the microphones. is that how we're doing it? go ahead. >> steve daniels, florida region. how do you think the administration is analyzing the analogies and differences

between the libya situation and the syria situation? how are they walking through the analysis? >> dani, do you want to start? >> sure. anytime you're asked to answer a question about how an administration is thinking, you're guessing. talking to people inside the administration, the sense that i have is that the president wasn't that enthusiastic about libya either. it was the beginning of the arab spring, that he felt he was cornered in to it by french president sarkozy, that he was pushed into it by the weight of international clamor. and that it was a mistake. we shouldn't have done it. yes, the outcome was okay, although that remains to be seen in libya. and that he's not going to get pushed into another one. this is what i understand from friends inside the administration. otherwise honestly i can't see a coherent argument against it. i supported the overthrow of

gadhafi absolutely. i thought as you could hear from my opening remarks, i thought it was the right thing to do. but i also think that it's important to manage a mistake that somehow none of us have learned from the mistakes of the previous administration. i also think it's important to actually try and manage what happens afterwards. it's not just okay to say, you know, the evil man is gone, long live whoever else comes, see you later. and that's part of the challenge is that the longer you let those kind of things go, the more likely it is you're confronted with something distasteful to you. i'm sorry, there was one other thing i wanted to say. and aaron, you said that only the israelis are the ones who want to bomb iran. even wikileaks will reveal that in fact former lebanese prime minister, the saudi king, iraqis

and others have been on us to bomb iran. they may want us to do, not the israelis to do it, but at the end of the day, i don't think they would be that picky. >> aaron, why don't you talk a little further about what you were saying about the unfair image of the obama administration as leading from behind in terms of the gentleman's question. >> you know, i think you have an administration -- you had an american president who inherited a very difficult foreign policy situation. the first shooting war -- actually he had two since lyndon johnson. a guy who -- and by the way, afghanistan is now obama's war, it's not george w. bush's war. the president made a decision to double down. but he was presented with several different options all involved in addition, not subtraction, with respect to the deployment of american forces. i think the president had a very -- like his view of domestic policy, like his view of himself, that he was a

potentially great president and he had an opportunity. i argue in my book that greatness in the presidency is driven by three things, crisis of a kind that is so profound that it tamz the political system, character, the issue that a president dominates the times through his -- not only his personality and capacity, to know what to do. those three cs determine greatness. obama thought he had them all. obama was wrong. the american political system is not right for transformation. his crisis was not as profound as the three great presidents who dominate american history and we misjudged his capacity. the fact that he ran a brilliant campaign which will be studied for decades is not an rx to somehow validate the principle that he knew how to govern. and in foreign policy, it seems to me initially he pursued the same transformative agenda. he was going to bend the arc of

history, largely through rhetoric, by the way. and the more he talked, the wider the gap between his words and deeds. we saw that with the empty threat with respect to -- and the wrong misplaced threat to challenge the israelis on the whole settlement enterprise, which is not the issue he should be fighting with the israelis about. there are other issues to fight with the israelis about at the right time and at the right place and with a strategy, but not settlements. so i think he's learned. if you compare the current speech and the oslo acceptance speech, the nobel peace prize that he didn't want and clearly didn't deserve, the fact is there's been a change. he has the worst economic dislocation since the great depression. he's dealing with debt, dysfunctional politics, deficit, cane infrastructure, the four or five deadly ds. as a consequence, his foreign policy agenda in my judgment,

dani disagrees, but i would argue this is not a question of left or right, conservative or liberal, democratic or republican, it's a question of dumb or smart. and which side of the line do you want american foreign policy to be on. we are coming off of two of the longest wars in american history. they cast their own shadows. we may have overreacted to them, but we're right to overreact. we're right to now look at when you decide to put american men and women, american resources, and american credibility in harm's way. when do you do that, under what circumstances? 20th century has been kind to only one american president with respect to an international conflict. only one. and you know why it was kind? it was kind because the justification for a war of necessity or choice was so clear, the objectives and the

victory were decisive and final, and it was the only war of the 20th century where america's internal house was strengthened as a consequence and its influence abroad was strengthened. i'm not holding up this war, we don't have the luxury in the 21st century and it's a good thing, too. my only point is we need to be -- and i'll say -- if i haven't used the words, i'll use them now. we need to be cruel and unforgiving when we decide when and under what circumstances to deploy american military power. libya is not syria. and a combination of neocons and liberal interventionists are convinced that it -- that's right, it's not libya. it's more important than lib yachlt it's more important

because syria is more important. it's more important because syria is centrally located. it's more important because if we can bring down the assad, we can somehow bring down the iranians. i understand that. eight months to bring down gadhafi. the president decides it's vital american interest, let him do it with a strategy, coalition and decisiveness that will accomplish it but do not give me a strategy based on an illusion that if we arm the syrian opposition, if we create a safe zone, which will somehow -- you'll have to suppress syrian air defenses, you'll have to protect the safe zone and enlist the turks as a full and willing partner, you're going to need some form of international legitimacy to sustain this

campaign, don't give me a half-baked, ill-advised strategy based on our ideals and illusions. do not do that again, because i've seen a much worse variation of this movie under the previous administration, where our illusions and our ideals drove us to at least one discretionary war that, frankly, i'm sorry, and i don't want to trivialize the americans who died and who were grievously wounded in that. never would i do that. but you tell me what the results have been to justify what it is we've paid. just explain it to me. and then maybe i'll be more open to deploying american power in these situations now. [ applause ] >> you started this. you dropped the nickel in there. >> i did, i did.

>> it's the wrong subject. >> and i'm going into hiding. can we have a question and i'll give dani a chance. >> jerry axelrod, houston. first of all, thank you for a very illuminating and informative session. my question for any and all of the four is how do you convince the chinese and russians that come along and say that their interests are aligned with our self-interests? >> on what issue, sir? >> iran, syria, you name it. primarily iran. >> let's focus on iraq. >> let's remember when it comes to iran about american credibility, there have been three administrations, democrat and republican, that have said that iran will not get nuclear weapons. what is going to be the future of american credibility if iran

is not stopped? who is going to believe america anywhere in the middle east? we've already had a crisis over the arab spring which i don't want to get into, which has already led to a certain real sense of discord about american credibility, but who's going to believe america if we allow iran to go that distance. and obviously i'm not saying my panelists believe that at all, bif iran really is the number one issue in that regard, an if we're looking at the syrian issue through the prism of iran, to me if we're looking at the issue of syria, it seems to me we have to look at it really clearly through that prism, meaning could we really be decisive in that war in a very tort timetable? or do we get mired in something that will be a great distraction from the iranian issue?

if danielle is right that it it is going to help us vis-a-vis iran, then it seems to me it's got to be a quick strategy to keep our eyes on the ball. if aaron is right, that ultimately we're never going to commit enough resources, then it seems to me it will be a big distraction. so i would like a strategy if it really is being seen through the prism of iran to what extent is there a strategy to do something in a very relatively short period of time. that to me is critical. and clearly the russians have been blocking the security council despite us having meetings and telling them all sorts of things. we're not out to take your arms share of the market, we're not out to take your port access in syria. his response to hillary clinton when she's raised this with him has been, you know what, i believe you, hillary, i'm sure

you mean what you say. but the problem is at the end of the day, you don't decide. at the end of the day, the new regime in syria is going to identify us with the old regime. and we don't have a chance with them no matter what american assurances are. so i think all this effort to flip russia on this issue has not produced. not that we haven't tried. not that we haven't sent saudis and turks to russia, et cetera. on the issue of iran, we've tried to have the saudis talk to the chinese about making up oil production. i think we've had some successes in cutting the chinese oil asp from iran. i think that's good. but we also have to project a sense that american credibility is at stake. because three administrations, republican or democrat, if we say we're going to stop iran and we don't stop iran, we're toast in the middle east. aaron is right, street cred is everything.

there's no curtis lemays in this story. there is nobody out it fire bomb tehran whether an american or israeli. no one wants war. but at the end of the day, if we're serious people, anyone who believes iran with a nuclear weapon is going to make it easier for america's position in the middle east, they're totally wrong and it will be much harder than we've ever seen. israel is not looking to start a war. i agree with aaron that clearly israel's interests would be that the united states deals with this issue as a super power. israel's fear is you don't always get your first choice in life. that the issue goes away peacefully through diplomacy and sanctions. or you get your second choice at life but the united states handles it. they have to worry what if you have to deal with your third choice. that's where israel is at. not because it's wanting to go to war. israel is not alone.