february identified documents that indicated ms. learner had experienced computer failure no 2011 consistent with mr. cain. february 4th, february 2nd, you knew there was a big problem and mid february you knew it was unrecoverable. your testimony said in mid march of 2014 this review we learned that the data stored on her computer hard drive was determined to be unrecoverable. mr. cain says he knew in february, you knew in mid march. >> that's right. >> but you were kept abreast. >> i new in mid april and that's a misstatement on my part. i had to read my testimony before this committee and the now, three hearings i've had. >> so you're saying this is your written testimony in ways and means. it's not accurate? >> this was your opening statement and what you said to the ways and means committee. the irs in february, identified documents indicating ms. learner indicated computer failure in 2011 mid march review 2014 the day they stored on her computer hard drive was determined to be unrecoverable. >> that's correct. >> that was what the irs knew. >> here's my question.

>> yes. >> mr. cain says on february 4th he knew. you indicate in your testimony mid february we knew there were big problems and you indicate mid march we knew it was unrecoverable. you knew even to your key staff people, mr. cain and ms. duval knew in mid february. you testified on february 5th, february 26th to the house appropriations subcommittee and march 26th to this full committee and april 8th to the senate finance committee. in those hearings you were asked about ms. learner and e-mail and different things. you had four different opportunities in front of congress. so i'm wondering. in the back of your mind were your wondering when you answered these questions we're going to produce all the louis learner e-mails, we're going to comply -- in the back of your mind were you thinking maybe i should let these guys in on the little kind of important fact that you know what? we've already determined that her hard drive is unrecoverable. was that ever in the back of your mind when you're answering

questions from members of congress in four different committees over the time period when you've already learned significant facts, even though in your mind as part of your testimony you didn't fully know we lost them all for good, even though you sort of knew it was pretty darn likely you lost them all for good in the back of your mind, did you think, you know what, maybe i should fully disclose what the real status is of ms. learner's e-mails. >> no, as i testified in the past -- >> that didn't enter your mind at all? >> i didn't know there were e-mails lost. i personally didn't know and that's what i was testifying about until the middle of april. and i stayed before in several hearings. when i testified on march 26th, i did not know her e-mails were not recoverable. >> but this is yourself testimony right here i'm reading this. this is the testimony in the mid march 2014 timeframe, learned the data stored on her computer hard drive was determined to be unrecoverable. so that's certainly before the march 26th hearing and the april 8th hearing in front of the

senate financing committee. you had two opportunities where you already know it's unrecoverable. that means you're not going to get what's there. >> no. i'm sorry. as i say, i go to the point earlier. i take responsibility for the agency. when i said in that trying to report to people what we knew, that's what the irs knew. when you asked me specifically what did i know, i knew and didn't know until april. even though if you told me now that tom cain said he knew in february, i would hence forth say, we as the irs, knew in february. i, myself, personally did not know. >> so -- >> when i testified i'll tell you what i know. >> this goes right to the chairman's point. when your chief council knows in february, mid february, that it's unrecoverable, you can't come in front of congress and say -- i didn't know. that's why i didn't answer it. your chief council knows. you should have known. >> i should have known and you should have disclosed that and you didn't. >> i didn't know and therefore, couldn't diggs close and you're right. i have not i had hidden behind the fact that somehow this is

somebody else's responsibility. i am perfectly prepared to take full responsibility for exactly what we did with the production of the information to the con. >> you didn't tell us that in your testimony. you didn't tell us, you know what? and march 26th when you answered this you didn't tell us -- it would have been nice if we had known at that point kate duval and tom cain knew it was unrecoverable but somehow they didn't tell you because you'd have to disclose it when asked about it in congress. is that why they didn't tell you? >> i have no idea. at that point we were spending most of our time trying to produce the information for the determination process which we were able to do built middle of march. >> this is what no one can figure out. something this important, louis learner, the lady that sat in your chair and took the fifth, the central figure in this investigation, your lose your e-mails and your chief council knows in february that the lawyer in charge of document production knows in february, and they don't tell you and you can come in front of congress four times and not des close that and when you learn in april

you can wait until june 13th to tell us, that is what the american people are like, no wonder there are morale concerns and no wonder there's a distrust. that is unbelievability! >> can i add one point? -- >> we didn't know your chief council knew. >> you're going to talk to the chief council and she'll tell you what she knew or didn't know. >> i talked to tom cain and he told us she knew. >> he knew that the hard drive had a significant problem. we did not know what e-mails we had. we, in fact, discovered and found 24,000 additional e-mails from louis learner to other people and i moved forward. >> all i'm saying is this, when tom cain, the lawyer in charge of the document professional that you said does good work at the irs, when he says "unrecoverable" and they knew that in mid february and you come to congress three times after they knew that, both he and your chief council and you don't disclose that, you should known that and you should have told us and when you find out you wait two more months?

come on! come on, we're supposed to buy that? i yield back. >> thank the chairman. i would point out before i recognize my friend in pennsylvania, here we are in, saying with february/march, saying you didn't know how many learn, e-mails were out there and granted you were not the commissioner the whole time but we've been asking for these things for over a year. subpoena was sent in august and reissued under your watch. so the irs drags its feet on that and i realize a lot of that is not necessarily on your watch but don't tell me nine or ten months after we request this stuff and five or six months after the subpoenas is issued that somehow you don't know how many e-mails had. that should have been ascertainable. thank you for your i dundulgenc and i'll recognize mr. cart wright. >> speaking of things that would

be nice to know and things not disclosed, i asked the chairman of the full committee who were the witnesses supposed to be. next wednesday from the irs. he declined to tell me. he declined to tell me whether he even knew who the witnesses next week will be. but i didn't ask you. and this is your department. do you know, have you been informed by anybody on this committee who the witnesses sought for next week's hearing will be? >> until i came to this committee meeting i had no idea the committee was going to hold yet another hearing next week. >> would you agree with me that those are among the things that would be nice to know? >> it's always nice to know in advance when we're supposed to show up for a hearing. i don't know whether i'm expected to show up next wednesday. >> neither do i. let's delve into the irs forensic lab together, shall we? there were comments today about scratches on hard drives and

that's not my area of expertise and i dare say it's not yours either. but we did have john minsek, an list from the irs criminal investigation's unit meet with ways and means staff on monday. he told them he did not find anything suspicious about how a scratch got on ms. learner's hard drive. the analyst, mr. minsek, said he tried to recover ms. learner's documents on two occasions, first with a normal too many set and then using more advanced tools. he still couldn't recover any data. mr. commissioner, contemporaneous e-mails confirm the irs criminal investigation's unit could not recover her documents. am i correct in that? >> that's correct. >> and the ci analyst, mr. mensek told the ways and means committee staff he gave his colleague in the irs i.t. shop

the name of a third-party vendor he used on rare occasions but the staff had already consulted with outside so experts at hp. mr. koskin, do you know if irs officials consulted with i.t. experts a second time in 2011 to recover ms. learn e's e-mails? >> i do not know. >> okay. all right. finally, i want to touch on something that the gentlelady from wyoming mentioned. she just said that her constituents are going to take matter into their own hands. and i say this because about an hour ago, somebody walked into the cannon house office building with a handgun. according to chad, our friend from fox news locally. knowing that there are over

4,000 staffers and interns at risk here on the house side of the capital and recalling the horrible gabby gifford tragedy and the loss of staffer, gabriel zimmerman, i would ask that members refrain from making statements that could even possibly be misconstrued by the public as, invitation to do anything like that. it's obvious that representative lomas meant no such thing but i think it behooves us all to be very careful about the way we phrase things because there are people out there ready and able to misconstrue things. with that, mr. chairman, i yield back. >> gentleman yields back the chair now recognizes the gentleman from georgia, mr. collins. >> thank you, mr. chair, i appreciate it. here we go again. you know, i told the story last time and it was the story of my young son who to some through some meteor force became famous

on the stories that he used to tell and i recounted this timeline and i wish i could stand here today and sit here and say that what was not plausible then is now gotten a little more plausible and it actually, it seems to have not gotten any more plausible. we still continue and people ask why we're continuing to do this because it just looks like something new comes out all the time. one request says this. another request and it was asked earlier i had to leave and come back and they said, how much, you know, paperwork that you've put to the committee and how many hours are being worked on. to restore trust in a relationship whether it is between two peoples or whether it's between government and the people that they serve, it should really be of no limit to restore that trust especially with the irs. so, frankly, to tell me you a million documents and your hours you're spending, because of the, that have been raised and the

lack of trust on both soods. democrats and republicans in my district who are appalled at this and they want the real answers and want to continue and they don't want to keep reading every week in the paper something new has come up. that's an issue of trust that has to be maintained here and frankly, if plausibility story is just, again, getting to the level of unbelievable in a lot of ways. i have some questions because we talk about, louis learner e-mails. but in addition to those, the committee has also asked for other e-mails and i want to talk to you about those for just a second to see the status of those, is that okay? >> sure. >> okay. e-mail from responsive to the committee's request from august 2nd, 2013, to february 14, 2014. have you gathered all of those e-mails? >> we provided all the e-mails with regard to the determination process. and quarterback again, pursuant to the what i thought wrar agreed-upon search terms but

apparently not totally agreed, with the investigative committees that we would select 83 custodians who were the ones most likely to be involved and we would -- >> are those the same 83 that a quarter of them hard drives crashed? >> not clear it's a quarter but nobody knows what the answer is. >> we could have more than crashed? >> we could have more or we could have less. i don't know. until we find out -- >> does that the not just boggle the mind of a small number, one, about a quarter and we can argue about a quarter, not a quarter. i'm not a mathematician and neither are you but there may be others in that subset that deals with the areas we're asking for? >> yes. that's a perfect example as to why it would be very helpful had we been able to complete the investigation of what happened to the coustodians we could tel you. if reason i decided we would find out how many louis learner e-mails we had because if we didn't, people would be talking about that. >> i asked about that -- we get away from learner. i asked about holley.

>> no, but my point is we -- to the extent we can provide the full story, your point, it's a lot easier to know and you can disagree about it but it's a lot better to know what the total picture is. so when you get to custodians because the ig is now doing that, we don't know what the answer is so it may be ten, it may be 20 or 5 or 25. i don't know. and at this point we're note able to investigate that and we're hoping the ig when he completes his investigation, would include -- will conclude the custodians as well. >> that's another source of contention. that's the problem with drug this in drips and drabs. >> thank you for saying drips and drabs. that's what this investigation seems like it's been ever since we started and from your comments and others, every day we get drips and drabs and the people are tired of it. this congress is tired of it and this is the problem we have. i'm an attorney we have and i'll assume from your question that's a "no." after all you said you've not gathered all the e-mails or you

don't know? >> that's right. i didn't mean to be evasive. we provided all the e-mails that were determined to be relevant to the determination process and not given all her e-mails because our first priority in march was to find all of louis learner's e-mail zmoos so the question, william wail kins, same question, yes or no. >> same answer. you have all of his e-mails responsive to the investigation that started all of this. >> okay. but no to all? jonathan davis, same question? >> no. >> no. i mean, because ats the point, automatic is all. >> and as i said in march we're happy to work with you to figure out what your next priority is. thanks to the system, we can't produce it all at once and we produced a lot of stuff and it takes us a long time. part of the background on the june 13th public report was to try to explain why with our system it takes so long to produce this stuff. we shouldn't have to spend $18 million. we should have a better system.

no doubt about that. >> i don't disagree. but the question i have is that -- we need them all in the sense of the clarification issue here and we're just not got that. i have one quick -- i want to go back to something candidate a lot earlier i believe from my friend from south carolina. he said we confirmed. and you said, i don't know who told me. and i sat through -- this will be my third rub with you listening. and there's been a lot of meetings in which year told information but you don't remember who was in the meeting. or you don't know who told you that. and it hit me as i was sitting here. maybe there were multiple people in the room and you're not sure who said it first. or who told you first. so i'm going to ask it differently. i don't to know who told you first or last. i'm not being speak, i want to know who was in the proom when you remember told that we've confirmed all of that? and surely, you're a very bright individual you would know at least who was in the room? >> i have 12 meetings a day on

average. >> i do as well. >> i know most of the ones in the meeting especially when it's senior staff on something of that in sure. >> and those meetings average eight to ten people and i can't toll you about any meeting who was in the room but i can tell you who was likely in the room. the people who were working in production with you're staff. obviously my counselor and probably my chief of staff but i can't tell you and i don't recall because it wasn't significant at the time who else was in the room. we were reviewing the documents. >> it wasn't significant at the time? that was not a significant meet something. >> your question was whether we could confirm -- >> but you're dealing with a bigger issue. is that not significant. >> in this entire issue is significant but i'm running an agency that has to deal with filing seasons. we've god overseas bond hearings programs. we have voluntary tax return programs we've been putting out and simplifying for small charitiable organizations.

>> i get the irs has other issues but i also get the american people, even over years of making fun and doing everything else, unfortunately the irs has had in the past it's not now just the fact that he don't lie to the irs because they have to send their money in. they're not an issue both partyline irregardless, they're not sure about the irs because they don't trust the irs anymore. when that's an issue, everything should be focused on that and this is the question that makes it completely i'm plausible and we keep getting dribs and drabs and i appreciate what you said because that's the problem we have right now and that's -- i'll yield back. >> i can just make one point clear. that is, nobody has a greater interest of getting you all the information you need and getting closure on the than i do and the people at the irs. if we could conclude one of these six investigations, find out what the determination of facts are and the recommendations are, we're delighted to take those recommendations and accepted automatic the inspector general's recommendations and the last thing in the world that benefits us is to have this go

on any longer than necessary so whatever we can do and as fast as we can produce documents. the relevant of the 960,000 pages is ask isn't gee isn't that a big amount? it takes a long time to get it done. >> the one thing we'll agree upon is the end result. so that we can move on and the people can restore the trust in a government agency which they need to have trust. i yield back. >> i'll recognize the gentleman from california for five minutes. >> this is round four. >> no, no, when -- people yielded me teime and under our rules that doesn't count but i'll be brief. commissioner, we have a history and i want to make sure i get the history straight today because it does matter for this committee. were you aware that the irs was stonewalling us and giving us

information we didn't want and in an order we didn't like in the months of may, june and july of 2013? >> i was not aware of that. >> we have a number of letters basically showing our dissatisfaction including what we now know to be misleading information that would imply that progresses were being targeted. the false narrative that continues to be used at times. in may 22nd, 2013, louis learner took the fifth. shortly after that, she became a person of extreme interest for this committee because, in fact, she had made statements outside of her assertion of the fifth that she had broke no rules or regulations. she additionally authenticated earlier temperature and statements, again, after she took the fifth she went back on the record. so under oath you made a number of sames as we began

investigating we became very aware that louis learner was an active participants in washington of targeting conservatives in addition, in evaluating her history, we became very aware that she did not like conservatives and she had that sort of predisposition, plus her public speeches made it very clear on behalf of the president, quote, they want us to fix this and certainly, the president had been the outgoing spokesperson against citizens united, that we had every reason to focus our investigation as her, on her, as the hub in a hub system, of deliberately targeting conservatives for their values. therefore, i issued the ranking member were here he'd call it unilateral but pursuant to the committee rules i issued a subpoena and made it very clear our first priority was to have all of louis learner's e-mails. that was the priority. were you aware of that? >> i'm aware of the subpoena, yes. >> you were aware that was our

goal? >> that's -- you have eight items on the subpoena and that's at the top of the list. >> very good. therefore, when we interviewed thomas cain, and we asked him -- so it fair to say this subpoena had no -- and this is the subpoena of august 2nd -- this subpoena had no impact on the process that you were following or the documents that you were reviewing? that was our question and his answer -- it didn't impact our production process. that's correct. question, did it have any impact on which documents were chosen to review? answer, no. additionally throughout that transcribed interview what we discovered was that you all met, had a discussion if you will, and decided you were not going to prioritize any aspect of the delivery of louis learner's documents even show she took the fifth before this committee and even though she clearly had public statements and she had been a person who had already unlawfully leaked but planting a

question, the outcome of an irs investigation. all of that is undeniable. why in the world should the american people believe that you're cooperating with us when i issue a subpoena, our committee makes it clear in multiple letters these are our priorities and now we have sworn testimony that or testimony under penalty of perjury, that didn't make any changes? you basically continued business as usual which was delivering us, based on you call it mutually agreed. they were your criteria primarily as to search terms and never disclosed to us that those search terms were searching but a small portion of what should have been the entire database. do you have an answer for that? >> i wasn't there. my understanding is that there are five other investigations that were are now going on and were going on then. that there were a wide range of requests for documents from the senate finance committee ways and means, permanent --

>> and did any of them issue binding subpoenaed. >>? i don't think so and my understanding and i wasn't there -- >> after february of 2014, did anything change then? >> at that point we were as i testified before, we began to pull the rest of louis learner's e-mails. we started with the analysis of e-mai e-mails already produced and that's where it was discovered there were fewer e-mails in the 2011 period. we completed one of the priorities at the time, competing priorities was to complete the production of the determination documents that everybody was interested in. it was kind of a -- i gather, a process by which all of the conflicting questions, to try to respond to documents that met as many of the requests as possible. and most of the requests for certainly for finance and at the time, ways and means were for documents around, the determination process. that was completed and since that time the full-court press

has been to produce all of louis learner's e-mails. whether in her account or any other account. >> thank you. i earlier i asked you for off discovery process of who was looking for when on a timeline and your assistant took it in very copious note there is. i want to add one clarification to that process. obviously we're interested in what you did during subpoenas but we're getting that. you have delivered some, i guess we're looking at an exorbitant number of documents that you constantly and many people constantly cite. what we don't understand that i think the committee has an absolute obligation to understand, is in this process of what you looked and where you looked, understanding the sources that these -- that this has come from. we're a committee of oversight and reform. we're a committee that has an obligation to see that you spend the american people's money properly. it appears from this side of the

day, aas though the process is very fragmented. in fact, you're looking sort of under cookie jars, to use an express of my youth, ta that you're providing large amounts of data in certain periods that, based on a six-month backup and a very small server capacity, wouldn't exist. so that means that they froebl came from other places. and we need to understand all the places that they came from, where you went. you said in many casings, hugely redundant e-mails. the same e-mails could come from multiple places. understanding that so that we can figure out how to prevent it in the future is important. because this is not the last time that a federal judge and an ig or congressional committee is going to want to know details i think we can all agree to that as corporate america receives countless subpoenas for document production, so much so that they've developed software

explicitly to do these kinds of searches and retention policies for that reason. can we have your agreement that we'll receive some accounting of how that happens? >> and we'd be glad to talk further with your staff to make sure we give you exactly what you need. but your exactly right. we are looked in the lodge kwal places and i understand we looked under every cookie jar. we were dedicated to making sure that we found every existing louis learner e-mail on her account or anybody else's so we would be able to say these are all the louis learner e-mails we have. and that's led to 67,000. >> i'll make a rather unusual request in this case. we're more than happy to have a small group briefing meeting bipartisan meeting with the individuals who have been involved in this so that separate from the investigation which is important and ongoing, the question of efficiency and the cost effect of fragmented data, the cost effect of

having -- held it up several other times -- individual drives like this that people have, notebooks that have been taken offline. all the other things i suspect are one of the reasons that has become so expensive and difficult. that meeting is not exactly on course with this investigation. but it is separately a question from a standpoint of the management of the 82 billion worth of funds that government spends to see if, in fact, poll ski changes with o and b and others should be instituted and funding allocated so that this kind of fragmentation doesn't happen in the future. as one person that worked in vat america to another, that's something that your briefing can be informal, off the record and it doesn't have to be definitive. but our committee has to have an understanding so we can be part of policy formation because what i know about how corporate america does it and what i'm beginning to glean you have to

do, are very different. >> they are very different as i said. i asked that question sometime ago. that we should not have to spend $18 million in this amount of time, responding to documented e-mail requests. it's clear. but i think if wregd get two birds with one stone, we could say, have that briefing that would answer questions about how the did this discovery process go and then what are the problems of that going forward? it is my understanding that there's been a tremendous amount of effort made to make sure that we found every document responsive e to the committee. it's a lengthy process. the june 13th report starts out trying to explain to all of the investigators what the process is and why it is so difficult. and i really, totally going forward, it would help all of us if we had a more efficient system for preserving and finding documents and e-mails. >> thank you, commissioner. i yield back. >> gentleman yields back and that concludes our hearing

today. thank you, mr. commissioner and the hearing is adjourned. i think we have two separate related issues. one, a specific challenge at one portion of the border of the rio grande valley and we have to deal with that and that requires setting additional resources, both redirecting resources that we currently have and asking for new resources from congress so

we're dealing with that. second, we have to deal with, you know, we were talking about executive action around long before we had the specific challenge of the border so obviously what happened at the border is part of the backdrop for the decision for the thinking behind this decision and it will make i think it will probably increase the angry reaction from republicans. i know you already have senator cruz saying that we can't -- he'll not allow there to be a vote on the supplemental appropriation's bill unless we agree to deport all of the dreamers who have received deferred action under the president's executive action of 2012. that speaks to both the tremendous cross currents in the republican party on immigration reform where you have people like john mccain and lindsey graham and others in the republican house who have been

very opened about the immigration reform and then they -- the tendency that is been very damaging to the republican party politically. we talk about the lawsuit and then you have sarah palin out there talking about impeachment. i saw a poll today that had a huge portion of the republican party base saying they support the impeachment. a lot of people in this town laughed that off. i would not discount that possibility. i think speaker boehner, by going down the path of this lawsuit has opened the door to possibly considering impeachment at some point in the future. and i think that that the president act on immigration reform will certainly up the likelihood that they would contemplate impeachment at some point. >> and he also talked about sanctions on russia, immigrant

children crossing the southern border and the 2014 and 2016 elections. you can see all of discussion on our website, go to cspan.org. 40 years ago the watergate scandal led to the only resignation of an american president. american history tv revisits 1974 and the final weeks of the nixon administration. this weekend the house judiciary

committee as it considers impeachment of the president and the charge of abuse of power. >> what up here are questions about what the framers had in mind and questions about whether the activitiesed that been found out by the committee and by the senate watergate committee, were, indeed, impeachable and thirdly, can we prove that richard nixon knew about them and even authorized them? >> watergate, 40 years later. sunday night at 8:00 eastern on american history tv on c-span3. michelle floronoy is our guest in this week's q and a. >> if you're in government you're dealing with this and you're focused on the crisis of the day. part of my responsibilities as undersecretary of defense is representing the secretary of defense on the so-called deputy's committee which is sort of the senior level group that's

develop -- working through the issues and developing options for the the principals and the president. a lot of crisis management focus. when you're in a think tank you're real utility is not trying to second-guess the policymaker on the issues of the day, but help to do some work to raise their day and help them look over the horizon to see what are the issues that i'm going to confront a year from now? five years and ten years from now and how do i think more strategically about america's role in the world? >> former undersecretary of defense and cofounder of the center for national american security, michelle flournoy on the creation of cnas, it's commission and current defense policy issues. sunday night at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's q and a. former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs chaz free man talked about the deplorable state of current middle east policy and said most of the u.s. foreign policies are at a dead

end. he was joined by a panel of middle east experts as an event hosted by the middle east policy council, this is about two hours and 20 minutes. now, i'd like the say just some brief words about the topic before i introduce the speakers. we chose this topic when we heard president obama's speech at west point late in may this year. he did say that the united states would use force unilaterally if our core interests were directly sbr threatened. but he emphasized a counterterrorism strategy which would rely upon supporting, training and working with security partners. and announced a $5 billion program to support security partners in the middle east. having identified terrorism as the most direct threat to the

united states. not long after that, the islamic state of iraq and syria moved down the tigris river and the iraqi security forces retreated raising the question of how we -- how much we can depend upon the strategy like that in iraq or even in afghanistan, where we'll be leaving soon. and he said that syria would be a major focus of the strategy and we know that we've had a did you have consult time finding security partners there because it's a very fragmented opposition and hard to vet and find moderates. our panelist will be discussing that today. another point he emphasized in his speech was our commitmentupo holding order for support for international institutions and international law. and he spoke about our

multilateral sanctions against iran and our multilateral diplomacy with iran in that context. and we know that the p- plus one negotiate yapgss with iran were scheduled to conclude yesterday. and they didn't. so they were extended for four months because everyone feels that some progress was made, enough prok was made to go forward and continue trial. we'll discuss that today. what terms ought to be in the final agreement and what united states would have to consider doing if we don't get a solution we consider satisfactory. i was struck in the speech by the fact that when he talked about international order, international institutions and international law, he never mentioned israeli/palestinian issues. but his for carries peacemaking

was well known and unfortunately, did not succeed and he is said to be willing to try again before his term is over. but wanted the failure to really sink into the minds of the parties and hope that they would come back to him with better ideas and now, instead of that we have the third escalation of the conflict in the gaza strip in the past five years. we know how they go and we know how they end and they don't produce agreements. they produce casualties. so that's another situation that we should try to explore today. and i know the panelists are ready to do that. and i'll introduce the panelists very briefly, all at the same time and they'll speak in the order in which they're listed. and i ask each of them to come to the podium because we have tv cameras here and speak into the microphone which i hope i've

been doing. our first speaker is -- and by the way, each of these speakers has a bio that would take all day to read and you'll find them on the back of tin i have expectation so i'm only going to give you if highlights. our first speaker is kenneth pollock who is a senior center at the brookings institution. and before that, he was the director of the center and before that he was the director of research at the center and he also has been at the council of foreign relations and had a career as analyst at the cia and is a very well known author who has a recent book out called "unthinkable." which is about the nuclear program. our second speaker is paul pillar who is anonresident senior fellow. at the center for security studies at georgetown,

university. and a nonresident senior fellow at the center for 21st century security and intelligence at the brookings institutions. contributing editor to the national interests. i recommend that you look up these articles there. and the former ci aimpblt analyst. and third speaker is amin tarzi who is the director of meals eastern studies at the amarine corp university and a senior fellow at the program on the middle east at the foreign policy research institute. and finally, our fourth speaker is chaz freeman, chairman of projects international. former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. former united states ambassador to saudi arabia and, also, former president of the middle

east policy council. so with that, i conclude and turn the mic over to kenneth pollock. >> thank you for the introduction and thank you for inviting me up here today. when the obama administration first took office i had the occasion to talk on a number of different instances with different members of the administration about their middle east policy and of course, that interaction has gone on ever since and what i consistently heard from the president's team, the president's middle east team was a proposition that the united states had consistently you've invested in the middle east. that was their perspective on u.s. policy toward the reach

that the u.s. had needlessly squandered resources, time, energy it set are, on the region and that they were determined to fix that. and when i pressed them on the i pressed them to explain their rationale. what i heard back very consistently from them was a three-point argument. the first one was -- we mooems experts and many other people beyond that had greatly exaggerated the importance of the middle east and a particular had greatly exaggerated its capacity for things to go wrong there. as part of that, they argued that the they'll really didn't need the united states to the extent that we had done middle east analysts and other people seem to. and what's more, some would go beyond that to argue that, in fact, the united states was a m major source of problems in the region and not only could the united states afford to disengage but it would be better for the region if we had less to do anything. and they argued that middle east

wasn't that important and even if bad things happen it wouldn't affect core american interests and therefore, for all these reasons they felt that it was not just possible but in fact, necessary, for the united states to pay less attention and devote fewer resources to the middle east and, instead, pivot to other things. to asia and a particular to dealing with if american economy, which of course and i think the president was right. the president believed that was what the american people had elected him to deal with first and foremost. at the time, i questioned many of these assumptions. but i think that you can see very clearly the underlying foundation of how the obama administration, at least in its first four or five years approached the middle east in this basic philosophy. this basic sentiments about the region. unfortunately, of course, this policy has running to some very

sfi significant problems since then and the first set of assumptions that the middle east wouldn't go to help and the united states wasn't necessary to keep it from going to hell. and that the united states was, in fact, part of the problem rather than part of the solution. i think that that's been proven demonstratively false. the region has gone to hell. i say this as someone who wasn't fond of george w. bush ae' apprh to the middle east either. i never thought in 2014 i would be looking at a middle east that would somehow be worse than the middle east of the middle east of 2006 and that's what i see. iraq and syria are in civil war. libya is in civil war. yemen is on the brink of civil war, probably is in civil war by most academic explanations.

ar a arab spring is dead. egypt has returned to a dictatorship, at least temporarily. any number of problems are spreading across the region. deeply troubled not to mention the point tom made about having yet, another israeli/palestinian war in gaza. this is not a good situation. this is not a good region. and i don't think think that everything the obama administration argued was wrong. i think the united statess that certainly made its share of mistakes in the middle east. and not overlive on the george w. bush administration. all though they certainly have had more than their fair share of those mistakes. but certainly it's the case that the united states has made mistakes in the region that we've often contributed to the problems but nevertheless, the weight of evidence on the whole, is that the united states has helped problems in the region more than we've hurt them. especially if you accept the obvious examples, the obvious contrary example of the bush

administration's handling of iraq and certain of the issues and, in fact, the best proof that the obama administration, now recognizes this, is how they've been handling the middle east in the last year or so. we've seen a very significant change in the obama administration's approach to many different issues in the region. it started with the selection of senator kerry as the secretary of state and foreign minister. and his decision to pursue a new peace process between arabs and israelis and israelis and palestinians. and while that effort seems to have failed and failed badly, nevertheless, the fact that he was willing to do so when, for the previous three years the administration had wanted nothing to do with it, i think that was the first indication that the administration was beginning, just beginning to question some of those basic assumptions. was recognizing the region was not headed in a good direction and was even threatening the last and most important of their assumptions, which is the

problems in the region really were not problematic for the united states. but i think that we've seen since then, a number of other important course corrections. the president's recent decision to alot $500 million for unknown purposes and support of the syri syrian moderate opposition. that represents a dramatic departure from their prior position on syria and now the recent efforts since the fall of mosul on the part of secretary kerry and other obama administration officials, to become much more actively involved in iraq's politics to try as best they can to pull it back out of the civil war into which it is once again descended. and i'll say that i applaud t s those everydays and i think they are the right ones but i wish they had come quite a bit earlier. and the piece in foreign affairs, i talked about this and i talked about the fact that i had this strong sense that it was my perception that while the

united states had swung too far in one direction under george w bush and towards a wore on terrorism that encompassed and overwhelmed everything else going on in the region, that i felt that the obama administration unfortunately, had pushed the pendulum too far if other way towards disengaging and simply walking away from the region and believing that whatever happened there wouldn't be too bad. it wouldn't be able to hurt us. and again, i think the administration is recognizing that that early position has become unsustainable and is also tacking back in the other direction. but what i take away there that in particular is obviously, not just that we need to do better with some of the crises at hand. we do. i'm glad to talk about them and i'll say a number of those cases while i dislike how the obama administration handled them before we got here, and some of those cases i actually largely in agreement with how they've been dealing with them since we got there and iraq is a perfect example. i think the administration's

rae raerk's policies was an unmilt gated problem. with the tactical tweaks here and there they have been by and large following the right policy in iraq. but i think iraq forward, and what the obama administration failed to recognize in its first four to five years, which is that especially in the middle east, the old aphorism that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is the best motto for the united states to take. i think there were any number of occasions when the united states could have had an impact on iraq that could have allowed it to avoid the current impasse at a much, much lower cost with much fewer resources, with much less commitment of time, energy, effort, et cetera than what we may now have to sink into it if we are going to try to help them pull themselves out of civil war. i think that we missed important opportunities early on with syria. i think we missed some tremendous opportunities with

libya after the fall of gadhafi. i think that we missed some tremendous opportunities in egypt, especially after the fall of mubarak where i think that had we made a greater effort with the government then, we might have helped then prime minister morsi avoid some of his worst mistakes -- excuse me, president morsi, avoid some of his worst mistakes and perhaps even headed off the military coup that overthrew him and that replaced him with yet another egyptian dictatorship. i think that around the region we can find other instances of that. and, again, what it brings me back to is this essential focus that the middle east does need some help from the united states, but that the more that we are engaged on a regular basis in the regular processes of diplomacy, of trade, of public diplomacy, of military assistance in a whole variety of ways, the better we will be able to head off the great problems of the region to prevent the kind of crises that we are now

facing all around the region and the better able we will be, the more influence and leverage we will have when the inevitable middle east crisis does break out. just looking forward briefly, i want to comment on a few other things. again, i'm glad in the q & a to focus on whichever specific parts you folks are interested in, but i want to say a few words about a couple of issues that i think are lying out there that we need to think harder about again in this same context of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure. the first of these is the arab spring. the arab spring is not what any of us hoped it would be. it's not what most arabs hoped it would be. there's good reasons for that. there are a lot of different reasons for that, but what i think we need to recognize moving forward is that the desire for change on the part of a great many arabs has not gone away. it has been frightened in many cases by fear of what happened in syria and yemen and libya and elsewhere, but that basic

unhappiness that gave rise to these protests movement all across the middle east, they haven't gone away, and chances are they will reappear, they will resurface at some point in the not too distant future, and we need to be thinking about what form they will take and how best to head off the potentially very negative manifestations of that pressure, and in my mind it goes back to an idea that i and a number of other people were advocating for long before the arab spring which is the idea of reform rather than revolution. okay? and here i would actually suggest we take a look at ambassador freeman's former stomping grounds in saudi arabia. we don't see saudi arabia as a great beacon of reform. from my experience, the saudis do, and that's been a critical element in allowing the royal family and allowing the saudi system to negotiate the arab

spring without the same kind of unrest that we saw in other countries. i can remember speaking to saudis at the time and having them say, but, yes, while we have the same problems as egypt, we don't need to do what the egyptians did because we have abdullah, not mubarak, and abdullah is moving us in the right direction, and for me that's one thing to think about is even in the face of all of this chaos and all of this anarchy, the impetus for change is still there, and one useful role that we can play is in helping the remaining governments of the region, those that have not fallen into civil war, to think about how they can begin programs of reform that will at least begin to let off the pressure, that will defuse the anger that led to the movements in 2011, and that's a very important one. and the last point i wanted to make was on iran. i am still hopeful that we will get a deal with the iranians. if we do, that would be by far

the best outcome for us, for the iranians, for our allies in the region, but obviously that hope has got to be tempered by the realities that we faced certainly over the past six months, but arguably of the prior 35 years. it is going to be difficult, and i think that we need to start thinking now about what we might do if we don't get a deal with the iranians. we also, by the way, have to be thinking about what we do if we do get a deal with the iranians. that will be equally important, but i have been struck by how many people around town are already focused on that. i think that we also need to be thinking about the other side, and i think there's going to be a very important debate to be had because if we don't get that deal, many people are going to take that as a sign that the iranians are now bound and determined to acquire nuclear weapons. they may be right. we probably won't know. but there's going to be a critical question of how we handle the iranians and the rest of the world going forward. from my perspective, i think war is not a good option.

i think war could be the worst of all options. but if we don't start to explore the alternatives, if we don't start to put in place the policy mechanisms and the pathway that is we might follow when that time comes upon us, i fear that we will have no other good alternatives and we will find ourselves pushed into another middle eastern war that we don't need. just because i don't think that obama has gotten it right, that he pushed too far too disengagement means that going to war with iran is the right way to center that pendulum either. thank you all very much. [ applause ] >> thank you, ken. i should have said there are cards on your seat. if you think of questions, please write them down and my staff will collect them. it may be hard to take questions from the floor because we didn't get the standing mic that we asked for, so, please.

paul, thank you. >> thanks very much, tom, and good afternoon. the title of this event is obama's foreign policy vision and the future of the middle east. in my judgment the vision thing as the elder george bush referred to it is overrated. it tends to be a thing that people like us, pundits and critics such as those of us sitting in the front of the room, like to deal with as a way to encapsulate and get our conceptual hands around policy, but any themes that would satisfy us in that respect would almost by definition be too simple, i would say simplistic, to be the basis for sound and successful u.s. foreign policy. the challenges out there are simply too complex, and the u.s. interests at stake in facing those challenges are too

multifaceted to boil everything down to a single vision in a bumper sticker kind of way, and that's certainly at least true in the middle east as elsewhere. successful foreign policies, including u.s. foreign policy in the middle east i would suggest are necessarily more ad hoc, at least as much a matter of avoiding losses as scoring gains than the sort of vision that would score high in the estimation of most critics. foreign policy strategy does not tend to get high marks for not doing certain things as opposed to doing certain things in response to a positive vision. but i would suggest that not doing certain things or to put it differently not screwing up is at least as important in advancing and protecting u.s. interests in this region as doing things. ken suggested a motto, the thing about the ounce of prevention. let me throw out an alternative

motto, not to be conflicted with it but i think you should consider it as well, that's the hippocratic principle of first do no harm. if you look back over the last few decades of u.s. involvement in the middle east and the u.s. interests that have been affected by it and ask yourself what particular things where the u.s. had some control over it have had the biggest impact positively or negatively in terms of american lives, resources, distraction from other interests, legacy problems we're dealing with today, and i would have to put squarely at the top of the list and squarely on the negative side the launching of the iraq war in 2003. so just as that example would indicate, not doing certain things and not doing harm i think is an important part of judging anyone's foreign policy even though it doesn't get high marks from the vision people. mr. obama's west point speech did not get especially high

marks from most of the critics, and it probably did not deserve them in terms of the usual criterion for assessing these things as opposed to my criteria. the one stab that the president seemed to take at a theoretical framework in the speech was a pretty bad one in my view. he seemed to equate realism with isolationism, which was rather wrong. much of the rest of what he did say was consistent, however, with at least implicitly with what i would consider more of a realist view and that's sound. the president articulated several important principles i think we ought to bear very much in mind. he talked about distinguishing our core interests from other lesser interests and explicitly made the point that that distinction is important in weighing what measures and what means we should use to pursue those interests. he also made very clearly the

point that not every problem has a military solution, and i think this particular point is one on which we see the sharpest difference or the greatest daylight between mr. obama and his most vocal critics here in washington. i expect that mr. obama himself probably privately regrets as he looks at the current mess in libya the role that the u.s. played in the use of military force there. i might be wrong, but that's just a guess in terms of private thoughts. the president appropriately acknowledged the many trade-offs between different u.s. objectives even when dealing with a single middle eastern country, and he specifically used the example of egypt, which is as good an example as anyone. in which we have interests having to do with democratization and human rights but he also quite frankly said we have more strategic

type military interests. we can go on and on detailing those, passage through the suez canal and so on. he did not mention, i would also add, the egyptian role in the current tragedy that we're reading about over the last week. but the point is he's correct that there are conflicting objectives and it can't be all boiled down to one vision even with a single country like egypt. the president made a good case, i thought, for collective action. the need to rely on what other countries and not just the u.s. do in this region even when we're pursuing u.s. interests. and i think this is another major difference with some of his chief critics who seem to believe that if there is a problem out there, not only can it be solved, but the u.s. can and should be the one to solve it. the president did not explicitly address, but i think we might, i think we should, the basic criteria in determining cooperation or lack of cooperation with particular

states in the region. we americans have an unfortunate manichaean tendency to divide the world in allies and adversaries on the other, a very rigid division, and to take that as the sole guide for determining whom we're going to cooperate with and whom we're going to oppose. the label gets slapped on some as ally as if that were a substitute for careful thinking about what the government of that country is doing that may conflict with or may advance u.s. interests. and conversely, we look at those who are traditionally labeled as adversaries and we consider any influence that they might have as bad without taking the trouble to ask ourselves how will they use that influence and to what purpose which may or may not be consistent with or in conflict with our own interests.

there are a variety of conflicting and converging interests with different states across the region, including ones that are traditionally labeled allies and other that is are traditionally labeled adversaries. a flexible one that is not changed to any one set of fixed relationships but rather leaves our policymakers and diplomats to do business wherever it serves u.s. interest. mr. obama in that west point speech voiced some pretty conventional themes that didn't really distinguish himself clearly from his critics, and seem innocuous enough. although some of them may carry the hazard of trapping them intoing aing against some of his own principles or at least increasing the pressure on him to act in ways contrary to his own principle s he identified terrorism as the biggest threat to u.s. interests. we could debate that.

let's just have that sitting on the table for right now. the counterterrorist aid initiative he announced is a worthwhile recognition of the principle i mentioned earlier of how what other countries do can be at least as effective as what we do ourselves in advancing our own interests. and speaking from an old counterterrorist hand, on that particular issue, terrorism, the u.s. must rely at least as much on the actions of others who are closer to the front line of dealing with terrorist threats and groups as on any other issue. but the enshrinement of terrorism as the prime threat with the natural focus on the ogre of the day, in this case the group that's called itself isis, increases the pressure to act in a place like iraq along the lines who believe that every problem can be solved by the u.s. and every problem has a military solution, which, again, goes back against what the president was trying to articulate elsewhere in his address. we see some of the same things

regarding syria, too, even though there the ogre is on the same side of the overall civil war as those that we would be assisting. still on terrorism, mr. obama mentioned in his speech what i thought were a very sound set of criteria in determining when to pull the trigger on a drone strike. but it still comes down to those individual decisions, and there probably is, i would guess, with this administration at least as much as the last one, you can just count the number of strikes that we've had, a bias in pulling that trigger maybe more often than a careful consideration of the criteria the president voiced would dictate because of the pressure to do something about terrorism. a few closing thoughts. i think the best approach to u.s. policy in this region is somewhat akin to steering, to use another cliche, the ship of state carefully to avoid the

rocks and shoals where it might crash. and if we're thinking just about long-term vision, we may miss the rocks that are right in front of us, and, my goodness, there are plenty of them right in front of us in this region. now, that sounds a little bit like straight lining. it's not imaginative, how can we change things for the better and i'll grant that, and i would identify two particular things that would be most likely to more fundamentally change what we're looking at in the middle east and change it, in my view, for the better. one is very unlikely because the political courage here in washington will not be mustered. the other is much more likely. the first one is the courage to do something about the israeli/palestinian conflict, to get that story off the tragic course, the tragedy of which has been emphasized by the events of the last week more than anything i can say. that requires not so much vision

as it does at conscience and the political courage. the other thing that's happily much more likely is the one that ken finished his thoughts on and i agree with almost everything ken said about this, and that's completing the nuclear deal with iran, which besides being the best way to preclude any iranian nuclear weapon would also by opening the door to a more normal relationship with iran unshackle an important aspect of u.s. diplomacy in the middle east, enable us as i suggested earlier to do business with anyone labeled as an adversary or an ally where it serves our own interests. and the fact is the iranians are major players in a lot of places of high concern to us, even where we wish they weren't like syria. and there are other places where they are not only a major player, but their interests actually are quite parallel to ours in major respects, even

though in other respects they would still conflict. i'm thinking of iraq. i'm thinking of afghanistan to go a little bit farther east, as areas where neither we nor the islamic republic have an interest in endless conflict and instability which is on their borders and not on ours. and finally, that kind of world in which we did have a more normal relationship with iran or we're edging closer to it, i'm not suggesting any embassies are going to be opened up in the foreseeable future, but it would bring us closer to a system where we had more flexibility and leverage in dealing with anyone else in the region who is troublesome whether they're labeled as an ally or an adversary. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> dr. tarzi. >> thank you. thank you very much.

i want to just put one caveat. unlike my esteemed colleagues, i still work for the united states government, and i will be speaking here wearing my fbi hat and not my marine corps hat, so whatever i say is amin tarzi speaking and not the defense department or any branch thereof. while i agree on some of the main points, the invasion of iraq. before i was a government person i wrote about the greatest strategic mistakes of our country's history and i still stick to that, and the iran issue but i will dwell on that later. i do have -- maybe i'm an idealist. maybe i just go to middle east too often. i'll be there in three days again. i do understand the fact that we should look at ad hoc avoiding the rocks and sailing straight, but at the same time i think

unlike any area in the world, you pick any area in this world, that includes now even sub-saharan africa which at one point was not doing so well. there's no place that has the problems that middle east has. people are talking about even why. this has been going on for a long time. it's not new. the psyche of the arabs and the muslim problem, is it colonialism, you name it. is it arab/israeli affairs. this has been going on for so long. students of middle east studied it last century literally, but the question that i have is that unless we address those in some form or fashion, i think we go from crisis to crisis. it becomes more of a crisis management rather than trying to at least find a way as a reliable partner, not that the united states can fix everything. i don't believe in that. i am a former marine. i think everybody thinks that we can fix everything. i tell you we cannot fix everything.

but as we heard before, yes, we are a partner. yes, we have interests there for the foreseeable future despite fracking and all that that we need to be in that region, and the interests are interwoven with other countries in the region as well. so i think a little bit of consistency is important. when you talk to colleagues in the region, they are confused. the word i get, if we are putting a policy forward to confuse them as part of an implementation of a policy, we are doing a fantastic job. friend and foe are confused to the point they have no idea what to do anymore, and in my view where the leadership of our country is no longer -- and maybe that's not a bad thing, we are no longer a unilateral situation right after the cold war where the united states was the sole power by all means, and there are rising powers, and that kind of environment if you

don't have a reliable partner as still the most strongest power in the world, still as the most looked up to power, then you have a state where i think the middle east will be. we have to avoid rocks, if i may use that cliche, rather than have some smooth sailing at one point to have some predictability, and i think if you talk about the foreign policy of president obama, if i think -- again, you may say after the first two speakers that i am very ideological. one of the issues that i look at and say we have made not only inconsistencies but we actually have made the situation worse is let's say the promotion of democracy. this is not new in the united states, promotion of democracy came in, but when you look at the numbers, at the fiscal year 2009, the united states put more

money on democracy than the entire decade between 1991 to 2001. so we spent more money in one year than the entire ten years. but look at the outcome. look at the input and the outcome. if you put this in a mathematical format or an investment, you say this was an amazing loss. and the other aspect is do we -- are we looking for partners in the region beyond these temporary ad hoc friends or foes for that matter, iran is now, i agree, partially. are we looking at something that is a bit more stable. again, is it possible? yes. look at latin america a few years ago and look at what's happening. they're not all friendly. we have the bolivias of the world and venezuelas, but there's still a process that is a much better process to deal with than what we have in the middle east. i'm not saying democracy is the panacea of all of this, but the inconsistencies that we have had with democracy going back to the

cairo speech 2009, then the speech at 2010 with first west point speech, and what has happened afterwards post-arab uprisings, if you want to call it spring. i like spring a little better than what's going on there, but with the exception of tunisia, that is one exception, it's struggling but it's still an exception, things have gotten worse in every case if you look at it as a "new york times" a while ago an editorial called "egypt exhibit a" and failing to support a democratic movement. even we called the ouster of morsi, not that morsi was any great person, the restoration of democracy. if that goes on and if year looking at the basic idea of this new generation coming in whether it be in afghanistan in the east or all the way to morocco in the west, where are they going to look at because it becomes almost -- in the cold

war we always stated that, you know, we have supported regimes because of security or, you know, regimes are against communism and later on after 9/11 who were against terrorism and we have lost on democracy and supporting -- and gaining these allies for long term. i think we have to have a balance of expedient, ad hoc missing the dangers in front of us, but also have a vision and balance it. you always have to have a balance. i agree policy has to be a balanced policy. i think when you look at the past few years, that is the missing issue. when you sit down, as i said, and talk to either the military side or the civilian side or -- i'm not even talking about grass root, there is an utter -- a lot of regions there blame everything on the united states, including the weather condition. i have gotten used to that, but that's not what i'm talking about. there are fundamental issues they look at, and they look

where are you standing on this issue? you know, if we remove every single president after a year in office because they mismanaged it and called him a terrorist the next day, the world would be without any leaders. i'm not saying morsi was a good president but the events that went on there was very, very in the face of this democratic movement. now, i would use the remaining time if i could on two countries, iran and i go all the way to the eastern and touch a little bit on afghanistan as i was asked. i agree that an agreement with iran, and again i'm speaking on my own behalf, an agreement on iran is a wonderful thing. an agreement whereby iran stops using or stops trying to procure nuclear weapons. that is a great thing and it's applaudable. it is wonderful.

nobody is against that, at least i am not. the question i want to ask, and this is something that we forget, that iranians, why they were pursuing a nuclear potential, if anybody thinks they were not pursuing a weapons, i would argue against that. they were. at least they were trying to tell us that they were. that's the whole thing. if they weren't, they were going a great job of telling the outside world they were trying to get a weapons system. why they went through basically mortgaging their country and coming very close to having themselves be targeted either by us or by some other regional states, but yet in the same time they went through all of that. why? this is a question. to my view there's only one answer. the iranians fundamentally did and still do even after president obama's u.n. general assembly speech of last september where he said the united states was not interested in regime change but change of

behavior. the iranians by in large, that includes ayatollah and, in my view, includes also the smiling mr. rouhani believed the united states of america's number one objective is regime change, not behavior change. and they also believe -- this is where i become worried as somebody who once in my past life dealt with nonproliferation. they believe fundamentally that having or pursuing weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons specifically, will alter america's activities toward you. and here we have iran, a country that is one of four countries that the state department recognizes as state sponsors of terrorists, only four of them. the oldest before cuba, '84 i believe. human rights just did a state department human rights report about them, or what comes out of this building.

yet they sit down with the six top leaders of the world, four top democracies, two of them are not democracies, but you know china and russia excluded. why are they there? how did they get that seat at the table? because they are nice guys? no. because they cheated and they're being rewarded, and they may get to keep their regime, a regime that kills more people today than ahmadinejad did, and this is where we need to look at, yes, it's an expedient, it's a great thing to do. the question is why iran was going for nuclear and why are they delaying it? who is rouhani? mr. rouhani is a regime savior. this is not the first time he's come to the fore. just look at biography. where he has come in. i have them all here. we can discuss that in q & a if you want. rouhani is there for one specific issue. the regime was hurting from within. number one, there was a structural problem. the whole aspect of the rule of

the jurisprudence which is the basis of the iranian regime was crumbling because mainly his 2009 support of ahmadinejad where he became part of politics. secondly, the sanctions were working. there were a lot of things that made the sanctions work. here we have to praise the president's policies. the coalition building, the fact that ahmadinejad was so easy to go against calling the holocaust a fable, saying that we're going to destroy everybody. it was easy to not dislike him. rouhani is sending greetings to iran and jews around the world amidst twitter. the aspect this man -- i'm not saying iran is going to invade anybody. don't get me wrong on thoat. i don't think iran was going to invade anybody. i was just in israel. i told my israeli friends in

public. however, the aspect is not iran has come a good guy. this is what somebody said before. we have to be looking, let's say tomorrow, december, november this year, we have a solution, have an agreement, then what? does that include that iran will have delivery systems? the question will become, why? anybody who talks about missiles or any other platforms is id t idiotic and crazy. if a country's building weapons that only are usable for delivery of specific type of warhead, i.e. a nuclear warhead, why are they having it? intrusion -- we have to balance this. and the second thing is that some people said a iran with nuclear weapons will become a domino effect. i will even tell you if iran gets an amazing deal, that will push a lot of countries in the region. foreign nuclear potential, or at

least a tenth thereof because they think that alters the united states policy toward them, and they always keep onli. always says that. he's quoted that a few times. look, after gadhafi was killed. look at you fool. the westerners gave you something, you gave them everything, then they killed you like a dog. so this is the idea. the promotion of nuclear weapons as something that gets you a seat at the table with the big boys. i think it is dangerous and it's going to bite us you know where if we don't follow it. and another line on syria. i believe that the chemical weapons use and then the agreement which in itself is good. again, please don't get me wrong. has given bashar al assad the lifeline. in a way bashar al assad may have saved his regime by using chemical weapons. this is a dangerous precedent. if we don't take leadership on it -- not to bag anybody, i don't believe in iran being attacked at all.

please, all i have to say is that because of an expedient agreement that could be nice because of whatever, i'm not going to go there because i want to keep my job. because of that, we have to make sure we have an agreement that is solid and that does not portray us as somebody that gets whatever that comes in because it's expedient at that moment. afghanistan became a -- it's the longest war we've ever fought in our history. in the history of the united states, that's the longest war. 80-something countries tried to democratize this country. we can discuss its merits, good or bad, constitutional, good or bad. that's too long for this here. the question is right now, there was an election in april that was applauded. we all looked at least with one place, things are going a little l bit further in a good way. the elections were actually pretty open. fingers were cut and all that, but people acted cute. great. well, unfortunately, nobody

won -- nobody, doesn't matter who, nobody won the 50% plus 1 vote. so we went back to square one. the second time it was pretty much everybody agrees it was a very fraudulent elections. secretary kerry did a miracle to at least have them talk, but right now the problem, as we speak today, nobody has agreed on the mechanics of what, how you count these votes. so, yes there was an agreement as an expedience issue but the details were missing. i think for the last ten years or so what we have done is built these villages, these walls that look very good, but they have no foundation. and all i'm saying is if we are not careful, they look good for picture taking and send them back home, but if you aren't careful, these walls will fall and sometimes they fall not only on intended people but they fall on something bigger. thank you very much. >> thank you. [ applause ]

i think those were three very interesting and stimulating presentations. a while back, the united states set out to reconfigure the middle east. and the result is the region and our position in it are both in shambles. much of what has happened seems irreversible. in the short time allotted to me, i just want to talk about the region's dynamics and i'll conclude with a few thoughts about what might be done but probably won't be. to begin, if we're at all honest, we must admit the deplorable state of affairs in the middle east, in egypt, iraq, israel, jordan, lebanon, palestine, syria, the persian gulf and arabian peninsula and

peripherally libya, afghanistan, is a product not only of the dynamics of the region, but also of a lapse in our capacity to think and act strategically. we have answered the end of the bipolar cold war order with a mixture of denial, strategic incoherence and inconstancy. false american assumptions and unrealistic objectives have helped create the current mess in the middle east. it's not news to anybody that american politics is uncivil and dysfunctional. we have a foreign policy that has its head up its media bubble. prefers narratives to analysis. confuses and military posturing with diplomacy and imagines the best way to deal with hateful foreigners is to use airborne

robots to kill them, their friends, and their families. we have leaders who can't lead. and a legislature that can't legislate. in short, we have a government that can't make relevant decisions, fund their implementation and list allies to support them or see them through. until we get our act together at home, those looking for american leadership abroad will be disappointed. at west point, president obama accurately pointed out that our military has no pier. he then sensibly added that, quote, u.s. military actions cannot be the only or even primary component of our leadership in every instance. just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail. true enough. experience is justified hesitancy about the use of force. our hammer blows in the middle

east were intended to showcase our power. instead, they convincingly demonstrated its limitations. these interventions worsened, not improved the region's stability, politics and prospects. our unmatched military prowess has not enabled us to impose our will in west asia and north africa, eastern europe or elsewhere. the record of covert action in solving political problems in all of these regions has been no better. the question then is, what alternatives to the military hammer and related kinetic instruments of state craft does the u.s. presidency now have? normally, the answer would be the political screwdriver of diplomacy or other nonpercussive means of influence like subsidies and subventions. but there's a reason the department of state is the smallest and weakest executive department of our government.

the united states seldom resorts to diplomacy in resolving major differences with other states. gladiators trump diplomats any time. in terms of the spectacle they provide. even if they don't work, coercive measures like sanctions and bombing are much more immediately satisfying emotionally than the long slog of diplomacy. then aside from our reflexive militarism, we're broke. our military commanders have walking around money, our diplomats do not. and the amateurism inherent in the spoil system further reduces the effectiveness of our diplomacy. jet-propelled seat of the pants drop-bys with foreign leaders by secretaries of state have proven

to be no substitute for either strategy or the patient cultivation of influence with those leaders or within their capitals. it's hard to think of any american project in the middle east that is not now at or near a dead end. this includes our policies toward israel and palestine, democracy promotion, egypt, islamist terrorism, stability in the fertile crescent, iran and the gulf. let me quickly run through that list. in april our four-decade long effort to broker a secure and accepted place for a jewish state in the middle east sputtered to a disgraceful end. in the tragic comic final phase of the so-called peace process, instead of mediating, the united states negotiated with israel in about the terms of palestinian capitulation. not with the palestinians about self-determination. the u.s. effort to broker peace for israel is now not just dead

but so putrid, it isn't fit to show at a wake. israel didn't believe in it, so it killed it. may it rest in peace. from the outset, israel used the peace process as a distraction while it created facts on the ground in the form of illegal settlements. israeli expansionism and related policies have now made israel's peaceful co-existence with the palestinians and thus with israel's arab neighbors impossible. the united states created the moral hazard that enabled israel to put itself in this ultimately untenable position. 40 years of one-sided american diplomacy aimed at achieving regional and international acceptance for israel, thus perversely produced the very opposite. increasing international isolation and a program for the jewish state. we will now cover israel's back as the saying goes as the united nations as its ongoing

maltreatment and intermittent muggings of its captive arab population complete its international delegitimization and ostracism. we'll pay a heavy price for this, political price, globally in the middle east, and very likely an escalating terrorism against americans abroad and at home. it may satisfy our sense of honor but it more closely resembles assisted suicide than a strategy for the survival of israel and our position in the middle east. americans like to have a moral foundation for foreign policy, for our policies. in the middle east, and not just with respect to israel, the geology has proven to be complex to allow such a foundation. to take our professed desire to promote democracy. in practice, the united states has made a real effort at

democratizing only countries that it has invaded, like iraq and afghanistan. or those it despises, like palestine, iran and syria. the rest we carp at but leave to their hereditary rulers, dictators, generals and thugs. when democratic elections yield governments to which our allies object as in algeria, palestine and egypt, washington tries their overthrow and replacement by congenial despots. if democracy is the message, america is not now its prophet. our willingness to rid the region of troublesome democrats has, of course, appeased israel and our friends in the arab gulf, but it has greatly tarnished our claim to seriousness about our values. it has produced no democracies. but it has pulled down several before they had a chance to take root.

egypt is a case in point. after raising hopes of a democratic arab awakening and electing an incompetent islamist government, egypt is now an economically sinking military dictatorship, distinguished from other tyrannies only by the grotesque parities of the rule of law it stages. not much we can do about this. u.s. concerns about israel's security dictate support for egypt regardless of the character of its government or how it put itself in power. america's arab gulf partners are committed to military dictatorship and suppression of islamist in egypt. it's hard to think of a place where there is a starker contradiction between american ideals, commitments to client states and interests in precluding the spread of terrorism than in contemporary egypt. it's tempting to conclude if

we'll be hard headed realists, we should just skip the off-putting hypocrisy about democracy and human rights and get on with it. that seems to be what we intend. how else is one to interpret the president's proposal for multiple partnerships with the region's security forces to suppress islamist terrorism? today's egypt is the outstanding example of regional cooperation in such repression. we have another model in mind? it's not apparent. but by leaving no outlet for peaceful dissent, egypt is forcing at least part of its pious majority toward violent politics. this risks transforming most populist of all arab countries into the world's biggest and most deadly training ground for islamist terrorists with global reach. its true, of course, that egypt is not the only incubator for such enemies of america.

americans went in search of -- went abroad in search of monsters to destroy. we found them and bred more. some have already followed us home. others are no doubt on their way. and that's why we have an expanding garrison state in this country. our counterterrorism programs, meanwhile, are everywhere nurturing a passion for revenge against the united states. we gave a big boost to the spread of islamist terrorism when we invaded iraq. our stated purpose was to deny weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist to terrorists who weren't there. having removed functioning government from iraq, we then thought, we might as well conduct a sort of hit and run democratization of the place. so we replaced the secular dictatorship with a sectarian despotism.

not only did that not work but it set off a religious war that ultimately gave birth to the jihadistan that now straddles the border. what we did in iraq resulted in breaking it into three pieces. now in practice, we seem to be working on dismembering the rest of the levant. israel is gnawing away at what remains of palestine. a transnational coalition of jihadis is vivisecting syria and iraq. with our help, syria is burning, charring lebanon and scorching jordan. as it does, the kurds are making their escape from the existing state structures. the syrian government is loathsome. but we fear that if, as we hope, it is defeated, it could be replaced by even more frightful people. bombing can't prevent this, so

in a triumph of magical militarism we propose to arm a force of mythical syrian moderates. we expect this latest coalition of the billing to fight both the syrian government and its most effective opponents while nobly refraining from making common cause with the latter or transferring weapons to them. this sounds like a plan for pacifying capitol hill if not syria. and if our objective is to keep syria in flames, it's a plausible plan. perhaps that's what we really want. after all, the anarchy in syria is a drain on iran, which we have identified as our main enemy in the region. destabilizing syria arguably adds to the pressure on iran to give up the nuclear weapons program that israel's and our intelligence agencies keep telling us it doesn't have. and that iran's leaders have said they don't want because it

would be sinful. our frequent threats to bomb iran seem to be a devilishly clever test of its leaders' moral integrity. if we give them every reason we can think of for them to build a nuclear deterrent, will they still not do it? judging from friday's news, this experiment will go on for at least another four months. this brings me to a key point of policy difficulty. we've repeatedly told people in the middle east that they must either be with us or against us. they remain annoyingly unreliable in this regard. iran's ayatollahs are against us in syria, lebanon and bahrain. but with us in afghanistan and iraq. the assad regime and hezbollah oppose us in syria and lebanon, but are on our side in iraq.

the salafi jihadis are with us in syria but against us in iraq and elsewhere. israel's government is with us on iran but against us in blocking palestinian self-determination and favoring it for the kurds. saudi arabia is with us on iran and syria but against us in iraq. it was for us and then against us before it was again for us in egypt. it is against the jihadistan in the fertile crescent, but nobody can figure out what its stand is on salafi jihadis elsewhere. how can you have a coherent policy in the middle east when the people there are so damnably inconsistent? i think the answer is that outsiders can't manage the middle east and shouldn't try. it's time to let the countries in the region accept responsibility for what they do, rather than acting in such a way as to free them to behave irresponsibly.

it's time to recognize that the united states can't solve the israel/palestine issue, can no longer protect israel from the international legal and political consequences of its morally deviant behavior. and has nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by continuing to be identified with that behavior. we pay for gaza. israel makes its own decisions without regard to american interests, values, or advice. i think it would make better decisions if it were not shielded from their consequences or if it had to pay for them itself. america should cut the umbilicus and let israel be israel. it's time to stop pretending the united states has signed any real importance of democracy or human law or human rights to the middle east. we pay for gross violations of all three by israel. we support their negation in egypt.

and we do not interfere in the politics of liberal monarchies like bahrain, saudi arabia and the united arab emirates. clearly u.s. policy is almost entirely about interests, not values. if that's the case, let's not violate our laws by dishonestly claiming there have been no misuses of american weaponry by israel and no coups, judicial horrors of violations of human rights in egypt. we should not have laws that require us to be scoff laws. if the real interests of the united states in syria relate to iran and its contest with israel and saudi arabia, as well as to our new cold war with russia, let's admit that and behave accordingly. this would mean axing the format of the geneva conference on syria. that excluded key parties making it a public relations issue.

not a serious effort to bring peace. only if we engage all the parties engaged in proxy wars, in syria, including iran, can we hope to end the mass murder there. i would say the same thing is true of the situation in gaza. it cannot be ended without talking to all parties including hamas. it's time in syria to end mass murder not just for humanitarian reasons, compelling as those are. ending the fighting in both syria and iraq is the key. both to containing jihadistan and to halting the further violent disintegration of the region. we should not be upping the ante in syria by pumping in more weapons, many of which are likely to end up in jihadi hands. we should be trying to organize an end to external involvement in the fighting there and

focusing on preventing the emergence of expanding terrorist bastion in the fertile crescent in the levant that will serve as a homeland for the growing number of enraged muslims our warfare is rallying to the black flag of islamism. the jihadistan calling itself the islamic state is a menace to both iran and saudi arabia, as well as to us. distasteful as they might find to work with each other, iran and saudi arabia have a common interest to discover. the new state was born of geopolitical and religious rivalry between riad and tehran. and can only be attained by their cooperation. depending on how u.s./iran relations develop, america might be able to help them do this. but if the united states and iran remain enemies, the obvious alternative for the united states would to be accept the inevitability of an expanded salafi dominated state that will replace much of the current

political geography of the region. to work with saudi arabia to tame extremist tendencies within such a state and to yoke it to a regional coalition to balance iran as the iraq/u.s. intervention destroyed once did and any and all of these approaches would demand a level of dippic sophistication, imagination, and skill which the united states has not displayed in recent years. the more likely outcome of our current bland of baffled hesitancy, diplomatic ineptitude and militarism is, therefore, that the events will take their course. that means the growth of a credible existential threat to israel. perspective political explosion in egypt. the disintegration of iraq, jordan, lebanon and syria along with palestine and the diversion of a considerably part of the resources of these countries to

terrorism in the region and against the american homeland. we can and should do better than this. [ applause ] >> i'd like to thank the speakers and i'd like to ask if there are any more in the audience with questions and for my staff to bring them. i would like to start with a couple of questions. remarkably, in this stack of questions i've been given, there is no question about iraq. so maybe we could start there. can you -- you spoke about missed opportunities. what do you think we could have

done, if anything, in iraq to get a better outcome than the one we have now? for example, do you think a greater effort to get a status of forces agreement that would have left americans there to train iraqi security forces? and paul, maybe you can comment. everyone, i hope we get a cross talk here among all the panelists. everyone can respond to these questions. but, paul, you questioned the labels we've put on people when we call people partners, call people foes is the al maliki regime really a reliable partner for the united states? >> tom, i'm going to answer your question in a way you hadn't intended because the truth is i think the mistakes we made and the missed opportunities are simply too legion to mention. i have been turned off by the blame game that's currently going on in washington.

i think the obama administration's iraq policy was dreadful. i think the bush administration's iraq policy was dreadful. both of them contributed to the current state of affairs in very significant ways. having gone over that history time and again and each time i find a mistake that obama made there is an antecedent that bush made. and every time there was a good move that either made you can find it traced to a good move the other made. and unfortunately the latter are far fewer than the former. but what i would say is that to my mind, one of the great lessons of reaction, and there are many. where i would like to see us focusing more energy is on this question of what lessons we should be learning as opposed to who is mistaken and who should be blamed for the current impasse. i think one of the greatest lessons, of course, was that whenever we take on a problem anywhere in the world but certainly in the middle east,

whenever we plan for the best, we get the worst. and when we plan for the worst we often do better than that. sometimes we even get the best. 1991 gulf war comes to mind as an instance where you had a very conservative small "c" to mind as an instance where you have a very conservative small sea of leadership that planned for all contingencies and did quite well. obviously, it was not a perfect war. there was unfinished business there, as well. but by planning for the worst case, they headed off for a lot of potential problems there. this is issues that i've seen time and again with approaches to the middle east which is what i've consistently seen from american policymakers. a sense that the middle east is just too hard. it's a mess. we don't understand it. what can we do to just push it on to the back burner. and, of course, the middle east doesn't go away. it ain't las vegas.

what happens there doesn't stay there. and when we do rouse ourself to stay there -- not entirely across the board. i don't entirely disagree with paul or ambassador freeman. there are issues where it's best we keep our nose out of. id think one of the greatest mistakes that we have made is trying to put a band-aid on things and try to walk away from them. the problems of the middle ooesz don't lend themselves to that. >> tom, prime minister malachy is an excellent example. certainly what chas freeman was talking about and how players in the region don't fit into those two bins of for us or against us.

mr. malachy is for himself. he's trying to do his best to win his third term. he could step down in favor of someone else. he has a very narrow view of what democracy, if you can still call it that, entails which is the majority and the rule and i'm the ruler. and there's no question that his very narrow view of how iraq ought to work has badly antagonized the great majority of sunni iraqi arabs. it has been because of the much

broader disillusion with the regime. so he's not a very good partner at all, which isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to do business with him. the thing we have to keep foremost in mind is that the united states has not seen an interest in taking sides in con flikts in this region. >> i think even if those disputes weren't sectarian would still be the case. we heard that before in south vietnam. and what we should learn from our own malpractice in that area, go back to hippocratic oath which is not a bad bit of advice.

it is, perhaps as lincoln said, changing horses midstream. it isn't wise. that is the solution for iraq, if, indeed, there is a solution, for iraq, if, indeed, there is an iraq. and it turns out that in trying to change the regime, we destroy the state in iraq. and it seems at the moment, as i said, that they're busily making their way for the exit. secretary kerry correctly stood for the violation of iraq. and i think the curds are going to do what the curds are going to do and i don't think they're

going to listen to us or israels or anybody else. we have a problem. we have something that is run by vicious extremists. that has erased the border between iraq and syria. i think that is the main issue. it is also the case that notwithstanding mr. malaky's aspirations to lead them all, we must divide them. and that, by the way, i will say is not an impossible outcome in afghanistan, either, after our departure. so i think we need to be a bit cautious. final observation. what we can learn from the gulf war and the iraq war deliberate

kuwait is something very simple. we should not intervene without a war strategy. how are you going to end it? it's not enough to get on an aircraft carrier and declare victory. we had nobody left in baghdad to surrender. after we took the place. we need to -- before we start intervening in places like syria and libya and iraq, we should think what's the end game? how does it end? we should always be asking the question and then what? and we don't ask that question.

and that gets us into trouble. >> just very briefly, for us, it opened a very open wound. there are a lot of marines and service members that come out and see what they need it there to secure it. i know we are talking about foreign policy, but, do mesically, we have to think that we're asking a lot from this military which is the greatest regime. there's a lot of questions which i think we'll catch up on as a nation. the only other question, i'll say that there's a lot of talk about the state. i'm trying to use my academic side. the constant of the state of the middle east is changing fundamentally.

we -- when i say we, i don't mean the u.s. alone, the west looks at every other state as a holy grail, you can't touch it. why? because our national system is based on a con structural state. that is shifting under our noses, fundamentally. i'm not saying because of, you know, the slavic state or whatever you want to call it. even in the states that we look at, i could go on, these states, and we still treat them as if they have the same attributes that we either believe that they exist or at least that's the only norm we work through. one way to look at this part of the world is to try to --

sometimes our models. if the model looks like this bottle and the reality is this. this doesn't change this. i think that's the idea that it's a long term again. it's not immediate to think about the con september of stco it works. maybe even in europe: so we have to, at least, academically, this is not politically, academically start thinking about that. i think that would behoove us to prepare when we have no idea what they are. they may work very well. i'm not talking about a slavic state working. i'm just saying that things are going to shift. thank you. >> okay. well, let me follow up with,

really, in the same vain as the last question. is there something that we could have done in syria to avert the situation as it is now. again, missed opportunities is something you spoke about, ken. should we have insisted on a safe zone or a no-fly zone. more importantly, what can we do now? in your foreign affairs, you talked about training in the regime. id believe krerchs says that's a possibility. again, other comments, please? >> first, i'll start by saying that for several years, and i am one of these humanitarian interventionists. and i bie